https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1976/63/section/9

https://open.canada.ca/en/open-government-licence-canada

Crown Copyright doesn't deal with university research, only with works done by the government. Pretty much everything released by central government is now licensed through the UK Government Licensing Framework under the Open Government License (OGL), which is essentially CC-BY.

See http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licen...

Examples of loads of photos and documents that Wikimedia have taken copies of (and often reusing) under the OGL: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:OGL

All hail blockchain as the most amazing non-solution to the problem.

https://stripe.ian.sh/

EV certificates tell you that a site is owned by a company with a particular name, not that it is the company you actually want. There's a reason browser vendors are de-emphasising EV: it isn't very useful.

Sounds like you need campaign finance and lobbying regulations. ;-)

The fact you think GDPR only applies to websites rather than the huge clusterfuck of personal data loss means you haven't understood the reason behind GDPR.

Equifax lost millions and millions of records and have so far faced no meaningful punishment from the UK regulators: as far as I can tell, they've so far made one brief statement on their website, and one tweet.

Major ISPs like TalkTalk lost millions of records (and ignored security researchers telling them about gaping security holes) and were given a slap on the wrist - £400,000 by the UK ICO. Mere pennies per user in fines; a drop in the bucket compared to their annual revenue. There is no economic interest to change their behaviour.

The negligence of these companies has led to millions of people having their personal and financial data stolen, having to keep eagle-eyed over bank statements and credit cards, having to worry that their transactions (or their travel bookings) might get flagged up as suspicious, that their credit rating gets eaten, and much else besides.

If a company you've entrusted your personal data with—not just your tweets or whatever, but sensitive personal data including health data, data about your religious affiliation, sexual orientation, etc. loses that data, as a UK citizen, you currently have no right to appeal the ICO failing to take action. GDPR/DPA2018 changes that balance.

Companies tell consumers "hey, trust us with your personal data". Consumers do in the false belief that there is some protection or basic responsibility taken. When they colossally fail to take the most basic steps to protect consumers from data loss, the status quo was this: nothing happens to them.

If said malicious actors pwn the phone of the person you were talking to, suddenly they have a pretty good way of mapping a contact called "My Best Friend" to a human through billing records.

Or even easier, they type the phone number into Google and find that the Syrian dissident they've just arrested has been corresponding with the NYTimes or BBC.

If they know only that they are talking to anonymoushackzor@gmail.com they could, uh, get Google to release their IP address. Google are fairly unlikely to honour a legal demand for disclosure from Libya or North Korea or some other tyrannical/fucked-up hellhole.

I like Signal, but I'm not totally sure about the threat model.

Nobody does, sadly.

Baking it into the protocol like Signal and WhatsApp did means nobody has to want it, they just get it included without having to bolt on any extras.

Simple: usernames. Humans are not phone numbers. Phone numbers are the IP addresses of legacy phone networks.

On law/crime articles, they don't link to legal judgments. That's partly the fault of the British legal system for not publishing a lot of that material. But there are plenty of times when it is available and it doesn't get linked to.

Hypertext is a thing. One day people will work out all the amazing possibilities.

Notes are basically bug reports for OSM. See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Notes

The lawyers are busy explaining to the "smart contracts" people that trying to translate contract law into code is going to produce a whole lot more comedy than it is practical value.