And given the torrent of inauthentic "right wing" commentators nudging public opinion on the BBC's Have Your Say, the Daily Mail and Reddit, I'm not entirely sure this will be a bad thing.
Recall that Iran cut off the internet for university exams, and the volume of posting by Scottish pro-independence accounts on Twitter/X dropped 98%. Food for thought.
Are you thinking of the US bombing Iran perhaps? Assuming they are running such a disinformation campaign (which is the theory you are talking about) why would they shoot themselves in the foot and cut their own spooks' connection off? And you're off by almost two order of magnitudes, the study in question found that 4% of pro-indy activity was linked to Iranian controlled attacks (and I am highly doubtful of Twitter's influence in that debate in 2025...)
> And given the torrent of inauthentic "right wing" commentators nudging public opinion on the BBC's Have Your Say, the Daily Mail and Reddit, I'm not entirely sure this will be a bad thing.
Reddit is the most left-wing moderated, fedora-tipping regime it's possible to get.
This is a natural and unfortunate consequence of crime and foreign aggression getting increasingly borderless. As the world gets smaller, and as more and more of the world's population knows about the outside world, the more badness we face.
Like it or not, our high-trust society is devolving into a low-trust society as the world opens up. Our defences must evolve -- and the current free-for-all needs to end.
Perhaps the better solution is to stop opening up and make a concerted effort to return to a high-trust society, rather than destroy privacy and go full authoritarian polite-state?
Or must we absolutely must accept eg every Nigerian, Pakistani, Syrian, Afghan, Indian etc who has a fleeting desire emigrate, else our society will collapse?
I don't understand why we can't have both - are you saying that native-born Brits are inherently more trustworthy than people from other nationalities? Or do you mean that we should also curb internal migration as well?
In times of war, civil liberties get curtailed. And in 2025 when Russian and Chinese bots are interfering in our democracy at an industrial scale to destroy our countries from within, the idea of identity being overlooked for all aspects of public life is looking increasingly untenable.
HARD eye-roll at the libertarian scaremongering about this basic, sensible idea to tame the identity mess.
* I have half a dozen different ID numbers for various things like NI, NHS, drivers license, tax etc
* I also have a dozen different GOV.UK logins for various services.
* When need to provide strong proof of identity to AWS to reset a root password, I have to go to a notary and pay £200 for a signature and stamp and then scan the paperwork into an email.
The antis, as always, are clutching at straws. At what point does this stop being acceptable because of libertarian vibes and scaremongering about 'Big Brother' -- especially when most of the rest of the world has had ID cards for decades?
I don’t own and refuse to purchase an iPhone or Android device. Where would that leave me? Fortunately I am not a UK citizen!
This effectively blocks development of mobile Linux as an alternative in the UK. It is already enough of a challenge to get people to try Linux phones without support for their favorite apps, and now it’s a requirement to own a US big tech pocket spy device? Absolutely absurd and Orwellian, and from the birthplace of Orwell no less.
This seems to be a pub bore talking point... the usual seemingly-clever street-level arguments that don't stand up to serious scrutiny.
If people think that if they get ID card, the government is coming to take their precious bodily fluids, then the country has bigger cultural, political problems than a mere public safety measure.
Some of the UK's biggest industries are money laundering and offshore tax evasion schemes for the very rich. They're literally worth hundreds of billions a year.
It's not a pub bore talking point, it's an oligarch and non-dom talking point. A lot of rich people would be inconvenienced if beneficial owner information records had reliable links to real people.
The pub bores are collateral damage - people who post unironically about privacy on social media.
My wife who is from a large mainland European country, has an ID card. Everyone has one and they're mandatory. It makes it trivial to prove your bona fides and is good for air travel within the Schengen area. Her ID even has a chip which can be used to create digital signatures for situations where rock-solid proof of identity is required.
Amazingly, they've always had ID cards and the world hasn't ended. These countries are in some ways freer and more democratic than the UK.
'Civil libertarianism' has become a self-licking ice cream cone, and their advocacy is not only shrill and counterproductive, but also enables common criminals and bad geopolitical actors, engaging in aggressive hybrid war against free countries.
One of the few ways we are going to be able to fight off the Russian and Chinese hybrid war aggression that is assailing the West online is to hold online commenters accountable by binding their online identities to real-world strong IDs.
The libertarians may not like it, but this is the direction the world is going. Strong ID is a common sense, tried-and-true approach to protecting ourselves against criminals and foreign aggressors. And we'll eventually get digital strong ID, unless the boot-leather connoisseurs amongst us win this argument.
Counterpoint...the UK government is already jailing people for voicing opinions they don't like. You are basically saying that this is OK by you. This can be abused very badly by bad actors in the government. It is also one of the things we criticize China for. Becoming like an authoritarian system isn't the solution for opposing authoritarian systems.
I had suspended judgement about Meta in the past; but every revelation in their media about their toxic behaviour makes me thankful I never seriously considering taking a job with them.
The clincher was when a colleague I worked with in a previous job joined Meta, and went from a fun and interesting person, to creepy and weird. As if he has joined a cult. Then a family member did the same -- the effect was subtle... their political opinions turned distinctly sinister -- like they'd downloaded the inherently un-egalitarian, anti-Western and anti-progress ideology of the founder into their own heads.
I've seen the same cult-like effect of Amazon on people. Literally 'selling' the idea of Jeff Bezos, and flogging his book like their company were some kind of dark techno Amway.
The FAANGs are NOT nice people, and I want nothing to do with them.
The poor application scripting story on macOS has made me grumpy for the last few releases of macOS.
AppleScript was never good, but the tooling has been left to rot and other language bindings steadily deprecated. And it seems it has not improved in Tahoe. I know the product manager of scripting for macOS ran it into the ground before being let go, but I've seen no discernible improvements.
For a platform touted as the first choice for technical users, this is a really poor showing.
