HERESY! BURN THE HERETIC! THE STATE IS YOUR FRIEND! IT PROTECTS YOU FROM THE COOKIES!

That's how billionaires fund themselves into existence: when you are going to have a lot of money in the future you can take out loans against it now and do things with the money. Apparently this is legal and is called "risk". It's part of the conspiracy.

Didn't know that Dario and Daniela Amodei were law-breaking MAGA centibillionaires before they founded Anthropic, but that explains why the Trump administration is treating them so favorably recently. Clearly we have a lot to learn from the investigatory powerhouse that is Talking Points Memo

Wikipedia suggests that it is a legitimate word but honestly, who came up with "centibillionaire"? Some American who has never used the metric system? It ought to be "hecto":

It’s not about the children, it’s about how monetize surveillance: demand the illiberal, stupid, self-defeating & impossible, & then criminalise the wrong people for circumvention https://alecmuffett.com/article/161699 #AgeVerification #australia

#DigitalSovereignty is a thin smear of legitimate disaster-and-political-schism preparedness, inflated by anti-capitalist anti-monopolists on the left, protectionist jingoists on the right, and shot through with money from local-industry regulatory capture lobbyists throughout. Don't get suckered:

It sounds like a truly neutral, academic and unbiased study group: :-/

Britain, or Russia? https://alecmuffett.com/article/161574 #AgeVerification #censorship #vpns

Who here remembers what happened when that U2 album was spontaneously forced upon all iTunes users in the world? If the British government obligates the BBC to be at the top of all feeds then the BBC is going to start being blocked individually by random people… and then they will be gone.

#CHATCONTROL EMERGENCY:The EU (still) wants to scan your private messages and photos. PUBLIC RESPONSE TO MEPs NEEDED TODAY: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/#CHATCONTROL

Free expression is a human right. This includes the right to receive and impart information. Children have this right too. As Scotland's Children's Commissioner said, the social media ban “would not currently be a proportionate, effective, or enforceable way to protect children's rights".

This is child abuse.

Source: www.politico.eu/article/pres...

#DigitalSovereignty in a single sentence: > we need cyber “preppers” alecmuffett.com/article/161325

I'm very sympathetic to this but I do also wonder if (and if so, how much of) some of the blame should be attributed to manufacturing reasonably not wanting to invest in growth, given the current global political climate?

Also, previously: Breaking Up “Ma Zuck” — how a generational divide amongst #DigitalRights #CivilSociety regarding #Messenger #Interoperability imperils the deployment of end-to-end encryption as a platform solution … for everyone alecmuffett.com/article/16086

Good. They're correct. Messenger Interoperability: pushing for conformity, destroying functional diversity, enabling abuse and dangerous monocultures alecmuffett.com/article/16151

#DigitalSovereignty is a thin smear of legitimate disaster-and-political-schism preparedness, inflated by anti-capitalist anti-monopolists on the left, protectionist jingoists on the right, and shot through with money from local-industry regulatory capture lobbyists throughout. Don't get suckered:

Digital Sovereignty is a Clusterfuck https://alecmuffett.com/article/161325 #DigitalSovereignty #cybersecurity

Gov’t “would…like Ofcom to launch a rapid assessment of what highly effective age assurance looks like for determining whether someone is over 16” https://alecmuffett.com/article/161274 #AgeVerification #censorship #ofcom

Concealing your plans to scythe benefits from the public is not “moderate”. Nor is joining culture wars on the side of hateful, cruel reactionaries, or conniving in war crimes and genocide, vastly expanding what counts as “terrorism” or creating spurious pretexts to arrest thousands of protestors.

Is this like "designing or adapting encryption systems to enable terrorism"? Like: is there an intentionality test, or are they going to try and swallow the ocean of general purpose computation?

Sun Microsystems Project Blackbox: data centre in a transportable container, modular, ready to go, especially in places like disaster relief. Circa 2007. Wikipedia link in attached skeet. #tesla #megapod

Strange man lying about ponds is no basis for a system of government.

DO NOT PUBLISH UNTIL NEWS IS CONFIRMED A look back at the PM's political career

I'm sure they will claim that "it's not [their] fault that the government took the ball and ran with it" - but it is. Large chunks of digital rights civil society told them up front that this would happen, and they did it anyway whilst castigating all expertise as "industry reaction".

I have many criticisms of the "surveillance capitalism" bandwagon, but chief amongst them is that they wilfully destroyed the capability of civil society to apply nuance to issues of tech oversight and of regulation. The last 15+ years have been a witch hunt. Hopefully it's ending.

I feel seen. Also: feline psychology is a really interesting area of study, I had two delightful cats, a brother and sister pair for 14 and 17 years respectively and I once had to bite the tom on the back of the neck when he got older because…

Spinal Tap's new drummer to be in place "as early as mid-July".

^- Advisory: this newsletter comes from a group of people containing - arguably led - by many of the minds who naively brought about the #OnlineSafetyAct and concept of "duty of care" applied to places which host user-generated content, thereby enabling censorship & where we are today. Oops.

Chips Security Act gains industry support: letter https://alecmuffett.com/article/161176 #ai #itar #llm

Protest against the UK social media ban in parliament square, June 28th

The problem with the internet - and with user empowerment - is nicely encapsulated in something Heather quoted a few days ago; the only way for the state to address it is to go "Full Orwell". bsky.app/profile/heat...

relevant to an email i just got

Gosh, what was that word from a long time ago? Began with a "B"? Bbbbbb…rand? Brand? Yes! That was it, "personal brand!" It's almost as if the people talking about personal brands during the era of the blogosphere were not entirely bonkers. Is Doc Searls on this thing yet? :-)

Synopsis from 2012: having governments insert their own favourite information sources was the obvious next step even then. web.archive.org/web/20120121...

Something like this has been on the cards since the early days of the TechLash and raggedy-bearded anti-capitalists demanding that plucky little web scraping price-comparison sites should not be downranked for "low value content" - leading to a major EU lawsuit: alecmuffett.com/article/6110

What the Council of Europe Committee of Ministers Recommendation on Online Safety has to say about this. search.coe.int/cm#%7B%2522C...

“The main news, however, is set to be a range of measures to force private social media companies to ‘give prominence’ to public service content.” Compelled speech? Art 10 ECHR, anyone? order-order.com/2026/06/19/e...

I wasn't part of the brainstorming on this one, but I agree this is one of our best.

wonders: what could possibly go wrong by parachuting a populist metropolitan mayor into a role as a member of parliament so that they can assume the premiership without a general election win, in order primarily to address long-standing internal party political divisions?

UK wants to monetize “leadership” in surveillance, censorship, age-verification to gatekeep internet, get revenue https://alecmuffett.com/article/160966 #AgeVerification #biometrics #surveillance #uk

Interesting watching people on Reddit shitposting re: my latest blog post; mostly themes of "well I came out ok" or "who are you to tell us to be angry about this?" www.reddit.com/r/ukpolitics...

If you are a Parent here’s One Thing you should be utterly furious about regarding the UK’s Social Media Ban https://alecmuffett.com/article/160943 #SocialMediaBan #censorship #youth

"but it worked so well for the cybersecurity industry"

Our local FB group is full of people complaining about teenagers hanging around the benches in the park. I mean what do they want them to do? Can't socialise on a computer, can't socialise in person...

If you are a Parent here’s One Thing you should be utterly furious about regarding the UK’s Social Media Ban https://alecmuffett.com/article/160943 #SocialMediaBan #censorship #youth

Nothing says patriotic England supporter like wearing a Euro '96 shirt in 2026 and then posting the same picture year on year.

Really not beating those 'gone into hiding' rumours

So, 25% of cyber attacks come from Friendly States?