I think a lot of non-techie people only know signal from the Trump admin using it illegally earlier in the year. In a lot of people’s minds because of that they think Signal = insecure because they don’t get the nuances of why using it in that specific context – on personal phones, using a third party app, with a random journalist in the mix – was bad, but that for most people it’s still one of the best options. WhatsApp on the other hand has a lot of marketing around it and if you didn’t know that Meta is Facebook I think some people wouldn’t even realise who the owners are.

Kyle’s own record hardly reassures sceptics. In June 2025 he reportedly referred one of his constituents to the police after she sent him emails protesting against arms sales to Israel. Within days, four officers raided her home at four in the morning, arrested her, and confiscated her devices. Journalists who examined her emails found them to be angry but not abusive, passionate but not unlawful. For civil-liberties campaigners, the case smacked of an MP unwilling to tolerate dissent on an issue where he is deeply invested.

I feel a bit one-note complaining about this one guy all the time but he really truly is the worst part of this government.

+1 for Navidrome. As simple as pasting the album into the directory and it sorts the rest. I use subtune on my phone to access it and it works great.

The tech secretary is the biggest idiot in our government right now which is really saying something. He doesn’t have any professional experience with technology, gets his policy ideas from asking chatgpt, accused anyone who opposes the online safety act of being a paedophile, and when a constituent sent him emails about Palestine he had the police raid her home at 4am.

That’s true. I don’t know what the answer is there, but I still think regardless of what the solution is, politicians shouldn’t be promising one thing and doing another. Especially to a demographic already so cynical about politics.

The same man who pledged to abolish tuition fees, immediately abandoned that pledge to gain power, tripled them instead, and was then caught afterwards having already scrapped the plan to abolish them internally while still publicly campaigning on it?

However, leaked documents revealed that the Lib Dems had actually planned to abandon their tuition fee pledge before the election even took place.

A month before Clegg promised to get rid of the “dead weight of debt,” senior insiders said the party should “leave” the pledge before entering any negotiations to form a coalition government, saying: “Let us not cause ourselves more headaches.”

That article is an interesting read on how the big three keep lying through their teeth on tuition fees as well. And how the National Union of Students opposed tuition fees for over a decade until the now-health secretary Wes Streeting became their general secretary.

I’ve tried tailscale and cloudflare tunnels in the past and ended up just using PiVPN to set up a WireGuard VPN on my Pi5. Tailscale for some reason was very slow for me, and cloudflare tunnels have a 100mb limit iirc which isn’t ideal for streaming. PiVPN is quite straightforward, it sets everything up for you and all you have to do is forward a UDP port. That was the bit I was most worried about, but, unless I’ve misunderstood something, because a UDP port will just ignore invalid requests to the outside world it will appear closed so it’s not very risky. It then generates a key for each device which you can scan from a QR code onto your VPN client. I have my phone set to auto-connect to the tunnel when I disconnect from my home wifi network and the tunnel is fast enough that I’ve accidentally turned off my phone’s wifi connection before and streamed a TV show through the tunnel over mobile data and not noticed any difference in speed.

The frozen food specialist said that anyone who spots a suspected shoplifter in its stores should inform the nearest Iceland employee who will verify the incident before adding the reward to the individual’s loyalty card for immediate use.

Posted this because it sounds like one of the boring dystopian things ever. Plus the perverse incentive to snitch on people for a pound off your groceries is quite horrible.

Also in the guardian today is an article on how the combo of proscribing Palestine Action and introducing the online safety act is causing platforms to censor information about Gaza. His counter-argument in this article is that Meta were censoring information on Palestine already, but Meta had always been overzealous in their content moderation, now it’s every platform.

He says in this that he’s worried being too specific would be more authoritarian but I would say the opposite is true - if what needs censoring is too vague, platforms are gonna be extreme in what they block and put behind age verification because the fines are so high. And vague guidance can be used to justify blocking anything. It only entrenches big tech further because small sites can’t afford the age verification or the risk of a £10 million fines.