As of today, about half of all U.S. states have some form of age verification law around. Nine of those were passed in 2025 alone, covering everything from adult content sites to social media platforms to app stores.

Right now, California's Digital Age Assurance Act (AB 1043) is all the rage right now, which targets not only websites and apps but also operating systems. Come January 1, 2027, every OS provider must collect a user's age at account setup and provide that data to app developers via a real-time API.

Colorado is also working on a near-identical bill, which we covered earlier.

The EFF's year-end review put it more bluntly: 2025 was "the year states chose surveillance over safety." The foundation's concern, which I concur with, is, where does this stop? Self-reported birthday today, government ID tomorrow? There appears to be no limit to these laws' overreach.

Meta’s approach to user privacy is under renewed scrutiny following a Swedish report that employees of a Meta subcontractor have watched footage captured by Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses showing sensitive user content.

The workers reportedly work for Kenya-headquartered Sama and provide data annotation for Ray-Ban Metas.

The February report, a collaboration from Swedish newspapers Svenska Dagbladet, Göteborgs-Posten, and Kenya-based freelance journalist Naipanoi Lepapa, is, per a machine translation, based on interviews with over 30 employees at various levels of Sama, including several people who work with video, image, and speech annotation for Meta’s AI systems. Some of the people interviewed have worked on projects other than Meta’s smart glasses. The report’s authors said they did not gain access to the materials that Sama workers handle or the area where workers perform data annotation. The report is also based on interviews with former US Meta employees who have reportedly witnessed live data annotation for several Meta projects.

The report pointed to, per the translation, a “stream of privacy-sensitive data that is fed straight into the tech giant’s systems,” and that makes Sama workers uncomfortable. The authors said that several people interviewed for the report said they have seen footage shot with Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses that shows people having sex and using the bathroom.

This series of inked drawings went viral on Reddit and while the images are all viewable for free, it led me to compile them all into a book available on Amazon. It’s a love letter to the Toronto transit system and my years riding line 2.

https://www.amazon.ca/Transit-People-Jarrett-Young/dp/B0GKDQ9BQ9?

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Core Architecture

My calendar app is a static, multi-page application with a fixed release cycle (annual deployment). It features a hard-coded UI with immutable data — the dates and layout cannot be modified without manual intervention. It's essentially a read-only interface optimized for offline-first functionality.

Key Features

Data Structure - 12-month dataset rendered as a grid-based layout with pre-populated date objects

State Management - Completely stateless; no persistent storage or sync capabilities

User Interaction - Supports reads and writes; compatible with any pen/pencil (similar to a POST request, but non-reversible)

Rendering - Raster-based output; responsive design (fits on my wall)

Accessibility - Physical accessibility for all members of my cohort

Portability - Take a picture once a month, refer to that on your phone

Performance - O(1) lookup time for any date; zero latency, zero network overhead

Technical Advantages

Zero dependencies, requires only wall space and a pen.

No API to support / learn, no loading times / lag, no version conflicts.

Guaranteed uptime. It's also compliant with most privacy standards, though it does require physical access.

Limitations

The calendar has no real-time sync, no cross-device functionality, and no undo. Annotations are permanent with an ink pen. It cannot adjust for time zones or integrate with other calendar systems. No ICS compatible export of appointment data. And unfortunately, the application will need to be replaced after just one year.

If you're interested in implementing a similar app, I can point you in the right direction...

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Norway's Forbrukerrådet consumer council is taking aim at the creeping enshittification of modern life in a 100-page report – and a splendid four-minute video which we highly recommend.

"Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future" is a new report from Forbrukerrådet. The report itself is a light read: it's in English, and while it is 100 pages long [PDF], it is in fact enjoyable and even amusing – we laughed quite a few times when reading it. For one thing, it contains a surprising number of puns and the occasional starred-out swearword, such as "Do androids dream of electric s***." A stodgy bureaucratic report this is not.

Another bit of evidence that the report is both fun and accessible is that to go with it, the agency commissioned a short – and hilarious – film about the problem from NewsLab. It's called "A Day in the Life of an Enshittificator," it's a second under four minutes long.

As the video was already linked a week ago, I'll just provide a link to the report.

While TikTok operates in the United States under new ownership, Apple has deployed technical restrictions to block iOS users in the United States from downloading other apps made by the video platform’s Chinese parent organization ByteDance.

ByteDance owns a vast array of different apps spanning social media, entertainment, artificial intelligence, and other sectors. The leading one is Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, which has over 1 billion monthly active users. While most of those users reside in China, iPhone owners around the world have traditionally been able to download these apps from anywhere without using a VPN, as long as they have a valid App Store account registered in China.

That’s not true anymore. Starting in late January, iPhone users in the US with Chinese App Store accounts began reporting that they were encountering new obstacles when they tried to download apps developed by ByteDance. WIRED has confirmed that even with a valid Chinese App Store account, downloading or updating a ByteDance-owned Chinese app is blocked on Apple devices located in the United States.

Instead, a pop-up window appears that says, “This app is unavailable in the country or region you’re in.” The restriction appears to apply only to ByteDance-owned apps and not those developed by other Chinese companies.

Apple and ByteDance declined to comment. TikTok USDS Joint Venture (the new entity controlling TikTok’s US operations) didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

The timing and technical specifics suggest the restriction is related to the deal TikTok agreed to in January to divest Chinese ownership of its US operations. The agreement was the result of the so-called TikTok ban law passed by Congress in 2024, which also barred companies like Apple and Google from distributing other apps majority-owned by ByteDance. The Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act states that no company can “distribute, maintain, or update” any app majority-controlled by ByteDance “within the land or maritime borders of the United States.”

The law was primarily aimed at TikTok, which has more than 100 million users in the US and had been the subject of years of debate in Washington over whether its Chinese ownership posed a national security risk. But ByteDance also has dozens of other apps that at some point were also removed from Apple’s and Google’s app stores in the US. Now it seems like the scope of impact has reached even more apps that are not technically designed for US audiences, such as Douyin, the AI chatbot Doubao, and the fiction reading platform Fanqie Novel.

WIRED collected dozens of user reports on Chinese social media from people either living in or traveling to the US who said they had been blocked from downloading or updating popular ByteDance-owned apps. These apps are also not available on the Google Play Store, but it’s less of a concern for Android users as their devices have fewer restrictions on downloading apps from non-Google sources.

Traditionally, the primary way Apple enforced geographic restrictions on iPhone apps was according to the country where a user registered their Apple ID. To have an Apple account registered in, say, China, a person would typically need to have a phone number, payment method, and billing address in China. But once their account was registered, they could download apps designed for the Chinese market regardless of where they traveled.

In recent years, however, Apple has been developing more sophisticated mechanisms to identify where an App Store user is physically located. In 2023, the tech outlet 9to5Mac reported that Apple devices had created a new system called “countryd” to precisely determine a person’s location based on “data such as current GPS location, country code from the Wi-Fi router, and information obtained from the SIM card.”

Observers theorized that the new system was created in response to the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, which went into effect in 2024 and required Apple to begin allowing people in the EU to download apps from third-party app marketplaces. Apple complied with the EU regulation, but it restricted the accessibility of alternative app stores only to people physically in the territory of the EU.

Hi!

I do use these two programs for single and batch photo and video compression. They let you cut the file size by ~80% without any noticeable loss in quality, but can not find anything similar for my huuuge music collection. Any reccomendations please?

CompressO -> https://github.com/codeforreal1/compressO Caesium Image Compressor -> https://github.com/Lymphatus/caesium-image-compressor

Save some space, guys!

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cross-posted from: https://expressional.social/users/Peter_Link/statuses/116189487047592419

Calabria, Italy refuses to fire Cuban doctors
[from Facebook, 3/7/26]

#US Chargé d’Affaires to #Cuba Mike Hammer was last week in #Italy, where he met with Roberto Occhiuto, the governor of the #Calabria region. He pushed Occhiuto to end Calabria’s employment of around 500 Cuban #doctors. Occhiuto refused.

After the meeting he issued a statement saying: “Cuban doctors who are allowing us to keep #hospitals and emergency rooms open are still a necessity for our region.”

In an apparent concession, Occhiuto added that he had intended to increase that number to as many as 1,000 in 2026, but is now considering advertising for applicants from elsewhere.

Cuban doctors and nurses are paid many times more abroad than what they earn in Cuba. BotB has verified that Cuban doctors in Italy are paid 3,000€ a month. They must send 1,800€ of that to the Cuban state (much of which supports the public #healthcare system), and keep 1,200€.

#CubanMedicalSolidarity
#news #politics #USpol
@cuba