Today I am being haunted by Hilary Mantel's essay on stationery, for surely my poor word count (on my MacBook) is the fault of my notebook's binding. www.theguardian.com/books/2010/m...

Transparent example of what we have termed 'platform illiberalism' -- an illiberal platform and an illiberal gov joining forces to support each other and their shared illiberal project journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Control your own future with a suite of business tools that don’t exploit your data. Today, we’re launching Proton Workspace, helping you collaborate securely and privately: https://proton.me/business/blog/proton-workspace

Methinks the National Security Act of 2024 is about to get a workout

Apple subsidiary fined by UK government over Moscow sanctions breach

We must build an internet designed for an era of rivalry and conflict, climate stress, democratic backsliding, and concentration of power, writes Konstantinos Komaitis.

I used "Jesus and John Wayne" extensively in my master's dissertation, so I am really quite thrilled that Kristen Kobes du Mez is turning her fire on the mommy bloggers.

This 50 yr old woman spent 5 months in jail accused of a crime in a state she's never even been to, because Clearview AI misidentified her as the suspect. A judge signed off on it, cops went along with it, no process in place to even question the AI. www.cnn.com/2026/03/29/u...

"a senior staff member felt the library’s ‘Life 101’ section (where Emily kept books for school leavers) was inappropriate, 'based on the association with the television program Room 101'. They were seemingly oblivious to Room 101’s origins in Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty-Four."

Much as I support mocking this app, I regret to inform you that this is pretty normal for an app. SDKs routinely pull off this kind of shit, and very few app developers check what their SDKs do.

Gratuitous fritillaria.

Countries banning all teenagers from social media because "their brains aren't developed enough to handle it", meanwhile nobody's talking about the percentage of retirement-aged adults who have irreversibly cooked their fucking brains on Facebook since 2020.

Admittedly I was parentless from my early twenties, so my perspective is skewed, but I have a sort of visceral disgust by these alpha male tech bros who are simultaneously masters of the universe and also poor wee souls still in clingy, codependent relationships with their mummies and daddies.

Saying the quiet part out loud, from London Playbook PM: “we should do it for the politics alone”

I always love it when the race for the top tech regulation role is between someone whose mission is to ban anonymity, and someone who famously still had his PA print out his emails for him. www.theguardian.com/media/2026/m...

The Publisher Is Also a Data Broker Academic research didn’t just go digital — it became trackable. Platforms run by Elsevier (part of RELX) log behaviour across the research cycle. This isn’t just publishing. It’s data extraction. informationlabs.org/the-publishe...

I have another new piece just out, considering the intersection of #surveillance and #ScienceFiction, this time in the context of the the ideologies of tech oligarchs, in Science as Culture, edited by @keanbirch.bsky.social and Les Levidow... www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

As a by the by, I was at a mtg yesterday where an official described the ministerial vision for "government by app". This is a flimsy, transactional view of capabilities - sthg built on top of an operating system you have no control over that prizes shaving seconds off interactions over resilience

I've been warning about the rising attacks on pro-choice speech for months. Just this week, South Dakota banned ads for abortion with language so broad that even providing *information* about how to get abortion could be prosecutable jessica.substack.com/p/south-dako...

It's late, but this is important: Senate Republicans are pressuring the FDA to shut down abortion pill websites jessica.substack.com/p/the-gops-p...

Happy Hi Bob! Day to all those who celebrate.

Niche wonk tweet: new OSCOLA just dropped ‼️ www.law.ox.ac.uk/content/news...

BRB moving to a cave and planting potatoes

A General Counsel writing "I'm pleased to have this opportunity..." when it can only properly be understood by anyone reading it as "You're a buffoon who has completely and utterly wasted my time" is just a chef's kiss of an insult. bsky.app/profile/emma...

Gotta condition the kids to give up their own privacy as early as possible. 🤮

NEW: WebinarTV, a company that bills itself as “a search engine for the best webinars,” is secretly scanning the internet for Zoom meeting links, recording the calls, and turning them into AI-generated podcasts for profit. @emanuelmaiberg.bsky.social reports:

@cyberleagle.bsky.social OSA

Glasgow's response to Glasgow Central reopening after sixteen days of emergency repairs and renewal:

On delegating your writing to LLMs. Excellent thread.

Who let him go to this interview?

It ~may~ be totally coincidental that 🇺🇦 has mowed down 7,000 🇷🇺s in the past five days, since 🇷🇺 began physically removing Telegram from soldiers’ phones in favour of the official state non-encrypted messaging app. But I do hope they had 🌻 seeds in their pockets. www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2...

Just saying that UK gov is not prepared to feel the wrath of teenagers who rely on VPNs to watch football (so I have heard, anecdotally) www.techradar.com/vpn/vpn-priv...

Reminder that you can submit an abstract to give a talk at our upcoming 'Rewilding the Web' workshop at the University of Edinburgh up until the 31st March. Details in image and alt text. Supported by @schoolofppls.bsky.social @edfuturesinstitute.bsky.social + Scotsphil

The perfect visual metaphor for the era of American global contempt doesn’t exi-

For this week's Tech Policy Press podcast, Justin Hendrix spoke to Boston University's Woodrow Hartzog and Jessica Silbey about their forthcoming law review paper, "How AI Destroys Democratic Institutions." They say the "affordances of AI systems extinguish" key features of democratic institutions.

For people who are concerned about having their devices seized at US airports starting Monday when ICE "assists" the TSA, EFF has this guide: www.eff.org/deeplinks/20...

Bless the innocent souls that believe that mere contractual protections are sufficient to protect data being misused by international government contractors.

This morning I am blowing a kiss to these glass panes in the Glasgow Central roof which cracked but did not shatter despite an inferno raging inches away, because if they had…

To create this mega-list of “alleged books with inappropriate content”, the school admitted (in documents we saw) that the categorisations of the books were written using AI. Michelle Obama’s Becoming was on the list for “racism and political themes”. www.indexoncensorship.org/2026/03/scho...

Fully agree with @hansardsociety.bsky.social's podcast observation that this month's Lords amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill, re online safety, were problematic enough from a lawmaking perspective before being scheduled for debate at ridiculous hours when no one is thinking straight.

@rossmc11.bsky.social the neighbourhood’s very own Mr She’s Turned The Weans Against Us has been standing on the street, live-streaming his rant about this, for forty-five minutes.

Feel like these two tweets sum up where we are right now

Oh come on, Stuart, make an effort. 😉

It sure is a cool and normal time to have seen this at the very same time that the Lords were debating amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill re: what groups get classified as “terrorists”, or are seen to be their supporters, and why, for the purpose of proscribing them both IRL and online.

When today comes around, and I'm working from my garden full of birds and critters and spring blossoms on the first day of the year when it's possible to do so, I smile and think to myself... "suck it London"

Reminder to read this ahead of having your evening ruined.

Watching Zelenskyy in the Commons showing MPs how the 🇺🇦 high command is running the war on iPads. This is why the @libertyhq.bsky.social + @privacyinternational.org challenge to the Home Office’s TCN on end-to-end encryption on Apple devices really is a matter of life and death.

Joe Kent is a right-wing lunatic with a “PANZER” tattoo (yes, in the original German), has close ties to White Nationalists and extremist paramilitary groups, he has consulted with Fuentes about social media strategy, employed a Proud Boy on his campaign - and that’s just off the top off my head.