Day: 4 January 2021

by Jake Woodhouse On February 4th 2004 the technological equivalent of a Trojan Horse was quietly rolled onto the internet. There had been others of course, Google being the obvious example of a new kind of business which provided a service to customers for free, but none which have come to symbolize the new era as much as Facebook. Do we even remember a time before Facebook? Or any of the other companies such as Twitter, Instagram, or YouTube who have come to dominate our society, changed the way we interact, how we do business, how we live our lives? And could we have predicated how this massive garnering of our attention has turned out? It seems not. At the beginning of 2021 it has now become alarmingly clear that we have given up our freedoms for a few shiny baubles. We have scrolled, clicked and liked our way into a trap so large and so dangerous, that our very liberty is now at stake. And yet, unbelievably, many of us have yet to pull back from the constant stream of notifications on our screens long enough to see it. The Internet has given us many good things. It has facilitated the dissemination of ideas quicker and more widely than at any other time in history, it has given artists ...

New Year, New Lockdown Restrictions Andy Davey's cartoon in today's Telegraph Appearing on The Andrew Marr Show yesterday, Boris Johnson warned the country that COVID-19 restrictions are "alas, probably about to get tougher". The Spectator has a summary: The Andrew Marr Show returned this morning, and with it came an in-depth interview with the Prime Minister. It will surprise no one to hear that the bulk of the interview focused on the coronavirus, and Boris Johnson signalled throughout that the new year could see fresh restrictions being brought into place. He did not go into any detail about what measures could be introduced under a potential "Tier 5", but it was clear enough that his 5pm Downing Street press conferences were not yet a thing of the pastBJ: It may be that we need to do things in the next few weeks that will be tougher in many parts of the country. I’m fully fully reconciled to that, and I bet the people of this country are fully reconciled to that... Alas, is probably about to get tougher, but we'll review it. Boris said that we need to see if the "extra steps that we've all taken in Tier 4 areas are going to work in driving the virus down" and insisted that the Government has got to keep things "under ...