Sam
@smithsam.bsky.social
1.3K followers 190 following 180 posts
Believes in better data with informed privacy for all. Day job @medconfidential amongst other things. he/him http://is.gd/samblog 🧘‍♂️ #FILDI Cambridge
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Reposted by Sam
jennifercobbe.bsky.social
Unreal disconnect between the kind of economy the UK thinks it has versus the kind of economy it actually has

See e.g. all the talk of fishing during the Brexit years, the denigration and ongoing destruction of the higher education sector, etc
samfr.bsky.social
In her lunch with the FT the OnlyFans CEO says her company pays more tax than the entire British fishing industry. Quite a stat.
Reposted by Sam
hetanshah.bsky.social
'The impression is of a regulator telling each audience what it wants to hear by pointing at one end of the see-saw, rather than grappling with the hard edges of the case law in ways that may temper expectations rather than raise them.'
Very good piece on OfS & free speech wonkhe.com/blogs/ofs-re...
OfS rebalances the free speech/harassment see-saw on antisemitism
A probing exchange with OfS director Arif Ahmed exposes the legal and practical tensions at the heart of campus free speech guidance. Jim Dickinson looks at when happens when promises to Jewish studen...
wonkhe.com
smithsam.bsky.social
“hospital to community”
smithsam.bsky.social
“Could” is doing a lot of work while DSIT are making user hostile decisions

bsky.app/profile/ntou...
ntouk.bsky.social
GOV.UK One Login is a mess. Alongside reported security issues & missing features like delegation & support for business, it breaks the government’s identity assurance principles: it's impossible to switch easily between different One Login accounts. How did it ever pass a service assessment?
A warning message within the One Login app — stating that everything will be deleted from the app if the user logs out from one of their One Login accounts in order to log in in again with another one, breaking the government's own identity assurance principles.
smithsam.bsky.social
ntouk.bsky.social
GOV.UK One Login is a mess. Alongside reported security issues & missing features like delegation & support for business, it breaks the government’s identity assurance principles: it's impossible to switch easily between different One Login accounts. How did it ever pass a service assessment?
A warning message within the One Login app — stating that everything will be deleted from the app if the user logs out from one of their One Login accounts in order to log in in again with another one, breaking the government's own identity assurance principles.
Reposted by Sam
sarahtgold.bsky.social
On Friday my phone blew up with messages about BritCard.

I don’t think it’s a tech test. It’s a trust test.

2m+ signatures against already. If trust isn’t designed in from day one, BritCard risks repeating the same failures that killed past ID schemes.

My take medium.com/writing-by-i...
medium.com
Reposted by Sam
ntouk.bsky.social
GOV.UK One Login is a mess. Alongside reported security issues & missing features like delegation & support for business, it breaks the government’s identity assurance principles: it's impossible to switch easily between different One Login accounts. How did it ever pass a service assessment?
A warning message within the One Login app — stating that everything will be deleted from the app if the user logs out from one of their One Login accounts in order to log in in again with another one, breaking the government's own identity assurance principles.
Reposted by Sam
youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com
this is a broader point but something the extract below touches on is that smartphones have made "not being online" an active choice you have to make every minute of every day, and as it states it *is* a mental tax you have to pay, and I'm not sure we've reckoned with that at all
Reposted by Sam
eliothiggins.bsky.social
History shows that when democracies face crises, strengthening and reinvigorating democratic participation is essential to prevent democratic backsliding and the rise of authoritarianism. This is not that.
owenblacker.bsky.social
Starmer’s desperate rush for digital IDs is a recipe for repression

ID cards won’t reduce migration and will put trans rights at risk. But that’s not the biggest cost of Starmer’s half-baked scheme, says Cat MacLean

goodlawproject.org/starmers-des...
Starmer’s desperate rush for digital IDs is a recipe for repression
ID cards won’t reduce migration and will put trans rights at risk. But that’s not the biggest cost of Starmer’s half-baked scheme, says Cat MacLean.
goodlawproject.org
Reposted by Sam
dsquareddigest.bsky.social
tbh, if you've got any material size of investments in the UK and you haven't threatened the government that you will withdraw them unless you're given a subsidy, can you really look your shareholders in the eye and say you did your best?
smithsam.bsky.social
Reboot your watch? Happened to me in an earlier update and a price was chewing battery until a reboot
Reposted by Sam
jamesrball.com
Reviewed Nick Clegg’s book. Didn’t think much of it, except for:
“Nadine Dorries, while secretary of state for the department overseeing the internet, ‘once called me in high dudgeon, demanding to know why I hadn’t taken down tweets … I had to explain to her that Twitter was a different company’.”
Even now, Nick Clegg offers too little too late
Earlier this year a former staffer of what was then Facebook, now Meta, wrote a gossipy tell-all memoir about her time in the office there. It was a huge hit – especially after the company’s chief glo...
www.spectator.co.uk
smithsam.bsky.social
put the link in a second tweet of the thread
Reposted by Sam
davidho.bsky.social
From things I've seen recently, I think many people would benefit from reading this. It's short, and it's free.

👉 rdcu.be/dbFbB
davidho.bsky.social
In recognition of us doing fuck all to reduce emissions, let me remind y'all that carbon dioxide removal (CDR) is useless unless we decarbonize drastically.

rdcu.be/dbFbB
Carbon dioxide removal is not a current climate solution — we need to change the narrative
Drastically reduce emissions first, or carbon dioxide removal will be next to useless.
www.nature.com
smithsam.bsky.social
someone should write that note. Freeman keeps complaining that all the investment goes into Cambridge, and he might care about Reform (or it's a gift for when he joins them)...
smithsam.bsky.social
Have any of the local train groups put a list of those together for Vallance? Ignore dft and pitch it as a science innovation thing? But GY probably too far to commute
smithsam.bsky.social
Maybe afterwards we will remember for the next century… but…
Reposted by Sam
jamesrball.com
“Bustling crowds wait for overwhelmingly non-white shop staff to serve up their alcohol, never wondering about who would turn up to scrub Westminster station clean of their urine at the end of the day.” www.thenewworld.co.uk/james-ball-t...
Tommy Robinson’s march was a drunken, coked-up mess
He claimed the world was watching, but most of London barely noticed - and much of what was on view was appalling
www.thenewworld.co.uk
smithsam.bsky.social
That may be a perfect sentence?
smithsam.bsky.social
It’s been 6 hours - there’s no fucking panic
smithsam.bsky.social
What happened to those guys who went out to remove graffiti as a community service? Or were their high viz jackets just a political stunt?
Reposted by Sam
chaipatel.net
Ah yes if black and brown people throw a party we need to scan their faces.

White supremacists organising a hate march do not need to worry about their privacy. The police have them covered.

This btw is also why everyone arguing for digital id in this country is either naive or dangerous.
2h ago 10.29 BS1
Police are not using live facial recognition in its policing of the 'Unite the Kingdom' demonstration which is beginning on London's south bank, reports the PA news agency.
It said:
• We're using a mobile CCTV van to help monitor the build up of crowds. Officers have been asked if it's using 'live facial recognition' - we can confirm it is not.
The live facial recognition technology - which captures people's faces in real-time CCTV
cameras - was used in the policing operation at the Notting Hill carnival.
Reposted by Sam
drwalpurgisnacht.bsky.social
An assassin writes Bella Ciao in the same breath as a Notices Your Bulge meme on his bullets. One of the government responses is a practicing Hindu asserting that the fundamentalist Christian victim will join him in a Norse pagan afterlife. Welcome to the epistemic collapse.