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UK Prisons: The Great Escape

Update 24.9.26: The prison system still seems to full to bursting, with a major bout of early releases due in early October. Check out the suggestion at the end of this piece for reducing overcowding...perhaps not so off-the-wall as it sounds ? Enjoy....  Our prison system does appear to be in something of a crisis at present.... It has been full to bursting over at least the last 5 years. Reasons quoted for this include lack of investment by successive governments, over-enthusiastic sentencing policies., etc , etc.  No doubt the current administration will at some stage attempt to blame it exclusively on the now infamous ‘Tory Black Holes’ as they do for most other things that have already failed, or are currently failing, under their watch….(I wouldn't be surprised if they even blamed the Tories for their own administration's eventual demise at the hands of Reform!) The sad fact is that we really can’t afford to imprison as many people as we do – not surprising given th...
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Could AI Prove to be Humanity’s Salvation ?

There has been much angst voiced in the media recently about the risks of AI being harmful to our species, most notably by the very people involved in developing it.... This is perhaps a reasonable 'gut' reaction to a technology which is developing faster than many of us expected and has turned out to be a powerful and transformative tool in a number of areas already. Its very power could certainly create havoc in the wrong hands.... Personally, I’m not an ‘AI harm denier’ any more than I am ‘climate change effects denier’…both of these phenomena are appearing in front of our eyes, and only the cognitively blind could fail to see the risks and accept them. What’s important is how we assess and deal with them….and more to the point, how we act to mitigate, and prefereably prevent, their worst effects. There are risks, certainly, in allowing AI to continue to develop virtually unfettered as we appear still to be doing now. We should of course regulate…and on a worldwide ...
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Shadow Libraries, AI and the Casual e-Reader – Whither Publishing and Copyright ?

 Blog first published November 2022. Updated April 2023, January 2025, July 2026. Editors note: After a long period when the 'authorities' seemed to be in abeyance on take-downs of the much loved and well-used shadow-libraries, they re-started their war in early 2025 with a vengeance by taking down two of the most popular (Anna's Archive and LibGen), by forcing ISPs to introduce server blockages. I suspect the timing of this was no coincidence, given the imminence of a new US government regime likely to be less favourably inclined towards to this type of industrial censorship, and the frequent 'spats' between the UK Labour government and the new US regime. The war has continued into 2026, with no end in sight despite Trump's anti-censorship stance. This nonsense has gone on for long enough...and could easily be sorted if vested interests wanted it. High time for a look at reforming the publishing industry model, I think... See update 22.9.26 below for more detai...
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Publication Paywalls - and How to Bypass Some of Them

  Just a quick heads up on a useful tool I discovered recently while on a quest to view Medium articles.  You'll also find an update on my shadow libraries blog which you might find useful if you use these repositories. For those who haven’t come across it, Medium is a blogging platform with a (hitherto!) fairly wide following in the blogging world, where authors can contribute articles, and also receive payment if they are members and are prepared to pay a monthly subscription. Some of these articles are worth reading, but almost all of those that are remain inaccessible behind a paywall. As a new user of this platform, I did some research and discovered quickly from other sources that Medium was losing readership and contributors…much in the same way that Blogspot did some time ago, although apparently at a faster rate.   I’m convinced that this is fall-off is because of the paywall and their aggressive marketing messaging about membership subscriptions. It’s inter...
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