Neil Madden

Communications and Digital Committee - Publications - Committees - UK Parliament Publications for Communications and Digital Committee

The report can be read/downloaded at committees.parliament.uk/committee/17...

The House of Lords Digital & Communications Committee just published their report on AI, copyright & the creative industries, and their conclusions could not be clearer.

🧵 1/5

My favourite type of Humeour

Causal inference and the metaphysics of causation - Synthese The techniques of causal inference are widely used throughout the non-experimental sciences to derive causal conclusions from probabilistic premises. This poses a philosophical question. What in the n...

New paper out in Synthese—a metaphysical theory of causation designed to explain statistical causal inference. Basically a summary of a 100,000-word book (Causation: Science, Statistics and Metaphysics) that'll go into production with CUP soon. Watch this space link.springer.com/article/10.1...

An Enron-style logo with NVIDIA and a neon N that says “unlike Enron” that I ironically made using AI

@chitgrrl.bsky.social see above correction.

@theguardian.com umm, I don’t think Kenneth Clark the presenter of Civilisation was ever a Tory politician. (A lifelong Labour voter according to Mary Beard). Is your reviewer confusing him with Ken Clarke?

www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio...

Looks like the little gray square in the bottom-left of these diagrams hasn’t moved *at all* for 3 years now. I think we were supposed to be at like 1000+ qubits by now. I give it one more year then I’m calling it as done.

sam-jaques.appspot.com/quantum_land...

Do you actually want ECB or do you want the raw block cipher? I’m struggling to see how ECB is a useful primitive otherwise. (And if you want the raw block cipher isn’t CBC with a null IV ok, or does it always add padding in WebCrypto?)

Unsigned X.509 Certificates This document defines a placeholder X.509 signature algorithm that may be used in contexts where the consumer of the certificate is not expected to verify the signature. As part of this, it updates RF...

The IETF feels like a heart attack machine sometimes.

tl;dr this is alg=none for X.509. Because of course.

datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ie...

🚫 Shut down X

⚠️ Ban Musk from the UK

🚀 Sanction his companies

🤔 That enough?

Author is employed by Microsoft, but that just warrants a tiny “competing interests” note at the bottom.

Doesn't seem great to have a premier scientific publication printing what sure sounds like Big Tech propaganda.

This is how I find out that Bertrand Russell’s parents lived in a house on my road??!

My team at @github.com is hiring for a senior product security engineer! www.github.careers/careers-home...

Nadim Kobeissi's Applied Cryptography Course YouTube video by Nadim Kobeissi

I made a video about my upcoming applied cryptography course: youtu.be/z6kK7rIbyB0

Among yesterday's arrestees is Deborah Hinton, an 81-year old retired magistrate with an OBE.
That's Yvette Cooper's idea of a terrorist.
Language has been turned on its head.
The law has been turned on its head.
Murdering children is righteous.
Trying to stop it is terrorism.

This was a deeply shocking interview, even knowing what we already know about the genocidal violence being inflicted on the people of Gaza. The IDF is amusing itself by targetting different body parts of boys trying to obtain food & water. One day abdomen, another head, arms, legs, testicles...

Just imagine……

And it’s not just about reaching net zero if they subsidised e-cargo bikes and invested in public transport and safe conditions for cycling they’d be investing in the inclusive, safe and accessible future we need as well as meeting net zero goals. 🤷‍♀️

Are humans, like everything else, destined to become crabs? | Aeon Essays ‘Everything becomes crab’ is more than an absurd meme. The crab is a deep symbol of our devil’s bargain with technology

"The crab is a deep symbol of our devil’s bargain with technology.”

aeon.co/essays/are-h...

#rust

Looking forward to reading source code with adverts in it.

At first. And then the reality of AI “peer review” hit me. God help us all.

Streaming public key authenticated encryption with insider auth security Note: this post will probably only really make sense to cryptography geeks. In “When a KEM is not enough”, I described how to construct multi-recipient (public key) authenticated encryption. A naïv…

Some back-of-the-envelope crypto design for those that like such things.

neilmadden.blog/2025/07/02/s...

First we outsource software dev organization to engineering managers, then taste and vision to product managers, then code writing to text bots, and it still does not make better software.
There is no world where you get quality software without experienced engineers who care about their work

On LBC @zoejardiniere.bsky.social lists 3 previous instances where military aircraft have been targeted by campaigners in order to prevent them being used in war crimes, and she describes the govt banning Palestine Action as terrorists as an abuse of state power.

Well said.

If only he’d come to a suitably Dahlian end… Marooned in a sea of fake tan lotion perhaps?

Guardian headline saying, "‘It’s terrifying’: WhatsApp AI helper mistakenly shares user’s number Chatbot tries to change subject after serving up unrelated user’s mobile to man asking for rail firm helpline"

'Meredith,' some guys ask, 'why won't you shove AI into Signal?'

Because we love privacy, and we love you, and this shit is predictable and unacceptable. Use Signal ❤️

- My phone contents were immediately downloaded, on threat of deportation
- In retrospect I should have denied search and accepted immediate deportation; in general I was too compliant, too trusting, too hopeful

🫠