(Are you sitting comfortably? Because you will need to be...)
The Online Safety Act got me thinking about VPNs and other gadgets, that got me thinking about online security, which pointed me to the ideas of OPSEC, and that changed my thinking on some of these matters.
Online security is about reducing the chances of financial and reputational loss by identity theft, unauthorised third-party use of your accounts and other means, that is brought about by using the Internet. Privacy is a by-product of doing OPSEC well. This approach leads to some interesting conclusions, for instance...
Adult sites carry a reputational risk (with almost everyone in your domestic and professional life). It hits when people who want to pick a fight with you, find out you visit adult sites. They find out because they catch you in the act, or because you leave traces. Those risks will not be reduced one jot by using a 15-character randomly-generated password stored in an encrypted vault. That password protects literally nothing, since the site advertises its content. The reputational risk will be defrayed by you leaving no trace of visiting the site or being a member, which is a whole bunch of measures discussed later. The password is the least of your concerns.
Let's talk about passwords.
Device, e-mail and Cloud storage passwords must never be stored on-line. In your memory, or on paper hidden in (your choice of unlikely place here).
First, financial / identity risk. Official document numbers - National Insurance number, NHS number, passport number, driving license number - as well as bank account details, credit card numbers and the like, must never be stored in password managers or anywhere else online. Where are you going to store them? Well, gee, how about on the document or card itself? Which you keep somewhere as safe as it needs to be (the room safe in a hotel, for instance). Only take such cards and documents as you really need when you leave the house / hotel room.
Passwords and challenge responses for banking sites, payment processors (e.g. PayPal), and retail sites where you store payment details (Amazon, for most of us), must never be stored in password managers or anywhere else online.
Do not store your credit card or other payment details on any retail website. (Okay, maybe Amazon and PayPal.) A commercial / charity / academic site gets your name, address and e-mail, and maybe some relevant preferences. (When they send the first marketing e-mail, click the "unsubscribe" link to keep down the spam.)
If you have anything valuable - don't post a photograph of it, or post about it.
Second, reputational risk. If someone gets your social media password, they can post scurrilous content that will land you in jail (these days in the UK, that's a low bar). With that in mind, you may not want to put those passwords in a password manager or similar. This is the first of the convenience trade-offs, and it's your decision. The same applies to passwords for your favourite online forum.
While it's nice to flex about your fabulous life, every week there's a story about someone being caught out by Welfare or HR or divorce lawyers, because of a social media post. The more reputation-sensitive the industry you work in (financial services and the Arts especially) the more your social media content becomes a performative PR exercise. This is a whole other can of worms.
Third, work-in-progress. Documents, photos, files, projects, recordings and any other of your work-in-progress, finished product and records, should be in Cloud storage (Instagram and the like also counts) - that way, you can recover from the loss of your devices. By all means keep local drive copies and take external drive backups as well, if you like, but anyone who takes the computers will take the external drives as well. Choosing suitable Cloud storage is a separate subject.
Next some good news.
The hardware and software industry knows you are not going to use the Internet if you think everything you do can be seen by anyone who can download the right program. So they work hard at providing encryption and security. They are actually so good at it, Governments keep asking them to provide "back doors", which the industry actively resists.
Wi-fi these days comes with WPA2 encryption by default, but if you have older equipment, you should check.
Your computer and phone (these days) have built-in firewalls, virus-checkers, and other such. These are good enough that you never see security hype about having anti-virus programs anymore.
HTTPS is the dominant standard for Internet transmission. Your internet traffic is encrypted from your device to the final destination server, and cannot be snooped by anyone in the middle. Your ISP can see the main page address, but nothing more.
So let's get to the counter-measures. As far as possible, these are setup-and-forget. The best security measures are affordable, invisible, do not require constant maintenance, and discourage all but the best of the pros and the worst of the crazy amateurs. "Eternal vigilance" is not a technique. These counter-measures are for you - how much you trust your partner and children to be sensible and respect everyone's privacy and security is up to you.
Your devices must have a password and / or fingerprint or facial recognition. While it may be possible to do without a password on an account, the OS may prevent other security-dependent features from working with that account.
Your Web Browser should have something along the lines of "Block trackers and third-party cookies" in its Settings menu. For Safari, it's Preferences -> Privacy -> Prevent cross-site tracking. Turn that on if it isn't already. You may need to ask Google for help finding it. If you can't find such a setting, look for an Extension that does the same and install that. This will take care of a lot of the "they are selling your data" issues. (Warning, Google disable your ability to upload images into Blogger if you disable this. Tut tut guys.)
Only visit sites that are HTTPS (or "secure"). (This is almost all of them now.) Your browser should have a setting like "warn when visiting insecure sites" or "force HTTPS" or something similar. Use that.
Use your 5G service rather than coffee-shop / airport / wherever wi-fi's. 4G and earlier are less secure, but better than a spoof wi-fi provider.
Use phone apps in preference to websites wherever possible. Aside from anything else, the app is often easier to use than the website.
Taking your work computer or phone home is a convenience / risk trade-off. Let your employer decide. Anyone who takes your personal devices from home will take the work devices as well. If you must take work devices home, go straight home. Having your laptop stolen in the pub is not a good look.
Open Banking is a convenience vs risk decision. Once someone gets one account, they get as many as you have linked.
Password managers are not a security tool, but a convenient way to log on to low-risk sites that require passwords (typically anywhere that doesn't have payment or official document numbers stored, nor is reputation-threatening: retailers, charities, museums, music streamers, online newspapers, and the like). Especially if you are logging in and out of even a handful of sites every day. Choosing and managing one is a separate subject.
VPNs are a tool to bypass geo-restrictions rather than a security solution. Don't use free ones - since how else are they making money except by selling traffic data? VPNs hide the ultimate destination from your ISP, but the VPN still knows it. Who do you trust more? Choosing one is a separate subject.
Apple's OS X and iOS are terrific operating systems. NEVER use either to do anything remotely shady, because you will never be able to remove all the traces. OS X and iOS are not designed to allow that level of access.
Windows is designed to allow that level of access. Even if you are an Apple fanboy, use a cheap Windows machine for... errr... private purposes, get a decent File Shredder / Disk Wiper, set up a routine to cleanse all the temporary files that get generated by web browsing, and run it every time you finish a session. You may need help with that - this is where you find out who you trust.
What about the (digital) stash? (if you don't know, I'm not telling you) There are online storage services providing end-to-end encryption, a solution that fits well with the rest of the advice here.
If you want some security theatre over-kill, try this guy...
If you like some of his hacks - use 'em.
We end with the harsh truth. A father's biggest OPSEC problem is not that he isn't using a VPN. It's allowing his son access to money so that the boy can lose nearly $6,000 in an online game. A husband's biggest OPSEC problem is not the length of his logon password, but the deteriorating relationship with his wife that leads her to snoop on his computer and phone looking for divorce-fuel.
Most people wind up in trouble over something digital because someone snitches on them. Someone at work reports something to HR; one of your kids says something that a teacher over-hears and reports; a "good person" whose precious Liberal conscience won't let them not report it; management looking to stitch someone up. ISPs run scans on un-encrypted data to compare file signatures, and report matches. Teachers, therapists, social workers and other functionaries have been turned into informants. And never forget that un-answerable question "Darling, why do you use Private Browsing?" Wives and children are entitled to privacy from you - just ask them - but you are expected to let them see everything you do.
Hackers and "government surveillance" are "stranger danger". Hackers are after entire databases, crypto-currency, and corporates, not random individuals. The security services can barely keep track of the Bad Guys they know about, and don't need to add to the list with mass surveillance - and they have said so. The people who will spend time going after you are people who know you and want bad things to happen to you. We do not want to know that about the people we deal with every day, and so the industry pushes "stranger danger".
A few days after I finished and polished these thoughts, The Algorithm threw this up for me, and his views are very close to mine.
Friday, 29 August 2025
Friday, 22 August 2025
Maria Muldaur's First Album
Oh the summer of 1973! I would be going to university that autumn. I had a summer job - ask your grandfather - and there was a crowd of us, made up mostly of boys from my old school and girls from my sister's school. We passed for legal drinking age, and met in one or other of handful of pubs in Twickenham and Richmond, usually on warm Friday evenings - and all the Friday evenings were warm then. We were all young and pretty and clever and south-west London middle-class, who lived with both parents in houses with gardens.
And we all knew the album and its hit single.
What we didn't know, because we were suburban kids, not real hipsters, was that Muldaur had been part of the early-1960's Manhattan folk scene. She hung out with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and the rest of them. Whereas most of those guys had albums and reputations by the mid-1960's, it was eleven years after Dylan released his first album that Muldaur released hers in 1973. His sold 5,000 copies in the first year and broke even, hers hit number 3 in the Billboard charts and contained a Magic Single: Midnight at the Oasis.
The solo is by Amos Garett. Steve Lukather gives it props. It has a double-bend - he bends up two notes, then back one, then returns to the straight string. And makes it sound like a throwaway thing, but it isn't.
It reached 21 in the singles chart in the UK, but everyone had heard it and knew it. Everyone had heard the album. We thought it was good, a little sentimentally country, but oddly charming.
Now it is immortal. A legend. Amos Garett gets into guitar heaven because of one solo. Muldaur needs six words to explain who she is to a total stranger: "I sung Midnight at the Oasis". It's the same kind of immortality given to mathematicians who get their name on a theorem. Remembered not for a solid body of work produced over a lifetime, but for one brilliant insight that everyone uses.
Muldaur put the song on the album as an afterthought.
There are as many emotions and memories buried in a song as we have when we first heard it, or were playing it everyday. "Midnight" is too much its own thing, for me the flavour and the emotional memories are in the other songs, especially "Any Old Time", ""Walkin' One and Only", and "Mad Mad Me" - but really there isn't one weak song on the album.
Go stream it. Especially if you are young, it's sunny, and you are about to go to university.
And we all knew the album and its hit single.
What we didn't know, because we were suburban kids, not real hipsters, was that Muldaur had been part of the early-1960's Manhattan folk scene. She hung out with Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and the rest of them. Whereas most of those guys had albums and reputations by the mid-1960's, it was eleven years after Dylan released his first album that Muldaur released hers in 1973. His sold 5,000 copies in the first year and broke even, hers hit number 3 in the Billboard charts and contained a Magic Single: Midnight at the Oasis.
The solo is by Amos Garett. Steve Lukather gives it props. It has a double-bend - he bends up two notes, then back one, then returns to the straight string. And makes it sound like a throwaway thing, but it isn't.
It reached 21 in the singles chart in the UK, but everyone had heard it and knew it. Everyone had heard the album. We thought it was good, a little sentimentally country, but oddly charming.
Now it is immortal. A legend. Amos Garett gets into guitar heaven because of one solo. Muldaur needs six words to explain who she is to a total stranger: "I sung Midnight at the Oasis". It's the same kind of immortality given to mathematicians who get their name on a theorem. Remembered not for a solid body of work produced over a lifetime, but for one brilliant insight that everyone uses.
Muldaur put the song on the album as an afterthought.
There are as many emotions and memories buried in a song as we have when we first heard it, or were playing it everyday. "Midnight" is too much its own thing, for me the flavour and the emotional memories are in the other songs, especially "Any Old Time", ""Walkin' One and Only", and "Mad Mad Me" - but really there isn't one weak song on the album.
Go stream it. Especially if you are young, it's sunny, and you are about to go to university.
Friday, 15 August 2025
A Hack For Crispy-Crunchy Tones At Bedroom Volumes
Watch or read anything about guitar amps and pedals, and you will come away with the impression that to get that juicy edge-of-breakup tone, the amp must be TURNED UP WAY TOO LOUD. No volume, no tone, as if it's some obscure kind of virtue.
Heresy incoming.
A valve amp is a very inefficient way of getting breakup tones. An electrical engineering undergraduate, tasked with that for a final-year project, would not design a Marshall Plexi circuit. They would design an effects pedal.
There. Now You Know.
Breakup-crunch-distortion happens because the shape of the waves making up the signal changes. That shape does not change back if the signal is attenuated later. The voltage level changes, but the shape doesn't. In fact, the more attenuation is applied, the more the sound of the signal is dominated by the effects produced by the changed shape. This is why a neat crispy at (say) 25W turns into an ungodly fizz when we turn the power selector to (say) 0.5W, or even when we turn the Effect Level of the pedal / effect block too far down.
Now I assume you have a) an actual pedal board, or b) an effects processor that lets you move effects blocks around in the chain.
B1) Put the drive / distortion pedal in at the start of the chain. Put the pedal controls at noon. Or wherever you like them.
B2) Follow it with a simple EQ pedal. Turn that down (be prepared for -15dB or more) until the volume is within your limits.
B3) Now crank the drive / distortion pedal to taste, leaving the Effect Level around the middle. Tame the volume by adjusting the EQ volume.
B4) On the Helix I can put the EQ and the drive pedal on the same stomp switch. So when I turn it off, I get the base clean sound, and when I turn it on, I get both in at the same time. If you can do the same, it adds a little more flexibility.
However, we're going to do one thing first.
We need to make sure that your amplifier has a clean sound you can live with. Owners of amps that cost less than about £1,000 will appreciate this.
A1) Set the guitar tone pots to 5. Pickup selector in the middle. We're dialling in the tone on the amp, not the guitar.
A2) No pedals. Clean signal path. All tone buttons and switches on the amp to OFF, and EQ's at 12:00. No pre-amp gain.
A3) Sit with your head at the same level as the speaker and directly in front of it, or you will not hear frequencies over about 2kHz. You want to hear about the same thing that a mic in the middle of the speaker would.
A4) Juggle the guitar and amp volumes until the amp sounds open and clean, and the neighbours are not calling the Police. Make sure the volume pots have the same setting. We want any changes to the guitar controls to vary the basic tone, not lose it.
A5) Play a simple phrase through the amp and listen carefully. What don't you like about the sound? For example, the 12" cube lower-power portable amps - Supros, Blues Jnr and the like - often sound boxy. The Katana without its DSP sounds like someone wrapped a wet towel round the speaker, and even with its DSP, with humbuckers, the base sound is darker than the Essex countryside when all the UFOs have switched their lights off.
A6) Put a 10-band (or more, but not less) EQ at the end of the signal chain, right before the amp.
A7) Whatever it is you don't like, it will be caused by a surplus or deficiency of a fairly narrow range of frequencies: experiment with the 10-band EQ or whatever you are using until that quality of sound goes away. Easier said than done. Expect to be using 10dB+ changes in places, we're not talking tweaks.
DO NOT TOUCH THE GUITAR OR AMP CONTROLS during this process.
One test is to play a scale across the fretboard with as even a pick stroke as you can. You should not be aware of a change of volume as you cross from one string to the next, and nor should the texture of the sound change. If the 6th string is crisp, the 1st string should be as well.
If the amp is too dark, increase the gain on the 2kHz and above bands. If the amp is too bright, decrease the gain on the higher frequency bands. Increasing the higher frequencies usually increases the definition of the notes, decreasing it makes the notes sound rounder and less distinct.
Another test is to play along with a backing track from You Tube or a streaming service. What sounds okay on its own may sound too muddy against other instruments - unless you really like treble, when it may sound too bright.
It's a hack. It's going to work better on some amps and worse on others. There are a lot of Katanas in the world, and it works on mine.
I cannot stress the "listen carefully" bit. I wanted something close to a Fender sound. When I listened over headphones to a demo of the Vibro Champ, which was kind of what I was after, I realised that it was not sparkly at the top, as I had thought - that was an artefact of the laptop speakers. Also it had more low-end thump than I thought.
You're welcome.
h/t You Tuber Adjustable Bias. His video is excellent: he explains a lot of things about how amps and pedals work that other people don't. My B-hack is a modified version of his volume control trick.
Heresy incoming.
A valve amp is a very inefficient way of getting breakup tones. An electrical engineering undergraduate, tasked with that for a final-year project, would not design a Marshall Plexi circuit. They would design an effects pedal.
There. Now You Know.
Breakup-crunch-distortion happens because the shape of the waves making up the signal changes. That shape does not change back if the signal is attenuated later. The voltage level changes, but the shape doesn't. In fact, the more attenuation is applied, the more the sound of the signal is dominated by the effects produced by the changed shape. This is why a neat crispy at (say) 25W turns into an ungodly fizz when we turn the power selector to (say) 0.5W, or even when we turn the Effect Level of the pedal / effect block too far down.
Now I assume you have a) an actual pedal board, or b) an effects processor that lets you move effects blocks around in the chain.
B1) Put the drive / distortion pedal in at the start of the chain. Put the pedal controls at noon. Or wherever you like them.
B2) Follow it with a simple EQ pedal. Turn that down (be prepared for -15dB or more) until the volume is within your limits.
B3) Now crank the drive / distortion pedal to taste, leaving the Effect Level around the middle. Tame the volume by adjusting the EQ volume.
B4) On the Helix I can put the EQ and the drive pedal on the same stomp switch. So when I turn it off, I get the base clean sound, and when I turn it on, I get both in at the same time. If you can do the same, it adds a little more flexibility.
However, we're going to do one thing first.
We need to make sure that your amplifier has a clean sound you can live with. Owners of amps that cost less than about £1,000 will appreciate this.
A1) Set the guitar tone pots to 5. Pickup selector in the middle. We're dialling in the tone on the amp, not the guitar.
A2) No pedals. Clean signal path. All tone buttons and switches on the amp to OFF, and EQ's at 12:00. No pre-amp gain.
A3) Sit with your head at the same level as the speaker and directly in front of it, or you will not hear frequencies over about 2kHz. You want to hear about the same thing that a mic in the middle of the speaker would.
A4) Juggle the guitar and amp volumes until the amp sounds open and clean, and the neighbours are not calling the Police. Make sure the volume pots have the same setting. We want any changes to the guitar controls to vary the basic tone, not lose it.
A5) Play a simple phrase through the amp and listen carefully. What don't you like about the sound? For example, the 12" cube lower-power portable amps - Supros, Blues Jnr and the like - often sound boxy. The Katana without its DSP sounds like someone wrapped a wet towel round the speaker, and even with its DSP, with humbuckers, the base sound is darker than the Essex countryside when all the UFOs have switched their lights off.
A6) Put a 10-band (or more, but not less) EQ at the end of the signal chain, right before the amp.
A7) Whatever it is you don't like, it will be caused by a surplus or deficiency of a fairly narrow range of frequencies: experiment with the 10-band EQ or whatever you are using until that quality of sound goes away. Easier said than done. Expect to be using 10dB+ changes in places, we're not talking tweaks.
DO NOT TOUCH THE GUITAR OR AMP CONTROLS during this process.
One test is to play a scale across the fretboard with as even a pick stroke as you can. You should not be aware of a change of volume as you cross from one string to the next, and nor should the texture of the sound change. If the 6th string is crisp, the 1st string should be as well.
If the amp is too dark, increase the gain on the 2kHz and above bands. If the amp is too bright, decrease the gain on the higher frequency bands. Increasing the higher frequencies usually increases the definition of the notes, decreasing it makes the notes sound rounder and less distinct.
Another test is to play along with a backing track from You Tube or a streaming service. What sounds okay on its own may sound too muddy against other instruments - unless you really like treble, when it may sound too bright.
It's a hack. It's going to work better on some amps and worse on others. There are a lot of Katanas in the world, and it works on mine.
I cannot stress the "listen carefully" bit. I wanted something close to a Fender sound. When I listened over headphones to a demo of the Vibro Champ, which was kind of what I was after, I realised that it was not sparkly at the top, as I had thought - that was an artefact of the laptop speakers. Also it had more low-end thump than I thought.
You're welcome.
h/t You Tuber Adjustable Bias. His video is excellent: he explains a lot of things about how amps and pedals work that other people don't. My B-hack is a modified version of his volume control trick.
Friday, 8 August 2025
The Online Safety Act - To Petition Against Or Not?
Should I sign the petition to repeal the Online Safety Act? After all, the thing was more or less written to order for the Carnegie Foundation, who have investments in facial recognition technology.
Everyone in the business knew the date, had their PR and stunts lined up, and let everything fly on Friday 1st August. It has given us the leading candidate for PR Puppet of the Year, Peter Kyle, who has had to utter the line "Register your age now, and protect a child". The man is either shameless, or has been crying in the shower every evening.
But I digress.
Age-related laws are nothing new. There's one that forbids the sale of alcohol to under-18's. It relies on the judgement of shop staff and keeps no records. It works as well as anything will. The shop staff look at me and decide if I'm old enough as much as they look at the kid in front of me and decide he isn't. But the process is friction-free, fast, and leaves no records. Facial age-estimation software is no different from shop staff giving us the once-over. Except the software is slower and keeps records.
I am all for preventing children from seeing pornography, beheading videos, extreme content from the Left, Right, Misandrist, Misogynist, Manosphere, and Womansphere, also jihadi videos, bomb-making instructions, pro-ana, self-harm, pro-bulimea material, and anything else of that ilk. Add in the brain-dead but insidious "trends" on TikTok / Instagram and other social media I haven't heard of. It's too damn easy for kids to find, by intention or accident, this stuff, and they don't have the filters to handle it. (They don't even know that much of what they see on social media sites is made in collaboration with the social media company's marketing people: heck, there are adults who still don't know that. MySpace did it first, and every social media site has done it since.)
The operators of the major hosting sites have proved over the past years that they cannot vet every single upload consistently and in a timely manner. Also that they do not want to be "publishers" responsible for selecting material. And nobody wants to use blacklists or whitelists - for many reasons. So age verification it is.
If the introduction of this Act was supposed to gather public support, it failed. It would have been the worst product launch since New Coke. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/about-us/history/new-coke-the-most-memorable-marketing-blunder-ever
But the purpose of the product launch was not to get support. It was to make it look as if the Government and Ofcom were Doing Something Tough about the disastrous effects of allowing people under 18 to access the cesspits of the Internet. Hence the apparent delusional grandiosity of claiming that its regulations applied to any website in the world - which is nonsense, and Ofsted knows it. UK law applies in the UK and one or two dependent territories. No-one else needs to give a damn, unless they have a treaty of some kind.
All the "the Government is out to restrict free speech / monitor your every breath and click" articles and videos that poured onto You Tube? The commentators may as well have been paid by Ofcom's PR department, since all they did was spread F(ear), U(ncertainty) and D(espair).
Is age verification a mechanism of censorship? No. The OSA requires age-verification for certain content, it does not impose not a restriction on hosting that content. Is age verification intended to reduce casual browsing for pornography? Of course it is. Will it have a chilling effect on what site hosts will accept if they want to avoid age-verification? Of course. Does Mumsnet need age verification? Ofcom would not dare. Will Ofcom pick on harmless sites with twenty-four subscribers and weekly views in the high 90's? Naturally. Is this going to turn into another farce? Of course.
The civic dangers are not in age verification.
One is that Left-wing governments and their apparatchiks take to surveillance, censorship and super-injunctions like ducks take to water, and Comrade Starmer's Supreme Soviet is just one such. Mission creep will afflict the OSA for sure.
Today's Left-Wing / Liberal / Internationalist governments have a habit of criminalising behaviour they find inconvenient. Rather than try to solve the social or economic problem causing that behaviour, they criminalise any criticism of the consequences of their failure to solve it. Anything they do not like, instead of asking why people do it, they criminalise, like a bunch of old codgers muttering "there ought to be a law against it". Except the government are the old codgers, but with less life-experience. This problem can only be solved at the next General Election, and you know what you have to do. So do it.
What does a poor boy do? The OSA lists a number of ways of age-verifying, of which only one is acceptable: facial age estimation. The face estimation service makes a judgement and passes it back to the site that made the request. The site (should) make a record that the person attached to the username / e-mail is over 18. It does not get a copy of your face, and the age-estimator has to delete the image within seven days.
Look carefully and there is nothing to stop you using anonymous user names and e-mail aliases. The phrase "your e-mail address" does not have an official meaning - you may have several e-mail addresses for different purposes. Age verification is another one of those. So if anyone hacks that, they get nothing else, and if they hack your regular gmail (say) they won't see the age verification activity.
Inconvenient but not intrusive.
This is yet another type of data to be hacked, sold, and distributed all over the place. Almost surely it will be. How else do you think the age-verifiers are making money? If you're not the paying customer, you're the product being sold. I get there are people who don't like the idea that other people know anything about them. Many people are private, and many are surrounded by a**holes who don't know when to stay schtum. This can be a deeply-held feeling and I'm not going to Scully anyone who has it.
So I'm not signing. Age verification always was coming. The long game is that Google and Meta take most of it on, streamline the process, and make even more money from it. The current situation is just an interim solution.
(Yep - I back-posted this. It took a while to get my thoughts straight. Edited 19/8/2025.)
Everyone in the business knew the date, had their PR and stunts lined up, and let everything fly on Friday 1st August. It has given us the leading candidate for PR Puppet of the Year, Peter Kyle, who has had to utter the line "Register your age now, and protect a child". The man is either shameless, or has been crying in the shower every evening.
But I digress.
Age-related laws are nothing new. There's one that forbids the sale of alcohol to under-18's. It relies on the judgement of shop staff and keeps no records. It works as well as anything will. The shop staff look at me and decide if I'm old enough as much as they look at the kid in front of me and decide he isn't. But the process is friction-free, fast, and leaves no records. Facial age-estimation software is no different from shop staff giving us the once-over. Except the software is slower and keeps records.
I am all for preventing children from seeing pornography, beheading videos, extreme content from the Left, Right, Misandrist, Misogynist, Manosphere, and Womansphere, also jihadi videos, bomb-making instructions, pro-ana, self-harm, pro-bulimea material, and anything else of that ilk. Add in the brain-dead but insidious "trends" on TikTok / Instagram and other social media I haven't heard of. It's too damn easy for kids to find, by intention or accident, this stuff, and they don't have the filters to handle it. (They don't even know that much of what they see on social media sites is made in collaboration with the social media company's marketing people: heck, there are adults who still don't know that. MySpace did it first, and every social media site has done it since.)
The operators of the major hosting sites have proved over the past years that they cannot vet every single upload consistently and in a timely manner. Also that they do not want to be "publishers" responsible for selecting material. And nobody wants to use blacklists or whitelists - for many reasons. So age verification it is.
If the introduction of this Act was supposed to gather public support, it failed. It would have been the worst product launch since New Coke. https://www.coca-colacompany.com/about-us/history/new-coke-the-most-memorable-marketing-blunder-ever
But the purpose of the product launch was not to get support. It was to make it look as if the Government and Ofcom were Doing Something Tough about the disastrous effects of allowing people under 18 to access the cesspits of the Internet. Hence the apparent delusional grandiosity of claiming that its regulations applied to any website in the world - which is nonsense, and Ofsted knows it. UK law applies in the UK and one or two dependent territories. No-one else needs to give a damn, unless they have a treaty of some kind.
The seeming diplomatic faux pas of sending e-mails directly to American site operators threatening penalties, something that should be done through official channels which would return the answer "Nuts", is about educating MPs, activists and "concerned citizens" about the limits of jurisdiction.
The preposterous suggestion of using NI numbers, driving licenses, passports or bank details as age-verification is there to confuse those who don't read the manual. And it's more mis-direction aimed at the activists.
(Solid explanation by US lawyer. Worth listening to.)
All the "the Government is out to restrict free speech / monitor your every breath and click" articles and videos that poured onto You Tube? The commentators may as well have been paid by Ofcom's PR department, since all they did was spread F(ear), U(ncertainty) and D(espair).
Is age verification a mechanism of censorship? No. The OSA requires age-verification for certain content, it does not impose not a restriction on hosting that content. Is age verification intended to reduce casual browsing for pornography? Of course it is. Will it have a chilling effect on what site hosts will accept if they want to avoid age-verification? Of course. Does Mumsnet need age verification? Ofcom would not dare. Will Ofcom pick on harmless sites with twenty-four subscribers and weekly views in the high 90's? Naturally. Is this going to turn into another farce? Of course.
The civic dangers are not in age verification.
One is that Left-wing governments and their apparatchiks take to surveillance, censorship and super-injunctions like ducks take to water, and Comrade Starmer's Supreme Soviet is just one such. Mission creep will afflict the OSA for sure.
Today's Left-Wing / Liberal / Internationalist governments have a habit of criminalising behaviour they find inconvenient. Rather than try to solve the social or economic problem causing that behaviour, they criminalise any criticism of the consequences of their failure to solve it. Anything they do not like, instead of asking why people do it, they criminalise, like a bunch of old codgers muttering "there ought to be a law against it". Except the government are the old codgers, but with less life-experience. This problem can only be solved at the next General Election, and you know what you have to do. So do it.
What does a poor boy do? The OSA lists a number of ways of age-verifying, of which only one is acceptable: facial age estimation. The face estimation service makes a judgement and passes it back to the site that made the request. The site (should) make a record that the person attached to the username / e-mail is over 18. It does not get a copy of your face, and the age-estimator has to delete the image within seven days.
Look carefully and there is nothing to stop you using anonymous user names and e-mail aliases. The phrase "your e-mail address" does not have an official meaning - you may have several e-mail addresses for different purposes. Age verification is another one of those. So if anyone hacks that, they get nothing else, and if they hack your regular gmail (say) they won't see the age verification activity.
Inconvenient but not intrusive.
This is yet another type of data to be hacked, sold, and distributed all over the place. Almost surely it will be. How else do you think the age-verifiers are making money? If you're not the paying customer, you're the product being sold. I get there are people who don't like the idea that other people know anything about them. Many people are private, and many are surrounded by a**holes who don't know when to stay schtum. This can be a deeply-held feeling and I'm not going to Scully anyone who has it.
So I'm not signing. Age verification always was coming. The long game is that Google and Meta take most of it on, streamline the process, and make even more money from it. The current situation is just an interim solution.
(Yep - I back-posted this. It took a while to get my thoughts straight. Edited 19/8/2025.)
Friday, 1 August 2025
Geroge Gissing, Elena Ferrante and Tracking Characters
I have not read an Elena Ferrante novel, but I have seen S1 of My Brilliant Friend,
It wasn't until I was well underway with George Gissing's novel The Nether World
The Nether World is about the poor in Clerkenwell and the surrounds. Everyone is poorly-dressed, in and out of work, hungry, living with two other families in one flat in a noisome tenement or multi-story house, surrounded by children, dropping in at the pub, speaking in a very similar manner with a limited vocabulary, doing piece-work in the garment trade, paying rents that take up much of their earnings, and there's a nice line to that working women have always looked down on stay-at-home-mums . ... and so on. It's hard to tell them apart, or at least I found it so. Gissing was a capable novelist and a proficient writer by the standards of the time, and maybe it was a deliberate effect to make a point: to the middle-class, the poor look alike. Whichever, I had to keep checking up who was who, and I could not summarise any of them for you now.
Because I couldn't track the characters.
As we read a novel, or watch a film or play, we build up a list of characters and facts about them. Here's the pseudocode:
If Passage.Text.Contains(Name) then
It's no problem for a computer, but if the last time a character appeared was sixty pages ago (say four days ago in your reading schedule), checking through your memory for it may take some time, or fail. Also updating each of the characters' fact-list in one of those many-person sentences may take time or fail.
That's what I mean by "tracking characters".
A number of things make it easier to do this.
First and obviously, give each of your characters a unique name, unless the plot is going to hang on a confusion.
Second, keep a character's name consistent: Detective-Constable Stephen Jones must be DC Jones, DC Stephen Jones, and can only be Stephen if he's off-duty and the context is very clear. Never call him 'Stephen" in one sentence and 'DC Jones' in another - if there is more than one 'Stephen' then the name-tracker will take the first one it finds and add the fact to that character, which might not be the right one. Gissing breaks this rule all the time and sometimes in the same paragraph, and I found it hard to get the characters established in memory.
Third, reduce the use of pronouns - 'he', 'him', 'she', 'her'. Whereas proper names have global scope - refer to the same character throughout the novel / trilogy / series - pronouns have a local scope, somewhere between one sentence and a half-page paragraph. Used over a number of sentences, in which other people's names may occur, the name-tracker may get confused as to whom the pronoun refers. As in "John asked Andrew to help. John and Andrew hefted the gun into the river. He brushed his hands and started walking back up the bank." 'He' most likely refers to John, but it might mean Andrew. If in doubt, use character names rather than pronouns and that will keep the name compiler straight.
Fourth, give each character something we can remember them by, even if it is to remind us that they are un-memorable. It might be the way they speak, or what they talk about, it need not be some physical characteristic, though it might be.
and I have read a Natalia Ginzburg novel,
so I'm good with Contemporary Italian Literature in Translation. I baulked at Ferrante when, opening one of her novels at random, I ran across a sentence along the lines of "Mary was upset that Thomas disapproved of the way that Marcel treated Angela after hearing about the way her parents had snubbed Toni and Loius". Too many people in one sentence. I just can't track that many people, I found myself saying, without really knowing what I meant.
It wasn't until I was well underway with George Gissing's novel The Nether World
that I realised what I meant. Gissing wrote Grub Street, which is about writers and journalists, so writers and journalists love it and that's the book "everyone" has read, but he wrote a whole lot more besides, and from an overview, with more interest in describing aspects of the wider society than, say, Henry James. He's not Dickens, but then no-one is, except maybe J B Priestly on a good day.
The Nether World is about the poor in Clerkenwell and the surrounds. Everyone is poorly-dressed, in and out of work, hungry, living with two other families in one flat in a noisome tenement or multi-story house, surrounded by children, dropping in at the pub, speaking in a very similar manner with a limited vocabulary, doing piece-work in the garment trade, paying rents that take up much of their earnings, and there's a nice line to that working women have always looked down on stay-at-home-mums . ... and so on. It's hard to tell them apart, or at least I found it so. Gissing was a capable novelist and a proficient writer by the standards of the time, and maybe it was a deliberate effect to make a point: to the middle-class, the poor look alike. Whichever, I had to keep checking up who was who, and I could not summarise any of them for you now.
Because I couldn't track the characters.
As we read a novel, or watch a film or play, we build up a list of characters and facts about them. Here's the pseudocode:
If Passage.Text.Contains(Name) then
If Not Character(Name).Exists then Character.Create(Name)
Character(Name).AddFact(Passage.Text)
End if
It's no problem for a computer, but if the last time a character appeared was sixty pages ago (say four days ago in your reading schedule), checking through your memory for it may take some time, or fail. Also updating each of the characters' fact-list in one of those many-person sentences may take time or fail.
That's what I mean by "tracking characters".
A number of things make it easier to do this.
First and obviously, give each of your characters a unique name, unless the plot is going to hang on a confusion.
Second, keep a character's name consistent: Detective-Constable Stephen Jones must be DC Jones, DC Stephen Jones, and can only be Stephen if he's off-duty and the context is very clear. Never call him 'Stephen" in one sentence and 'DC Jones' in another - if there is more than one 'Stephen' then the name-tracker will take the first one it finds and add the fact to that character, which might not be the right one. Gissing breaks this rule all the time and sometimes in the same paragraph, and I found it hard to get the characters established in memory.
Third, reduce the use of pronouns - 'he', 'him', 'she', 'her'. Whereas proper names have global scope - refer to the same character throughout the novel / trilogy / series - pronouns have a local scope, somewhere between one sentence and a half-page paragraph. Used over a number of sentences, in which other people's names may occur, the name-tracker may get confused as to whom the pronoun refers. As in "John asked Andrew to help. John and Andrew hefted the gun into the river. He brushed his hands and started walking back up the bank." 'He' most likely refers to John, but it might mean Andrew. If in doubt, use character names rather than pronouns and that will keep the name compiler straight.
Fourth, give each character something we can remember them by, even if it is to remind us that they are un-memorable. It might be the way they speak, or what they talk about, it need not be some physical characteristic, though it might be.
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