As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.

An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device. That’s when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn’t consented to. The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers’ IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after. After a lengthy investigation, he discovered that a remote kill command had been issued to his device.

Swiss data protection officers have warned public bodies not to use cloud services from industry hyperscalers Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, due to a lack of true end-to-end encryption.

Share your favorite open-source F-Droid apps so more users can find and enjoy it.

https://www.livemint.com/news/india/if-you-don-t-want-jyotiraditya-scindia-says-sanchar-saathi-app-is-optional-amid-strong-opposition-protests-11764659707854.html

Casting support is still available on older Chromecast devices or TVs that support Google Cast natively, according to Netflix’s support page

Archive link

Let’s Encrypt will be reducing the validity period of the certificates we issue. We currently issue certificates valid for 90 days, which will be cut in half to 45 days by 2028. This change is being made along with the rest of the industry, as required by the CA/Browser Forum Baseline Requirements, which set the technical requirements that we must follow. All publicly-trusted Certificate Authorities like Let’s Encrypt will be making similar changes. Reducing how long certificates are valid for helps improve the security of the internet, by limiting the scope of compromise, and making certificate revocation technologies more efficient.

excited to see what this means for the project, the poor UI/UX of libreoffice is easily its most glaring flaw imo

Privacy stalwart Nicholas Merrill spent a decade fighting an FBI surveillance order. Now he wants to sell you phone service—without knowing almost anything about you.

With only eight fluent Nyiyaparli speakers remaining, an Aboriginal group is racing against time to save its 41,000-year-old language.

Not the first time they were caught.

NextDNS analytics

I rediscovered the joy of my own music collection by quitting Spotify and switching to self-hosted Navidrome.

Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands and Slovenia will boycott next year’s Eurovision Song Contest, after Israel was allowed to compete.

The Swiss privacy regulator Privatim has taken steps to ban Microsoft, Amazon, and Google’s American cloud services for government agencies. Data storage within Switzerland offers no protection against American laws, Privatim argues.

Happy winter and merry festivities!

Exclusive: Swedish carmakers push to retain target as Germany lobbies to help its own industry by softening cutoff date

India’s telecoms ministry has privately asked smartphone makers to preload all new devices with a state-owned cyber security app that cannot be deleted, a government order showed

The Indian telecommunications authority, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT), has instructed eight messenger services to implement a permanent binding to inserted SIM cards. Affected are WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, Snapchat, ShareChat, as well as the Indian services Arattai, JioChat, and Josh. According to the directive, the companies must ensure within 90 days that their services can only be used with a physically inserted SIM card.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about PeerTube, Loops, Bandwagon, and other platforms in the Fediverse that are geared around artists. I might get flamed for this, and you’re welcome to disagree, but I think the network is in dire need of having support for commerce.

… by running your own instance of the free and open-source federated metasearch engine SearXNG on OpenBSD!

Advocates are fighting against the $16.7bn global smart-toy market, decrying surveillance and a lack of regulation

Georgia’s authorities used a World War One-era chemical weapon to quell anti-government protesters last year, evidence gathered by the BBC suggests.

Wonder if there’s a spin cycle. Ha.

Two sibling contractors convicted a decade ago for hacking into US State Department have once again been charged, this time for a comically hamfisted attempt to steal and destroy government records just minutes after being fired from their contractor jobs.

Scientists are raising alarms about the potential influence of artificial intelligence on elections, according to a spate of new studies that warn AI can rig polls and manipulate public opinion.

Archived version

This is a list of phone manufacturers that lock their bootloaders to prevent people from installing custom operating systems (LineageOS etc) to remove bloatware and spyware/tracking.

The partnership is designed to protect undersea oil and gas pipelines, as well as cables for data traffic.

Archived version

In order to monitor encrypted communication, investigators will in future, according to the Senate draft and the Änderungen der Abgeordneten, not only be allowed to hack IT systems but also to secretly enter suspects’ apartments.

TL;DR

I have an old ass webcam that only connects by a USB, and I haven’t connected to my computer in an eternity. The only other camera is on my phone, and I make sure it is never pointing at anything I don’t want people to see if it was hacked.

Currently, only GOG and Itch are still selling this game.

The plaintiffs’ brief alleges that Meta was aware that its platforms were endangering young users, including by exacerbating adolescents’ mental health issues. According to the plaintiffs, Meta frequently detected content related to eating disorders, child sexual abuse, and suicide but refused to remove it. For example, one 2021 internal company survey found that more than 8 percent of respondents aged 13 to 15 had seen someone harm themself or threaten to harm themself on Instagram during the past week. The brief also makes clear that Meta fully understood the addictive nature of its products, with plaintiffs citing a message by one user-experience researcher at the company that Instagram “is a drug” and, “We’re basically pushers.”

Web archive link

https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/138162351

I just noticed multiple websites show this error. This isn’t just me, right?

I spun up nextcloud to replace onedrive about a year ago. Everything was going well so I chose not to renew my onedrive subscription, this was exactly 6 months ago, I’d assume.

Today’s game is some more Project Zomboid. It turns out who I thought was Cable was actually Carley Mangrove. I had forgotten my friend wanted to try a different build, so Cable is on a “Apocalyptic Bible Cult Retreat”, which explains how he lost all his skills. Anyways, we had gotten Carley a prosthetic, and she looks bad ass as fuck with it. She’s still getting used to using it, but my friend who controls her is glad to have her back to full strength.

Besides convenience, one of the main benefits of self-driving cars is supposed to be safety.

A draft legislation informally agreed with the Council seeks to protect the EU’s interests from the weaponisation of energy supplies by the Russian Federation.

Charentaises (litteraly, “from Charente”, a departement and historical region in southwestern France) are slippers with a long history dating back to the 17th century. Traditionally entirely made of wool, from the felt upper to the chain stitched sole, they’re super warm, fuzzy, soft and comfortable.