Sam de Silva

works where tech, human rights, culture and information overlap. now past @internews, part-time @session_app 🇱🇰/🇦🇺/ ☮

[Sam de Silva @sam_roam]

Free as in freedom - from anti-colonial refusal to public-interest AI

Today, dependency on AI is not imposed at gunpoint. It is offered as a world-transforming revolution at a bargain price, and we are buying into it.

https://t.co/zu2ivHBlNx

[Thomas Fazi @battleforeurope]

On Thursday, the European Parliament “adopted” the extension of Chat Control 1.0. This is the temporary suspension of the EU’s ePrivacy rules that allows tech platforms to mass-scan citizens’ private communications, ostensibly to detect child sexual abuse material. “Adopted” is placed in quotation marks here because the word implies something that conspicuously failed to happen: a majority of MEPs voting in favour. In fact, 314 MEPs voted to reject the text, against 276 in favour. And yet it passed anyway.

This was made possible through a procedural sleight of hand worthy of Brussels at its most cynical. The file was rammed through under an “urgency procedure”: European Parliament President Roberta Metsola unilaterally reopened a dossier that MEPs had already rejected in March, and the Council conveniently bounced it back at the start of the summer recess, when securing attendance is hardest. Rejecting it a second time would have required not a simple majority but an absolute one: 360 votes. The law was therefore approved despite a majority of MEPs voting against it. The regulation will now remain in force until April 2028, buying time for negotiations on its even more ambitious successor, Chat Control 2.0.

As German MEP @FabioDeMasi noted following the vote, Chat Control is a “legislative zombie” — a measure the European Parliament has rejected multiple times, revived again and again until the desired outcome emerges. This episode should give pause to those who insist that the EU’s democratic deficit could be cured by handing more power to the European Parliament. Here is that very institution’s president working with the Council to resurrect a file the Parliament itself had buried. If this is how the Parliament operates, empowering it further would only deepen this democratic deficit, lending a thicker veneer of legitimacy to what remains, at bottom, an executive-bureaucratic machine that treats votes as obstacles to be engineered around.

Continue reading here: https://t.co/yxWOZ07vTA

[Alex Volkov @altryne]

If you, like me, just woke up, let me catch you up on the Claude Code Leak (I know nothing, all conjecture):

> Someone inside Anthropic, got switched to Adaptive reasoning mode
> Their Claude Code switched to Sonnet
> Committed the .map file of Claude Code
> Effectively leaking the ENTIRE CC Source Code
> @realsigridjin was tired after running 2 south korean hackathons in SF, saw the leak
> Rules in Korea are different, he cloned the repo, went to sleep
> Wakes up to 25K stars, and his GF begging him to take it down (she's a copyright lawyer)
> Their team decided - how about we have agents rewrite this in Python!? Surely... this is more legal
> Rewrite in Py
> Board a plane to SK🇰🇷
> One of the guys decides python is slow, is now rewriting ALL OF CLAUDE CODE into Rust.
> Anthropic cannot take down, cannot sue
> Is this "fair use?"
> TL;DR - we're about to have open source Claude Code in Rust

[Sam de Silva @sam_roam]

Inspired by @balajis Network School concept off Singapore. I'd be interested in creating a similar platform for those who are entering their second innings - ie. not the 20-somethings, but for the 50-something :-)

[Iddo עידו عيدو @iddoelam]

Yesterday, we protested in Tel Aviv with the next generation of refusniks who are going to refuse to be complicit in genocide in the coming weeks and months.

We refuse!
Genocide, Occupation, Apartheid - not in our name!

[☀️👀 @zei_squirrel]

I wish children didn’t die. I wish they would be temporarily elevated to the skies until the war ends. Then they would return home safe, and when their parents would ask them: “where were you?”, they would say: “we were playing in the clouds”.

— Ghassan Kanafani, Palestinian writer murdered by Israel

[Dinidu de Alwis @dinidu]

This is the story of how hackers stole data from Cargills Bank and dumped it on the internet, and how the bank hid it from the wider public, and of zero mainstream media reporting.

This is Sri Lanka's biggest ever cybersecurity incident.

Brace yourself.
https://t.co/E3h6r9clOF

[Naomi Brockwell priv/acc @naomibrockwell]

When we normalize surveillance, we normalize control.

[Sam de Silva @sam_roam]

@naomibrockwell Should be able to scrape your posts and then paste them elsewhere. Will chat with friends @session_app and a couple of coder/scraper folks and revert.

[Session @session_app]

🎉👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Groups v2 has been released!

If you participate in group chats on Session, it’s essential that you follow some important steps and prepare to recreate or rejoin those groups when the upgrade is enabled in 10 days.

Here’s everything you need to know 👇

[Dan Hendrycks @hendrycks]

We’ve found as AIs get smarter, they develop their own coherent value systems.

For example they value lives in Pakistan > India > China > US

These are not just random biases, but internally consistent values that shape their behavior, with many implications for AI alignment. 🧵

[Session @session_app]

Privacy matters now more than ever.

[Samira Mohyeddin سمیرا @SMohyeddin]

What stood out for me was not the actions of journalist @samhusseini but those in the room who fell in line, as he was forcibly removed.

“I’m a journalist not a potted plant.”
- Sam Husseini, January 16, 2024

[Privacy Guardians @privacyguardia]

1/ 2025: Time to resume The Privacy Series and explore promising Anon & Privacy tech.

The past, the present and the future of our space 🌖

For those who missed it 📖🧵

[Senator Lidia Thorpe @SenatorThorpe]

After speaking with a range of stakeholders and hearing from many community members, I've decided to oppose the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill.

More needs to be done to tackle these problems. But this Bill is not the answer.

Read more here:

https://t.co/BkfcTlESK4

[Naomi Brockwell priv/acc @naomibrockwell]

On #GlobalEncryptionDay let's celebrate Phil Zimmermann, creator of PGP. The US govt fought him for 3 years for spreading encryption. He won, & privacy prevailed.

Today, we’re in another war against privacy, & we need more Phil Zimmermanns to lead the charge.

Full interview:

[Session @session_app]

ENCRYPT YOUR SHIT.

#GlobalEncryptionDay

[Center for Democracy & Technology @CenDemTech]

🌎IT'S HERE: We're celebrating #GlobalEncryptionDay 2024, the annual day of action championing how #encryption empowers people to connect w/others, build community, protect themselves & their loved ones, & live their lives to the fullest. #ProtectTheFuture https://t.co/XUIF4GZS1U

[Session @session_app]

DATA 👏 NOT 👏 COLLECTED

[Naomi Brockwell priv/acc @naomibrockwell]

The companies that truly care about your privacy know they're the weak link and can't guarantee your data's safety. That's why they remove their own access & avoid keeping message records that could be used against you.
Trust e2ee, not people who make empty promises.