Best Of

I have never understood why so many British people get so animated about events in America. Sad day for his family, but a man I have never heard of being killed in a country famed for gun violence didn’t really register for me.

However, I’m clearly the odd one out.

I suspect only a tiny fraction of the people in Britain now expressing profound grief had even heard of him before his was murdered. PB is the most illustrious and informed political website on earth, yet according to Google the phrase 'Charlie Kirk' never appeared on its threads until yesterday.

Plus he's on record as saying that a few gun deaths is a price worth paying for the right to have guns
Obviously he didn't mean his own death, he meant someone else's young child but there you go. It's what Jesus would have wanted, probably.

Jacob Rees Mogg has just prayed in Latin for the soul of Charlie Kirk on his GB News show

Quite frankly Rees-Mogg is turning the man's death into a circus. Yes, we know Rees-Mogg knows some Latin. He doesn't have to parade it on this occasion and make it all about him. Poor taste in my opinion.

"And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly."

Matthew 6: 5-6 KJV

If you want to pray in secret, doing so on GB News amounts to almost the same thing.

Whatever you think about Mandelson and his sometimes poor judgement overall he is competent at the jobs he does, whether as Business or NI Secretary or in his most recent post as DC Ambassador. He is also ruthlessly effective as a campaigner, it was Mandelson who helped Kinnock bring back Labour from the abyss after their 1983 Foot led rout, it was Mandelson who played a key part in New Labour's landslide of 1997 and it was Mandelson who helped Brown narrow the gap in 2010 enough for a hung parliament, hence he never sacked him. Mandelson also worked behind the scenes on Starmer's 2024 win after the defeats of the Corbyn and Ed Miliband years.

He is gone for now but he may be back, as he has been before. Not as an elected politician or grand Ambassador, but as an effective behind the scenes man

I have found that employing lying scumbags because they are "good at their jobs" is not a recipe for long term success.

Not -for the record- that I am alleging that anyone in particular is a lying scumbag.

The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has issued a warning about what it calls the "worrying trend" of students hacking their own school and college IT systems for fun or as part of dares.

It has told teachers that they are failing to understand and recognise what it calls the "insider threat" pupils pose.

It says more the majority of so-called "insider" cyber attacks and data breaches in education settings - meaning they have been carried out by someone with access to internal systems - originate with students.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c203pedz58go

But they will never work out VPNs and bypassing OSA.

If an illegal activity was committed using a VPN, the police can trace the users via a warrant to id them from the ISP and then the VPN provider

LOL...you really don't understand VPNs do you. Most paid reputable ones operate no log, RAM cache, IP mixing. Pc Plod is absolutely shit out of luck. Most of those caught doing really dodgy stuff have required a) intelligence services and b) they let something slip unrelated to VPN usage. GCHQ did have a zero day for OpenVPN, but it was closed and they won't burn something like that on some spotty teenager hacking their school.

No, some operate no log as you say not all and as you say intelligence services can be brought in to track cookies and browser fingerprints can be used as well.

And if you are accessing and running child porn sites, planning terrorist outrages and hate crimes with others then GCHQ will be brought in to find you even if your VPN provider has no logs

That is quite an escalation from spotty teenager hacks own school, which is the original conversation.

Also you have repeated showed you don't understand this VPN and anonymising yourself ok the internet, but you keep trying to make ridiculous points when somebody mentions OSA.

No, I do understand it, if you are using VPNs to commit serious crimes then VPN provider logs or not GCHQ will likely eventually catch you.

OSA was brought in primarily to stop under 10s finding porn sites and violent sites by mistake, something clearly and worryingly you don't care about, not to stop spotty teens 13+ watching legal adult porn

What - you haven't a clue

Clearly more than you it seems

I have children and grandchildren and a son who is head of IT at a local school to call on

Your last paragraph could only be written by someone who has no practical knowledge of children's interaction with the Internet

I suggested upthread, Mr G, that he lives a sheltered, perhaps unworldly, life.

Given 69% of adults back the Online Safety Act it is certainly not just the sheltered and unworldly who support it, indeed it is one of the few popular acts of this Labour government ensuring it was implemented.

Most of the public are far more authoritarian than the average PB poster

https://yougov.co.uk/technology/articles/52693-how-have-britons-reacted-to-age-verification

Here are just some of the problems with the OSA:

1. Teenage boys are the most technically savvy group on the planet. If they want to evade the OSA it's trivial for them.
2. By encouraging people to use VPNs, and normalising their usage, you make it much harder for the police to track real criminals.
3. It encourages people to use sites that are more likely to be dodgy