Phil Wane retweeted
When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me-it still sometimes happens-and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting.
Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous, not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. . . . That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. . . . That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. . . . That we could be together for twenty years.
That is something which sustains me and it’s much more meaningful. . . . The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday.
I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful.
- Ann Druyan
Phil Wane retweeted
🚨BREAKING: All Britons may need ID to use social media, the UK's online safety regulator today announces
“This plan for a government ‘social media ban’ is a national ID system by the back door.
Both the government and Ofcom have admitted that children will get around the ban, which means the real effect will be normalising adults and children alike to hand over their passports just to get online.
Hundreds of thousands of people without ID, who tend to be poorer people, and many more who don’t want to risk handing their passports over to foreign tech companies will be locked out of huge parts of the internet.
The plan will kill anonymity online, whilst the UK’s culture of speech policing is reaching a crisis point. The policy is painfully misguided, an Orwellian assault on free speech and privacy, and will make children no safer at all.
The false illusion that children aren’t on social media will cause the companies to abandon all their child safety measures. The Government could be promoting meaningful safety measures and supporting parental controls that genuinely protect children - instead, they’re demanding government ID from the whole population just for uncensored internet access. It is authoritarian madness.”
- Silkie Carlo | @silkiecarlo
Read ⤵️
telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10…
Phil Wane retweeted
Zuckerberg already admitted it wrongly suspended the No Kings Instagram account during the peak of a massive voter-mobilization effort.
Now, seven days before the midterms, Zuckerberg has suspended the account Angie Nixon’s Senate campaign uses to organize Latino voters.
At what point do repeated “mistakes” that suppress organizing by Democrats become an election-integrity crisis?
Phil Wane retweeted
This is long overdue - the budget reveals a push to cut red tape and (I am guessing) peacetime aviation rules to enable drone manufacturers to test drones in the UK - something that has been a massively limiting problem given the critical importance of this technology for the armed forces to be able to train on and learn to fight with:
6.81 Drone regulation unit– The government is launching a new Ministry of Defence-led drone regulation unit working across the government, which will take a targeted approach to cutting red tape and create clearer routes for testing uncrewed and autonomous systems.
Threat level remains high but defences have been neglected, to put it mildly, by successive governments who ignore history at our collective peril. A reminder of that Roosevelt quote "speak softly and carry a big stick". Good advice #defence
Phil Wane retweeted
🚨 Wow. There is a little bullet point buried at the bottom of paragraph 4.131 in the 166-page budget document that suggests the UK could next year embark upon potentially its most consequential cybersecurity policy change since GDPR.
🧵
Phil Wane retweeted
Why are most media outlets saying Flávio Bolsonaro simply “left” Brazil after losing the presidential election?
He fled the country while under investigation for corruption and money laundering, defied a Supreme Court order to surrender his passports, and had his Brazilian passports revoked.
This is hardly an ordinary departure.
The same media outlets regularly use bombastic language when it’s completely unwarranted, yet choose remarkably mild language to describe something this serious.
Most people get their understanding of events from headlines before liking, commenting or sharing. Journalists have a responsibility to write headlines that accurately convey what happened, rather than leave out the most important facts.
Flavio Bolsonaro and family to receive US visas after leaving Brazil, State Department says reut.rs/4zfZrXm
Phil Wane retweeted
Badenoch has forgotten that Thatcher sold off the family silver, Cameron ruined public services with austerity, Johnson ruined the economy for a generation with his Brexit deal. Then he pissed £billions up the wall with dodgy Covid loans and PPE contracts.
Then we had Mad Lizzy!
Phil Wane retweeted
Sergey Nalobin, a Russian ‘diplomat’ who launched the ‘Conservative Friends of Russia’ group has now been identified as a Russian intelligence officer involved in an attempted European disinformation campaign.
Nalobin called Boris Johnson a good friend and was quick to congratulate Vote Leave Chief Matthew Elliott on his engagement. Elliott was a founder member of the Conservative Friends of Russia, and in 2012 went on a 10-day trip to Moscow with all expenses paid by the Russian government.
The British authorities repeatedly refused to investigate Russian interference in the Brexit campaign and the UK’s broader politics. However, Nalobin was looking for a way to channel money into the Conservative Party in the early 2010s, and the Tories received many donations from Russian oligarchs resident in the UK. The article provides details of how Nalobin orchestrated Russian interference in Estonian politics, so it is very likely that he was playing the same role in the UK.
Putin wanted Brexit. The Tories delivered it, and unfortunately every British government since then has covered up the extent and nature of Russian interference in British politics.
Please repost if you demand that the government ends the conspiracy of silence and launches a full-scale investigation of Russian interference in British politics starting with the Conservative Friends of Russia and Farage's appearances on Russia Today.
bylinetimes.com/2026/10/26/t…
Phil Wane retweeted
Kemi Badenoch claims £39 400 per year for her personal expenses.
Suella Braverman £45,000 for water bills alone.
Esther McVey, where do we start.
It's MPs expenses that need to be curtailed. It's absolutely obscene what some of them are claiming.
#PoliticsLive #Budget2026
Phil Wane retweeted
Methinks the common sense of resilience would dictate we retain both analogue & digital phone systems - landline switchover could cut people off in emergency, minister warned
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6x2…
Phil Wane retweeted
People (including me) have been saying this - it is not a good idea to remove landlines especially without a solid power network and particularly for people in rural areas. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c6x2…
Phil Wane retweeted
So wholesale price is 12.3p/kWh and we pay 26.32p/kWh plus £200 a year standing charge (both GB average). Hmmm.
Phil Wane retweeted
The Wayback Machine risks becoming collateral damage in the fight against AI, writes Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle in The Atlantic.
Blocking the Internet Archive won’t stop AI companies from scraping the web. But it can undermine a vital resource for journalists, researchers, and anyone seeking information that has disappeared or changed.
Read the article free 👉 theatlantic.com/technology/2…
#NotAllBots #ProtectTheWayback
ALT Dark green graphic with the quote "The Wayback Machine has become collateral damage in a fight between publishers and AI companies." Attributed to Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian, Internet Archive. Internet Archive logo at bottom right.
Phil Wane retweeted
I analyzed hundreds of tweets from this past weekend and found evidence of two unique disinformation campaigns amplifying Elon Musk’s accusations against Ukraine. One of these campaigns can be traced back to a Russian social media account and one of Putin’s top allies.
my latest. (Link 👇)
Phil Wane retweeted
This is honestly shocking.
Three months ago, Hong Wang was awarded the Fields Medal for resolving the Kakeya conjecture in three dimensions.
Today, OpenAI released a proposed proof of the conjecture in ALL dimensions.
And that’s not all. It also announced a proposed existence proof for quantum chromodynamics and a proposed refutation of the Exponential Time Hypothesis.
Experts say that, if confirmed, these would be Nobel prize and Turing award level discoveries respectively.
A journalist just asked me: “What remains for humans to do?”
I think it’s becoming increasingly clear that more and more problem solving will be automated.
But humans will remain crucial in determining the direction of discovery. Deciding which problems are worth solving.
Because the value of a discovery depends on our needs, our priorities and the kind of world we want to build.
There will be a shift from problem solving to problem setting.
I also think there will be huge individual differences.
People with strong critical thinking skills, creativity and imagination will be supercharged by AI.
People without those skills risk surrendering to it.
I’m particularly concerned for children, who may never develop these skills.
I think epistemic literacy - how to distinguish information from knowledge - is the single most important skill we should be teaching.
Phil Wane retweeted
Farage looks increasingly rattled by the £5m standards investigation.
Asked about it yesterday, he called the process a “farce” and sarcastically questioned the commissioner’s independence.
Classic move when you’re worried about the verdict: attack the referee before he blows the whistle.
If the verdict goes his way, will the commissioner suddenly become independent again? 🤔
Phil Wane retweeted
Yes @Nigel_Farage - Raheem Kassam is just “someone in America”. Just as Wigmore, Banks and Gunster are just “people I happened to meet in Trump’s golden lift
Phil Wane retweeted
One interesting snippet from Hancock’s evidence to the enquiry. He whined about a bottleneck preventing the distribution of PPE. Not a shortage of staff or vehicles but, you won’t guess so I’ll tell you, all the PPE was kept in one giant warehouse that only had one door. So loading it onto trucks took forever. You can’t make this shit up.
Yes, if bin liners were good enough he shouldn’t have paid out £100’s of millions for PPE equipment to self and cronies, lovers, family of lovers, friends, other politicians etc.
£37B for track and trace and no tracking and tracing of that money either.
The Chancellor authorised and signed every cheque without due diligence, whilst Johnson was in charge, and Hancock ran the Department including all the elected lobbyists.
They all are accountable and should face criminal investigations, fines and jail for manslaughter by being deliberately negligent.
If we let it go we create a rod for our own backs and the behaviour will be repeated by subsequent governments.
You can already see the signs the way they are claiming expenses as if the PAYE taxpayers have a magic tree of money.