internet – Hellbound and Down

Michigan Retiree Without Internet Connection Credited with $4,500 in ActBlue Donations

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Charlie LeDuff said in a Wednesday report that federal records had tied an 88-year-old retiree in Milan, Michigan, to nearly $4,500 in new ActBlue donations over six weeks, among them four logged on a day she had no internet access.

LeDuff reported that 562 transactions were attributed to Elizabeth Waffle during that stretch. Four of them, totaling $22, posted the very day he first visited her rural trailer, where the power, water, and internet are all off.

During that first visit, LeDuff and Waffle tried to make a donation together and could not get online.

“Last time we were here, remember, we tried to make a donation,” LeDuff said, recounting the exchange in a follow-up interview.

Among the new transactions was $51 logged for Abdul El-Sayed, whom LeDuff called “the king of the Michigan micro-donors.” El-Sayed won the Democrat Senate primary in August by under a percentage point and faces Republican Mike Rogers in November, in a contest analysts rate as a possible tipping point for Senate control.

The retiree lost her house to a fire two years ago and has lived in the trailer since. She said the figures made no sense to her. Federal filings reviewed in July had attributed 14,696 donations to her over five years — roughly eight a day — a tally LeDuff put at more than $130,000.

When the reporter returned last week with printouts, the widow turned on him, asking whether he was building a hit piece on the platform.

“I think it’s a bunch of hogwash,” Waffle said.

She suggested Republicans cheat too, and agreed when LeDuff asked if her view was to “fight fire with fire.” Then she softened.

“I believe in honesty,” she said. “I do care if somebody is fudging and putting stuff in.”

Asked whether she wanted him to keep looking, Waffle agreed. “Yeah, if they are,” she said.

Not every independent review matches the Michigan Enjoyer’s totals. The Center Square reported that FEC records show $100,295 in contributions tied to Waffle’s name across three cycles, and noted that ActBlue’s Tandem Fundraising tool can split a single donation form across many campaigns, generating multiple logged transactions from one gift.

The renewed attention follows months of federal scrutiny of the Democrat fundraising platform. ActBlue CEO Regina Wallace-Jones repeatedly invoked her Fifth Amendment rights before the House Administration Committee this year. President Donald Trump directed the Justice Department in April 2025 to examine whether online fundraising platforms had processed illegal contributions.

Keep reading

Florida Wants to Put an Age Gate on the Entire Internet

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has announced a legislative proposal that would bring age verification to the app store, the operating system, and AI chatbots.

The announcement was made at Polk State College in Winter Haven, and Uthmeier was joined by Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd and education leaders.

Under the proposal, app stores and similar marketplaces would have to “determine the user’s age, link minors to a parent’s account, and obtain parental consent before a minor downloads or buys an app from a covered platform.”

In addition, the operating systems would have to “apply age-appropriate restrictions at the device level based on the user’s age,” while AI chatbot operators and platforms “must determine account holder’s age.”

The proposal, that has not yet been turned into a bill, is full of invasive promises, including that “all age determination must use commercially reasonable, privacy-protective methods,” as if that’s possible.

However, no method is named, and this is the same promise made with most age-check laws, while reports of identity document leaks keep showing that the promise is not being kept. As Reclaim The Net reported in April, Discord’s earlier experiment with government ID age checks ended in a massive breach that exposed over 70,000 government-issued IDs.

Other provisions of the proposal include forcing social media accounts of those aged 14 to 17 to have a “quiet mode” that blocks access from 11 pm to 7 am, and from 8 am to 3 pm on school weekdays. The release says, “Muting notifications is not enough.”

For the same age group, screen time would be capped at two hours a day and 60 hours a month, “including messaging and long-form content.” Like counts would be hidden, autoplay and infinite scroll would be off unless a parent turns them on, and cosmetic filters would be disabled. Teen accounts would not be recommended to unconnected adults, who may not message them. Every three days, teens would get a prompt to switch to a non-personalized feed that they cannot dismiss.

Reports of child sexual exploitation would get human review within 48 hours, with a “one-strike” rule for adult offenders.

AI chatbots would not be allowed to offer minors features that “simulate companionship through personification, emotional engagement, user-data retention, unsupervised therapy, sexual content” or ones that “suggest the chatbot is a real human” or “encourage isolation or discourage help from appropriate adults.”

The press release said that knowing or reckless violations would be considered unfair practices under Florida Statutes section 501.1736, and would carry a fine of up to $50,000 per violation. The AG’s office would also be able to “maintain a public website to track incidents.”

Uthmeier said, “Parents deserve real control, and companies must design for safety, not addiction.” He also noted that “Florida already prohibits social media accounts for anyone under 14, and the Eleventh Circuit just upheld that law. The Safe Screens Act goes further.”

“If you invite Florida’s children onto your platform, you have a duty to keep them safe,” he also said.

Judd, meanwhile, praised the proposal, saying, “It takes the power and determination of an Attorney General to keep large social media and gaming companies from exploiting and endangering our children.”

Keep reading

Rush is on to patch a software vulnerability that could impact 70% of websites worldwide

Governments and corporations worked throughout the night on urgent security updates after the AI-assisted discovery of vulnerabilities in a programming language vital to 70% of websites globally.

Many government sites appeared to be functioning normally Thursday, but outages or limited service continued while security work was under way.

The FBI’s cyber division warned on Wednesday that the vulnerabilities could allow malicious actors to remotely execute code in the programming language, PHP, which powers websites and web applications. That raised the risk of sensitive data and networks being compromised, said the agency, which recommended that operators take websites offline if they can’t update them immediately.

In Britain some “limited” government services may temporarily be offline while work is carried out to address potential cybersecurity issues, the prime minister’s office said.

“Work has already taken place across Government to identify and fix potential exposures to our systems, and our experts are continuing to work closely with both OpenAI and international partners on this issue,” a spokeswoman said Thursday.

“No large public-facing critical services are being affected by the exercise, but some limited services may temporarily be offline while security work is carried out, the spokeswoman said.

The two critical flaws identified by AI could allow bad actors to get unauthenticated access to sites which, in theory, could allow them to control a web server remotely without needing a password, said James Sullivan, Director of Cyber and Tech at the Royal United Services Institute in London. That could allow a hacker to steal data, alter data or use the system as a platform from which to launch other attacks, he said.

Taking websites offline while fixing the problem is “good practice,” and appropriate cyber risk management but it’s “staggering” that some of the flaws are more than a decade old, Sullivan said.

Artificial intelligence agents helped uncover the vulnerabilities. In a blog post, OpenAI said it had led a coalition of researchers, security providers and others to address vulnerabilities in PHP over the past two months.

OpenAI called the flaws “one of the most impactful security issues in recent memory.” It said AI appeared to find the vulnerabilities before any attackers did.

Keep reading

Eleventh Circuit Lets Georgia Social Media Age Checks Proceed

A federal appeals court has given a green light to a controversial part of a Georgia law that requires social media platforms to verify the age of every user, and in the case of those under 16, obtain parental consent.

The ruling came on Thursday, October 15, from a panel composed of Judges Newsom, Luck and Tjoflat, with Judge Kevin Newsom writing the opinion.

The case now goes back to the district court, but the decision did not address whether the law is ultimately constitutional – only that NetChoice went about its lawsuit the wrong way and did not provide enough evidence to prove the law is not constitutional.

Paul Taske, director of the NetChoice Litigation Center, said, “While we are disappointed in the Eleventh Circuit’s ruling, the court notably did not hold that SB 351 is constitutional.”

On June 26, 2025, Judge Amy Totenberg of the Northern District of Georgia ruled that the law was too vague, that it was preempted by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), and that it likely violated the First Amendment, and blocked it.

The law’s social media part requires platforms to “make commercially reasonable efforts to verify the age of account holders” and obtain a parent’s consent for anyone under 16. For those under 16, platforms can only use age and location for ad targeting.

According to the court’s own summary, the law “requires platforms within its ambit to verify the ages of all their users.”

If a platform does not verify, it must “apply the special conditions applied to minors under this chapter to all account holders.” The ways a platform can confirm a parent include “Collecting information related to the minor’s parent’s or guardian’s government issued identification or financial or payment card information.”

The attorney general can seek up to $2,500 for each violation.

There is also another section of the law that requires sites that are more than 33.33 percent “harmful to minors” to check every visitor’s age, including by submitting government-issued ID. This part of the law has been in force since July 1, 2025, and was not challenged by NetChoice.

The Eleventh Circuit panel found that NetChoice had standing to sue but did not meet the test set by the Supreme Court in Moody v. NetChoice to prove the law was unconstitutional in a facial challenge – that is, across the full range of its application. The group had to show that the law was unconstitutional across the board, and it did not.

“NetChoice hasn’t provided even a full list of its own members to which SB 351 applies,” Judge Newsom wrote.

“We’ve learned the facial-challenge lesson the hard way,” the ruling states. “We needn’t address the merits of its First Amendment claim,” it continues.

The panel also reversed the lower court’s ruling that said the law was too vague and that it was preempted by Section 230.

Attorney General Chris Carr said, “This is a major win for Georgia families and a huge blow to those who would stand in the way of commonsense solutions to protect our kids.”

Keep reading

British Government Reportedly Plotting Internet Tax to Prop Up BBC

The left-wing UK government is reportedly planning to introduce an internet tax to prop up the financially struggling BBC public broadcaster.

Currently, everyone who watches broadcast television in Britain must pay the government an £180 ($239) annual licence fee, whether they watch the BBC or not. The fee was originally used to fund the BBC’s radio broadcasts, but was later expanded to incorporate TV following the Second World War. Now, amid the rise of streaming services, the left-wing Labour Party government is said to be planning on extending the effective tax to the internet.

According to The Independent, which cited a Whitehall source, plans to change the BBC’s charter will be made public before Christmas, with the present agreement set to expire in December of next year.

The source said the so-called “YouTube tax” will be imposed on internet-based video platforms to stop people from avoiding the television licence fee by watching content on computers, phones, or tablets. This comes as about two million people have stopped paying the BBC television licence fee over the past five years, and 539,000 over the past year, up to April.

If the government imposed an internet fee, an estimated three to four million more people would likely be on the hook to fund the BBC. Yet this would still likely be insufficient to meet the broadcaster’s budget shortfalls.

Nevertheless, the civil service source told the Independent that the additional money could be spent countering “conspiracy theories and fake news” that they claimed helped Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party rise in working-class regions of Britain.

This negative attitude by the civil service and the BBC towards Reform may reflect the party’s vow to abolish the BBC licence fee altogether and force the broadcaster to compete on an even footing with private media.

Keep reading

Every Bad Idea Australia Ever Had About the Internet, Now in One Bill

A “safety net upstream” – that’s how Australia’s Communications Minister Anika Wells described the intent behind the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026, introduced to the country’s Parliament on Thursday.

Wells was making the announcement hours before she was to address the National Press Club. The bill, which is 90 pages long, carries a civil penalty of up to 60,000 penalty units, or $109.2 million, for failing the duty.

In Parliament, Wells said, “It moves the safety net upstream to the people who design the product to stop the harm before it ever reaches an Australian.”

At the Press Club, she put it this way: setting “basic safety standards for the online services we use every day” will see the platforms regulated “just like we have in every other industry.”

Wells said that the goal is to “shift the burden from the shoulders of victims to the companies that are creating the environments where harms occur.”

She added: “To make this abundantly clear, we have removed the ministerial rule-making power to define new harms in the final bill.”

Instead, she said, “New harms can be added by parliament through legislative amendment.”

The takedown changes in Schedule 1 kick in the day after Royal Assent, while the duty of care itself comes into force 12 months later.

In September, the exposure draft gave the minister the power to add, by instrument, any material “that the Minister is satisfied may cause serious harm.” That power is now gone.

The bill does not at any point ask platforms to balance their “duty of care” with the need to protect freedom of expression and privacy of users.

Section 26 sets the duty: a platform “must take appropriate action to ensure a safe online environment, including by taking effective measures to mitigate risks.”

Section 26A spells out what counts as “appropriate” and “effective.” The matters to be taken into account “include” how far the measures achieve “a safe online environment,” how much they reduce the risk of harmful material, “the impact on the security of the online service,” and “whether the action or measures are or would be proportionate to the level of risk.”

Section 26A(3) states: “The cost of the action or measures must not be taken into account.”

Nowhere in this is freedom of expression or privacy mentioned. The word “encryption” does not appear at all in the 90 pages, nor do the phrases “freedom of expression” or “free speech.”

In the UK Online Safety Act – which is no friend of free speech, either – there is at least a section (22) that imposes on platforms, when deciding on safety measures, “a duty to have particular regard to the importance of protecting users’ right to freedom of expression within the law,” and a matching duty on privacy.

The Australian bill has no such provision.

Keep reading

Government-Funded Group Helped Push Australia’s Digital Censorship Bill

Teach Us Consent, a group whose latest financial statements show it is nearly 90 percent funded by the Australian government, was one of those who supported the government’s Digital Duty of Care bill, and even stood beside Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese as he presented it.

The bill, that the group lobbied for privately and publicly, is a censorship law. It will force platforms to police content more stringently, and gives a minister the power to add to the list of “harms” that they must protect against. The eSafety commissioner will be able to issue removal notices, and can even create “sock puppet” accounts to patrol the internet, and fine platforms up to A$109.2 million.

Teach Us Consent wrote to the Prime Minister’s office on March 30, 2026, in a “private letter” that was co-signed by Digital Rights Watch and Reset Australia, to ask for a meeting to discuss the bill. An adviser replied the next morning, and a meeting was set for April 9. On September 8, the group was by the Prime Minister’s side as he announced the censorship bill, calling it “an example of change from the bottom-up, my Government listening and acting.”

Teach Us Consent then announced that the government “heard our calls and committed to the #FixOurFeeds campaign.” And: “We did it.” But the group did not do it on its own: in the 2024/25 financial year, it had “total revenue of $2,738,561, representing a substantial increase of approximately 975% from the previous financial year’s total of $254,807.” Of that, $2,436,156 was “government funding” – 89 percent.

This is not money the group received to lobby – the government gave it for “Consent resources” aimed at people 16 and older. But the grant guidelines, released under freedom of information, shows that the Department of Social Services approved the content strategy.

The government also gave Teach Us Consent $4.4 million for a porn literacy campaign. The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet grant was approved on March 6, 2026.

The bill’s exposure draft was released on September 8, and it reveals that the duty to protect against “harm” will be imposed on social media, games, apps, and AI chatbots.

The eSafety commissioner will have the power to issue removal notices to companies, and the minister will be able to add any material “that the Minister is satisfied may cause serious harm.”

The eSafety Commissioner may assume a “false or fictitious identity” – a sock puppet – and “generate material using an online service (including by means of artificial intelligence).”

Those powers apply “despite anything to the contrary in any other law.” Penalties will reach A$109.2 million.

Opposition communications spokesperson Sarah Henderson said: “It provides the minister with unfettered powers to make any regulation into what she would describe as serious harm.” And: “The government could shut down any content or material that they deem to be harmful.”

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said: “It’s not about censorship. It’s about giving people control themselves over what they see.”

Network Affects called the feed-choice framing “a ruse,” finding the only explicit reference in the draft is “by providing control over the kind of content that is recommended for the user”:

“Fourteen vague words in a Bill containing more than fourteen thousand.”

The group had a specific proposal for the legislation, the “Fix Our Feeds” campaign. The page for the campaign on the group’s website states that “it takes just 23 minutes for a social media account mimicking a 16-18 year old boy to be fed misogynistic content, regardless of the account’s viewing preferences.”

The claim was repeated by Minister Tanya Plibersek on ABC Insiders, and it is based on a study conducted by Dublin City University. But the study used only ten accounts, and no real teenagers were involved. Instead, the researcher “watched and liked the video” when shown problematic content.

Keep reading

The Permission Grid: A Blueprint for a Permanent Slave Class

Shoe-horned into the permission grid.

It’s what they want and you know what? I think it’s what they’ll get. They’ll get it because there is a loss of agency amongst the populace. The pushback to this Orwellian nightmare is… in a word, pathetic.

The EU wants a passport for the peasants to access the internet.

The justification. Why, of course. The kids. Who wouldn’t want to protect children? Only a psychopath or a pedophile. You’re not a psychopath or a pedophile, are you?

A digital identity system, tied to age verification, with a specific carve-out written into the design: “The new age verification system cannot be bypassed via VPN.”

They’re not just building a verification layer. They’re closing the one exit that lets the peasants opt out of it. VPNs exist for exactly one reason that matters here — they let you decide who gets to know where you are and who you are.

Blocking VPN circumvention isn’t a technical footnote. That’s the point. Now, I’m not a tech nerd, so I’ve no idea if this is mere posturing by these psychopaths, and if it is actually possible for them to achieve this… technically. The truth is, most of the peasants will simply comply. The cage is compliance of the mind, and most are already slaves.

The above isn’t happening in isolation. Look at where Europe has been walking, one regulation at a time:

Cash transactions banned above €10,000. Bitcoin purchases require an ID above €1,000. Privacy coins banned outright. MiCA compliance costs pushing an estimated 90% of crypto firms out of the market.

Each of these, taken alone, gets defended in the same way these parasitic pedophile satanists always defend their actions: as consumer protection, anti-money-laundering policy, or tax compliance.

Taken together, they form something else entirely: a system where every transaction, every wallet, every website you visit resolves back to a verified identity, and where the tools that let you route around that — cash, privacy coins, VPNs — are being systematically removed.

This is the architecture of permission-based participation. Not “here’s what’s illegal.” Instead: “Here’s what you’re allowed to do, and here’s how we confirm it’s you doing it.”

Keep reading

Censorship Advocates Seek To Use Bots And Anonymous “Sock Puppet” Accounts For Themselves While Denying Them To Others

Political leaders across the West have said for a decade that governments must end online anonymity to shut down fake accounts known as bots, particularly those from Russia. “I want to see real names on the internet,” said German Chancellor Friedrich Merz in February. “In a democracy, citizens have the right to privacy,” said Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez at Davos in January 2025, and “not to anonymity or impunity,” proposing to tie every social media account to a European digital identity wallet. Greece’s digital governance minister proposed in April 2026 to link every profile to a verified identity because “The major problem behind anonymity is toxicity.” French President Emmanuel Macron declared that his priority was “to demand the disappearance of fake accounts” and “these famous bots, these troll farms.”

But now the advocates of government censorship of legal speech are demanding the legal power to wage information warfare through anonymous accounts and an explicit “sock puppet” strategy. Buried in the Australian government’s new censorship bill is a definition: “A sock puppet identity is a false or fictitious identity assumed by a person in the course of using, or carrying out any activity in relation to, an online service.” The legislation goes on not to warn of bad actors using sock puppets but rather to authorize the eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, to create and use sock puppets to “disseminate” information.

Keep reading

	Bigus Macus on Education Department Calls For…
	freemattpodcast on Trump Admin Weighs Emergency P…
	freemattpodcast on Muslim-Majority Turkey Detains…
	Bigus Macus on DOJ Seizes Over $560,000 in Cr…
	Study: Homeschool Ki… on Study: Homeschool Kids Outperf…