Privacy

Cross posted from: feddit.uk/post/45797826

In a sensational turn of events in the fight against Chat Control, a majority in the European Parliament voted today to end the untargeted mass scanning of private communications. In doing so, the Parliament firmly rejected the error-prone and unconstitutional surveillance practices of recent years. Pressure is now mounting on EU governments to respect the MEPs’ vote and bury untargeted mass surveillance in Europe once and for all.

Amendment 5, tabled by Pirate Party MEP Markéta Gregorová (Greens/EFA group) and adopted by a narrow margin, demands that any scanning of private communications must be strictly limited to individual users or groups of users suspected by a competent judicial authority of being linked to child sexual abuse. This aligns with the European Parliament’s 2023 mandate on the permanent Chat Control regulation (CSAR).

Based on today’s mandate, trilogue negotiations between the EU Parliament, the European Commission, and the Council of the EU are set to begin as early as tomorrow. Negotiations are taking place under extreme time pressure, as the current interim regulation authorizing Chat Control expires on April 6. The EU Commission and the vast majority of the EU Council—except for Italy—have so far categorically rejected any restrictions on untargeted mass scanning.

Digital freedom fighter Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party) commented on the historic vote:

“Today is a sensational victory for the countless citizens who made calls and sent emails to save their digital privacy of correspondence. Digital privacy is alive! Just as with our physical mail, the warrantless screening of our digital communications must remain taboo. EU governments must finally realize that true child protection requires secure apps (‘Security by Design’), the removal of illegal material at the source, and targeted investigations against suspects with a judicial warrant—not overreaching, pointless mass surveillance.”

The Hard Facts: Why Chat Control has failed spectacularly

Continue reading here - patrick-breyer.de/…/historic-chat-control-vote-in…

cross-posted from: lemmus.org/post/20815993

Instagram appears to be stepping back from end-to-end encrypted messaging — a surprising move after years of Meta, its parent company, promoting strong encryption as the future of private communication.

A notice on Instagram’s help pages now says end-to-end encrypted messaging on Instagram will no longer be supported after May 8, 2026. The page instructs affected users to download any chat messages or shared media they want to keep before that date.

I saw this post on r/Linux and wanted to share it here

Are there any alternative app stores that do list them? I might just go to apkpure to side load, but it’s annoying these often-recommended browsers aren’t available there.

Alternatively, are there any browsers preexisting in F-Droid any of you recommend?

Just got a phone and just installed lineage OS.

Edit: FOUND IT in case anyone is looking github.com/BrowserWorks/…/releases list of APKs here

What the hell?!

mastodon: @mshelton@mastodon.social

article: signal.org/bigbrother/district-of-columbia/

context: technologymagazine.com/…/protonmail-under-fire-ov…

Howdy all. I want to deGoogle, but the one thing that keeps me here is Google Maps. Any good alternatives? I don’t want to use Apple or Microsoft products, either, that’s going from one head of Cerberus to another.

I find it alarming that to “protect” women, men have to be surveilled secretly in all public places. This is way beyond dystopian.

AI and remote security personnel get to decide if someone is “a predator” and take 'em down preemptively if they look suspicious.

What could possibly go wrong?

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(“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: gyrovague.com/…/archive-today-on-the-trail-of-the… 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: arstechnica.com/…/wikipedia-bans-archive-today-af…

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.”