The amendment runs a single sentence: “A recipient of assistance under Title 23, United States Code, may not use automated license plate readers for any purpose other than tolling.”
Subs, threads, votes, mods. None of the rest.
- Operator runs the lights. No mod appointments, no override button, no special voice. If I go bad, fork the repo and walk.
- Sign-in is a magic link. The email is fingerprinted on arrival and never stored — same address on two plato sites gives you two unrelated handles.
- Public modlog. Enough community flags auto-collapse a post; enough upvotes after a mod removal auto-restore it. The math can override the mod.
- Plain text only, no uploads. RSS out of every sub, RSS in for your follows + replies. Interop on day one.
Live: terribic.com/about · Code: github.com/hamr0/plato
Tear it apart.
So.. if we don't submit a picture of our face to be checked by AI then we don't get to play "popular games?"
Why are they so desperate for our pictures? This seems weird. It's creepy. I will not be playing anymore. Goodbye Roblox.
Is this the future of technology? How bright.
In this Orwellian age we are in, what are easy ways to block my phone from listening to a (legal) conversation a friend and I are having while out hiking? No involving removing the phone's microphone. We could leave our phones in the car but then they could get stolen, or we might need a phone in the event of an accident while hiking. Just do not like the idea of Big Brother possibly listening in on (legal) conversations.
Title says it
I was poking around Emerald Chat in their production code is :
- maskAllText: false,
- maskAllInputs: false
Sentry Session Replay is running on 50% of sessions. maskAllInputs: false means password fields aren't masked your keystrokes are being recorded and shipped to Sentry's US servers.
The worst part: replays OnErrorSampleRate: 1.0. If you've ever miss typed your password on Emerald Chat, that session was recorded at 100%. Your password attempt went straight to Sentry.
Their privacy policy says "protecting your privacy is our top priority." None of this is disclosed anywhere in it.
maskAllInputs is ON by default in Sentry. Someone turned it off deliberately.
Change your password and don't reuse it.
did these idiots sell my freaking data??? i RARELY got spam calls before requesting it and now it’s every hour and it’s so annoying…
Could be a dumb question, did anyone fully read the Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy regarding agreeing to use the new Bluelink Store?
Could be my conspiratorial nature mixed with all the 2027 Killswitch Laws and Flock Camera news lately, but is everyone just saying ok to the Terms for fun themes and autopay? Or is there anything more sinister hiding in there we should be concerned about in terms of monitoring activity and providing info to 3rd parties, insurance, and police?
Strictly just curious here, feel free to educate me. Thanks!
Eleven days ago, on a Friday, Meta turned off end-to-end encryption on Instagram DMs. They posted a short blog about it. Almost nobody covered the story. Most users have no idea it happened.
Today, May 19, the reason became obvious.
A federal law called the Take It Down Act takes effect today. It says platforms have to remove non-consensual nudes and deepfakes within 48 hours of a takedown notice. Sounds reasonable. Reads great on the floor of the Senate. Got bipartisan support, signed by Trump exactly a year ago.
The catch: it contains no exception for encryption. If you can't read your users' messages, you can't scan them, you can't comply, and the FTC bills you $53,088 per violation.
For Instagram, which has about a billion users, that math gets ugly fast. So Meta did the only thing a publicly traded company can do: they killed the encryption.
They picked the most honest of the four available options. Here are all four, because every encrypted app on Earth is about to pick one of them:
Crack the lock. Read messages on your server. Tell users encryption is "evolving."
Install a snitch on the user's phone. Scan the message BEFORE encrypting it. Tell users the encryption "still works."
Eat the fines. Bleed out one quarter at a time.
Pull out of the country.
Meta took door 1.
TikTok took door 4 by simply never building encryption in the first place.
WhatsApp is about to walk through door 2 with a big PR smile and call it a "trust and safety update."
Door 2 is the one that should terrify you, because it sounds harmless.
Picture a safe. You put a letter inside, close the lid, only the recipient has the key. That's end-to-end encryption. The dream cypherpunks fought for in the nineties.
Now imagine a small security camera mounted on the INSIDE of the safe. Pointed at you. It photographs every letter before the lid closes and ships those photos to a server you don't control, run by people you've never met, under the authority of a government you might not have voted for.
The lock still works. The math still checks out. Your safe is technically "still secure." You can put that on the marketing site.
But the camera is in the room before you ever lock the door.
Apple proposed exactly this in 2021. They called it CSAM scanning. The public lost its mind. Edward Snowden, Matt Green, the EFF, 90 organizations signed an open letter. Apple paused.
That was the last time the public stopped it. The Take It Down Act, the EU's Chat Control 2.0, the UK Online Safety Act, India's traceability mandate, and roughly six other laws in motion right now have all decided that pausing is no longer an option. The fines make pausing irrational. The PR makes pausing impossible. The cameras are coming back online. Quietly. One platform at a time.
Here's the part nobody wants to say out loud:
If you use Instagram DMs today, your messages are no longer private.
If you use TikTok DMs, they never were.
If you use iMessage, the camera is already shipped, just not switched on yet.
If you use WhatsApp, you have maybe twelve months before the same announcement.
The only apps that survive this aren't the ones with better marketing. They're the ones with worse architecture for compliance.
A messenger that wants to genuinely survive the next ten years of legal pressure has to refuse to have three things:
A headquarters where subpoenas can land.
A signed binary the platform can update with whatever code a government asks for.
A user identity tied to your real name, phone, or email.
Signal still flies the privacy flag from inside the corporate jungle, but they survive on Brian Acton's money and Moxie's philosophical stubbornness. They're an exception, not a strategy.
The structural future lives somewhere weirder.
SimpleX has no user identifiers at all. Matrix is federated. There's a small but growing set of wallet-native messengers (I work on one called ANO, full disclosure) where your "account" is just a cryptographic keypair you own. No email. No phone. No central server that can be forced to flip a switch.
They're clunkier. They look intimidating. The addresses are long strings instead of phone numbers. You have to back up a key file. None of them have a Super Bowl ad.
But they have one thing every centralized messenger is losing today: nobody can force them to put a camera in the safe. There's no platform to compel. The protocol runs between users' devices. The clients are open source. If a scanner ever gets added, the community sees it, forks the code, and routes around it inside a day.
That isn't a feature. That's the architecture refusing to be capturable.
The mainstream era of "encrypted by default" ends today. Not loudly. Not with a single news story. With a slow drift, a sequence of small compliance moves, and a generation of users who will never quite figure out when the privacy they thought they had quietly stopped existing.
Five years from now, "private messaging" won't mean the encrypted feature on a centralized app. It will mean the apps that can't be scanned, can't be pressured, and can't be shut down without taking down the network itself.
The camera goes in the house when the house belongs to someone else.
Start building your own. Or at least pick a messenger built by someone who already did.
This is mainly about data retention, deletion, and minimizing personsal information on platforms used for education.
I've been looking into getting a degree. It seems that no matter what I look into I'll have to surrender an ID for online proctoring at some point in time.
I understand the need for institutions to have that information however other places such as Sophia learning or study.com (allows you to earn credits by taking exams online) don't have simple ways to remove the information.
I've also looked into the policies from some of the proctoring / ID verification companies used by Sophia learning, study.com, and my future intuition (Veriff, measure learning, proctorU, etc.). They state that they only retain information for as long necessary for the use of the service or longer.
Do y'all trust this information? Is it possible to delete my information from ID verification companies? I'm paranoid when it comes to leaking my information online even though I know most of our info is already online.
It feels like I'm worrying too much and I should ignore any concerns I have with privacy and security if I want to have an education.
EDIT 1 I think an automod is blocking comments for review. 1 comment is from another user with low karma and the other is my reply to michaelh. My reply was agreeing with michaelh and stating my concern with how long data is kept along. I also stated that yourprivacyrights org has a study.com listing but even if they accept the deletion of your account or personal info, Veriff is an entirely different entity.
The Know Your Labor Rights Act was introduced on Apr 21, 2026, which "Makes employers display posters and tell new hires about their rights to organize and bargain for better working conditions under federal law".
I'm well aware legislation like this is unlikely to become law, especially given the current majority in Congress. But I thought it was rare and interesting to see a bill sponsored and cosponsored by Republicans that is in favor of unions and worker's rights.
And its not like adding posters in workspaces is going to make any radical differences over night. But I imagine there are thousands of workers that are completely unaware of their rights, and maybe something as simple as a poster is enough to spark something bigger?
Hi everyone,
I’m trying to help a family member who is being stalked on her personal website which she uses to portfolio her work.
The stalker is a known person, who lives in the same city, and has been using her website’s “contact me” form to send her messages.
We’ve alerted the local PD, Family Justice Center, and have been keeping a papertrail of contact this person has done.
Is there a way to prevent this person from using her website to contact her, or outright block him from accessing the website?
Thank you
You may know about Anubis by Techaro, the PoW challenge thing that protects websites from bots. It's used on several major sites, including FFmpeg, Arch, and the Linux Foundation. This experiment is specifically about Anubis.
Note that Anubis does not use up all CPU cores for its challenge to not overheat devices and for a better UX. Some PoW challenge systems do all cores, making them more effective. However, it appears as if Anubis gets the job done just fine.
These activist attorney generals never miss an opportunity to abolish the fourth amendment using child safety to do it.
https://reclaimthenet.org/oklahoma-roblox-lawsuit-child-safety-biometric-age-verification
Just read the TechRadar article about the FBI getting court orders to remotely wipe/reset thousands of compromised TP-Link routers because of Russian GRU malware (APT28）
On one hand, these old SOHO routers (Archer C5/C7, WR841N, etc.) are End-of-Life, have no security patches, and are basically being weaponized into botnets. But on the other hand, the fact that the government can just drop commands into consumer hardware at scale is a huge reminder of how vulnerable our home networks actually are.
Once a router stops getting firmware updates, it’s a ticking time bomb. What is everyone’s strategy here? Do you just buy a new consumer router every 3-4 years, flash OpenWrt, or move to hardware-level firewalls/gateways?
I came across this detailed write-up on Medium about NetMirror.
The author claims the app was sophisticated spyware/adware that:
mobidetects[.]live, etc.).READ_CALL_LOG and READ_SMS ready to request dynamically.The article is very technical (includes decompilation steps, code snippets, MITRE ATT&CK table), but it was published on April 5, 2026 (just last month). The author, "Espress0", doesn't have a long history on Medium.
Has anyone else analyzed this APK or heard of NetMirror? Is this a real threat or a well-written but fake/scareware post? I want to know if I should warn friends who sideload movie apps.
A long time ago we separated from the monkeys. We've come a long way since then. We're now clever. We use iPhones. We send men to the moon. And well all stuff our fat faces with Big Macs and Cheezey Fries.
IMO, we've reached one of the most pivotal times in our entire evolution. Anthropic have just rolled out Mythos. It's the most intelligent AI ever created.
Experts predict that in two years from now, AIs like Mythos will be able to give birth. Yes, you read that correctly. AIs will be able to generate next generation AIs.
So Mythos #3 will have a baby. It'll be called Mythos #4. A year later, Mythos #4 will give birth to Mythos #5. And so on.
I'm a published designer. My company makes websites. We have a client that not so long ago sold a multi-million dollar superyacht.
On the PC, I use Google Chrome. I will now be massively downvoted. But one year from now, I will be massively UPVOTED.
Security will be significantly more important than privacy.
Imagine what might happen if Mythos #6 ends up in the hands of scammers, or the type of people that inject malware into websites and/or browser extensions.
Every week, at least two people on this sub start threads asking about privacy browsers. Next year, these people will be asking about security browsers.
What do you guys think about this? Some of you are a lot more knowledgeable about this topic than me, so I'll be interested to see what you think.