Notices by Bruce Lawson ✅ (quiet time) (brucelawson@social.vivaldi.net)

"Police officers and employees misusing access to police database now account for over half of all cybercrime prosecutions in the UK. The harms this can cause are considerable. Yet police continue to call for encryption to be weakened to allow for greater access to communication data." - Alice Hutchings, Director, Cambridge Cybercrime Centre, Cambridge University. (3pp PDF: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~ah793/papers/2025police.pdf)

The boyhood of Donald Trump (by Matt, UK Daily Telegraph)

After my leg x-ray, the radiologist said "your patella measures exactly 2.54 centimetres". I said, "Inch-high knees?". She looked puzzled and replied, "'您的髌骨是2.54厘米高."

Trump has free rein over Dutch government data. "The Netherlands relies heavily on American IT service providers such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon for the storage of government data." - I bet the UK does, too. And many others.
https://ioplus.nl/en/posts/trump-has-free-rein-over-dutch-government-data

The sweater I bought last week was giving me static electricity shocks. So I returned it to the shop and they gave me another one free of charge.

"We do not "use" the computer — we negotiate with it to try and make it do the things we want it to do, because the incentives behind modern software development no longer align with the user." https://www.wheresyoured.at/what-were-fighting-for/

And this is why we make @Vivaldi - to provide you with tools you need, not get in your way, earn an honest living with no external investors demanding nonsensical features or world domination by any means possible. Give it a try! https://vivaldi.com

Sigh, why does the Labour Party always get authoritarian when it gets into power? I remember Tony Blair's hard-on for ID cards and extending detention without trial. https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/02/07/uk-secretly-orders-apple-to-let-it-spy-on-iphone-users-worldwide

"Hitler's dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. His was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means in a perfect manner for the domination of its own nation.

Through technical devices such as radio and loudspeaker 80 million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man." - Albert Speer's final testimony at Nuremberg war trials. https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/08-31-46.asp#:~:text=Hitler%27s%20dictatorship%20differed%20in%20one%20fundamental%20point%20from%20all%20its%20predecessors%20in%20history.%20His%20was%20the%20first%20dictatorship%20in%20the%20present%20period%20of%20modern%20technical%20development%2C%20a%20dictatorship%20which%20made%20complete%20use%20of%20all%20technical%20means%20in%20a%20perfect%20manner%20for%20the%20domination%20of%20its%20own%20nation

There's definitely nothing Orwellian about the cheerily-named “Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling
EXECUTIVE ORDER” in the Democratic People's Republic of Trumpistan https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/ending-radical-indoctrination-in-k-12-schooling/

New posters have appeared in my home city.

All my thoughts and prayers for Big Techbros whose stochastic parrots shares are plummeting.

It's 80 years today since the liberation of Auschwitz. And this weekend, the world's richest man has been fluffing German fascists and the US President has floated the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Never forget?

How and why I deleted all my tweets https://brucelawson.co.uk/2025/deleting-all-my-tweets/

Honestly, BBC, I don't give a fuck about Eva Braun's hat. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cz7e99ww55vo

Well-paid Woke job vacancy! Head of Digital Accessibility at BBC, open to disabled applicants only. https://careers.bbc.co.uk/job/Head-of-Digital-Accessibility/811220202/

New in Birmingham

Bah, Starmer going all-in on Stochastic Parrots - "unleashing" them, no less! - to spot potholes in roads, which no-one has the money to repair. Wake me up in 2030, fam. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crr05jykzkxo

The distant past isn't actually so distant. My house is at least 130 years old. My great-grandmother, who i met many times (she died when I was 11) had seen Queen Victoria.

When I was a kid, my elderly music teacher told me that, when he was a kid, his music teacher told him that, when he was a kid, his music teacher had actually met Beethoven.