Aerated concrete and EHCPs: https://richardpope.org/2025/11/26/aerated-concrete-and-ehcps/

But "child safety" is so important to this and previous governments that the whole population must be forbidden confidential conversations and encrypted backups or cloud storage.

Will be published at midnight - I hope of interest

Control of your own devices is temporary, but surveillance is forever.

I presented the Consequence Check tool to some digital folks in govt this week. It's a methodology for rapidly QAing tech products against their social impacts, not just their tech specification, designed to help surface trade offs www.careful.industries/blog/2025-11... Someone asked a very good Q

A Sharon Begley byline, almost 5 years after her death. Upon hearing the news James Watson had died, a STAT reporter said in our Slack, "I wish I could read what Sharon would have written." Incredible news: Sharon in fact did pre-write a Watson obit. And it is masterful and excoriating. 🧪🧬🧫

The upcoming ID Cards consultation www.no2id.uk/2025/upcomin...

On a typical day, 3% of people who complete Wordle get it in one guess. Which means around one person in 30 completes Wordle on incognito mode, then goes back in a second time and gets it “in one”. There’s something oddly fascinating about this.

Owen is right to highlight this. As taxpayers, we already paid. All this will do is introduce higher prices to all consumers and businesses.

I've just been reminded about an event we ran in October 2010 called Beyond Blogging at @wellcometrust.bsky.social The list of speakers is quite wonderful. @jackthurston.bsky.social @jenitennison.com @paulclarke.com @richardpope.org @smithsam.bsky.social @lesteph.com Evan Harris, Jonathan Raper

Today in the Database State www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

To be clear about this, this is a very very very bad idea.

The other £50 note lying on the pavement with respect to tax policy is to turn Tell Us Once into a full concierge service covering the utilities, bank accounts and probate, but only for people paying the full rate of IHT.

Who is it who writes the regular complaint about the free childcare requiring admin from parents every 3 months? I can’t find the right term to search for…

Anyway, it just so happens I wrote something about the need for digital social policy the other day www.powertochange.org.uk/evidence-and... better support for parents and children feels like a great place to start

Unreal disconnect between the kind of economy the UK thinks it has versus the kind of economy it actually has See e.g. all the talk of fishing during the Brexit years, the denigration and ongoing destruction of the higher education sector, etc

'The impression is of a regulator telling each audience what it wants to hear by pointing at one end of the see-saw, rather than grappling with the hard edges of the case law in ways that may temper expectations rather than raise them.' Very good piece on OfS & free speech wonkhe.com/blogs/ofs-re...

On Friday my phone blew up with messages about BritCard. I don’t think it’s a tech test. It’s a trust test. 2m+ signatures against already. If trust isn’t designed in from day one, BritCard risks repeating the same failures that killed past ID schemes. My take medium.com/writing-by-i...

GOV.UK One Login is a mess. Alongside reported security issues & missing features like delegation & support for business, it breaks the government’s identity assurance principles: it's impossible to switch easily between different One Login accounts. How did it ever pass a service assessment?

this is a broader point but something the extract below touches on is that smartphones have made "not being online" an active choice you have to make every minute of every day, and as it states it *is* a mental tax you have to pay, and I'm not sure we've reckoned with that at all

History shows that when democracies face crises, strengthening and reinvigorating democratic participation is essential to prevent democratic backsliding and the rise of authoritarianism. This is not that.

tbh, if you've got any material size of investments in the UK and you haven't threatened the government that you will withdraw them unless you're given a subsidy, can you really look your shareholders in the eye and say you did your best?

Reviewed Nick Clegg’s book. Didn’t think much of it, except for: “Nadine Dorries, while secretary of state for the department overseeing the internet, ‘once called me in high dudgeon, demanding to know why I hadn’t taken down tweets … I had to explain to her that Twitter was a different company’.”

From things I've seen recently, I think many people would benefit from reading this. It's short, and it's free. 👉 rdcu.be/dbFbB

“Bustling crowds wait for overwhelmingly non-white shop staff to serve up their alcohol, never wondering about who would turn up to scrub Westminster station clean of their urine at the end of the day.” www.thenewworld.co.uk/james-ball-t...

Ah yes if black and brown people throw a party we need to scan their faces. White supremacists organising a hate march do not need to worry about their privacy. The police have them covered. This btw is also why everyone arguing for digital id in this country is either naive or dangerous.

An assassin writes Bella Ciao in the same breath as a Notices Your Bulge meme on his bullets. One of the government responses is a practicing Hindu asserting that the fundamentalist Christian victim will join him in a Norse pagan afterlife. Welcome to the epistemic collapse.

👀

I was initially surprised that Rayner hadn’t sought more advice on her tax liability. And £40k is a lot of money. But @timleunig.bsky.social makes a good point here, especially as a court told her to set up the trust. Goes to show quick takes can be bad ones. open.substack.com/pub/timleuni...

I decided to test whether EXIF data is removed from images sent over X's new encrypted chat feature like Signal and other messengers do. I can confirm it is not. I was able to extract information including GPS coordinates from a test image sent to me.

Government platforms that all messages and state interactions - at all levels of govt - go through? Where things aren't designed to resist authoritarian abuse so central govt can read things? Hunh Luckily no liberal democracies would be daft enough to build such things

Trump administration has added to its “specially designated” sanctions list (a list for terrorists & drug traffickers) the three leading Palestinian human rights organizations- Al Haq, Al Mezan, and PCHR. Because of their courage and dedication ofc!!!

“This is the inevitable result of Elon Musk’s changes to X: he has outsourced moderation to the UK’s police forces – and unsurprisingly, they are bad at it. They are having to make decisions, and use the blunt instruments of the law, because Musk is refusing to use the many tools available to him.”

I never thought I would see this in my life, and that they’re making it immediately generic so it’s affordable is making me want to cry

If you're in the US and want a *signed* copy of my book "Hey, There's Science In This", please order it BEFORE FRIDAY 23rd*. The rules for mailing goods to the US are changing and I can't feasibly mail them after that. evaamsen.com/product/sign...

Yes. I also felt this way about the assassinations in Minnesota. In fact, I continue to feel this way about the assassinations in Minnesota.

"yes, you can be banned for life from football grounds for saying that. on the other hand, Oxford University is legally required to protect your ability to say it during a lecture"

ICE is now clean on OPSEC. www.404media.co/ice-adds-ran...

Minnesota teen says server forced her to prove her gender in restaurant bathroom The 18-year-old high school student alleged the server would not let her exit the Buffalo Wild Wings restroom until she unzipped her hoodie and showed she had breasts. For @nbcnews.com: www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-...

GCHQ first bsky.app/profile/thej...

the data governance parts are in no better a state. The staff left will commandeer all GP medical notes and hope Palantir will fix it all. bsky.app/profile/shau...

Sunder is doing heroic work providing informed and balanced analysis on asylum protests (which are hugely exaggerated by many).

I could say the same about Long Covid and the millions of children who will suffer the proliferation of cancer, vascular disease, immune dysfunction, kidney and liver disease as the result of repeated infections from SARS-CoV-2. Adults live in denial about what they’re doing to their own kids.

Listen, we are in a terrible and difficult time where the horrors can often feel overwhelming. Lean into the things that bring you joy. If that means that sometimes you're wringing that last drop of dopamine out of watching bad people suffer as the result of their poor choices, you do you.

Centralise NHS (in England) onto an app? Led by PM & SoS? & without any real thought for how this might affect people who don't use apps and healthcare services that don't easily go through one app? Looks like a path to worse healthcare, & ultimately higher costs institute.global/insights/pub...

RFK Jr. used to warn about a government takeover of our data. He said wearables and their tech were part of a plot to surveil us, enabled tyranny, caused cancer, and turned users into “permanent consumers” to Big Tech. Now, he'd like your data, please. www.msnbc.com/opinion/anal...

While July 31 @planet.com imagery shows some more minor damage — it at least shows the dirt berm area was not expanded. That space included hundreds of now-bulldozed gravestones. A June image from Middle East Eye shows the same corner that's now been destroyed: www.middleeasteye.net/sites/defaul...

A new episode of Everything Digital Health just dropped: The NHS Single Patient Record - with Sam Smith of MedConfidential https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knp8bQJ47xg Sam Smith from MedConfidential once again joins me on Everything Digital Health to discuss the pr...