Later this year, the UK government will enact a law that requires online providers of pornography to vet the age of their users. Properly. Not just tick a box, but full ID checks. As I see it, this poses some very real problems. What? The UK legislation that comes into effect in July will mean that if you want to view content online deemed to be pornographic, you must either: Upload your passport / driver’s license / identification to an online service provider Or, buy a pass from a licensed newsagent British Passport (image by Annie Spratt on Unsplash) Why is this a bad thing? Censorship & Transparency This is the government ultimately deciding what content should and should not be allowed to be viewed. Unlike content which is objectively bad and easy to categorise (such as videos of beheadings and other right-wing extremism, which currently run rampant on easily accessible sites), pornography is incredibly subjective and hard to define. If implemented badly, you could end up with classical artworks of nudes, critical news on the subject and information sources

Thanks go to Arcolinux for creating an edition of the Bspwm window manager that I was able to approach, after two years of trying other editions of Bspwm to no avail. The idea of focus-follows-mouse is explicitly there in i3wm, but unfortunately mouse-follows-focus is not. This is one of the reasons why I am looking elsewhere. After installing Arcolinux's edition of Bspwm and booting into it, I found that it was surprisingly mouse-friendly for a tiling wm. You can flip two tiles next to each other by mouse-drag. You can also mouse-drag a tile from one monitor to the other. The behaviour of Bspwm can be tested "live" (without having to change configuration) by typing its commands in terminal. The command format is bspc followed by more options. For example open a terminal emulator, type bspc node -t floating and now it is floating...

    “In this way the learner will be prevented from regarding grammar as a piece of dead mechanism or a Chinese puzzle, of which the parts must be fitted together in accordance with certain artificial rules, and will realize that it is a living organism which has a history and a reason of its own. The method of nature and science alike is analytic ; and if we would learn a foreign language properly we must learn it as we did our mother-tongue, by first mastering the expression of a complete thought, and then breaking up this expression into its several elements.” - Professor Sayce   English Language section of        PRACTICAL KNOWLEDGE            FOR ALL...

Hello. I have noticed a lot of other Vivaldi bloggers, who write in languages that I will never understand, are keen to learn better English. I am by no means a teacher, so I can't claim to be able to help you significantly with your goals. However I'm English, and my understanding of English language is poor. I am embarking on reading an old textbook from the nineteen-fifties. And will be copying the English Lessons and posting them on here...

I’m starting to think I should just stick with what works and learn to be happy with it. Solus Linux has been working wonderfully on my laptop, so I decided to install it on my desktop too. It turns out it throws me an error when the machine boots up. So, back to Manjaro on the desktop, maybe the laptop too, I haven’t decided yet. It’s not that I don’t like Manjaro. I really do. I just thought I’d found something that was simpler to maintain, requiring less work...

Blog wiring is not easy. I’ve shred few tips in my earlier post where I tried to explain How to improve SEO Score in blogpost but those tips works when you know about blogging. SEO improvement tips can help you in writing great SEO blog but what if you don’t know much about blogs and blogging. And looking for suggestions on “how to write a blog”? In this situation, you need to understand little bit about blogs and blogging and then start your own blog. Today’s topic is going to be interesting for people who don’t know much about blogging but wanted to explore about it. I am going to share some key points and easy steps on how to write a blog...

What is Social Engineering Social engineering is a method of misguiding users and getting their personal information such as email id, contact number, sometimes bank details and other personal details. It is directly related to phishing or hacking. The purpose of using Social Engineering is to collect personal details of users and use it for own benefits. You can easily understand if someone has the access of user’s sensitive information, what kind of misuse they can do. However, it is social engineering content also used for marketing purpose. For example, it might be used in marketing products and political campaigns. With this method advertisers get to know about people’s preferences and habits is gathered in advance. Then this information is used to encourage people for buying stuff, opt in for subscriptions or to vote for a particular person or political party...

This post originally appeared on an old blog on 13 April 2013. It's part of a series of posts which I'm "recovering" from the archives. This post, a complaint of Google+, is a nice insight into technology. Given recent events, the final sentence seems particularly amusing. I don't use very many google services these days aside from the google play store on android and the occasional YouTube video from an RSS subscription. I'm glad to be rid of it. [edited lede 2019]...