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BREAKING: You checked the weather this morning.

And you just told a surveillance company where you sleep.

Meet #Webloc, used by ICE, cops & foreign govs to track 500m+ phones.

No warrant required.

Read on to understand our latest Citizen Lab investigation + how to protect yourself.

HEARD OF ADINT? Aka ADvertising INTelligence?

Your apps don't just show ads.

They stream info about your GPS location + a unique identifier to HUNDREDS OF BROKERS EVERY SECOND.

The industry swears the data is "anonymous" but it's actually a Spies-eye-view. Of everyone.

THE "ANONYMIZED DATA" LIE Companies peddle the BS that advertising data is 'anonymous'

They want to keep you in the dark.

Because, behind the scenes...your weather app is a blinking tracking beacon.

And then players like Pen Link turn that beacon into a data flow.

And sell it to governments.

EXPORT-GRADE SURVEILLANCE Where does #Webloc, a tool that can monitor entire populations come from?

Well, it originated from notorious Israeli surveillance firm Cobwebs.

But like so many surveillance products, it's gone through some corporate ownership shuffling.

Now, it's sold by Pen Link. https://blossom.primal.net/cebecd52265591ed4b736653b3103df62606f939076f664a82fb3e97c0f3c5ac.png

YOUR AMERICAN RIGHTS DON'T PROTECT YOU American? Think you're protected by the 4th Amendment from ADINT?

I know my rights, get a warrant... right?

Well, some sheriff is just going to pull out the credit card & buy it.

EUROPE? NOT MUCH BETTER You're 🇪🇺European? Protected by #GDPR, right?

It may be a paper wall.

We sent 96 FOI requests & got some dubious answers.

Meanwhile our collaborator Szabolcs Panyi found multiple intel agencies in 🇭🇺#Hungary using Cobweb products.

If that's not bad enough, the Hungarian government filed charges against Szabolcs while he was collaborating with us.

That's after he revealed Russian influence operations targeting Hungary's upcoming election.

(He's also a past target of #Pegasus spyware...)

ONLY THE WORST BAD GUYS...RIGHT? 'We only use mass surveillance against the worst bad guys'

Tucson Police bought #webloc for sex trafficking.

And wound up using it to hunt a guy stealing cigarette packs from a CircleK gas station. https://blossom.primal.net/e0fdfe40c5806d221fe0ac763aedfd25e2914b8d9e2a85ead67550809c3acf3a.png

And monitor political protests (against Kamala Harris)

Mass surveillance turns regular citizens into surveillance targets.

And long history shows that the federal government has an insatiable appetite for tracking law-abiding people with inconvenient politics.

Whatever their stripe.

IT GETS WORSE Think #webloc is bad? Meet another Cobwebs product: #trapdoor.

Hallmarks of a hidden hacking kit + social engineering tools.

Shady looking stuff & much more investigation needed.

OH HAI BIG TECH Here's the thing, tons of this technology is hosted by big platforms.

And a sign of how surveillance vendors seek to leverage commercial relationships & infrastructure of big cloud providers.

TELL ME HOW TO STOP THIS Real talk, it's hard, but you can help starve the ADINT dragnet. Do this now:

IPHONE: ⚙️Settings➡️Privacy & Security➡️ Tracking

Turn off "Allow Apps to Request to Track"

ANDROID: ⚙️Settings➡️Privacy ➡️ Ads ➡️Delete Advertising ID

It's only a beginning, but you don't owe any of these companies a drop of your data.

TAKEAWAY Ad-tech built a warrantless surveillance system in the guise of a marketing tool.

You are the target. So are your kids. And your friends.

And it's being abused by some of the worst autocrats & security forces around the world.

The ADINT machinery is targeting you.

Search for your country & start asking questions.

It's time to bring more sunlight to this industry.

READ OUR FULL REPORT: https://citizenlab.ca/research/analysis-of-penlinks-ad-based-geolocation-surveillance-tech/

By my brilliant Citizen Lab colleagues Wolfie Christl, Astrid Perry, Luis Fernando Garcia, Siena Anstis, and Ron Deibert

GO DEEPER Want to learn more about #penlink & #webloc? There's some great reporting out there.

Like this investigation by 404 Media / Joseph Cox

https://www.404media.co/inside-ices-tool-to-monitor-phones-in-entire-neighborhoods/

Another good piece by Forbes' Thomas Fox Brewster: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2025/09/18/ice-spends-millions-on-social-media-spy-tech-banned-by-meta-facebook/

It's simple, your #privacy #security and #freedom are at constant risk by private companies that help governments trample on your rights.

They deserve maximum exposure. Thanks for reading!

First, Outlook fails.

Now: Bluetooth won't pair.

Artemis II is NASA's most relatable mission yet. https://blossom.primal.net/c28ea92becb52b3f2ff3d12beead8e2332f0330dfa5ea0784f85386f9cbb9c49.mp4

If you're pissing off the powerful interests, watch this video.

Follow along. Get safer.

They showed us cute missing dogs & we consented to opt into a mass human tracking system.

I think Ring's wants to be Flock. On steroids.

Because instead of just sketchy cameras in parking lots, Search Party will cover your own backyards & homes.

And if you & your neighbors want to challenge the loss of privacy? Well, how exactly would you do that effectively?

Because, instead of going to the city council, looking at the contracts, and calling out your mayor for speeding your city to dystopia, it's massive and distributed.

Will you even know which of your neighbors is now helping to feed the system?

If we had half competent privacy regulators & laws in the US this kind of thing would be a big, hard fight for Ring.

Instead? It's a Super Bowl commercial.

Oh, and yeah Ring has already partnered with Flock Safety to incorporate tools letting the government directly request footage

A VPN company server was seized.

Reminder: your 'privacy' VPN is still a physical server in somebodies jurisdiction.

Claim of RAM disk servers as protection is...interesting.

I know nothing more about this case, but hotplugs that let authorities grab a server without cutting power are common.

Commodity VPNs are not tools for people that need strong privacy.

VPN servers can be seized, and data that goes in & out of them is subject to whatever interception regime is in place in the jurisdiction.

Then there's the question of whether the company can be compelled to turn over user data.

There are some clever approaches to interception & law enforcement demands, like layering data through multiple VPN companies.

Obscura VPN is an example of these tactics.

But it still comes down to you needing to place a lot of trust in a provider...

But your average podcast-sponsoring VPN company?

They are not a safe place if you are concerned about legal action taken in any of the jurisdictions that your data is passing through.

And that's if your data is actually going where you think it is.

Ultimately there is a massive information asymmetry between VPN providers and their customers.

Many of the claims 'defends against hackers' or 'prevents websites from tracking you' etc. are stinkers.

A VPN isn't protecting you from hacking that matters in 2026.

And despite the marketing BS, if all you do is change your IP address with a VPN, trust me your providers still know that you & your browser...are you.

On, and plenty of VPN providers are owned by some exceptionally shady companies..

VPNs are in the 2020s what Antivirus was in the 2000s.

Something that, thanks to marketing, everyone was conditioned to believe was the first step in being secure online.

When if you talked to experts, the consensus view was: nope, not even close.

https://research.google/pubs/no-one-can-hack-my-mind-comparing-expert-and-non-expert-security-practices/

I TRUST YOU BUT YOUR AI AGENT IS A SNITCH: Why We Need a New Social Contract

We’re chatting on Signal, enjoying encryption, right? But your DIY productivity agent is piping the whole thing back to Anthropic.

Friend, you’ve just created a permanent subpoena-able record of my private thoughts held by a corporation that owes me zero privacy protections.

Even when folks use open-source agents like #openclaw in decentralized setups, the default /easy configuration is to plug in an API resulting in data getting backhauled to Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.

And so those providers get all the good stuff: intimate confessions, legal strategies, work gripes. Worse? Even if you’ve made peace with this, your friends absolutely haven’t consented to their secrets piped to a datacenter. Do they even know?

Governments are spending a lot of time trying to kill end-to-end encryption, but if we’re not careful, we’ll do the job for them.

The problem is big & growing:

Threat 1: proprietary AI agents. Helpers inside apps or system-wide stuff. Think: desktop productivity tools by a big company. Hello, Copilot. These companies already have tons of incentive to soak up your private stuff & are very unlikely to respect developer intent & privacy without big fights (Those fights need to keep happening)

Threat 2: DIY agents that are privacy leaky as hell, not through evil intent or misaligned ethics, but just because folks are excited and moving quickly. Or carelessly. And are using someone’s API.

I sincerely hope is that the DIY/ OpenSource ecosystem that is spinning up around AI agents has some privacy heroes in it. Because it should be possible to do some building & standards that use permission and privacy as the first principle.

Maybe we can show what’s possible for respecting privacy so that we can demand it from big companies?

Respecting your friends means respecting when they use encrypted messaging. It means keeping privacy-leaking agents out of private spaces without all-party consent.

Ideas to mull (there are probably better ones, but I want to be constructive):

Human only mode/ X-No-Agents flags How about converging on some standards & app signals that AI agents must respect, absolutely. Like signals that an app/chat can emit & be opted out of exposure to an AI agent.

Agent Exclusion Zones For example, starting with the premise that the correct way to respect developer (& user intent) with end to end encrypted apps is that they not be included, perhaps with the exception [risky tho!] of whitelisting specific chats etc. This is important right now since so many folks are getting excited about connecting their agents to encrypted messengers as a control channel, which is going to mean lots more integrations soon.

#NoSecretAgents Dev Pledge Something like a developer pledge that agents will declare themselves in chat and not share data to a backend without all-party consent.

None of these ideas are remotely perfect, but unless we start experimenting with them now, we're not building our best future.

Next challenge? Local Only / Private Processing: local-First as a default. Unless we move very quickly towards a world where the processing that agents do is truly private (e.g. not accessible to a third party) and/or local by default, even if agents are not shipping signal chats, they are creating an unbelievably detailed view into your personal world, held by others. And fundamentally breaking your own mental model of what on your device is & isn't under your control / private.

NEW: Microsoft turned over Bitlocker keys to FBI.

When you key escrow your disk encryption with someone, they can be targeted with a warrant.

This case is a really good illustration that if you nudge users with a default to save their keys with you... they will do so & may not fully understand the implications.

Of course, once the requests start working... they are likely to accelerate.

Story: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2026/01/22/microsoft-gave-fbi-keys-to-unlock-bitlocker-encrypted-data/

Hotel toilet privacy is disappearing.

Glass doors.

Or no door.

Or a big window into the room.

Who is asking for this?

Suddenly hearing about zcash everywhere.

Feels inorganic.

What's up?

YIKES: NSO floats Pegasus spyware use in a "time of domestic crisis" in 🇺🇸America.

I believe they won't stop lobbying until they get Pegasus into USA.

To hack Americans. https://blossom.primal.net/ede4092ee60114cd3466cf082d7633a9954be5ba91db50c289a4fb2b9ccf8ee1.png

POV: you can't sleep because your bed can't talk to AWS.

Design thinking that inserts brittle dependence into our lives while extracting fees for life.

Don't be these guys.

GOOD MORNING.

Today's massive outages nicely illustrate which of your favorite internet things are secretly Amazon-dependent.

Specifically on US-EAST-1 Region, which woke up with Main Character Syndrome.

Result? Massive outages.

Sure, Amazon has regions.

But US-EAST-1 is the legacy/default for a pile of services...and other Global Amazon services also depended on it.

So when there was trouble...it was quickly everywhere.

Hyperscalers rule almost everything around us. And this is absolutely bad news for all sorts of resiliency.

Amazon sez: root cause = DNS resolution with DynamoDB... which a ton depends on.

They say they are mostly mitigated & have a pile of backlog to clear.

But this is a great moment to think about just how many eggs that matter are in one basket...

https://health.aws.amazon.com/health/status

NEW: coalition sues Trump administration to stop viewpoint surveillance.

Buttressed by a survey that found widespread viewpoint self-censorship among union members aware of the program.

The survey results aren't surprising and it will be interesting to see them replicated among other populations.

Unions are core plaintiffs in the suit and the basic claims are that not only does viewpoint surveillance chill freedom of speech, but it constitute unconstitutional coercion.

This will be an interesting suit to watch.

https://www.eff.org/press/releases/labor-unions-eff-sue-trump-administration-stop-surveillance-free-speech-online

NEW: 🇰🇵DPRK hackers have begun hiding malware on blockchain.

Result, decentralized, immutable malware from a government crypto theft operation.

It only cost $1.37 USD in gas fees per malware change (e.g. to update the command & control server)

Blockchains as malware dead drops are a fascinating, predictable evolution for nation state attackers.

And Blockchain explorers are a natural target.

Nearly impossible to remove.

Experimentation with putting malware on blockchains is in infancy.

Ultimately there will be some efforts to try and implement social engineering protection around this, but combined with things like agentic AI & vibe coding by low-information people...whew boy this gold seam is going to be productive for a long time.

Still, where here they used social engineering, I expect attackers to also experiment with directly loading zero click exploits onto blockchains targeting things like blockchain explorers & other systems that process blockchains... especially if they are sometimes hosted on the same systems & networks that handle transactions / have wallets.

REPORT: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dprk-adopts-etherhiding

NEW: Cost to 'poison' an LLM and insert backdoors is relatively constant. Even as models grow.

Implication: scaling security is orders-of-magnitude harder than scaling LLMs.

Prior work had suggested that as model sizes grew, it would make them cost-prohibitive to poison.

So, in LLM training-set-land, dilution isn't the solution to pollution.

Just about the same size of poisoned training data that works on a 1B model could also work on a 1T model.

I feel like this is something that cybersecurity folks will find intuitive: lots of attacks scale. Most defenses don't

PAPER: POISONING ATTACKS ON LLMS REQUIRE A NEAR-CONSTANT NUMBER OF POISON SAMPLES https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.07192

Only four fire department callouts?

Clearly the Asian market isn't stocking enough durians.

Durian is one of the only fruits where your nose can tell you if it's in stock before you get near the section.

Also, I disagree that Durian smells of gas. It smells of sweet old wet socks and vanilla ice cream.

NEW: breach of Discord age verification data.

For some users this means their passports & drivers licenses.

Discord has only run age verification for 6 months.

Age verification is a badly implemented data grab wrapped in a moral panic.

Proponents say age verification = showing your ID at the door to a bar.

But the analogy is often wrong.

It's more like: bouncer photocopies some IDs, & keeps them in a shed around back.

There will be more breaches.

But it should bother you that the technology promised to make us all safer, is quickly making us less so.

STORIES:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2025/10/05/discord-confirms-users-hacked---photos-and-messages-accessed/

https://www.theverge.com/news/792032/discord-customer-service-data-breach-hack

NEW: turns out the EU helped finance a bunch of spyware companies with..public money.

That's YOUR money if you live in Europe.

Eou deserve to know that your money is fueling spyware companies like Paragon.

And if you aren't in Europe? There's a good chance that the mercenary spyware crisis is still fueled by your pensions & tax dollars.

Whether it's Oregon public employees or Alaskans, Europeans or folks in South Yorkshire...

The Fund managers stewarding your cash bear a heavy ethical responsibility for the harms they turbocharged.

And they completely sidestep it.

Now a group of MEPs from 4 EU political groups is calling for action & transparency. Good to see them leaning in...

It's great to see a cross-cutting call for action...

Kudos to these MEPs for standing up. But honestly, there should be many, many more..

Here's the story: https://apache.be/2025/10/01/european-investment-fund-eif-financed-israeli-spyware-company-paragon

PAY ATTENTION: The UK again asked Apple to backdoor iCloud encryption.

Backdoors create a massive target for hackers & criminal groups.

Dictators will inevitably demand that Apple build the same access structure for them.

They insert vulnerable bad things right at the place where we need the strongest protections.

This latest attempt to demand access is yet another unreasonable, secret demand on Apple (a TCN) from the Home Office....

https://www.ft.com/content/d101fd62-14f9-4f51-beff-ea41e8794265

Friend,

If scrolling leaves you feeling hollowed...

If anger is frictionless and thinking feels like fighting the current,

You're not swimming, you're being swept in an algorithmic rip tide.

And your mental clarity is the target.

So, take a beat and step out

Put the thing down.

Connect with your own thoughts.

It's what the designers of these algorithms fear most.

The internet needs YOU to stand up against surveillance abuses & mercenary spyware.

Thank you for your attention to this matter.

NEW: foreign mercenary spyware is coming to the US.

ICE just quietly unsuspended contract with spyware maker #Paragon.

They got caught this year being used to hack journalists.

Friend, let me me bring you up to speed on why this is bad on multiple fronts.

YOUR BACKGROUND BRIEF:

#Paragon was co-founded in Israel in 2019 by ex head of Israel's NSA equivalent (Unit 8200) w/ major backing from former Israeli PM Ehud Barak.

Pitched themselves as stealthy & abuse-proof alternative to NSO Group's Pegasus.

The company has been trying to get into the US market for years.

For a long time all we knew about Paragon was their performance as a 'virtuous' spyware company with values.

All that came to a crashing halt in 2025 when they got very caught, helping customers hack targets across #WhatsApp.

WhatsApp did the right thing & notified users.

Almost immediately after the WhatsApp notifications, we started learning about the targets.

They weren't the supposed serious criminals... They were Journalists... human rights defenders...groups working on sea rescues.. etc

In other words, a very NSO-like scandal. https://blossom.primal.net/a530f88b24d07ffae346e2ed762a391f0e3908142a1aa2032a87bcfe0fb649b0.png
Ultimately Paragon & its Italian customer had a massive spyware scandal on their hands.

WhatsApp wasn't the only player tracking paragon & doing user notifications. Apple got in on the game.

Ultimately, we at the Citizen Lab had forensically analyzed cases from each notification round.

We testified to Italy's parliamentary intelligence oversight committee about our findings.

The conclusion? Deeply unsatisfactory.

Italy admitted hacking some targets, but denied hacking journalists. Tons of loose ends with Paragon. And they haven't been honest about who used their tech to hack journalists in Europe.

BIG PICTURE:

After 14 years investigating countless spyware companies, I tell you with confidence:

Mercenary spyware is a power abuse machine incompatible with American constitutional rights and freedoms.

Our legal system isn't designed for it, oversight mechanisms are woefully inadequate to protect our rights...

Here's the thing. You probably know that mercenary spyware like #Pegasus gets sold to dictators.

Who, predictably, abuse it.

But We have a growing pile of cases where spyware is sold to democracies... and then gets abused.

HISTORY LESSONS

History shows: secret surveillance usually winds up abused.

The history of the US is littered with surveillance abuses.

Thing is, our phones offer an unprecedented window into our lives.

Making zero-click mercenary spyware an especially grave risk to all our freedoms.

If the government has wants access to your accounts for law enforcement...they have to prepare a judicially authorized request and send it to the company, which reviews it.

Mercenary spyware bypasses any external review.

And the whole industry behind it seeks maximum obscurity.

COUNTERINTELLIGENCE THREATS? YEAH THAT TOO

I'm concerned about the impact on our rights an dour privacy.

But there's something else that should worry everybody about the choice to work with the company: Paragon poses a potentially grave counterintelligence threat to the US. Let me explain.

When you use an integrated spyware package to conduct sensitive law enforcement / intelligence business, you have to place a lot of trust in them...

If the developers originate from a foreign intelligence service that aggressively collects against the US government, that should be a huge red flag.

America (or any country) should be maximally wary about using foreign-developed surveillance tech for the same reason that America shouldn't operate a Chinese-made stealth fighter.

So, have Paragon's spyware, people & ops been aggressively vetted for technical and human counterintelligence risks?

MERCENARY SPYWARE = FATE SHARING Paragon's #Graphite mercenary spyware shares the same downsides as other products in their class:

❌They keep getting caught

We researchers aren't the only ones that have found techniques for tracking and identifying Paragon spyware... I'm sure hostile govs have too.

❌Customers fate share.

Since all customers roll the same tech, when one gets caught it impacts & potentially exposes everyones' activities.

Now, that fate sharing will include US law enforcement activity.

WHAT CAN YOU DO?

What can you do? Take 5 minutes and call your member of Congress.

Ask them to request a briefing on Paragon.

They should ask whether the company was properly vetted & reviewed.

What is the oversight mechanism for this maximally invasive technology?

What are the guardrails? How would abuses be handled? Etc.

PERSONAL SECURITY?

Paragon & this category of spyware is fiendishly hard to track & defend against.

And on a personal level? Apple's Lockdown Mode & Android Advanced Protection both offer some serious security benefits but neither is a silver bullet..

Unfortunately, as of right now I am pretty confident that no publicly available / commercially developed third party tool can reliably detect Paragon spyware either in realtime. Or retrospectively.

Beware a false sense of security.

If you got this far & found this post useful, let me know! Drop a comment.

SELECTED READING LIST

Exclusive: ICE reactivated its $2 million contract with Israeli spyware firm Paragon, following its acquisition by U.S. capital

https://jackpoulson.substack.com/p/exclusive-ice-has-reactivated-its

Virtue or Vice? A First Look at Paragon’s Proliferating Spyware Operations

https://citizenlab.ca/2025/03/a-first-look-at-paragons-proliferating-spyware-operations/

Graphite Caught First Forensic Confirmation of Paragon’s iOS Mercenary Spyware Finds Journalists Targeted

https://citizenlab.ca/2025/06/first-forensic-confirmation-of-paragons-ios-mercenary-spyware-finds-journalists-targeted/

Voices of Insects, 2019 Kaori SOMEYA

https://www.someyakaori.com/

NEW: Analysis finds UK's age verification rollout is producing exactly the opposite of the desired effect:

Driving traffic non-compliant adult sites.

Which punishes compliant ones.

Entirely predictable.

The more the government squeezes, the more they reward the very sites that scoff at their rules.

And then there's the matter of the UK government asking people to please stop using VPNs...

It's a harmful embarrassment.

The UK's age verification law forces law-abiding citizens to hand over personal data / scan their faces as they browse.

Compelling folks to participate a massive clandestine census of browsing activity.

As these troves of data grow, they expose everyone to the risk of new breaches. And worse.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/08/31/age-verification-uk-porn-sites/

GOOD MORNING: WhatsApp caught & fixed a sophisticated zero click attack...

They just published an advisory about it.

Say attackers combined the exploit with an Apple vulnerability to hack a specific group of targets (i.e. this wasn't pointed at everybody)

That's a CROSS-APP exploit chain. Which is fancy. We'll discuss in a second.

But wait, you say, haven't I heard of WhatsApp zero-click exploits not so long ago?

You have.

A big user base makes a platform big target for exploit development.

Attacker's perspective = an exploit against a popular messenger gives you potential access to a lot of devices.

The regular tempo of large platforms catching sophisticated exploits is a good sign.

They're paying attention & devoting resources to a growing category: highly targeted, sophisticated attacks.

But it's also a reminder of the magnitude of the threat.

Here's the Apple CVE.

Somewhere, earlier this summer, some people in a room probably had a bad day when this clever cross-app chain stopped working.

The cross- app chain = probably also a sign of the increasing tech lift required to get to device compromise. Consequence of various mitigations.

The cost-to-compromise is only going up. Which is arguably a sign that the increasing scrutiny + efforts by platforms & OS developers is having an impact.

That said, the threat of this stuff is going nowhere because there's an infinite governmental appetite for compromise.

Still, I'd argue that increasing costs of zero-clicks has the effect of pricing out a bunch of potential actors which slows the proliferation of this tech to some bad actors.

WhatsApp Advisory: https://www.whatsapp.com/security/advisories/2025/

Apple Advisory: https://support.apple.com/en-us/124925

The water is boiling.

Frog, it's time to get out of the pot.

Did the University of Chicago blow their endowment on shitcoins?

Nobody is exactly sure how much they gambled and lost on 'crypto.'

But they are now freezing research amidst federal funding cuts.

If only they'd put that money into BTC those labs where I slaved away as an undergrad would be humming.

Source: https://stanfordreview.org/uchicago-lost-money-on-crypto-then-froze-research-when-federal-funding-was-cut/

Age-verification laws are a universal mute button for free speech.

Government‑mandated KYC to read is coming fast.

And the walls of castle freedom are cracking.

Why haven't mosquitoes evolved silent flight?

Everybody please stop using VPNs begs UK government.

"everybody who's out there thinking of using VPNs, let me just say to you directly, verifying your age keeps a child safe...So let's just not try and find a way around. Just prove your age."

• UK government.

The goal is to make you numb to total surveillance.

Just say no to snitchglasses.

WHOA: Could Germany Ban Ad Blockers?

German megapublisher Axel Springer is asking a German court to ban an ad-blocker.

They claim HTML/ CSS of their sites are protected computer programs.

And influencing they are displayed (e.g by removing ads) violates copyright.

I'm in puzzled wonderment at this claim.

Preventing ad-blocking would be a huge blow to German cybersecurity and privacy.

There are critical security & privacy reasons to influence how a websites code gets displayed.

Like stripping out dangerous code & malvertising.

Hacking risks from the online advertising are documented.

Any attempt to force Germans to run all of the code on a website without consideration for their privacy and security rights and needs will end very, very poorly.

Defining HTML/CSS as a protected computer program will quickly lead to absurdities touching every corner of the internet.

Just think of the potential infringements:

-Screen readers for the blind -'Dark mode' bowser extensions -Displaying snippets of code in a university class -Inspecting & modifying code in your own browser -Website translators

Or blocking unwanted trackers.

This is why most governments do it on their systems.

I'm not a lawyer, but if Axel Springer wins the consequences are just nuts:

Basic stuff like bookmarking & saving a local copy of a website might be legally risky.

The Wayback Machine & internet archives and libraries might be violators.

This might even extend to search engines displaying excerpts of sites.

Code sharing sites like GitHub could become a liability minefield...

The list goes on and on.

Finally, only one country has banned ad-blockers. China.

This is not good company for Germany.

READ MORE: From Mozilla https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2025/08/14/is-germany-on-the-brink-of-banning-ad-blockers-user-freedom-privacy-and-security-is-at-risk/

Bleeping Computer: https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/legal/mozilla-warns-germany-could-soon-declare-ad-blockers-illegal/

NEW: UK reportedly drops secret demand for Apple encryption backdoor.

Good.

While there was strong activist pressure here the key push came from the US government.

But there is zero rest for the weary as the UK has been leaning much harder into Age Verification.

Which is another mechanism for gaining deep visibility into peoples online activity.

Story: https://www.theverge.com/news/761240/uk-apple-us-encryption-back-door-demands-dropped

Behind every marble statue account is a...

UPDATE: LAPD is considering acquiring geospy.

First US police Dept. known to be interested in it.

Won't be the last.

Story: https://www.404media.co/lapd-eyes-geospy-an-ai-tool-that-can-geolocate-photos-in-seconds/

Yeah! Humans do OSINT. Some do it super well.

So what is different about an automated house locator as a service that uses dwelling interior pics?

Turns out we counted on friction to protect us.

Not rules. Not norms.

There just weren't millions of Trevor Rainbolts that could act instantly OSINT anything that invasive.

It was a cost thing.

Meanwhile the datasets were getting collected. Zillow. AirBnB.. etc etc.

When the right invasive automation came along... the privacy / rights intrusion became automated & scaled. Unstoppable.

And we were left unprotected.

Like with so many privacy & power things.

Designer lets intrusive thoughts win.

Deletes Lorem, calls it a day.

Location tracking based on interior pictures.

It will be abused to target people.

Post the inside your place at your peril. https://blossom.primal.net/37c8d6d2f6c2c9ce1d8d3332fbbfd044b20ec93e0af249f1013d527e55532178.png

Earliest days of vibecoding-as-a-target.

Without a radical increase in security, vibecoders will get wiped out & lose their savings.

And their companies will get hit with fat breaches.

Me? I'm waiting for attackers to figure out how to reliably slip backdoors into vibecoded outputs at scale.

X: we are actively fighting bots

Also X: here's an ad for bots.

Neuroticism? Ripping.

Conscientiousness & agreeableness? Dipping.

Via FT: https://www.ft.com/content/5cd77ef0-b546-4105-8946-36db3f84dc43

NEW: 🇩🇪Germany's top court says spyware severely violates fundamental rights.

Bans spyware in cases with <3year sentences.

Enforces tough proportionality tests on all surveillance.

Restricts spyware to serious cases.

Interesting development.

Court says: capturing data at the source (i.e. on someone's phone) is maximally invasive.

Especially given how much of our lives happens online.

They also surface the security risks to systems from this kind of surveillance.

Watching Germany's highest court grapple with spyware's invasiveness & rights violations is instructive.

States wielding spyware without robust legal limitations and tight judicial oversight... are almost guaranteed to be violating their citizens' basic rights.

In so many jurisdictions, state secrecy & lack of effective legal challenges means spyware harms happening daily

Huge credit to German digital freedoms organization #digitalcourage for bringing this case.

Court statement:

https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/SharedDocs/Pressemitteilungen/EN/2025/bvg25-069.html

Internet-connected microphones in school bathrooms.

What could go wrong?

Mandated microphones in private spaces are a bad idea.

Throwing invasive sensors into private spaces rarely fixes socially scary problems.

But is almost guaranteed to have risky downsides. https://blossom.primal.net/7da39cdd62cbd37ae4b6ceedc0bfbf8ce729b74809e18f41f697cf54a9b605ea.png

Story: https://www.wired.com/story/school-bathroom-vape-detector-audio-bug/

Regular people know that age verification mandates won't work.

But they are worried about their children's safety, and they aren't being offered non-dystopian alternatives.

LLM chat exposures keep on coming.

Why? My theory is that these platforms don't do a very good job explaining to users what their public/share features mean.

Result: users may think that while something is public that doesn't necessarily mean that anyone is indexing or caching.

Story:

https://www.404media.co/more-than-130-000-claude-grok-chatgpt-and-other-llm-chats-readable-on-archive-org/

What took them so long?

Maybe they had to dust off exploits from the 2000s?

Or maybe the better question is: how many unnoticed breaches have happened here.

It is an open secret (ask any lawyer) that these court filing systems are incredibly out of date.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/06/federal-court-filing-system-pacer-hack-00496916

They want turbo #KYC in everything.

Pic via: X post by Rob Warren (@bikesandbitcoin)

Own goal alert.

Governments constantly demand more access to monitor us.

But are completely reckless about the systems they use to handle that data.

Harming all of us.

How are Daily Active User numbers looking on #Nostr these days?

#AskNostr

Age verification laws are coming fast.

And, from my perspective, opponents are struggling to find impactful messaging to explain to the general public the damage they are about to do to freedom.

Or to propose alternate futures that address the underlying anxieties.

Sure, most folks that are here on #Nostr intuitively understand the dangers... And nod along when we gesture at the dangers of surveillance overreach.

But I worry that the common language for talking about these initiatives typically relies on some priors that are not universally shared outside people that live and breathe concerns about tech.

Saying that something is a surveillance dystopia works on me. But not the neighbors.

I'm guilty of being inside this language bubble too, and it's hard to escape.

Yet, when faced with politicians talking about protecting kids from bad things that parents feel they see right now... I worry that the communities doing pushback are struggling to:

1 -find framing that makes enough sense to the vast majority of people that they say 'ok this is net bad' and push back 2- find their own ways to productively connect with the anxieties that politicians are drawing on. E.g. worried parents. 3- offer things that are honest, well meaning alternative paths for the underlying problems

Anyone have thoughts on this? #AskNostr

We are in the opening chapter of using vibecoding to assert your rights.

And reclaim your freedoms.

Tremendous time to be alive.

It seems to me like a strong anti-AI view is becoming left / progressive coded.

I'd love to understand this better.

Anyone have thoughts?

Rhisotope https://blossom.primal.net/6d81f88a3bae0b73c45a24e111476ce09e9ab40a27e748c71f6bb86c4265209e.png Sauce: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyvn3264q01o

Google bad ux.

And you'll get your results in Comic Sans.

Try it

It is a lot easier to celebrate a turn towards dictatorship when you are untethered to historical knowledge.

No amount of centralized power delivers a society with true personal freedom in the long run.

History shows that even when dictatorships perform 'well' on some factors, especially in the short term, they send people into a freedom-robbing labyrinth.

Do you care about personal liberty?

Because in the long run with dictatorships you will lose on having a society that supports freedom, personal rights and liberties and decentralization of knowledge and innovation.

Because dictatorships concentrate power without balance.

Over time as inequalities & unfairness become severe... the rule gets more brittle.

And dictators have to give more favors to the people that help them stay in power. Like economic favors.

People with ambition then need to play into the system and help prop up the dictator if they want to keep their resources.

Even then they are vulnerable to having everything taken.

And for anyone that dares point out increasingly obvious flaws?

Well, most dictatorships invariably slide into repression.

People with new, better ideas that also happen to challenge the dictators entrenched interests? Or those of the dictators necessary economic allies? Family members? Point out corruption?

Co-opted or cut down.

Fueled by massive surveillance.

And the threat of violence.

Because self-censorship scales better than physical coercion on each person.

People see opportunity for personal advantage. Some become informers.

Some delight in the cruelty of seeing people they dislike arbitrarily punished.

And when the strong leader dies? The society can be incredibly unstable as it carries the weight of so many injustices, so many lies.

And for the system to persist? More repression needed.

The bones of this are already in place.

And if you look at the EU & beyond you see a super-intense push for Age Verification... which is always the leading wedge.

No accident that many of the countries pushing for this are also the biggest hitters in signals intelligence & monitoring...

...With the worst norms for personal privacy and freedoms.

Objectively, a terrible hammer.

But a reminder that we still are in the earliest days of GenAI touching various fields.

Like CAD.

Wehere I think the impact of GenAI will be enormous.

Natural place for it.

So many human hours spent creating extremely simple repetitive things with slight variations.

Checking in on the incumbent Autodesk..and looks like they are incorporating AI in assistant / #ML ways.

Looks Interesting. Conservative. Very incremental. Makes sense given their codebase & users.

Lots of inertia there too so I wonder what they have in the pipe?

And how they will handle the upstarts going hard on generative model / asset creation.

https://www.engineering.com/autocad-2025-adds-ai-features/

Vibecoding is super interesting. And powerful.

Coding syntax is getting better. But secure coding isn't keeping pace.

In a test of 100 coding models, 45% of them introduced a serious vulnerability.

For example, in 86% of tests, code wasn't secured against Cross-Site Scripting.

NOW-TERM IMPLICATIONS This has big implications. Sure, there are the YOLOcoders that ship whole vibecoded apps without thinking about security. Or code review.

Some percentage of their users will get rekt.

If those projects get near high risk users, they are sprinkling knives in the weeds with potential for harm.

BUT BIGGER MODELS = BETTER? Interestingly, even big fat models aren't massively better with security.

S'EVERYWHERE My other worry? Vibecoding without security check steps is happening in existing projects / platforms etc.

Even when people say they are coding. Sometimes they be vibecoding.

This sort of thing has already come to tools you use, including to handle your funds & privacy.

Sure secure code writing & review has never been anything near universal, but the scale and speed of new code creation that #vibecoding enables is new.

VULNERABILITY DISCOVERY...ALSO ACCELERATING ICYMI, vulnerability DISCOVERY is also accelerating a lot faster than secure code creation...

Whole industries are spinning up, including lots of offensive projects.

ME? I #VIBECODE I love the change in how I create with code. But I think we are in for some really rough times, and the least informed parties are gonna be users. As ever.

In the longer run this problem space also seems to offer paths for AI-driven improvement in secure code creation. But since not everything is accelerating at the same pace, the deltas = harm.

Sauce: https://www.veracode.com/blog/genai-code-security-report/

The EU's Digital Identity Wallet project has a lot of big icks.

Looking at the GitHub for the android Age Verification application feels like chewing rocks.

Like the proprietary attestation baked into a must-use form of identification is absolutely the wrong path...

And while we're at it, recall the rule of thumb: Age Verification either by deliberate or convenient naïveté is almost always a surveillance trojan horse.

Source:

https://github.com/eu-digital-identity-wallet/av-app-android-wallet-ui

Proton #VPN signups spike1,400% as the UK Online Safety Act rolls out.

Proton says spike is sustained & higher than when France blocked adult content.

Source: https://archive.ph/i2d9W

Tea enforced ID & selfie collection. And doxxed their own users.

In other news, the UK Online Safety Act is forcing websites to begin collecting IDs.

This will end, predictably in fresh breaches.

And more harm to users.

The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.

-Attributed to Camus

Your honor, in my defense I was being extremely productive at the time of the crash.

You read dystopian sci-fi as a warning.

These companies found business plans..

Just as there are war hawks that delight in hard talk about military action, there are surveillance-yearners...

For reasons I'll never fully understand the UK politicians aren't just surveillance-permissive.

They delight in the idea.

Pre-crime preventative detention coming soon...

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jul/01/tech-firms-suggested-placing-trackers-under-offenders-skin-at-meeting-with-justice-secretary

Mass biometric surveillance is a one-way ticket away from democracy.

How it began: "our service helps consumers quickly do X..."

How it's going: "we help business understand consumer behavior..."

Soon: "we're launching a surveillance subsidiary for government customers..."

This is a tool for one person to acquire a lot of power.

Sam Altman wants his technology to become not only unavoidable, but mandatory.

Bad move for privacy & freedom.

Worse move for #Reddit , whom he might very well one day compete against.

h/t

I prefer the company of people that don't snitch my business to skynet. https://blossom.primal.net/f161ba9922a7b534e2a925c5a641c331f659e6f68d70d3a664e98103a5cd87df.png .

You can patch software, but you can't patch people.

This is why social engineering will always work.

The human brain is loaded with forever-day vulnerabilities...and attackers are constantly probing.

Sometimes I think that they've developed a more applicable & empirically tested theory of human motivation and cognition than psychologists...

Sometimes tens of thousands of A/B tests a day...

Yes #Nostr does! As someone that just finished writing up a long post...Excited for this!

🚨NEW REPORT from us: exposing a new social engineering/hacking tactic.

🇷🇺Russian state-backed hackers successfully compromised a prominent (& professionally paranoid) expert on Russian military operations.

Shocking, right? But the attack is solidly clever & worth understanding. I expect more like it.

ATTACK FLOW

Keir Giles gets a message purporting to be from U.S. State Dept asking for a consultation.

The attackers send the message from a gmail, but CC'd a bunch of email addresses state.gov email addresses. Including one from with same name as the purported sender.

Strong credibility signal to have a bunch of gov ppl on the CC line right?

Well, what the attackers were counting on is that the State Dept mailserver just accepts all email addresses without emitting a bounce.

So they seem to have just created some fake State Dept staff names and addresses.

INTRODUCING THE DECEPTION

The attackers wait for the 2nd interaction to introduce the pivotal deception: getting him to 'connect to a secure platform.'

In the next days they patiently walk him through what they want him to do, even sending a very official looking (but fake) State Dept. document.

The attack works like this: the attackers try to deceive the target into creating and sharing an App-Specific Password (ASP) with them.

They do this by reframing ASPs as something that will let him access a secure resource (spoiler: not how this works)

REMINDER: WHAT IS AN ASP?

What's an ASP? Well, not every app that users want to use supports Multi-Factor Authentication.

Some older email clients for example don't. So providers like #Google let users create a special password just for those apps.

There were so many clever bits to this attack, it's easy to imagine a lot of people falling for it.

Everything was clean. Doc looked real. The language was right. Email addresses at the State Dept. seemed to be CC'd.. I could go on.

They even had Keir enter "ms.state. gov" into the ASP name...

SLOW FOOD SOCIAL ENGINEERING

This attack was like slow food. 10 email exchanges over several weeks! Very much not your run-of-the-mill phishing.

It's like they know what we all expect from them...and then did the opposite.

Ultimately, he realized something was wrong and got in touch with us at #citizenlab ... but not before the attackers got access.

He's said that he expects some sort of 'leak' constructed out of a mixture of his real messages & carefully added falsehoods. I tend to agree, this is a pretty common tactic. Here's what that looks like, btw, from a report we did back in 2017 where we compared what was released after a hack by Russian hackers vs the original:

Coda: Hilariously (to me at least) the attackers called the fake platform it MS DoS

WHO DID IT?

Enter the Google Threat Intelligence Group w/analysis & attribution.

GTIG had been working on their own parallel investigation. Our friendly social engineers are: 🇷🇺 #UNC6293, a #Russian state-sponsored threat actor.

Google adds bonus additional low confidence association to #APT29 (that would be Russia's #SVR).

Nice people.

TAKEAWAYS?

Takeaway: some gov-backed groups are feeling pressure & experimenting.

Moving from smash & grab phishing... to subtler, slower & perhaps less detectable.

Targeting App-Specific Passwords is novel.

But it's just part of a trend of state-backed attackers innovating & moving beyond simple phishing that targets credentials (maybe multi-factor codes) towards other mechanisms of account access.

A lot of more sophisticated attackers are also spreading attacks across platforms.. for example starting the attack on Signal/Telegram, then later pivoting to email, etc. The folks at Volexity (above pic showing a similarly complex operation) have some good reporting on that (link below)

GET SAFER

Do you think you face increased risk because of who you are & what you do?

✅Use Google's free Advanced Protection Program.

Set it up now: https://landing.google.com/intl/en_in/advancedprotection/

✅Exercise extra skepticism when unsolicited interactions slide into suggesting you change account settings!

✅Talk to your IT/ Security team about ASPs. Share the report, we've made some suggestions for them..

READ THE REPORTS

Ours at Citizen Lab: https://citizenlab.ca/2025/06/russian-government-linked-social-engineering-targets-app-specific-passwords/

Google's Post: https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/creative-phishing-academics-critics-of-russia

Other citations:

Our Tainted Leaks report where we walk through how materials got manipulated & leaked after a Russian gov hack: https://citizenlab.ca/2017/05/tainted-leaks-disinformation-phish/

Volexity's recent report:

https://www.volexity.com/blog/2025/04/22/phishing-for-codes-russian-threat-actors-target-microsoft-365-oauth-workflows/

Searching #Youtube, I ignore content less than 12 months old.

To get past the #GenAI sloplayer.

Like a volcanic explosion.

Except instead of blanketing the world with ash, it's a smothering burden of low value, low-enjoyment, derivative, error-filled content.

“The Arab writer can be easily killed by their government under the pretext of ‘national security’"

-Turki al-Jasser in 2014, unwittingly predicting how he'd die in 2025.

He was just executed by Saudi Arabia, probably by beheading.

For his posts critical of the government.

He was reportedly tortured while in prison.

Story: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/18/saudi-arabia-turki-al-jasser-executed

New: WhatsApp announces that they are adding advertising.

Ugh.

As a researcher working on targeted / 0click attacks (including a few that have been done over WhatsApp..) it's hard to see how this works without opening up a fat new attack surface to be probed.

I'm also worried about the ways that these advertising signals get used for tracking people in new parts of their digital lives.

And it bugs me that it's going to be really hard if not impossible to use WhatsApp in a privacy-first way.

What are your thoughts?

Writeup: https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/16/whatsapp-is-adding-ads-to-the-status-screen/

Throwback to the 2010 Mass Homeopathy Overdose that killed scores of skeptics.

Just kidding, they were fine.

I remember getting curious about this & chasing down homeopaths responses.

My favorite went like: 'well of course they survived! They took to much! If they'd only taken less... it could have been really dangerous'

Pic: https://www.nursingtimes.net/archive/mass-homeopathy-overdose-protest-outside-boots-01-02-2010/

Government surveillance powers are like a ziptie.

Nobody has the incentive to loosen them.

They only ratchet tighter.

Headline that I saw...

This is not something I was tracking.

Source: https://www.thefp.com/p/im-the-cto-of-palantir-today-i-join