> I belive that US tech firms have increasingly become valid military targets.
Not just US tech firms. So-called dual-use has been embedded into all kinds of what was previously exclusively civilian infrastructure including telecoms networks and data centres.
Of course dual-use has always been a thing up to a point, but there has been a shift in recent years to bring it right to the heart of military doctrine.
For example the UK's Strategic Defence Review 2025 and the new Defence Industrial Strategy:
"A new £11bn ‘Invest’ annual budget has also been established under the NAD. This will fund kit for our front-line forces which is affordable and grows our UK industrial base. Our new partnership with industry and a decade of consistently rising defence spending will encourage more private finance to grow our world-leading scale-up and dual-use tech companies."
"Today, much of the best innovation is found in the private sector, while the increasing prevalence of dual-use technologies has widened the net of potential suppliers that can contribute to Defence outcomes."
The way things are going it won't just be tech firms that will be considered 'legitimate targets'.
You don't need to do this for your blog. Comments on "provider content" are out of scope. [1] This was done mainly to protect legacy press and media comments sections but it applies equally to a blog comments section.
This is the problem I had with all the content removal around Covid. It never ends with that one topic we may not be unhappy to see removed.
From another comment: "Looks like some L-whateverthefuck just got the task to go through YT's backlog and cut down on the mention/promotion of alternative video platforms/self-hosted video serving software."
This is exactly what YT did with Covid related content.
Here in the UK, Ofcom held their second day-long livestreamed seminar on their implementation of the Online Safety Act on Wednesday this week. This time it was about keeping children "safe", including with "effective age assurance".
Ofcom refused to give any specific guidance on how platforms should implement the regime they want to see. They said this is on the basis that if they give specific advice, it may restrict their ability to take enforcement action later.
So it's up to the platforms to interpret the extremely complex and vaguely defined requirements and impose a regime which Ofcom will find acceptable. It was clear from the Q&A that some pretty big platforms are really struggling with it.
The inevitable outcome is that platforms will err on the side of caution, bearing in mind the potential penalties.
Many will say, this is good, children should be protected. The second part of that is true. But the way this is being done won't protect children in my opinion. It will result in many more topic areas falling below the censorship threshold.
I agree with this article that it's probably fake news [0]. It's also mostly moot now anyway, since if TV service is provided via Sky or Virgin, you're bang to rights. Same if you use BBC iPlayer, which is very good at detecting VPN use and so its very hard to hide your real IP address.
Indeed, but of equal stature in my opinion is that they people on the receiving end of the miscarriage of justice are continuing to be abused by the so-called compensation process.
During the inquiry, the statement was made, can't remember by whom, that value for taxpayer money had to be respected.
I think its past that point, and I would like to know why the instigators of the miscarriage aren't at risk of losing their personal assets to (at least partly) cover the cost. Maybe we have to wait for the inquiry report for that, but in the meantime it is pretty clear that 'value for taxpayer money' means, at least to some degree, kicking the can down the road until as many of the claimants are dead as possible.
- Ofcom sets out more than 40 practical steps that services must take to keep children safer
- Sites and apps must introduce robust age-checks to prevent children seeing harmful content such as suicide, self-harm and pornography
- Harmful material must be filtered out or downranked in recommended content
My question is why have they singled out Tiktok? This seems political to me.
Last year Ofcom published a report on childrens' use of social media. It found:
"For children aged 8-12 who used social media the proportions with their own profile were; eight in ten (79%) among Snapchat users, 72% for Facebook, around two-thirds on each of the other platforms (i.e. TikTok, Instagram, Twitter), except YouTube at 43%."
One area that I think is interesting to look at, aside from overall budget, is bed capacity and nursing staff numbers.
According to Statista:
Bed capacity is significantly lower than at the turn of the century, but more damage was done there by Labour than the Tories [1].
The numbers of nurses has steadily increased in the last twenty years under both Labour and the Tories [2].
So if there are many more nurses per bed than there were twenty years ago, why is patient safety one of the issues they are currently in dispute with the government over?
I don't know the answer to this, but I think we need to know. It is, like teachers, that nurses are spending so much time on non-clinical bureaucracy that the don't have time to nurse?
It's certainly viewed as immoral at the very least in the UK.
"In R v Looseley; Attorney General's Reference (No 3 of 2000) [2002] 1 Cr. App. R. 29, the House of Lords held that although entrapment is not a substantive defence in English law, where an accused can show entrapment, the court may stay the proceedings as an abuse of the court's process or it may exclude evidence pursuant to Section 78 PACE 1984 ...
"Police conduct which brings about state-created crime is unacceptable and improper, and to prosecute in such circumstances would be an affront to the public conscience."
Indeed - it was set up long before Ukraine or Liz Truss. But aside from bad long term energy policy, the incompetence of Andrew Bailey can't be ignored in my view.
In July 2021, Andrew Bailey said "Our forecast at the moment is that we do expect inflation to pick up in the next month or so really ... At the moment we don’t see that evidence [of long term inflation] but we will watch it, of course we must do, very carefully."
So he took no action.
By October 2021 his colleague Hugh Pill said "The magnitude and duration of the UK's inflation spike is proving greater than expected …"
And yet they continued to do nothing. They continued to claim inflation would rise to a few percent and then drop back.
It may be reasonable to say that they couldn't foresee Ukraine, but the inflationary pressure was already there, as you say partly because of Covid bailout money printing, but also from the supply side because of China's zero Covid policy, which was already recognised by many, but not by the Bank of England apparently, as being a fairly major contributor of inflationary pressure [1].
Not just US tech firms. So-called dual-use has been embedded into all kinds of what was previously exclusively civilian infrastructure including telecoms networks and data centres.
Of course dual-use has always been a thing up to a point, but there has been a shift in recent years to bring it right to the heart of military doctrine.
For example the UK's Strategic Defence Review 2025 and the new Defence Industrial Strategy:
"A new £11bn ‘Invest’ annual budget has also been established under the NAD. This will fund kit for our front-line forces which is affordable and grows our UK industrial base. Our new partnership with industry and a decade of consistently rising defence spending will encourage more private finance to grow our world-leading scale-up and dual-use tech companies."
"Today, much of the best innovation is found in the private sector, while the increasing prevalence of dual-use technologies has widened the net of potential suppliers that can contribute to Defence outcomes."
The way things are going it won't just be tech firms that will be considered 'legitimate targets'.