ReHacked vol. 347: Europe is scaling back its privacy and AI laws, The Patent Office Is About To Make Bad Patents Untouchable and more
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Europe is scaling back its landmark privacy and AI laws | The Verge #privacy
After years of staring down the world’s biggest tech companies and setting the bar for tough regulation worldwide, Europe has blinked. Under intense pressure from industry and the US government, Brussels is stripping protections from its flagship General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — including simplifying its infamous cookie permission pop-ups — and relaxing or delaying landmark AI rules in an effort to cut red tape and revive sluggish economic growth.
The changes, proposed by the European Commission, the bloc’s executive branch, changes core elements of the GDPR, making it easier for companies to share anonymized and pseudonymized personal datasets. They would allow AI companies to legally use personal data to train AI models, so long as that training complies with other GDPR requirements.
The proposal also waters down a key part of Europe’s sweeping artificial intelligence rules, the AI Act, which came into force in 2024 but had many elements that would only come into effect later. The change extends the grace period for rules governing high-risk AI systems that pose “serious risks” to health, safety, or fundamental rights, which were due to come into effect next summer. The rules will now only apply once it’s confirmed that “the needed standards and support tools are available” to AI companies.
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Fran Sans – font inspired by San Francisco light rail displays #design
Kevin Boone: The privacy nightmare of browser fingerprinting #privacy
Until about five years ago, our main concern surrounding browser privacy was probably the use of third-party tracking cookies. The original intent behind cookies was that they would allow a web browser and a web server to engage in a conversation over a period of time. The HTTP protocol that web servers use is stateless; that is, each interaction between browser and server is expected to be complete in itself. Having the browser and the server exchange a cookie (which could just be a random number) in each interaction allowed the server to associate each browser with an ongoing conversation. This was, and is, a legitimate use of cookies, one that is necessary for almost all interactive web-based services. If the cookie is short-lived, and only applies to a single conversation with a single web server, it’s not a privacy concern.
Unfortunately, web browsers for a long time lacked the ability to distinguish between privacy-sparing and privacy-breaking uses of cookies. If many different websites issue pages that contain links to the same server – usually some kind of advertising service – then the browser would send cookies to that server, thinking it was being helpful. This behaviour effectively linked web-based services together, allowing them to share information about their users. The process is a bit more complicated than I’m making it out to be, but these third-party cookies were of such concern that, in Europe at least, legislation was enacted to force websites to disclose that they were using them.
Browsers eventually got better at figuring out which cookies were helpful and which harmful and, for the most part, we don’t need to be too concerned about ‘tracking cookies’ these days. Not only can browsers mitigate their risks, there’s a far more sinister one: browser fingerprinting.
Did Qualcomm kill Arduino for good? | Molecularist #copyrights #opensource
Six weeks ago, Qualcomm acquired Arduino. The maker community immediately worried that Qualcomm would kill the open-source ethos that made Arduino the lingua franca of hobby electronics.
This week, Arduino published updated terms and conditions and a new privacy policy, clearly rewritten by Qualcomm’s lawyers. The changes confirm the community’s worst fears: Arduino is no longer an open commons. It’s becoming just another corporate platform.
APA PsycNet FullTextHTML page #psychology #health #socialmedia
This systematic review and meta-analytic investigation found that SFV use was associated with poorer cognition (attention, inhibitory control, language, memory, and working memory) and most mental health indices except body image and self-esteem. Moderator analyses revealed that these associations were consistent across youth and adult populations but were strongest when SFV use was measured via addiction scales and when general SFV use (as opposed to TikTok-specific use) was assessed. Although the inclusion of covariates did not impact effect sizes, future studies would benefit from more consistently accounting for general social media use in order to better isolate the unique associations of SFV use with health correlates. Incorporating a stronger focus on SFV content and user motivations will also be critical for understanding the specific conditions under which SFV engagement may relate to health. Additionally, given that most included studies were cross-sectional and correlational, more rigorous longitudinal and experimental designs are essential for clarifying directionality and mechanisms underpinning the associations between SFV use and health. Nonetheless, these findings offer a valuable foundation for future research aiming to disentangle the multifaceted nature of SFV use and its implications for well-being. As SFV platforms continue to evolve and expand across educational, commercial, and social contexts, understanding the health correlates of SFV engagement remains an important focus for digital health research, particularly for guiding balanced approaches to media use and informing future public health recommendations.
Verifying your devices is becoming mandatory #privacy #security
In April 2026, we will be rolling out a significant update to strengthen the security of your conversations: unverified devices will no longer be able to send and receive end-to-end encrypted messages via Element. This change follows the Matrix specification update that was announced at the Matrix 2025 conference on October, 17 and benefits everyone by enhancing security, but may require an action from you to continue sending & receiving encrypted messages on your existing devices.
Students at the University of Staffordshire have said they feel “robbed of knowledge and enjoyment” after a course they hoped would launch their digital careers turned out to be taught in large part by AI.
James and Owen were among 41 students who took a coding module at Staffordshire last year, hoping to change careers through a government-funded apprenticeship programme designed to help them become cybersecurity experts or software engineers.
How to Stay Sane in a World That Rewards Insanity #psychology #health
So how do you actually stay sane?
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Start by diversifying your information diet in ways that feel actively uncomfortable. The goal isn't to agree with everything you read. You'll still think most of it is wrong. But exposing yourself to articulate versions of positions you oppose does something valuable: it makes you realize that intelligent people can disagree with you without being monsters or morons. This sounds obvious when written out, but your social media feed has spent years training you to believe otherwise.
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Second, practice distinguishing between stakes and truth. Just because an issue matters doesn't mean every claim about it is correct, and just because you've picked a side doesn't mean you have to defend every argument your side makes. The tribal logic says you have to accept the whole package, but that logic is selling you certainty you haven't earned.
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Third, find (or at least, look for) communities that reward humility, not tribal loyalty. These are rare, but they exist. They're the group chats where someone can say "I changed my mind about this" without being treated like a traitor. They're the forums where "I don't know" is an acceptable answer. They're the relationships where you can test ideas without performing for an audience. You cannot be reasonable in isolation. You need a small group of people who value truth-seeking over status games, and you need to invest in those relationships deliberately.
The Patent Office Is About To Make Bad Patents Untouchable | Electronic Frontier Foundation #copyrights #longread
Inter partes review, (IPR), isn’t perfect. It hasn’t eliminated patent trolling, and it’s not available in every case. But it is one of the few practical ways for ordinary developers, small companies, nonprofits, and creators to challenge a bad patent without spending millions of dollars in federal court. That’s why patent trolls hate it—and why the USPTO’s new rules are so dangerous.
IPR isn’t easy or cheap, but compared to years of litigation, it’s a lifeline. When the system works, it removes bogus patents from the table for everyone, not just the target of a single lawsuit.
IPR petitions are decided by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), a panel of specialized administrative judges inside the USPTO. Congress designed IPR to provide a fresh, expert look at whether a patent should have been granted in the first place—especially when strong prior art surfaces. Unlike full federal trials, PTAB review is faster, more technical, and actually accessible to small companies, developers, and public-interest groups.
Here are three real examples of how IPR protected the public:
The “Podcasting Patent” (Personal Audio) Personal Audio claimed it had “invented” podcasting and demanded royalties from audio creators using its so-called podcasting patent. EFF crowdsourced prior art, filed an IPR, and ultimately knocked out the patent—benefiting the entire podcasting world.
Under the new rules, this kind of public-interest challenge could easily be blocked based on procedural grounds like timing, before the PTAB even examines the patent.
SportBrain’s “upload your fitness data” patent SportBrain sued more than 80 companies over a patent that claimed to cover basic gathering of user data and sending it over a network. A panel of PTAB judges canceled every claim.
Under the new rules, this patent could have survived long enough to force dozens more companies to pay up.
Shipping & Transit: a troll that sued hundreds of businesses For more than a decade, Shipping & Transit sued companies over extremely broad “delivery notifications”patents. After repeated losses at PTAB and in court (including fee awards), the company finally collapsed.
Under the new rules, a troll like this could keep its patents alive and continue carpet-bombing small businesses with lawsuits.
IPR hasn’t ended patent trolling. But when a troll waves a bogus patent at hundreds or thousands of people, IPR is one of the only tools that can actually fix the underlying problem: the patent itself. It dismantles abusive patent monopolies that never should have existed, saving entire industries from predatory litigation. That’s exactly why patent trolls and their allies have fought so hard to shut it down. They’ve failed to dismantle IPR in court or in Congress—and now they’re counting on the USPTO’s own leadership to do it for them.
Aldous Huxley Predicts Adderall and Champions Alternative Therapies — Angadh Nanjangud #motivation #philosophy
Alexander’s technique is to education what education is to life, in general. It proposes an ideal and provides means whereby that ideal can be realised.
--Aldous Huxley paraphrasing John Dewey
An official atlas of North Korea - by Miguel García Álvarez #maps #longread
According to the prevailing narrative in North Korea, the war was won by the communists and since then, the entire Korean peninsula has remained united under the rule of the Korean Workers’ Party. Therefore, when looking at the maps in this atlas, it should come as no surprise that Korea is always shown as one country, with no reference to the other country that exists at the southern tip of the peninsula.
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