Ian Abbott

Television is 100 years old today! 🎉

Nation Yearns For Relative Calm Of ‘President A Giant Pedophile’ News Cycle

Nation Yearns For Relative Calm Of ‘President A Giant Pedophile’ News Cycle https://theonion.com/nation-yearns-for-relative-calm-of-president-a-giant-pedophile-news-cycle/

Largest storm in 20 years and naturally the skies have been solid rain clouds all night for the Home Counties. /sigh

The #VisualEffectsSociety has revealed the official nominees for the 24th Annual #VES Awards, spotlighting the year’s most accomplished work in #visualeffects. Congratulations and good luck to everyone! https://www.artofvfx.com/ves-awards-2026-visual-effects-society-reveals-this-years-nominees/

If true this is bonkers. Just two weeks in cinemas is so damaging to the industry and shows a total disregard to everyone involved in creating the films and anyone who wants to see them on a big screen.

Comic. [Comment section on a video. 564 comments, including posts from three different avatars: “Who else is here in 2023?” “Is anyone else watching this in 2017?” “Anyone else here in 2025?”] [caption] For some reason, confused time travelers always try to find each other using YouTube comments.

Anyone Else Here

xkcd.com/3188/

Watching M-i:III on the BBC for the first time since it came out.

Simon Pegg’s speech where he says “I used to have this professor at Oxford, okay? Doctor Wickham, his name was…And he used to sort of scare the underclassmen…”

Surely Professor Wickham, and what on Earth is an underclassman? 😀

Awww. Happy new year.

The long-awaited trailer for #TheOdyssey marks a major shift in genre for Christopher Nolan, who ventures into myth and legend for the first time! The #VFX are made by #dneg: https://www.artofvfx.com/the-odyssey/

The only good thing is that all traditional UK government IT projects have been truly awful (and unfortunately consumed insane amounts of money). Hopefully Apple, Google et al will head this off or find a way to do it securely with trusted computing in a Secure Enclave and on-device only.

I’ve been working in the IT-related sector for thirty years and what I’m seeing happening at the moment worldwide is highly concerning and in most part entirely unnecessary.

What they are planning with data controls here is exactly the thing that China currently do… that’s the point. Similarly the USA’s plan for a massive data grab on tourists in the World Cup with Palantir. I’d trust our government and civil service if they understood computing, but they don’t.

Why Isn’t Online Age Verification Just Like Showing Your ID In Person? This blog also appears in our Age Verification Resource Hub: our one-stop shop for users seeking to understand what age-gating laws actually do, what’s at stake, how to protect yourself, and why EFF o...

Good article from the EFF about the risks of age verification for “online safety”… www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

That may not be the original intent, because let’s face it most members of parliament and the House of Lords are technology illiterate, but the fact remains that once such controls are in place they are hard to remove and definitely open to abuse in the future and that should be a concern to anyone

It is not a conspiracy. Right now data harvesting and data control are major target areas within computing, just take a look at the Cambridge Analytica scandal or the plans of Palantir. This isn’t tin foil hat territory. It’s pragmatism. Give people the leverage to control such things and they will.

There are ways to stop this commercial exploitation that does not involve the government installing a control layer into every single phone and desktop computer in the country… it’s not that hard to understand that concept is it? /sigh

I should be able to do whatever I choose - as long as it is legal - on my own devices without having to have someone looking over my shoulder or to give away personal data to do so. The “but think of the children” is not an acceptable risk for the removal of privacy.

At the moment they’re treating this as safety for children, but a future government could attempt to restrict further blocking any sociopolitical views they disagree with and block dissent. Once the mechanism is in place they can force it to be extended. It’s the dumbing down of society.

Parental filters and device configuration can block most of this already. Parents should be guarding children’s usage of devices themselves; we don’t need a nanny state where all adults are treated as children unless proven otherwise. That’s a ridiculous state of affairs to be in.

It’s not about that though. Operating systems already have these sorts of controls, and the ones governments do tend to overreach. This is not about porn - it’s about putting in mechanisms for a potential future surveillance state where any action on your own system may need external approval.

The fundamental issue with all of this isn’t about the display of explicit imagery but it being potentially the beginning of successive power grabs until everything you do on your own computer is monitored and requires some form of government approval. Sleepwalking towards an Orwellian nightmare.

UK Wants All iPhones to Block Explicit Images Unless You Prove Age Apple and Google will soon be "encouraged" to build nudity-detection algorithms into their software by default, as part of the UK government's strategy to tackle violence against women and girls, repo...

So now the UK government would like to impose age verification checks within operating systems to control how they work? “But think of the children” is the worst reason to kill privacy. Parental controls already exist without needing government to control everything www.macrumors.com/2025/12/15/u...

Won’t really miss Disney being involved in Doctor Who. I’m glad it can continue without them in the manner that it did before and it will likely be better as a result. Sure the budget may be smaller again but that’s not a bad thing, and good work was done before… www.doctorwho.tv/news-and-fea...

As a developer I’m worried about all the “vibe coding” including test suites direct from LLMs. In my experiments they often produce overly complex and bad code, and hallucinate to the point of arguing methods and modules exist when they don’t. It makes me worried how much of this goes into prod.

It’s times like today where I’m thankful we use a on-premises, private cloud architecture and not public cloud.

And whilst in this case it may not have been a third party recommended by the OSA the fact remains that it’s hard to trust that any third party age verification system is handling data in a secure manner if any of the data or processing occurs off-device… if that data is stored online it is at risk

Update on a Security Incident Involving Third-Party Customer Service | Discord At Discord, protecting the privacy and security of our users is a top priority. That’s why it’s important to us that we’re transparent with them about events that impact their personal information.

“The unauthorized party also gained access to a small number of government‑ID images (e.g., driver’s license, passport) from users who had appealed an age determination”.

And yet the UK government and Ofcom wonder why we keep pointing out the major issue with the Online Safety Act….

I wish our government would stop trying to dismantle all sense of privacy in the UK. The OSA was bad enough but trying to force back doors to break encryption of our personal data is just insane. They likely won’t stop there either.

I’m so glad that Trump is using his congressional authorization to increase tariffs on the Lord of the Ring films & Rings of Power show. For too long our national security has been threatened by Middle Earth being set in New Zealand & UK. It should be set in the Mojave Desert, as Tolkien intended.

The bumbling idiot strikes again… here’s hoping this never gets anywhere and doesn’t do too much damage. When is he going to leave office and let the sane people work again?