Nice to hear they're all still having a jolly good laugh about things.

She will know that I have an unbridled enthusiasm for debate, for votes and for sitting in the Chair for extended periods listening to the intellects of Einstein and the eloquences of Demosthenes, which are so regularly on display from my colleagues in all parts of the House. I cannot get enough of it. It may seem eccentric on my part, but I love to listen to my colleagues. The more debates and the more votes, the better. I am most grateful to the right hon. Lady, of whose point of order I had only a moment’s notice, but which I enjoyed.

Moving debate in Westminster Hall misogyny and hate. Mhari Black in particular makes a very strong speech.

Guess which honourable member doesn't make a very good impression of himself early on?

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for telling me that it is International Women’s Day tomorrow. I think that is what is called mansplaining.

So in 2017, anticipating that another vote was just over the horizon, the British establishment came after Wings Over Scotland with a vengeance.

The site's editor was arrested by the Metropolitan Police on the grounds of farcically ridiculous allegations from a lunatic who we're still under their "advice" not to identify.

While no charges were brought and the case was eventually dropped, the accusation alone enabled the Met to confiscate every piece of computer equipment used to produce Wings - including two PCs, a laptop, four tablets, two phones and even the iPod Touch that we use for listening to Radio Scotland - and impound it for no reason for three months, leaving us to try to hold the site together for a quarter of the year with emergency replacement kit.

Kezia Dugdale, the then-leader of Scottish Labour, launched an extraordinary personal attack, using the pages of a tabloid newspaper and the entirety of First Minister's Questions to issue baseless smears aimed at discrediting the site and forcing us to take expensive court action not only to defend our own reputation, but that of all Yes activists from the sort of malicious slurs that the Unionist parties and media deployed throughout the first indyref.

And when we exclusively revealed in December that self-styled "grassroots" Unionist organisation Scotland In Union was in fact funded almost entirely by an elite cabal of Lords, Dukes, Earls and common-or-garden multi-millionaires, they sent in some very pricey lawyers, and the police again, to try to silence us.

(All on top of the usual daily death threats and abuse from Unionists, and their useful idiots on the Yes side too.)

But we're still here.

“You have a culture of lawlessness and fear in some of these communities where the victims know who is shooting them; the parent knows who is shooting their child. Sometimes parents are negotiating with these thugs to take the kid to certain places by arrangement.

“It is not unknown to my officers that in certain circumstances parents have dosed their kids up with powerful painkillers and alcohol to remove the impact of the ‘punishment’ shooting or beating. By colluding in this they [the parents] are hoping to negotiate less severe beatings or shootings. There is something madly wrong with society whenever parents even countenance doing that with their own children.”

Rex Tillerson, which was somehow, the most sympathetic and seemingly sane figure in the Trump administration was fired.

What I can't get my head around is there's lots of ways to kill people so if Russia wanted to do this and then deny it why use a nerve agent that supposedly can be traced right back to them?

What I can't get my head around is there's lots of ways to kill people so if Russia wanted to do this and then deny it why use a nerve agent that supposedly can be traced right back to them?

If you do the survey, that's fine. It's just that in so doing, the company sucked up all your friends' data too.

As with all forms of data analysis, I find what's possible in equal parts deeply fascinating and deeply sinister.

Planning permission has been applied for to turn the road into a car park. There are objections. WHERE WILL IT ALL END?

STOP THE QUOTE WALLS DAMMIT

OK

If it was, then a researcher could have done it by hand.

Yes, I agree. Your card was 9 hearts, right?

Agree. Parties and political organisations have been using and collating data for targeting voters for years. Just a computer is faster than going up and down tower blocks knocking on doors and matching that against turnout rolls, census data, etc. It's the combination of that with the use of narrowly targeted campaigns and extensive testing of different messages to get reactions that's the scary part. I don't think people realise how much stuff is out there.

Not sure we're actually disagreeing on this. Parties have always used data for mobilisation, organisation, and voting purposes. This is taking it to new heights, and saves getting cold in graveyards.

I agree with this. I don't think there was a kerfuffle with Obama campaign.

This is taking it to new heights

The Obama campaign app was exactly that -- a campaign app. No-one was surprised it gathered your data to use on a political campaign. The CA data came from an app run by a Cambridge University professor that purported to be for psychological research. In addition, the Obama app didn't store any data from your friends' profiles, or use it for anything other than a "send a friend a message" feature. Whereas the CA data sucked up everything it could and exfiltrated it all. These are very different things.

Wikipedia borrows the definition of "data breach" from the US DHHS as "A data breach is a security incident in which sensitive, protected or confidential data is copied, transmitted, viewed, stolen or used by an individual unauthorized to do so." That makes the data that CA worked with a breach, whereas the Obama campaign app was not.

Away from the data angle, the reps in the C4 videos were also talking about a lot more nefarious schemes to manipulate electorates such as entrapment, and they generally came across as jerks. They deny this.

"We like to talk big... vampires do. "I'm going to destroy the world." That's just tough-guy talk. Strutting around with your friends over a pint of blood. The truth is, I _like_ this world. You've got...dog racing, Manchester united. And you've got people. Billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs. It's all right here. But then someone comes along with a vision. With a real... passion for destruction. Angel could pull it off. Good-bye, Picadilly. Farewell, Leicester-bloody-Square."

How the data was obtained is the issue. The survey takers agree to it through the T&Cs and their friends who had publicly accessible profiles had those scraped for information which someone with pen and paper could (labouriously) do.

No. Some or perhaps most of the scraped data in the friends' profiles would have been only viewable to friends and not publicly, so you couldn't gather it up like this without being friends with everyone on Facebook first.

I also continue to reject the idea that this is something "someone with pen and paper could do" and therefore not a new thing. Consider Google Photos. I can search my 30k+ photos for the word "trees" and get back my pictures of trees. In theory, without machine learning, I could have paid a room full of flunkies to do that, but there aren't enough flunkies in the world for everyone to do this.

So when Google Photos launched, was this a new product the world had never seen before? I think it was. Similarly, the way CA analysed data at scale is fundamentally a different thing to how traditional human-powered campaign modelled had to operate.

Away from the data angle, the reps in the C4 videos were also talking about a lot more nefarious schemes to manipulate electorates such as entrapment, and they generally came across as jerks. They deny this.

I'm not sure they know enough about technology to be journalisting this.

So was the guy a nazi or someone just taking the piss out of nazis and making a daft joke? If it's the latter then I'm with Gervais and Davies on this particular issue.