"How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." -- Anne Frank

New reCAPTCHA requires approved phones to pass​ | Cybernews #internet #privacy

Verify you’re human – by owning an approved Android or an iPhone. Google’s new reCAPTCHA system forces users to scan a QR code with a “compatible mobile device” and locks out anyone using a privacy-focused OS and device, warns GrapheneOS, a security-hardened OS alternative.

GrapheneOS warns that people without an iOS or Android device might soon be banned from accessing online services, even when browsing on desktop computers or laptops.

A recent change left arbitrary devices and operating systems, such as deGoogled Android smartphones, unable to complete Google’s reCAPTCHA verification, which prompts users to scan a QR code with a mobile device.

“It’s enormously anti-competitive,” GrapheneOS said in a public statement shared on major social media platforms.

“Control over reCAPTCHA puts Google in a position where they can require having either iOS or a certified Android device to use an enormous amount of the web.”

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Chernobyl at 40: Secret Stasi files reveal extent of Soviet misinformation campaign over nuclear disaster

Controlling the message

Handling the press was a top priority.

In the Soviet Union, top government officials created their own briefings for the media to be published at precise dates and times. In a set of classified documents that one government official bravely saved and later published, the concreteness with which the lies were devised is apparent. It documents Mikhail Gorbachev, then-leader of the Soviet Union, saying in a Politburo meeting with top government officials: “When we inform the public, we should say that the power plant was being renovated at the time, so it doesn’t reflect badly on our reactor equipment.”

Later in the same meeting, another senior Soviet official, Nikolai Ryzhkov, suggests that the group prepare three different press releases: one for the Soviet people, one for the satellite states and another for Europe, the U.S. and Canada.

Your EPUB Is Fine. Kobo Disagrees. Blame Adobe - André Klein Dot Net #copyrights

In a perfect world, RMSDK would just stop living in the CSS stone-ages or at least provide some kind of error handling instead of dropping the whole book, but I’m not holding my breath.

The digital publishing world is more obsessed with restricting access than giving users the best possible reading experience.

And until that changes, which it won’t, if you want to make sure that your book is Kobo-compatible, relying on epubcheck is unfortunately not enough. Gotta chuck it into Adobe’s woodchipper first.

Either it will work, or it will fail silently. In which case, you probably used some forbidden new-fangled CSS.

Swiss voters reject proposal to cap population at ten million - SWI swissinfo.ch #society #politics

Swiss citizens have rejected by a 55% majority the right-wing Swiss People's Party proposal to limit the population to ten million, final results of Sunday's polls show. The civilian service reform, for its part, has passed.

Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers #ai #copyrights

A German regional court has ruled that Google is directly liable for false claims in its AI-generated search overviews. In this case, Google's AI had wrongly linked two publishers to scams and shady business practices. The court treated the AI overviews as Google's own content and rejected Google's argument that users were responsible for fact-checking the results themselves.

Anti-social: It's fads, not friends, which now dominate our feeds #internet

Aurélia fixes herself a coffee, sits down in her beautiful garden not far from Paris and goes on Instagram "to relax." First up: "a guy I like a lot who does interior design. He's in Venice at the moment." She's into interior design, and has even just had two bird drawings by the 19th Century English designer William Morris tattooed on her arms. She scrolls down. Two kittens having a fight. "I love animals so I get a lot of animals. That's how it works, social media. You click on bananas and they give you bananas."

There are ads too – although they look just like the other posts – for a robot-vacuum cleaner, a diet and bed linen (with Morris-inspired designs). But no friends. She has 198 on Instagram but she says "it's completely changed. I practically don’t see any friends' posts anymore." She’s pretty much given up posting herself. "I don't think anyone sees them anymore anyway." 

While there remain committed social, amateur posters on Instagram and especially Facebook, the switch from communicating with people you know to scrolling through professionally made content from people you don't, is even more pronounced among young users.

Pokémon Go Scans Quietly Trained The Navigation Tech Now Headed Into Military Drones #privacy

Hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players spent years filming the streets, parks, and buildings around them to earn in-game rewards. Those roughly 30 billion environmental scans are now owned by Niantic Spatial, and they helped train a camera-based navigation model that a U.S. defense contractor is preparing to put into drones and other military robots. Most of the players had no idea.

Microsoft's open source tools were hacked to steal passwords of AI developers | TechCrunch #security

Microsoft has cut off access to dozens of its open source projects hosted on GitHub as it investigates how hackers apparently breached the projects and injected password-stealing malware into the code.

Many of the affected projects relate to Microsoft’s cloud service Azure and other tools used by developers to code with AI development apps, such as Claude Code, Gemini’s command line interface, and VS Code.

According to security firm Cloudsmith and community-driven malware analysis site OpenSourceMalware, which were some of the first to flag the hack, the malware allowed the hackers to steal the users’ passwords and other sensitive credentials when they opened the compromised tools in their AI coding apps.

FCC Wants to Kill Burner Phones By Forcing Telecoms to Get All Customers’ IDs #privacy

The FCC wants to legally force telecoms to collect new and renewing customers’ government issued identity number and physical address, impacting everyone from the privacy-conscious to domestic abuse survivors. “We never thought that would happen here.”

The Cypherpunk Library #resources #rabbithole

A personal collection of good public-domain reads. Nothing for sale, nothing to take down.

Massachusetts votes to pass new privacy rights bill that bans sale of precise location data | TechCrunch #privacy

Massachusetts lawmakers have voted to pass privacy protections that grant the state’s residents new rights over accessing and deleting their data held by big tech giants. The bill also bans companies from selling their users’ precise location data.

Lawmakers in the Massachusetts House passed the state’s Consumer Data Privacy Act in a unanimous 146-0 vote on Thursday, months after all of the Senate’s 40 lawmakers voted in favor of advancing its own bill in September. Now, the bills will be combined in the Senate, and sent to the state governor’s office, where it is expected to be signed into law. It’s not immediately clear when that will happen.

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