The oxymoronic Online Safety Act
28th July 2025
I've avoided writing about the oxymoronic "Online Safety Act" in detail as others have already documented all the insanity and sleaze of this shambolic law in much better and probably more polite words. I could tell you how it's technically unworkable, but that's been explained already so many times by so many people with nobody listening. The short summary is that the Labour party have effectively made it a legal requirement to hand over personal details and ID documents to untrusted foreign websites if you want to be able to do anything from discussing wine making to seeking support for drink, drugs or abuse. This is obviously batshit insane and the exact opposite of everything the security community has been trying to explain for the last couple of decades.
That the current government is so unbelievably technically illiterate is not the issue that concerns me now. Yes they're massively damaging the UK tech industry while simultaneously making adults and children vulnerable to exploitation and pushing them to the most dangerous people and places on the internet, but the immediate concern is the effect on democracy.
I'm not talking about how as some claim, the government are effectively censoring content that may be critical of their policies, but what happens between now and the next election. People had hope for Labour. After 14 years of Conservative lies and corruption expectations were not high, but a vague clue about how the world works and a few small steps in the right direction were the minimum most people expected.
Instead, what we got is a government that while simultaneously reducing the voting age to 16, has effectively banned those same 16 and 17 year olds from viewing vital political discourse online. A 17 year old now can't legally view protest posts, get a clubcard discount on their shopping or read about electric cars. It's going to be interesting to see how they react to this at the ballet box. Labour have done all this in the time they should have been sorting out real electoral reform so the mess of the last 14 years couldn’t happen again, but instead they've shat the bed. Not just a year wasted, but a year spent making an even bigger mess that will need to be cleaned up by someone else if they can't do the decent thing and admit their mistake.
16 and 17 years olds are only a small percent of the voting public and there's a good argument they should have the right to vote, so what about the vast number of adults that have or will notice the censorship in their social media feeds or the missing posts on their Reddit accounts? What happens after the first inevitable data breach exposes a large percentage of the population's personal details and MP's and the public start to get blackmailed for their online habits?
The Conservatives failed due to corruption and lies on a scale that will take a generation to forget. I've heard Labour described as a party full of very decent people who when working together can only agree on the things they all collectively know nothing about. Unfortunately they evidently know nothing about technology, which in the modern world means they have now failed as a party, though for a very different reason to the Conservatives and one that leaves hope they may be able to regain credibility if they can acknowledge this and learn quickly from their mistakes.
So who steps into the void if Labour maintain this loss of credibility from now until the next election? One would hope it would be someone in the middle, but there's nobody left in the middle and apart from tactical voting, the UK's undemocratic first past the post system rarely allows people to vote for the party that most closely reflects their views. All that that's left are the far right who could now end up in power by default.
I despise Nigel Farrage and would never vote for him or any of his racist friends, but this week he said the first thing I've ever heard him say that I agree with, that the online safety act is a threat to democracy. Maybe not for the reason he thinks, but a stopped clock can be right one time. I hope Labour do the decent thing and repeal this nonsense before it's too late and they willingly hand the country over to him.
Update
29th July 2025 at 1800
Literally hours after I wrote the above the Labour MP responsible for technology policy Peter Kyle went on Sky News and accused anyone criticising Labour as being on the side of paedophiles. While this may just be a Freudian reflection of the mentality of Peter Kyle, it shows Labour have serious issues with not just basic technical literacy at the highest level, but with a fundamental lack of decency in some of their MPs. Labour have done quite a good job of clearing out racists. They obviously still have a long way to go to clear out toxic people like him, who I hope is just an idiot and not something much worse.
Either way the party does not appear to be learning from their mistakes.
Update 2
29th July 2025 at 2200
Professor Tim Wilson has made a Youtube video about this. As expected he puts it much more eloquently and succinctly.
Update 3
1st August 2025 at 2200
To the surprise of absolutely nobody it appears Peter Kyle is personally profiting from his position and is up to his neck in sleaze. From 'The National': Firm linked to Labour minister Peter Kyle awarded £10.2m in contacts
Remembering Joyce Carol Vincent
18th July 2025
It's hard to remember someone you never knew. Someone you never met. We see celebrities on TV and we think we know them, but having met a few famous people I can tell you the person you see on television is sometimes not the person they really are. People are attracted to beauty, or humour, or wisdom and get drawn in wanting to known more. The tabloid press fills this void by publishing stories that are often nonsense and are well known for making things up just for a headline.
But what about a "normal" person? A woman who is beautiful, intelligent, loved by many, who once went to dinner with Stevie Wonder, talked on the phone to many celebrities and met Nelson Mandella, briefly being seen by millions around the world. Someone who may be hiding from an abusive former lover in a rented flat above Wood Green shopping centre? Someone who at 38 is not the sort of person the press have a reason to feature. Someone who, a few weeks earlier had to have emergency treatment for a peptic ulcer and is now, after going shopping a month before Christmas 2003, lying on her sofa with presents she has wrapped watching BBC1.
While we can't know exactly what happened next, the evidence is clear. On that sofa, while probably in pain but either not thinking it was major or not having anyone she could call for immediate help, Joyce must have passed out and then died. Most likely due to internal bleeding from the ulcer. To die at such a young age is shocking and sad but doesn't make the national press, except in her case it did, because she wasn't found until January 2006.
I vaguely remember the press reports at the time about a "woman in her 40s" being found after so long. No pictures or other details, the stories focussing on the length of time rather than anything about the person. Another sad story that day which would normally be tomorrow's fish and chip paper.
Filmmaker Carol Morley saw the story in a copy of The Sun which had been left on the tube. She also had no idea who this person was but wanted to know more. After five years of research tracking down former colleagues, childhood friends and boyfriends she released the film 'Dreams of a Life' about Joyce Carol Vincent in 2011. It's a truly impressive work, though by definition some details are speculative. What we do know is a lot of people loved her and wanted to be with her, yet all thought she must be living a more glamourous life with other people. When the time unexpectedly came she had nobody to call for help.
The film itself was then seen by others, making Joyce into a celebrity of sorts, a decade after her death. Steve Wilson saw it and it inspired his fantastic hit concept album Hand Cannot Erase. The excellent Hampshire rock group 'Miss Vincent' named themselves after her after being inspired to write the song 'No One Knew' and Paloma Faith wrote 'Lost and Lonely'.
The sad part is not really the length of time after she had died, it's the fact that such a beautiful and popular person had nobody she felt she could call, or who knew where she was to check on her, when she suddenly and unexpectedly needed vital help (her family had hired detectives but they couldn't find her). If it could happen to her it could happen to anybody. I often wonder what would have happened if, before lying down to rest, she had called someone or dialled 999 before she lost consciousness (though even they might not have been able to find her in that maze of a housing estate if her phone was registered elsewhere). She might have been saved before it was too late, but ironically we would never have known and could never know.
With the national press reporting, questions were asked and even her MP chased for answers. How was the annual gas safety check missed for over two years? What about the housing trust that provided the flat or the women's refuge she had been to previously? It appears she had some savings and benefits and her bills were on direct debit, so when she was found the heating and electricity was running and the TV still on tuned to BBC1. Eventually it was the rent going unpaid for a few months that caused bailiffs to find her. I suppose a small mercy is she was found before the first ever episode of The One Show.
They all said it couldn't happen again. Lessons had been learnt. Processes had been put in place. But it did.
Sheila Seleoane who was 58 lived in a smart looking flat in Peckham. The only known photo of her is a photo booth picture where she looks incredibly pretty, especially given how passport photos usually turn out. She was last seen alive in August 2019 and similar to Joyce seems to have collapsed at home due to a medical condition and been unable to call for help. Unlike Joyce however her neighbours noticed and raised the alarm on multiple occasions starting around a month after she was last seen. However she was not found until 22nd February 2022 two and a half years later.
While the case of Joyce is incredibly sad, the case of Sheila Seleoane is pretty horrific. It seems even though her neighbours tried to raise the alarm, nobody in an official capacity cared. She had Crohn's disease but her GP doesn't seem to have raised any concerns. Her landlord cut off the gas from outside the flat in the middle of the 2020 pandemic without doing any checks. The police visited twice in 2020 in response to the neighbours, but no actual checks were made and for unclear reasons they recorded that she was "alive and well". The only reason she was eventually found is because storm Eunice blew open her balcony window.
These are not isolated incidents and they seem to occur all around the world. While I vaguely remember the original news story I completely missed the release of the film 'Dreams of a Life' in 2012 and only discovered it in the last month or so, going down a rabbit hole reading about Joyce Carol Vincent and Sheila Seleoane.
Someone I never knew, someone I never could know, yet somehow someone I wanted to know. Someone I now feel I used to know.
The enshittification of Coca-cola
16th July 2025
I just cut myself on a Coke bottle. A plastic Coke bottle. I've been drinking Coca-cola since the cans had pull tabs that came off, the ones that were in the news in the early 80s for causing major injuries to people on beaches. Those things were lethal but at least you knew the ring pull had a sharp metal edge so injuries were almost always due to someone else littering.
This was solved by fixing the ring pull to the can in a design that was seen as so cool it was almost science fiction when it first appeared. For the first time we could drink a can of drink and not have to wear the ring pull like a wedding ring the whole time (which is why people dropped them). It also almost never fell inside the can, so children ending up in hospital with internal injuries caused by drinking a can of drink stopped being such a regular occurrence.
Then there were the broken glass bottles. I'm not old enough to remember when a glass bottle was the only way to buy Coke so broken glass appears, with the exception of some 1980s pub gardens, to also be an issue solved decades ago by the introduction of cans and plastic. Plastic also has the benefit of being both cheaper to make and more environmentally friendly in this role, due to the energy requred for transport and production.
So since the 80s this was a solved problem. You bought a can or a bottle of Coke and unless it was damaged or tasted bad, never even thought about if it was safe to use.
But these are the 2020s. If a corner can be cut to save a fraction of a penny then you can be sure the first to do so will be one of the richest companies in the world, with others forced to follow to compete. This is not a new thing. In the early 2000s I called the Coca-cola helpline to ask why Fanta in the UK tasted so bad compared to the imported Fanta you could get at many shops (Fanta is a Coca-cola product) and that was before they filled it with artificial sweeteners. The reply was some nonsense about "less orange" being more popular in the UK. So much less popular that everyone I knew would try to buy the imported stuff.
But they got wise to those complaints. Why make a slightly bad drink when you can make a terrible one for a fraction of the cost and sell it for the same price. So at some point in the 2010s they started to fill all their non-caffeinated NON-DIET drinks with artificial sweeteners. They taste like shit, leave a horrid taste in your mouth for hours and make you need to go to the bathroom, but in many places they're the only option other than water, which often costs the same or more, or Coca-cola. I sometimes have low blood sugar so relied on these drinks but had to switch to Coca-cola which of course contains caffeine. It seems one of their objectives is to push you towards this to get you chemically addicted. The changes are so bad, health agencies have had to issue warnings to diabetics.
Of course other companies jumped in on the bandwagon. Ribena and Lucozade were bought out by a Japanese company who immediately filled Ribena with artificial sweeteners and polydextrose. They didn't tell anyone of course or even put a warning on the bottles, in the hope you might not notice the disgusting taste and subsequent diarrhea. 80 years of history literally down the drain. They still owe me the cost of the two bottles I had to pour away having bought them on "offer" not knowing that was because they were not actually Ribena anymore. Rocks make a good alternative but I will always miss Ribena. Hopefully the Japanese company Suntory will go bust and be forced to sell them back to someone with ethics some day.
Some blame the sugar tax for artificial sweeteners being added to everything. It's certainly been the enabler of lower food industry standards and the excuse given by many companies trying to dodge tax, to explain why they need to add artificial sweeteners and cheap bulking agents to their products. It's what I call the Jamie Oliver effect. The sort of thing that happens when someone so self-centred they only think of themselves gets the idea they can pretend to be doing good for others in order to become richer and more popular, while deflecting from their own lack of ethics with no regard for actual consequences. The sort thing a person that complains about junk food while selling worse burgers to children and not paying his bills, who then goes to work with McDonalds, would do.
But we're seeing some positive changes. Ice Drinks who are based in the UK and EU now make very good versions of all the old popular favourites and I highly recommend them. We still have the problem of monopoly deals with businesses and unfair competition, but at least it's a start.
But back to bottles. I've read that making bottle tops cut you and spill your drink when you open them is part of a six year old EU directive for some unclear environmental reason. There are just two minor problems with that claim. The Polish Coca-cola our local shop sells has caps that remove properly and don't cut you and they're in the EU and the UK is not in the EU, so any claim that a company in the UK is doing a bad thing because of the EU is a blatant lie. Yes the EU can encourage behaviour, as we've seen with USB-C and third-party app stores, but nobody is forcing Coca-cola to sell dangerous bottles in the UK or the EU, it's a choice they have made. It also harms the environment as the bottle caps are now much harder to put back on and as a result appear to be being more frequently discarded as litter without the bottle, in the way the old ring pulls were 40 years ago.
Being environmentally friendly or healthy does not mean being shoddy and we shouldn’t allow companies to set that narrative. A cotton bud that breaks when you use it forcing you to use 10x as many is not progress, even if it has "less plastic". A paper straw that contains glue is not better than a plastic straw when you could just redesign the cup to not need one, leaving plastic straws easily available for those with disabilities. Filling food and drink with unhealthy crap so you can say you use "less sugar" but actually only so you can make more money at the expense of customers health, reminds me of all the shit the tobacco companies used to pull.
The travesty of online English
4th July 2025
It used to be so simple. The word colour was spelt colour unless you were programming an American computer. You could even watch the BBC 'Computer Programme' to learn how to write the program. Steve Vickers got it right when he designed the BASIC and manuals for the ZX Spectrum by avoiding the word 'colour' and instead using the keywords 'ink' and 'paper'. I was in my thirties before I realised the name of the movie 'Airplane' was not itself meant to be a joke but actually how Americans are taught to spell it.
There's nothing wrong with taking something that exists and changing it to suit your needs. It's the basis of 'interpolation' in music, it's the inspiration for artists and in the technology world it's what allows essential things like Hanna Montanna Linux to exist. Those are all fantastic, but the problems start when the changes unintentionally feed back into the original like a sewer that relies on water leaking back into a fresh spring.
We've been seeing this more and more online over the last 30 years as people in different countries communicate. However, in the last decade it's got to a tipping point where instead of being a curiosity, it's become at best an annoyance and at worst created conflict between users who don't understand what the other person is saying, or think their point isn't valid because they appear illiterate.
In the past you could rely on a majority of mainstream sites getting this right, a foundation that also helped the average user with their writing. For example, if you don't know the correct spelling or grammar when writing, if you see others writing it correctly then over time you learn without even having to try. The problem is a lot of large sites now seem to have given up any pretence of editorial control of spelling or grammar.
I first noticed this on 'The Register' a British technology website that's been very popular since the 90s. It's never been the most serious of sites, but until recently they could be relied on to form coherent sentences. Now it appears they don't give a fuck. Spelling and grammar is all over the place, with rogue commas appearing and being omitted randomly from sentences and Americanisms mixed with British humour to the point where it's a challenge to actually understand what they're trying to write. Of course, this in itself could be a joke by The Register and it certainly causes the comments sections to fill, but I'm not so sure. If it's intended as a joke it's very good satire on the state of professional online writing. So good in fact it will probably cost them their readership.
By the way I'm aware of the irony of writing online in order to decry it, so don't bother pointing that out.
Blogs
31st May 2025
I was told all the cool kids have blogs these days, though that was in 1998. Those kids probably have their own kids now and they probably make instatoks or something. In 2025 the cool kids have to be at least in their 40s, those that made it. Did many members of the '27 Club' have blogs back in the 90s? I last had a blog about 15 years ago but the words seem to be lost to the entropy of a third party hosting company, much like a lot of the BBC's Apollo 11 footage, though that was on tape and lost in house. Then again hosting companies used tape for backups. I wonder if in 50 years time there'll be news stories about a mysterious collection of DDS tapes that have been found, believed to contain the only known photos of Princess Diana's cat Marmalade. Totally unplayable of course, not just because of tape mould but because DAT tapes were never very reliable when new.
Yeah, I'm losing my edge. I'm losing my edge. The kids are coming up from behind. I'm losing my edge to the kids from France and from London. But I was there. But I'm losing my edge. To better-looking people. With better ideas and more talent. And they're actually really, really nice. You don't know what you really want.
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