emmatonkin.bsky.social

From the image, I really thought this was going to turn out to be an ad for a SyFy parody starring Kellita Smith. Sort of disappointed it isn't.

The Discord Hack is Every Users’ Worst Nightmare A hack impacting Discord’s age verification process shows in stark terms the risk of tech companies collecting users’ ID documents. Now the hackers are posting peoples’ IDs and other sensitive informa...

BREAKING: A catastrophic breach has impacted Discord user data including selfies and identity documents uploaded as part of the app’s verification process, email addresses, phone numbers, approximately where the user lives, and much more.

🔗 www.404media.co/the-discord-...

Another way of saying it: would a Deepfakes4Good event yield much of worth to society?

Robert Jenrick wowing Tory Party conference there with his legendary yet completely baffling wig ventriloquist act.

AI isn't replacing radiologists Radiology combines digital images, clear benchmarks, and repeatable tasks. But demand for human radiologists is at an all-time high.

In 2016 Hinton predicted that AI would replace all radiologists in five years. Ten years later, why hasn't it happened? This post is a great explainer.

www.understandingai.org/p/ai-isnt-re...

Unpacking Digital ID - can the government deliver on its ambitions? — Careful Industries A look at what has been proposed, how it might work, and whether it will be effective.

My take (from Friday) on the digital ID proposals. I don't think it's relevant to say, "but other countries have ID cards, why can't we?" The critical questions here are implementation-based and it seems like they are up for grabs

www.careful.industries/blog/2025-9-...

We are thrilled to announce that our NEW Large Language Model will be released on 11.18.25.

"She crossed her arms - behind her back, as is the custom in these parts - and, executing a deep backbend, glared at me where I stood behind her. Meetings must be much less interesting, I reflected, when one does not work at the Contortionists' Society."

OpenAI employees are very excited about how well their new AI tool can create fake videos of people doing crimes and have definitely thought through all the implications of this

I saw the other day that Macron used a Pilot Vanishing Point pen, then read that he also uses a Waterman Carene. Nice pens, but not in the "you could buy a pretty nice used car for that" category. I believe Sarkozy was more into Montblanc and Montegrappa.

Quite. My French ID card is... a card. Yes there is a database behind it but nobody is asking for real estate on my smartphone or for me to participate in particular operating system usage in order to, say, prove my right to vote or work in France.

Johnson says he will never use government ID

I wonder if this guy is related to "Boris Johnson" who introduced "voter id" as Prime Minister in 2023 ... off the back of some crazy US conspiracy theories ... and in the process, made digital ID pretty much inevitable.

Another gargoyle reading in the wild.

The most accurate recreation of DS9 I've seen.

Too many of you are showing that you've never been stopped and searched on the street.

Your ID card discourse is myopic.

Asking for your papers is one of those 'discretionary' things and guess who the police use their discretion on?

A packet of sliced ham which is a particular type of ham called Drury Lane Ham

what actors call that one legend who’s always overacting

Illustrative, yet unhelpful.

If UKGov were more polished at procurement (and privacy) this would be a very different discussion. For onr thing, they wouldn't have approached it by alienating stakeholders with a bunch of political posturing, which is silly and self-defeating if one wants buy-in to one's proposed solution.

3 panel comic Panel 1: Blue Guy and Pink Guy. Pink Guy: Ai will change EVERYTHING. Just give me a Shitload of money Blue Guy: okey Panel 2: Blue Guy hands over a massive stack of cash and says “How will it change everything?” Panel 3: Pink Guy is running away as fast as he can with the money. He says “It’s a secret”

buying into AI

We taught our raccoons sign language and the first thing they said was "The trouble is, you think you have time.”

Very illustrative way to frame this: more money has been spent on this lop generator than on the largest and most expensive infrastructure project this nation has ever undertaken.

Seems dicey.

Whether or not digital ID is a good long-term policy, the politics of it are that Labour just set up a battle with its own party and all the others, promising to achieve something this scheme probably can't, at an obvious actual and opportunity cost.

It just mystifies me. Why not go for a mild, undramatic, 'no-score win' form of governance for a while? Why leap with both feet on every rake in sight? Is it for charity - some sort of Ice Bucket Challenge thing?

The government's immigration policy has fallen into the same Blue Labour pose of assuming that there is some group out there it can talk about rather than to, and that this is something that won't have any negative consequences.

More people should be talking about this.

It's Don't Argue Inside Your Head With Other People Friday. Today, if you find yourself arguing inside your head w/someone who's not present, or whom it's not safe or not fair for you to argue with, gently move your mind away. Do this as many times as you need.

Time for me to deploy my expertise from having worked with databases of individuals and their data in the public sector: whatever you might imagine will be happening behind the scenes of a digital ID card, the actual reality of that dataset is going to be an information governance nightmare.

If only we'd adopted RFC3514 back in the day, govt must think, we would have legislated cybersecurity concerns almost completely into nonexistence, because surely all the bad guys would comply with the request to correctly mark malicious comms...
www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514....

Absolutely. How about one of them data protection impact assessment exercises for a start, seeing as it's the law n'all.

One more thing to say on ID cards. This is a complex issue, worth detailed and expert discussion. It needs time and attention, not knee-jerk or rushed policies for headlines and short-term political gain.

If we do this, it will be forever. We need to be very sure.