"Following a three-hour trial at Wandsworth County Court on 14 May 2026, in which both sides were represented by barristers, the court found in favor of the claimant,"

So... no... AI didn't win a case.

He's also going to have to pay that money back, have all his assets seized to do so (proceeds of crime), and then the tax man is going to be asking "Hey, you earned £2m, right? Where's the tax on that?"

Now that he's been jailed, they have years to unpick it all, file additional charges, seize everything he owned, even take any "gifts" that he gave to friends and family, and build a case for tax fraud to jail him further.

You need to read The Secret Barrister novels, written by a real criminal-law barrister.

The UK courts are an absolute mess of chaos, that's not the lawyer's or the judges fault.

You would think that with a former-lawyer as the prime minister now it would get sorted, but they've made only token changes to an absolutely nonsensical court-appointment system that operates largely on constant fire-fighting and ill-preparedness and throwing lawyers to the wolves making them run from case to case with little to no preparation or warning.

It's continued because "that's how it's always been done" but the court system outgrew the capacity decades ago.

So does... Starlink own space now?

Maybe if you hadn't sent up countless thousands of satellites without asking anyone but the US, people will give a damn about where they were.

If you are using signed and end-to-end encrypted emails, let me tell you:

You're merely using email as a transport mechanism, where ANY OTHER SUCH MECHANISM would suffice and be just as secure.

Including things like Jabber, etc.

Email is utterly monopolised because if you want to send/receive email to the major players... you MUST abide by whatever ridiculous restrictions they put on things (e.g. 10 DNS lookups for SPF, blacklists, domain verification, spam categorisation, etc.) regardless. Even if you're only using it as a communications medium for encrypted, signed comms, you still have to comply.

Email as a protocol needs to die. The stuff we do by email can be done PROPERLY AND BETTER by just basing the same top layers on something else that actually works and does the end-to-end encryption, domain verification, signing, authnetication etc. for you anway).

Bolting shit onto email to make it "work" is no different to how bolting shit onto FTP to make it "secure" was. You still have to deal with NAT traversal, packet-rewriting, etc. and all kinds of other nonsense that come FROM that use of a terrible, inefficient, outdated protocol as the base of your communications.

Email just needs to die.

That's all there is too it.

It was designed for a different era, and makes many, many terrible assumptions, and throws most of them out of the window in the worst possible way at the worst possible time.

Plus, it's built on "honesty", and everything security, or authentication, or even just claiming who you actually are as an email sender are all bolt-ons that don't work to their full extent.

Even with DNSSEC+SPF+TLS+DKIM+greylisting+limiting.... there's still no way to reliably know who can see your email, and that it's secured end-to-end and that people are who they APPEAR to be, and no way to reliably discard email that you don't want to receive or people have no place sending in the first place.

We need to just bin the whole thing. POP3, IMAP, SMTP, the lot.

I have nothing Microsoft at home.

Yeah, sure, I'm an IT geek, but it's probably the first time that's happened since I first used a DOS disk back in the day (as before that all my computers weren't PCs at all but small home computers).

Windows 11 literally forced me off Windows at home, I haven't run Office at home in decades, and I now need to be paid to manage Microsoft systems of any kind.

Microsoft told me that Windows 10 would be the last version of Windows. And you know what? In my case, they were right.

One of the best things of running Linux instead of Windows is that even if I choose to install a binary driver, it doesn't come with a bunch of "companion" apps and background services and a 4GB LLM, a game launcher, an update program, and whatever other nonsense people want to shovel onto me.

Because if it did, distros would revolt and/or ship a version that was just the driver.

You're a graphics card. Act like it. All you need is a driver, nothing more, nothing less.

Whoosh.

I like updating my Vivaldi browser.

The apt version just sets a flag during the update and any currently-running Vivaldi browser picks up on it and shows a small "update" button in its browser bar.

You can just carry on using it, obviously. Or you click the small update button and it will update the browser and carry on.

I love the way that it's a) part of the entire apt system so still under your control, b) apt upgrades don't need to kill/restart applications (Windows really needs to learn this), and c) it just detects an update underneath, lets you know, and waits for you to decide when your want to close your browser.

It's very subtle and very simple, but it's a whole world of difference compared to Windows, and a show of how an application and an OS update mechanism can co-operate to the user's advantage.

Yeah, but it also lead to the kind of feature bloat that turned productive apps in overly complicated whales that were no longer usable for their original purpose.

Too little, too late.

I moved on to better OS when you started messing with stuff and REFUSED to even give me an option to put it back how it was.

Modern Windows UI/UX literally and actually hinders my workflow because of enforced nonsense that I don't want.

Google promised that you would never have to delete an email ever? That they would keep all of it forever as though they were doing you some kind of favor?

What are they hoping to achieve at this point?

Boils down to one thing:

Teach them.

Homework doesn't teach them - that's "independent learning" which, though a skill, isn't something you can really instil in them, but which they have to bother to learn themselves... it's also, incidentally, how private schools achieve results. They encourage independent learning, and they more use it to PREPARE, rather than after-the-lesson chores. "This is what we'll be doing next week, read up on it now so I don't have to explain all the minutiae when we get to that part."

But without a teacher in the class, the significance of where/what they learn is diminished and turns learning into a chore. The biggest assets in a school - any school - are not budgets, facilities, fancy tech... it's parental motivation, and teacher skill. Private schools already have parental motivation ("I lose 30k if you mess about", says Dad, and the school won't tolerate you risking their 600k of tuition income across that class just to keep your 30k).

His last paper was a multi-year study on the different methods to teach boys and girls science (especially physics) and maths in Kuwait (where they have segregated classes for such things) to achieve best results for each... I'll see if I can dig it out.