For the last few years I’ve been running a proxy of the BBC News RSS feeds (https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev) that strips out duplicate content,
non-news content, and (optionally) sports news.
Woodcraft Folk stands in solidarity with every trans child, young person and volunteer who faces exclusion from Girlguiding UK following the announcement on Trans inclusion.
We recognise that Girlguiding UK have taken this decision in the context of intense political pressure and legal uncertainty. However, this does not make the outcome acceptable.
Young people should never bear the consequences of political disputes. All children and young people deserve respect, safety and inclusion in their youth organisations.
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Excellent statement from Woodcraft Folk.
I was saddened to hear the news that Girlguiding will no longer accept trans girls as members. It seems to me that it
would have been perfectly reasonable for them to change their articles in response to the Supreme Court silliness: instead of declaring themselves as being for the benefit
of “girls and women” they could have become for the benefit of “girls, women, trans girls, and trans women”.
Yes, obviously it’s horrible that the Supreme Court’s othering decision means that people have to spell out that “by women, we mean all women, including trans women”. But
that’s a thing that a charity can do. It’s perfectly reasonable for a charity to be for the benefit of multiple groups.
But no, they took the easy option.
So it’s great to see youth-supporting organisations like Woodcraft Folk make a statement like this that trans kids continue to be welcome with them. Okay, this was easier
for them than for Girlguiding because Woodcraft’s articles didn’t contain any gendered language in the first place. And it’s fine that Girlguiding’s does use gendered
language – it’s okay for charities to be gender-specific! – but it’s a shame that they didn’t… pardon the pun… have the balls to stand up for what’s right
for all women and girls, in spite of the UK’s growing transphobia. Ugh.
New research coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC has found that AI assistants – already a daily information gateway for millions of people –
routinely misrepresent news content no matter which language, territory, or AI platform is tested.
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Key findings:
45% of all AI answers had at least one significant issue.
31% of responses showed serious sourcing problems – missing, misleading, or incorrect attributions.
20% contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.
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In what should be as a surprise to nobody, but probably still is (and is probably already resulting in AI fanboys coming up with counterpoints and explanations): AI is not an accurate
way for you to get your news.
(I mean: anybody who saw Apple Intelligence’s AI summaries of news probably knew this already, but it turns out that it gets worse.)
There are problems almost half the time and “major accuracy issues” a fifth of the time.
I guess this is the Universe’s way of proving that people getting all of their news from Facebook wasn’t actually the worst timeline to live in, after all. There’s always
a worse one, it turns out.
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Separately, the BBC has today published research into audience use and perceptions of AI assistants for News. This shows that many people trust AI assistants to be accurate – with
just over a third of UK adults saying that they trust AI to produce accurate summaries, rising to almost half for people under-35.
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Personally, I can’t imagine both caring enough about a news item to want to read it and not caring about it enough that I feed it into an algorithm that, 45% of
the time, will mess it up. It’s fine to skip the news stories you don’t want to read. It’s fine to skim the ones you only care about a little. It’s even fine to just read the
headline, so long as you remember that media biases are even easier to hide from noncritical eyes if you don’t even get the key points of the article.
But taking an AI summary and assuming it’s accurate seems like a really wild risk, whether before or after this research was published!
Representation matters. That we have a trans former-judge, somebody both well-equipped and motivated to escalate this important challenge to the ECHR, is hugely
fortunate.
We need more representation (of trans people specifically, but many other groups too, and perhaps particularly in the intersections) in positions of power, expertise, and authority. To
defend the human rights of all of us.
In the fight for equal representation for polyamorous relationships, polyamorists may have a strange and unlikely ally in… the Scottish Fire Brigade Union:
Scotland’s Fire Brigade Union (FBU) has been blasted after calling for more legal protections for Scots who have more than one romantic partner. Members of the group, which is meant
to campaign to protect firefighters, want to boost the legal rights of polyamorous people.
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I love that a relatively mainstream union is taking seriously this issue that affects only a tiny minority of the population, but I have to wonder… why? What motivates such
interest? Are Scottish fire bridades all secretly in a big happy polycule together? (That’d be super cute.)
Anyway: good for them, good for us, good all round at a time with a bit of a shortage of good news.
The news has, in general, been pretty terrible lately.
Like many folks, I’ve worked to narrow the focus of the things that I’m willing to care deeply about, because caring about many things is just too difficult when, y’know, nazis
are trying to destroy them all.
I’ve got friends who’ve stopped consuming news media entirely. I’ve not felt the need to go so far, and I think the reason is that I already have a moderately-disciplined
relationship with news. It’s relatively easy for me to regulate how much I’m exposed to all the crap news in the world and stay focussed and forward-looking.
The secret is that I get virtually all of my news… through my feed reader (some of it pre-filtered, e.g. my de-crappified BBC News feeds).
I use FreshRSS and I love it. But really: any feed reader can improve your relationship with
the Web.
Without a feed reader, I can see how I might feel the need to “check the news” several times a day. Pick up my phone to check the time… glance at the news while I’m there… you know how
to play that game, right?
But with a feed reader, I can treat my different groups of feeds like… periodicals. The news media I subscribe to get collated in my feed reader and I can read them once, maybe twice
per day, just like a daily newspaper. If an article remains unread for several days then, unless I say otherwise, it’s configured to be quietly archived.
My current events are less like a firehose (or sewage pipe), and more like a bottle of (filtered) water.
Categorising my feeds means that I can see what my friends are doing almost-immediately, but I don’t have to be disturbed by anything else unless I want to be. Try getting that
from a siloed social network!
Maybe sometimes I see a new breaking news story… perhaps 12 hours after you do. Is that such a big deal? In exchange, I get to apply filters of any kind I like to the news I read, and I
get to read it as a “bundle”, missing (or not missing) as much or as little as I like.
On a scale from “healthy media consumption” to “endless doomscrolling”, proper use of a feed reader is way towards the healthy end.
If you stopped using feeds when Google tried to kill them, maybe it’s time to think again. The ecosystem’s alive and well, and having a one-stop place where you can
enjoy the parts of the Web that are most-important to you, personally, in an ad-free, tracker-free, algorithmic-filtering-free space that you can make your very own… brings a
special kind of peace that I can highly recommend.
After “fixing” BBC News’ RSS feeds I noticed that I was seeing less news (and, somehow, stressing less over everything happening in the
USA). Turns out that in switching myself to my new system I’d subscribed to the UK edition, whereas previously I’d been on the Full edition. I’ve corrected it now in my RSS reader, but
it was an interesting couple of days.
tl;dr: I accidentally stopped reading international news and I was less stressed
Anyway: if you’re not already using my improved BBC News RSS feeds, they’re at: https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev
The secret order — issued under the U.K.’s Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (known as the Snoopers’ Charter) — aims to undermine an opt-in Apple feature that provides end-to-end encryption
(E2EE) for iCloud backups, called Advanced Data Protection. The encrypted backup feature only allows Apple customers to access their device’s information stored on iCloud — not
even Apple can access it.
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Sigh. A continuation of a long-running saga of folks here in the UK attempting to make it easier for police to catch a handful of (stupid) criminals1…
at the expense of making millions of people more-vulnerable to malicious hackers2.
If we continue on this path, it’ll only be a short number of years before you see a headline about a national secret, stored by a government minister (in the kind of ill-advised manner
we know happens) on iCloud or similar and then stolen by a hostile foreign power who merely needed to bribe, infiltrate, or in the worst-case hack their way into Apple’s
datacentres. And it’ll be entirely our own fault.
Meanwhile the serious terrorist groups will continue to use encryption that isn’t affected by whatever “ban” the UK can put into place (Al Qaeda were known to have developed their own
wrapper around PGP, for example, decades ago), the child pornography rings will continue to tunnel traffic around whatever dark web platform they’ve made for themselves (I’m curious
whether they’re actually being smart or not, but that’s not something I even remotely want to research), and either will still only be caught when they get sloppy and/or as the
result of good old-fashioned police investigations.
Weakened and backdoored encryption in mainstream products doesn’t help you catch smart criminals. But it does help smart criminals to catch regular folks.
Footnotes
1 The smart criminals will start – or more-likely will already be using – forms of
encryption that aren’t, and can’t, be prevented by legislation. Because fundamentally, cryptography is just maths. Incidentally, I assume you know that you can send me encrypted email that nobody else can read?
It turns out my seriesofefforts to improve the BBC News RSS feeds are more-popular than
I thought. People keep asking for variants of them, and it’s probably time I stopped hosting the resulting feeds on my NAS (which does a good job, but
it’s in a highly-kickable place right under my desk).
The new site isn’t pretty. But it works.
So I’ve launched BBC-Feeds.DanQ.dev. On a 20-minute schedule, it generates both UK and World editions of the BBC News feeds,
filtered to remove iPlayer, Sounds, app “nudges”, duplicates, and other junk, and optionally with the sports news filtered out too.
Their inclusion of non-news content such as plugs for iPlayer and their apps,
Their repeating of identical news stories with marginally-different GUIDs, and
All of the sports news, which I don’t care about one jot.
Well, it turns out that some people want #3: the sport. But still don’t want the other two.
Some people actually want to read this crap, apparently.
I shan’t be subscribing to this RSS feed, and I can’t promise I’ll fix it if it gets broken. But if “without the crap, but with the sports” is the way you like your BBC News RSS feed,
I’ve got you covered:
The Beeb continue to keep adding more and more non-news content to the BBC News RSS feed (like this ad for the iPlayer app!), so I’ve once again had to update my script to “fix” the feed so that it only contains, y’know, news.
Dogs are being offered boat and rail season tickets to ease their path to walkies in the Lake District.
Ullswater Steamers and the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway have introduced £20 annual “Rover” season tickets, which include a 10% donation to animal charities.
The cost for a standard doggie day ticket is £2.50 for the railway and £1 for a boat trip.
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In a world where the news is dominated by war, cyber attacks, or imminent elections, it’s nice to be distracted by a nonsense bit of news. And this one’s just delightful.
For a fee of £1 – £2.50, dogs can travel on the boats and railways of Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway and Ullswater Steamers. So far, so good.
And now they’ve introduced a season pass for people who take their canines on the ferries or railways more often. Also good.
And they’ve called the season pass for dogs… a “Rover” ticket.
