liagason

#random stuff

[liagason @liagason]

"it's onside" #USMNT

[IT Guy @T3chFalcon]

This is not the first time.

2023: UK passes the Online Safety Bill. Signal threatens to leave. Meta threatens to pull WhatsApp. the government backs down.

2026: same government, new prime minister, same bill, different name. Keir Starmer gives Apple and Google 3 months to scan every device in the country or face criminal charges against their executives.

Signal's president Meredith Whittaker, on the BBC, yesterday:

"we would absolutely 100% walk rather than ever undermine the trust that people place in us."

not a maybe. 100%.

UK government ministers use Signal.

civil servants use Signal.

law enforcement officers use Signal.

the people writing the law that would break encryption use the app whose encryption they are trying to break. for their own sensitive communications.

they want a backdoor in your Signal.

not theirs.

and one more thing. this doesn't stay in the UK. Australia already has encryption-weakening laws. the EU has been debating the same measures. the Five Eyes alliance has pushed for backdoors for years. France tried it last year. Sweden is next.

every country watching this fight will use the outcome to justify their own demands.

what happens in London doesn't stay in London.

[Signal @signalapp]

Our statement on the UK government’s demand that all content on all devices sold or used in the country be scanned, on the presumption of nudity, using a dystopian combination of age verification and content scanning. This proposal will not safeguard children. It endangers us all.

https://t.co/VdWe9uhi8p

[Mullvad.net @mullvadnet]

This is what the UK spyware proposal means.

There must be government spyware on every mobile device. It shall watch everything that happens, including always watching the screen, looking for things the government disapproves of.

When anything is flagged by the software as something the government doesn't like, the software must block it from being sent or displayed (in realtime).

The user of the device must not be able to shut this watching and blocking off. The only way to shut it off would be to ask the government or its proxies to do so for you, at their discretion.

Therefore the whole device must be locked down. Administrator rights and the decision of what software or operating system to run or not to run must be taken from the owner/user and handed to the government and its proxies.

Apple and Google are themselves working hard to lock down the devices they are involved in to shut out competition and establish a duopoly.

The UK government says it is "working closely" with Apple and Google and currently they synchronise and coordinate their communication on this subject.

The UK government is now proposing to mandate what would otherwise be illegal anti-competitive practices.

@GrapheneOS on the Apple and Google duopoly:
https://t.co/rbRmcUDTRu

Statement from @signalapp
https://t.co/vJILcSrs4s

@ReclaimTheNetHQ on the state spyware:
https://t.co/3FCi06bP77

The government announcement:
https://t.co/ynYjR3DIRo

[Hugo Ferrer @ContraInvest]

Esto es Europa en estado puro. El Banco Central Europeo frenó permisos a Revolut para sacar nuevos productos financieros porque el BCE está "preocupado sobre la rapidez con la que el banco digital saca nuevos productos"

Revolut, que lo que tiene son tarjetas de crédito y préstamos al consumo le parece muy rápido al BCE 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡 Prefieren bancos atestados de gente que parecen oficinas del siglo XX donde aún hacen fotocopias.

https://t.co/zu21ttLqJR a través de @ft

[liagason @liagason]

@Pirat_Nation What's wrong with Libreoffice?

[𝒟𝒾𝓁𝓁𝓎💤 🇵🇸 @DegenDilly]

The New Dark Age is really upon us huh?

[No to Digital ID @NoToDigitalID]

EU prepares to impose internet restrictions on more than 65 million people

[alpha @omarsbigsister]

In every single country that passed age verification laws:

1) databases got leaked
2) innocent websites got censored
3) governments became more censorship heavy
4) protests became more criminalized
5) information got harder to find

[PeterSweden @PeterSweden7]

If your country requires digital ID verification to use social media, then you don't live in a free country anymore.

If your country want to regulate or ban VPNs, you don't live in a free country anymore.

[@levelsio @levelsio]

My gf is banned from reviewing places in Europe on Google Maps after she gave one restaurant in Portugal a 1-star review

When she reviews inside EU it gets auto rejected, outside EU she can review any place

Free speech in Europe has sadly died a long time ago

[Nym @nym]

Age verification is backdoor mass surveillance.

[Zara Riffler @ZaraRiffler]

VPN ist übrigens in solchen Staaten weitgehend verboten:
X China
X Russland
X Nordkorea
X Weißrussland
X Iran
🥲

[TFTC @TFTC21]

Andreas Antonopoulos breaks down #Bitcoin vs corporate control of money in 2016:

[Urs Marti @UMartiZH]

EU will VPNs einschränken, damit niemand die Alters-ID umgehen kann.

Nur totalitäre Regime kennen das und Steganographie macht es sowieso sinnlos.

Die EU hat den rechtsstaatlichen Kompass verloren.

[Captain Insight @CaptainInsightX]

20+ billion installations across earth and Mars.
Built by one Swedish guy. Alone. In 1996. 🤯

Meet Daniel Stenberg 🇸🇪

> Born 1970 in Huddinge, Sweden. Self-taught on a Commodore 64. No CS degree.
> In 1996, started building a tiny tool to download files from the internet.
> Called it cURL ~ today the silent backbone of every app, website, and connected device.
> Worked on it alone in his spare time. For free.
> Nearly 30 years later, cURL runs on 20+ billion installations worldwide.
> Every iPhone. Every Android. Every PlayStation. Every Tesla.
> Powers Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, Instagram behind the scenes.
> NASA used cURL on the Mars Ingenuity helicopter. 🚀
> His code literally flew on another planet.
> Companies worth trillions used his code. He answered bug reports for free.
> Made $0 from cURL for the first 23 years.
> In 2017, the King of Sweden personally handed him the Polhem Prize ~ Sweden's oldest tech award.
> First time ever given to an open-source project.
> 2019 ~ finally joined wolfSSL to work on cURL full-time. 🔥
> In 2025, awarded the IVA Gold Medal by the Royal Swedish Academy.
> Still ships from his home office in Stockholm. Still answers GitHub issues himself.

He spent nearly 30 years writing code that runs the internet from the background.

He made nothing for 23 of them. He kept going anyway.

What a man. Open-source GOAT. 🐐

[Jonas Fröller @jonasfroeller]

What if the EU built GitHub?

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

The EU is cracking down on emojis.

There are many things to say here.

The first is that this is what surely happens without the broadest possible protection of speech, necessarily including offensive speech.

Another is that "hate speech" will always find a way because people want to communicate it, so bans are ridiculous and will be driven into absurd tyranny every time.

A third is that you cannot change people's hearts by telling them something they cannot say by force of law. Righteousness has to be pursued because people want to, which requires appealing to them, not forcing them.

Another is that law that behaves this way will be regarded as arbitrary, capricious, and stupid and openly invites more of what it seeks to prohibit, thus backfiring. (The European mind cannot comprehend this.)

One more is that these laws will always serve special interests, thus corruption, and so accelerate the precise resentments that seem to (but don't) necessitate them.

Let people speak freely and honestly, though non-threateningly. Prohibit nothing more than active threats, incitement, open sedition that is moving into action, genuine harassment, and defamation.

Free the emojis! Even the ones being used for evil.

Also, maybe solve some of the actual problems causing people to speak out in "ugly" ways rather than accelerating them, protecting them, and trying to ban speech about them.

Europe is doing all of this exactly the wrong way.

[Ian Miles Cheong @ianmiles]

The EU is basically retarded at this point.