If bots can solve common captchas with between 90-100% accuracy, what is even the point of still using them? https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2025/11/accessibility-problem-authentication-methods-captcha/

Lots of Seals taking a break by a windy shore today #scotland #photography #nature

🇪🇺Misleading headlines: #ChatControl is not dead, it is being privatized! 🚨 EU governments voted today for: 🔍 Warrantless mass surveillance 🆔 Mandatory ID for everyone (End of anonymity) 🚫 Digital house arrest for teens The fight continues! 👇 […] [Original post on digitalcourage.social]

Another game banned from Steam with no explanation and no apparent reason, with the studio behind it at risk of closing because of the ban. Steam's de-facto monopoly must be broken, by legal means if it's not possible to challenge them commercially. They have become something between a […]

Czy ktoś może mnie uszczypnąć? Czy to znaczy że... przekonałem Ministerstwo Cyfryzacji do RSSów? Po prawie roku walki o to? Jeżeli to prawda, to panie i panowie – osiągnęliśmy sukces.

I just filled out the UK Government's consultation on the proposed changes to settlement status (immigration). If you live in the UK, I encourage you to do the same. Be warned: there is a lot of double-speak in this consultation. https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/earned-settlement

A nearby pond had its old flat concrete spillway upgraded into a proper stream with fish accessible pools, and replanted green borders. I love to see this kind of rewilding work, it makes green spaces nicer to be in, and it's good for wildlife too. #environment #scotland

_Have I Got Phobia For You_ is an online game that shows how modern transphobia is just 80s/90s homophobia rebadged. https://haveigotphobiaforyou.com/ #trans #transphobia #homophobia

Ed Zitron one again at it with some dire looking financials for the biggest name in AI. Not only is this industry, and all the tech it touches, bubbling dangerously, now there is hard evidence that they may have possibly indirectly not been entirely honest about their finances? If I was an […]

Shen's comics run the gamut from funny to dark, but this one is nice and inspiring. I really need to get motivated to do more drawing. https://www.webtoons.com/en/slice-of-life/bluechair/ep-1203-you-can-do-it/

November and finally the last of the apples have come off the trees. A pretty good harvest this year. And this is only what's left after all that we've been eating since August. Should keep us through to spring just fine. #autumn #food

A month or two ago I switched my desktop from Windows 10 to Kubuntu 25.04 and things were a bit rough. Luckily though the 25.10 release that is now out is much better. Wayland sessions with Nvidia cards don't crash periodically, keyboard and tablet integration works better, and it generally […]

Can mastodon help me here, because I've been trying to figure this out and it's driving me insane. On my laptop, running KDE 5.27 (Ubuntu 24 LTS) the taskbar can interleave pinned and active apps, like Windows, so pressing Meta+2 always activates the app […] [Original post on social.vivaldi.net]

I enjoy buying books from physical shops, but for the love of the written word, could you PLEASE stop putting impossible-to-remove stickers on the front covers? I'm buying a physical book because I want something nice to look at and hold, not for it to be covered in streaks of gluey residue #books

Good morning. Starlink has now launched more than TEN THOUSAND satellites into orbit. Nearly 1400 have already been burned up in the atmosphere so far. Here's a "lovely" image from my Kuiper Belt discovery program with dozens of satellite streaks in a 3 hour […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

A new home for Open Science "Federate with Mastodon and Bluesky and integrate your social graph with scholarly data. Transform any conversation into citable FAIR data with persistent identifiers. The future of scholarly communication is open, community-owned, and interconnected." […]

Hacker gets annoyed at Amazon’s Kindle apps, reverse-engineers the Kindle web reader’s protocol (which basically sends each page as a set of glyphs in a deliberately broken variant of SVG). Such obscurity, much security. https://blog.pixelmelt.dev/kindle-web-drm/

I find services like backblaze to be a very useful way to get peace of mind that my stuff is backed up offsite (encrypted of course). However, it's always good to test this regularly. I have just discovered I'm unable to log in to backblaze because the email based 2FA codes are not being sent to […]

I am the last person to want to defend Tommy Robinson, but this is further evidence of how much of a police state the UK has become. That 1) the police can detain you under anti-terror legislation, 2) demand sans warrant that you unlock your phone, 3) with no evidence, save the crime of "filming […]

I love eating fish - it's a very versatile food, there's loads of different types, textures, flavours. But this article makes for some grim reading. It advocates for zero-catch on popular fish like cod, and I am beginning to wonder if we should ban all large scale fishing for a year or two to […]

Side point on #chatcontrol: When I worked on the law in the European Parliament, in the face of questionably legal, and highly problematic behavior by DG HOME, I prepared a whitepaper on why it was such a terrible Idea. As it is in the public interest, I have decided to make that white paper […]

I genuinely cannot understand why Nvidia would invest money into OpenAI. Nvidia is just about the only company that's managed to come out of the AI sector making a profit, and they've done that by selling hardware to them. What could Nvidia possibly gain by investing money in a company whose […]

Trying out Linux on my main desktop now that Win 10 is out of support. Glad to see that drivers are still as broken as ever. /s

Apparently across England toxic sludge from landfill gets mixed with sewage and just... spread onto the fields that grow our food‽ This behaviour is normalised to the point that if farmers stopped doing it treatment works would be overwhelmed by the volume of sludge to get rid of. How on earth […]

You know what the mastodon web interface could really use? A way to only show posts once. So often I'll see one user I follow post something, and then 5 others will boost it throughout the day. I've already read this, I don't need to see it again. Note: I'm not talking about "hide boosts" from […]

Bit of a rant from me, in light of von der Leyen talking of "tech sovereignty" today "If you’re a “thought leader” about anything in European politics, it’s imperative you practice what you preach in terms of the tech you use" 👇 […]

The UK Met police are upset at having to enforce terror laws. They get called out on it and feel bad. If they feel bad, and their managers feel bad, and the lawyers behind the scenes feel bad, why are they still enforcing a law that they see as unjust? […]

The UK governments Microsoft Copilot AI experment shows little to no value for money, and no productivity boost. The apps with the most usage during the trial - Excel and Powerpoint, ended up showing "worse accuracy and quality" with those that used Copilot. Surprise surprise that a chatbot […]

I just cloned all the repositories I had "starred" on Github (i.e. the ones I might conceivably want to use the code for at some point) to a local drive. As well as keeping a copy of my own repositories which I always do as matter of course. Now I have a backup if everything important if things […]

"The home secretary has moved to proscribe jellyfish as a terror organisation due to their history of interference with national infrastructure" https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx299eyg7qko

SNCF Really "Our trains are too full, what do we do?" "Impose compulsory reservation to stop overcrowding, and restrict the numbers who can take them!" "But now our tickets are so damned complex now everyone is queuing to try to buy tickets!" "Make the ticket office compulsory reservation […]

My local bus operator is now generating timetables that include buses that do not exist. AI Vibe coding slop or regular incompetence? Wrong timetable or non-existent bus? Who knows! I just hope you're not out late at night and you find out the answer 🚌 🚌 🔥 #scotland #programming #webdev

I have just found a fantastic photography website with old buses from around Scotland and elsewhere. There's some real boneshakers on here. https://victoryguy.smugmug.com

The EU is now running a new consultation on a Digital Fairness Act proposal. Targeting dark patterns, unfair sales practices, and more. Feedback can be given either as general comments or as a more qualified consultation response. Well worth a read and a reply if you care about digital consumer […]

Another annoyance I've found with the #onlinesafetyact - When trying to find info on reddit, if someone marks a post as NSFW, you can't see it without an account in the UK. Some communities use this as a marker that doesn't indicate something is over-18, merely that it is sensitive. reddit […]

Considering just how much of gov, public, and probably critical national security, data is held on US cloud providers, the revelation that none of this is actually secure against foreign powers should be sounding alarm bells to have it moved off onto locally owned cloud sites […]

Applying for scottish government documents: 0. Spend more than a month waiting for the document to be ready 1. Finally get email saying it's ready. Click link in email 2. You need to sign in 3. Sign-in page needs a random domain awswaf .com allowed before it will load the form 4. Needs a 2FA SMS […]

In addition to having to deal with problems of payment processors, it seems that itch.io is outright blocking some pages in the UK because of the OSA. Full text given: "Content unavailable in your region We're sorry — this content is not available in your […] [Original post on social.vivaldi.net]

I really struggle when I'm walking around town and suddenly there's a really high-pitched noise. It can be painful at times. I signed this to try and get something done about it - https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/731197

A good analogy for dealing with encroaching technologies. https://blog.foxtrotluna.social/theyre-putting-blue-food-coloring-in-everything/

Good job, evolution #comic #art

[UKPol] Hey Brits, go sign this if you want Mastodon to still exist here. https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/722903

Watching Wimbledon - they have IT issues. In any well designed systems you should have backups. In this case the responsibility falls back to the umpire - you know - the person in charge of the match. Did they take responsibility? No, they pretend that because there was an IT fault that […]

https://www.dw.com/en/paris-reopens-seine-river-for-public-swimming/a-73163816 The seine has no been cleaned up enough to permit riverside bathing areas. if France can clean their rivers up why can't the UK?

"Whatever" is a brilliant essay on "AI" by @eevee: "But I think the core of what pisses me off is that selling this magic machine requires selling the idea that doing things is worthless. Because if doing something has some value, then it must be somehow better than pushing a button and […]

https://thephrasemaker.com/2025/07/02/crunchyroll-uses-ai-translations-months-after-ceo-claimed-no-ai/ I really don't understand what it is about AI that makes people act so braindead. Here crunchyroll say they won't use it, then use it in ways that are painfully obvious. It would be better if […]

This is a weird one. The UK government's e-petition site had a petition uploaded a few days ago asking to stop the sale or donations of weapons to Israel. The UK gov today changed the text of this simply to "export". Why the change? Is that a distinction […] [Original post on social.vivaldi.net]

The bat box in my garden finally has a bat living in it! Fantastic