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Making Content from Discoverable Servers Easier to Discover
Discord announces that every Discoverable Server (public servers with 1,000+ members) will get a public Server Web Page from November 16, 2026, and that messages from public channels may appear on those pages and in web search from mid-December; admins can opt channels out and members can turn off their messages now, while private servers and DMs are unaffected.
8 min · 1,838 words
Somebody please stop the spam texts
Nathan Pilkenton complains about a flood of political spam texts from Texas campaigns after moving out of state, and explains why he is hesitant to simply reply STOP to unsubscribe.
3 min · 797 words
I refuse to accept a censored Internet. Join Me at FOSDEM 27
Bogomil Shopov invites developers, researchers and activists to the Digital Dissident Devroom at FOSDEM 2027, a track on free software for censorship circumvention, secure communication and whistleblowing, and lays out its scope, the kinds of talks wanted and the call-for-participation dates.
4 min · 1,009 words
Be Aware of What's in Your Logs
Prompted by a bug report that came with a log full of things the developer never wanted to see, fireborn explains how log files can contain screen text, messages, account identifiers, file paths and more, and urges users to check what they share and developers to provide clear warnings, safe defaults and privacy-respecting ways to report problems.
14 min · 3,114 words
Indian government sites are serving revoked eMudhra certificates
After eMudhra revoked 9,356 certificates on its emSign RSA hierarchy on 19 October 2026 (separate from the compromised G3 intermediates), Nemo scanned Indian government hosts and found many, including MeitY bodies like STPI, Bhashini, UIDAI and the CCA's India PKI site, still serving revoked certificates days later, contradicting MeitY's claim of limited impact.
16 min · 3,696 words
Canadians Are Running Out Of Time To Oppose The Dangerous C-22 Surveillance Bill
EFF's Joe Mullin warns that Canada's Bill C-22, the Lawful Access Act, has passed the House of Commons and now sits before the Senate, and urges Canadians to oppose its expansion of surveillance powers and cross-border data sharing with US police.
2 min · 395 words
Getting ready to operate Taler in Germany
The GNU Taler project announces Taler Operations AG, a new company in Bochum that will apply to BaFin for an e-money licence to operate the privacy-preserving Taler payment system in euros, first in Germany, and explains why a regulated operator is needed.
3 min · 803 words
Full Disk Encryption on Fedora w/ TPM2
A hands-on walkthrough from apalrd's adventures on how LUKS full disk encryption works on Fedora and how to enroll a key into the TPM2 with systemd-cryptenroll, including PCR choices, PIN options, crypttab edits and rebuilding the initramfs, as a first step toward a business-wide Linux rollout.
4 min · 923 words
Quad9 explains why, after a French court ruling in beIN's favour forcing it to block DNS resolution for certain domains, it will stop offering its free DNS cyberprotection service to users in France from November 24, 2026, and what users can do next.
15 min · 3,417 words
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez announces a court order requiring Facebook to pay $25 billion in civil penalties after a jury found 43,899,725 violations of the state's Unfair Practices Act in its Cambridge Analytica case.
3 min · 587 words
Victory! Court Rules OPM Data Disclosure to DOGE Is Unlawful
EFF reports that a federal court in New York ruled on summary judgment that the Office of Personnel Management violated two Privacy Act provisions when it disclosed millions of federal employee records to DOGE agents, one restricting inter-agency disclosure and one requiring records security. The court will decide the remedy later.
2 min · 354 words
How I got over 300 Tor exit nodes removed
The author of KABA.CX describes discovering that 333 compromised Tor exit relays, about 10% of all exits, were redirecting SSH connections to interception servers to steal passwords and spread the Ebury backdoor. They explain how an exitmap script and an sshesame honeypot exposed the relays, and how the Tor network health team got them flagged and shut down within days.
4 min · 965 words
Blocking Identity Resolution Infrastructure
WebKit's John Wilander, Charlie Wolfe and Matthew Finkel explain identity resolution, the post-cookie tracking method where invisible third parties collect your email at login or signup and turn it into a persistent cross-site tracking ID and identity graph, and how Safari and WebKit in the 27 releases block network access to that infrastructure at the domain level.
4 min · 873 words
WhatsApp's Hidden Notes Told AI Not to Recommend a Regulator
Redact found hidden text on 80 of WhatsApp's 545 help pages instructing its support chatbot, including orders not to recommend data protection regulators to locked-out users and not to cite GDPR once a lawyer is mentioned, compares them with WhatsApp's privacy policy, and explains how to verify via the Internet Archive.
11 min · 2,543 words
Cretezy explains how to strip ads from Android TV and Google TV devices by replacing the launcher with Projectivy, swapping YouTube for SmartTube, using Wholphin for Jellyfin and remapping the remote with Button Mapper, with step-by-step ADB commands for disabling the stock launcher and cleaning up.
3 min · 764 words
Should Police Wipe a Criminal's Cellphone Before Returning It?–U.S. v. Stathas
Eric Goldman analyses U.S. v. Stathas, where a court considered whether data on a convicted defendant's seized cellphone, used to commit the offense, should be wiped before the phone is returned, and what that means for forfeiture of digital data.
6 min · 1,363 words
Dark Enlightenment: The Authoritarian Trajectory Being Taken by Tech Giants
Sydney Criminal Lawyers argues that Silicon Valley elites are normalizing Dark Enlightenment ideas—technocratic rule, privately run city-states, and hostility to democracy—with little pushback from authorities.
5 min · 1,160 words
Israeli ad-tech company was a delivery system for "mercenary spyware"And they used Google, Facebook and every other major ad platform to do it.
Cory Doctorow unpacks Citizen Lab's "Exposing AdFection" report on an Israeli ad-tech firm whose targeted ads, served through Google, Facebook and other major platforms, delivered mercenary spyware, and argues everyone should block programmatic ads and that surveillance advertising should be banned.
5 min · 1,140 words
Google's selfie video sign-in puts your face on its servers
Proton's Elena Constantinescu examines Google's new selfie video account recovery, which stores a multi-angle reference video of your face on Google's servers, and what that could mean for AI training, US government data requests and age checks, compares Facebook's video selfie checks and lists recovery options that avoid it.
5 min · 1,229 words
Amazon uses AI to monitor union risk in UK warehouses
openDemocracy reports that internal Amazon documents made public in a Canadian court case describe Atlas, an in-house AI forecasting tool that draws on 'hundreds of data points' including social media and staff feedback to predict union activity at warehouses in the US, Canada and UK.
6 min · 1,341 words