alecm

Blog: [alecmuffett.com](https://alecmuffett.com/ )
Profile: [alecmuffett.com](https://alecmuffett.com/article/author/alecm )
Homepage: [alecmuffett.com](https://alecmuffett.com/ )

Last Notes

2026-04-01 20:12:25 UTC

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Australian eSafety: “It is a ‘dark pattern’ to permit people to 1/ amend mistakes 2/ be in control of information about themselves 3/ be obliged to validate abuse reports”
Clearly the perspective which the Australian eSafety Commissioner brings to the table is “users are untrustworthy scum and must be whipped into control” – basically like MPs, then.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy4181pkxl2o
#australia #censorship #eSafety #onlineSafety #socialMediaBan #surveillance

2026-01-09 09:51:31 UTC

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It will be interesting to see if Britain’s politicians maintain their taste for self-harm through isolationism by banning X for whatever reason
The internet is speech and if you take the position that “*bad speech is harm*” rather than “*bad speech demands good speech*“, the only effective option is a kind of Digital Brexit where you block your citizens from participation in the bigger world.
The UK Government will simply have to start censoring internet access for Britons. Or it could give up on the pretence of global control… but that would look like weakness.
> Elon Musk’s X could be banned in Britain over AI chatbot row
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/01/08/musks-x-could-be-banned-in-britain-over-ai-chatbot-row
Archived at: https://archive.ph/2026.01.09-080303/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/01/08/musks-x-could-be-banned-in-britain-over-ai-chatbot-row/
#censorship #elonMusk #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #surveillance #twitter #x

2025-10-01 09:32:52 UTC

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Nixon: You may not have read about the time he told a dinner party at the White House, “I could leave this room, and in 25 minutes, 70 million people would be dead”American Presidents, eh?
> Nuclear weapons: How Cold War major Harold Hering asked a forbidden question that cost him his career
https://slate.com/human-interest/2011/02/nuclear-weapons-how-cold-war-major-harold-hering-asked-a-forbidden-question-that-cost-him-his-career.html
#globalThermonuclearWar #nixon #politics

2025-09-30 19:44:07 UTC

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Online Safety Act: A well-intentioned disaster? | Professional Security Magazine> As internet users become desensitised to handing over their confidential information to websites, we could see attackers spoofing age verification domains in a bid to steal confidential information, such as passport details or driving licences. These phishing attacks are especially dangerous because they appear entirely plausible in the context of the Act.
https://professionalsecurity.co.uk/news/interviews/online-safety-act-a-well-intentioned-disaster/
#ageVerification #censorship #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #surveillance #vpns

2025-09-28 05:40:32 UTC

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The Liberal Democrats finally come out hard against something: Digital ID Cards. Let’s hope that they generalise this to all ID Cards…> No to Digital ID Cards | Liberal Democrats
> People shouldn’t be turned into criminals just because they can’t have a digital ID, or choose not to.
https://www.libdems.org.uk/nodigitalid
#digitalId #idCards #libDems

2025-09-27 19:02:55 UTC

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Tip for Civil Society: Never Negotiate. Always make them do the bad thing. Don’t help them do it, but make their choice either: do something really bad, or nothing at allI started messing with Unix in my 2nd year at university in 1986, I got into cryptography in 1990, open source/free software in 1991, and then pretty much constant battles with regulators & authorities ever since.
If I was to share one lesson it’d be: *always* call their bluff. Make them do the bad thing that they are threatening to do anyway.
Generally they will present you with a choice: either you do this small thing for us — tell us who is downloading your software, build an export controlled version of your software, put a backdoor into your software, put an age gate in front of your software, ban artificial intelligence and regulate anyone who builds related technologies — OR ELSE we will be forced to legislate you out of existence / ban the internet / ban all cryptographic software / put a firewall around the whole of Great Britain.
Your response should be: *Okay then, you do that.*
Don’t negotiate a middle ground — if they have stated an extremist end-game then that is what they are intending to achieve in any case. Your job is to force them to be — to out themselves as being — the bad guy. It is not your job to try and negotiate a liberal and reasonable middle ground on behalf of all humanity. The very fact that they can propose such an extremist position underscores that they do not understand what they are talking about, and that they will be severely bitten by unintended consequences.
You, dear heart, are not the saviour of humanity, and you are not competent to negotiate on behalf of all of humanity and upon the basis of all future innovation.
Always make them do the bad thing, because it will blow up in their face eventually.
#ai #artificialIntelligence #encryption #government #homeOffice #policy #regulation

2025-09-22 11:38:23 UTC

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The Guardian uses — and then hides/recants — photos of schoolgirl in article targeting fearful parents; perhaps we need a better conversation?If, like me, you’re a parent, there’s a good chance that you woke up on Saturday to outraged fellow parents on various group chats, [sharing a story from the Guardian](https://archive.ph/cfpjw ):
> Exclusive: Instagram pictures of girls as young as 13 were posted to promote Threads site ‘as bait’, campaigner says
With a very bait-like photograph immediately beneath / as part of the share-card, which I strongly suspect contributed to the article’s viral appeal:
The article cites an anonymous man – identified only as “Campaigner” or “Recipient” or “Instagram user” – [who (for the moment, ignoring the rest of the article) we learn](https://archive.ph/cfpjw ):
> Meta has used back-to-school pictures of schoolgirls to advertise one of its social media platforms to a 37-year-old man, in a move parents described as “outrageous” and “upsetting”.
> The man noticed that posts encouraging him to “get Threads” […] were being dropped into his Instagram feed featuring embedded posts of uniformed girls as young as 13 with their faces visible and, in most cases, their names. […]
> The recipient told the Guardian the posts felt “deliberately provocative and ultimately exploitative of the children and families involved”. […]
> The man who received the posts said that as he was only sent promotional posts of schoolgirls – there were no boys in school uniform, for example – there appeared to be “an aspect of sexualisation”. […]
> The 37-year-old Instagram user from London who received the posts and asked to remain anonymous said: “Over several days I was repeatedly served Meta adverts for Threads that exclusively featured parents’ images of their daughters in school uniform, some revealing their names. As a father, I find it deeply inappropriate for Meta to repurpose these posts in targeted promotion to adults.”
> He said he had not posted or liked any similar images before he was sent the schoolgirl pictures.
> “To me, showcasing such content as trending or popular feels deliberately provocative and ultimately exploitative of the children and families involved, putting their online safety at risk.”###
So what’s wrong here?First up: I have to give credit to the journalist, Robert Booth, for at least attempting (*“any similar images*“) to recognise that **IF YOU CLICK ON STUFF THEN THE ALGORITHM WILL TRY TO SERVE YOU MORE OF THE SAME STUFF.**
This is why you get so many people, hooked in an hate/love outrage loop, saying: *“My feed is nothing but fascism and I hate it, I keep on clicking on the links and checking and yes, social media is serving me nothing but evil content!”* — the solution to which is (a) *don’t click on the links*, and (b) find a pulldown menu option saying something like *“Show Me Less Of This”* (or, [*“Show Me More Of This”*](https://alecmuffett.com/article/114576 )) which should be the hallmark of a good algorithmic feed-based platform.
What Robert / the Campaigner presumably *don’t* consider — and certainly don’t mention — is that this algorithmic boosting happens **in real time**, so much so that you can be scrolling sideways in a gallery and it will be working out what to show next you on the basis of what you engaged with only moments before, caching its decisions temporarily (until you scroll away for an extended period) in order to maintain consistency.
This is less a matter of long-term profiling than *“if you’ve engaged with this, then maybe you will engage with that”* which — like it or not — is a standard sales tactic around the world: *would you like to supersize that choice*?
So my personal feeling is that if the Campaigner is the sort of person to click on stuff that outrages him, then he’s going to get a lot more outraged and that’s kind of where everyone is at the moment.
Secondly: Meta *are* telling the truth. The images are public, and under the terms which people use Instagram & Threads, they may be used for such.
If you don’t like it, make the images private and share them only amongst friends.
So… let’s dig into *privacy* for a bit. Back to the article:###
Privacy versus Unstated ExpectationsMeta and all the other big platforms have recently been roasted by the Online Safety Act, causing them to lock down access to childens’ accounts — or at least that what politicians want you to believe, however a lot of the constraints to keep kids safe online are years if not 1+ decades old.
But what if it’s the parent who posts the photograph?
So I was [reading the Guardian article](https://archive.ph/cfpjw ) on my Android phone, and out of curiosity I tapped and held-down the big central button — thereby launching *Google Lens* and *Google Image Search* — and I circled the image which the Guardian had chosen to post the article with.
This immediately (*“Images Similar To This”*) led me to mother Sarah Dart’s [posting on Instagram — which is public and visible to the world](https://www.threads.com/@sdart23/post/DOORf0BiOn8 ) — with approving comments from (presumably) her circle of friends:
…although with immediate, critical and crude *“don’t post private pictures”* commentary on the related automatic reposting to Threads.
If we pick through the article focusing on commentary that is probably attributable to Sarah:
> [Image Caption] The mother whose Instagram picture of her 15-year-old daughter was used in a post advertising Threads said she had ‘no idea’ it would be used as a promotion.
> [The mother] said she posted the picture to a public Instagram account. The posts of their children were highlighted to the stranger as “suggested threads”. […]
> The mother of a 15-year-old whose picture was used in a promotional post that featured a large “Get Threads” button said: “For me it was a picture of my daughter going to school. I had no idea Instagram had picked it up and are using it as a promotion. It’s absolutely disgusting. She is a minor.”
> She said she would have refused consent and “not for any money in the world would I let them use a girl dressed in a school uniform to get people on to [its platform]”.
> With 267 followers, her Instagram account usually had modest reach but the post of her child attracted nearly 7,000 views, 90% from non-followers, half of whom were aged over 44 and 90% of whom were men.
My perspective is that Sarah’s wants are absolutely fair, but it seems odd to me that she posted a photo — *one of such quality that for some reason the Guardian photo editor picked it up to illustrate the story* — and shared it with the world rather than just with a circle of friends. Sarah has had a Threads account since November 2024 but it has little content, so it could be that she forgot that her Threads account exists and that this was essentially an unpleasant surprise… but [the photo is still public on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/sdart23/p/DOOReZjCBQl/ ) and it’s [tagged with the location of Exeter](https://www.instagram.com/explore/locations/218182521/exeter-devon/ ) — so anyone could stumble across it via that means, too.
One of the other things you find from Sarah’s Threads account is that Robert created his own and reached-out to her:
…which — reading his other posts — then means that you can find the names of all the other people he reached out to:
Let’s ignore the joint failures of operational security and of source protection — the Guardian are [generally pretty good](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/09/edward-snowden-nsa-whistleblower-surveillance ) [at that stuff](https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2022/may/30/guardian-launches-tor-onion-service ), maybe Robert just needs a refresher — but these messages lead us to Jade, Lau, and Katie, who all have private Instagram accounts, some of whom actively use their Threads accounts for typical purposes, and one or more of whom (or their partners) are cited:
> One mother said her account was set to private, but the posts were automatically cross-posting to Threads where they were visible. […]
> The father of a 13-year-old who appeared in one of the posts said it was “absolutely outrageous”. The images were all of schoolgirls in short skirts with either bare legs or stockings.
> “When I found out an image of her has been exploited in what felt like a sexualised way by a massive company like that to market their product it left me feeling quite disgusted,” he said. […]
> Another mother whose post of her 13-year-old was used in a promotional post said: “Meta did all of this on purpose, not informing us, as they want to generate content. It’s despicable. And who is responsible for creating that Threads ad using children’s photos to promote the platform for older men?”
It’s interesting to observe that the parents have apparently been approached by Robert with the frame *“Threads [is] using children’s photos to promote the platform for older men”* as if this was an intentional marketing tactic, as opposed to *“Some Guy Clicked On A Schoolgirl Photo And Was Served More Of The Same”* — which would be less outrageous.
What I *would* strongly criticise Meta regarding is that they’re not nagging people enough about the existence of crossposting between Instagram, Threads and Facebook itself.
As a heavy Threads user I get frequent popups along the lines of:
> *Do You Wish To Keep Sharing Your Threads Posts Into The [Mastodon, ActivityPub] Fediverse?*
…but there’s far less (some, but *far less*) of this for mutual sharing between Meta-owned platforms (*Instagram to Threads, Instagram to Facebook*) — probably because it’s not such a significant unaddressed legal risk when posts are automatically re-shared *within* the Meta ecosystem.
But Robert is not doing that, and worse I feel like his whole article is actually framed to convey a subtext along the parodical lines of:
> *Exclusive! Meta are actively attempting to grow Threads readership and engagement by attracting pervy men via posting sexualised pictures of young girls dressed in school uniform in short skirts with either bare legs or stockings. Photos like, for example, this one: [illustration]*
That the Guardian have slightly recognised this hypocrisy *may* be illustrated by the fact that they [subsequently changed the headline image to a stock photo](https://archive.ph/u40S8 ); however this may also be a belated attempt to preserve the privacy of Sarah and her daughter — a young woman who has her own, private Instagram account.
As ever, Baroness Kidron gets a shout-out:
> Beeban Kidron, a crossbench peer and campaigner for children’s rights online, said: “Offering up school-age girls as bait to advertise a commercial service is a new low even for Meta.
> “At every opportunity Meta privileges profit over safety, and company growth over children’s right to privacy. It is the only reason that they could think it appropriate to send pictures of schoolgirls to a 37-year-old man – as bait – Meta is a wilfully careless company.”
> She called on the regulator Ofcom to consider if measures, introduced this summer to prevent unknown adults connecting to children, make clear that “companies cannot offer sexualised images of children as bait to unknown men”.
…but, but, but, the photos were *posted by the parents*, and the “Campaigner” is the one who “sexualised” them:
> The recipient told the Guardian the posts felt “deliberately provocative and ultimately exploitative” […] there appeared to be “an aspect of sexualisation”
Who is the wilfully careless person in this scenario, and who is the wilfully sexualising one? Not the parents? Not the guy who is so offended that he has to keep clicking thorough to establish (quote) *“parents’ images of their daughters in school uniform, some revealing their names”*?###
LessonsTrying to wrap this up:<li>If parents post pictures of their kids, publicly, to platforms the primary purpose of which is to share images widely … then these photos, posted from parental (i.e. adult) accounts, will be shared widely and without the protections that would have been applied had the child posted their own stuff around their own circle.</li><li>Expecting pictures that are posted to such platforms to remain somehow “private” on the grounds that (paraphrase) “not many people follow or are interested in me” is not merely unrealistic, it’s antithetical. Some experts refer to this as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Context_collapse">“context collapse”</a> but more simply it’s <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewi_KNMs2rg">living distractedly in your own little world until you walk into a tree</a>.</li><li>If you want something to be private, make/keep it private. That’s what privacy means. </li><li>Example: If parents want to share photos privately amongst relatives, then use an end-to-end encrypted messenger tool such as WhatsApp or Signal, and turn on disappearing messages so the pictures are trashed after a reasonable time, if not actively saved.</li><li>Ironically, the Online Safety Act means that parents posting pictures of their kids in some ways is more risky than kids sharing photos amongst themselves. The parents have fewer guardrails and less awareness than the kids themselves, and then they blame choices on the platforms.</li><li>Although platforms do need to remind people about federation and automated resharing more often, because sometimes people forget or fail to understand.</li><li>The question of whether “all public content” on Instagram should be “fair game” to include in “recommendation boxes” is a thorny one: this is not like TikTok where people are using the “#fyp” tag to compete for the privilege of being recommended, but also recommendations may be “from friends” rather than merely “popular” and thus demanding content be nominated by posters for inclusion may undermine the whole point of the recommendation mechanism.</li><li>Absolutely nobody is talking about the good things that the Internet does any more — connecting family, friends, people, all that is washed away in fear of abuse and exploitation.</li><li>The Guardian have been derelict: they should not be posting the parents’ pictures of the kids, THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN POSTING SCREENCAPS OF THE ADVERTS DEEMED AT FAULT — so that we can judge the pictures in their proper context, and sense how they were targeted. Reporting hearsay generated by an outraged “Campaigner” is not worthy of this.</li>###
ExperimentAs an experiment, as a parent, and subsequent to my clicking for this investigation around the Guardian article, I scrolled down my Instagram feed to find the Threads recommendation box, and what did I find?
…and if you click through you find a Threads posting with 4 Million views and some savage child-protection commentary from Threads users:
How are you, dear reader, going to feel about this?###
ElsewhereI’m not the only person discussing this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1nlrlwm/parents_outraged_as_meta_uses_photos_of/
#childSafety #guardian #instagram #meta #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #privacy
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2025-09-18 08:56:31 UTC

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Has Britain Gone Too Far With Its Digital Controls? | The New York TimesYes. And the Tony Blair institute is a lot of the problem.
> “There’s a big philosophical debate going on here,” said Ryan Wain, the executive director of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, a London group started by the former prime minister that supports the government’s policies. “There’s a big question about what is freedom and what is safety.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/technology/britain-facial-recognition-digital-controls.html archived at https://archive.ph/55wVW
#ageVerification #censorship #digitalId #idCards #ofcom #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyBill #surveillance #tonyBlairInstitute

2025-09-15 11:36:24 UTC

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I strongly suspect that Bluesky “content moderation” and “safety” is following the same trajectory that Facebook did, and that “distribution” excuses it…In case you missed it: a bunch of people on Bluesky posted about the recent assassination/murder of a prominent right-wing American figure with a statement which in Latin* would be: *requi?scat in ur?n?* — and then they had their posts blocked:
https://bsky.app/profile/nathangrayson.bsky.social/post/3lynw7ennws2h
Truthfully: this sounds like the behaviour of a text classifier which — working from a small training set of postings made by challenging individuals — decided to go do a mass-takedown of offending content.
Colloquially: “a bot worked out that some words were ‘bad’ and took down everything containing them.”
Between this and the recent deployments of age verification [in the USA](https://www.theverge.com/news/775901/bluesky-age-verification-us-south-dakota-wyoming ) and [in the UK](https://www.theverge.com/news/704468/bluesky-age-verification-uk-online-safety-act ), I am wondering if Bluesky’s circumstances are so desperate to not run foul of Government attention / regulation / fines, that it’s taken to proactive and deep compliance in the knowledge that “the nerds will be okay, [they can just run up another PDS or implement client haxx and thereby circumvent the controls.](https://gist.github.com/mary-ext/6e27b24a83838202908808ad528b3318?permalink_comment_id=5690428 )“
That’s not a healthy way to approach bad regulation.
*[*] translated to confuse image text classifiers, just in case they’re still being zealous*
#bluesky #censorship #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #surveillance

2025-09-11 18:53:27 UTC

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Briefing: VPNs and the Online Safety Act | Open Rights Group> If adults are using VPNs to by-pass age-checks it is because they do not trust the age assurance providers with their personal data. An adult using a VPN does not impact the safety of a child online.
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/publications/briefing-vpns-and-the-online-safety-act/
#ageVerification #censorship #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #surveillance #vpns

2025-09-09 19:30:38 UTC

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Memory Integrity Enforcement: A complete vision for memory safety in Apple devices | Apple Security ResearchCute:
> Today we’re introducing the culmination of this effort: Memory Integrity Enforcement (MIE), our comprehensive memory safety defense for Apple platforms. Memory Integrity Enforcement is built on the robust foundation provided by our secure memory allocators, coupled with Enhanced Memory Tagging Extension (EMTE)
https://security.apple.com/blog/memory-integrity-enforcement/
#apple #security

2025-08-15 09:15:16 UTC

- reply

Sorry Tom, but no; I literally hang out with the lobbyists that you talk about, because they ask me about stuff like end-to-end encryption. Between that and my work in the open rights group – you saw the link to the document I wrote in 2016 explaining age verification issues – this is all very much techlash / fomenting criticism of technology in order to gain popular political approval and leverage, not to mention open up opportunities for rent seeking amongst the age verification and digital ID communities.
The big platforms don’t want to be part of identity, it’s not their job, and it gets in the way of making money from advertising from user tracking. I used to work at Facebook, I know that OpenID is a wreck. The platforms do not want to be gatekeepers to people’s activity, they just want to surveil that activity so that they can advertise.

2025-08-15 08:44:06 UTC

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I’m sorry, but the solution to Online Safety Act Age-Verification age-gating & censorship blocks is *not* to call on platforms to “ban the UK”; here I shall respectfully explain why…Some folk, including [Thomas Pearson with 115k followers on TikTok](https://www.tiktok.com/@thomasrpearson/video/7538099279550827798 ), are calling for big global platforms to shun the UK in order to “…make the UK Government lose money, and fast”. In this instance this is the wrong approach, it will cause harm, it won’t work, and here’s why:###
Who am I?First up: my credentials. You can check [my “about” page for details](https://alecmuffett.com/about ), but for this post most relevantly I’m a software engineer, have worked in the digital rights space around encryption and security since ~1988 with 20 years in “Big Tech” industries — including 3 years at Facebook working on security infrastructure, “darkweb” and end-to-end encryption — and ~9 years volunteering on the Board of Directors of the Open Rights Group (the “British EFF”). I also helped put the BBC, Guardian and Reddit onto the darkweb / tor network to assist their audience reach into repressive regimes.
I am now a semi-retired occasional consultant and full-time parent with no financial axes to grind. I have a kid rapidly approaching school and I don’t consider the Online Safety Act a fit approach to my kid’s welfare.###
So What’s Up?The UK Online Safety Act requires all big global platforms to age-verify everyone who uses those sites “from the UK” ostensibly in order to prevent British children “stumbling upon” pornography.
Implementations have proven to be embarrassingly simple to bypass, advocates for the general principle (often with financial interest) are calling for [greater and more invasive restrictions having global impact](https://alecmuffett.com/article/114258 ), to address a problem that the UK has caused for itself.
Further, subsequent reporting has demonstrated that the Online Safety Act’s intended purpose is not to protect children as-advertised, but to [bring all significant communications platforms under UK regulatory control](https://alecmuffett.com/article/114434 ), with an approach [that can only be described as **YOLO-FAFO**](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjr11qqvvwlo ), with Ofcom [literally calling for laws to be enacted so that regulations can be issued permitting them to learn enough so that they can work out how to regulate properly to achieve what the law intended… eventually](https://archive.ph/3pave ):
> Ofcom informed officials that it had [little] chance of understanding how to refine its approach … and that in order to work out how to craft a regulation that wouldn’t accidentally cover the wrong websites, it would need to wait for the law to come into effect so that it could legally force the websites in question to hand over data about how they operate, and then it could rewrite the rules to exclude them. The minister was given the bad news, along with the helpful “suggestion” that “the secretary of state should not ask for more information about this”.
The Government can’t say that it wasn’t warned, because [we told them all about this back in 2016](https://medium.com/@alecmuffett/on-the-digital-economy-bill-1df356862ac2 ), including the [stuff about VPNs](https://www.girlonthenet.com/blog/get-round-a-porn-block/ ).###
Wouldn’t Banning the UK be a good idea?Some people are saying that “big platforms” should ban the UK in order to somehow hurt the government and that this will somehow bring about an end / overthrow the online safety act. This will not work, in the same way that biting a dog will not break up a dogfight.
But why not? After all, Apple have made a huge dent in UK surveillance political power by [withdrawing Advanced Data Protection from the UK](https://support.apple.com/en-gb/122234 ), and there is a very real risk that [Signal will ban UK users if client-side scanning obligations are imposed upon it](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-64584001 ). Both of those approaches “work”, both combat state overreach, and I agree with them politically and strategically.
But we/you/they/platforms should not ban UK users from the Internet.###
AccelerationismVarious world governments have spent the past 10-15 years participating in the [techlash](https://www.oed.com/dictionary/techlash_n?tl=true ), basically an anti-tech — and especially anti-*big*-tech — populist movement to stop people thinking critically about the erosion of their online freedoms to *instead* make them simply and rather mindlessly hate “billionaires” and to make citizens *call for aid from the government* to stop all the badness and harms coming from unregulated connectivity and speech.
But then the government decided that the citizens are the problem, and that the solution is to require them to present ID before they are permitted to look at *stuff* — tits, dicks, arses, LGBTQ discussion, alcoholism recovery, domestic abuse experiences, wartime atrocities — because of course [all the content on the Internet is individually labelled with some sort of taxonomy of meaning and intention, right? (hint: nope)](https://alecmuffett.com/article/114003 )
But if you’re calling for the big platforms to ban Britons from their platforms until the UK Government unwinds its stupidity, then you’re making at least three big mistakes:<li>You are providing fresh meat to the anti-big-tech backlash because “the billionaires are not doing what we (erroneously) want, to protect our freedoms”</li><li>If the big platforms actually did this, the Government would just double-down on the “techlash” anti-big-tech aspects — “billionaires don’t care about our children” — and would seek common cause with the complaints and diffuse/dilute them </li><li>In order to achieve what is being asked, the big platforms would have to identify all British users and block them, which to a first approximation is literally what the UK Government want to have happen anyway.</li>
You would literally be calling for the platforms to **get good** at the thing you are trying to get them to **not do**; and *in what universe does that make sense?*###
How this actually needs to pan out…There is already a good historical precedent for what needs to happen: the [disastrous and subsequently repealed 1920s prohibition on Alcohol in the USA](https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/alcohol-prohibition-was-failure ). Go check out that article, look at the graph and compare it to [recent reportage about a supposed sudden decline in UK-based porn access](https://www.theverge.com/news/759234/uk-porn-site-traffic-tumbles-age-verification-rules ).
There is no quick fix. The UK needs to lead the way in being pointed-at and laughed-at for doing such a boneheaded thing as attempting to coerce global censorship. People need to circumvent it, trivially. The Government is attempting to force its influence globally, and that simply will not happen. By the time any effective censorship controls actually sediment into the technology stack, the users — the kids, the people ostensibly being protected — will have migrated to some other application or network stack where they don’t have to deal with age verification and identity bullshit.
The actual victims will be the British people — and the citizens of any other country stupid enough to follow suit — where the ordinary citizens will have to spend their time dealing with being doxed and having identities stolen *in order to* circumvent the controls that otherwise will not exist.
Just as most abuse is domestic, in the newly created market for fake ID, kids will be stealing parents’ IDs to swap them, and what will that do to society?
So, yeah: don’t call for the UK to be banned from big platforms. If you do you will be playing into the Government’s hands. Instead, we have to sweat it out.###
ReferencesHere’s Thomas.
Sorry, mate, but no.
https://www.tiktok.com/@thomasrpearson/video/7538099279550827798
#ageVerification #censorship #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #surveillance #ThomasPearson #VPN

2025-06-11 17:13:07 UTC

##
Government using national security as ‘smokescreen’ in Apple encryption row | Computer Weekly> Senior Conservative MP David Davis told Computer Weekly there was “no credible case” for the government to refuse to tell Parliament how many notices it issues each year to telecoms and internet companies.
> “The government is being dishonest in its use of ‘national security’ as a smokescreen to avoid telling the public how often it has ordered tech companies to hand over data or undermine encryption,” he said.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366625724/Government-using-national-security-as-smokescreen-in-Apple-encryption-row
#apple #davidDavis #endToEndEncryption #homeOffice #surveillance #tcn #whatsapp

2025-03-21 10:22:37 UTC

##
Signal threatens to leave France if encryption backdoor required | ComputerworldOne of these days this is going to actually have to happen before they pay attention; one of the few architectural benefits of Signal requiring a phone number to bootstrap an identity is that they can fairly easily block any account associated with a +33 or +44 international dial code:
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3850597/signal-threatens-to-leave-france-if-encryption-backdoor-required.html
#endToEndEncryption #france #signal #surveillance

2024-11-19 07:38:05 UTC

##
Speaking as a former Sun Microsystems employee, I look forward to Chrome being purchased by (e.g.) Oracle & taken closed-source, thereby killing an entire browser ecosystemAll bets are off when a huge open source platform like Solaris or Chrome is sold off, and we can see from the diverse installed Solaris ecosystem today how successful the various Solaris “forks” were at individual survival.
Chrome will die and take all its progeny, except maybe Edge, with it.
> DOJ Will Push Google to Sell Chrome to Break Search Monopoly | Bloomberg
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-18/doj-will-push-google-to-sell-off-chrome-to-break-search-monopoly
#chrome #google #openSource

2024-08-30 20:58:34 UTC

**Brazil judge orders suspension of Elon Musk’s X | AP News**
It will be interesting to see how state censorship really works in a world of VPNs:
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-musk-x-suspended-de-moraes-46c9d5c5c895e17d9adfac43e6ac20fd
https://alecmuffett.com/article/110335
#Brazil #censorship #twitter

2024-06-18 15:48:26 UTC

**‘Encryption is deeply threatening to power’: Meredith Whittaker of messaging app Signal | Chat and messaging apps | The Guardian**
Important read especially if you are European and have not yet complained to your representative about ChatControl
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jun/18/encryption-is-deeply-threatening-to-power-meredith-whittaker-of-messaging-app-signal
[](https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/copy_link?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Falecmuffett.com%2Farticle%2F109944&linkname=%E2%80%98Encryption%20is%20deeply%20threatening%20to%20power%E2%80%99%3A%20Meredith%20Whittaker%20of%20messaging%20app%20Signal%20%7C%20Chat%20and%20messaging%20apps%20%7C%20The%20Guardian )[](https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/threads?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Falecmuffett.com%2Farticle%2F109944&linkname=%E2%80%98Encryption%20is%20deeply%20threatening%20to%20power%E2%80%99%3A%20Meredith%20Whittaker%20of%20messaging%20app%20Signal%20%7C%20Chat%20and%20messaging%20apps%20%7C%20The%20Guardian )[](https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/facebook?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Falecmuffett.com%2Farticle%2F109944&linkname=%E2%80%98Encryption%20is%20deeply%20threatening%20to%20power%E2%80%99%3A%20Meredith%20Whittaker%20of%20messaging%20app%20Signal%20%7C%20Chat%20and%20messaging%20apps%20%7C%20The%20Guardian )[](https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/whatsapp?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Falecmuffett.com%2Farticle%2F109944&linkname=%E2%80%98Encryption%20is%20deeply%20threatening%20to%20power%E2%80%99%3A%20Meredith%20Whittaker%20of%20messaging%20app%20Signal%20%7C%20Chat%20and%20messaging%20apps%20%7C%20The%20Guardian )[](https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/email?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Falecmuffett.com%2Farticle%2F109944&linkname=%E2%80%98Encryption%20is%20deeply%20threatening%20to%20power%E2%80%99%3A%20Meredith%20Whittaker%20of%20messaging%20app%20Signal%20%7C%20Chat%20and%20messaging%20apps%20%7C%20The%20Guardian )[](https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/twitter?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Falecmuffett.com%2Farticle%2F109944&linkname=%E2%80%98Encryption%20is%20deeply%20threatening%20to%20power%E2%80%99%3A%20Meredith%20Whittaker%20of%20messaging%20app%20Signal%20%7C%20Chat%20and%20messaging%20apps%20%7C%20The%20Guardian )[](https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/linkedin?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Falecmuffett.com%2Farticle%2F109944&linkname=%E2%80%98Encryption%20is%20deeply%20threatening%20to%20power%E2%80%99%3A%20Meredith%20Whittaker%20of%20messaging%20app%20Signal%20%7C%20Chat%20and%20messaging%20apps%20%7C%20The%20Guardian )[](https://www.addtoany.com/add_to/mastodon?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Falecmuffett.com%2Farticle%2F109944&linkname=%E2%80%98Encryption%20is%20deeply%20threatening%20to%20power%E2%80%99%3A%20Meredith%20Whittaker%20of%20messaging%20app%20Signal%20%7C%20Chat%20and%20messaging%20apps%20%7C%20The%20Guardian )[](https://www.addtoany.com/share )
[⊞](/tti-cache/109944.png )
https://alecmuffett.com/article/109944
#chatControl #europeanUnion #surveillance