Ten years later
I originally established this personal homepage in January 2015, just over ten years ago now. The first post was a lament that secure OpenID-style login systems never took over from passwords, something which is still largely the case in 2025. I soon began commenting on the state of privacy and security in the tech industry, including growing concerns of the rise in anti-privacy legislation in Britain following the Edward Snowden disclosures of 2013.
In May 2016, after 61 posts, I decided to quit blogging on security. It wasn’t my specialist field, and at best I was just re-stating ideas that had already been reported better by experts in the field. At worst, I might be targeted by governments as an activist. I deleted most of the articles on privacy and security, and focused more on topics in hobbies in which I was better knowledgeable: computer programming, science fiction, and tabletop roleplaying games.
I became comfortable with this decision. Many of the issues I raised in 2015 would, ultimately, not come to pass. The UK never repealed the Human Rights Act as was threatened, and encryption was not outlawed. I began to dismiss my concerns as paranoia.
In July 2025, a British law called the Online Safety Act came into force. The blowback was immediate. UK netizens were barred from huge chunks of the internet, British-run internet sites closed down entirely, politicians downplaying the law’s problems went unchecked, and an official 100,000 signatory petition to repeal the law was immediately and predictably refused.
And where was I when the law passed in 2023? Posting Babylon 5 trivia and retrospectives on the rules of Monopoly. Returning to my backup of 2015 posts, I discovered a consistent pattern of government mass surveillance laws marketed as child safety or national security, and a ready willingness of politicians to lie to a credulous public.
Now, we have not just OSA in the UK, but soon to pass KOSA in the US and Chat Control in the EU. OSA is clearly not a one-off, but part of a general trend of western governments to gamble the privacy, safety, and rights of citizens on the misguided notion that criminals and terrorists won’t just circumvent the entire system by deploying their own layer of encryption, which is strong and readily available.
Today, I’m restoring my old articles to the site, mostly to the “opinion” section. They’re at the bottom of the list in chronological order. Readers who do not care for this content may feel free to ignore these articles. Category pages are available for anyone interested in only one type of content, e.g. articles on roleplaying games, and I have implemented theme improvements to make it clearer when articles have been updated.
Finally, a few other theme updates have been made. The hit counter service stopped working after reaching 307,523 in April 2025, and has been removed. A “hot” tag has been added to some articles which I think are the most useful or interesting. Small improvements have been made, such as slightly brightening text fixing some broken links, and linking back to category at the bottom of articles.