amiga386
He added in the Commons "I haven't at any point said it altered the result." https://x.com/SkyNews/status/2109670197833429270
The head of MI5 backed both these statements, stressing both that Russia did interfere and didn't have much of an effect: "There is a really important difference between interference attempted and outcome swayed" https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/oct/13/russia-brex...
Farage is a lot of things, but I wouldn't claim he was a Putin asset as we don't have evidence of that. The evidence we do have against him (dodgy foreign money pouring into his bank account, him springing into action for his paymasters, him having criminal fraudsters on staff, etc.) is just as damning. You have to be careful in making such claims. Arron Banks (the main source of money for Leave.EU) had dealings with the Russian state around the time of his Brexit campaign, and was being investigated for these dealings. But, ultimately nothing untoward was found, and he sued Carole Cadwalladr who merely hinted that he had Russian financial ties. She is now bankrupted by having to pay his enormous legal costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carole_Cadwalladr#Banks_v_Cadw...
But not providing one does seem to follow with their "be a normie as much as possible in order to not stand out" mantra, even if (to me) providing that extra service for non-GMS users seems harmless. Maybe it's not, I don't know.
Anyway, however much more battery it uses, from my experience, it hasn't been an inconvenience, the phone still lasts a couple of days without charging.
Signal works without GMS or any alternative, at the cost of more phone wakeups. This is much more preferable to everyone whose WiFi or data service you use see you connect to "push.myownname.com", or for you to rely in some rando gatekeeping your message delivery.
Copy the backup off your phone and use https://github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools to extract everything.
Install vanilla LineageOS or GrapheneOS with no GApps. Then install Signal from https://signal.org/android/apk/
Getting elected is table stakes and shows you have the soft skills needed to organise, campaign and convince. Which is the minimum you need to get disparate groups of humans to pull in the same direction and make progress in advancing the country.
Theres no consolation if you get experts to plan solutions to problems but 1) the people you need to implement the plans have their own opinions or priorities and 2) the public want focus in some other priority and are start rioting if they don't feel heard.
You need schmoozers as much as you need tacticians.
Do you wonder why there even was a referendum?
Compare 1997: Sir Jammy Fishpaste hates Europe, spends millions of his own money promoting his Referendum Party, gets nowhere. Because it's "cool Britannia" and the common man is doing well for himself. People think he's a nutter and all he achieves is keeping 4-11 Tories out of power by sapping their votes
But the 2008 crash wrecks the country. UKIP builds a voter base over years, and gets an enormous share of the vote. That's a warning shot for the Tories, whose voters UKIP are sapping. They only just squeaked through a hung parliament with a Libdem coalition. Hence Gambling Dave offers a referendum to bring Europe haters back to his party so he can remain in power.
Those percentage points were already in place before Russia even got going.
I think this is exactly what he wanted, as these were the complaints levelled against the service when he was still in charge.
From 2018: https://drewdevault.com/blog/Signal/
> Moxie knows about everything I’ve said in this article. He’s a very smart guy and I am under no illusions that he doesn’t understand everything I’ve put forth. I don’t think that Moxie makes these choices because he thinks they’re the right thing to do. [...] Moxie can’t come out and say it openly, but he’s made the decisions he has made because they serve his own interests.
And it looks like it's working. The Signal social network is growing. Revenue is growing (revenue pays for ongoing maintenance). Alternative servers are not sapping user metrics. It's still easy to push both security fixes and eye-catching new features because one central server, and client upgrades are aggressively pushed. Spam is not a plague because registration remains expensive - you need a genuine phone number you control, or Google to vouch for you (who in turn have their own robust defences against account creation).
If it was a free sign up where you just need an IP address to play, spammers would have hundreds of millions of accounts and you'd get as much nuisance friend requests as you get email spam. Most people would leave. You've seen the scraperpocalypse, every sketchy person on the planet has money to fund a million sign ups each from a unique US residential IP (thanks to "smart" TV vendor neglect/corruption allowing residential proxies), IP reputation is worthless.
Personal instances of Signal would hide until spammers found them but you'd better have your own locked down registration because you can't hide forever. Not to mention that sending ongoing traffic to your own server tells everyone where and when you're posting, moreso than using Signal's centralised services.
Its tradeoffs all the way down.
It was my fellow countrymen, and their long held Eurosceptic views, that fucked us. Russia posting divisive pish in 2016 has nothing on our decades of native politicians and newspapers blaming Brussels for everything bad (often its their own policies being policywashed) and pretending everything good came from them.
He clearly redirected the railway station maintenance budget to his friends instead, because he assumed the public were suckers who'd vote him back in no matter how badly he fucked up. Then the station canopy collapsed and killed people. Entirely avoidable.
When your leaders are nakedly corrupt, and through sheer luck you still have free and fair elections, you vote those fuckers out. Otherwise they'll fiddle while your country burns.
It looks like the public want someone else in charge, they'll give them a fair shake. Maybe the new lot will direct the treasure more appropriately.
1. Planes can determine their altitude. Trains don't know which track they're on. You'd have to re-engineer existing signalling systems designed around the inverse. Track transponders and axle counters know which trainset passed a specific piece of track, but the trains don't know which track transponders link together on the same track. They don't even know which track they'll be going down next because that's up to the signallers controlling the points, not them.
2. Planes fly in the air and can send omnidirectional radio signals with little to no interference. Trains run on the ground, often in valleys and tunnels. There is no guarantee that trains broadcasting "I am here" signals can be picked up by the next train within the stopping distance.
Many trains did broadcast "I am here" signals, but once speeds got faster, the broadcast range (about 1km) wasn't far enough for a train to stop in time before a collision, which is why trains need to communicate, using on-track wires that run the length of the track, to each other and central control. Which therefore means that the central control system needs to work, and when it doesn't, the trains have to stop.
Planes use radio signals because they don't have signalling cable following their entire route. Trains do, and it's usually much more reliable than radio.
The issue is not the idea, it's that railway signalling systems have to be an interoperable, multi-vendor, tested and accredited pile of little ideas like this, that have infinite numbers of ways to go wrong and have corner cases by the metric ton. And it's not like coding a website, where you can just ignore standards and focus on your case. "Your" rails need to support other people's trains. "Your" trains need to run on other people's rails. Even in a fully closed system with your trains on your rails... who's going to be your equipment maintainer and supplier for the next 30-50 years of their operational life?
Read this article and notice how often cost and project overruns are mentioned:
https://www.railengineer.co.uk/etcs-preparing-the-east-coast...
> The use of ETCS is driven by deliverables, not the technology but concerns exist as to why it is costing so much. In Europe, the success of ETCS is driven by country mandate and a system authority which helps to create a stable ongoing work plan.
> There is also the question of strategic safety versus functional safety, namely fundamental versus site specific. Over-specified ETCS undermines the strategic safety and functional over scope and so drives unaffordability since the accreditation inflates the cost.
Cost must be driven out of ETCS if it is to be the preferred system for ongoing renewals. Despite interoperability requirements, there is risk in always using the same supplier. There is no common way of delivering ETCS. Having it as an overlay system will always be expensive and not beneficial to the business case. Lessons have been learned from the application of ETCS to the Cambrian route, the Thameslink central core, and the Northern City line from Finsbury Park to Moorgate but all of these have only one type of rolling stock in day-to-day operation. Equipping a mixed traffic railway as in the ECML makes it much more difficult.
The LZB system, which broke down, had the data you describe. It knows when trains pass over fixed sensors so it computes where they are, and sends data packets to specific trains informing them their current speed limit, and the next, and how far away that is. If the driver won't slow down, the train will.
When LZB broke down, they had to switch to their other system, BSL (fixed block signalling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_block_signaling). You can then know the distance to the next block, and if it's occupied or not, but not where the train is inside the block. You can only guess.
In the next few days we'll likely find out if the control centre also fucked up the block signals...
He has no authority to name international bodies of water - i.e the large part in the centre where Google should be writing "Gulf of Mexico" because that's its name.
But he does have the ability to cause trouble for the giant corporations based in his country that serve map images to most of the rest of the world. The giant corporations also see that he grants favours for fealty. So it's actually the unofficial power he has that's the problem, rather than what's within his legal remit.
As Skytrain has no attendants, there's a certain level of risk of passenger injury and death no matter how good the sensors are. If Skytrain had platform doors, there would likely be less, but probably never zero, and TransLink baulk at the cost (for now).
Other systems, e.g. the Docklands Light Railway, which has attendants that can also drive if needed, are OK with paying those attendants (for now). I presume they've done a cost/benefit analysis and decided that it's cheaper to keep paying humans to ensure every train departs safely, and to operate the manual controls if the automation fails, than it is to upgrade the system to the point that doesn't require them and is also considered safe.
Anything less is begging to get someone wedged in there as the train drives off, even if it's just a limb or a trailing bag strap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platform_screen_doors
> In June 2023, the operator of the Vancouver SkyTrain, TransLink announced a feasibility study into installing platform screen doors on the Expo and Millennium lines. Such installation was previously deemed infeasible, due to SkyTrain's diverse fleet and different door positions. However, with the acquisition of the Alstom Mark V trains, which will replace the ageing Mark I, the door positions allow for a feasibility study to proceed.
EDIT: I found some SkyTrain stats for you. 2016-2025, 1 fatal train-passenger interaction on the platform, 36 fatal in the guideway. Most were intentional suicide attempts.
https://www.technicalsafetybc.ca/technologies/railways/skytr...
What this chart doesn't show you is how much more expensive it is to advance the grade of automation. Systems like the Docklands Railway are only safe because all their tracks are grade separated with exclusive track. They still need a person on board to be sure that nobody is stuck in the doors or wedged between the train and platform before the train starts moving.
"Have computers control everything" is four words to say, but it's millions or billions more in money, and adds years to the projects. London's Crossrail, for example, was years late due to the complexity of switching between 4 separate signalling systems (ETCS on the Heathrow branch, AWS on the GWML, TPWS on the GEML, and CBTC in their tunnel and exclusive track.)
We're still using TPWS on the ECML, for example, because:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_Protection_&_Warning_Sys...
> TPWS was developed by British Rail and its successor Railtrack, following a determination in 1994 that British Rail's Automatic Train Protection system was not economical – ATP would cost £600 million (equivalent to £1.2 billion in 2024) to implement, compared to value in lives saved: £3 – £4 million (£6 – 8 million in 2024), per life saved, which was estimated to be 2.9 per year.
TPWS is where a little light comes on saying it would be a good idea to brake now because you passed a signal at danger. Only very fancy versions of TPWS will actually apply the brakes for you.
And then we had the Southall and Ladbroke Grove crashes a few years later: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ladbroke_Grove_rail_crash
> Both crashes would have been prevented by an operational automatic train protection (ATP) system, wider fitting of which had been rejected on cost grounds. The crash severely damaged public confidence in the management and regulation of safety of Britain's privatised railway system.
But even then, an inquiry asked to look specifically into ATP determined we were right to reject it, it was just Too. Fucking. Expensive.
> Since both the Paddington and Southall crashes had reopened public debate on ATP, a separate joint inquiry considering the issue in the light of both crashes was also held in 2000; it confirmed the rejection of ATP and the mandatory adoption of a cheaper and less effective system, but noted a mismatch between public opinion and cost-benefit analysis.
> We'll be honest about where we stand. We don't like copyright as it exists. We'd like to see it radically reformed, and we wouldn't mourn it if it were abolished. Our community lives in its grey areas every day: many of the models on our sites are fan ports of characters from commercial games, made out of love and shared for free. When a studio sends us a takedown notice, we comply.
> While we as small artists and fan communities get copyright used against us, the world's largest companies are committing copyright infringement at a scale unseen in human history. This has been the case since the invention of the internet of course; digital media make duplication, remixing and resharing trivial, but copyright law never caught up. Filesharing stabbed copyright in the gut. AI is just twisting the knife, and completes the creation an unequal system where copyright infringement is only a crime if you're a low net worth individual.
Rich companies are infringing copyright at industrial scale in order to build their LLMs, and even if caught and challenged, they don't suffer any catastrophic punishment. The infringed party gets enough money to shut them up and everyone moves on. A fine is a price. They'll keep doing it with impunity. Meanwhile the small guy who doesn't have copyright lawyers on retainer is getting shafted, time and time again.
"All of Denmark in Minecraft. Recreated in a map with a scale of 1:1. Explore cities, landscapes and landmarks built of 4 trillion blocks."
"Switzerland. Block by block. At 1:1 scale. Every block is one metre. Terrain, glaciers, lakes, forests and dams come from swisstopo’s open geodata. The Matterhorn is exactly as tall and as steep as the real one."
The latter website's wording is unnecessarily staccato, self-congratulatory, and draws your attention to odd points, while missing out vital information like the word "Minecraft" (which appears elsewhere in 5 point font). It reads like a failed marketer camping out on LinkedIn wrote it.... and that's probably what the LLM was trained on. And the person using the LLM either didn't care what the website said, or reviewed it and thought it looked good and needed no changes. Either way, awful.
I might add "you've spent more effort reading it than I spent writing it"
Why do people go to pub restaurants, where one of the overworked staff will put a frozen meal in a microwave until it goes "ding", then slop it onto a plate for you? Probably not the same reasons, and you'd expect a lot cheaper, though not as cheap as the same microwave meal from the supermarket.
Do people go to what they think is a real restaurant, because its marketing has diddled them, but find out it's actually a pub restaurant when they get there, replete with low-effort slop? If they do, I hope they leave a terrible review and don't come back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Organization_for...
https://geoboxers.com/denmark-in-minecraft/
> ‘Denmark in Minecraft’ was released in April 2014 by the Danish Geodata Agency. The project was conceived, developed and operated by Simon Lyngby Kokkendorff, Thorbjørn Kjærshøj Nielsen and Nynne Sole Dalå, the founders of GeoBoxers.
> The work was funded and carried out by the Danish Geodata Agency as an initiative following the 2013 “basic data programme”, where a significant amount of public Danish data were made available for free. The purpose was to make geographical and topographical data available through Minecraft, and help disseminate the free data to a broader audience and specifically reach children.
> Denmark in Minecraft was released with an invitation to teachers and schools to use the data in geography, math, science and history lessons, and within the first few months Minecraft-data were downloaded 300.000 times from the Geodata Agency, and around 37.000 unique users logged in to the agency’s Minecraft-servers.
> January 1st, 2016 the Danish Geodata Agency changed into the Agency for Data Supply and Efficiency, and links in English regarding “Denmark in Minecraft” were removed. Since 2020 Denmark in Minecraft can no longer be downloaded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_consumption
It gives the example of Hatsune Miku, who strictly speaking is a fictional character attributed to a sampled singing voice in a vocal synthesizer VST called Vocaloid 2. She was the product branding. There is now a huge industry of fans inventing stories about Hatsune Miku and rendering/drawing pictures of her and enjoying thoughts of her being their waifu. Whatever they've made up is now their headcanon.
I can totally understand Hatsune Miku fans asking you to get lost if you tell them you bought Vocaloid 2, it's cramping their vibe.
Is it the same with the menagerie of Touhou characters? Are there people enjoying thoughts of Marisa Kirisame who don't want to be reminded she's a character in a shoot'em'up?
I don't believe they do. That would be massively disproportionate. Show me they do, show me even a single tourist being prosecuted for not informing every street passer-by behind them in their selfie-stick video of their data rights.
The law has been applied at e.g. commercial photographers (who make contractual agreements with the intended subject in the photo because they want to make full use of the subject's identity, e.g. advertising), CCTV (notice has to be given) and events (where people are informed there is filming and they can choose not to be in it), but the public in public filming the public? (in general, and not specific people) It has not happened to my knowledge.
If the law were applied like you say it is, the only legal filming in public would be to CLOSE the area to the public and have no members of the public in public. Like a film set, where the only passers-by are paid extras who signed a release. That's completely untenable.
I can't speak for member states laws, I only know one country's laws, but in the UK, this simply wouldn't be done. The reasoning would be that providing such data subjects with information about the data processor would be IMPOSSIBLE. The data processor (tourist) has absolutely no idea who any of the people in the photo/video are, and never will.
My understanding is that when videos are uploaded to YouTube, the fact Google is publishing it makes Google the data processor, and Google's duties are fulfilled by not seeking to identify the people in the video, but offering them their rights nonetheless should the data subject be able to identify themselves.
GDPR Article 2(2)c "This Regulation does not apply to the processing of personal data: by a natural person in the course of a purely personal or household activity". If you're photographing/videoing for yourself (non-commercial), an exception for you already exists. You don't need to become a data controller for all the incidental people in your holiday videos.
But if you upload the video to YouTube... Google is the data controller, and billions of unnamed, unknown individuals are its data subjects. Courts have ruled that even if you post on social media and you're restricting it to friends & family, that falls under the individual/household exception, but if it's viewable to all, GDPR applies.
Google doesn't need to discover who these people are. That would be bad in and of itself (Article 11: Processing which does not require identification)
But if a data subject does contact Google, and can confirm they are the specific person in a video, they can get their Article 13/14/15/16/17/18 rights... which are subject to the other exceptions you mention.