NEW: πŸ‡©πŸ‡ͺGermany's top court says spyware severely violates fundamental rights. Bans spyware in cases with <3year sentences. Enforces tough proportionality tests on all surveillance. image Restricts spyware to serious cases. Interesting development. image Court says: capturing data at the source (i.e. on someone's phone) is maximally invasive. Especially given how much of our lives happens online. They also surface the security risks to systems from this kind of surveillance. image Watching Germany's highest court grapple with spyware's invasiveness & rights violations is instructive. States wielding spyware without robust legal limitations and tight judicial oversight... are almost guaranteed to be violating their citizens' basic rights. In so many jurisdictions, state secrecy & lack of effective legal challenges means spyware harms happening daily Huge credit to German digital freedoms organization #digitalcourage for bringing this case. Court statement:
Rules on preventative and criminal procedural (source) telecommunications surveillance and criminal procedural remote searches are constitutional for the most part
In orders published today, the First Senate of the Federal Constitutional Court rendered its decision on two constitutional complaints concerning s...
Internet-connected microphones in school bathrooms. What could go wrong? image Mandated microphones in private spaces are a bad idea. Throwing invasive sensors into private spaces rarely fixes socially scary problems. But is almost guaranteed to have risky downsides. image Story:
WIRED
It Looks Like a School Bathroom Smoke Detector. A Teen Hacker Showed It Could Be an Audio Bug
A pair of hackers found that a vape detector often found in high school bathrooms contained microphonesβ€”and security weaknesses that could allow ...
Regular people know that age verification mandates won't work. But they are worried about their children's safety, and they aren't being offered non-dystopian alternatives. image
LLM chat exposures keep on coming. Why? My theory is that these platforms don't do a very good job explaining to users what their public/share features mean. Result: users may think that while something is public that doesn't necessarily mean that anyone is indexing or caching. image Story:
404 Media
More than 130,000 Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, and Other LLM Chats Readable on Archive.org
The issue of publicly saving shared LLM chats is bigger than just Google.
What took them so long? Maybe they had to dust off exploits from the 2000s? Or maybe the better question is: how many unnoticed breaches have happened here. It is an open secret (ask any lawyer) that these court filing systems are incredibly out of date. image https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/06/federal-court-filing-system-pacer-hack-00496916
They want turbo #KYC in everything. image Pic via: X post by Rob Warren (@bikesandbitcoin)
Own goal alert. Governments constantly demand more access to monitor us. But are completely reckless about the systems they use to handle that data. Harming all of us. image
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