With chat control 1.0 now reading everything on your phone (except end to end encrypted messages), this is only a soft launch of CC 2.0 (which is getting voted on in september) which will scan everything. Welcome to the future of mass surveilance.
I have to ask. Does democracy still exist? Even with the majority opposing (314:276), it still passed.
It always surprises me when I see some queer folks romanticising the ussr, proudly wearing ussr symbolic or stalin's portraits in their bio. Like 'fuck yeah I'm this radical communist, baby'. No, you're not. You're a fool, used by russian propaganda. Cos guess what often comes hand in hand with romanticising ussr? Yeah - complete ignorance and denial of ussr crimes. But also, as a pleasant bonus, it comes with romanticising russia and complete ignorens and denial of russia's war crimes against numerous of it's neighbor countries. Including so-called federations (cos it's not just russia it's russian federation). Should I tell you how Ichkeria (Chechnya) because a part of russian federation?
'But... but ussr meant the unity of nations! The end of racism! The end of class dividing! The end of capitalism!' You might say. No, my dear. All nations were equal in ussr, but russians were more equal than the others, if you know what I mean. They were special. They often were presented as more pure, more noble, more kind, more intelligent. You often might hear how with such ecstatic voices they said 'russian man'. Like they're saint just because they're russian. All others though... Ukrainians, for example, were considered lazy, cunning and stupid. Jews... well. God forbid, you're Jewish in ussr. And you're most certainly gone for good if you're native and non white looking lad. There were special names for all middle eastern nations in ussr. Even if you were about to forget your origin, your culture and your face and became a comrade, devoted communist - You'd still be worse than russian. Because 'russian man' (ecstatic voice here)...
Now the end of capitalism part. It didn't work, okay. If there's a way to make more human way of economy, so everyone would feel fulfilled without the need to survive - it's not communism. Even communist countries nowadays shifted to the market economy because communism didn't work. My humble opinion nobody asked about - both capitalism and communism sucks. Both these ways are inhuman.
And the cherry on the top - LGBTQA+ communities! So yeah whatever lenin was blah blah at the beginning of his sunrise to allure more people into his cult - it was never done. Like all cults (and lenin build a cult. If you look closely at whole communism history you'd see it's one, huge cult with all cult like attributes) it started with promises of liberation, better life and free food for everyone and ended up in slavery. So all your 'gay communist' communities with stalin and lenin portraits, and ussr symbols are pure clownship. A circus. Being gay in ussr was a crime. It was considered a disease, a deviation nobody tolerated. There's no lgbt+ movies, books or whatever from ussr. You know who brought you lgbt+ movies, books and art? Not ussr, not communism, but simple people, activists who put their lives on it. So if you're so pro LGBT+ do us all a favor - put in your bio faces of real activists who fought for your rights, not ussr/stalin/lenin shit who'd executed you if you dared to born in ussr.
"Capitalism and the US suck, so therefore communism and the USSR have to be good because they are the opposite" is a dumb fallacy, I've been saying this for years
Also "unity of nations" and "anti-fascism" my ass, my parents were taught that the n-word was the appropriate word to use when describing black people. Not at home, in school. My mom was born in the 70s and she still learned race theory in school, but always followed up with "oooh but they are our brothers". Sure, Jan. If you analyze literally any bit of Soviet propaganda, you realize very quickly that it just portrayed other nations and races as equal on the surface, but in reality non-white, non-russian people were always seen as lesser. The "little, dumb brother", if you will.
How about we start applying critical thinking not just to right-wing propaganda, but to Soviet era propaganda as well? Because it seems to me a lot of people completepy shut off their brains when it comes to the latter.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
I don't think that it's impossible for politicians, even nontechnical politicians, to make good tech policy. After all, the fact that no one in Congress is a microbiologist doesn't stop federal standards from delivering potable water (and it doesn't excuse the ghastly failures, such as Flint, MI):
For politicians to make good policy, they don't need to be technical experts: they need to have solid, independent, well-resourced expert agencies. Those would be the very agencies that Trump and Musk have DOGEd into oblivion, which is pretty ominous, since the work of expert agencies is how you avoid dying of food poisoning, water poisoning, air poisoning, collapsing buildings, faulty antilock brakes, train explosions and plane-crashes.
But when it comes to tech policy, politicians get it all so goddamned wrong. Partly that's because the cartel of tech companies lies to them like crazy, even under oath, leading to a kind of nihilistic refusal to believe any expert input. Mark Zuckerberg wants you to think that's it's inconceivable for you to have a social life without him eavesdropping on it, and any rule demanding this is a farce, like a demand to make water that's not wet:
Big Tech's highly resourced bullshit machine convinces some politicians that technical expertise is not to be trusted, and gives other, more cynical politicians cover for ignoring experts by saying, "Oh you people are always telling us that this or that is impossible."
For example, since the Clinton era, politicians all over the world demanded a kind of impossible encryption: encryption that works perfectly when it's doing something legitimate, like keeping hackers from pushing malware to your pacemaker or stealing your life's savings or listening in on you through your phone's microphone, but also they require that this encryption offer no protection to criminals, drug dealers, terrorists, child abusers, and other miscreants.
This really is like water that's not wet. We can make encryption that works. It's hard to get right, but when we do, it offers a wondrous level of protection from interception and eavesdropping, scrambling our data so thoroughly that you would have to consume multiple universes worth of time and space to build all the computers necessary to guess the descrambling key. We can also make encryption that doesn't work. People do this by accident all the time. Sometimes, the NSA does it on purpose (and doesn't mention that fact to the people who rely on it for their safety and integrity):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
But what we absolutely, positively, totally cannot make is encryption that both works and does not work, depending on whose secrets it is protecting. That's impossible.
But when technologists tell policymakers this, they tell us that they have every confidence in our ingenuity, and also, they can't be certain we're not telling a Zuck-style fable about how the stuff we merely disprefer is actually impossible. They tell us to NERD HARDER!
NERD HARDER! is the answer every time a politician gets a technological idée-fixe about how to solve a social problem by creating a technology that can't exist. It's the answer that EU politicians who backed the catastrophic proposal to require copyright filters for all user-generated content came up with, when faced with objections that these filters would block billions of legitimate acts of speech:
When politicians seize on a technological impossibility as a technological necessity, they flail about and desperately latch onto scholarly work that they can brandish as evidence that their idea could be accomplished.
For example, back in 2019, Trump's Bureau of Land Management tried to impose a ton of absolutely bizarre, environmentally devastating requirements on Burning Man's land-use permit. One of these requirements was to effectively ban LED lights at night (!), on the basis that these were so bright at altitude that they could disrupt nocturnal birds.
In support of this measure, the BLM cited a PhD dissertation from a physicist who developed a method for estimating light pollution. That physicist turns out to be a burner, who filed comments in the docket describing how the BLM had misapplied his work, making crude mathematical errors that led them to grossly overstate the amount of light pollution at altitude (I've just spent an hour trying to find this comment and I came up craps – if you can find it, please let me know, as it was delicious).
That kind of Annie Hall/Marshall McLuhan/"You know nothing of my work" moment is always fantastic, and especially so when politicians are demanding that technologists NERD HARDER! to realize their cherished impossibilities.
That's just happened, and in relation to one of the scariest, most destructive NERD HARDER! tech policies ever to be assayed (a stiff competition). I'm talking about the UK Online Safety Act, which imposes a duty on websites to verify the age of people they communicate with before serving them anything that could be construed as child-inappropriate (a category that includes, e.g., much of Wikipedia):
The Starmer government has, incredibly, developed a passion for internet regulations that are even stupider than Tony Blair's and David Cameron's. Requiring people to identify themselves (generally, via their credit cards) in order to look at porn will create a giant database of every kink and fetish of every person in the UK, which will inevitably leak and provide criminals and foreign spies with a kompromat system they can sort by net worth of the people contained within.
This hasn't deterred Starmer, who insists that if we just NERD HARDER!, we can use things like "zero-knowledge proofs" to create "privacy-preserving" age verification system, whereby a service can assure itself that it is communicating with an adult without ever being able to determine who it is communicating with.
In support of this idea, Starmer and co like to cite some genuinely exciting and cool cryptographic work on privacy-preserving credential schemes. Now, one of the principal authors of the key papers on these credential schemes, Steve Bellovin, has published a paper that is pithily summed up via its title, "Privacy-Preserving Age Verification—and Its Limitations":
The tldr of this paper is that Starmer's idea will not work and cannot work. The research he relies on to defend the technological feasibility of his cherished plan does not support his conclusion.
Bellovin starts off by looking at the different approaches various players have mooted for verifying their users' age. For example, Google says it can deploy a "behavioral" system that relies on Google surveillance dossiers to make guesses about your age. Google refuses to explain how this would work, but Bellovin sums up several of the well-understood behavioral age estimation techniques and explains why they won't work. It's one thing to screw up age estimation when deciding which ad to show you; it's another thing altogether to do this when deciding whether you can access the internet.
Others say they can estimate your age by using AI to analyze a picture of your face. This is a stupid idea for many reasons, not least of which is that biometric age estimation is notoriously unreliable when it comes to distinguishing, say, 16 or 17 year olds from 18 year olds. Nevertheless, there are sitting US Congressmen who not only think this would work – they labor under the misapprehension that this is already going on:
So that just leaves the privacy-preserving credential schemes, especially the Camenisch-Lysyanskaya protocol. This involves an Identity Provider (IDP) that establishes a user's identity and characteristics using careful document checks and other procedures. The IDP then hands the user a "primary credential" that can attest to everything the IDP knows about the user, and any number of "subcredentials" that only attest to specific facts about that user (such as their age).
These are used in zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP) – a way for two parties to validate that one of them asserts a fact without learning what that fact is in the process (this is super cool stuff). Users can send their subcredentials to a third party, who can use a ZKP to validate them without learning anything else about the user – so you could prove your age (or even just prove that you are over 18 without disclosing your age at all) without disclosing your identity.
There's some good news for implementing CL on the web: rather than developing a transcendentally expensive and complex new system for these credential exchanges and checks, CL can piggyback on the existing Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) that powers your browser's ability to have secure sessions. When you visit a website with https:// in front of the address (instead of just http://).
However, doing so poses several difficulties, which Bellovin enumerates under a usefully frank section header: "INSURMOUNTABLE OBSTACLES."
The most insurmountable of these obstacles is getting set up with an IDP in the first place – that is, proving who you are to some agency, but only one such agency (so you can't create two primary credentials and share one of them with someone underage). Bellovin cites Supreme Court cases about voter ID laws and the burdens they impose on people who are poor, old, young, disabled, rural, etc.
Fundamentally, it can be insurmountably hard for a lot of people to get, say, a driver's license, or any other singular piece of ID that they can provide to an IDP in order to get set up on the system.
The usual answer for this is for IDPs to allow multiple kinds of ID. This does ease the burden on users, but at the expense of creating fatal weaknesses in the system: if you can set up an identity with multiple kinds of ID, you can visit different IDPs and set up an ID with each (just as many Americans today have drivers licenses from more than one state).
The next obstacle is "user challenges," like the problem of households with shared computers, or computers in libraries, hotels, community centers and other public places. The only effective way to do this is to create (expensive) online credential stores, which are likely to be out of reach of the poor and disadvantaged people who disproportionately rely on public or shared computers.
Next are the "economic issues": this stuff is expensive to set up and maintain, and someone's gotta pay for it. We could ask websites that offer kid-inappropriate content to pay for it, but that sets up an irreconcilable conflict of interest. These websites are going to want to minimize their costs, and everything they can do to reduce costs will make the system unacceptably worse. For example, they could choose only to set up accounts with IDPs that are local to the company that operates the server, meaning that anyone who lives somewhere else and wants to access that website is going to have to somehow get certified copies of e.g. their birth certificate and driver's license to IDPs on the other side of the planet. The alternative to having website foot the bill for this is asking users to pay for it – meaning that, once again, we exclude poor people from the internet.
Finally, there's "governance": who runs this thing? In practice, the security and privacy guarantees of the CL protocol require two different kinds of wholly independent institutions: identity providers (who verify your documents), and certificate authorities (who issue cryptographic certificates based on those documents). If these two functions take place under one roof, the privacy guarantees of the system immediately evaporate.
An IDP's most important role is verifying documents and associating them with a specific person. But not all IDPs will be created equal, and people who wish to cheat the system will gravitate to the worst IDPs. However, lots of people who have no nefarious intent will also use these IDPs, merely because they are close by, or popular, or were selected at random. A decision to strike off an IDP and rescind its verifications will force lots of people – potentially millions of people – to start over with the whole business of identifying themselves, during which time they will be unable to access much of the web. There's no practical way for the average person to judge whether an IDP they choose is likely to be found wanting in the future.
So we can regulate IDPs, but who will do the regulation? Age verification laws affect people outside of a government's national territory – anyone seeking to access content on a webserver falls under age verification's remit. Remember, IDPs handle all kinds of sensitive data: do you want Russia, say, to have a say in deciding who can be an IDP and what disclosure rules you will have to follow?
To regulate IDPs (and certificate authorities), these entities will have to keep logs, which further compromises the privacy guarantees of the CL protocol.
Looming all of this is a problem with the CL protocol as being built on regulated entities, which is that CL is envisioned as a way to do all kinds of business, from opening a bank account to proving your vaccination status or your right to work or receive welfare. Authoritarian governments who order primary credential revocations of their political opponents could thoroughly and terrifyingly "unperson" them at the stroke of a pen.
The paper's conclusions provide a highly readable summary of these issues, which constitute a stinging rebuke to anyone contemplating age-verification schemes. These go well beyond the UK, and are in the works in Canada, Australia, the EU, Texas and Louisiana.
Age verification is an impossibility, and an impossibly terrible idea with impossibly vast consequences for privacy and the open web, as my EFF colleague Jason Kelley explained on the Malwarebytes podcast:
Politicians – even nontechnical ones – can make good tech policy, provided they take expert feedback seriously (and distinguish it from self-interested industry lobbying).
When it comes to tech policy, wanting it badly is not enough. The fact that it would be really cool if we could get technology to do something has no bearing on whether we can actually get technology to do that thing. NERD HARDER! isn't a policy, it's a wish.
Wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one will be full first:
made a post about how I'm relieved and excited to be alive in 2026 and how I'm glad I exist in a time where music and education and communication are so expansive and accessible and said post wasn't even up for a single hour before someone started declaring that actually there are evil revolting breaches of human rights happening right now. not even an hour
I am asking with all the kindness I can muster to please let people tentatively express their hope for the future without needing to remind them that actually, sometimes life is terrible and horrific. I am aware. please trust me I am so aware. I am alive on planet earth. it is hard to not be aware. I just also want to enjoy being alive. I don't have to be constantly miserable in order to care about other people. jesus fucking christ
the post was quite literally just about music and family and learning and growing old. and this person brought up the fucking epstein files. and rape. and cannibalism. inappropriate and unfathomably disrespectful to the victims involved. I can't even begin to imagine the thought process. please don't do this
Link Cleaner is a web app for removing tracking code, search parameters, and other junk from URL links.
I dunno if the above about Spoitfy is fully verifiable or has changed recently but I'm plugging link cleaner again. It does this job for you and perhaps more effectively and only takes like 2 seconds! It lets you test the link and gives sharing options and even do multiple links at once! I have made this website my best friend and if this stuff concerns you you should too
uh hey that person you just reblogged from used to be in our discord server but we had to kick them out because they admitted to watching t*m and j*rry... that show features violence and as such glorifies it.... when we confronted them all they said was "wtf its a show about a cat and a mouse"... if you dont believe me theres a whole callout post that features their name age and street address so you can go to their house and check... anyways you should unfollow them before people start thinking you like problematic media too :/ just trying to help
"China is such a dystopian nightmare. I can't imagine living in a place where I'm under surveillance 24/7 and the state has the possibility to control every aspect of my life by limiting or completely eliminating my basic rights if I don't do what they want. Anyway, wanna go grab a pastry from a café that only accepts digital payments and then watch a movie on Netflix on my smart TV? I also want to show you my new robot vacuum that responds to voice commands and my smart fridge that can be locked and opened with a fingerprint lock, it's all so convenient! By the way, did you hear that Western country x and y require you to verify your age through government ID or facial recognition to access certain social media platforms now? We need to do that too, social media is so harmful for kids."
That’s Louis Rossman, a repair technician and YouTuber, who went viral recently for railing against Apple. Apple purposely charges a lot for repairs and you either have to pay up or buy a new device. That’s because Apple withholds necessary tools and information from outside repair shops. And to think, we were just so close to change.
This guy inspired me to repair my own macbook. First of all, you should know that I am not… like, I have to look up HOW to look up what my computer specifications are. Tech, that ware either soft or hard, is not a subject in which I experience comfort or competence.
But my puppy peed on my keyboard, and I asked the apple store, or the fucking mac cafe, or the godsdamn Computer House Chill Zone or whatever cute ass name they have for their bullshit store, and they said it would be TWELVE HUNDRED DOLLARS TO REPLACE MY KEYBOARD. I’m not even exaggerating.
So I asked the internet, well how hard IS it to repair? And I saw this guy’s video, and while I am no techie, I AM fueled by spite, so I was all “oh, they do that shit on purpose specifically so they can charge me $1200 bucks or make me buy a new computer hunh? FUCK THEM” and I bought all the tools I needed for about $25 and I bought all the parts I needed for about another $25 and I watched a few tutorial videos, and I replaced my own keyboard.
So, once you are doing the actual deed, it becomes pretty obvious that they are finding creative ways to make this much harder than it has to be on purpose. On thing that stood out to me is, instead of all the tiny screws being the same size, there are about two dozen very slightly different sizes. They could easily be all the same size, or like, two sizes at most, but no.
These mother fuckers will take a panel that screws into place and they’ll use a different size screw for each corner. They are so close that you almost cannot tell them apart visually, but they each will only screw into the matching corner. Like, it’s a pretty clear “fuck you” to anyone trying to do repairs.
anyway, this guy is also fueled by spite, and doing holy work, and I have mad respect
No, actually, i want cables and not bluetooth, i don't want touchscreens, i want buttons and knobs, i want to be able to take the battery out of my phone, i want to charge my phone and plug in head phones at the same time, i want a cd drive in my laptop and not have to buy an external drive, i want a car without a display, i want to turn on the lights with a switch not with my voice, i want to have a paper cinema ticket not a QR code, i want to listen to illegally burned music on a 00s cd player, i want to watch movies that i actually own, i want to read news once a day on paper, i want to aimlessly flick through magazines and not doomscroll on social media, i want to write emails and not talk to chatbots, i want to own stuff without hundreds of digital subscriptions, i want
While watching a DVD from the library my TV popped up a message saying to press a button if I wanted to watch this from additional providers.
It's never done that before so I looked it up and turns out Roku TVs have added all sorts of creepy things in the privacy section since I last checked.
One of which being they take screenshots from what you're watching and send them to third parties to identify it.
Fucking hell! Remember when every fucking device in your life wasn't a spy implanted in your home and working against your interests to try and sell your data? Remember how nice that was??
Remember when the TV was just a tool that would play the things you plugged into it?
is shaving defiance? is promoting plastic surgery girl's girl behaviour? is makeup self care? are heels empowering? is reading apolitical? is voting feminist? is giving up on your career freeing? is starting a traditional family with 5 kids my own choice? is having rights feminist?
