Tag: internet

“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.

Keep reality

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.

Keep reading

Google imports ex-Israeli spies who automated Gaza genocide

On Mar. 18, Google bought Israeli cybersecurity company Wiz for $32 billion. The acquisition will mark the single largest transfer of former Israeli spies into an American company. This is because Wiz is run and staffed by dozens of ex Unit 8200 members, the specialist cyber-spying arm of the IDF.

Unit 8200 wrote the programming and designed the algorithms that automated the genocide of Gaza and was also responsible for the pager attack in Lebanon. Now the men and women who helped design the architecture of apartheid are being swallowed by the US tech-surveillance complex.

The identity of the Wiz founders, all former Unit 8200, is fairly well-documented (by Israeli media at least). One of the founders, Ami Luttwak, boasts on his LinkedIn profile that he led a “mission critical R&D team” for Unit 8200 which won them the “Israel Defence Award 2012.” Less well-documented, however, is the fact that a huge chunk of the Wiz workforce, from office managers, to software engineers to product analysts, are also former Unit 8200. Following my investigation earlier this year into the former Unit 8200 members working in key AI positions for tech companies, I have identified nearly fifty Wiz employees as being ex Unit 8200 operatives.

Keep reading

Top Streamer Says Violent Threats on Reddit Will Lead to Real ID For the Internet

Top streamer Asmongold predicts that the sheer amount of violent threats being posted on Reddit will grease the skids for an Internet ID system that will end online anonymity.

Since Donald Trump took office, the far-left website has seen a massive uptick in threats of violence targeting Trump, people in his administration and conservatives in general.

Last month, Reddit temporarily banned multiple pages after users began posting threats aimed at staff working for the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

“Time to hunt,” one user posted, while another asserted, “Lets drag their necks up by a large coil up rope.”

According to popular streamer Asmongold, the deluge of threats will provide a pretext for the government to mandate tying a person’s real identification to their online user accounts.

Keep reading

FCC Chair Brendan Carr Wants More Control Over Social Media

In his short time as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr has been no stranger to using his power against disfavored entities. The chairman’s targets have primarily included broadcast networks and social media companies.

Recently, Carr revealed a fundamental misunderstanding about one of the most important laws governing the internet and social media.

On February 27, digital news outlet Semafor held a summit in Washington, D.C., titled “Innovating to Restore Trust in News,” which culminated in a conversation between Semafor editor-in-chief Ben Smith and Carr.

“The social media companies got more power over more speech than any institution in history” in recent years, Carr told Smith. “And I think they’re abusing that power. I think it’s appropriate for the FCC to say, let’s take another look at Section 230.”

Section 230 of the Communications Act effectively protects websites and platforms from civil liability for content posted by others. It also protects a platform’s decision to moderate content it finds “objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”

Like many conservatives, Carr looks askance at social media’s latitude to moderate content with what he perceives as impunity. “The FCC should issue an order that interprets Section 230 in a way that eliminates the expansive, non-textual immunities that courts have read into the statute” and “remind courts how the various portions of Section 230 operate,” he wrote in a chapter of The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership, more popularly known as Project 2025.

Keep reading

US Tech companies, Including X and Google, Threaten To Leave Starmer’s Leftist Britain Over the Cost of Funding Online ‘Safety’ Censorship

As the ‘Trump Tornado’ is forcefully rearranging things all over Europe, there’s a justified expectation about the Donald J. Trump administration’s reaction to the ill-disguised push for censorship in the upcoming ‘Online Safety Act.’

As of now, Tech companies, including Elon Musk’s X and Google, have warned businesses could leave the PM Keir Starmer’s leftist experiment in Britain over the cost of funding the online safety crackdown.

Google said the fees charged to internet companies will drive services out of the UK, while X says it will ‘disincentivize’ global companies from entering the British market.

The Telegraph reported:

“Ofcom [British Office of Communications] has laid out plans to raise around £70m a year to cover the costs of enforcing the new laws, which take effect in the coming months. They will require tech companies to introduce age checks and limit exposure to harmful content. The bill would almost entirely be borne by the largest five providers – believed to be Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple and TikTok – [that] would face charges equal to 0.02pc of global revenue.”

Keep reading

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