Gateklons

The Russian Duma will consider a bill to ban the use of cash to buy real estate as part of measures to clean up the economy.
What are all the thugs with suitcases full of cash supposed to do then—sleep in the train station? (Russia is the only place I have seen suitcases full of cash.)

If anyone is selling you the opportunity to make money, *you* are how *they* make money and the 'secret' they have is convincing people like you to pay them.

There will be a lot of smoke & mirrors to make it look like you have agency, but the product is your gullibility.

To be very clear, that lady in the NYT article is not making any money with her hundreds of AI slop books.

She makes money by *convincing people* she makes money that way and getting them to pay her to teach them how to do it.

It's an evolved MLM, and the NYT is helping market it.

The weirdest thing is that these dudes do something incredibly stupid with AI and then the rush online to tell us all about it.

What Iran’s Internet Shutdown Reveals About Starlink Iran reveals that satellite internet is not immune to disruption and that it is embedded in the same systems of sovereignty and control.

Governments don’t “break” the internet during shutdowns—they use powers already baked into law and infrastructure, writes Dinah van der Geest. Iran’s 2026 shutdown shows why Starlink and satellite internet were never the censorship-proof fix they were sold as.

I dunno….it’s not really ‘engineering’ though, is it? That would require understanding of the underlying components, purposeful choices and a degree of rigour in their application. It’s like operating a vending machine and claiming to be a chef

Wow, 2006… that was the era of, what, EnCase 4? Not sure that ancient software, oft used to investigate compromised computers, would load on a current Windows system, but its vulnerable driver still works to enable intrusions. Oh, the irony.

ICE and CBP’s Face-Recognition App Can’t Actually Verify Who People Are ICE has used Mobile Fortify to identify immigrants and citizens alike over 100,000 times, by one estimate. It wasn't built to work like that—and only got approved after DHS abandoned its own privacy r...

Technology that doesn't work is a desired feature to the surveillance state, not a bug. When everyone is a "maybe" match, then probably cause can be manufactured to justify whatever it is one wanted to do in the first place. www.wired.com/story/cbp-ic...

I would never argue all self-publishing is bad, but I realized years ago that Amazon designed KDP for exactly this purpose: to incentivize people to adopt new tech to churn out more slop titles in a clear attack on the publishing industry with little regard for readers or even the writers themselves

EU's Digital Sovereignty Depends On Investment In Open-Source And Talent While Europe accounts for a substantial share of global open source developers, its contribution to open source-derived infrastructure remains fragmented.

Europe already contributes a major share of global open source talent. Members of the European Open Source Academy say fragmentation, not skills, is holding back EU's sovereignty ambitions.

Sousveillance: When the Public Surveils the Surveillance State In a time of repeated violent clashes between civilians and federal law enforcement, particularly involving Department of Homeland Security operatives, recording and documenting their activity is crucial to ensuring truth and accountability.What has been demonstrated over the last month, following t...

If you're planning on recording federal agents, turn biometrics off on your phone and opt for long passwords instead, EFF’s @legind.bsky.social told @thefulcrum-us.bsky.social. thefulcrum.us/civic-engag...

gotta abuse government antitrust review to ensure Larry Ellison can buy every media company under the son in order to construct state television

Next up: Matt Stoller quoted in Politico saying this is a good faith example of the administration's populist monopoly busting bonafides

Exclusive | Justice Department Casts Wide Net on Netflix’s Business Practices in Merger Probe As it probes bids for Warner, the department is asking if the streamer has engaged in conduct that could make it a monopoly.

told ya

From the Piracy community on Reddit: No more vpn allowed on YouTube Explore this post and more from the Piracy community

YouTube seems to be at least trialing out blocking VPNs and proxies

I really fear what sort of internet the future has in store for us. Probably where you have to identity yourself to every service and where anonymity and VPN use are increasingly illegal.

www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/s/3...

New York lawmakers propose a bill to impose a three-year moratorium on data center development, making NY at least the sixth state to introduce such legislation (Molly Taft/Wired)

Main Link | Techmeme Permalink

If we want digital sovereignty, we should dismantle the copyright law which protects US tech from interoperable competition.
They already broke their side of the bargain.
It will keep us secure.
It will even benefit the economy, for those who only care about money.

pluralistic.net/2026/01/30/z...

From Cory Doctorow: Eurostack is about to run into a wall: Article 6 of the EU's Copyright Directive, prohibits reverse-engineering and modification of tech products. It's a law that the US Trade Rep lobbied for by promising tariff-free access to the US for Europe's exports (which Trump has broken)

"Open source software that doesn't spy on us"

"This proves what many have long suspected — that even the CEOs of the largest AI companies know their mass exploitation of copyrighted works is unfair and unsustainable.” @ednewtonrex.bsky.social

In politics, what is believed has always mattered more than what is true. The difference is that today, AI can manufacture belief at industrial scale and zero marginal cost.

How Bluesky Transformed their Safety Operations with Osprey Robust Open Online Safety Tools or ROOST is a new non-profit entity designed to address the urgent need for accessible, high-quality safety tools in the rapidly evolving digital landscape.

How do you protect 39M users from AI-driven abuse?

We’ve just published a deep dive into how @bsky.app uses Osprey to handle the scale of the AT Protocol firehose.

roost.tools/blog/how-blu...

and the model of the individual journalist running a whole damn newsletter where they spend a lot of time marketing to patrons is NOT the salvation of journalism anyway

YouTube video by ThioJoe Microsoft Fixed Windows... But Only For Europe (Force It Anyway)

Interesting (and illegal) that Microsoft ties EU-exclusive (DMA) features to the device set up region and not the current region. youtu.be/MfBNxGw_5J8

This.

If you value security and privacy you should support APIs like WebBluetooth, WebUSB, WebSerial and WebHID. The web is so much safer than native. Looking at you Safari and Firefox.

Web Bluetooth API support · Issue #1001 · web-platform-tests/interop Description https://webbluetoothcg.github.io/web-bluetooth/ Specification W3C web-feature https://web-platform-dx.github.io/web-features-explorer/features/web-bluetooth/ Test Links No response Addi...

This comment from Espruino on Web Bluetooth is 😘

Web Bluetooth has been avail. on billions of devices, for several years, and I can't seem to find any instances of abuse. In the mean time I've lost count of the times hardware I've purchased has required me to install a dubious app to make it work.

Yes, I think so, see the other replies to the original post.

Commission, chatbot developer, softlaw authors, legal community, news reporting, what's generally written about the law etc. Depends on the training data.

The European offensive against encrypted phone evidence | Computer Weekly Over the past four years, I have handled numerous international cases involving SkyECC, Ennetcom, EncroChat, and other PGP- or crypto-phone networks. These networks were designed to guarantee privacy ...

The European offensive against encrypted phone evidence

Defendants and lawyers are demanding transparency about digital evidence from police hacking operations used in criminal prosecutions across Europe following a series of critical court judgments.

www.computerweekly.com/opinion/The-...

Art. 82 GDPR Right to compensation and liability under GDPR - Joint Controllership

GitHub - laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist: A huge blocklist of manually curated sites that contain AI generated imagery for uBlock Origin & uBlacklist. A huge blocklist of manually curated sites that contain AI generated imagery for uBlock Origin & uBlacklist. - laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist

github.com/laylavish/uB...

And unlike traditional soft law like guidelines and opinions, it's quite questionable if chatbot output (or training data for that matter) can be challenged before the CJEU as invalid.