Link to video of the hacking: https://xcancel.com/Paul_Reviews/status/2044723123287666921

This is about cookie banners on websites

There was another time I got into a very serious ontological discussion with a fairly senior engineer about what the difference was between taxes and fines and they didn’t understand there was a difference,” he said.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.ca/c/technology/p/631442/hw-news-nvidia-s-face-id-chip-youtube-loses-lawsuit-lol-amd-9950x3d2-and-laptop-scams

• Invidious
• Youtube

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/62594213

Denial Takes Hold as Teens Circumvent Australian Age Verification

The failure of the Australian age verification laws has left advocates with the only tool left in the chest: denial.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/62278765

Software changes for compliance with age-verification laws are being pushed a bit everywhere in Linux-development; for example:

• In Systemd, already merged.

• In xdg.desktop.portal (a portal frontend service for Flatpak and other desktop containment frameworks), still open.

• In Arch Linux, still open.

• In Freedesktop.org, still open.

It's interesting that it's the same small group of people behind these pull requests, and that discussion threads in them have been locked owing to a great amount of negative criticisms.

They say "we have to comply with the law". Which also means that if "the law" in the future will require proper verification, handling to 3rd-parties, or whatnot, then they will comply.

Well, it's their right to. They don't owe anything to anyone, and are under no obligation to report to users or to the community, nor to pay heed to anybody's wishes.

If things proceed in this direction, we users may at some point have to choose between privacy-friendly Linux distributions or legal Linux distributions. People who, like me, are worried, need to start thinking about concrete actions to take before it's too late: where to develop such distros? which channels to download and distribute them from? And so on. (And of course, more generally we need to write and protest to politicians, organize protest marches, go on strike, refuse to comply...)

It's good to remind to those who keep on repeating the words "legal" and "illegal" that for example Nelson Mandela was, technically speaking, a criminal who did and promoted illegal activity. This happens when laws become immoral.

cross-posted from: https://mander.xyz/post/49367302

Hong Kong police can now demand phone or computer passwords from those who are suspected of breaching the wide-ranging National Security Law (NSL).

Those who refuse could face up to a year in jail and a fine of up to HK$100,000 ($12,700; £9,600), and individuals who provide "false or misleading information" could face up to three years in jail.

It comes as part of new amendments to a bylaw under the NSL that the government gazetted on Monday.

The NSL was introduced in Hong Kong in 2020, in wake of massive pro-democracy protests the year before. Authorities say the laws, which target acts like terrorism and secession, are necessary for stability - but critics say they are tools to quash dissent.

The new amendments also give customs officials the power to seize items that they deem to "have seditious intention".

Monday's amendments ensure that "activities endangering national security can be effectively prevented, suppressed and punished, and at the same time the lawful rights and interests of individuals and organisations are adequately protected", Hong Kong authorities said on Monday.

...

The city has seen the arrests of hundreds of protesters, activists and former opposition lawmakers since the introduction of the NSL.

...

Bernie has a conversation about AI with an AI agent, Claud. Found it informative and fascinating, especially for someone who knows little about AI.

I saw Wire get mentioned a bit, and now I'm curious.

cross-posted from: https://piefed.ca/c/pcgaming/p/592341/rip-discord-self-hosted-discord-alternatives-tested-teamspeak-stoat-fluxer-matrix-more

• Invidious
• Youtube

Disclaimer: This is not technically a privacy matter for the reader, but I believe it is adjacent and important enough for this community.

Around January 11, 2026, archive.today (aka archive.is, archive.md, etc) started using its users as proxies to conduct a distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack against Gyrovague, my personal blog. All users encountering archive.today's CAPTCHA page currently load and execute the following Javascript: setInterval(function() { fetch("https://gyrovague.com/?s" + Math.random().toString(36).substring(2, 3 + Math.random() * 8), { referrerPolicy: "no-referrer",…

Far too many netizens still try to ignore this or even come up with reasons why gyrovague is the bad guy here.

Alternative archive pages:

archive.org
ghostarchive.org
archivebox.io (self-hosted)

But how else to bypass a paywall?

I've read relevant articles and clicked old links - they all seem to be history. The only ones that still work just look for the article in various archives - the subject of this post always amongst them. The same applies to this article, but there's still some good tips.

Here is the original article from 2023: https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the-mysterious-guerrilla-archivist-of-the-internet/ and what Patakallio has to say about it today:

The post mentions three names/aliases linked to the site, but all of them had been dug up by previous sleuths and the blog post also concludes that they are all most likely aliases, so as far as “doxxing” goes, this wasn’t terribly effective.

Here is a relevant ArsTechnica article: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/02/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-after-site-executed-ddos-and-altered-web-captures/

Wikipedia editors discovered that the archive site altered snapshots of webpages to insert the name of the blogger who was targeted by the DDoS.

archive.today (.ph, .is, .md, .fo, .li, .vn) also loads a pixel and javascript from mail.ru. The script mentions lamoda.ru, kommersant.ru, dzen.ru, ad.mail.ru, vk.com, vkontakte.ru, ok.ru, odnoklasseniki.ru. I haven't researched this further, but I think one can assume that your IP address will be spread across all relevant Russian websites. 10 years ago I would have said "so what? The Russians have social media too" but today you can safely assume that all this data is available to the government itself and is actively contributing to the hybrid war.

All in all, archive.today has always been in the "too good to be true" category. Call me suspicious.

And once again because it's important:

The Wikipedia guidance points out that the Internet Archive and its website, Archive.org, are “uninvolved with and entirely separate from archive.today.”

Youtube automatically adds a tracking code called an SI to most links generated through their app and webpage. It's a unique identifier used to track video sharers. If Alice shares a video with her SI in it and Bob clicks the link, Bob's browser will send Alice's SI to youtube, and now Google knows that Alice and Bob are friends. It's a way of spying on people's interactions outside of youtube. You can install browser extensions and alternate apps that strip away your SI, to prevent Google from spying on you.

So I'm wondering if we can use SIs to hack the youtube algorithm. For example, let's say we took note of a left wing youtuber's SI, someone nice like hbomberguy, and a million people installed a browser extension that adds hmbomberguy's si to all their youtube links. And then they just go along sharing links as normal. Would the algorithm notice that tons of people are looking at videos seemingly shared by hbomberguy, and boost his videos? Or is there anything else we could do with SIs to manipulate Google's analytics in a way that spoils their data and achieves some useful and prosocial end we believe in?

It's important to be clear that this is not the same company that made the Motorola brand famous.

"Motorola Mobility is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Hong Kong based Chinese technology giant Lenovo"