The Braindump Blog

Technology

2026-07-19: Yet another 'you can't trust cloud services with your data' example, Microsoft edition.

2026-07-19: Sadly, the critical concerns highlighted by the Person of Interest TV show seem quaint in today's world

2026-07-18: Buy a new monitor, get some adware for free

2026-07-09: The UK is currently undergoing its third heatwave in as many months. Given we have such a low …

2026-07-04

UK parents warned over posting images of children amid AI sexual abuse fears: ‘The average parent or carer does not post a picture of a child online thinking that it might be scraped to be turned into CSAM’.

2026-06-25

Meta pauses employee tracker for AI training amid privacy concerns: Funnily enough its employees were not fans of ‘a tool that tracked staff keystrokes, mouse clicks and content displayed on computer screens in order to collect data for training its AI models’.

AI helps read papyrus scroll burnt to crisp during Vesuvius eruption: Seems a decent use of AI if accurate - the doc was all about Stoic philosophy.

Four in five under-16s in Australia using social media despite ban, study shows

2026-06-17

France to ditch Palantir’s AI data tools in favour of domestic provider: A wise move that needs to happen elsewhere too.

2026-06-14: Unsurprisingly the Online Safety Act hasn't stopped social media companies pushing dangerous content

2026-06-13: The Trump administration forces Anthropic to stop foreign nationals accessing its latest AI models

2026-06-13: Dark Mirror retells the Edward Snowden story from a journalist's viewpoint

2026-06-07: DocFetcher is a great multi-OS application for searching through vast tranches of your files

2026-06-06: On the grimmer side of Wikipedia entries I see there’s now an official page for ‘Deaths …

2026-06-06

No Right to Remain Silent: Negative Rights in a Positive-Rights World: ‘…the right to produce no data broadly doesn’t exist.’

2026-06-03: The economic benefits of Open Source software

2026-05-30: Pure nerd in-joke perfection from @KyleTrainEmoji: PICARD: Data, shields up DATA: Brilliant! …

2026-05-30: Instagram quietly disables end-to-end encryption on your DMs

2026-05-28: The pope has (very lengthy) thoughts on AI. I can’t pretend to have read it all yet, but the …

2026-05-27: Government department saves £ millions by replacing its Palantir IT system with an in-house one

2026-05-25: WhatsApp is being repeatedly sued alleging that it's lying about its end-to-end encryption

2026-05-17: The Open Rights Group's very comprehensive report on the importance of Digital Sovereignty

2026-05-16: Britain's dependence on US technology makes us vulnerable

2026-05-02: When my OneDrive sync started seemingly permanently destroying some of my files I was surprised to …

2026-05-02

UN warns women in public life face increasingly sophisticated online violence