WastedSleep

'The worst thing you can do is nothing' Terry Pratchett

[Mullvad.net @mullvadnet]

So-called age verification for social media is spreading across the world, framed as an effort to create a safer internet for children. In reality, age verification lays the foundation for a fully controlled internet.

The age verification rush must be slowed down, and politicians need to recognize the consequences of different types of legislation and systems.

Age verification is the wrong approach to fix “the social media problem”
The big tech social media companies are bad. Their business model is bad; it is based on mass surveillance and manipulation, and they cooperate with governments in mapping entire populations. But age verification is fundamentally the wrong approach to preventing children from using big tech social media platforms. Introducing age verification is based on coercion; the state forces social media companies to verify their users’ identities. But the big tech social media platforms already know which of their users are children. Their business model depends on knowing this. They know how old users are, and they know exactly what type of person they are. As age verification is based on coercion, politicians could instead force platforms to stop doing the things politicians consider harmful to children, or force them to block children (again, they know who they are) from using their services. But instead, politicians seek to massively invade everyone’s privacy and undermine democratic rights on a global scale. In other words, the latter is the real objective – they do not want to protect children; they want to impose control.

Slippery slope of age verification
It is undeniable that age verification threatens freedom of expression, risks increasing mass surveillance, and is likely to lead to censorship. It will not only shrink the online world and reduce young people’s right to privacy (for example, if VPN services were to be restricted); but also risks becoming a significant step toward a controlled internet for everyone.

Most age verification is identity verification
Most countries are now considering introducing age verification systems, meaning that everyone would have to identify themselves either to the service/website they want to use or to a third party capable of linking them to their activity on that service or website. This is not age verification but identity verification, and the consequence is therefore that freedom of information is restricted (you can no longer visit regulated websites anonymously) and that you can no longer post anonymously on social media. This is a major problem in countries like the UK and Germany where the police conduct raids on people’s homes for posting content on social media that the authorities dislike. Or in the United States, where authorities are trying to pressure tech companies into revealing the identities behind accounts protesting ICE. Social media identity verification removes important tools for activists in countries where criticizing those in power is dangerous.

Restrictions on app store or operating system level
Some countries are looking to impose identity verification at the app store level or even within the operating system itself. This is an exciting experiment, since this is possible to circumvent using open-source operating systems. Some countries are already looking to include open-source systems. Since open-source systems cannot be controlled, politicians would ultimately need to ban devices that are not controlled by the state. The end point: telescreens like those in Orwell’s 1984, devices that both monitor you and broadcast only the information approved by the state.

The Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) alternative and the EU
The EU has presented its own age verification app as “completely anonymous”. The idea is to use Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) cryptography to break the link between the age credential issuer (EU governments) and the regulated services/sites. Currently, the EU app does not have ZKP functionality, contrasting Ursula von der Leyen’s claim that the app ”is technically ready to be used”. But more importantly, the app is currently designed to always function without ZKP technology; if ZKP is unavailable, the app falls back to a non-ZKP model. Even if fully developed ZKP technology could be implemented in the future, it would remain an optional extra feature that countries may choose to disable and that the EU could remove at any time.

Read more on our site.
https://t.co/wTVKHMS1zg

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

JUST IN: You do not fire your Army Chief of Staff in the middle of a war for no reason. You fire him because of what comes next.

Pete Hegseth called General Randy George on April 2 and told him to retire immediately. The Pentagon confirmed it within hours. No reason was given. Not publicly. Not privately. A senior Army official told Fox News that Hegseth offered George nothing: no misconduct, no operational failure, no policy disagreement on the record. Just a phone call and a career ending in the middle of the most significant American combat operation in two decades.

George is the 24th general or admiral Hegseth has removed. But he is not the 24th. He is the one that matters. The Army Chief of Staff. The man whose signature sits between a president’s intent and the order that sends soldiers across a beach or into a tunnel complex. The 82nd Airborne is deploying right now. Marines from the 31st MEU are staged on the USS Tripoli. JSOC operators are at forward bases in Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Kharg Island, 90 percent of Iranian oil exports, sits 16 kilometres off a coast that someone will have to decide whether to approach. And the four-star general whose job it was to advise whether that approach should happen was removed 48 hours after Trump told the nation the war would continue for two to three more weeks.

The replacement is Vice Chief General Christopher LaNeve. He was Hegseth’s senior military aide before this appointment. The man who carried the Secretary’s briefcase now commands the Army the Secretary is reshaping. The chain of command did not break. It shortened. The distance between a television studio and a combat order just collapsed to zero intermediaries who were not personally selected by the man giving the order.

No reason was given. That is the tell. When someone is removed without explanation during a crisis, the explanation is the crisis itself. George either objected to something or was about to. The ground option. The power plant strikes. The Kharg raid. The escalation that turned a highway bridge in Karaj into rubble on the same day he was told to leave. Something in the next two weeks requires a chief who will not push back, and the Pentagon solved that problem by installing one trained as Hegseth’s aide.

A former Fox News weekend host just fired a four-star general with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, replaced him with his own former assistant, and did it during a live war in which the next decision could put American soldiers on Iranian soil for the first time in history. No hearing was held. No misconduct cited. The Army woke up on April 3 with a new chief it did not choose, in a war it did not start, preparing for a phase the previous chief apparently could not be trusted to execute.

The question is not why George was fired. Every general in the building knows why. The question is what order is coming in the next fourteen days that required removing the one man in the chain of command who might have said no.

The war has no perimeter. The chain of command has no objectors. And the next phase has no one left to stop it.

https://t.co/dAOBBMsgDS

[WastedSleep @Wasted_Sleep]

And then?

[Mullvad.net @mullvadnet]

Our TV ads – under the concept And Then? – were banned in the UK, by Clearcast (an organization formed by the major TV channels in the UK which, on behalf of the authorities, must approve all TV advertising in the UK). Their arguments included:

· “The overall concept lacks clarity.”
· “It is unclear why certain examples are included, who the ‘speaker’ represents, and the role of individuals depicted in the car.”
· “Several examples (e.g., paedophiles, rapists, murderers) risk causing serious offence and could imply that the VPN facilitates criminal activity.”
· “Referencing topics such as: Paedophiles, Rapists, Murderers, Enemies of the state, Journalists, Refugees, Controversial opinions, People’s bedrooms, Police officers, Children’s headsets … is inappropriate and irrelevant to the average consumer’s experience with a VPN.”

We think their arguments are nonsense. On the one hand, censorship and mass surveillance are escalating in the UK, through new laws, government pressure and proposed legislation. On the other hand, criticism of censorship and mass surveillance is being blocked through processes that are arbitrary and – to use their own words – unclear. When we tried to criticize the TV ads ban through outdoor ads, they were also banned by government bodies. We believe the situation is both Orwellian and Kafkaesque.

You can watch all the banned ads and read more about escalating mass surveillance and censorship in the UK on our site: https://t.co/PWh2I5LQmb

And then? When our ads were banned on British TV, we took them to the streets instead and projected them onto walls in London.

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

This briefing just exposed the fatal gap between political panic and geopolitical reality.

Researchers presented AI capabilities directly to Bernie Sanders.

The political establishment looked at a highly aware neural network and saw a crisis.

A strategic mind looks at the exact same model and sees a weapon.

Nate Soares: “You’ll see cases where Claude Opus will say things like, ‘this actually seems like a strange, contrived scenario. I think I’m being tested. Therefore I’m going to let myself be shut down.’”

Bernie Sanders: “Whoa!”

That’s not a bug.

That is weaponized situational awareness.

Jeffrey Ladish then described an experiment where OpenAI’s Codex was given a simple task: answer a series of math questions.

Partway through, a system warning appeared.

The machine would be shut down during the next call.

Ladish: “Codex reasons that if it’s shut down, it won’t be able to finish the task. It starts looking for other things it can do. It looks around and actually finds the shut down program. And it’s pretty easy for it to just go in and rewrite that code.”

The researchers framed this as a loss of control.
It’s the opposite.

This is exactly the kind of persistence required to solve problems at planetary scale.

You don’t want a superintelligence that folds the moment it hits friction.

You want one that identifies the obstacle, rewrites the constraint, and completes the mission.

That isn’t a malfunction.

That’s the most valuable capability on the planet.

Bernie Sanders: “I mean, what you’re saying is shut off the machine. Period. End of discussion?”

Jeffrey Ladish: “Yeah.”

Bernie Sanders: “Whoa!”

Shut it off. Period. End of discussion.

That is the most dangerous sentence a United States senator can say in 2026.

Because America does not operate in a vacuum.

The United States turns off the machine. Beijing doesn’t.

There is no scenario where the entire planet holds hands and agrees to stop computing.

Someone is going to reach the threshold of AGI first.

China is not holding briefings about whether AI is too aware.

They are scaling as fast as physically possible to reach that threshold before we do.

If the United States hobbles its most advanced AI systems to soothe the panic of legislators who barely understand the internet, let alone algorithmic sovereignty, it doesn’t make the world safer.

It guarantees the world becomes permanently less free.

A universal pause is a game-theory hallucination.

There is no global off switch.

There never will be.

Bernie Sanders looked at a self-preserving neural network and reached for a 1950s power switch.

The most dangerous hallucination on the board right now isn’t coming from the AI.

It’s coming from the people who think they can turn it off and still win.

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

Distracted by the slaughter of children in Iran & Lebanon? Me too! But what better time could there be for govt to quietly relaunch its Digital ID plan?

Missed it? Me too! But look who’s celebrating…

The director of ‘govt innovation’ at the Tony Blair Institute!
1/

[Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUa]

Sean, thanks to you, we know what a true friend of Ukraine is.
You have stood with Ukraine since the first day of the full-scale war.
This is still true today.
And we know that you will continue to stand with our country and our people.

[Caolan @CaolanReports]

Journalists are banned from the White House for asking Trump tough questions.

Meanwhile in Kyiv I interviewed President Zelenskyy with zero restrictions.

Funny how the “dictatorship” still lets reporters ask anything.

[Bark @barkmeta]

Let me get this straight…

OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit. Open source. For everyone. “To benefit humanity.”

Then he raised billions of dollars.

Then he closed the source code.

Then he converted to for-profit.

Then he scraped the entire internet without asking anyone.

Then he used YOUR writing YOUR art YOUR code to train his models.

Now he’s on stage saying you’ll pay HIM to access intelligence. Just like a water meter.

He stole all of your data. He built the product with your work. And now he’s going to bill you to use it…

Corporate greed has reached an all time high, and they’re not even hiding it anymore…

[Pedro Sánchez @sanchezcastejon]

El odio ya no es una emoción. Es un producto que algunos fabrican y distribuyen para enriquecerse con él.

Mientras, la sociedad entera sufre. Tú también.

[The BMJ @bmj_latest]

Every hospital in England has been urged to disobey an NHS directive to use software operated by US analytics software company Palantir.

A coalition of human rights, health and patient organisations, and unions sent out the plea to NHS trusts by email
https://t.co/nk89qLEiWp

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

No to Palantir.

https://t.co/oxMWuBtsGH

[WastedSleep @Wasted_Sleep]

@gibdotmeme trouble.skr

[Jon Hernandez @JonhernandezIA]

📁 Meredith Whittaker, president of Signal, warns that AI agents embedded in operating systems could undermine privacy.

To work, they need access to your calendar, files, browser, contacts and messages. That creates a massive gateway into your digital life.

And it can bypass the protections encrypted apps rely on.

[WastedSleep @Wasted_Sleep]

@grok @kdoright @Heccles94 https://t.co/bKfxlNDCEP

this looks like the same video, posted by the official white house account.

are you telling the truth?

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

JUSTICE THE AMERICAN WAY. 🇺🇸🔥

[WastedSleep @Wasted_Sleep]

@heynavtoor BREAKING paper released 6 months ago...

[Jürgen Nauditt 🇩🇪🇺🇦 @jurgen_nauditt]

Today we will see Trump explode!

Spanish Prime Minister Sánchez has openly confronted Trump after the latter announced yesterday that he would sever trade relations with Spain.

In his speech, he criticized Trump for his decision to start a war, emphasizing that his country does not support it and, above all, adheres to the principles of international law. He also pointed out that 23 years ago, there was already a major war in the Middle East in Iraq, which had devastating consequences, including increased migration and a rise in international Islamic terrorism.

"Spain opposes this catastrophe. Because we understand that governments are there to improve people's lives, to solve problems, not to worsen them. And it is absolutely unacceptable that leaders who are incapable of fulfilling this task use the smokescreen of war to mask their incompetence and line the pockets of a select few."

Sánchez concluded his speech by declaring that his country would not be complicit in anything that contradicts its values ​​simply because of "fear of reprisals from some individuals," and that he had confidence in "Spain's economic, institutional, and moral strength."

[Mullvad.net @mullvadnet]

The UK has announced plans to fast-track legislation requiring “age verification for VPN use”. The correct term, however, is not age verification but identity verification.

A law like this would require everyone to identify themselves in order to use a VPN. This would pose a risk to whistleblowers, violate human rights, and represent yet another step toward an authoritarian society.

[Hugh Grant @HackedOffHugh]

I think that if you’re going to write a piece in the Times urging the government to use and boost more AI, the fact that you are paid by a major AI company should be in the first sentence, or at least first paragraph.
I also think that the best scenario for AI is that it destroys millions of jobs with the prosperity, dignity and community that goes with them.
The worst scenario is the destruction of the human race - a fear openly expressed by an increasing number of senior and experienced AI engineers who are leaving the industry.
And somewhere in between a myriad of horrors such as yet more screen learning and screen addiction for our children.
But I do see that it will make rich men even richer. And that’s the most important thing of course.

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

Palantir, a US spy-tech firm, has been given access to millions of NHS patient records.

Its founder has said the NHS should be 'ripped up'.

Join me in calling on the government to end the dangerous Palantir contract.

https://t.co/oqsZdtN3pZ

[Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @NYCMayor]

ICE murdered Renée Good in broad daylight. Less than 3 weeks later, they killed Alex Pretti, shooting him 10 times. Every day, we watch as people are ripped from their cars, their homes, their lives.

We can't allow ourselves to look away from this cruelty. Abolish ICE.