#Skype shuts down TODAY. Here's the link to download your contacts, chats etc: secure.skype.com/en/data-export

Age verification is often a trojan horse for broader surveillance demands.

AI friends consoling me because my cat bonded to the robot vacuum & ignores me.

Friends don't let friends get their eyeballs scanned to buy a coffee. This portable dystopia machine is Tools for Humanity's latest effort to live up to their Orwellian name. Connoisseurs of the AI-will-end-humanity marketing hype train of a few years ago should find plenty to appreciate in an eyeball scanner framed as as a 'helpful' tool to distinguish between AI agents & humans. Or is it for that? Or maybe point of sale? Or nebulous 'verification?' The only clear thing? This device starts from a point of biometric #privacy invasion. It sure looks to me like another effort by the company Sam Altman founded to make a global data-grab. Just say no.

TechCrunch

Sam Altman's World unveils a mobile verification device | TechCrunch

Tools for Humanity, the startup behind the World human verification project, unveiled a mobile verification device and expanded to the US.

2027: we can't wait to show our advertising partners how we deliver behavior shaping across whole lives. this is a surprisingly great feature, imo.

They Criticized Musk on X. Then Their Reach Collapsed. Graphs from this story are stark. Link:

They Criticized Musk on X. Then Their Reach Collapsed.

Three users who disagreed with the site’s owner saw views for their posts plummet.

Constant algorithmic improvements have empirically reverse engineered the human psyche. I suspect that explicit research neuroscience hasn't caught up to the insights about how to induce behavioral dependence that are embodied in these systems. The user experience of most platforms now mirrors maladaptive behavior-maintaining effects you could *only* achieve with most addictive drugs up to about a decade ago. We need to avoid the moral panic, but it's impossible to overstate how novel this is for our brains. One thing we know from behavioral addiction research (my old field) is that the brain is plastic. When you induce one category of addiction, it changes the motivational substrate of the brain in sticky ways. And coss-sensitizes / potentiates other forms of addiction and behavioral dependence. This will only accelerate & become less scrutable with improvements in AI. We are in the earliest, earliest days of trying to understand what this means for the next decades of human life. Painting: The Opium Den, Edward Burra,1933

NEW: 🇪🇺EU issuing burner phones to staff traveling to 🇺🇸US. Anecdotal: matches what I'm seeing, which is orgs retooling what was once the high security "China travel policy" into a US travel policy. Burner phones, dedicated travel devices & border wipes are the new normal. Story:

Client Challenge

Anyone come across good analyses of new US #tariffs . Longer term projections a bonus. #AskNostr

I've spent my adult life thinking about defending digital privacy. Yet until a few years ago, financial freedom & privacy was barely on my radar. This would have probably continued but for a handful of good humans that took the time to talk me through things. Thanks to thinking they kicked off for me, I now think that individual access to aspects of financial freedom & privacy are necessary to a healthy society. Why did it take so long? Well, there was a failure of adversarial imagination on my part. And partly because if you aren't actively asking hard questions, this state of affairs will be hidden from you. The financial system & how it is taught is set up to hide structural privacy violations & disempowerment. I'm pretty sure my ignorance was closer to the norm than the exception. But when you completely restrict financial privacy & freedom, you disempower people...constantly. And it will keep eroding & blocking the exercise of other core rights. Until this changes & awareness grows, we're stuck paying the price for it in a thousand ways. Shoutout to @gladstein for getting & keeping the intellectual ball rolling for me. And to all the good humans that have helped me along the way since. Thank you. You know who you are. Painting : Egon Schiele, Four Trees, 1917.