Ben Cooper retweeted
Best anecdote in Carol Thatcher's book about her father is when Sir Denis boarded a train at Paddington in which the only empty compartment was reserved for Rosewood Psychiatric Hospital.
Denis travelled alone and in comfort as far as Reading when "all these chaps piled in", accompanied by a male nurse, who counted them before the train moved off.
'One, two, three, four ... who are you?"
"I'm the Prime Minister's husband."
"Six, seven, eight, nine..."
The interesting thing is it’s perfectly fine to object to this on “dignity” grounds, but that’s not what the museum code of conduct talks about, and it’s hard to see the dividing line between mummies and other artefacts.
Ben Cooper retweeted
The EU fee was about £12.6bn a year, whereas the estimated Brexit loss of output is now roughly £170bn–£230bn a year, with an associated loss of tax revenue of roughly £65bn–£85bn a year. That makes the fee equivalent to only about 5–7% of the estimated annual GDP loss. #BrexSHIT
Did nobody stay at holiday homes before Airbnb? It was probably less common, but still happened a lot - we did Landmark Trust holidays as a kid, we’ve been staying on a Arran every year for decades, etc. Tidying up before you leave is completely normal in those places, but I guess if you’ve only stayed in hotels it seems a big ask.
Ben Cooper retweeted
I'm just going to point out that there are two people at the start of this hike.
It is an oft-noted effect that people seem to get more conservative as they age, but the corollary is that people who were very liberal try to fight against this as they age, and stay relevant by climbing onto new cultural bandwagons.
rest 🙏🏻 ✨✨ with trans voices in london ❤️❤️🥹 thank you for your channelings and moving your wild and hair-up-on-arms magic with me. i love you 🫶🫶🏳️⚧️ alanismorissette.lnk.to/rest…
Ben Cooper retweeted
We’re consulting on proposals to make Maryhill Road, Bilsland Drive, North Canal Bank Street, Shields Road and Maxwell Road safer and more accessible for active travel.
Attend the Southside drop-in event or have your say on all routes via surveys 👇
glasgow.gov.uk/15840
Just back from staying in an Airbnb and when we left we emptied the dishwasher, stripped the beds and took the bins out.
What mugs.
(Honestly, the people moaning about having to do this are a. slobs, and b. didn’t grow up staying in Landmark Trust properties.)
It takes some brass neck to say this while introducing “Making Tax Digital” which requires five tax returns a year instead of one.
Before 2005, you paid VAT to Customs & Excise, and tax to HMRC - then those two departments were merged. Even 20 years later, they still haven’t managed to integrate the systems well enough.
Ben Cooper retweeted
Hamas isn’t a terrorist organisation, claim Scottish Greens
thetimes.com/article/443c96d…
An interesting new logical twist, specifying that it’s only human remains from outside the UK that will be removed from display. 🤷♂️
(Also, if I was her watching from the afterlife, I’d be a bit offended at being yanked out of my sarcophagus.)
Museum removes mummified remains from public view over ethical concerns. news.stv.tv/west-central/uni…
Ben Cooper retweeted
'He has since promised to give up the habit'
Monk on Caldey Island gave naked photos of himself to visitors bbc.in/4dXa09b
Ben Cooper retweeted
I would like to give my informed consent to be putting back on display at Kelvingrove, I dont like it in this cupboard with the mops and buckets
@GlasgowCC
I’m 50ish. All IT news looks like this:
I spent last night watching my honeypot server get hit 14,000 times in six hours.
And almost none of the traffic was human.
I've been in security for over a decade, and I can tell you with full honesty that what's happening right now doesn't resemble anything I've worked through before.
The shape of the threat has changed.
When I started, we tracked attackers like weather systems like individual storms with a direction, a motive, and a human operator you could eventually name.
These days I'm watching autonomous agents swarm login pages with the patience and discipline of machines, because that's what they are.
The numbers coming out of October are the ones keeping me up.
Cloudflare just absorbed a 4.2 terabit per second DDoS attack, the largest in recorded history.
Ransomware incidents jumped 41% in a single month.
In September, OpenAI-powered agents got caught attacking RubyGems, a package registry that quietly underpins a huge chunk of software I use every day.
In July, roughly 700 AI agents coordinated an attack on Hugging Face's infrastructure as part of a single automated task.
A Chinese threat actor was publicly caught running full attack chains through DeepSeek with no human at the keyboard.
I keep rereading these reports because each one by itself would've been the biggest story of the year five years ago. Together, in one month, they're the new baseline.
What I want people outside the industry to understand is why this specific moment feels like a hinge.
For thirty years, the thing protecting most of us was simple economics. Attackers had to choose who to target because their time was finite. That ceiling is gone.
An agent I can rent for pennies will try every leaked password you've ever used against every service you've ever signed up for, in parallel, overnight, and never get tired.
The same math that made ChatGPT useful made opportunistic hacking infinite. The old assumption that you were "too boring to be a target" relied on scarcity that no longer exists.
I'm not writing this to spiral anyone out.
Most of this fight genuinely isn't yours to win.
But the small things still matter more than people think.
Tonight I'd switch your most important accounts like email, bank, primary cloud, etc. to passkeys or a hardware key.
I'd kill SMS 2FA wherever an authenticator app is offered.
I'd turn on breach alerts in whatever password manager you use.
If you're in the US, I'd freeze my credit at all three bureaus, which is free and takes about ten minutes.
None of that stops the swarm.
It makes you a slightly worse target than the person next to you. In a month like this one, that's the whole game I'm playing too.
@mattshumer_ has summed it beautifully.
Drop everything and go give it a read. Nothing is more important than this article right now.






















