Tag: internet

Quote of the day by Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy: ‘You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it’ — an early declaration foreshadowing the modern era

Sun Microsystems was a huge force in the technology landscape, with its co-founder and CEO Scott McNealy an outspoken and brash maverick in the early Silicon Valley ecosystem. The company had just launched a new system, and McNealy was quick to push back on any critique centering around the implications for user data.

During an informal Q&A session with reporters, McNealy slapped down concerns that the newly launched Jini platform could pose a risk to user privacy.

The system, as it was engineered, was a revelation – but ultimately failed to catch on due to some pretty significant hardware hurdles. Designed to allow devices to communicate with and share resources, the Jini network architecture allowed unadulterated communication without configuration, driver installations, or human intervention.

It was an early and ambitious effort to establish a vision for smart homes and offices. The trouble was that it required devices to continuously upload data and lease space on networks, with the system creating a massive digital footprint.

Erosion of privacy

McNealy’s comments, unsurprisingly, drew immediate and sharp criticism from privacy advocates and campaigners. Lori Fena, then chairman of the board of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the comments were “completely irresponsible”, for example.

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‘Online Predator Network’: Court Hears Chinese Migrants in Germany Shared Rape Advice in Group Chat

They called themselves the “German driving school for experts,” but prosecutors say the true purpose of their Telegram chats was to brag about the women they raped and share tips about how to drug them.

In posts that sometimes included photos and videos of their attacks on unconscious victims, they referred to women as “cars,” sedatives as “fuel” and rape as “driving,” according to court documents. They called their victims “dead pigs.”

Investigators have been poring through several years’ worth of posts in roughly two dozen group chats on the popular messaging app that authorities believe served an online predator network of mainly Chinese men targeting mostly Chinese women in Germany. Their investigation has led to the convictions of three alleged inner circle members on rape and other charges, and the ongoing trial of a fourth man in Berlin.

“The perpetrators were characterized by a particular ruthlessness, an objectification of the victims, and the perfidious planning of their crimes,” Frankfurt chief prosecutor Dominik Mies told The Associated Press.

Major details of the investigation remain unknown, at least to the public, including how many attacks and perpetrators have been linked to the German Telegram chats and how the chats, some of which reportedly had tens of thousands of members, could have operated for so long. It’s also unclear if the chats are linked to a ballooning investigation in Europe and the Americas into drug-facilitated sexual assaults by misogynist online communities.

Under German privacy laws, prosecutors are limited in what they can say outside the courtroom, documents are restricted and, in the ongoing case in Berlin, members of the public have been forced to leave the courtroom during parts of the trial.

This may be why the investigation into the Telegram group has garnered less attention in Germany than might be expected. But members of the country’s Chinese community, mostly women, have been attending court proceedings to show support for the victims even if they don’t know them.

“What makes one really angry is to see that such groups hate women, they have no respect,” said Fu Xiao, who traveled roughly 500 kilometers (310 miles) to Berlin last week to attend the trial. “Women aren´t seen as people.”

In China, state media has covered the cases comprehensively, but wider discussion about the prosecutions on Chinese-language social media like Rednote has been partially censored. Certain tags have been more likely to get a post deleted or banned on Rednote, screenshots and searches show. But posts using less direct language have survived the censors, including ones that refer to “date rape” or the euphemistic “students studying abroad in Germany.”

China´s Ministry of Public Security and Rednote didn’t respond to requests for comment.

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Supreme Court won’t block Texas from enforcing a law requiring age verification for app downloads

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to block Texas from enforcing a state law that requires apps stores to verify users’ ages and obtain parental consent for minors seeking to download apps or make in-app purchases on mobile phones.

Justice Samuel Alito, in a pair of one-sentence orders, denied petitions by plaintiffs who claim that the Texas App Store Accountability Act violates users’ constitutional rights to free speech.

Last month, a three-judge panel from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the law can take effect. The panel suspended a district court’s ruling last December that the law is unconstitutional.

The plaintiffs suing to block the law include the Computer & Communications Industry Association and Students Engaged in Advancing Texas. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is a defendant in both cases.

Plaintiffs’ lawyers argued that the law impermissibly seeks to limit access to content protected by the First Amendment, including news and educational material.

“Equity and the public interest support relief because protecting First Amendment rights — and parents’ rights to supervise their children as they see fit, not as the government tells them they should — is always in the public interest,” wrote attorneys for Students Engaged in Advancing Texas.

Attorneys from Paxton’s office argued that the law protects children from “dangerous modern products.”

“A child with access to an app store and a mobile device (such as a tablet or smartphone) can potentially download any number of software applications, potentially agreeing to invasions of the child’s privacy and sale of the child’s data and be exposed to any conceivable content without parental consent or even parental knowledge,” they wrote.

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YouTube Warns Independent UK Creators of Impending Censorship Push From Labour Government

American video-sharing platform YouTube told users in Britain that, under pressure from the left-wing Labour Party government, independent creators will likely see their content suppressed.

The British government has been accused of attempting to silence political opposition, with YouTube telling UK creators that proposed new rules would include a “prominence regime” that would force sites like YouTube to give a “privileged position” to the BBC, ITV, Channel 4, and other legacy media.

The notice said that artificially propping up establishment media would naturally result in independent media being downranked and obscured from view, as “pushing this group forward means pushing everyone else downward. Mandatory prioritisation of broadcasters would affect how your content reaches your audience, regardless of what your audience actually wants to see.”

“Mandating prominence for established media networks would push the UK’s diverse mix of independent journalists, educators, and digital-first businesses down the line,” YouTube added.

Creators were also told that this would impact their ability to grow their communities, generate views, and ultimately earn money as a business.

The government is said to have told the site that legacy broadcasters had the “trust” of the state to provide accurate reporting, which YouTube noted implies that “digital-first voices are less credible, damaging the foundational trust that sustains the creator economy.”

This comes despite the BBC recently facing significant scandals involving the accuracy of its reporting, including last year when it was forced to apologise to U.S. President Trump after a documentary produced by the public broadcaster deceptively spliced together different sections of his speech on January 6th 2021, to falsely give the impression that he had encouraged supporters to riot, when he did the exact opposite.

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CISA: Windows BlueHammer flaw now exploited by ransomware gangs

CISA confirmed on Monday that ransomware gangs have begun exploiting a high-severity Microsoft Defender privilege escalation vulnerability that has previously been abused in zero-day attacks.

Dubbed BlueHammer, the security flaw (CVE-2026-33825) was leaked by a security researcher known as “Nightmare Eclipse” in early April, together with proof-of-concept exploit code, in protest at how the Microsoft Security Response Center (MSRC) handles the disclosure process.

“Insufficient granularity of access control in Microsoft Defender allows an authorized attacker to elevate privileges locally,” Microsoft explains in a security advisory.

Will Dormann, principal vulnerability analyst at Tharros, told BleepingComputer in April that while the issue is not easy to exploit, it gives local attackers access to the Security Account Manager (SAM) database, which contains password hashes for local accounts.

With this access, they can escalate to SYSTEM privileges and potentially take complete control of the targeted system.

“At that point, [the attackers] basically own the system, and can do things like spawn a SYSTEM-privileged shell,” Dormann said.

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Australia’s Top Censor Wants Power Over The “Ratio”

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner wants legal power to order social media companies to shield favored users from criticism and to suspend everyone piling on against them. Julie Inman Grant made the pitch on July 2, testifying to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, the government probe set up after the Bondi Beach terror attack.

She calls the tool a “notification power.” What it does is let her office tell a platform that a particular Australian account is under heavy criticism and demand that the platform punish the accounts responsible.

Her own description of the trigger runs to “insulting” and “ugly” comments stacking up beneath someone’s posts. “If there’s a pile-on, if there’s a brigade, if it’s meant to be an avalanche of online hate, we put the onus back on the platform to say, this Australian is being targeted,” she told the commission.

“We expect you to protect their account and take action against all of those people that you can see… whether it’s you just suspend them or you take them away.”

Watch the video here.

She wants the power to reach across platforms, too. The current adult cyber-abuse rules frustrate her because they force her office to “look at that specific tweet” rather than the whole swarm of replies beneath it. The fix she wants hands platforms a standing order to police disapproval on her behalf.

Grant does not think of this as censorship, of course. Asked about companies that frame their resistance as free speech, she said “it’s easy to slip a censorship label on just about anything,” and offered a softer account of her own work. “What we’re trying to do is minimize harm. Encourage as much speech as possible, but when it veers into the lane of hurting individuals, hurting communities, hurting society and undermining democracy, I think we all need to band together and take more of a stand.”

The regulator asking for authority to suspend users in bulk says her goal is more speech.

Who defines the harm that flips speech from protected to punishable? She does. Phrases like “hurting communities” and “undermining democracy” stretch far enough to cover most heated political argument, and the office reaching for them writes the definition.

Much of her testimony was a complaint that the companies keep winning. eSafety has eight cases running against X Corp, and Grant said six of them were “led by X.” She cast the legal pushback as commercial greed dressed up in principle, accusing platforms of fighting “to be able to serve, share and monetize horrific content.”

Asked whether she had actually seen platforms fight to monetize such material, she answered “I can’t imagine any other reason they would want to put it up there.”

The clearest example she offered cuts against her. After the Wakely church stabbing of Assyrian bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, eSafety sent formal removal notices to Meta and X. “Meta applied within the hour, and then of course, X Corp said, ‘We’re not taking it down, we’ll see you in court,’” Grant said.

X won the legal challenge. And the bishop whose stabbing she cited as the reason to censor went on to back Elon Musk and defend free speech from the pulpit in his first sermon after surviving the attack.

The person eSafety said it was protecting did not want her protection.

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The House Just Voted for KOSA, a Privacy and Free Speech Disaster

The House voted Monday night to build the machinery of online identity checks into federal law, packaging the mandate inside a bundle of kids online safety bills that cleared the chamber 267-117, with 47 members not voting.

It marks the first time any version of the Kids Online Safety Act, known as KOSA, has escaped the lower chamber, and the version that survived carries a structure that pushes platforms to figure out who you are before you can use them.

The legislation, called the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, or KIDS Act (H.R. 7757), stitches together more than a dozen separate bills, including KOSA, the SCREEN Act, the SAFE BOTs Act, COPPA 2.0, and the SPY Kids Act, plus data broker rules and research initiatives.

House leaders rushed it to the floor under suspension of the rules, a fast-track path requiring a two-thirds majority. Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone, who announced their agreement a week earlier, said the bill would “hold Big Tech accountable” and described months of cross-aisle work toward what Guthrie called a “workable compromise.”

If you’ve been following our updates, you’ll know the accountability positioning hides the actual design. The bill defines “know” or “knows” to mean “to know or should have known,” and that phrase runs through sections covering platforms, AI chatbots, and gaming services.

A company that fails to spot a minor faces legal exposure, which gives every platform a reason to gather more information about everyone who shows up. The text tries to defuse this, stating that nothing in it may be construed “to require the provider of a covered platform to implement an age gating or age verification functionality on the covered platform.”

The reassurance collapses on contact. A platform forbidden from ignoring a user’s age, yet liable the moment it “should have known” someone was a minor, has one move left. It starts checking ages, deploying age-estimation tools, demanding ID, or watching behavior closely enough to guess. The law does not order surveillance outright, it engineers the incentive and lets companies build the rest.

That is the First Amendment problem dressed as a child-safety provision. Verifying age means verifying identity, and identity checks sit between a person and ordinary protected activity, whether that is reading, watching, posting, or speaking. Adult websites would face explicit age-verification requirements under the package, which functionally means every visitor proves who they are before viewing lawful content. Anonymous and pseudonymous speech, the kind the Supreme Court has shielded for decades, gets harder to find the more platforms lean on identity to limit their liability.

The bill tightens how data brokers handle children’s information and updates the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to widen its reach.

But, to do that, it would require platforms that know a user is a minor to offer controls that limit communications, restrict geolocation sharing, cut compulsive-use features, and let users opt out of personalized recommendation systems, with default settings for minors set to what the bill calls “the most protective level of control with respect to privacy and safety.”

These are strong protections on paper and would be good if they applied evenly to all users, but they all depend on the platform identifying minors first, which loops straight back to the same question of how much data gets pulled from users, adult or not, to sort out who the children are.

The encryption language carries the same gap. The bill says platform requirements may not override encrypted communications and that companies must comply in ways that “do not compromise the integrity of strong encryption.” That could read as a shield until you notice that regulatory pressure to monitor behavior or flag certain users can hollow out encryption without ever formally banning it. Compliance routes around the protection the text claims to offer.

Getting the package across the floor cost the duty of care provision, the piece many child-safety groups and KOSA’s Senate authors consider the heart of the bill. The text now states that nothing in it may be construed to “impose a duty of care on a provider of a covered platform.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a KOSA co-author, wrote that “KOSA without a duty of care isn’t KOSA,” and said last week that the House version is “dead in the Senate.” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), the other co-author, agrees the provision was central. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, told reporters he stays open to negotiating with the House.

That stalemate is the most encouraging thing about this whole fight.

The Senate’s standalone KOSA (S.1748) keeps the duty of care, which would legally require platforms to “exercise reasonable care” to prevent broad categories of harm to minors. On the free speech axis, that is the more dangerous of the two bills, not the safer one. A duty of care over vaguely defined harms compels companies to police or re-engineer recommendation algorithms for lawful, constitutionally protected content, under threat of liability so open-ended that the rational corporate response is to over-remove anything that might draw a lawsuit.

So neither chamber holds the civil-liberties high ground. The Senate bill compels platforms to suppress protected speech, while the House bill conscripts them into identity verification, and a conference committee tasked with reconciling the two could just as easily graft the worst of each onto a single law as split the difference.

The good news for anyone who values either anonymity or free expression is that the two chambers, each representing a different type of civil liberties disaster, do not appear close to agreement.

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Government’s latest attempt to censor online discourse is grave threat to free speech

The government’s latest censorship Bill C-34 is framed as legislation necessary to protect children. However, it incorporates some of the worst elements of Bill C-63 – the government’s previous “Online Harms Act” that failed to pass – and adds new censorship powers.

The bill proposes regulating social media, online services, and AI chatbots through the creation of a Digital Safety Commission. The Commission will have broad discretionary power to force compliance from online services and compel the removal of any harmful or “hateful” material.

Controversially, the bill weakens the legal definition of hatred presently used by the courts, reducing the requirement from both vilification and detestation to only one of either vilification OR detestation. The result will be increased censorship and a substantial chill on controversial speech.

Importantly, existing laws capture almost all of the conduct outlined in the bill. This includes cyberbullying and non-consensual distribution of intimate images, terroristic or violent threats, hate speech under the Criminal Code, counselling self-harm (Criminal Code s.241), and possession and distribution of CSAM material.

The bill requires online service providers to create an age verification system. Though the bill doesn’t specify age verification methods, it will undoubtedly require service providers to collect biometric and/or behavioural information from both adults and children, engaging privacy rights and raising fears of security breaches. The effect will be to create a database of personal identifying information and to destroy online anonymity 

Digital services that fail to comply with directives of the Digital Safety Commission will face substantial fines based on a percentage of global revenue.

“Laws protecting children from online harm and abuse are vital. However, for the most part, they already exist. All digital services like YouTube, X, Facebook, and TikTok have reporting and takedown policies and mechanisms for illegal or egregiously harmful material. Criminal charges for hateful or threatening posts are already commonplace. Of course, laws should be enacted to address any gaps, but online age verification for children will require age verification for everyone. So while the government frames the bill as a law to protect children, its effect will be to control digital access, comprehensively surveil and punish adults for online dissent. Together with Bill C-22, it establishes an online surveillance architecture that will negatively impact every Canadian’s right to free expression. Parliament should pursue targeted child-protection measures without undermining privacy, anonymity, and freedom of expression.”

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UNPRECEDENTED: EU Parliament President Roberta Metsola Pushing Controversial Scanning of Online Content, Ignoring That EMPs Have Already Rejected the Idea Multiple Times

Another EU tyrant on the move.

Leave it to the EU to have a dizzying number of ‘chiefs’, signaling a bloated bureaucracy that has become more of a problem than a solution for the issues that European nations face.

Fasten up for the list: the European Commissioner (currently Ursula von der Leyen/VDL): a ‘member of the European Commission’s College responsible for overseeing one specific policy area (portfolio), such as trade, climate, or digital affairs.’

The President of the European Council (currently Antonio Costa): ‘Chairs summits of EU heads of state and government, drives consensus on the EU’s overall political direction and priorities, and ensures the EU’s external representation at that level’.

High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (currently Kaja Kallas): ‘Leads and coordinates the EU’s Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP), chairs the Foreign Affairs Council, represents the EU on the world stage as its chief diplomat, and serves as a Vice-President of the European Commission’.

Hold on, that’s not all. President of the European Parliament (currently Roberta Metsola): ‘Chairs plenary sessions and key internal bodies, oversees the Parliament’s work and rules, signs adopted legislation, and represents the Parliament to other EU institutions and externally’.

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The KIDS Act: A Bipartisan Mass Surveillance Megabill

Just weeks after Americans criticized the United Kingdom for imposing intrusive and heavy-handed social media rules, Congress is now advancing legislation that raises strikingly similar concerns about government overreach, privacy erosion, and the expansion of online surveillance.

A bipartisan agreement on children’s online safety legislation unveiled by House Energy and Commerce Committee leaders would impose new obligations on social media platforms, while creating powerful incentives for companies to end online anonymity.

The proposal is part of the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act (KIDS Act), an omnibus package that bundles together multiple bills, including the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), the SCREEN Act, the SAFE BOTs Act, COPPA 2.0, the SPY Kids Act, and more, as well as data broker provisions and research and education initiatives.

We obtained a copy of the bill for you here.

Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone announced Monday that they had reached agreement on the legislation, which would require social media companies to provide additional safeguards and parental tools for minors. The lawmakers said it would “hold Big Tech accountable.”

“We worked across the aisle for many months and have now found common ground on policies to significantly improve the digital environment for kids,” Guthrie and Pallone said in a joint statement.

As always, under that framing lies a familiar and deeply controversial approach: imposing broad obligations on platforms that hinge on whether companies know a user is a minor, without clearly defining how that knowledge is supposed to be obtained.

Congress has tried for years to set national rules for social media and youth safety. Those efforts have repeatedly stalled, in part because of unresolved tensions between child protection goals and fundamental privacy rights. In the absence of federal action, states have moved ahead with their own laws, often pushing even more aggressive requirements.

One of the main disputes appears to have been resolved in favor of House Republicans. According to a committee spokesperson, the agreement does not include a “duty of care” provision, a requirement backed by many child-safety advocates and several Senate lawmakers.

The bill text states that nothing in it may be construed to “impose a duty of care on a provider of a covered platform.”

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