Technology

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.

Here’s what’s happening

Pocket shuts down July 8, 2025

• You will no longer be able to download Pocket or purchase a new Pocket Premium subscription from May 22, 2025.
• Premium monthly and annual subscriptions will be cancelled automatically. Annual subscribers will receive automatic refunds from July 8, 2025.
• Users can export saves anytime until October 8, 2025, after which their data will be permanently deleted.
• API users will no longer be able to transact data (read or write) over Pocket’s API from October 8, 2025 and will need to export their data before this date.
• For more information, including refund details for Premium annual subscribers and how to export saves, go to our Pocket support article.

Fakespot will begin shutting down on July 1, 2025

• You will no longer be able to use the Fakespot extensions, mobile apps, or website from July 1, 2025.
• The Fakespot feature within Firefox known as Review Checker will shut down on June 10, 2025.

Ever wonder how government documents, once locked away on tiny sheets of microfiche, become searchable and accessible online? Now you can see it happen in real time.

Police in France have uncovered a vast child abuse network operating through encrypted chats on Telegram, leading to the arrest of 55 men across 42 departments.

Microsoft fires Joe Lopez for disrupting Genocide-profiteer Satya Nadella during Microsoft Build Keynote speech and bans words like "Palestine", "Gaza" and "Genocide" in all company emails!!! Yet another chapter in a long tale of Microsoft's intimidation, retaliation, repression, and censorship culture.

Source - Tools to view without account.

I've been digging through the 410 GB of Java heap dumps from TeleMessage's archive server, provided by DDoSecrets. Here's a description of the dataset, some of my initial findings, details about an upcoming open source research tool I'm going to release, and a huge list of potential TeleMessage customers.

First, some background. This "clean OPSEC" saga is unbelievable.

Mike Waltz invited a journalist into a Signal group full of high-level Trumpers where they discussed and executed bombing an apartment building full of innocent people. This led to Congressional hearings (about using a Signal group for war, not the war crimes themselves... Congress doesn't really care about those).

Later, Waltz was photographed using TeleMessage SGNL, an Israeli-made knockoff of Signal that archives messages for its customers, and that lied about supporting end-to-end encryption. Then TeleMessage was hacked, twice. The trivial vulnerability let anyone on the internet download Java heap dumps from the server. Then, DDoSecrets released 410 GB of these heap dumps, all from May 4, 2025, and is distributing them to journalists and researchers.

"The trove included material from disaster responders, customs officials, several U.S. diplomatic staffers, at least one White House staffer and members of the Secret Service," according to a Reuters report.

Companies like Apple and Microsoft don’t want you to repair your own tech, because they make a fortune from planned obsolescence. But learning to do it yourself brings empowerment.

In 1994, the Microsoft designers Mark Malamud and Erik Gavriluk approached Eno to compose music for Windows 95. The result was the six-second start-up music-sound of the Windows 95 operating system, "The Microsoft Sound".

Eno shed further light on the composition of the sound on the BBC Radio 4 show The Museum of Curiosity, admitting that he created it using a Macintosh computer, stating "I wrote it on a Mac. I've never used a PC in my life; I don't like them."

In 2025, the Microsoft Sound was selected for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".

Text source

Open Letter - Tools to view it without account

We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work. Our economy is run by people that don't participate in it and our tech companies are directed by people that don't experience the problems they allege to solve for their customers, as the modern executive is no longer a person with demands or responsibilities beyond their allegiance to shareholder value.

I, however, believe the problem runs a little deeper than the economy, which is a symptom of a bigger, virulent, and treatment-resistant plague that has infected the minds of those currently twigging at the levers of power — and really, the only levers that actually matter.

The incentives behind effectively everything we do have been broken by decades of neoliberal thinking, where the idea of a company — an entity created to do a thing in exchange for money —has been drained of all meaning beyond the continued domination and extraction of everything around it, focusing heavily on short-term gains and growth at all costs. In doing so, the definition of a “good business” has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price to a sustainable and loyal market, to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter.

This is the Rot Economy, which is a useful description for how tech companies have voluntarily degraded their core products in order to placate shareholders, transforming useful — and sometimes beloved — services into a hollow shell of their former selves as a means of expressing growth. But it’s worth noting that this transformation isn’t constrained to the tech industry, nor was it a phenomena that occurred when the tech industry entered its current VC-fuelled, publicly-traded incarnation.

HTML Paper

Discord has evolved from a gaming-focused communication tool into a versatile platform supporting diverse online communities. Despite its large user base and active public servers, academic research on Discord remains limited due to data accessibility challenges. This paper introduces Discord Unveiled: A Comprehensive Dataset of Public Communication (2015-2024), the most extensive Discord public server's data to date. The dataset comprises over 2.05 billion messages from 4.74 million users across 3,167 public servers, representing approximately 10% of servers listed in Discord's Discovery feature. Spanning from Discord's launch in 2015 to the end of 2024, it offers a robust temporal and thematic framework for analyzing decentralized moderation, community governance, information dissemination, and social dynamics. Data was collected through Discord's public API, adhering to ethical guidelines and privacy standards via anonymization techniques. Organized into structured JSON files, the dataset facilitates seamless integration with computational social science methodologies. Preliminary analyses reveal significant trends in user engagement, bot utilization, and linguistic diversity, with English predominating alongside substantial representations of Spanish, French, and Portuguese. Additionally, prevalent community themes such as social, art, music, and memes highlight Discord's expansion beyond its gaming origins.

Hacker News Discussion

If policymakers’ speeches and industry lobbying points are to be believed, commercial data is a strategic resource necessary to “win” the “AI race” with China. This argument demands continued widespread, unfettered, permissionless corporate access to vast troves of data (so the rhetoric goes). Not only consumer data should be accessible, but data held (and, in many cases, copyrighted by) corporations, research institu­tions, and other entities, too—all of which can be funneled into corporate AI systems, turbocharged into the military and national security apparatus, and used to gain a competitive edge, particularly against Beijing.

Indeed, there are plentiful ways that commercial data and open-source intelligence can be used to advance national security objectives and fulfill what many would agree are important governmental functions, such as hunting foreign hackers or investigating Russian war crimes in Ukraine.30 Yet, the conundrum lies in the copious national security and counterintelligence problems embedded throughout the practically unrestrained private-sector data collection landscape. How­ever much might be gained by this (often nakedly self-serving) appeal to the national interest as the trump card against stronger AI and data regulations, there are too few incentives to consider what has already been lost: any semblance of anonymity, obscurity, or privacy that once enabled sensitive government entities to function safely.

Ultimately, policymakers must come to terms with the fact that U.S. national security officials, military service members, intelligence officers, and sensitive facilities worldwide already operate at a major disadvantage in the face of both state and nonstate adversaries alike. This vulnerability will only grow with time as long as we have few meaningful protections against data-brokers and other types of unfettered data collection, transmission, and use. Protecting service members from espionage, blackmail, sabotage, or worse will mean confronting a stark reality: piecemeal policing at the post-collection stage like that attempted by previous administrations cannot achieve what even a modest federal data privacy framework could. Taming the adtech market will require a great deal of political will, particularly in response to objections from would-be “national champions.”31 But the decade since the OPM hack has made one thing clear: data-dependent tech companies can champion the national economy or they can champion the national security bureaucracy, but doing the former through race-to-the-bottom data hoarding and sale will only put the latter in even greater jeopardy.