When a political party shows you who they are, believe them the first time

For-profit age-verification providers are now pushing for "continuous biometric monitoring" — AI scans of your face, your voice, your behavior — while you're online to protect children. Every session. Every website. Every keystroke. Monitored and recorded.

Ok. They’ve pissed me off. I’m back to tell you 3 things about ID cards: 1. Migrants ALREADY HAVE biometric ID cards & govts have been trying to digitise them for years w repeated fuckups & failures causing complete chaos - they don’t work, you do not want that system for you.

If you've been enjoying ITV's the Hack, read up further on what happened next - the extraordinary trove of damning evidence which emerged in multiple legal cases but which were never tested in court www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/media/...

Just your annual reminder to raise a glass to Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov who on this date in 1983 saved your life when he decided to wait for evidence in stead of passing on the message that could have caused armageddon. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_So...

Why, I wonder, has someone painted the stopcock/ water meter cover outside my house (and the one opposite, but no others nearby) blue?

Handle validates on Bluesky's own validator

Can anyone work out why my handle is invalid? The .well-known path resolves properly.

Question: how many councils have asked the govt to provide a centralised digital ID scheme to improve pothole reporting?

Very odd that #TheHack gave @tomwatsonofficial.bsky.social a (very bad) Brummie accent, when he doesn't have one in real life.

Visiting my Bluesky profile while logged out results in an "Unable to resolve handle" error. I've changed my handle, then changed back and then reverified it, to no effect. Any tips?

I only know one person who has eaten swan* and he is indeed an immigrant. He moved from England to Scotland. * It had died after flying into a power line

Cannot stress enough how it is already possible to report potholes www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/poli...

Manaaki Whenua have appointed Siobhan Leachman as their Wikimedian in Residence! Supporting staff to share their expertise, @siobhanleachman.bsky.social will be assisting the group with contributing content from their nationally significant collections to openly accessible Wikimedia platforms.

Look what we have here then.

It's almost like a massively incompetent fool let a bunch of other incompetent fools play at being in charge for a while.

Just had an EE salesman call at the door, spinning a load of lies, asking me if I could oblige him by doing a speed test. I played along, refusing to answer his questions about my current provider. When I'd done the test, he told me I'd be much better off switching to EE... My current provider.

Best. UK is best country in Europe for drug prices. HTH.

This does not make an easy read for those of us hoping Birmingham City Council’s governance and culture might change post its effective bankruptcy - Parents at Raddlebarn Primary tried to raise the alarm. The council investigated them for bullying www.birminghamdispatch.co.uk/the-headteac...

RAPTCHA

Just a reminder before the “big announcement” today. Autism was discovered in 1911 and the modern definition of Autism came in 1943. Tylenol wasn’t widely used until the 1950s. Anyone trying to tell you that Tylenol causes Autism isn’t someone that should be taken seriously.

Take a moment—as I did this morning—to admire the decorative brickwork on Birmingham Metropolitan College's James Watt Campus, the former Brooklyn College, Great Barr, north Birmingham. I had a part-time job teaching there, one summer, although mostly off-site.

Take a moment—as I did this morning—to admire the decorative brickwork on Birmingham Metropolitan College's James Watt Campus, the former Brooklyn College, Great Barr, north Birmingham. I had a part-time job teaching there, one summer, although mostly off-site.

Trump at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service: “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I HATE my opponent, and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry.” Again, this is a memorial service.

The ITV exposé on COVID now turns its sights on testing. I was stunned in 2020 when Sir Paul Nurse - Director of the Francis Crick Institute - told me he’d written to the government to offer the services of the Crick (the biggest biomeolecular lab in the country) - and never got a reply…

Wikipedia is what the internet was meant to be and one of the few online places that hasn’t got worse. It’s a miracle

Wait 'til he hears some Welsh place names...

So as a bit of an FCDO website nerd, I can confirm Palestine has been added to the list of countries. www.gov.uk/government/p...

In Swedish, a word for what you eat to bridge the gap between meals (or while waiting for the main course to cook) is stödmacka. It means "support sandwich." A similar word in Norwegian is ventepølse, or "waiting sausage."

Happy Batman Day!

Interesting that the Grauniad have changed the image used on this article. Would be interesting to hear that (sub-)editorial discussion

The Casual Archivist’s Short History of the Business Card, From Versailles to Microsoft Word themalin.co/journal/the-... #identity #GraphicDesign #BusinessCards

Idea: Browser plugin that, when you land on a paywalled news article, automatically suggests the same story in other, actually readable sources

You've got to love #openaccess for books (if you can fund it). Now ~19,000 downloads for A History of Scientific Journals: publishing at the Royal Society 1665-2015. Unbelievable figures, compared to traditional academic book publishing! From @uclpress.bsky.social or www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv...

Thread

Y'all, I bought a e-version of a textbook that has several pages left blank with "text not available due to copyright restrictions." I bought this book, presumably when they published it they had the rights to it, but now my expensive ebook is missing whole sections and I don't really know why.

Even ignoring the MB(!) of JavaScript, the BBC News front page loads this 375KB image: ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard... which is right at the very bottom of the page as a background. Sticking an IntersectionObserver in (dracos.co.uk/said/three-r...) would save GB of traffic a day

This is what you get for calling them "seagulls", not "gulls". YHBW.

I'm imagining a version where the crab grabs the phone and disappears back down its hole with it

I reported this flooding to Birmingham City Council, who have just replied, saying "Your service request has been investigated but unfortunately this didn’t meet the intervention levels that require repair at this moment in time."

Ooh, I could crush a seed!

anti-anti-fascist feels like it should have a one-word synonym

Golden Oysters are bad news. So far, there have only been a few records in Britain, but it's worth being vigilant. Record any sightings sonewhere like iNaturalist #FungiFriends www.yahoo.com/news/article...

🚨 POLICE TOOK OUR TRUMP & EPSTEIN VAN They're obviously terrified of THIS photo of Donald with the world’s most notorious paedophile making headlines while Trump visits the King. So whatever you do - DO NOT SHARE THIS VIDEO Location: Windsor High Street, UK #trump #epstein

Though I'm not their customer, I sent an email to Virgin Media telling them one of their cabinet doors is open. I got a reply saying "this inbox is no longer monitored. Please resend your request to..." So if you live in N Birmingham and your broadband dies: sorry, but I'm not their clerical worker

Quora, who eight years ago wrote a series blog posts thanking me for helping them integrate Wikidata into their workflows (and vice versa) now won't show me "mature" content unless I verify my age with them. Do they think I was under ten, then?

I collect pictures of gate latches. The endless minute variations and human ingenuity appeal to me greatly, and the countless hands that have moved them. This one is between Near and Far Sawrey, Lake District and has a lovely combination of textures between the iron, wooden gate, and stone gatepost.

The BHL online collection just hit 200,000 titles! A title could be a single rare book or an entire 200-year journal run, so 200,000 titles is huge (63+ million pages!). Check out BHL's MAMMOTH collection here: www.biodiversitylibrary.org 📖 🧪 🦣 #OpenAccess #OpenScience #ILoveBHL

I can see David Blunkett, James Corden and Phil Lynott in the mugshots...