Cybermatron

https://someone.elses.computer/@TheCybermatron

Academic, technology and data protection law. She/her. 🏳️‍🌈 Kraut abroad. Maintaining her sanity behind her avatar since 2009.

Occasionally blogs at https://cybermatron.blogspot.com/

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Last Notes

2026-06-01 17:02:57 UTC

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Same. For me as a Gen X German, who grew up in a country where we were taught everything about the Holocaust and nothing about Jewish history or culture, that chapter of Klein’s book was eye opening. It’s also really useful for German left-wingers arguing in favour of Germany getting its head out of its own backside on Gaza. As soon as the paperback edition of the German translation comes out, it’ll be the birthday present of choice for all my German friends.

2026-03-21 09:36:29 UTC

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The scary thing is that I work for a THE Top 5 UK Uni and it is happening here. The bifurcation is (also) happening within the staff body of the same institution.
We are essentially creating an new class system with an “academic upper, middle and working class”, depending on the kind of contract you managed to get when you started out. And no guesses what the real life class background (gender, nationality, etc.) of the “academic working class” often is.

2026-03-21 08:43:14 UTC

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What few people talk about is also how this does not work with the academic calendar. My Uni only teaches from mid -September to the end of March. My colleague on a 100% teaching contract therefore has to do 90% of their work (save for some marking and dissertation supervision) in 7.5 months. That is a massive physical and mental health challenge.

2026-03-21 08:43:14 UTC

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Why anyone would even consider joining the academy these days is beyond me. I could not honestly recommend it to any of my students as a career.

2026-03-21 08:43:14 UTC

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Finally, there is the problem of downgrading entry-level positions. The standard at my Uni for entry level, start of career positions used to be Grade 8 (junior lecturer/assistant professor level). We are now being told that all business cases for new positions must be submitted at Grade 7.
This comes on top of a by now 2-year promotions freeze, meaning that not only are we recruiting junior staff at a lower, less well paid level, we are also keeping them there for longer.

2026-03-21 08:43:14 UTC

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Of course, Unis@have long wanted to fit a third semester into the summer (some already do). But that would be the end of research-focused universities as we know it. Maybe that is the longterm strategy?

2026-03-21 08:43:14 UTC

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Also, the people doing these teaching-only jobs mostly WANT to do research and are taking these jobs in order to get a foot in the door, hoping for a better position next time. But the longer they stay in teaching-only jobs, the less likely it is that they will have the time to do the kind of research that will make them eligible for a full teaching/research post. We are destroying young academics‘ careers almost from the outset to feed the machine.

2026-02-10 08:43:02 UTC

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Can someone tell my vice-chancellor?

2026-02-04 07:20:07 UTC

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The irony is, of course, that he publishes this article on a website, that charges £5 to “free“ yourself from targeted advertising, but that will still “personalise“ the content you see, meaning that it will most likely still track your online behaviour for that purpose, even if you pay them.

2026-02-04 07:20:07 UTC

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The role of recommender systems in the polarisation and radicalisation of society (as well as in causing or contributing to the severe mental health issues, we are beginning to see) remains severely under explored, not least because it threatens the dominant business model. But unless we get a handle on this, I’m not sure we can really deal with those problems.
“Not designed with citizens’ best interests in mind” is an understatement.

2026-02-01 15:22:54 UTC

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Fortunately, it is now February, so we can drink gin from the bottle neat [hic]

2025-12-13 17:43:44 UTC

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Our political class likes to snuggle up to the biggest bully in the playground. Maybe because the UK once was the biggest bully in the playground.

2025-11-24 08:14:25 UTC

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After all the fanfare about the GDPR as the world‘s “gold standard” in data protection this is all quite disheartening and it is becoming increasingly clear that - gold standard or not - it rests on democratic foundations that could do with some maintenance work.

2025-11-24 08:14:25 UTC

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The UK is now down there with the Irish DPC in the race to the bottom of enforcement. But unlike the DPC, it no longer has an EDPB to keep it in line. The one possible bit of leverage that civil society may have is to bring a Schrems-like challenge to the EU Commission‘s adequacy finding for violation of Art. 45(2)(a) GDPR.

2025-11-24 08:14:25 UTC

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Of course, the Commission could be proactive and just not renew the UK adequacy finding this year. But it has already made it clear that it is happy to do so, and its own attacks on the GDPR via the Digital Omnibus shows that it is willing to do Big Tech’s bidding too. Although there is some political wrangling about this, I don‘t see that going anywhere. So, the CJEU and the Charter are the only backstop, meaning that the money to engage the court would have to be found.

2025-11-24 08:14:25 UTC

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But that would have to come from outside the UK and given how stretched NGO finances are, that‘s unlikely to happen (Max Schrems has pretty much let it be known that he‘s not interested, and the UK is just no longer important enough in many non-UK people‘s eyes to justify the cost).

2025-11-24 08:14:25 UTC

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David Erdos has been very vocal about this over on LinkedIn for the last year or so, and he is not exactly a radical prone to storming the barricades. This crisis has been a long time in the making, but if one had looked at the job description used for the current Commissioner back in the day, it was pretty clear that this pro-controller stance was encouraged by the previous UK government. The current one, again, seems to offer no better alternative.

2025-11-12 07:36:23 UTC

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My mum was in a profit-making care home for a short period while we were waiting for a place in one run by a non-profit, where her brother already lived, to become available. The standard of care was so horrible that I ended up dropping in unannounced, just to avoid incidents of abject neglect (which happened at least once with her). But staff were mostly contract, who moved from home to home for short stints. I was so happy when she finally got to move.

2025-09-20 17:43:32 UTC

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I’m not thrilled that they gather up here too, but there still tend to be many more counter-protesters than far right. During a recent one in Edinburgh I was at, the ratio was about 50 far right to 250 counter protestors. It’s a long way from the 150,000 to 5,000 we saw in London last week.

2025-09-05 06:47:30 UTC

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This process, which subtly shifts the Overton Window, is one of the reasons why Germany criminalised the “Auschwitzlüge” in 1994. It got (and still gets) a lot of stick for that from the free speech crowd, who argue that we shouldn’t do this because “factually incorrect statements” can be disproven in the “marketplace of ideas “. But Germany has so far been steadfast in arguing that the spreading of harmful and disprovable lies does not deserve legal protection. This is why.

2025-09-01 06:45:00 UTC

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That said, I’m loving the fact that Scotland is doing away with peak time fares. Selfishly, because it will save me so much money on my thrice weekly commute, but also because on the days when I am able to go in a bit later, it means I won’t then have to hang around in the office in the evening until I can use my off peak ticket again. So, it’s a quality of life issue as well.

2025-09-01 06:44:59 UTC

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If the experience with the €9 Deutschlandticket has shown anything, it’s that people will absolutely increase their use of of public transport, but that in the long run, this is not sustainable without increased capacity. The €9 ticket applied mostly over the summer when a lot of people were on holiday. So, many of the extra journeys were for leisure. But people were concerned about what it would mean for peak time travel at other times as the trains were so full already.

2025-08-19 22:05:26 UTC

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I was in practice as a tech lawyer during the dot com boom and bust, mostly advising sprightly 20-something start up founders, who were carried to their IPO on a wave of VC cash. These last few months have triggered a lot of memories of that time. The dot com bubble was going to last forever, right until the day it burst. And when it went, it went all at once.

2025-07-25 11:19:37 UTC

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And to somewhat respond to the various comments below, my reason for doing this was pedagogical. I will never be able to force them to read those articles. I am also not planning to use those reading lists as evidence for academic misconduct. What I can do, is use them as an indicator for whether or not students have used the relevant legal search engines and then have a conversation about this with them, if it looks like they have not. Everything else is still the student’s own responsibility.

2025-07-25 11:19:37 UTC

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My personal view is that the only really effective thing we can do, is to make students understand how much they are engaging in self-harm and self-sabotage, if they use GenAI to write essays. As one of my colleagues recently said, you don’t take a fork lift into the gym to lift the weights for you. The point is not to ensure that the weights are lifted but to build muscle yourself.

2025-07-25 07:39:15 UTC

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Update: Student was referred for academic misconduct and fined enough mark deductions that they failed the course.
Learning from this experience, I have started asking dissertation students to provide their reading lists at regular intervals because that is now the clearest indicator of whether they used GenAI (signified by an abundance of non-peer reviewed and US articles over relevant, EU-based academic literature).

2025-06-09 11:36:12 UTC

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Arguably, things are classified as “utopian”, if they are unlikely to happen in the context of existing power relationships between individuals, business and the state. Change those power relationships and ideas simply become possibilities.

2025-05-13 08:43:03 UTC

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When the MW was first introduced, my then partner, who was working a graduate entry level position at the Charity Commission at the time, had to be given a 20% pay rise because her salary didn‘t comply. But at least they had flexi time, so were given time off in lieu for extra hours worked. I look at what Unis pay their ECR and guaranteed hours staff now based on totally unrealistic models of how long it takes, for example, to prepare and teach a tutorial, and I weep.

2025-05-11 21:55:03 UTC

Hello hive mind. I’m just marking a student essay, which quotes from page 4 of “Cory Doctorow’s 2024 book “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse And What to Do About It”.
I was under the impression that the book was only going to be published in October 2025. Am I wrong and is there an open access copy out there already or have I finally caught a student using one of those famous “hallucinations” (if so, what an author to pick for it🤦‍♀️)?
@pluralistic

2025-03-23 06:42:59 UTC

So, it looks like the Guardian in the UK has moved over to pay or consent. I have the choice of either being tracked and targeted via cookies or having to sign in to a paid for account and being tracked under my real life identity. I‘m not sure how much more tone deaf it can get in the current climate for a supposedly liberal paper but here we are.
Contextual advertising, people. It‘s the future!

2024-12-16 19:56:08 UTC

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If the next government doesn’t address the wealth gap and inequality, it could get scary. But it’ll be exactly the same in the UK, if the Starmer government messes up and the Tories and Reform manage to find common ground and either merge or come to a tactical voting arrangement. The fact that, unlike France and Germany, the UK has no historical “firewall mindset” actually has me more worried about what might happen here in 2029 than what might happen there.

2024-12-16 19:56:08 UTC

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Germany isn’t France. There are similarities but the the calculus is somewhat different, not least because of constitutional safeguards. And Scholz holding out until September might just allow the far right and the far left to “close the circle” and feed off current resentment. This way, there is a good chance that the country buys itself another four years of democratic government as the UK has just done. What happens after that is anyone’s guess.

2024-12-16 19:56:07 UTC

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Germany tends to go Grand Coalition in situations like this to keep the firewall intact. This likely to happen again this time, particularly, if the Liberals don’t clear the 5% hurdle (as is expected). The real risk lies in the combined vote of the two big parties no longer being enough for a majority government. That’s the Weimar scenario where the current fragmentation becomes dangerous. But for now, it’s then still possible to bring the Greens in too.

2024-08-09 06:29:23 UTC

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Whether it’s good or bad for theUK is one question. Whether it is ethical to staff your hospitals to a great extent with medical personnel that has been educated and trained in other (often Global South) countries, to require them to pay tax and (extra) NI here, and then expect them to go “home” to those other countries, when they need to rely on whatever is left of the UK social security system, is an entirely different question.

2024-08-09 06:29:23 UTC

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So often, when we’re having these discussions about the impact of migration on the UK, we completely ignore the corresponding impact the departure of highly qualified professionals has on their countries of origin. It is undeniable that decades after the end of Empire, the UK mindset remains entirely colonial in this respect.