former developer | studying combined bsc in cs + health sciences | @speechunion member
United Kingdom
Joined December 2007
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The UK already had two primary methods used for child protection online, with a third system also being recommended:
1. cleanfeed (confidential, http only, no https, silent response, primarily for CSAM, recommendations provided by IWF, singular resources only - e.g. specific jpg files over http)
2. court order (public, entire domains, IPs, multiple URLs, wildcards, http and https, etc..)
Additionally, there were recommendations made on mandating parental filters by default for UK ISPs, which would have been far more effective than anything OSA has achieved (or ever will).
Ironically, by pursing OSA & social media bans, it's forced kids into VPNs, which bypass the existing protections that already existed - thus weakening the actual protection for children.
The problem is, that not only are the politicians in this country tech-illiterate, but as we've also seen recently, for example with the BBC tech editor didn't even know what PHP was - the tech editors at BBC, Sky, and other news organizations are also often very tech-illiterate. This has only worsened the underlying issue of how detached the politicians are from the reality of the system that they are proposing, or how to work with the existing systems.
Easy libertarian soundbite though this is, tearing down the social media ban and failing to offer an alternative is not only a shortsighted political move (parents overwhelmingly want action and parents are a constituency of millions); it also morally reprehensible.
If we were to tackle the hardware - smartphones rather than content - many of these issues fall away.
Additional note:
Cleanfeed and court order blocks already apply to all UK residential connections, and cannot be disabled.
ISP-level parental filtering operates by default on some mobile connections now, but since it isn't mandated, most residential ISPs do not enable it by default.
The best protection will have simply been to mandate ISP-level filtering systems that can be disabled by the billpayer, and ditching the outdated cleanfeed system. It'd have been far more effective than anything OSA can offer, since OSA does noting to prevent malicious actors from distributing content to children - the door is still wide open.
Just like the EU cookie legislations, the OSA is flawed from the ground up, developed by people that have minimal exposure to the internet beyond their iPad wielding interns.
Seems like the home office isn't happy with open rights groups raising concerns about data protection.
Tells you everything you need to know about this rotten, corrupt government.
NOW — The Home Office has released the list of social media posts its Standards and Compliance Unit observed about Prevent in 2024.
The department disclosed:
• A post of mine criticising a local-council training module that directed staff to report anyone sharing “anti-immigration views” to counter-terrorism police.
• A post from @Con_Tomlinson criticising the Home Office’s RICU unit and the fact Prevent designated Douglas Murray a far-right extremist.
Dozens of other public posts and articles are listed raising the same position, “Prevent training focuses heavily on the far-right while downplaying Islamist extremism.”
This unit, known as “StaCU” - is collecting and logging criticism of Prevent’s training bias.
The original request for this material was refused under national-security and health-and-safety exemptions.
Disclosure only happened after the applicant went to the ICO.
When you consider the original purpose of reddit, and the ideas from Swartz, it's just so bizarre how reddit ended up - the complete opposite of the original intentions.
Swartz and others originally sought to develop a free, uncensored platform that allowed for open exchange of information. Today it's the complete opposite, and possibly one of the most censored sites on the internet.
Struggling to understand why they are even doing this, given that traffic/engagement has already decreased. This will presumably serve to decrease it further. My guess is maybe they have deals with content providers/search engines and want to block any other unauthorised access?
Either way, hopefully this will begin the final death spiral of reddit.
This isn't intended as an attack on Ozempic, but I do wonder how much the physical change (without the traditional discipline required) impacts behaviour in cases like this.
If you earn that kind of physical change without acquiring the discipline to wield it, then that can presumably have a number of potential negative effects on the psyche.
rick.h retweeted
For context, a Russian dissident criticizing the Putin regime anonymously from the UK now risks persecution and death if Russia or North Korea manages to get hold of social media firms’ doxing databases.
Which they will.
Huge infringement on freedom of speech.
🚨BREAKING: All Britons may need ID to use social media, the UK's online safety regulator today announces
“This plan for a government ‘social media ban’ is a national ID system by the back door.
Both the government and Ofcom have admitted that children will get around the ban, which means the real effect will be normalising adults and children alike to hand over their passports just to get online.
Hundreds of thousands of people without ID, who tend to be poorer people, and many more who don’t want to risk handing their passports over to foreign tech companies will be locked out of huge parts of the internet.
The plan will kill anonymity online, whilst the UK’s culture of speech policing is reaching a crisis point. The policy is painfully misguided, an Orwellian assault on free speech and privacy, and will make children no safer at all.
The false illusion that children aren’t on social media will cause the companies to abandon all their child safety measures. The Government could be promoting meaningful safety measures and supporting parental controls that genuinely protect children - instead, they’re demanding government ID from the whole population just for uncensored internet access. It is authoritarian madness.”
- Silkie Carlo | @silkiecarlo
Read ⤵️
telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10…
Now that I'm zonked out recovering from an infection, I have time to break out my Jellyfin instance and watch some old shows.
ID required for memes online, but no ID required for voting?
No thanks - I refuse.
🚨BREAKING: All Britons may need ID to use social media, the UK's online safety regulator today announces
“This plan for a government ‘social media ban’ is a national ID system by the back door.
Both the government and Ofcom have admitted that children will get around the ban, which means the real effect will be normalising adults and children alike to hand over their passports just to get online.
Hundreds of thousands of people without ID, who tend to be poorer people, and many more who don’t want to risk handing their passports over to foreign tech companies will be locked out of huge parts of the internet.
The plan will kill anonymity online, whilst the UK’s culture of speech policing is reaching a crisis point. The policy is painfully misguided, an Orwellian assault on free speech and privacy, and will make children no safer at all.
The false illusion that children aren’t on social media will cause the companies to abandon all their child safety measures. The Government could be promoting meaningful safety measures and supporting parental controls that genuinely protect children - instead, they’re demanding government ID from the whole population just for uncensored internet access. It is authoritarian madness.”
- Silkie Carlo | @silkiecarlo
Read ⤵️
telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10…
rick.h retweeted
one of my favorite bits of forgotten apple history is that back in 2007, a company called axiotron was literally buying macbooks, ripping out their keyboards, and rebuilding them as pen-based tablets running mac os x
they called it the modbook
just an incredible amount of effort to make a computer apple had absolutely no interest in making
New MBP weighs just ~1.36kg.
Have a feeling this might finally be the model that I could potentially replace my M1 Touchbar with.
rick.h retweeted
Michael Pollan reveals how the introduction of caffeine completely changed human history and consciousness.
"Before caffeine, it was a very different world and a very different consciousness. People were drunk a lot of the time, buzzed almost all of the time because it was safer than water"
"Water was really how you got diseases. If you fermented things, even low alcohol, it killed a lot of the microbes. So people, even kids, drank hard cider for breakfast"
"Tea, chocolate, and coffee all arrive in the same decade in England, and things start to change... no one ate or drank boiling water or hot beverages before"
"Boiling it made it much safer. This gave this incredible public health boost to these places, and then you have the drug that fosters a kind of more linear, rational, focused way of thinking"
"People in the 1600s started writing about it saying, 'Wow, we have this new civil and sober drink that we can use.' And that, I think, makes possible things like the Industrial Revolution"
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The clip repeats the myth that pre-caffeine people were mostly drunk because water was unsafe. Historians and medieval sources show water was commonly drunk from wells/springs while weak ale provided nutrition/calories, not a substitute for bad water.
leslefts.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-gr…
slate.com/human-interest…
fakehistoryhunter.net/2026/02/02/dri…
How many of these issues are being caused by an over-reliance on AI in the first place? 👀
Ordinarily these are all things that people would be aware of when building their own machine.
Modding was also far more important than graphics, in my opinion.
We had a lot of fun modding BF2 back in the day. Back then, EA/DICE supported the modding community, providing development tools, support, among other things. Many interesting projects grew out of it - one of the best IMO was Project Reality.
Sadly my own mods have largely been lost to time.... although the launcher I built for assisting modding is still around.
You can't replicate any of the fun we had, or the communities we built with just graphics.
