Tag: internet

Trump Cracks Down on Pro-Censorship CISA, Puts Key Officials on Leave

President Donald Trump appears to be making good on a number of campaign promises, including those moves aimed at ending practices that, during the previous administration, resulted in wide-scale censorship collusion between the government and large tech companies.

According to a number of insider documents, lawsuits, and Congressional investigations, the reason for this “joint work” in flagging, removing, deplatforming, and committing other forms of free speech violations was most often justified as the need to combat “misinformation” – usually election, or Covid-related.

But critics have for years insisted that the actual result was First Amendment violations, through the exertion of control over speech and therefore public opinion ahead of an election (such as the discrediting of the Hunter Biden laptop story as “misinformation” and an example of supposed foreign interference).

And, the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) by all accounts “excelled” at this work.

Keep reading

EU Launches “Democracy Shield” Initiative to Tighten Controls on Tech Giants and Enforce “Hate Speech” Compliance

EU’s new “European Union Democracy Shield (EUDS)” committee, which aims to impose more control over tech giants now perceived as aligned with US President Trump, and promote their compliance with “hate speech” laws while imposing more “fact-checking” has gained its chair – French member of European Parliament (MEP) and French President Macron-allied politician Nathalie Loiseau.

The EUDS initiative was first unveiled by EU Commission’s Executive VP Henna Virkkunen, and Loiseau appears to have been given the job in true unelected-Brussels-bureaucracy fashion: this was known before a vote on her nomination took place.

“Nathalie Loiseau will be elected this evening at 6 pm,” it was announced early on Monday by La Lettre (this effective appointment has in the meantime been confirmed).

And it gets worse – another French MEP, Virginie Joron, said that Loiseau had announced she would be elected “the weekend before” those electing her had a chance to vote.

Stalin could never.

However – given the role that “Democracy Shield” is expected to play, namely, control speech/opinions, this odd process is seen by some as basically symbolic of the body’s purpose – albeit it happens to be one that is “denying democracy.”

Loiseau is a member of the European Parliament’s Renew group, whereas Joron is from the Patriots for Europe (PfE); the manner in which the EUDS selected its chief was particularly offensive to the latter since the PfE had hoped to have its own candidate, Antonio Tanger Correa – but that was rendered pointless by the manner in which Loiseau was appointed.

Correa denounced it as a “sham democracy” while Joron slammed the European Parliament’s “theater” where one can get “elected” before the vote.

Keep reading

UK Home Secretary Signals Tougher Online Censorship Beyond Current Censorship Laws

Judging by the most recent statements made by UK Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, the government feels it will have to implement even more stringent speech-restrictive measures than those contained in the sweeping and controversial censorship law, the Online Safety Act.

Appearing on a BBC political talk show, Cooper kept beating the now well-established drum the ruling Labour has gone for in the wake of last year’s Southport killings, and subsequent mass protests – namely, to try to portray social media companies as somehow “a part of the crime,” which is verbatim how the cabinet minister put it.

One of the recurring themes these last weeks, since the Southport trial saw its conclusion, has been that tech companies are “morally responsible” for not deleting (that request came only last week) one of the violent videos viewed by the killer, Axel Rudakubana.

This request was made even though said companies are under no legal obligation to do that, until the spring of this year and the start of the enforcement of some parts of the Online Safety Act.

The stage set that way, Cooper’s logic – or lack thereof – goes like this: “We are being clear that we are prepared to go further if the Online Safety Act measures are not working as effectively as we need them to do,” she told the host, Laura Kuenssberg.

There is no way to predict how social media firms will act once they are under obligation to remove certain types of content – and yet Cooper is already threatening to make the Online Safety Act even worse.

Keep reading

Sweden Says No Sabotage In Baltic Sea Cable Damage, Releases Seized Ship (But Russia!)

The mainstream media narrative of Russian ‘shadow fleet’ vessels traversing the Baltic Sea in a clandestine anti-NATO operation to sabotage vital underwater communications cables linking European nations continues to unravel at rapid pace.

Swedish authorities have issued the results of their official investigation into Malta-flagged Vezhen ship, following the discovery of damage to a fiber-optic cable between Sweden and Latvia on Jan. 26. Authorities had immediately seized the cargo ship on suspicion it intentionally damaged the cable.

But in a sudden turn, as of Monday the Vezhen has been released after the investigation found no wrong-doing. It was not the result of sabotage or any intentional plot, investigators now say.

“The investigation concerning a cable break between Sweden and Latvia in the Baltic Sea has clarified that it is not a case of gross sabotage,” Swedish prosecutors said in a new statement.

“It has been established that a combination of weather conditions and deficiencies in equipment and seamanship contributed to the cable break,” Senior Prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist added in the statement.

The consensus is that as the vessel was transporting fertilizer from Ust-Luga, Russia to South America – a ship anchor was damaged and unintentionally dropped into the sea during extremely bad weather, which is when the damage to the cable occurred. The incident is one of several cable incidents in regional waters still being investigated as suspected Russian sabotage.

Now that the ship has resumed its journey to South America, its operator has indicated it may stop for repairs in nearby Denmark.

A statement by ship operator Navigation Maritime Bulgare (Navibulgar) to AFP said Swedish authorities formally notified the crew that “there is no reason to believe that sabotage or malicious act was committed on board by our crew.”

It said the crew members, who had been detained along with the ship, are in good health and that they are resuming the journey. A week ago the company had vehemently denied that this was an act of sabotage, and called on Sweden to quickly release the vessel. 

Keep reading

AI haters build tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers that ignore robots.txt

Last summer, Anthropic inspired backlash when its ClaudeBot AI crawler was accused of hammering websites a million or more times a day.

And it wasn’t the only artificial intelligence company making headlines for supposedly ignoring instructions in robots.txt files to avoid scraping web content on certain sites. Around the same time, Reddit’s CEO called out all AI companies whose crawlers he said were “a pain in the ass to block,” despite the tech industry otherwise agreeing to respect “no scraping” robots.txt rules.

Watching the controversy unfold was a software developer whom Ars has granted anonymity to discuss his development of malware (we’ll call him Aaron). Shortly after he noticed Facebook’s crawler exceeding 30 million hits on his site, Aaron began plotting a new kind of attack on crawlers “clobbering” websites that he told Ars he hoped would give “teeth” to robots.txt.

Building on an anti-spam cybersecurity tactic known as tarpitting, he created Nepenthes, malicious software named after a carnivorous plant that will “eat just about anything that finds its way inside.”

Aaron clearly warns users that Nepenthes is aggressive malware. It’s not to be deployed by site owners uncomfortable with trapping AI crawlers and sending them down an “infinite maze” of static files with no exit links, where they “get stuck” and “thrash around” for months, he tells users. Once trapped, the crawlers can be fed gibberish data, aka Markov babble, which is designed to poison AI models. That’s likely an appealing bonus feature for any site owners who, like Aaron, are fed up with paying for AI scraping and just want to watch AI burn.

Tarpits were originally designed to waste spammers’ time and resources, but creators like Aaron have now evolved the tactic into an anti-AI weapon. As of this writing, Aaron confirmed that Nepenthes can effectively trap all the major web crawlers. So far, only OpenAI’s crawler has managed to escape.

Keep reading

NATO, Sweden, Latvia On High Alert After Baltic Undersea Data Cable “Damaged”

The third severing of an undersea cable in just three months occurred on Sunday, this time between Latvia and Sweden in the Baltic Sea. The incident has prompted a criminal investigation and heightened concerns of potential sabotage by Russia or China.

Latvia’s State Radio and Television Center, a data transmission provider, released this statement about the damaged cable connecting Ventspils in Latvia and Sweden’s Gotland island:

In the early morning of January 26, the submarine fiber optic cable of the Latvian State Radio and Television Centre (hereinafter – LVRTC) in the Baltic Sea was damaged. The LVRTC Data Transmission Monitoring System recorded disruptions in data transmission services on the Ventspils – Gotland (Fårösund) section. LVRTC continues to provide services using other data transmission routes. Currently, there is a possible delay in data transmission speed, but it does not affect end users in Latvia for the most part.

Prime Minister Evika Silina commented about the incident on X:

Early morning today we received information that the data cable from Latvia to Sweden was damaged in the Baltic Sea, in the section that is located in the Exclusive economic zone of Sweden. We are working together with our Swedish Allies and NATO on investigating the incident, including to patrolling the area, as well as inspecting the vessels that were in the area. Authorities have intensified information exchange and started criminal investigation.

Keep reading

AT&T kills home Internet service in NY over law requiring $15 or $20 plans

AT&T has stopped offering its 5G home Internet service in New York instead of complying with a new state law that requires ISPs to offer $15 or $20 plans to people with low incomes.

The decision was reported yesterday by CNET and confirmed by AT&T in a statement provided to Ars today. “While we are committed to providing reliable and affordable Internet service to customers across the country, New York’s broadband law imposes harmful rate regulations that make it uneconomical for AT&T to invest in and expand our broadband infrastructure in the state,” AT&T said. “As a result, effective January 15, 2025, we will no longer be able to offer AT&T Internet Air, our fixed-wireless Internet service, to New York customers.”

New York started enforcing its Affordable Broadband Act yesterday after a legal battle of nearly four years. Broadband lobby groups convinced a federal judge to block the law in 2021, but a US appeals court reversed the ruling in April 2024, and the Supreme Court decided not to hear the case last month.

The law requires ISPs with over 20,000 customers in New York to offer $15 broadband plans with download speeds of at least 25Mbps, or $20-per-month service with 200Mbps speeds. The plans only have to be offered to households that meet income eligibility requirements, such as qualifying for the National School Lunch Program, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or Medicaid.

AT&T’s Internet Air was launched in some areas in 2023 and is now available in nearly every US state. The standard price for Internet Air is $60 a month plus taxes and fees, or $47 when bundled with an eligible mobile service. Nationwide, AT&T said it added 135,000 Internet Air customers in the most recent quarter.

AT&T has pitched Internet Air as a long-term replacement for DSL Internet in areas where it doesn’t plan to build fiber. AT&T has said it won’t build fiber home Internet in over half of its wireline footprint and will focus its fiber builds on more densely populated areas.

Keep reading

The Evolution of the Militarized Data Broker

Today, the world’s economy no longer runs on oil, but data. Shortly after the advent of the microprocessor came the internet, unleashing an onslaught of data running on the coils of fiber optic cables beneath the oceans and satellites above the skies. While often posited as a liberator of humanity against the oppressors of nation-states that allows previously impossible interconnectivity and social organization between geographically separated cultures to circumnavigate the monopoly on violence of world governments, ironically, the internet itself was birthed out of the largest military empire of the modern world – the United States.

The ARPANET

Specifically, the internet began as ARPANET, a project of the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which in 1972 became known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), currently housed within the Department of Defense. ARPA was created by President Eisenhower in 1958 within the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) in direct response to the U.S.’ greatest military rival, the USSR, successfully launching Sputnik, the first artificial satellite in Earth’s orbit with data broadcasting technology. While historically considered the birth of the Space Race, in reality, the formation of ARPA began the now-decades-long militarization of data brokers, quickly leading to world-changing developments in global positioning systems (GPS), the personal computer, networks of computational information processing (“time-sharing”), primordial artificial intelligence, and weaponized autonomous drone technology.

In October 1962, the recently-formed ARPA appointed J.C.R. Licklider, a former MIT professor and vice president of Bolt Beranek and Newman (known as BBN, currently owned by defense contractor Raytheon), to head their Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO). At BBN, Licklider developed the earliest known ideas for a global computer network, publishing a series of memos in August 1962 that birthed his “Intergalactic Computer Network” concept. Six months after his appointment to ARPA, Licklider would distribute a memo to his IPTO colleagues – addressed to “Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network”– describing a “time-sharing network of computers” – building off a similar exploration of communal, distributed computation by John Forbes Nash, Jr. in his 1954 paper “Parallel Control” commissioned by defense contractor RAND – which would build the foundational concepts for ARPANET, the first implementation of today’s Internet.

Keep reading

It Begins: China Cuts Undersea Internet Cables to Taiwan

In September, a group of journalists (including me) were hosted by Taiwanese national security experts to discuss the developing crisis of Chinese aggression toward Taiwan.

The portion of the week-long visit at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, the Taiwanese Defense and Security Think Tank akin to MITRE, Rand, or The Aerospace Corporation, contained an urgent and compelling message.

“We will be quarantined within six months and the first step of the operation will be China cutting our undersea cables to interrupt our communications with the world” was what Senior research fellows at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taiwan, Drs. Tzu-Yun Su, Shan-son Kung, and Charles C.J. Wang, shared.  Their observations were prescient because that has now happened.

Keep reading

Leaked emails expose ‘collaborative efforts’ between Israeli govt and Center for Countering Digital Hate

Emails obtained by The Grayzone reveal how leading “anti-hate” campaigner Imran Ahmed collaborated with Israeli embassy officials to censor pro-Palestine social media accounts — and courted them for donations to his censorship-obsessed Center for Countering Digital Hate.

Since emerging in America from seemingly out of the blue in 2020, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) has become one of the trans-Atlantic establishment’s most effective tools for censoring online speech. Its founder, Imran Ahmed, has nurtured close ties with the Biden White House since moving to Washington DC, targeting its political enemies with calls for their removal from social media. Back in his hometown of London, Ahmed was an influential advisor to the neoliberal wing of UK Labour, helping sabotage the leftist insurgency of Jeremy Corbyn and place his ally, Keir Starmer, in charge of the party. 

Ahmed has been embroiled in controversy since journalists Paul D. Thacker and Matt Taibbi published internal CCDH documents showing he held private meetings with influential Democratic lawmakers throughout 2024 to advance a plan to “kill Elon Musk’s Twitter.” The billionaire Twitter/X owner and his allies in president-elect Donald Trump’s inner circle retaliated by accusing the British operative of violating laws against foreign interference in American politics.

Ahmed, for his part, has dismissed the charge that he colludes with foreign governments as a kooky conspiracy. “The Center for Countering Digital Hate researches conspiracy theories. We don’t engage with them,” he said.

However, internal CCDH emails obtained by The Grayzone reveal that while Ahmed nurtures ties to the Labour government in Britain, the self-styled “anti-hate” campaigner also enjoys a secret, “collaborative” relationship with a rogue foreign government whose leadership currently stands accused of genocide by the International Court of Justice, and is wanted for crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court.

Provided by a CCDH insider who requested to remain anonymous out of fear that Ahmed and his allies would retaliate against him, the emails reveal that top officials in the Israeli Embassy in Washington DC helped introduce Ahmed to potential funders, and were even invited to review a CCDH report before its publication. The report urged Meta to remove pro-Palestine Facebook groups on the grounds that they promoted “anti-Jewish hate.” 

Ahmed seemed agitated when The Grayzone reached him by phone and asked him to confirm his email exchanges with the Israeli officials. “I have no idea which emails you’re talking about,” he stated. “You’ll have to send them through to us and have a look at them and come back to you.”

When asked if he had collaborated with the Israeli government, Ahmed did not deny the relationship. “We work with all governments,” he claimed. 

Keep reading