"End-to-end encryption" normally implies that the service provides encryption for its users' messages, but doesn't keep any of the keys on any servers that it controls. Keys are held only on users' devices, and encryption and decryption happens there. So if law enforcement want to read a user's messages, they either have to seize the user's device (and defeat its security), or find a flaw in the implementation of the encryption, or brute-force the encryption.

That's the sort of encryption that this bill is aimed at - the service could have decided that it would be able read its users' messages, or pass them on to law enforcement, but has "deliberately blinded" itself by choosing to make that impossible. If, say, you and I agree that we'll use our own encryption for messages sent over an unencrypted service, then I guess technically that's end-to-end encryption too, but that's not what the term normally means. The service wasn't involved in our decision to use encryption, so it hasn't "deliberately blinded" itself to what we're saying.

No, but those don't (or didn't) have end-to-end encryption built in, so if the authorities decided that you were using them to plan or commit a crime, it was relatively easy for them to find out what you were writing or saying.

Or as Brian Kernighan put it, "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it."

So ZO'R TV doesn't have to provide evidence that they own the copyright to the material?

In theory, yes, in practice, probably not. If I file a DMCA takedown notice alleging that some film A that you uploaded to YouTube infringes the copyright in some film B, then the part of the notice where I assert that I own the copyright in B (or I'm authorised to act for B's copyright owner) is made under penalty of perjury. So if I lie about that, I could go to jail. But I've never heard of that actually ever happening.

All the other parts of the notice, in particular the part where I allege that A infringes B's copyright, are not made under penalty of perjury. The official reason is that in the general case, the question of whether A actually infringes B's copyright can be answered only by a court, but you can supply your own conspiracy theory.

It's up to the Prime Minister to decide when to call a general election, with the only restriction being that it can't be more than five years after the last one. Parliament doesn't get to vote on it. Theoretically, Parliament could pass a law to call an election against the Prime Minister's wishes, but as you say, at least 72 Conservative MPs would have to vote for it, and that's not going to happen.

There are several systems of proportional representation, some of which keep a connection between an MP and the area that elected them, and some of which don't. Among the ones that do -

• Single transferable vote, where constituencies elect more than one MP (usually 3, 4 or 5), and voters rank as many of the candidates as they like in order of preference. Unless you vote only for unpopular parties or candidates, there's a good chance that at least one of the candidates you vote for will be elected.
• Various additional member systems, where some of the seats in the parliament aren't filled by someone who was elected by voters in a particular constituency, but filled according to some formula that uses the votes from all constituencies. This makes the number of seats held by each party roughly proportional to the total number of votes cast for that party.

To be fair, most other languages aren't secure against remote code substitution either, but that's probably because their designers assumed no programmer would ever be stupid enough to load untrusted code from someone else's computer at run time. Whereas in most JavaScript frameworks these days, it seems to be the only way to get anything done ;-)

If they'd been able to make the M0 work, they wouldn't have had to spend the time and money to create a new, simpler design, and their customers would've been able to reuse existing hardware and software that are compatible with it. But yeah, a 32-bit chip that can monitor a sensor and emit a signal based on the sensor's value seems excessive.

I assume that 25MHz refers to how fast you could clock it, not how fast you do clock it. In principle, there shouldn't be any reason why you can't clock a modern CPU at 25Mhz, but some operations might time out. For instance, the RAM in modern computers is basically banks of billions of tiny capacitors, each of which can hold a charge or not, to represent a 1 or a 0. The charge leaks away quite quickly, and has to be periodically refreshed. The refresh interval is normally derived from the system clock, so if it's happening at a few percent of the frequency that it's meant to, the charge might drain before the chip has a chance to work out whether it needs to put the charge back. So your RAM might appear to always contain all zeroes.

Lasers bright enough to cause permanent blindness are banned under the UN Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, which both Ukraine and Russia have signed up to. Lasers that can cause temporary blindness are OK, though, apparently.