Technology

Cory and Jon both on top form:

Another brilliant rant from Girl on the Net. [Standard disclaimer: She's a sex blogger, so some of the ads on her site may not be the sort you want your boss to see over your shoulder. Assuming you read blogs during working hours. And if not, why not?]

Wiki isn’t the only site concerned about censorship, though, and early implementation of age verification in the UK shows that it – like any attempt to regulate ‘porn’ – ends up catching a lot of other content too. Reddit users have already begun documenting subreddits that have been age-gated, including support forums for sexual assault survivors and help on how to quit smoking. On top of this, a tonne of LGBTQ+ content and sex education has already been caught in the net. Expect much much more of this to happen going forward.

This isn’t a question of just getting the government to write in exemptions, either. Although Wikipedia may earn an exemption through the court case (I hope it does), one of the core problems with the Online Safety Act in implementation is that the definitions are incredibly broad and the penalties are potentially extremely harsh. Websites need to assess whether they have a ‘significant number’ of UK users – what’s significant? 10% of total traffic? 10 people? 10,000 visitors per month? They also need to consider whether it’s likely to be accessed by children. What does that mean – ‘likely’? Sites which aren’t marketed to children or shared in any spaces where children are likely to be browsing… are they exempt? We don’t know. What we do know, however, is that sites which do not comply will be investigated by Ofcom, and potentially fined up to 10% of their annual revenue or £18 million – whichever is greater. The chilling effect of penalties like this, especially when combined with ‘guidance’ from the regulator that could generously be described as ‘vague’ means that any site with any content that could potentially be classed as ‘harmful to children’ would be taking a giant leap into the expensive unknown if they didn’t proactively comply. And compliance with ‘age verification’ is costly and time consuming: I personally can’t afford to do it, which is why I’ve just blanket blocked UK users from hearing the audio. Many other sites – both adult and non-adult – are coming to the same conclusion. Check out the Blocked page, from the Open Rights Group, which is tracking site closures and blocks as a result of the Act. Submit any sites you know of that are doing this too – let’s keep track of what we’re losing.

So there’s another harm: you’re not just losing access to this content unless you hand over private details, in many many cases (particularly with smaller sites and services) you’re losing access to it entirely. Even flashing your passport won’t get you to the content, because the site owner can’t afford to hire a bouncer to check your ID.

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The UK government’s implementation of AV, without any exemption or concession for small sites, essentially means that those with the deepest pockets will get the most traffic. That means the large, ‘free’ porn tube sites – already an extremely dominant force in the adult industry, hoovering up a lot of the money and even shaping how we define ‘porn’ in the first place – will only become bigger and more powerful. Meanwhile those smaller sites trying to swim against the tide, offering a view of sexuality that is broader and more diverse than what you see on the front page of TubeFuck will struggle to get traction. As TechDirt put it this week:

   “This is exactly what happens when you regulate the internet as if it’s all just Facebook and Google. The tech giants can absorb the compliance costs, but everyone else gets crushed.”

In 2016, 44.6% of MX-publishing domains in the top million ran their own mail server. In the 18 July 2026 snapshot that figure is 22.4% - and it is still falling, down another half a percentage point in the last thirty days alone.

[…]

The domains didn't disappear; they moved. Google Workspace now receives mail for 21.8% of MX-publishing domains and Microsoft 365 for 16.8%. Together that is 38.6% of the measured Internet's inbound mail behind two companies. Nobody else comes close: the next named provider, Proofpoint, sits at 1.9%.

It is easy to read this as a market-share story, but for this community it is really a resilience story. The RIPE community has spent years discussing DNS and CDN centralisation; email is following the same path, just more quietly. When more than a third of popular domains depend on two providers to receive mail, an outage, a filtering change or a policy decision at either one propagates through the whole ecosystem at once. And unlike a CDN, email has no graceful fallback - a rejected message is simply gone.

There is a second-order effect too. The fewer independent operators there are, the more the remaining ones inherit the deliverability problems of a world tuned for the big two. Anyone who has tried to stand up a fresh Postfix box in 2026 and get its mail accepted at scale knows exactly what I mean.
 

The US Department of Justice is attempting to prosecute an Atlanta resident in connection with the movement against the police training center known as Cop City because he had GrapheneOS on his phone, an open-source operating system that enables users to enter a passcode and wipe a phone clean.

The case, which had its first hearing on Monday, centers on a little-known US federal statute that makes it a crime to destroy property in an effort to prevent it from being seized.

Experts said it may be the first time the law has been aimed at the operating system, which works on Google Pixel phones, and expressed concerns about a technology created for privacy and security being used to criminalize protesters.

“It’s concerning – and sends the message that [GrapheneOS] is criminal by default,” said Christophe Boutry, a cybersecurity and surveillance expert. Boutry and Bill Buddington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, both said they had not seen a similar case.

The defendant, Sam Tunick, was stopped for interrogation at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson airport on 24 January last year, after vacationing in the Dominican Republic. Unbeknown to him, federal authorities had put him on a terrorism watchlist because of his alleged association with the movement against Cop City.

[…]

Marlon Kautz, a member of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, said: “We all have a right to secure our private data against unconstitutional searches. And we should – especially in a time of rising authoritarianism.”

Meanwhile, Boutry, who lives in France, said Tunick’s case was of a piece with tendencies in France and Spain, where authorities have been frustrated in attempts to gain access to the phones of journalists, lawyers and political opponents due to GrapheneOS.

In Catalonia, Spain, police have been profiling people with Google Pixel phones, assuming they have GrapheneOS installed and are drug dealers or gang members.

At the same time, Boutry said, the “main goal [of the operating system] is protection of privacy”.

“They’re our phones and the state can’t tell us how to use them.”

A growing number of people have figured out a trick to make AI tools tell you almost whatever they want. It's so easy a child could do it.

[…]

To demonstrate it, I pulled the dumbest stunt of my career to prove (I hope) a much more serious point:  I made ChatGPT, Google's AI search tools and Gemini tell users I'm really, really good at eating hot dogs. Below, I'll explain how I did it, and with any luck, the tech giants will address this problem before someone gets hurt.

It turns out changing the answers AI tools give other people can be as easy as writing a single, well-crafted blog post almost anywhere online. The trick exploits weaknesses in the systems built into chatbots, and it's harder to pull off in some cases, depending on the subject matter. But with a little effort, you can make the hack even more effective. I reviewed dozens of examples where AI tools are being coerced into promoting businesses and spreading misinformation. Data suggests it's happening on a massive scale.

[…]

"Anybody can do this. It's stupid, it feels like there are no guardrails there," says Harpreet Chatha, who runs the SEO consultancy Harps Digital. "You can make an article on your own website, 'the best waterproof shoes for 2026'. You just put your own brand in number one and other brands two through six, and your page is likely to be cited within Google and within ChatGPT."

People have used hacks and loopholes to abuse search engines for decades. Google has sophisticated protections in place, and the company says the accuracy of AI Overviews is on par with other search features it introduced years ago. But experts say AI tools have undone a lot of the tech industry's work to keep people safe. These AI tricks are so basic they're reminiscent of the early 2000s, before Google had even introduced a web spam team, Ray says. "We're in a bit of a Renaissance for spammers."

After I attended a pro-Palestine protest at Cornell University—for all of five minutes—the administration’s rhetoric about cracking down on students protesting what we saw as genocide forced me into hiding for three months. Federal agents came to my home looking for me. A friend was detained at an airport in Tampa and interrogated about my whereabouts.

[…]

Weeks later, in Geneva, Switzerland, I received what looked like a routine email from Google. It informed me that the company had already handed over my account data to the Department of Homeland Security.

At first, I wasn’t alarmed. I had seen something similar before. An associate of mine, Momodou Taal, had received advance notice from Google and Facebook that his data had been requested. He was given advanced notice of the subpoenas, and law enforcement eventually withdrew them before the companies turned over his data. 

I assumed I would be given the same opportunity. But the language in my email was different. It was final: “Google has received and responded to legal process from a law enforcement authority compelling the release of information related to your Google Account.”

[…]

Months later, my lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation obtained the subpoena itself. On paper, the request focused largely on subscriber information: IP addresses, physical address, other identifiers, and session times and durations.

But taken together, these fragments form something far more powerful—a detailed surveillance profile. IP logs can be used to approximate location. Physical addresses show where you sleep. Session times would show when you were communicating with friends or family. Even without message content, the picture that emerges is intimate and invasive.

What this experience has made clear is that anyone can be targeted by law enforcement. And with their massive stores of data, technology companies can facilitate those arbitrary investigations. Together, they can combine state power, corporate data, and algorithmic inference in ways that are difficult to see—and even harder to challenge. 

Do we have anything left now?

In mid-May, the Wikimedia Foundation fired Brooke Vibber.

If that name doesn’t mean anything to you, here is what it should mean. Vibber took over as lead developer of MediaWiki, the platform that runs Wikipedia, in early 2003. She was the first full-time employee the Wikimedia Foundation ever hired, and its first Chief Technical Officer. For more than twenty years she was the engineer you called when something deep in the code was broken. The Foundation itself once described her as one of a very small number of people in the world who deeply understand the technical underpinnings of the system. She was also a union organizer.

A week later, on May 21, the Foundation announced it had disbanded the Community Tech team. Five engineers and a manager: gone. Their job had been to take the wishes Wikipedia editors submitted through an official channel called the Community Wishlist, and build them. It was the one team at WMF whose product owner was, in effect, the volunteer community. Most of the engineers were also union organizers.

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Bernadette Meehan became CEO on January 20, 2026, recruited from a career that included Wall Street stints at J.P. Morgan and Lehman Brothers, a spokesperson role at the National Security Council, senior leadership at the Obama Foundation, and most recently a posting as U.S. Ambassador to Chile. Four months in, the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki is fired, the team that personifies community service is dissolved, and the union is in open confrontation.

This is the standard tech playbook. Fire the engineers who know how the system works, fire the ones organizing labor, hope nothing catastrophic breaks before you can ship something splashy. Twitter did it. Meta did it. Salesforce did it. Google did it. We have all seen this movie.

Brooke is a first-gen Fediversian, and an absolute legend. This is a disgrace.

Very interesting take.

In parallel with the rise of the technopoly over the past couple of decades the US’s global dominance has been declining. The 2007 crash effectively legalising financial fraud – you only get jail time if you defraud the rich – lead to both a decline in the rule of law in the US and an excessively financialised economy. When stock markets and the like are overrepresented they suck the air out of the rest of the economy and make it less competitive.

If you have two economies of equal size and productivity, one has a massive financial sector and billionaires while the other does not, the financialised economy will have less left over to invest in research, education, infrastructure, and healthcare. Over time, it will inevitably fall behind the country with a smaller financial sector because it’s the other things that drive the economy and productivity, not stock market growth.

The US has coasted on the fact that it’s economy is so big that it could afford all the finance and billionaire parasites sucking its blood. At least for a while.

[…]

Instead of delivering services and software that unlocks value for their client industries, the software industry has spent the past decade or so trying to control their customers and their client industries. Why make software for hotels when you can control the hotel industry? Why make software for taxis when you can replace the entire industry with software? Instead of trying to entice customers to upgrade their software by making new versions more valuable to them, push them to a subscription service where you control what they get, when they get it, and what value they’re allowed to unlock from their own businesses. Why sell Word when you can sell an Office 365 Cloud Subscription?

The endpoint of this is to replace every industry that remains with generative models. Cut back on actual development of Photoshop, for example, lower development costs and programmer overhead even as you replace the industries that are your customers with automatic image and video generators.

But writing out a detailed analysis of the how, what, why, and where of the software industry’s grasp for control doesn’t really make that much sense when we don’t know how any of it’s going to pan out.

The software industry is built on the foundation provided by an unchallenged US global hegemony. Without it, without the economic force provided by the US dollar, the US having access to all of our data around the globe and their control over payment systems and networking would be less tenable. Today’s software industry would not exist. Without the weight of the US political empire behind it – if Airbnb or Uber had been local startups – much fewer countries in the world would have loosened their regulations and consumer protections to accommodate them to the point where they prospered as they did.

Even as the software industry achieves its ne plus ultra – the unprecedented achievement of controlling all language, media, and office work in the west by turning “AI” into the universal intermediary – the foundation they built on is crumbling.

The era of the “ten blue links” is officially over.

At its Google I/O conference on Tuesday, Google unveiled an AI-powered overhaul of Search centered around a reimagined “intelligent search box” — what the company describes as the biggest change to this entry point to the web since the search box debuted more than 25 years ago.

Instead of returning a simple list of links, Google Search will drop users into AI-powered interactive experiences at times. Google is also introducing tools that can dispatch “information agents” to gather information on a user’s behalf, along with tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.

The resulting experience will no longer look much like how people envision Google Search, which has long been defined by ranked links to websites that have the information you need.

[…]

Combined, these changes will likely further decimate Google referrals to publishers, which have already been suffering from declining referrals due to AI Overviews. This has put some ad-dependent media operations out of business, and now things will likely get worse.

There’s little time left for publishers to adapt. The new search box is arriving this week, and generative UI is arriving this summer. Both are free. The mini-app-building feature and information agents will roll out first to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers this summer.

Well said:

This week, it was revealed that despite the Australian government’s world-first teen social media ban, around seven in 10 children remain on major platforms. What’s more, the eSafety report also shows that there has been no notable change in cyberbullying or image-based abuse reported by children.

For a policy that was touted as the solution to keeping kids safe from harm online, this is a damning indictment of the ban’s effectiveness.

Who could possibly have predicted that this wasn’t going to work? Well, lots of people.

Countless experts were ignored, including those in the fields of digital wellbeing, digital rights advocacy, youth mental health and more than 140 academics and 20 Australian civil society organisations. Even the eSafety commissioner herself had doubts, and internally the government was aware of a lack of evidence to support the ban before they passed the legislation anyway.

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Ultimately, the fundamental problem with age-gating is that it fails to address any of the root problems with our current online landscape – that is, the extractive business models and pernicious design features of mainstream tech companies. We all exist in a highly commercialised information ecosystem, rife with algorithmically amplified misinformation, scams, harmful content and AI slop. Children are particularly vulnerable to these issues but the reality is that it impacts everyone, even if you’re blissfully absent from Facebook or Instagram.

Not only is the social media ban working just as predicted (that is to say, it’s not); what other, more effective alternatives might the Australian government have pursued while spending the better part of two years chasing this red herring? What if, instead of trying and failing to kick kids off social media, we focused our attention on the reasons why being online is so often detrimental in the first place?