Karl Austin @[email protected]

The emperor woke. At the foot of his bed, an assassin sat.
"I was sent by an honourable man," the assassin said. "He says you are ambitious."
"When the poor cried, I wept with them, and made the lords open their coffers."
The assassin gave the emperor a sword.
"They are coming."
#MicroFiction #TootFic #SmallStories #IdesOfMarch

I love how Silicon Valley Bank is being portrayed as a "woke" bank, and their failure is blamed on being too woke.🤡

There is absolutely nothing that the US won't try to blame on Black folk.

Less than 2% of VC money even goes to Black folk. By assets, it was an anti-woke bank.

Black. Woke means Black.

It amuses and irritates me that some of the services I care most about are the ones that don’t support a range of MFA options including hardware keys.

Why do banks never support authenticator apps or yubikeys?

Why are memorable words where they ask you for the 7the letter still a thing (and a bloody annoying thing at that)

It’s always the services that I care most about that appear the least secure.

Create safe internet spaces for children instead of making the internet unsafe for everyone.

Read the full story at https://mullvad.net/chatcontrol

#StopChatControl #EU #privacy #openSource

via: @mullvadnet

Seen elsewhere: "If the BBC find themselves with gaping holes in their schedules due to the collapse of their sports coverage, could they fill the gaps with more natural history, perhaps? Maybe David Attenborough has an episode going spare?"

The BBC confirming the revolution will not, in fact, be televised

OK, so the Alt-Right regime at the BBC has cancelled a 96 year old national treasure. THE national treasure. Lifelong naturalist and broadcaster, who introduced most of the country to a love for the natural world in their childhoods. For the capital crime of a nature program covering damage to ecosystems. In the final series of his lifetime of service

Remind me, which side of the political spectrum does cancel culture? 🤬

#IStandWithDavidAttenborough #BBC

They're not just fighting to deny the fundamental human rights of those people you don't like.

They're fighting against the very concept that anyone has fundamental human rights.

⚠️ This will one day bite you on the backside, too.

Be wary of any government trying to deny anyone their rights. It's just another way for them to put more power into their own hands.

If you think that politicians increasing their own power won't eventually impact your freedom as well, then you're a fool.

The french really perfected the art of striking

When I am a dictator, it will be the law that any company which has a call-holding announcement of "we are experiencing a higher number of calls than usual" must publish ongoing and historic figures justifying this statement, and explaining what they intend to do about it.

Something the UK government might want to consider - if you're drafting legislation with an implied intent to "get around" the UN's Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights, you might want to stop and ask yourself ... "Are we the bad guys?"

Two Times headlines today:

“Migrants on small boats to be barred from Britain”
And
“Johnson nominates his father for knighthood”

The Tory party is so morally broken, so corrupt, so prejudiced, entitled, greedy and cruel, it simply cannot see how repulsive it’s become.

If you are looking at the USA's proposals around website / information blocking and thinking "haven't I seen another country doing that?!", here's something I wrote a couple of years back, about the UK's approach to blocking:

https://decoded.legal/blog/2021/02/online-harms-and-the-role-of-intermediaries-as-enforcers

And here is the result of a rather stressful weekend, when the UK decided to impose, overnight and without notice, a website blocking sanctions regime on *all* ISPs, including those without filtering kit:

https://www.aa.net.uk/etc/news/uk-sanctions-law-aa-and-domain-blocking/

#decodedlegal

A programming life hack:

This Reg story about #ChatGPT telling Alexander Hanff that he had died in 2019, and then creating false links to the Guardian news site as “proof,” is deeply disturbing. https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/chatgpt_considered_harmful/

@neil Yup. Not sure if this has made the news in the UK, but in germany, Quad9 (9.9.9.9) was just found guilty of copyright infringement and forced to censor specific domains: https://www.golem.de/news/netzsperren-dns-resolver-quad9-wegen-urheberrechtsverletzung-verurteilt-2303-172316.html
(might need deepl.com for that)

WTAF is going on with politics and judges these days?

“In Webb’s first weeks, as astronomers raced to find the most distant galaxies ever detected, they wondered whether the data were actually wrong. The ancient galaxies were just too big and bright … The early universe was, somehow, bold and brash and remarkably luminous. ‘The objects we’re finding are as massive or larger than the Milky Way’ … Even accounting for some weird new phenomena, “everything’s too big, and it’s too big, too soon…’”

https://www.inkl.com/a/AZZQabclBMl

#astronomy #JWST

Tech industry, please hire more writers. I can happily read docs for 3h and get much more out of them than watching a video for 3h. And while I'm watching the video, I'm making copious notes so that I don't have to watch the video *again* later to refresh my memory. If it was written down in the first place with good indexing I wouldn't have to do that. Video is such a crap way to document things.