Tag: internet

FBI Has Launched 250 Probes Tied To Online Networks That Prey On Minors

The FBI has been investigating at least 250 subjects allegedly tied to violent online networks that prey on minors.

The networks, under investigation by all of the FBI’s 55 field offices, are known as “764” but have other names.

“The FBI is growing increasingly concerned about a loose network of violent predators who befriend minors and other vulnerable individuals through popular online platforms and then coerce them into escalating sexual and violent behavior,“ the FBI said in a May 8 statement to The Epoch Times, noting this includes ”pushing victims to create graphic content, child sexual abuse material (CSAM), harm family pets, cut themselves with sharp objects, or attempt suicide.”

“Some of these predators even watch live-streamed self-harm and other violent content.”

The FBI had issued a public service announcement on March 6, warning about “a sharp increase” in the activity of “764” and other such online networks.

In targeting minors, the bureau said, these networks “use threats, blackmail, and manipulation to coerce or extort victims into producing, sharing, or live-streaming acts of self-harm, animal cruelty, sexually explicit acts, and/or suicide.”

“The footage is then circulated among members of the network to continue to extort victims and exert control over them,” it said in the March announcement.

The platforms exist on social media, gaming platforms, and mobile applications, with the victims usually being between the ages of 10 and 17, though some aged 9 have also been targeted, according to the FBI.

“These violent actors target vulnerable populations to include children, as well as those who struggle with a variety of mental health issues, such as depression, eating disorders, or suicidal ideation,” the bureau said.

Predators, they said, usually “groom their victims by first establishing a trusting or romantic relationship before eventually manipulating and coercing them into engaging in escalating harmful behavior designed to shame and isolate them.”

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Trump says he’s ending Biden’s ‘Digital Equity’ program — and Democrats are freaking out

Democrats are furious at President Donald Trump for saying that he will shut down the Digital Equity Act signed into law by former President Joe Biden.

The president said Thursday that he wanted to end the program signed into law in 2021, which spent billions ostensibly to expand internet access to underserved communities.

“I have spoken with my wonderful Secretary of Commerce, Howard Lutnick, and we agree that the Biden/Harris so-called ‘Digital Equity Act’ is totally UNCONSTITUTIONAL,” wrote Trump on Truth Social.

“No more woke handouts based on race!” he added. “The Digital Equity Program is a RACIST and ILLEGAL $2.5 BILLION DOLLAR giveaway. I am ending this IMMEDIATELY, and saving Taxpayers BILLIONS OF DOLLARS!”

Some of the funds allocated for the bill have already been handed out, including to some red states like Kansas, Alabama, and Arkansas. Defenders of the bill deny the president’s allegation that it is racist and claim that the legislation hardly even mentions race, according to the New York Times.

Democrat Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, who authored the bill, expressed her outrage at the suggestion.

“It is absolutely insane that resources meant to help red and blue communities—everyone from local school districts and libraries to workforce training programs and Tribes—close the digital divide will be illegally blocked because the President doesn’t like the word equity,” wrote Murray.

“Americans are sick and tired of extremist right-wing culture wars being forced down our throats,” she added. “Republicans will have to explain to their constituents why this Republican administration doesn’t believe their local library should get funding to help seniors navigate telehealth options or why middle schoolers in rural districts shouldn’t get laptops.”

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India Poised to Approve Starlink, Provided It Supports User Surveillance and Content Censorship

India’s Ministry of Communications has issued a memorandum that details the conditions under which the country’s authorities would approve licenses to Starlink and other Global Mobile Personal Communication by Satellite (GMPCS) companies.

A set of rules required of these operators is interpreted in some reports as an obligation to agree to facilitate surveillance and censorship.

At the same time, it is acknowledged that most countries impose similar rules – but the memo and its provisions are above all framed as a test for Starlink owner, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, and his commitment to free speech.

Starlink has shown interest in entering the Indian market and has service resale deals with two of the country’s largest telecommunications firms. But making those deals operational depends on being granted a license, with the memorandum now explaining the 29 conditions that companies must meet.

GMPCS operators will have to ensure security clearance for gateway/hub location in India, as well as that functionality such as lawful interception facility, monitoring/control facility of user terminals, data traffic routing, etc., are located in the country.

Unregistered terminals will be immediately disconnected, while those registered for one location and then moved will be locked.

“Rogue for malicious activities” terminals are to be blocked without delay.

During hostilities, those issued GMPCS licenses must be able to restrict or deny service either based on specific geo-locations or to individuals or groups of subscribers.

Another requirement is to set up special monitoring zones 50 kilometers within the land borders and the exclusive economic zone (200 nautical miles).

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The Net Neutrality Hydra: Twice Decapitated, Still Standing

We still use the internet under net neutrality regulations (aka Obamanet), despite its repeal by the Trump administration in 2017 and an unsuccessful attempt to reimpose them on the federal level by the Biden administration.

The issue persists because regulations equivalent to net neutrality were enacted as state laws by nearly all Democrat-controlled states, effectively imposing it as a nationwide mandate. For example, California passed a harsh net neutrality law, SB-822, in 2018 while the FCC repeal of Obamanet was still enjoined and litigated. This California legislation was challenged by industry groups in 2018, who were joined by the Department of Justice in 2020. This was a half-hearted effort. The plaintiffs brought only claims and arguments based on federal preemption. The court did not grant an injunction, and the litigation continued into the Biden administration, when plaintiffs dropped their case.

Plaintiffs elected not to bring constitutional claims, despite net neutrality laws and regulations breaching at least the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments, and the famous Section 230. The industry groups were likely intimidated, and the DOJ was in shambles.

Contrary to the massive propaganda, net neutrality regulations and laws do not regulate broadband internet service providers. These laws regulate how citizens access and use the internet from their homes. It is achieved by defining all the ways customers want to obtain content and services over the internet as “broadband internet access,” then prohibiting all services that allow customers to exercise their First and Fourth Amendment rights. The target of the regulations is the citizenry, not industry.

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Congress Takes Another Step Toward Enabling Broad Internet Censorship

The House Energy and Commerce Committee on Tuesday advanced the TAKE IT DOWN Act (S. 146) , a bill that seeks to speed up the removal of certain kinds of troubling online content. While the bill is meant to address a serious problem—the distribution of non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII)—the notice-and-takedown system it creates is an open invitation for powerful people to pressure websites into removing content they dislike. 

As we’ve written before, while protecting victims of these heinous privacy invasions is a legitimate goal, good intentions alone are not enough to make good policy. 

This bill mandates a notice-and-takedown system that threatens free expression, user privacy, and due process, without meaningfully addressing the problem it claims to solve. The “takedown” provision applies to a much broader category of content—potentially any images involving intimate or sexual content at all—than the narrower NCII definitions found elsewhere in the bill. The bill contains no protections against frivolous or bad-faith takedown requests. Lawful content—including satire, journalism, and political speech—could be wrongly censored. 

The legislation’s 48-hour takedown deadline means that online service providers, particularly smaller ones, will have to comply quickly to avoid legal risks. That time crunch will make it impossible for services to verify the content is in fact NCII. Instead, services will rely on automated filters—infamously blunt tools that frequently flag legal content, from fair-use commentary to news reporting.

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Two Million User International Paedophile Child Porn Ring Busted by Europol

A massive international pedophile network spanning across over 30 countries was shut down, and dozens of arrests were made relating to child pornography, the Europol police agency announced on Wednesday.

The European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation said that the Darknet child porn platform “Kidflix” has been shut down under the direction of the Bavarian State Criminal Police Office in Germany.

Europol said that the platform had an estimated 1.8 million users throughout the world, with investigations being coordinated across 35 counties.

So far, 79 people have been arrested and nearly 1,400 further suspects have been identified, over one hundred of whom were located in Germany, broadcaster NTV reports.

The platform, which was created in 2021, is said to have been one of the largest of its kind in the world and the largest to date to have existed in Europe.

According to the investigators, the site had over 91,000 child porn videos before it was shut down, with an average of three and half videos being uploaded to the site every hour. In exchange for paying a fee to the site, users were able to stream and upload videos of child sex abuse.

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Which AI Chatbots Collect The Most Data About You?

The harbinger of the AI revolution, ChatGPT, remains the most popular AI tool on the market, with more than 200 million weekly active users.

But amongst all its competitors, which AI chatbots are collecting the most user data? And why does that matter?

Visual Capitalist’s Marcus Lu visualizes data from Surfshark which identified the most popular AI chatbots and analyzed their privacy details on the Apple App Store.

At first place, Google’s Gemini (released March, 2023) collects 22 different data points across 10 categories, from its users.

Data collected ranges from general diagnostics (that all bots in this study collect) to access to contacts (that no other bot identified collects).

xAI’s Grok (released November, 2023) collects the least unique data points (7).

China’s DeepSeek (released Jan 2025), sits comfortably in the middle of the pack at 11 points.

The kind of data collected by each of these AI tools varies. All of them collected general diagnostics information. However, only Gemini and Perplexity look at purchases.

And then, nearly all but Perplexity.ai and Grok collect user content.

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Pentagon Kills Off HR IT Project After 780% Budget Overrun, Years Of Delays

After blowing deadlines and budgets for years, the Pentagon has finally pulled the plug on a troubled project to overhaul its outdated civilian HR IT systems.

Like many government projects before it, the US Defense Civilian Human Resources Management System (DCHRMS) promised big things when it was kicked off nearly a decade ago. According to a memo [PDF] signed by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth late last week, the program was intended to streamline a large portion of the DoD’s legacy HR IT systems, but it’s being axed after officials concluded pouring more funds into it would be “throwing more good taxpayer money after bad.”

DCHRMS started in 2018 with a planned development timeline of one year and a budget of $36 million, “but instead it’s taken eight years and is currently $280 million over budget – that’s 780 percent over budget,” Hegseth said in a video announcing the DCHRMS and other spending cuts. “We’re not doing that anymore.”

That’s not to say the DoD is giving up on modernizing its civilian HR systems – the memo noted that the Pentagon still wants a new solution, with Hegseth directing officials to develop a fresh plan within 60 days to achieve the project’s original goals.

While the headline item in the memo is the cancellation of DCHRMS, Hegseth ordered cuts to additional programs, contracts, and grants too.

The memo mentioned the cancellation of more than $360 million in grant programs “in areas of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and related social programs, climate change, social science, COVID-19 pandemic response” and the like, stating these efforts were not aligned with the DoD’s current priorities.

We’ve reached out to the Defense Department to get a more complete list of the programs being terminated, but Hegseth did single out a couple in the video. In particular, he pointed to a $6 million grant for decarbonizing the emissions from US Navy ships and a $9 million university grant to develop “equitable AI and machine learning models.”

“I need lethal machine learning models,” Hegseth said. “Not equitable machine learning models.” 

The memo also directed the cancellation of $30 million in contracts with Gartner and McKinsey for analysis products and what Hegseth described as “unused licenses” from “external consulting services.” The move echoes the ongoing scrutiny of federal consulting contracts, such as reviews of deals involving Accenture, IBM, and Deloitte.

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“MyTerms” wants to become the new way we dictate our privacy on the web

Author, journalist, and long-time Internet freedom advocate Doc Searls wants us to stop asking for privacy from websites, services, and AI and start telling these things what we will and will not accept.

Draft standard IEEE P7012, which Searls has nicknamed “MyTerms” (akin to “Wi-Fi”), is a Draft Standard for Machine Readable Personal Privacy Terms. Searls writes on his blog that MyTerms has been in the works since 2017, and a fully readable version should be ready later this year, following conference presentations at VRM Day and the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW).

The big concept is that you are the first party to each contract you have with online things. The websites, apps, or services you visit are the second party. You arrive with either a pre-set contract you prefer on your device or pick one when you arrive, and it tells the site what information you will and will not offer up for access to content or services. Presumably, a site can work with that contract, modify itself to meet the terms, or perhaps tell you it can’t do that.

The easiest way to set your standards, at first, would be to pick something from Customer Commons, which is modeled on the copyleft concept of Creative Commons. Right now, there’s just one example up: #NoStalking, which allows for ads but not with data usable for “targeted advertising or tracking beyond the primary service for which you provided it.” Ad blocking is not addressed in Searls’ post or IEEE summary, but it would presumably exist outside MyTerms—even if MyTerms seems to want to reduce the need for ad blocking.

Searls and his group are putting up the standards and letting the browsers, extension-makers, website managers, mobile platforms, and other pieces of the tech stack craft the tools. So long as the human is the first party to a contract, the digital thing is the second, a “disinterested non-profit” provides the roster of agreements, and both sides keep records of what they agreed to, the function can take whatever shape the Internet decides.

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Rosie O’Donnell floats bizarre conspiracy theory about Elon Musk after fleeing US after election

Rosie O’Donnell has suggested the 2024 presidential election may have been stolen during her first Irish television interview since leaving the United States for Ireland.

The famously outspoken comedian and former talk show host spoke with Patrick Kielty on Friday’s The Late Late Show on the Irish channel RTE One in which she implicated tech billionaire Elon Musk without naming him directly.

‘I question why for the first time in American history, a president has won every swing state and his largest donor was a man who owns and runs the internet,’ O’Donnell said.  

‘I would hope that would be investigated,’ she added. ‘Whether or not it was an anomaly… or something else that happened on election night in America.’

O’Donnell told Kielty how she found Trump’s win strange because then-Vice President Kamala Harris was ‘filling up stadiums with people who supported her and Donald Trump was not able to do that.’ 

Now self-exiled in Ireland, O’Donnell explained how she fled the US following what she calls a ‘terrifying’ sequence of political events. 

‘The president of the United States has it out for me,’ she said, referring to Donald Trump, with whom she’s had a public feud spanning decades. 

She explained how her critique of Trump’s bankruptcies and sexual assault allegations on TV show The View had made her a long-term target.

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