Does anyone have a verifiable source for that? It would be extremely controversial if true and even among the big civil liberties and privacy advocacy groups in the UK I have never seen anyone make that claim.

The defence to using Palantir by British government departments and public services has typically been that Palantir only provides the technology and the data itself is still held and processed in the UK under the native organisation's control. Even this is still controversial because of issues like the CLOUD Act and the general reputation of Palantir.

But that is a long way from allowing the mass export of sensitive personal data to a US firm without the data subjects' knowledge or consent. That looks just plain illegal under our existing data protection legislation. Green lighting it - even in the panic phase during COVID - would probably be controversial enough to end a few political careers at least. It might even leave enough of a cloud over the party in government at the time to affect a future election.

Speaking only for my own small business in the UK we have never understood how it can be possible to comply with our legal and regulatory constraints on issues like privacy/confidentiality while using an operating system that is under the control of another company with a proven track record of forcing updates that are incompatible with those standards. Issues like pushing saving/uploading to OneDrive or the potential implications of Recall if they do push it out are very serious concerns if you're working with any kind of sensitive data.

For us the "last ever version" of Windows was Windows 7. We aren't confident that we could legally use Windows 10+ for a lot of our real work. We are too small to run the enterprise editions where they don't dare try to remove control from corporate IT departments in the way they have been forcing on everyone else. So apart from occasional testing for products where the users are likely to be running on Windows we exclusively use other platforms now. I don't see that ever changing back unless there is a root and branch reform of Microsoft starting with totally new senior leadership because it's no longer a technical decision or based on the capabilities of the products.

Then again Teams is still barely an amateur compared to the incomprehensible slowness of Jira.

If the AI sector wants to take a big risk that either pays off or it doesn't then that's one thing. If the danger is contained and the people taking the risks are the only ones who will suffer if things don't work out then that's their choice. The important point is that the danger in this case is not contained. It's not just the AI sector being affected now. It's not just the people choosing to take the risk in the hope of a big profit who are being harmed.

I don't think it's realistic any longer to treat this as some sort of short term supply-and-demand problem with luxury products. It's been building up for several years already. We're seeing public statements from some of the big companies involved that already run through 2026 and beyond that imply the supply chain situation continuing to worsen for everyone else. And the components in question are now necessary for a lot of normal operations and day-to-day life.

If we just wait and see for another 2-3 years as some are suggesting then in the meantime real businesses who were operating responsibly and doing nothing wrong will be failing to grow as they should, putting up prices for their customers, letting staff go, or even failing completely. Governments will be redirecting tax revenues to basic IT infrastructure instead of public services. People who just wanted to buy a normal device for their own personal use won't be able to afford one or maybe to find one at all and their quality of life will fall.

I can see no reason why we should allow these harmful outcomes just because some already rich VCs and some AI tech bros are playing games at the scale of the global economy to try to sustain the unrealistic valuations of the big tech companies for their own benefit. It's increasingly unlikely to work anyway and it's a realistic possibility that the bubble will burst this year so trying to contain the fallout from that as much as possible instead of allowing the bubble to inflate even further is not a bad idea either.

We wouldn't allow any amount of investor money to buy out essential utilities and then exploit their natural monopolies to charge the public 10x as much for access to water or electricity.

We wouldn't allow any amount of investor money to buy out all the companies that maintain our roads or rail networks and then charge 10x the established prices for maintaining that infrastructure.

We wouldn't allow any amount of investor money to buy out all the phone networks and then deny people access to communication because they didn't pay some exorbitant protection fee.

No-one thinks regulation of these markets and interference with these kinds of corporate transactions is a crazy idea. Why do so many people here apparently think we should let the funny money funded AI giants distort the entire global tech supply chain in the hope that their silly valuations won't come crashing down for a bit longer?

We can't afford to wait "several years" to see whether the invisible hand will fix the problem. The markets have already allowed this situation to develop over a period of several years. The damage is too severe and it's happening right now and it's getting worse. Governments need to start swinging the regulatory axe now.

This situation is harmful both economically and for basic quality of life. It is rational - and probably now necessary - for governments to intervene to counter the market distortion and ensure the continued availability of normal products to everyone else.

I am fully aware that the West regulating here would potentially undermine the VC investment model that these big tech firms are relying on. I have no problem with this. Business entities are legal fictions that we allow to exist for the benefit of real people. If the behaviour of those entities is harmful to real people - and I don't think anyone can credibly claim otherwise in this case - then it's time to change the rules they operate under.

The solution might have to be mandatory rationing of some kind to avoid a situation where only a handful of AI giants are able to buy essential components. We can't just throw the rest of the economy under a bus to support the AI bubble for a few more months.

I'm working with a business right now that would like to buy some new servers for sensible, boring business reasons. It is having trouble because the prices from their normal suppliers are now extremely high - if the components are even available at all. This business has nothing to do with AI or Big Tech and yet it's at risk of being unable to continue normal operations in much the same way that a business would be affected if the phone networks were all switched off or the water supply to its office was cut. We regulate those industries because their continued reasonable operation is essential to make sure everyone else can continue to operate reasonably as well.

IME this becomes quite jarring if you're watching on a modern high-res screen - even something like a quarter-sized browser window or PIP on a 4K monitor - with other much sharper content visible nearby. If you're watching either full-screen or in a smaller window but without other more detailed visuals around it then personally I find it less jarring and I can still become immersed if the material itself is good. It's still noticeable if you're used to watching HD or 4K content on other devices but I'd rather watch something good in SD than not watch it. The same goes for old shows that were only made in SD originally.

It would be if it were actually social - if the messages people saw were written by authors those people were interested in because of some kind of social relationship. But of course that's not really the case.

One problem here IMHO is that the meaning of terms like "press" and "media" has shifted significantly with modern Internet trends. Freedom of the press used to be an extension of freedom of speech. The principle was essentially the same but it acknowledged that some speech is organised and published to a wider audience. Neither has ever enjoyed absolute protection in law anywhere that I'm aware of because obviously they can come into conflict with other rights and freedoms we also think are important. But they have been traditionally regarded as the norm in Western society - something to be protected and not to be interfered with lightly.

But with freedom must come responsibility. The traditional press has always had the tabloids and the broadsheets or some similar distinction between highbrow and lowbrow content. But for the most part even the tabloids respected certain standards. What you published might be your spin but you honestly believed the facts in your piece were essentially true. If you made a mistake then you also published a retraction. If someone said they were speaking off the record then you didn't reveal the identity of your source. You didn't disclose things that were prohibited by a court order to protect someone involved in a trial from prejudice or from the trial itself collapsing. Sometimes the press crossed a line and sometimes it paid a very heavy price for it but mostly these "rules" were followed.

In the modern world of social media there are individuals with much larger audiences than any newspaper still in print but who don't necessarily respect those traditional standards at all and who can cause serious harm as a direct result. I don't see why there is any ethical or legal argument for giving them the same latitude that has been given to traditional media if they aren't keeping up their side of the traditional bargain in return. We have long had laws in areas like defamation and national security that do limit the freedom to say unfair or harmful things. Maybe it's time we applied the same standards to wilful misinformation where someone with a large audience makes claims that are clearly and objectively false that then lead to serious harm.

As a personal observation - I think this might start to change over the next few years and the current positions of MPs and government might start to look very out of touch. We are seeing the fall of our long-standing "big" political parties and the rise of a very right wing populist party that is increasingly looking like it might actually win significant power at the next general election. I think awareness of the potential for abuse by the next people to run the government and agencies is growing among the general public. Whether it grows enough to stop some of these policies from becoming law in the near future is a different question of course.

This is the independent reviewer doing his job and pointing out how the legislation under review could have consequences we might not like.

It's not a government spokesperson supporting or endorsing those consequences.

Today the ability to run proper content blockers is still a selling point for Firefox but obviously wouldn't be if they started to meddle with that as well. (Has there ever been a more obvious case of anticompetitive behaviour than the biggest browser nerfing ad blocking because it's owned by one of the biggest ad companies?)

Other than customisation the only real advantage I see for Firefox today is the privacy angle. But again that would obviously be compromised if they started breaking tools like content blockers that help to provide that protection.

It certainly does require informed consent in other situations though and the dreaded cookie banners were the industry's attempt to interpret that legal requirement.

The cookie banner requirement is itself a widespread misconception because the actual rule is neither specific to cookies (it would also cover other locally stored data) nor universal (for example it doesn't require specific consent for locally storing necessary data like session/login mechanics or the contents of a shopping basket).

The requirements for consent that do exist originate in the ePrivacy Directive. That directive was supposed to be superseded by a later ePrivacy Regulation that would have been lex specialis to the GDPR - possibly the only actual link between any of the EU law around cookies and the GDPR - but in the end that regulation was never passed and it was formally abandoned earlier this year.

So for now rules about user consent for local data storage in the EU - and largely still in the UK - do exist but they derive from the ePrivacy Directive and they are widely misunderstood. And while there has been a lot of talk about changes to EU law that might improve the situation with the banners so far talk is all it has been.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPrivacy_Directive

The unfortunate reality is that we have a duopoly in the mobile device market and having one of those devices are now a practical necessity to live a normal life for most people. Without regulation to force the market to open up there's little to stop organisations that want ever more control over the devices you can use to access their systems. Trying to go outside the two big players just means you're going to get a substandard or completely pointless experience. And even governments are in on it.

Which is going to be interesting when both the huge US corporations that form that duopoly and/or the government of their home nation decide to do something that goes against what the government or laws in other places want to happen.

However the story might be different in a decade as sixth gen aircraft like Tempest are entering service and probably other modern technologies like unmanned/autonomous drones and hypersonic and directed energy weapons are more widely deployed. Connectivity between units in the field is also clearly a huge deal that is going to matter more and more and that is going to require a level of interoperability and trust that won't be kind to "partners" who aren't good team players.

On that kind of timescale I expect "buying American" will be much less attractive to most "allies" of the US than it has been for most of the past century and it will show exactly in decisions like who is making and buying whose planes.