‘I’ve lost my friends’: advocacy groups warn Australia’s social media ban risks isolating kids with disabilities | Social media ban | The Guardian https://alecmuffett.com/article/144675 #SocialMediaBan #australia #censorship

🚨 This evening, a notice was circulated from representatives of Peter Mandelson, via press regulator IPSO and the Press Association news wire, to all media across the UK We believe it is strongly in the public interest to publish this memo. This is it in full 👇

BREAKING: Peter Mandelson just sent this secret notice to all UK media, demanding they leave him alone. He uses IPSO clauses designed to support grieving families in a bid to stop scrutiny of his relationship with Epstein We have published it in full. www.thenational.scot/news/2583451...

European Commission mandates Facebook (etc) must not take down right-wing hate content for 24h if posted on self-declared “editorially independent” websites https://alecmuffett.com/article/144608 #EuropeanCommission #HateSpeech #censorship

Epstein file PDFs contain OCR texts of complete, *unredacted*, Base64-encoded email attachments; forensics geeks commence challenging reconstruction… https://alecmuffett.com/article/144542 #epstein #redaction

It’s almost hard to work out which country this is meant to be about… https://alecmuffett.com/article/144415 #iran #russia #totalitarianism #trump

Spotlighting The World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell | CIA https://alecmuffett.com/article/144397 #cia

There is no cavalry. There is no magic wand to wave. Privacy preserving age verification is just as much of a myth as "if only everybody would store food properly and maintain good kitchen hygiene, we would be free of salmonella" - it's true, but it's never going to happen.

Similarly with "privacy preserving age verification" - it makes for a cute hack which works well in laboratories with metaphorical test tubes and nice clean infrastructure, but as soon as it meets the internet and timing attacks and log files and application installs & shoddy implementation… nope.

You can withdraw a statement in parliament or apologise for an insult, but you can't undo the fact that it actually happened. Speech can't be undone, and frameworks that insist it CAN essentially stand atop of coercion of everyone to behave in a particular way. WHICH DOESN'T WORK ON THE INTERNET.

The idea that age verification can be performed online with an information exchange that is unlinkable to an identity, is pretty much the same kind of architectural fallacy which leads parliamentarians, lawyers, etc to accept the fiction that you can "unsay" or "withdraw" an insult or statement.

In the hope that this may assist @elaineburke.bsky.social, although yes there are folk working on privacy preserving age verification, there are also inherent limits to the privacy benefits of such, which are exposed upon deployment. Good paper on this issue: www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/...

A major loss for sensible and informed tech coverage in the media:

So the discussion around the table is that Apple & Google should be policing what people use general purpose Apps to generate and share on Twitter, and applying moral judgements to the entire app - even taking it down from app stores - if people do bad things with it, anywhere?

Great read. An ICE attorney working for DOJ temporarily explains that ICE has no clue how all of this "federal court" stuff works and makes clear that both ICE and DOJ were totally unprepared for the flood of habeases that were the inevitable result of the Minneapolis raids.

Prediction: if it hasn’t happened already there will soon be a massive media story about “Quoted Printable” encoding, possibly including somebody getting shot because of it https://alecmuffett.com/article/144352 #QuotedPrintable #epstein

This does not surprise me in the slightest, I presume you know the history of Meta's internal analyses of reports to NCMEC? It's almost as if they benefit from publishing really huge mediatastic numbers that somehow misrepresent the reality and extent of challenges alecmuffett.com/article/15902

There’s been a lot of press about an explosion of AI generated content that resembles CSAM. But the thing is, none of that reporting was true. It was based on the misclassification of a large volume of reports of real CSAM. cyberlaw.stanford.edu/letter-to-nc...

The 3D printing community learns how to support protesters in its own quiet way… https://alecmuffett.com/article/143987 #3DPrinting

next, after age verification, will come “proof of humanity” … https://alecmuffett.com/article/143876 #EndToEndEncryption #ai #privacy

Introducing Encrypt It Already | Electronic Frontier Foundation https://alecmuffett.com/article/143853 #EndToEndEncryption #eff

Sometimes I think there are folk in liberal academia who are simply waiting for Chomsky to die so that they can usurp the throne

Anna Riedl: “The amount of prompt engineering needed to not make medical professionals have wild irrelevant hallucinations is truly extraordinary” https://alecmuffett.com/article/143779 #ai #llm

James Ball: On almost everything…evidence suggests that over 60s are in much more urgent need of online protection and education than teenagers… https://alecmuffett.com/article/143670 #OnlineSafety #OnlineSafetyAct #elderly

On almost everything – fraud, polarisation, radicalisation, misinformation – evidence suggests that over 60s are in much more urgent need of online protection and education than teenagers. But that issue gets zero political attention, and is a total non-starter. Nothing good will come of it.

Oh, and if you suddenly accept that there is a burden of censorship on the long haul transatlantic bearers to prevent bad things coming into the United Kingdom, you are implicitly throwing away the notion of "net neutrality" which is popular consumer rights legislation.

You *may* deny this observation & put all the blame on the website; but if you face complex questions of "why is it a burden on a foreign exporter to not export to Britons?" and "what content censorship *should* be applied by long-haul/transatlantic bearer ISPs, cf: shipping companies like DHL?"

British jurisprudence already has a long established meme about this problem, attached: "If parliament enacts that smoking in the streets of Paris is an offence, then it is an offence" What we have here is crafty Britons hopping over the Channel/Atlantic for access to Gitanes/4chan. Ban *them*.

State Department confirms: federal censorship shield law incoming | Preston Byrne https://alecmuffett.com/article/143643 #AgeVerification #OnlineSafety #OnlineSafetyAct #censorship #ofcom #surveillance #vpns

Will Congress shield the US from foreign attacks on the First Amendment? | Spectator | Ofcom & British civil society does not understand the 1st amendment https://alecmuffett.com/article/143572 #4chan #OnlineSafety #OnlineSafetyAct #censorship #surveillance #vpns

Somebody used spoofed ADSB signals to raster the meme of JD Vance over Mar-a-Lago using AF2 ICAO identity https://alecmuffett.com/article/143548 #adsb #trump

Few know that the Trump name was originally Merkwürdigliebe before immigrating to the US.

"Wait, I've seen this movie…" youtu.be/gP2L2L-Ebec #DrStrangetrump

WhatsApp’s new ‘Strict Account Settings’ Adds Lockdown-Style Protection Against Spyware |CyberScoop https://alecmuffett.com/article/143457 #EndToEndEncryption #OnlineSafety #OnlineSafetyAct #encryption #whatsapp

Trump: "With that being said, you can't have guns. You can't walk in with guns. You just can't. You can't walk in with guns. You can't do that. But it's just a very unfortunate incident."

#Trump Against #2ndAmendment: "With that being said, you can't have guns. You can't walk in with guns. You just can't. You can't walk in with guns. You can't do that. But it's just a very unfortunate incident." #2a www.reddit.com/r/Fauxmoi/s/...

One-Ended Encryption / OEE | JP Aumasson https://alecmuffett.com/article/143356 #encryption

“The UK war on VPNs is an embarrassment” | Jimmy Wales https://alecmuffett.com/article/143312 #AgeVerification #OnlineSafety #OnlineSafetyAct #vpns

“Much of what people want to solve with the [online safety act] is actually [better] solved with a search warrant and an arrest” | Preston Byrne https://alecmuffett.com/article/143205 #AgeVerification #OnlineSafety #OnlineSafetyAct #censorship #surveillance #vpns

"I have no idea what is going on amongst my friends nor in my local country's politics, but Uganda just woke up and you would not believe what's going on over there"

It would be interesting to have an outright ban on anything other than "reverse chronological" iff we could engineer it to also ban "geographic proximity". The result would be: users seeing nothing but the global chronological firehose a-la Twitter in 2007 & the death of all political content.

Meantime, over on Reddit, "Why don't Bluesky trending topics reflect breaking news?" It turns out that chronological vs ranking is a design choice which has consequential impact on global awareness. www.reddit.com/r/BlueskySoc...

Content Moderation History: do we all remember 2013-19 when online sociology pundits were everywhere expounding the need to block streaming/sharing of video of people being murdered? https://alecmuffett.com/article/143092 #ContentModeration #OnlineSafety #OnlineSafetyAct #censorship

Bondi is such a bad lawyer. Because with this single move she tanks legal arguments in support of trying to get the voter roles and also for ICE enforcement. "We're coming for your elections with the use of force," and "Forget immigrants, we're using this force only to screw with your elections."

If you are not on X you are missing content like this:

Some interesting hypothetical content on Tiktok, today: www.tiktok.com/@oddpride/vi...

"…but at least #AgeVerification will ensure that no *young* people get angry about this."

Alex Pretti was a colleague at the VA. We hired him to recruit for our trial. He became an ICU nurse- I lover working with him. He was a good kind person who lived to help and these fuckers executed him. White. Hot. Rage.

To those blaming Walz for not mobilizing the Guard, he did that six days ago. I have to say it's disturbing to see people angry at Walz instead of the government agents that just executed a man. As though we should all be experts about what to do when a secret police force invades an American city.