Linux won’t be legal in Colorado if they pass this. You’ll need an account with some age-policing, ID-reporting corporation to be able to use a computing device.

How do they imagine they could enforce this though? Presumably quite selectively, based on the user’s political leanings.

If ordinary users could get a good supply of even DDR4 from China it would be a big relief. Not everyone needs to be at the cutting edge of performance, but we all need enough RAM to make a useful machine.

Turn your volume down before opening the link in public. Someone thought it would be a good idea to have background music.

That’s often the point of this kind of legislation. The review from which this comes points out that the law is very broad and a lot is left up to the discretion of the police about how to apply it. In other words, they implement a law that just about everyone is breaking, then enforce it against environmentalists, critics of Israel, privacy advocates, socialists, anarchists and human rights campaigners, while leaving Meta execs, MPs, banks and the far-right untouched.

I found it and posted a link in this thread.

I found it:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/report-of-the-independent-reviewer-of-state-threats-legislation/report-of-the-independent-reviewer-of-state-threats-legislation-accessible

It’s an independent review of some UK laws concerning national security, and the reviewer is warning that the laws could be used against people unfairly. Note the last sentence of the section: “Serious responsibility is put on police to use the power wisely.”

Engagement in Hostile Activity

6.16. Under Schedule 3 a person may be engaged in hostile activity even though unaware that their activity is hostile activity[footnote 428].

So a person could be examined on account of their wholly inadvertent and morally blameless conduct.

Examples could include a journalist carrying confidential information whose significance to national security he did not understand, or the victim of planted material. The examining officer could act if there was no possibility that the person was aware that its dissemination might be in the interests of a foreign state, or even that they were carrying the material.

The Code of Practice to Schedule 3 refers to the innocent dupe, who “…may believe that they are working for a legitimate business, or charity, which is in fact being utilised specifically for the purpose of espionage”[footnote 429].

6.17. Since hostile activity does not require any knowledge or tasking by a foreign state[footnote 430], the phenomenon of double-ignorance could arise. A person may be engaged in hostile activity if they do something which, unknown to them threatens, national security and which is in the interests of another State, also entirely in the dark. For example:

The developer of an app, whose selling point is end-to-end encryption which would make it more difficult for UK security and intelligence agencies to monitor communications. It is a reasonable assumption that this would be in the interests of a foreign state even if though the foreign state has never contemplated this potential advantage.

The lobbyist for a foreign firm, who seeks to persuade an electronic chip manufacturer to build its factory in France rather than the UK. This would engage the UK’s economic well-being in a way relevant to national security even though France is entirely unaware of the lobbying and the lobbyist is only doing his normal day job.

A journalist carrying information that is personally embarrassing to the Prime Minister on the eve of an important treaty negotiations affecting UK security interests.

6.18. In each of these cases the motive of the app developer/ lobbyist/ journalist may be more sinister than first appears, so permitting an officer to examine whether the individual is a witting or unwitting agent of a foreign state might be described as necessary in the right circumstances. Serious responsibility is placed on police to use the power wisely.

What document is this from?

Yes, the trick is to outlaw it entirely then enforce the law selectively against those whom you find politically awkward.

Yes, Librewolf runs Firefox extensions just fine.

Apple Eyeing A Partnership With Chinese Memory Makers YMTC And CXMT As The Big Three Adopt Hardball Tactics

This happened last year. It isn’t new news.

Google has been systematically moving stuff out of the open-source part of Android and into proprietary areas for some time now. They’re making it harder and harder for anyone to make a working Android OS that isn’t full of closed-source Google spyware. For now these projects survive, but Google is clearly hostile to them.

It’s clearly a risk, but if you have dozens of accounts and passwords it’s hard to come up with a feasible alternative.

It doesn’t say what they’re planning to do about laws requiring age verification. It says they’re forming a group to figure that out. The problem with bad legislation is you can’t just ignore it, so they need to at least work out an approach. In itself this news is neutral, but we’ll have to see what they decide.

If you don’t have to use your passwords from multiple locations, your hints are intelligible only to you, and you don’t leave the paper anywhere too obvious, this isn’t a bad solution.

Google has forgotten how to do competition.

It probably refers to advances in AI-driven surveillance on behalf of the US Government.

Yes, although it sounds like they haven’t finished fixing some of them:

All issues have been addressed by Bitwarden. Seven of which have been resolved or are in active remediation by the Bitwarden team. The remaining three issues have been accepted as intentional design decisions necessary for product functionality.

Edit: There’s more information about the specific threats and remediation steps in the PDF report linked at the end of the Bitwarden blog post:

https://bitwarden.com/assets/Kki4W785JIPOdFj6EeWB5/1e74e924febb4c6a5ad03eed23b92d23/pwmgr_paper__1_-combinedÂ__1_.pdf

Well the specific point here is that these companies claim that a server hack won’t reveal your passwords since they’re encrypted and decrypted on your local device so the server only sees the encrypted version. Apparently this isn’t completely true.

Why would they? It’s by far their biggest market. This is capitalism working as designed: sell to the companies running datacenters, then you and they can make money by renting computing resources at a premium to the peasants, and by spying on those peasants as they use it.