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Mullvad, Napoleon and Sun Tzu: it would be wise for civil society to take a look in the mirror
There is a famous dictum in warfare, attributed as a summary of the strategy of either/both Napoleon or Sun-Tzu: “If your enemy is making a mistake, do not stop them.” So if we look at this situation and flip the script: “Person who has odious political beliefs is co-owner of company that overtly supports and
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When you build tools with abstract and rather arbitrary notions of “safety” baked into them – not addressing a specific threat model – they get considerably weaker
“Gosh, who would ever have thought such a thing?” https://x.com/banteg/status/2072048614424166679
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Online Age Verification Law Could Kill Whistleblowing
Threats to online anonymity harm everyone, but one group is often overlooked: journalists and the sources who talk to them. Age verification requirements will help the Trump administration carry out its vendetta against the press by creating new avenues to identify journalists’ confidential sources. https://theintercept.com/2026/06/28/age-verification-privacy-surveillance-journalists-whistleblowers/
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It’s not about the children, it’s about how monetize surveillance: demand the illiberal, stupid, self-defeating & impossible, & then criminalise the wrong people for circumvention
Start arresting the teens and then see what happens: Australia to double penalty for social media ban breaches to $99m as tech giants accused of ‘not doing enough’ | Social media ban | The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/jun/27/australia-under-16-social-media-ban-tech-companies-penalty-double
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Britain, or Russia?
“I don’t really understand how to regulate VPNs, because it became clear to everyone fairly quickly that this is an extremely complex system and that banning or switching off VPNs is simply impossible” [he said] “If you try to shut everything down, the entire vast internet system could simply be broken. That’s obvious.” … However,
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Digital Sovereignty is a Clusterfuck
Digital Sovereignty has exactly the same problem that Cybersecurity has / always has had: it is an abstract concept which has been co-opted by the state, the state having mistaken it for a political and administrative goal that it is in their gift to create and bless, rather than an emergent property of a properly
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Gov’t “would…like Ofcom to launch a rapid assessment of what highly effective age assurance looks like for determining whether someone is over 16”
OMG. Ofcom will have to deliver acceptable / target “failure” metrics for AV & social media blocks. Maybe even false positives & false negatives. This is an epic read even though it comes from a pro-AV and somewhat slanted website. [popcorn intensifies] https://www.biometricupdate.com/202606/uk-tech-secretary-asks-ofcom-to-clarify-what-highly-effective-age-assurance-looks-like UK tech secretary asks Ofcom to clarify what ‘highly effective age assurance’
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Chips Security Act gains industry support: letter
Oh look! It’s ITAR for AI, done worse and with an option for both supply-chain AND salt-typhoon/type attacks, to no great benefit: The CSA aims to address those loopholes, mandating that chip exporters better track where advanced chips are sent, via either bespoke location-verification hardware or software that can run on existing hardware. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/chips-security-act-gains-industry-support-letter-rcna350500
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UK wants to monetize “leadership” in surveillance, censorship, age-verification to gatekeep internet, get revenue
This has always been the deal proposed by the grifters to the government of the day: *UK positions digital standards as strategic infrastructure through 2030* https://www.biometricupdate.com/202606/uk-positions-digital-standards-as-strategic-infrastructure-through-2030 …and on the SAME DAY: *UK gov’t weighs options to boost domestic digital trust services market* https://www.biometricupdate.com/202606/uk-govt-weighs-options-to-boost-domestic-digital-trust-services-market Shame about the civil liberties.
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If you are a Parent here’s One Thing you should be utterly furious about regarding the UK’s Social Media Ban
You cannot demand that children return to an analogue childhood after spending forty years dismantling the transport, community, communication and public-service infrastructure that made analogue childhoods possible
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The White House Wants Anthropic to Block All Jailbreaks. That May Not Be Possible | WIRED
White House further calls for an end to SQL injection. https://www.wired.com/story/the-white-house-wants-anthropic-to-block-all-jailbreaks-that-may-not-be-possible/
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OECD urges mandatory use of shared infrastructure to scale DPI adoption | Biometric Update
What could possibly go wrong? One key recommendation in the 2026 report is the mandatory use of shared infrastructure, and that governments must move away from siloed agency projects by legally requiring or strongly incentivizing ministries and other public entities to use common building blocks that deliver services better to the public https://www.biometricupdate.com/202606/oecd-urges-mandatory-use-of-shared-infrastructure-to-scale-dpi-adoption