Albert

[Ethereum Foundation @ethereumfndn]

0/ Clear signing is now live.

An open standard to end blind signing, making human-readable transactions default.

This effort brings a major UX and Security upgrade to transaction signing on Ethereum.

[Chubby♨️ @kimmonismus]

This worries me a lot. VPNs are an important gateway to the open internet.

To now supposedly raise concerns about child protection seems like a pretext.

[Christian Reber 🇪🇺 @christianreber]

Zero Germans voted for this.

[Tangem @Tangem]

Most crypto cards take full custody of your assets before you can spend them.

Tangem Pay doesn’t. Your crypto stays onchain in your control until the exact moment you pay for an item or a service.

Activate your FREE payment card in the Tangem app now.

[Claude @claudeai]

Computer use is now in Claude Code.

Claude can open your apps, click through your UI, and test what it built, right from the CLI.

Now in research preview on Pro and Max plans.

[S&D Group @TheProgressives]

There can be no compromise between the protection of children online from sexual abuse and the e-privacy of citizens.

Any claims suggesting that one must come at the expense of the other are misleading and made in bad faith.

https://t.co/VoSYHv7lOZ

[OpenAI @OpenAI]

Introducing EVMbench—a new benchmark that measures how well AI agents can detect, exploit, and patch high-severity smart contract vulnerabilities. https://t.co/op5zufgAGH

[Albert @Decentropia]

@grok remove the worst chancellor

[vitalik.eth @VitalikButerin]

This is what I worry Europe will get negatively polarized into: an ideology taking pride in a neat, sanitized online environment free of evil corporate and fascist pathogens.

I hope European govs do not go this way, and instead take a Pirate Party approach of user empowerment.

First, what's wrong with the tweet I'm quoting:

The idea that there should be "no space" for something you dislike is fundamentally a totalitarian and anti-pluralistic impulse. It's incompatible with being in an environment that you do not fully control.

This is especially true for categories that are subjective and controversial, because you end up trying to fully remove things you think are pathogens, when other people have good faith disagreements, and because you give yourself the maximalist goal of not even giving them breathing room, you create conflict and end up building the machinery of technocratic authoritarianism to impose your victory in the conflict.

So sorry, if you want to be a free society, you have to bite the bullet that some people, somewhere, will be selling things that you consider dangerous and saying things you consider disinformation and vicious lies.

What is the goal to shoot for?

You want to create an environment where those things don't dominate. This is the problem with twitter today: not that it's a safe space where 1000 people talk to each other in a corner about how heritage americans are the master race and putin is good or whatever, but that that crap gets shoved in our face on a mass scale, and the algorithms actively favor it.

The right metaphor is not castles and walls, but biological - think, why European forests don't have tropical lizards.

Having incentives for social media platforms to have less of those things instead of more is fundamentally reasonable, @audreyt has talked about how Taiwan has done something similar.

You also want to do this in a way where it's clear what the underlying principle is, so it's not a vehicle for imposing arbitrary and frequently changing expert-consensus agendas.

You also want to empower users, rather than working against them. People want to see and buy good things instead of bad things. Often the problem is that competition is too difficult in the current market. I actually supported the USB-C standardization mandate; it created more interoperability and thus improved competition and convenience. I would support incentivizing social platforms to be more open, and to be more transparent (eg. my proposal to require algorithms to be continuously published with a 1-2 year delay, with zk-proofs to ensure that the algorithm being used in real time exactly equals the one that gets published later)

Being able to better identify what messages are coming from what communities is also good, though I don't support the direction of banning anonymity of individual posters, rather I would want to see more macro-scale analytics, eg. seeing what communities are most strongly saying and amplifying content that semantically matches a particular idea; this can be done in privacy-preserving ways.

There is a real opportunity to reaffirm freedom of speech in a unique and different way, that emphasizes pluralism and pushes against unbalanced attempts to manipulate the discourse by individual powerful actors. We want to do this, not go down the dark path of having something that claims to support fundamental rights but actually is not trusted by anyone to be anything other than the fundamental right to follow the footsteps of a few technocratic experts.

[Mullvad.net @mullvadnet]

The war on privacy and encryption goes on. This time in the UK. Under the “Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill”, lawmakers now want client-side scanning on every phone and tablet.

The lawmakers write: “Any relevant device supplied for use in the UK must have installed tamper-proof system software which is highly effective at preventing the recording, transmitting (by any means, including livestreaming) and viewing of CSAM using that device.”

Once again, they use “what about the children”, this time to install state spyware that would continuously scan every action on a phone or tablet and watch everything that is shown on the screen. This will effectively ban end-to-end encrypted communication and open source operating systems like GrapheneOS and forbid that people have administrator rights on their own devices.

The bill also seeks “Action to prohibit the provision of VPN services to children in the United Kingdom” and wants “all regulated user-to-user services to use highly-effective age assurance measures to prevent children under the age of 16 from becoming or being users.” In practice, this means identity checks for VPN users, making things like anonymous whistleblowing difficult.

The attack on secure and private communication is worldwide. Now is the time for resistance. Demand transparency from your politicians, and privacy for the people.

[LayerZero Foundation @LayerZero_Fndn]

Fee Switch Referendum #3

On Dec. 20, ZRO holders will vote:
• “Yes” to activate the LayerZero protocol fee
• “No” to keep the protocol fee inactive

Once activated, collected fees from each message will be converted to ZRO and burned.

[Tangem @Tangem]

Tangem Pay. The reveal. Tomorrow.

[Patrick Hansen @paddi_hansen]

Great news and big win for privacy in the EU! 🇪🇺🇩🇪

Germany’s ruling CDU/CSU party made it clear today: there will be no chat control - as pushed for by other EU countries - with this German government.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

Freedom won today!

🚫 No ChatControl in EU

Now keep this snooping on people's private messages off the 🇪🇺 EU's agenda forever please

[Steinhoefel @Steinhoefel]

Unter dem Vorwand, Kinder zu schützen, sehen die neuesten Vorschläge der EU zur Chat-Kontrolle das massenhafte Scannen jeder Nachricht, jedes Fotos und jedes Videos auf dem Gerät eines Bürgers vor, um diese über eine von der Regierung vorgeschriebene Datenbank oder ein KI-Modell zu bewerten und festzustellen, ob es sich um zulässige Inhalte handelt oder nicht.

[FDP Sachsen @fdpsachsen]

Was als Kinderschutz verkauft wird, birgt die Gefahr digitaler Massen-#Überwachung. Wer Verschlüsselung aufweicht, schwächt den Schutz aller – Familien, Unternehmen, Journalisten, Whistleblower. Kinderschutz ist Pflicht. Aber Überwachung ist keine Lösung. #Chatkontrolle

[Julian Reichelt @jreichelt]

Krass! Wladimir Putin will mit einem neuen Gesetz alle Chat-Nachrichten scannen und durchsuchen, noch bevor sie verschlüsselt und versendet werden. Ah, sorry, nicht Putin. Ursula von der Leyen.

[Christian Dürr @christianduerr]

Was wirklich bitter ist: Die Regierung ist sehr schnell, wenn es darum geht, Grundrechte einzuschränken, Stichwort Chatkontrolle. Aber wenn es um den Herbst der Reformen geht, passiert nichts. Statt radikaler Eingriffe in die Freiheit brauchen wir radikale Wirtschaftsreformen!

[Christian Dürr @christianduerr]

Es ist alarmierend, dass Schwarz-Rot plant, die allgemeine Chatkontrolle in der EU zu ermöglichen. Damit öffnet sie das Tor für eine in der Geschichte der 🇩🇪 beispiellose Überwachung unbescholtener Bürgerinnen & Bürger. Das gefährdet das Fundament unserer liberalen Gesellschaft.

[Marco Buschmann @MarcoBuschmann]

#Chatkontrolle ist so, als wenn man Briefe vorsorglich öffnet und man nachschaut, ob nicht etwas Illegales darin stehen könnte. Sowas hat im Rechtsstaat keinen Platz. Diese Linie habe ich als Justizminister durchgesetzt. Ein Kurswechsel wäre ein Jammer!

https://t.co/lZdjF18EHh