"Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other one thing." -- Abraham Lincoln

EU calls VPNs “a loophole that needs closing” in age verification push #privacy #politics

The European Parliamentary Research Service (EPRS) has warned that virtual private networks (VPNs) are increasingly being used to bypass online age-verification systems, describing the trend as “a loophole in the legislation that needs closing.”

The warning comes as governments across Europe and elsewhere continue expanding online child-safety rules that require platforms to verify users’ ages before granting access to adult or age-restricted content.

VPNs are privacy tools designed to encrypt internet traffic and hide a user’s IP address by routing connections through remote servers. While widely used for legitimate purposes such as protecting communications, avoiding surveillance, and enabling secure remote work, regulators are increasingly concerned that the same technology allows minors to circumvent regional age checks.

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Louis Rossmann tells 3D printer maker Bambu Lab to ‘Go (Bleep) yourself’ over its threatened lawsuit against enthusiast — Right to Repair advocate offers to pay the legal fees for a threatened OrcaSlicer developer | Tom's Hardware #copyrights

Louis Rossmann has officially pledged $10,000 to cover the initial legal fees for an independent software developer threatened with a cease and desist letter from Bambu Lab. He posted a video on Saturday to mobilize the Right to Repair community to back the developer and crowd-fund his legal defense. Rossmann is quite unhappy with Bambu Labs, giving the company the middle finger several times in the video and then ending it with, “And if you're watching this, Bambu Labs, go f*** yourself. Pick on somebody your own size.”

Obsidian Plugin Abused in Social Engineering Campaign to Deliver New PHANTOMPULSE RAT - CyberNetSec.io #security

Security researchers have identified a highly targeted social engineering campaign (REF6598) that weaponizes the Obsidian note-taking application to deliver a previously undocumented Remote Access Trojan (RAT) named PHANTOMPULSE. The campaign targets individuals in the financial and cryptocurrency sectors on both Windows and macOS. Attackers use platforms like LinkedIn and Telegram to build trust before luring victims into a malicious shared Obsidian vault. The attack chain relies on tricking the user into enabling a community plugin, which then executes code to deploy the RAT. PHANTOMPULSE demonstrates advanced capabilities, including using the Ethereum blockchain to dynamically resolve its command-and-control (C2) server address, making it highly resilient to takedowns.

Space Cadet Pinball on Linux • Stephen Brennan #pcgaming #retro #fun

The Intolerable Hypocrisy of Cyberlibertarianism #internet #longread

AI generated summary ahead

The sources argue that the modern internet is built upon a flawed and hypocritical ideology known as "cyberlibertarianism," which emerged in the 1990s. This ideology, championed by figures like John Perry Barlow and documents such as the "Magna Carta for the Knowledge Age," promised a decentralized, harmonious utopia achieved through total deregulation and radical individualism. However, the author contends that this was a "beautiful fiction" used to benefit large, profit-seeking corporations. Instead of fostering freedom, this framework allowed massive firms to conflate their corporate interests with individual rights, effectively avoiding regulation while offloading the social costs and responsibilities of governance onto unpaid labor and the public. Today, rather than the promised utopia, we face an internet dominated by centralized corporate power, the erosion of shared reality, and the "pretty fucking obvious problem" of unregulated AI. The author concludes that the cyberlibertarian promise was a lie and that saving the internet requires a new ethical code that prioritizes human well-being over profit and technical capability.

The Keypoints

• The Origin of Cyberlibertarianism: The ideology was codified in the mid-90s through documents like "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace," which demanded that virtual selves remain immune to government sovereignty. These documents established a creed of "catch up or get left behind," insisting that technology must evolve without any regulatory checks or concern for consequences.
• The Four Pillars of the Ideology: Scholar Langdon Winner identified four core pillars: technological determinism (progress is inevitable), radical individualism (personal liberation above all obligations), free-market absolutism (the market solves all problems), and a fantasy of communitarian outcomes (the belief that selfishness and deregulation would somehow produce harmony).
• The Corporate Conflation: A central "trick" of cyberlibertarianism was conflating the activities of freedom-seeking individuals with the operations of enormous corporations. This allowed tech giants to argue that government regulation was an attack on "individual freedom" even when that regulation was intended to foster competition or protect users.
• The Shifting of Responsibility and Costs: While the tech industry captures the profits, it shoves every harm, cost, and responsibility onto others. The internet relies on a "fiction" that governance happens by magic, when in reality it is performed by unpaid moderators, editors, and maintainers who are often mocked or ignored by the platforms that profit from their work.
• The "Ladder" of Hypocrisy: Cyberlibertarianism served as a "ladder" that founders used to climb to the roof; once they achieved corporate dominance, they "kicked it away". They transitioned from demanding zero regulation to using copyright and patent laws to protect their own interests while quietly shelving their libertarian rhetoric.
• The Failure of the Digital Utopia: The promise that universal access to information would create a better-educated populace has instead broken our shared reality. Algorithms now allow individuals to inhabit curated realities where they never have to face uncomfortable truths, leading to extreme polarization and the proliferation of misinformation.
• The Call for an Ethical Evolution: The author argues that the "cyberlibertarian bus" never existed and that we must find an ethical code stating that money and technical capability are not sufficient justifications for unleashing technology. Saving the internet requires moving past a broken ideology that is no longer compatible with the survival of democracy.

Meta, Zuckerberg Sued Over Alleged Copyright Infringement by Book Publishers and Scott Turow #copyrights

As a result of the alleged infringement, Meta’s AI system “readily generates, at speed and scale, substitutes for Plaintiffs’ and the Class’s works on which it was trained,” the lawsuit states. “Those substitutes take multiple forms, including verbatim and near-verbatim copies, replacement chapters of academic textbooks, summaries and alternative versions of famous novels and journal articles, inferior knockoffs that copy creative elements of original works, and derivative works exclusively reserved to rights holders. Llama even tailors outputs to mimic the expressive elements and creative choices of specific authors.”

The Sleep Trick That Actually Quiets a Racing Mind #health #psychology #biohacking

Once you go to bed—following your normal routine—pick a word that doesn’t carry much meaning to you and is five to 12 letters long. “The word should be emotionally neutral, so not something tied to stress or strong feelings,” says Patricia B. Pedreira, a health psychologist and postdoctoral associate at Duke University Medical Center who specializes in behavioral sleep medicine. “We want to avoid words like ‘money’ or ‘deadline’ or anything that might trigger worry chains.” Some of her favorites: blanket, garden, bedtime, and kitchen.

With your word in hand, work through it letter by letter, generating as many unrelated words as you can think of for each one. For example, if you chose “bedtime,” your shuffling might look like this: B: butterfly, basket, bagel. E: envelope, Egypt, emerald. (In practice, you’d keep going until you run out of ideas.) “The key is keeping them unrelated,” Pedreira says. “If your brain starts making connections or building a story, it defeats the purpose.”

Valve releases Steam Controller CAD files under Creative Commons license | Digital Foundry #hardware #copyrights

With the rather excellent Steam Controller now on its way to the lucky few that managed to order one, Valve has released a full set of CAD files for their new hardware. The idea is to let enterprising modders create their own Steam Controller add-ons, like skins, charging stands, grip extenders or smartphone mounts.

The Valve release includes files for the external shell ("surface topology") of the Controller and Puck, with a .STP, .STL and engineering diagram of each device, with the latter showing areas that must remain uncovered to let the device maintain its signal strength and otherwise function as designed.

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