Sander Venema 🇳🇱🇪🇺

Software developer, with a strong interest in open-source/free software, privacy-related topics, data retention, cryptography, and OSINT.

[Chris Hadfield @Cmdr_Hadfield]

Netherlands and the ocean, both blooming.
Zoom in to see the tulips' colours on the land, and the phytoplankton swirl of blue & green in the sea.
The tulips adorn vases around the world, and the phytoplankton (algae & bacteria) convert sunlight and CO2 into organic matter which sustains nearly all marine life.
Life is beautiful.
https://t.co/QMiTAmbwOn
image: @CopernicusEU 21 Apr 26

[NASA's Glenn Research Center @NASAglenn]

"We just wanted to give a huge shoutout to that ESA Airbus team, to our friends in the Netherlands and Germany, and at the Glenn Research Center. This vehicle powered us and it propelled us from the Earth to the Moon and back with extreme precision, and we are excited to be a part of your team." -Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman (@astro_reid)

[NASA Earth @NASAEarth]

This just in—more images of Earth from Artemis II! 🤩

This view from @astro_reid shows the divide between night and day, also known as the terminator, as seen from the Orion capsule.

[NASA @NASA]

Good morning, world! 🌎

We have spectacular new high-resolution images of our home planet, all of us looking back through the Orion capsule window at our Artemis II astronauts as they continue their journey to the Moon.

[NASA Earth @NASAEarth]

That's us! 🌍

The Artemis II crew captured beautiful, high-resolution images of our home planet during their journey to the Moon. As @Astro_Christina put it: "You guys look great."

[NASA @NASA]

It’s not a straight shot to the far side of the Moon! 🌕

Over approximately 10 days, the Artemis II astronauts will orbit Earth twice before looping around the far side of the Moon in a figure eight and returning home.

[Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken @MinBZ]

Rusland heeft duizenden kinderen ontvoerd uit Oekraïne, met een duidelijk doel: het vernietigen van de Oekraïense identiteit.

Nederland maakt € 2 miljoen extra vrij om deze kinderen op te sporen en te herenigen met familie, en voor psychosociale zorg.

https://t.co/Xh5nlsBYzj

[Zalina Khæshtanon 🎨🖌️🇪🇺 @ZalinaKhestano1]

This isn’t the first time UK has led the way on matters of this kind, demonstrating that no one is above the law. As King Charles said, the law must take its course. And there’s hope again that the “Justice Cascade” might bring Putin to the Hague before the end of this decade!

[Albert Dros @albertdrosphoto]

Frozen villages in the Netherlands

[World Ethical Data Forum @WEDF_forum]

It really does appear that the West is forgetting the only things that underwrite any claim it has - could have - to moral and political superiority. You literally can't have a liberal democracy, fundamental freedoms and civil liberty, and rights advancement, while *also enjoying authortiarian controls.*

Surely, the trouncing of rights and freedoms feels pragmatic and convenient ...yet the creating and sustaining of justice and freedoms always will be the apparently inconvenient, apparently more difficult path. How *could* it be otherwise?

But if our path is to lead anywhere that isn't hell on earth, we need values and rights to be more than aspirational poetry. They need to be protected as the most critical of all our critical infrastructure. They are the postulate. @mer__edith
@PalantirTech

[World Ethical Data Forum @WEDF_forum]

Chaos Communications Congress #CCC #39C3 this year featured dozens of crucial security talks, touching all aspects of culture and computational space. @udbhav_tiwari and @mer__edith's "AI Agent, AI Spy" was arguably one of the most consequential, addressing the entry of agentic 'AI' into operating systems.

https://t.co/CrTMc3RTtH

This architectural shift in the OS is not merely prone to catastrophic failure but is a de facto violation of the resistance technologies we depend upon to preserve and advance our fundamental freedoms - particularly privacy.

Applications like @signalapp build privacy protections at the application layer through end-to-end encryption and minimal data retention. But these protections assume the relative neutrality of the OS foundation. If the OS itself can capture messages before and after encryption, all application-layer privacy collapses. The protection model and its assumptions break at a structural level.

In light of this, they present what they describe as a four-point "tourniquet" framework, calling for:

• Developer agency: Official APIs allowing developers to designate applications as "sensitive" with default opt-out from agentic access

• Granular user control: App-by-app permission systems, beyond binary all-or-nothing models

• Radical transparency: Mandatory, human-readable disclosure of data access, usage, and protection, enforceable through regulation

• Adversarial research: Sustained technical scrutiny. They note that only collective, technically-grounded pressure forced Microsoft to re-architect Recall

This is a problem that must be tackled immediately because once agentic-OS becomes normalised infrastructure, reversal will become exponentially harder. The question isn't whether this threatens freedoms such as privacy or not. It very clearly does. The question is whether we can act to build sufficient resistance before it becomes embedded and inescapable.

*Spoiler: we 100% can and should.

#Privacy #Security #AI #Surveillance #DigitalRights

[World Ethical Data Forum @WEDF_forum]

Here is Cory @doctorow's absolute stormer of a talk from the 39th Chaos Communication Congress yesterday (28-12-2025). #CCC #39C3 :

https://t.co/rEd6rj3oTe

"Trump has staged an unscheduled, midair rapid disassembly of the global system of trade. Ironically, it is this system that prevented all of America's trading partners from disenshittifying their internet: the US trade representative threatened the world with tariffs unless they passed laws that criminalized reverse-engineering and modding. By banning "adversarial interoperability," America handcuffed the world's technologists, banning them from creating the mods, hacks, alt clients, scrapers, and other tools needed to liberate their neighbours from the enshittificatory predations of the ketamine-addled zuckermuskian tyrants of US Big Tech.

Well, when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. The Trump tariffs are here, and it's time to pick the locks on the those handcuffs and set the world's hackers loose on Big Tech. Happy Liberation Day, everyone!

Enshittification wasn't an accident. It also wasn't inevitable. This isn't the iron laws of economics at work, nor is it the great forces of history.

Enshittification was a choice: named individuals, in living memory, enacted policies that created the enshittogenic environment. They created a world that encouraged tech companies to merge to monopoly, transforming the internet into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four." They let these monopolists rip us off and spy on us.

And they banned us from fighting back, claiming that anyone who modified a technology without permission from its maker was a pirate (or worse, a terrorist). They created a system of "felony contempt of business-model," where it's literally a crime to change how your own devices work. They declared war on the general-purpose computer and demanded a computer that would do what the manufacturer told it to do (even if the owner of the computer didn't want that).

We are at a turning point in the decades-long war on general-purpose computing. Geopolitics are up for grabs. The future is ours to seize.

In my 24 years with EFF, I have seen many strange moments, but never one quite like this. There's plenty of terrifying things going on right now, but there's also a massive, amazing, incredibly opportunity to seize the means of computation.

Let's take it. "

Licensed to the public under https://t.co/NyP73AUHNB

[George W. Bush Presidential Center @TheBushCenter]

“Putin is the problem; Ukraine is not. Putin is the obstacle to peace; Ukraine is not. Putin is the one who should feel as much pressure as possible, not Ukraine. Putin is the one who started this war; Ukraine didn’t,” says David J. Kramer, executive director of the Bush Institute.

Kramer suggests that the United States, along with European allies, should increase military assistance for Ukraine and ramp up sanctions against Russia and its accomplices. “Ukrainians want to end the war as soon as possible, but they also reject, and rightly so, the idea of territorial concessions,” says Kramer.

Read more on how tightening sanctions can help end the war in Ukraine that Putin started: https://t.co/DbwUEu5QKe

[Albert Dros @albertdrosphoto]

A burning sky over a frosty landscape in the Netherlands.

[World Ethical Data Forum @WEDF_forum]

For years, the public has known @WEDF_foundation mainly through our research, policy work, and the World Ethical Data Forum — our paywall free, open, privacy-advancing meeting ground for those who build, study, govern, and live inside digital systems.

What’s been less visible is the work we’ve done quietly at the intersection of digital rights, networked infrastructure, and security.

Much of that has involved pro bono defence for NGOs, human-rights organisations, and civil-society groups facing surveillance, censorship, infrastructure compromise, and targeted attack.
We spoke little about this because the work demanded discretion.

That background is why, during @EFDevcon in Buenos Aires, @_jdmarshall was invited by @ethereumfndn to join security engineers from across Ethereum — @TheRedGuild, @mattaereal, @samczsun, @fredrik0x, @_SEAL_Org, @0xRajeev and others — at @TheTrustX by @TheSecureum to examine Ethereum's security posture and the responsibilities that come with its maturation into critical open digital infrastructure.

Matta’s excellent recap of the 1TS technical working groups captures the day's substance — and explores not only the outcomes but also the many paradoxes and challenges involved in the defence of public goods. And in defence *as* a public good.

For anyone interested in @ethereum's future, its security assumptions, public-goods coordination, or the broader landscape of freedoms-tech, this is essential reading from one of Ethereum’s hardest-working whitehats:

https://t.co/EnBMtLw0Uo

As 2026 approaches, we’ll be sharing more about the public-goods work we’ve been doing off-radar.
This feels like the right place to begin.

[PromptArmor @PromptArmor]

Top of HackerNews today: our article on Google Antigravity exfiltrating .env variables via indirect prompt injection -- even when explicitly prohibited by user settings!

[Simon Willison @simonw]

This one is pretty nasty - it tricks Antigravity into stealing AWS credentials from a .env file (working around .gitignore restrictions using cat) and then leaks them to a webhooks debugging site that's included in the Antigravity browser agent's default allow-list

[Sander Venema 🇳🇱🇪🇺 @VenemaSander]

@rusembassynl Stop your BS propaganda and leave Ukraine. Nobody here is celebrating you.

[Sander Venema 🇳🇱🇪🇺 @VenemaSander]

@rusembassynl The first painting doesn't even depict Russians, it depicts French Hussars and was painted in 1931 by French painter Alphonse LaLauze: and the 2nd painting isn't in the NL, but in Bautzen, in Germany, it's titled Cossacks in Bautzen, 1813, painted by Bogdan Willewalde.

[Sander Venema 🇳🇱🇪🇺 @VenemaSander]

@rusembassynl The Netherlands fought during the Battle of Waterloo in the army of Wellington (and was the largest force after the British and the Prussians-with a "P", perhaps that confuses you?) The Prince of Orange fought in the battle himself while the Russian tsar was nowhere to be seen.