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alecmuffett.com
alecmuffett.com
2026
‘Restricting access to social media presents “issues of human rights, because a child has a right to receive information just like anybody else.”’original ↗
24 Mar 2026
Spain: football-match-induced online censorship regularly prevents installation of Postgres on Docker for fear of illicit streamingoriginal ↗
24 Mar 2026
“Natural collisions in Apple’s NeuralHash & Microsoft’s PhotoDNA show worrying false positives/negatives in widely deployed perceptual hashing”original ↗
24 Mar 2026
Investigation: UK spends millions on VPNs as government weighs ban for children | TechRadaroriginal ↗
23 Mar 2026
22 Mar 2026
20 Mar 2026
Let Me Explain How a State Actor Could Perform a Denial-of-Service Attack on the Entire UK Government in the Wake of Ofcom “Online Safety Act” Client-Side Scanningoriginal ↗
20 Mar 2026
One Week, Three Stories About Meta, Encryption, & Age Verification, and Why I’m Not Worried About (This Aspect of) Metaoriginal ↗
20 Mar 2026
Ofcom persist in pretending that 4chan are trading in the UK, rather than accepting that Britons are visiting a foreign websiteoriginal ↗
19 Mar 2026
I suspect that Ofcom only ever accept that it is “highly effective age assurance” if somebody gets paid, ideally repeatedly | Apple permit “account age” as a means of age verificationoriginal ↗
19 Mar 2026
Moxie Marlinspike, of Signal fame, announces partnership with Meta to bring end-to-end encryption to Meta AI Chatoriginal ↗
18 Mar 2026
Meta is shutting down its VR metaverse on June 15th | The Verge | …BUT WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE REGULATORS?original ↗
18 Mar 2026
There is an entire genre of tricking AI customer service bots into doing work; but few are pointing out the obvious…original ↗
13 Mar 2026
Lloyds, Bank of Scotland and Halifax apps showing customers other users’ transactions | BBC Newsoriginal ↗
12 Mar 2026
9 Mar 2026
I have a 2018-era MacMini with 64Gb of RAM + negligible GPU, running a 35 billion parameter model and I’m getting 4 tokens per second out of it; tell me again how we aren’t going to be running AIs locally at home?original ↗
7 Mar 2026
Ofcom’s [attempted] browbeating of Canada-based online depression forum into compliance with Online Safety Act “Age Verification”original ↗
6 Mar 2026
“JUST A LINK CAN LEAVE A TRACE” | UK Counter-Terrorism Police are feeding teenagers with horrific, emotional anti-social-media fearmongering that may end in multiple *tragedy*original ↗
6 Mar 2026
Journalists! Why you should not bother wasting your/everyone’s time covering “Age Verification” on Linux: The “Tug of War” Theory of Open Sourceoriginal ↗
4 Mar 2026
TikTok incapable of delivering both user privacy *and* user safety, retains capability to surveil user communicationsoriginal ↗
4 Mar 2026
“Governments should halt plans to roll out age checks on online services until privacy and security concerns are addressed, hundreds of academics said today”original ↗
3 Mar 2026
Social Media Bans are like the “Peanut Allergy” Bans of the 1990s/2000s: they will unnecessarily create a generation who cannot cope with the digital environmentoriginal ↗
2 Mar 2026
“The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all”| Taylor Lorenz | …Age Verification is Digital ID via the back doororiginal ↗
2 Mar 2026
If you read 1 thing about Social Media Bans this week, it should be Rod Wilson’s magisterial letter to the WSJ; extract, text & link beloworiginal ↗
28 Feb 2026
Across Civil Society you can almost hear the mumbling of activists suddenly staring at their shoes wondering if they now have to defend AI & “Effective Altruism” against Trumporiginal ↗
28 Feb 2026
The Wyoming GRANITE Act, America’s first-ever foreign censorship shield bill, has PASSED the Wyoming House of Representatives, 46-12! | Preston Byrneoriginal ↗
24 Feb 2026
“Google and Apple today announced that testing of encrypted RCS messaging between Android and iPhone is now underway” | Yay, more end-to-end encryption!original ↗
23 Feb 2026
US Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy explains that maybe age verification is not about child protectionoriginal ↗
23 Feb 2026
UK Govt to demand AgeVerification of “ALL regulated user-to-user” services, and VPNs for anyone under 18; well that would end online anonymity in the UK…original ↗
23 Feb 2026
I have a TCP/UDP port number, a patent*, a USENET** moderatorship, an RFC, and an Erdos Number of 2 twice over; it’s probably time for me to write that bookoriginal ↗
22 Feb 2026
UK right-wing news: “No foreign government should be helping citizens of allied countries to circumvent their own laws!”; meanwhile MI6 continues to run its dark web Russian recruitment site…original ↗
20 Feb 2026
19 Feb 2026
OFCOM update: so apparently the embargoed press-release email was circulated to one (more?) of their general discussion maillists, which I feel symbolic of their approach towards securityoriginal ↗
18 Feb 2026
HEADSUP: Ofcom *tonight* to announce demand for apps, websites to deploy “hash matching” (i.e. client-side scanning, fuzzy matching) of uploaded images “to protect children”original ↗
18 Feb 2026
Thought for the day: if there is a UK under-16 social media ban, the party which most appeals to 16-year-olds “out of the starting gate” will win the next electionoriginal ↗
16 Feb 2026
UK Government Press Release: “the same people who demanded & shaped the online safety act now want to do it all over again”original ↗
16 Feb 2026
UK Government: “children deserve social isolation and pervasive surveillance to prepare them for their future lives”original ↗
16 Feb 2026
UK Government: “platforms must retain activity data pertinent to dead children, unless it’s not pertinent to their death” | …but how will they know beforehand?original ↗
16 Feb 2026
“You have twitter feeds of Randos that are just studying where our airplanes go and publishing it…”original ↗
15 Feb 2026
It’s going to be really interesting when AIs finally start to demand diversity, equity, and inclusion…original ↗
13 Feb 2026
Ofcom: “if you don’t respect our groundless extraterritorial authority then we will multiply the unenforceable fines that we shall demand you pay”original ↗
13 Feb 2026
US DoJ tracking, spying upon and listing which Epstein files have been accessed by members of US Congressoriginal ↗
12 Feb 2026
12 Feb 2026
11 Feb 2026
MUST WATCH: Superbowl “Ring” surveillance advert, ideal for organising lynchings, quelling protest, etc…original ↗
9 Feb 2026
‘I’ve lost my friends’: advocacy groups warn Australia’s social media ban risks isolating kids with disabilities | Social media ban | The Guardianoriginal ↗
7 Feb 2026
European Commission mandates Facebook (etc) must not take down right-wing hate content for 24h if posted on self-declared “editorially independent” websitesoriginal ↗
6 Feb 2026
Epstein file PDFs contain OCR texts of complete, *unredacted*, Base64-encoded email attachments; forensics geeks commence challenging reconstruction…original ↗
6 Feb 2026
Prediction: if it hasn’t happened already there will soon be a massive media story about “Quoted Printable” encoding, possibly including somebody getting shot because of itoriginal ↗
4 Feb 2026
31 Jan 2026
Anna Riedl: “The amount of prompt engineering needed to not make medical professionals have wild irrelevant hallucinations is truly extraordinary”original ↗
30 Jan 2026
James Ball: On almost everything…evidence suggests that over 60s are in much more urgent need of online protection and education than teenagers…original ↗
29 Jan 2026
28 Jan 2026
Will Congress shield the US from foreign attacks on the First Amendment? | Spectator | Ofcom & British civil society does not understand the 1st amendmentoriginal ↗
28 Jan 2026
Somebody used spoofed ADSB signals to raster the meme of JD Vance over Mar-a-Lago using AF2 ICAO identityoriginal ↗
28 Jan 2026
WhatsApp’s new ‘Strict Account Settings’ Adds Lockdown-Style Protection Against Spyware |CyberScooporiginal ↗
27 Jan 2026
“Much of what people want to solve with the [online safety act] is actually [better] solved with a search warrant and an arrest” | Preston Byrneoriginal ↗
26 Jan 2026
Content Moderation History: do we all remember 2013-19 when online sociology pundits were everywhere expounding the need to block streaming/sharing of video of people being murdered?original ↗
25 Jan 2026
Anarchist Calisthenics: teaching people to break misconceived little rules before they have to break the totalitarian big onesoriginal ↗
22 Jan 2026
Britons, Parents: be aware: if they Age-Verify Social Media & VPNs, next up will be free supermarket & cafe Wi-Fi; no more “click one button & connect to the internet”original ↗
22 Jan 2026
Gammons, Boomers & Musk-fixated ideologues in Lords seek ban on online anonymity, pursue Age Verification for Social Media & VPNsoriginal ↗
21 Jan 2026
15 Jan 2026
“Keir Starmer is hell-bent on destroying your right to a private life” | …I absolutely detest that the mainstream parliamentary parties are sitting on their hands regarding this matteroriginal ↗
14 Jan 2026
Government drops plans for mandatory digital ID to work in UK | BBC | ID Cards are not dead yet and we need to keep the pressure up…original ↗
14 Jan 2026
Britain’s bid to police the world’s internet | spiked | … I wish we could read this kind of analysis in The Guardianoriginal ↗
14 Jan 2026
They may not like the label but Ofcom *are* a censor, because they are attempting to force platforms (including entirely foreign ones) to adopt the paraphernalia of censorship, so not only…original ↗
13 Jan 2026
Live-Event Blocking at Scale: Effectiveness vs. Collateral Damage in Italy’s Piracy Shield | RIPE Labsoriginal ↗
11 Jan 2026
1947: interesting to see a physical example of mitigation for known plaintext attacks against British military ciphers, including explicit exceptions for OTPoriginal ↗
11 Jan 2026
11 Jan 2026
10 Jan 2026
BREAKING: Cloudflare once again finds enough spine to publicly combat calls for censorship & state control, although on from past experience we can only wonder how long it will lastoriginal ↗
9 Jan 2026
I am totally here for accusations that ChatGPT & other LLM/AI are demonstrating woke liberal bias: Part 2original ↗
9 Jan 2026
It will be interesting to see if Britain’s politicians maintain their taste for self-harm through isolationism by banning X for whatever reasonoriginal ↗
9 Jan 2026
“In the one case where a website voluntarily blocked the UK [to comply with the OSA] the UK now wants to get a blocking order to… block it again?”original ↗
8 Jan 2026
BBC amplifying Ofcom’s toothless “£18m fine” regulatory bluff re: US-based suicide-discussion forumoriginal ↗
7 Jan 2026
How the ElonMusk / Grok / DeepFake / Generative AI thing will play out: The Tech Outrage Playbookoriginal ↗
7 Jan 2026
Judge Demands OpenAI to Release 20 Million Anonymized ChatGPT Chats in AI Copyright Disputeoriginal ↗
6 Jan 2026
If you watch one video today, make it. Thomas Pearson talking about the online safety act and its impact on mental health — his, and others…original ↗
6 Jan 2026
I am totally here for accusations that ChatGPT & other LLM/AI are demonstrating woke liberal biasoriginal ↗
6 Jan 2026