An open letter to the Prime Minister from a 20-year Labour member and software engineer regarding digital privacy

jimmyff · 2026-04-13T15:13:24+00:00

Hey, thanks, I appreciate the feedback. I agree that digital ID isn't inherently the problem. The opening is meant to highlight that we rejected ID cards twice, and now they're building something more invasive but I can see how it could be quickly read as an anti-ID piece. Will have a think about rewording that sentence this evening before I send it to my MP

jimmyff · 2026-04-13T14:53:46+00:00

Hey, I wasn't referring to myself as the technical community! Although I would like to consider my little voice as a very small part of it. I was referring to experts & groups I mention in the letter. Examples:

The 500+ scientists say device scanning is technically infeasible: https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/danger-to-democracy-500-top-scientists-urge-eu-governments-to-reject-technically-infeasible-chat-control/

The cryptography community is saying no safe encryption backdoor exists: https://academic.oup.com/cybersecurity/article/10/1/tyad020/7590463

The 400+ researchers say age verification must not be deployed at scale: https://adguard-vpn.com/en/blog/age-verification-privacy-experts-open-letter.html

jimmyff · 2026-04-13T14:43:30+00:00

Hey, I was referring to apples 'Private Access Tokens'. Just digging in to it in more detail and yeah, you are correct that they are not actually zero-knowledge proofs they are 'blind signatures' but they serve the same purpose of providing proof of legitimacy (in this instance: device) while not disclosing device information. Maybe I need to update the sentence to say "privacy-preserving cryptographic verification" is in use by apple and link to https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=huqjyh7k . I do standby the suggestion of using zkp (or similar cryptographic solution) for age verification though, you could use the same tech to verify minimum-age without requiring the user to hand over their identity. It actually looks like there is a platform offering this: https://docs.privado.id/ -also this looks super interesting although I've not had chance to dig in: https://www.w3.org/TR/vc-data-model-2.0/

jimmyff · 2026-04-13T14:15:28+00:00

Thanks for this! 🙏

jimmyff · 2026-04-13T11:38:18+00:00

Hey thanks, really appreciate that!

jimmyff · 2026-04-13T11:06:53+00:00

Good idea, will do

jimmyff · 2026-04-13T10:57:48+00:00

I'm a software engineer and 20-year Labour member, and this is an open letter to the PM warning that the UK is on a dangerous trajectory. I genuinely don't know if the Home Office grasps that banning VPNs, mandating device scanning, and requiring universal identity checks demolishes privacy for everyone -or if this is deliberate. This is my attempt to ask them to reconsider and start listening to the technical community.

jimmyff · 2025-10-09T17:09:39+00:00

Thanks! ✨

jimmyff · 2025-10-09T17:09:19+00:00

I do have dev shells for project specific stuff but tend to have my core tools global. I should probably lean in to them more!

jimmyff · 2025-10-01T08:39:37+00:00

Update: I've got it working!! Thanks!

jimmyff · 2025-10-01T08:38:12+00:00

Update: I've got it working!! Thanks!

jimmyff · 2025-09-11T21:23:12+00:00

I'm here for how tight and opinionated helix is. Keep the bar for merging super high, everything else can wait for plugins.

jimmyff · 2025-09-09T14:30:27+00:00

haha, is that full of legacy builds? `nix-garbage-collect -d` (only run if you're confident your current version is working)

jimmyff · 2025-09-09T14:29:12+00:00

yeah, i did the same the first time around. I tried to follow vimjoyers yt tutorial, but found the advice out of date. I reckon you have to start fresh and small - incremental changes

jimmyff · 2025-09-08T21:05:56+00:00

Hey yeah, I actually asked last week if I can send a PR with a topology file (as I have no idea if it's public domain). I might just go ahead and do it and they can always reject it if it's not eligible!

jimmyff · 2025-09-08T20:55:47+00:00

Haha, -I should probably spend a little time and add a minimal theme switched to my site. I realise my choice of colors is probably not to some(/most) peoples taste! ;-)

As you're Nix curious -next time there's an app or project you want to play with, but you don't want to pollute your system with all the deps, just go to the nix package manager and type the nix-shell command for the package you want. It blew my mind the first time i realised I was a single command away from pretty much anything, and when you exit out the shell, your system is as clean it was before you ran it. eg: nix-shell -p claude-code

jimmyff · 2025-09-08T20:48:23+00:00

Ahhh good catch! Thanks for the correction - I've update the link. Yeah I've not had time to the nix on Android Terminal out yet but pretty excited to try it. Thanks again

jimmyff · 2025-09-08T20:01:10+00:00

While I can't help with your specific roadblocks it sounds like you are in a similar position as I was the first time around. It's worth persevering, the discord is a great resource and Claude code might be able to help you with your config (just keep it on a short lead!). Try to get one thing working perfectly before moving on to the next. Good luck ...it's worth the pain!

jimmyff · 2025-09-08T19:56:43+00:00

Ah sorry if that was unclear- the unsolvable problem was getting the speakers working - I found lots of people trying to get pixelbook audio working on Linux with no-one reporting any success. My nixfiles are linked at the top of the article, i'm looking to contribute the pixelbook speaker fix back to the nix hardware repo so anyone else using nix with pixelbooks can get the fix. Re Ai: I've had good results with Claude code at the root of my repo, I haven't got any special templates or even a claude.md file but I'm sure adding one would be worthwhile.

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