Kieran

Mandatory ID cards are a terrible, terrible idea
iandunt.substack.com/p/id-cards-a...

@stellacreasy.bsky.social Re: ID cards. "It is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state" --Bruce Schneier.

Detained people without lawyers are only given a few days' notice of the intention to send them to France. In this time they need to find a lawyer, who will then need to gather evidence and consider whether there is a claim. Of course court applications are being made only shortly before removal.

Why the United Kingdom government cannot leave the ECHR without either breaching or re-negotiating the Good Friday Agreement 1st July 2023 * The overlooked obstacle to the United Kingdom withdrawing from the ECHR * From time to time the demand comes from a government minister, or from one of their political and media sup…

Apparently “leading” lawyers and “experts” say that the Good Friday Agreement is no obstacle to UK leaving ECHR.

Me, being neither, merely sets out what the Good Friday Agreement expressly says.

davidallengreen.com/2023/07/why-...

rewarding my microwave by letting it heat up a fork as a treat

if you wanna make video games as a career you have to enjoy the process of making video games. its not enough to just enjoy the end result. same goes for most types of creative works

I came to Bluesky to get away from the old place, and my timeline is full of people sharing bad stuff from the old place. Please. Stop. Let it die.

A pride flag with every color band represented by a NASA image. White is Earth clouds, pink is aurora, blue is the Sun in a specific wavelength, brown is Jupiter clouds, black is the Hubble deep field, red is the top of sprites, orange is a Mars crater, yellow is the surface of Io, green is a lake with algae, blue is Neptune, and purple is the Crab Nebula in a specific wavelength.

I made this Pride flag using only NASA images and our team thought it would be cool to share on social (I work on the NASA heliophysics communications team), but it's getting all sorts of hate on the bird app and Fbook. Thought y'all might be more appreciative of it here. ☺️🏳️‍🌈💖

A reminder that when the Sycamore Gap tree was cut down people immediately started blaming immigrants and teenagers...

It was neither. It was two white Englishmen in their 30s.

You receive a call on your phone.

The caller says they're from your bank and they're calling about a suspected fraudulent payment.

"Oh yeah," you think. Obvious scam, right?

The caller says "I'll send you an in-app notification to prove I'm calling from your bank."

🧵 1/4

I was taught at school (80s) that genetics meant no child would grow to be taller than both their parents

I was also taught the blue eyed one mentioned here

US deports hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador despite court order Their arrival comes less than 24 hours after a federal judge blocked a law Trump planned to use for the deportations.

US deports hundreds of Venezuelans "despite" court order.

Meaning, of course: "in breach of".

On the face of it, it looks like there is now a full constitutional crisis in United States, in that the executive is now freely ignoring court orders.

Crisis point reached.

www.bbc.com/news/article...

Labour’s escalating claims around the potential use of  AI in government are borne out of relatable constraints and welcome ambition for Britain but We are deeply concerned that in an effort to increase efficiency and find savings, the UK could end up wasting £100s of millions of public money in failed projects. This risks damaging public services - and ultimately holding Britain back -  rather than taking the opportunity to make them fit for the future. It might sound like a silver bullet but we can’t just shoehorn AI into existing services.  Here are 10 questions that we believe the Government needs to demonstrate it has answers to before signing away millions of pounds of taxpayer’s money with no break clause on the contracts if things go wrong

Yesterday a group of us put our heads together to think about the questions that should be asked of Starmer's plans for AI in government - you might have seen this nod to it in Politico this morning. These are for journalists, politicians, and anyone with an interest in pro-democracy tech (1/3)

Petition for a service that routinely checks the direct debits and utility contracts of elderly people to check if companies are ripping them off for services they don’t need

Secret London tribunal to hear appeal in Apple vs government battle over encryption | Computer Weekly The decision by home secretary Yvette Cooper to issue a Technical Capability Notice requiring Apple to give UK law enforcement and intelligence services “backdoor” access to data stored by Apple’s cus...

Whisper it, the showdown over Apple encryption is THIS WEEK ⏱️

🤐 A secret tribunal will hear the appeal against the government’s order to carve a backdoor into Apple’s encrypted services.

🛑 Our cybersecurity and privacy shouldn’t be decided in the shadows.

www.computerweekly.com/news/3666203...

How denial of airborne COVID transmission broke the world - Healthy Debate Five years later, the greatest basic science failure in generations caused the pandemic harms highlighted by people across the political spectrum, and broke our social cohesion.

Five years on and we’re still going round and round with whether Covid is airborne. There’s no scientific doubt. Denial broke us.
healthydebate.ca/2025/03/topi...

“For decades, the US was the champion of western values. The America of Trump, Vance and Musk has left them behind.”

Another jaw-dropping data analysis by the Financial Times shows why MAGA is quite literally out of the liberal democratic world

on.ft.com/4iqh3qA

It is insane that so few people in power are willing to say what is so obviously true. It's always worth paying attention to what @meredithmeredith.bsky.social says.

No matter how many chilled out melodic suggestions I kick into the bin, Spotify Discover Weekly seems determined, recently, to offer me songs to fall asleep to. Might save a few in case I ever get into heroin.

just re-upping this with some
context buttondown.com/justenoughin... (see below)

‘Consider Phlebas’ Sci-Fi Series Based On Book In Works At Amazon From Charles Yu, Chloé Zhao & Plan B Amazon MGM Studios is developing Consider Phlebas, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Iain M Banks, the first in the Culture book series.

Oh hello

Save Encryption Message scanning breaks end-to-end encryption, which puts everyone’s privacy and security at risk.

Privacy is security.

Message scanning powers in the Online Safety Act will break end-to-end encryption – the firewall that protects us from predators and criminals.

Parents, children, domestic violence victims all at risk.

Save encryption #PracticeSafeText

www.openrightsgroup.org/campaign/sav...

Apple pulls iCloud end-to-end encryption feature for UK users after government demanded backdoor | TechCrunch In an unprecedented step, Apple caved to a reported U.K. government’s demand to prevent users from using end-to-end encryption in iCloud.

“The Home Office’s actions have deprived millions of Britons from accessing a security feature. As a result British citizens will be at higher risk of their personal data and family photos falling into the hands of criminals and predators.”

🗣️ ORG's James Baker #Apple

techcrunch.com/2025/02/21/a...

One very minor error is that at one point, you refer to Starmer as "The opposition leader"

Investing in popcorn futures.

This is a venn diagram showing how 69 Trump actions map onto domains covering: undermining democratic institutions; suppressing dissent and media; dismantling social protections; attacking science and education; destabilising the global order. A table version is available here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1LZN7QnbSyFfUZJG8Sn1MWpK0VnfBtb0OSyZ1jxP3xBk/edit?usp=sharing

🧵"So this is how liberty dies..."

Trump’s first 3 weeks have been a relentless flood of actions. It's incredibly hard to keep up.

I’ve gone through 69 actions & mapped out the pattern - showing how they fall within 5 broad domains consistent with authoritarian states 1/9

Ofcom Session for Small, Low-Risk Community Sites · Zoom · Luma Promising Trouble is hosting a lunchtime session with Ali Hall and Andrew Park from Ofcom to discuss the new Online Safety responsibilities for small, low-risk…

Having just run this session lu.ma/qijpvfnl some quick thoughts on the pickle we find ourselves in wrt to UK tech policy

No Sadiq. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Insane property prices and the death of nightlife risks 'hollowing out' London.

The big takeaway here is that Reuters won this case against the AI company on grounds they violated fair use—the judge found the AI company was guilty because, in using copyrighted works to generate its output, it “meant to compete... by developing a market substitute.”

Huge.

I guess this is what we get when the Overton window is in a truly shitty place.