“Where is Vader today?” “He’s paying the Rebel Alliance $300 billion dollars after defeating them completely, every day for the last four months, sir.”

You can even be the most powerful man in the world, but when a 5’4” Italian woman raises her little finger and gestures like that, you definitely have to listen to her 🤣 Giorgia Meloni epic with Donald Trump 🇮🇹🤌🇺🇸

I confidently look forward to absolutely nothing happening

Nothing in the released slides on Ukraine biolabs funded by US gov suggests bioweapons development. However, US gov does need to perform a systematic review of labs it funds overseas. As Covid origins investigations showed, US funds are not always used accountably.

I’m actually a child online safety expert and was one of the pioneers in this space with Club Penguin and so I feel uniquely positioned to critique this. The groomer problem is real but it’s also vastly overstated. The far larger issue we saw at Penguin was suicidality or reports of sexual abuse in the home. There is no solution for lazy/bad parenting. You can implement all the ID laws you want but if parents are going to just hand kids their phones unlocked, those kids will have access to all the same things the parents have unfettered. What I found is that these draconian safety laws actually make it harder to be an honest operator of kids apps because on one hand it’s so much legal risk and so much user friction that it simply becomes uninvestible as a business. Parents will just lie to let their kids use the unfettered internet. For example, I have a friend who works in mobile gaming who has two kids, one above and one below the age limit but separated by just 2 yrs, and the two wanted to play and chat together on Roblox - which is reasonable. To do this, he just verified that his younger kid is old enough for the chat feature when he’s not. This happens all the time and will happen with these laws to. How far do we want to go with this? Scan the face of the user in real-time to make sure it’s not a kid using the device? We could do that but it feels like a massive unwanted intrusion of privacy. That’s how you know this law isn’t about kids. COPPA and GDPR-K and so forth already make it illegal to allow chat and other grooming vectors to kids. What’s really being done here is trying to eliminate online anonymity. And this is a far bigger issue that goes to core speech rights because if you cannot criticize the govt anonymously and if wrong speech is a crime then it becomes easy to identify all the detractors of the govt in power, and ban, fine or jail them for speech crimes. Starmer has already been doing this and he wants to do it at a much bigger scale. Starmer won’t even acknowledge the problem of actual grooming gangs in Britain’s neighborhoods but he’s worried about online grooming? No he’s not, and this hypocrisy gives away the game. What he wants is to kill online anonymity so he can enforce censorship of his unpopular policies. No politician should have this power.

The social care sector is going to explode when folk start putting cameras in their elderly relative homes. If you think this stuff is bad wait until you find out what’s going on behind closed doors.

To clear up any confusion: There are TWO bans on under 16's access to social media in the UK. The first is at the app level and this comes into play next year. It will require selected social media apps to prompt for age verification when accessing them. The second more insidious one is happening much sooner. This one is the 'nudity detection' feature and this one operates on device level. It will require every adult to show a form of ID in order to operate their phones and tablets without restrictions/monitoring. The voluntary deadlines to tech companies to implement this is around early September this year. If Apple, Google and others don’t implement device-level monitoring by then, the government has said it will bring forward legislation to make it mandatory. People saying "Just use a VPN!" are not understanding how this works.

Manchester backstreets. Watercolour and charcoal.

🚨 NEW: The BBC has revealed Russia has been setting up fake far-right and Islamist groups in the UK to stoke division Operatives paid people to vandalise mosques, spread extremist propaganda and inflame tensions after the Southport riots

One of the consequences of the UK rotating through six (soon likely seven) PMs in about a decade is that the country has been peppered with shoddy legacy-building legislation that PMs circling the drain were desperate to get over the line

Every parent in the country having to explain to their children why YouTube is banned.

Thank god I didn't fill up today

No they won’t. The tech oligarchs are the most useless set of elites imaginable. No set of rich people in American history have been as useless a drain on society as they have

When you see a heated towel rail in your friend’s bathroom.

“Shadow fleet” ships start turning around and changing course after British forces detain Russian tanker in the English Channel Cameroon-flagged Lion I and Maini and Sierra Leone-flagged C Viking and Sona all changed course, per @StarboardIntel. theins.press/en/news/293694

LOL. Parents can't even control phones, hence the online safety act's digital ID cards

This means in effect mandatory Digital ID cards for *everyone* who owns a phone. Clever. Now watch it spread