I feel like I have watched this coming in slow motion from the early days of 4chan. At this rate I will be an old dude watching on the prison camp tablet as the first zoomer president exhorts his audience to read Siege
Another paper from the TCS SI on "Planetary Property" is online. In their electrifying piece, Alain Pottage and @bernardkeenan.bsky.social read Carl Schmitt through the lens of electricity.
Big money has bought British politics
75% of Reform’s money has come from three rich white men
democracyforsale.substack.com/p/75-of-refo...
The financialization of everything is all that is left. Which is why we end up with the totally insane situation that people are betting on whether world leaders are going to get killed, or that a nuke will drop this year
Watch, subscribe here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=paHM...
It's not up to me to prosecute the US 'fascism debate', but now that ICE has answered the "but there is no armed militia loyal to the leader" objection, Hegseth is now answering the "but there's no glorification of war for its own sake" objection.
Over 400 scientists have signed a letter calling for a moratorium on the deployment of age-verification technologies. The letter suggests the widespread deployment of untested AV tech is making the internet less safe.
www.politico.eu/article/age-...
I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed.
Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.
thank you Hyo
Loved working with Alain on this account of Schmitt's nomos and its disavowed sociotechnics.
"Only defending our allies from attack" is also how Britain entered WW1
Daniella Lock: In Defence of the Divisional Court’s Palestine Action Ruling ukconstitutionallaw.org/2026/03/02/d...
I keep thinking of @dylandifford.bsky.social's point that everything wrong with the McSweeney-Starmer governing strategy was obvious to anyone who had done the most basic and broad of first year political science.
The current argument of the British right is that Muslims turned out in "blocs" with "family voting" to cast their ballots for a party led by a gay Jewish man, and this shows that multiculturalism has failed, voting is "sectarian" and we are in a crisis.
Hmmmmmm.
The concept of "not doing yourself justice" has been fully canvassed in the annals of football punditry
It’s a running joke in academia that Matt Goodwin is bad at maths.
This sort of thing is why: the combined Labour/Green vote could have split in any way possible and Goodwin would have finished 2nd or 3rd. He did not lose because progressives coordinated. He lost *in spite of them not doing so*.
The Guardian/UCL have conducted an in-depth study of all of the immigration debates in parliament over a century. It shows sentiment more mixed, more negative today than in the past. (Though also that parliamentary sentiment historically is more pro than con)
www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-...
The Trump regime is using AI for mass surveillance of Americans, and plans to integrate AI into their weapons systems. They are trying to extort Anthropic for refusing to go along.
The oligarchs and their would-be King want to make human beings like us obsolete.
33 Action to promote the wellbeing of children in relation to social media (1) Within 12 months of the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must, for the purposes of promoting the wellbeing of children - Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill Part 1 - Children's social care 55 (a) direct the Chief Medical Officers of the United Kingdom ("the UK CMOs") to prepare and publish advice for parents and carers on the use of social media by children at different ages and developmental stages, and (b) by regulations made by statutory instrument require all regulated user-to-user services to use highly- effective age assurance measures to prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users. 5
(2) Any advice published under subsection (1)(a) must have regard to - (a) the paper published on 7 February 2019 entitled "United Kingdom Chief Medical Officers' commentary on 'Screen-based activities and children and young people's mental health and psychosocial wellbeing: a systematic map of reviews'", and (b) any scientific or other developments since the publication of that paper which appear to the UK CMOs to be relevant. (3) Any regulations under subsection (1)(b) must be treated as an enforceable requirement within the meaning of section 131 (and for the purposes of Part 7) of the Online Safety Act 2023. (4) A statutory instrument containing regulations under subsection (1)(b) or subsection (5) may not be made unless a draft of the instrument has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament. (5) For the purposes of this section - "the Chief Medical Officers of the United Kingdom" means the Chief Medical Officers for - (a) England, (b) Wales, (c) Scotland, and (d) Northern Ireland; "regulated user-to-user services" shall have the meaning given to it in the Online Safety Act 2023, subject to any modification, addition or exclusion as the Secretary of State may specify in regulations made by statutory instrument under this subsection. 10 15 20 30
Three things are remarkable.
1) The Children’s Wellbeing & Schools Bill is mandating age gates on *any site or service* which falls in scope of the Online Safety Act,
2) Regardless of whatever compliance that service already did for the OSA and AADC; and
3) Nobody knows about this, or cares.
I guess social media rewards and amplifies the most extreme, reductive positions and essentially silences consensus, and over ~15 years this has shaped the decisions of media and political elites, who also value fast amplification over slow consensus and are vulnerable to attack from the margins
This week, 404 Media speaks to Harlo Holmes from Freedom of the Press Foundation about how to fight back against privacy nihilism, digital security practices everyone can use, and the arrests of journalists in the U.S.
Watch/subscribe here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=chcN...
Meta's director of AI safety allowed an AI agent to... accidentally delete her inbox. This is supposedly the person at the company who is working to make sure that powerful AI tools don’t go rogue and act against human interests
www.404media.co/meta-directo...
Age verification vendor Persona left frontend exposed, researchers say
To demonstrate the privacy implications, researchers took a closer look and found a publicly exposed Persona frontend on a US government-authorized server, with 2,456 accessible files. You read that right. According to researcher "Celeste" the exposed code, which has now been removed, sat at a US government-authorized endpoint that appears to have been isolated from its regular work environment. In those files, the researchers found details about the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users. Beyond checking their age, the software performs 269 distinct verification checks, runs facial recognition against watchlists and politically exposed persons, screens "adverse media" across 14 categories (including terrorism and espionage), and assigns risk and similarity scores. Persona collects —and can retain for up to three years —IP addresses, browser and device fingerprints, government ID numbers, phone numbers, names, faces, plus a battery of "selfie" analytics like suspicious-entity detection, pose repeat detection, and age inconsistency checks.
According to The Rage, Discord has stated it will not continue to use Persona for age verification. However, other platforms reported to use Persona include: • Roblox: Uses Persona's facial age estimation and ID verification as the core of its "age checks to chat" system. • OpenAl / ChatGPT: OpenAl's help center explains that if you need to verify being 18+, "Persona is a trusted third-party company we use to help verify age," and that Persona may ask for a live selfie and/or government ID. • Lime: The ride-sharing service deploys custom age verification flows with Persona to meet each region's unique requirements. We don't just report on threats - we help protect your social media Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Protect your social media accounts by using Malwarebytes Identity Thett Protection.
Persona, the age verification company used by Roblox & Discord was hacked.
And despite the company & platforms claiming Persona utilised “zero knowledge” methodologies to verify age, they are gathering user data.
Palantir is one of Persona’s main investors.
www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/20...
Oh, the grand old duke of york
He ██████████████████
He ██████████████████
And he ██████████████████
They’re so clearly going to try to fix the elections
Every US outlet should be reporting on this every single day between now and mid terms
oh no, get well soon Hyo!
My first piece for @techpolicypress.bsky.social - a primer of sorts on Ireland’s role in EU tech regulation
Context for the year ahead, as the 2 foundations of the economy - the 2 forces that dragged post independence Ireland out of poverty - the EU & US FDI - go to war
Since the government is about to introduce a social media ban for under-16s based largely on vibes – and Jonathan Haidt's shitty book – in the hopes it boosts its popularity (it won't), I'll re-up this.
If we're banning under-16s, why not over-60s?
Here are some thoughts on the Palestine Action ruling for the @lrb.co.uk. The ruling shows the importance of the UK Government's national security assessments being challenged - which doesn't happen enough under our current system.
