Infosec.Pub

Gaetano Bresci was a 30-year-old anarchist who assassinated the king of Italy in 1900. The establishment press cast him as a madman, but many ordinary Italians saw his actions as due vengeance for the state’s bloody repression of workers’ protests.

Records show well-timed trades by executive branch employees and congressional aides. Even if they had no insider information, ethics experts say such trading undermines faith in government and the markets.

The German chancellor has visited Lithuania to mark Berlin’s first permanent foreign troop deployment since the second world war, as he called on allies to dramatically expand their efforts to bolster European defences against a hostile Russia.

As a crowd waved Lithuanian, German and Ukrainian flags, Friedrich Merz and his defence minister, Boris Pistorius, attended a ceremony launching the official formation of an armoured brigade aimed at protecting Nato’s eastern flank.

It’s official. As my colleague David Dayen and I both predicted, enough Democratic senators have voted for a crypto “regulation” bill (called the GENIUS Act), basically written by the industry and Donald Trump’s minions, that it passed easily on Monday. If anything, it was even worse than I expected—just nine Democrats were needed to get to the necessary 60 votes, but 16 voted for it. (Two Republicans, Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Jerry Moran of Kansas, voted against it.)

This vote was technically for cloture, meaning the bill couldn’t be halted by a filibuster, but it’s the only vote that mattered. The official vote, now scheduled for Thursday, is only a formality, and I expect several of these senators to vote against it so they can pretend they aren’t monumentally corrupt.

The Crypto Sixteen are the following: Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who co-sponsored the bill, Adam Schiff (D-CA), Angela Alsobrooks (D-MD), Mark Warner (D-VA), Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), John Fetterman (D-PA), Cory Booker (D-NJ), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Martin Heinrich (D-NM), Jon Ossoff (D-GA), Alex Padilla (D-CA), Jacky Rosen (D-NV), and Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE). Every one of them ought to be primaried in their next election.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who has more experience in financial regulation than anyone in Congress, outlined the problems in a speech on the Senate floor. First, the bill gives a clear green light to Trump’s world-historical corruption. “Passing this bill means that we can expect more anonymous buyers, big companies, and foreign governments to use the president’s stablecoin as both a shadowy bank account shielded from government oversight and as a way to pay off the president personally. For crooks, it’s a two-for-one,” she said.

In March, officials at the US State Department revealed that they would use artificial intelligence to revoke the visas of “foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terror groups.” The new program, known as “Catch and Revoke,” will scan social media accounts and is part of a broader uptick in the US government’s use of AI-powered surveillance, with the goal of combating antisemitism, terrorism, and illegal immigration. And the word “uptick” may be a significant understatement. According to the Brennan Center of Justice, the Trump administration is planning to gather social media identifiers of more than 33 million people, “including those applying for permanent residence or adjustment of their immigration status.”

Social media monitoring is not new, nor are US immigration policies necessarily an outlier when compared to other democracies. However, the US changes, which are in keeping with a global trend of increasing state surveillance of noncitizens, have implications for the free expression and due process rights of the population as a whole.

Social media surveillance differs legally and technically from other forms of surveillance. Because it is based on publicly available information, law enforcement agencies generally do not need to follow the robust legal safeguards that are associated with wiretaps and other covert types of monitoring. Autocratic leaders have used monitoring tools to silence political opponents and repress minority populations. In democracies, courts have found that security and law enforcement agencies have sometimes overstepped their authority and even abused antiterrorism policies to target protected speech. As monitoring has increasingly been outsourced to the private sector, a new industry of data brokers can collect, analyze, and share with law enforcement agencies people’s personal data without their knowledge, undermining privacy and due process. Ubiquitous monitoring of speech, even public speech, has a chilling effect on free expression.Further, the automated tools officials use during investigations can produce costly errors, such as misinterpreting speech or context to arrest the wrong individual.

Laws and technologies first launched to combat the threat of terrorism and foreign invasion have now been repurposed to curtail migration. All governments have a responsibility to secure their borders from potential threats and enforce immigration policy in line with the rule of law. Without appropriate oversight, however, the growing use of AI surveillance technologies could exacerbate errors and injustices. Recent moves by the Trump administration to sidestep due process for undocumented immigrants and even legal residents have generated legal scrutiny around the rights of noncitizens in a democracy. Across the Atlantic, European governments have taken this further by expanding powers to revoke the citizenship of naturalized citizens.

You can't be feminist without including some of the most vulnerable women in society

As decentralised social networks grow and evolve over time, so does the meaning of the word decentralisation. People do not understand a meaning of a word in a vacuum, they form an understanding of what a word means based on their think other people think a term means. The term decentralisation is a good example of this: it is clearly an important term to the communities that make up networks like the fediverse. But the meaning of the term decentralisation has shifted over time. Communities take on a shared mental framework to understand a technology. Once a framework has been established, changes to that shared framework are slow, and can happen due to forces of other communities who have a different shared perspective.

The fediverse, and the networks that it grew out of, are decentralised social networks in two different ways: they are decentralised in a technical description of how the network architecture looks. But the fediverse is also decentralised in the sense that this became a core part of the identity of the network. For a variety of reasons, as the fediverse grew and matured, being decentralised became a core way how people on the fediverse understood the network themselves. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, it gave a strong validation of the idea that centralised ownership of social networking is bad, and thus that good social networks should be decentralised.

Over time, the meaning of the term ‘decentralisation’, as understood by people on the fediverse, grew more diffuse. Other characteristics of the network became conflated with the idea of the network being decentralised. Traits of centralised platforms that people deemed bad, such as a single algorithmic timeline controlled by an oligarch, became a template for how an alternative social network should do the opposite: only have a timeline where the content displayed is fully controlled by the user. The boundaries blurred between features resulting from a decentralised networking architecture versus those from human-focused product design. It is totally possible to create a decentralised social networking platform with only algorithmic timelines. But the connection between fediverse platforms largely only having ‘following’ feeds and the network being decentralised was regularly implied.

TOS s2e20 "Return to Tomorrow"

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Advanced persistent threat (APT) groups with ties to China have become persistent players in the cyber espionage landscape, with a special emphasis on European governmental and industrial entities, according to a thorough disclosure from ESET’s APT Activity Report for Q4 2024 to Q1 2025.

The report, covering activities from October 2024 to March 2025, highlights the sophisticated tactics and tools employed by these threat actors to infiltrate sensitive networks.

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These diverse and innovative techniques illustrate the persistent dedication of China-aligned APTs to espionage, often prioritizing long-term access over immediate financial returns.

The ESET report emphasizes that the highlighted operations are merely a snapshot of the broader threat landscape, with intelligence derived from proprietary telemetry data and verified by expert researchers.

The sustained focus on European targets by these APT groups signals a strategic intent to gather sensitive political and industrial intelligence, potentially influencing geopolitical dynamics.

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