Tag: internet

You can now legally request revenge and deepfake porn to be taken down. Here’s how

Online platforms are now required by law to remove non-consensual intimate images within 48 hours of reporting, as a federal law criminalizing the sharing of such content goes into full effect Tuesday.

President Donald Trump signed the Take It Down Act into law last year, which makes it illegal to publish online nonconsensual intimate visual depictions, real or artificially generated. But the act gave online platforms one year to create a process for removing such imagery within 48 hours of notification from users. If online platforms fail to do so, they could face civil penalties of $53,088 per violation. That one year deadline expired on Tuesday.

The provisions now going into effect ensure that tech companies “can no longer turn a blind eye to these horrifying abuses on social media,” Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who co-wrote the bill with Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, said in a statement.

The Federal Trade Commission, which will enforce the law, sent letters to major online platforms last week warning them about compliance. That includes popular social platforms such as Meta, Snapchat, TikTok and X, along with gaming platforms and dating apps Bumble and Match Group, Reddit, Discord, Pinterest and tech giants Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft.

Any business that “primarily provides a forum for user-generated content or regularly publishes, curates, hosts, or furnishes intimate content shared without consent,” is subject to the law, according to the FTC.

The other provision of the law applying to individuals who post non-consensual intimate imagery is already in effect. Violators can face fines and up to two years in prison.

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Ottawa says use VPNs but kindly leave a backdoor for us

Public Safety Canada recently posted advice encouraging Canadians to use VPNs online to better protect their privacy.

It was sensible advice when taken out of political context.

I use a VPN and you should too. But it ultimately didn’t play well with the general public and backfired.

That’s because Ottawa is simultaneously telling Canadians to shield themselves online while major VPN and other encryption-based platforms are threatening to pull out of the country, all because of Bill C-22.

This contradiction has become typical of Ottawa. One arm of the federal government reminds citizens to lock their doors, while another is drafting legislation designed to make it easier to kick those doors down. The attitude extends beyond tech and into the real world, where lax bail laws are emboldening criminals.

Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act, introduces sweeping powers that would compel digital service providers to retain highly sensitive user data and location history for up to 365 days without any evidence of a crime. More alarming still, it aims to force companies to build technical “backdoors”, so state agencies can easily extract user data.

Signal, NordVPN and Canadian-headquartered Windscribe have already issued an ultimatum threatening to pull out of Canada entirely rather than play a role in spying on Canadians.

Tech companies understand something politicians refuse to acknowledge: there is no such thing as a secure backdoor.

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Ofcom and the Fantasy of Global Speech Control

Ofcom appears to believe that a website is a kind of television channel. This would explain a lot about what happened on Wednesday, when Britain’s speech regulator fined an American mental health and suicide discussion forum £950,000 ($1.3 million) for hosting speech that is legal in America, on servers in America, operated by Americans.

The site had already blocked British visitors from accessing it, voluntarily, as a gesture of goodwill, despite having no legal obligation to do so and despite Ofcom having no jurisdiction to demand it. Ofcom fined it anyway. The fine is unenforceable.

The site owes Ofcom nothing under American law. And even if the site had never blocked a single British visitor, Ofcom’s case would still make no sense, because a British regulator cannot fine an American citizen for legal American speech on an American server any more than the French postal service can fine you for what you write in your own diary.

Ofcom is the Office of Communications, the British government’s speech regulator. Americans don’t really have an equivalent because most Americans would never stand for one. The closest thing is the FCC, except imagine the FCC could also decide what you’re allowed to say on the internet and fine you if it disapproves.

Under the notorious Online Safety Act, passed in 2023, Ofcom gained the power to decide what speech is permissible online and to fine platforms that host speech the UK government doesn’t like.

That includes speech that is perfectly legal everywhere else on earth. It is, when you think about it for more than four seconds, absolutely mad.

Ofcom launched on December 29, 2003, stitched together from five separate regulators: the Broadcasting Standards Commission, the Independent Television Commission, the Office of Telecommunications, the Radio Authority, and the Radiocommunications Agency.

They all dealt with broadcasting, telecoms, or spectrum. They regulated transmitters, phone lines, and radio frequencies, all of which used publicly owned spectrum and publicly funded infrastructure to push content into British living rooms.

The airwaves belonged to the public. The transmitters were built with public money. If you were using national resources to broadcast to a national audience, it made sense that a national regulator got to set some terms. None of these five organizations were designed to have opinions about what a foreigner writes on a computer in Virginia.

The confusion starts with Ofcom not understanding what a website actually is.

A website does not push anything. Content sits on a server. A visitor actively goes to it and requests it. The data crosses borders only because someone on the other end typed in the URL. Website users are called “visitors” and not “viewers” for exactly this reason. They go to the site. The site does not come to them.

This is not a complicated distinction. A reasonably bright nine-year-old could grasp it over breakfast. Ofcom, apparently, cannot.

The regulator is treating a website in Virginia as though it were a transmitter on a hill in Surrey and claiming jurisdiction over the server rather than the person visiting it. It’s like fining an American for not stopping British citizens from mailing letters to them.

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Days Away: The TAKE IT DOWN Act Creates a Censorship Mechanism With No Safeguards

The Federal Trade Commission sent letters to 17 major tech companies this week, warning them to comply with the Take It Down Act by May 19 or face fines of $53,088 per violation.

Amazon, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok, X, Reddit, Discord, Snapchat, Pinterest, Bumble, Match Group, Automattic, and SmugMug all got the same message from Chairman Andrew Ferguson.

We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.

“We stand ready to monitor compliance, investigate violations, and enforce the Take It Down Act,” Ferguson wrote.

“Protecting the vulnerable, especially children, from this harmful abuse is a top priority for this agency and this administration.”

The law, signed by President Trump in May 2025 with strong backing from First Lady Melania Trump, requires platforms to delete non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), including AI-generated deepfakes, within 48 hours of receiving a removal request.

Platforms must also find and remove identical copies, provide clear notice about the removal process and let people track their requests. The FTC published a business guidance page alongside the letter spelling all of this out. The definition of “covered platform” is broad enough to capture social media, messaging apps, video sharing, gaming platforms, and essentially any site hosting user-generated content.

Nobody wants revenge porn circulating online. But the law Congress passed is far broader than the problem it claims to solve.

The TAKE IT DOWN Act borrows its structure from the DMCA’s already-controversial notice-and-takedown system, then strips out the safeguards.

Under the DMCA, a takedown request must include a statement under penalty of perjury. False claims can result in liability. There’s a counter-notice process so the person whose content was deleted can push back. TIDA has none of this. There’s no penalty for false claims, no counter-notice, no requirement that the filer prove anything before content disappears. A platform gets a complaint, has 48 hours, and deletes. That’s the entire process and exactly why the Take it Down Act introduces a new censorship mechanism.

The law defines a violation as involving an “identifiable individual” engaged in “sexually explicit conduct,” without defining that conduct narrowly.

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Watching Porn on California’s Death Row

Under Governor Gavin Newsom, California has sought to transform its massive prison system into a Nordic-style rehabilitation program. Newsom has placed a moratorium on all executions, transferred condemned prisoners to facilities across the state, dismantled San Quentin State Prison’s death row, and turned the notorious prison into a therapeutic center, with art, classrooms, a café, and podcast studios.

As part of this transformation, the Newsom administration approved a $189 million contract to provide new digital tablets—generic, flat-screen devices in a plastic shell—to every inmate in the state prison system, at “no cost” to offenders. The administration heralded the effort to replace inmates’ old tablets—which were piloted in 2018 and given to nearly all prisoners by 2023—as a step toward “digital equity” for “justice impacted” individuals, who could, in theory, use the devices to contact their families, consume “educational” content, and “learn new technology.”

In reality, taxpayer-funded tablets have also been used for more lurid endeavors. In this exclusive City Journal investigation, we contacted dozens of death-row inmates, who told us that prisoners in the state system use such devices to watch pornography and have explicit sexual conversations. Some prisoners, according to a former high-ranking California corrections official, use their tablets to groom minors. Though the state has claimed to regulate explicit content, the inmates told us that users can easily evade detection.

When reached for comment, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said the tablets were “tightly controlled education tools” that provided inmates with “access to the Bible, education, and reentry resources that actually reduce crime.”

But inmates told us a different story. For some, the devices have become personal sex machines. In the words of one inmate, California’s death row is populated with desperately “horny” criminals who see the tablets as a way to satisfy their basest fantasies and desires—all thanks to the California taxpayer.

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When one man, a civilian, controls the kill switch for military ops

In September 2022, Ukrainian forces prepared to launch a drone strike on the Russian naval fleet anchored off Crimea. The drones never arrived.

Elon Musk had decided, unilaterally, not to activate Starlink coverage over the region. But he wasn’t simply declining to help. SpaceX had already been managing battlefield access for both sides: restricting Russian use, imposing speed limits to prevent drone integration, and maintaining a verified whitelist with Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense. One private citizen, with no security clearance and no accountability to any electorate, was governing the battlefield connectivity of an active war.

The public debate treats this as a story about Elon Musk — his politics, his proximity to the White House, his X posts. That framing lets the actual problem off the hook. Replace Musk with the most patriotic, internationalist, apolitical CEO imaginable and the structural problem remains identical. The Pentagon has spent a decade building critical military functions on infrastructure it can’t legally compel, and the consequences are now arriving in real time.

A common reflex is to argue that private defense contractors have always been central to American military power. Lockheed Martin builds the F-35; Raytheon builds the Patriot. What’s different now is the control plane: who has real-time administrative control during use. When the government buys a tank, it owns it. The keys don’t expire. The manufacturer can’t disable it mid-mission or impose terms in combat. Software and AI are different. Vendors keep ongoing control — updates, access, and usage limits. They don’t sell a capability; they license access to one, and the license has conditions.

Those conditions have already collided with active operations. After months of failed negotiations, the Pentagon formally designated the AI firm Anthropic a supply-chain risk because of restrictions on how its model could be used. The Pentagon was explicit in its decision: “The military will not allow a vendor to insert itself into the chain of command.” Emil Michael, the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, described the moment he fully grasped the vulnerability: Anthropic’s models were already embedded across combatant commands and intelligence agencies, wired into classified workflows. Anthropic retained the control plane inside the Pentagon’s cloud — able to update, restrict, or shut off access. When Michael raised hypothetical crisis scenarios, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, offered exceptions case by case. “Just call me if you need another exception,” Michael recalls him saying. In a genuine crisis, a commander can’t call a vendor to authorize military action, nor should he have to.

This isn’t about whether Anthropic’s rules are reasonable. They weren’t set by anyone accountable to the joint force, there’s no override mechanism, and the Pentagon had made itself dependent on systems it doesn’t control.

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Europe Wants To Ban VPN Privacy

The European Union is now openly discussing restricting VPN access as part of its expanding online age-verification system, which demonstrates precisely where the entire digital agenda has been heading from the beginning. They always introduce these systems under emotionally untouchable justifications such as child safety or combating terrorism, but once the infrastructure is in place, the scope inevitably expands.

According to a new European Parliament briefing, officials are concerned that users are bypassing online age-verification requirements via VPNs, and the report notes a surge in VPN usage in countries implementing stricter digital controls. The proposal being discussed is to potentially restrict VPN access itself to those above a so-called “digital age of majority.” In other words, they are now targeting the very tools people use to protect their privacy online.

For readers who may not use these services personally, a VPN simply encrypts your internet traffic and masks your location, preventing internet providers, corporations, and governments from monitoring everything you do online. Businesses use them constantly, financial institutions rely on them, journalists use them, and ordinary people use them simply to avoid being tracked across the internet.

The problem from the government’s perspective is that VPNs interfere with surveillance. Europe’s Digital Services Act has already pushed platforms toward mandatory age-verification systems that increasingly require identification documents, facial scans, or biometric verification simply to access online content. Once users began using VPNs to avoid those systems, regulators immediately shifted toward framing the VPN itself as the threat. This is how these systems always evolve, because the objective is never merely regulation, it is compliance and visibility.

What they are building is effectively a digital identity system where access to information requires permission. People fail to understand how dangerous this becomes once connected to the broader European agenda involving CBDCs, centralized digital IDs, online speech regulation, and financial monitoring. These are not isolated policies appearing randomly at the same time. They are interconnected components of a single structural transition toward centralized digital control.

First they regulate speech under the justification of misinformation. Then they regulate platforms under the justification of safety. Then they require identity verification under the justification of protecting children. Finally they target anonymity itself by restricting the tools people use to avoid surveillance.

This fits perfectly within the broader cycle unfolding in Europe, where declining economic confidence and political instability lead governments toward greater centralization and control. Historically, governments facing crisis do not voluntarily reduce authority, they expand surveillance, tighten restrictions, and attempt to maintain control over information and capital flows.

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Radical Leftist Adored by Democrats Pushes ‘Violent Revolution’ Following Court Decision Against Virginia Gerrymander

People in the left are absolutely frothing at the mouth over the decision by the Virginia Supreme Court that tore down their effort to gerrymander the state.

Hasan Piker, an America-hating, self-proclaimed communist and streamer, who Democrats just can’t seem to get enough of, has alsready suggested violent revolution as a fix for the problem.

It’s just amazing how political violence has become so normal for people on the left. They just want their way and will do anything to get it.

FOX News reports:

Leftist streamer calls violent revolution ‘inevitable’ as Democrats explode over Virginia court decision

Democrats exploded in fury Friday after the Virginia Supreme Court struck down a party-backed redistricting map central to their midterm election strategy, with at least one prominent leftist voice going so far as to call violent revolution “inevitable.”

In a 4-3 decision, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled that a voter-approved map, which would give Democrats a 10-1 advantage in U.S. House races, violated the state’s constitution because of procedural errors in the map’s passage. Virginia voters will cast ballots in the 2026 midterms using the same district maps from the 2022 and 2024 elections, which Democrats currently hold 6-5.

But Democratic lawmakers and commentators alike have framed the Supreme Court’s ruling as an act going against the will of the people. Hasan Piker, a popular leftist streamer who has espoused antisemitic rhetoric and campaigns with congressional candidates, accused the Virginia Supreme Court of denying the results of the state’s redistricting referendum.

“Scotus gutted the voting rights act and tennessee carved up the last dem district destroying black voter power in the state,” Piker wrote on X. “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”

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European Commission Official Touts 17 Investigations as Proof the Digital Services Act “Delivers”

The European Union’s Digital Services Act is a censorship and surveillance law dressed in the language of safety. It gives unelected officials in Brussels the power to decide what hundreds of millions of people are allowed to say online and it is building the infrastructure to verify their identities before they’re permitted to say it.

But at POLITICO’s AI & Tech Week summit in Brussels this month, Renate Nikolay, the European Commission’s Deputy Director-General at DG CONNECT, celebrated the law’s growing enforcement record. Seventeen ongoing investigations and one non-compliance decision, she told the audience, prove the DSA “delivers.”

What the DSA delivers is pressure. Pressure on platforms to censor more speech, faster, with fewer questions asked. Pressure to open their algorithms and internal systems to government inspection without a court order. And, increasingly, pressure on individual users to prove who they are before they’re allowed to participate in public discourse online.

Nikolay presented these enforcement numbers as proof of success. They are proof of something but not what she thinks.

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EU Going To War With VPNs In Bid To “Save The Children”

Western European governments and EU bureaucrats are advancing tighter regulations on VPNs as part of a broader push for “online age verification” and their ‘Chat Control’ agenda.  Privacy advocates and digital rights groups warn that Europe is drifting towards a surveillance and censorship regime similar to internet restrictions and firewalls used by Russia and China.

Last week European Commission Executive Vice-President Henna Virkkunen suggested that Brussels may need to address the use of VPNs to bypass the EU’s upcoming age-verification systems.  Speaking during a press conference on the EU’s new digital age-verification app, Virkkunen acknowledged that users could circumvent the system with VPNs and stated that preventing such circumvention would be among the ‘next steps’ policymakers need to examine.

Her statements were delivered only two weeks after she shared a stage with EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who called for a crackdown on web media companies to “protect children” from dangerous content.  The first stage of their agenda is a government created universal age verification app which web companies will be required to integrate.  Von der Leyen asserts that the new restrictions are designed to “defend children’s rights” (how does restricting access protect rights?).

The Orwellian language of the EU is not coincidental.  “Child vulnerability” is a carefully chosen vehicle to manipulate public approval, opening the door to incremental government management of online content and discourse. 

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