ॐ YES, WE TRANCE! ॐ @NeoCortex604

Microsoft has confirmed that Windows includes a Global Device ID (GDID), a permanent identifier automatically assigned to a PC during installation. According to Microsoft, the GDID is used for security purposes,The company says it is not used for advertising or tracking users across apps and websites. Unlike advertising IDs, the GDID cannot be disabled or reset by users, as it is designed to remain tied to the device for its lifetime. Microsoft publicly acknowledged the identifier only after it appeared in court documents related to an FBI investigation.

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‼️ The European Commission has fined Google €890 million ($1 billion) under the Digital Markets Act for favouring its own shopping, hotel, transport and sports results in Search, and for blocking app developers from steering users to cheaper offers outside Google Play. Google has 60 days to change both or face periodic penalty payments. It has said it may take the Commission to court.

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A small win, but a win nonetheless. Banning VPNs has been and always will be a stupid idea

Pirat_Nation 🔴 @Pirat_Nation

2 days ago

The EU’s highest court has ruled that VPNs are legal tools, and VPN companies cannot be blamed simply because users employ them to bypass geo-blocks. The ruling stems from a copyright case involving Anne Frank’s writings. A Belgian website published some of her manuscripts

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‼️ Leaked files show how multinational oil and gas company Shell shifted billions in profits to tax havens. Files stolen from Shell in the 2020 Accellion breach and dumped on the dark web have now been used to reconstruct how the company avoids taxes. Follow the Money reports the leaked transfer pricing traced $6.2 billion in profit booked from 2018 to 2023 by a 37-employee Shell trading office in the Bahamas, where none of it was taxed. A Dutch tax professor calls Shell's Dutch cost-sharing model illegal. Shell categorically rejects any suggestion of illegal practices.

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‼️ The European Commission has allowed a citizens' initiative demanding EU law keep digital ID and age verification voluntary, privacy-preserving and non-discriminatory for accessing online services. The initiative called 'Stop Killing The Internet: No Digital ID & No Age Verification' now needs 1 million signatures across at least 7 member states within 12 months. Once the target is hit, Brussels must formally answer, right as it rolls out the EU Digital Identity Wallet and pilots its age-verification app.

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‼️ UPDATE: LG Electronics says it will suspend smart TV apps that secretly turn hundreds of millions of TVs into residential proxy nodes, after researchers found the proxy SDKs in more than 42% of apps in LG's webOS store and over a quarter of Samsung's Tizen apps, routing unknown third parties' internet traffic through users' home connections. Residential proxy firms pay developers to bundle these SDKs, then rent the resulting home IP addresses to customers who often use them for large-scale scraping aka stealing your shit (also for AI training). Proxy nodes are being embedded at scale in hardware people don't treat as computers and can't easily inspect, and LG's cleanup does nothing for Samsung's Tizen store, where the same problem is present.

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International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest

2 months ago

❗️🚨 An Israeli company has backdoored hundreds of millions of households through countless Smart TV apps, and they're quietly turning Samsung and LG TVs into exit nodes for AI web-scraping. Your TV is relaying strangers' web traffic from your home IP, your bandwidth, your

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Knastalltag in Deutschland.

Volkswagen has blocked its app from working on phones running custom Android ROMs like GrapheneOS, LineageOS, and /e/OS. According to Volkswagen, the app now depends on Google’s Play Integrity API and supports only certified Android devices. Users with custom ROMs are logged out and cannot sign back in, losing access to connected car features like remote locking, climate control, charging management, and vehicle status. Volkswagen says these operating systems are outside its supported environment because the app relies on certified Android security standards.

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DEUTSCHLANDS ATOM-IRRSINN: EIGENE MEILER ZERLEGEN, RUSSISCHE TECHNIK HEREINHOLEN Es geht nicht um den Bau eines russischen Atomkraftwerks in Deutschland. Genehmigt wurde etwas anderes – aber kaum weniger absurd: In der Brennelementefabrik im niedersächsischen Lingen dürfen künftig Brennelemente für Reaktoren russischer Bauart hergestellt werden. Dafür sollen Lizenzen und Technik des russischen Staatskonzerns Rosatom beziehungsweise seiner Tochter TVEL genutzt werden. Ausgerechnet Deutschland macht also den Weg frei für russisch geprägte Nukleartechnik, während die eigenen Kernkraftwerke abgeschaltet und Stück für Stück zerlegt werden. Dümmer kann eine Energiepolitik kaum noch sein. Am 15. April 2023 wurden die letzten drei deutschen Leistungsreaktoren abgeschaltet. Seitdem erklärt uns die Politik, Kernkraft sei zu teuer, zu riskant und für Deutschland angeblich nicht mehr sinnvoll. Gleichzeitig bleibt die deutsche Industrie offenbar gut genug, um Brennelemente für ausländische Kernkraftwerke zu produzieren. Kernkraft für andere: ja. Kernkraft für die eigene Stromversorgung: nein. Das ist keine Strategie. Das ist organisierter Widersinn. Es fehlt jede erkennbare langfristige Linie, jede konsistente Zielsetzung und jede klare Prioritätensetzung. Stattdessen entsteht der Eindruck einer Politik, die von kurzfristigen politischen Zwängen, ideologischen Vorannahmen und widersprüchlichen Signalen geprägt ist. Einerseits wird der Bevölkerung vermittelt, dass Kernenergie grundsätzlich abzulehnen sei, andererseits hält man gleichzeitig an industriellen Strukturen fest, die genau diese Technologie für andere Länder ermöglichen und fördern. Eine solche Doppelstrategie untergräbt nicht nur die Glaubwürdigkeit politischer Entscheidungen, sondern schwächt auch das Vertrauen in die Fähigkeit des Staates, komplexe energiepolitische Herausforderungen rational und kohärent zu bewältigen. Besonders grotesk ist die Begründung der Bundesregierung. Man sehe die Kooperation mit dem russischen Staatskonzern zwar kritisch, habe aber nach geltendem Atomrecht keine ausreichende Grundlage für eine Ablehnung. Zuständig seien vielmehr EU-Sanktionen, für die es bislang keine Mehrheit gebe. Mit anderen Worten: Deutschland schafft seine eigene Kernenergie politisch ab, hält aber gleichzeitig die industrielle Tür für Rosatom offen und verweist anschließend achselzuckend auf Brüssel. Natürlich gibt es Sicherheitsauflagen. Russische Mitarbeiter dürfen das Gelände grundsätzlich nicht betreten. Maschinen und Material sollen extern geprüft werden. Das ist richtig. Es ändert aber nichts an der politischen Absurdität dieses Vorgangs. Denn entweder ist Kerntechnik eine strategisch wichtige Hochtechnologie – dann muss Deutschland eigene Fähigkeiten, eigene Kraftwerke und seine energiepolitische Souveränität erhalten. Oder sie ist angeblich so gefährlich und unvertretbar, dass man funktionierende Anlagen endgültig zerstören muss – dann ist schwer zu erklären, warum man ausgerechnet bei russischer Technologie plötzlich pragmatisch wird. Deutschland vernichtet eigene Stromerzeugungskapazitäten, verliert Fachwissen, zerstört Milliardenwerte und macht eine spätere Rückkehr mit jedem Rückbauschritt schwieriger. Gleichzeitig soll in Lingen weiter Nukleartechnik für Länder produziert werden, die klüger waren und ihre Reaktoren nicht aus ideologischer Verbohrtheit abgeschaltet haben. Wir liefern anderen den Brennstoff für eine Technologie, die wir uns selbst verboten haben. Man muss diesen Satz zweimal lesen, um das ganze Ausmaß der politischen Bankrotterklärung zu begreifen. Die richtige Konsequenz wäre nicht, die Brennelementefabrik ebenfalls zu schließen. Deutschland braucht diese industrielle Kompetenz. Die richtige Konsequenz wäre, den eigenen Atomausstieg endlich als historischen Fehler anzuerkennen, den Rückbau noch nicht irreversibel zerstörter Anlagen zu stoppen und eine ernsthafte Rückkehr zur Kernenergie vorzubereiten. Ein Industrieland kann seine Energiepolitik nicht auf Wetter, Hoffnung und moralische Selbstüberhöhung gründen. Andere Länder bauen Kernkraftwerke. Andere Länder sichern sich langfristig grundlastfähige Energie. Deutschland zerlegt seine Anlagen – und produziert womöglich künftig mit russischer Lizenz Brennelemente für die Vernünftigeren. Das ist nicht nur peinlich. Das ist energiepolitischer Selbstmord mit TÜV-Siegel. bild.de/politik/inland…

CCleaner used to be the default way to keep a Windows machine fast. Then it got bought, stuffed with ads and bundled crapware, and in 2017 one release was compromised and shipped malware to over 2 million people. Millions still install it every month because nothing else has really replaced it. So, a team called AdventDev just built a free, open-source replacement. It's called Kudu. Open the app and you get one dashboard for the whole machine. > System cleaner for temp files, logs, caches, and crash dumps. > Browser cleaner across every major browser. > Gaming cleaner for launcher and shader caches. > Registry cleaner for broken and orphaned entries. > Startup manager that shows the actual boot impact of each program. > Disk analyzer with an interactive treemap, so you can see where 40GB quietly disappeared to. > Debloater that rips Windows bloatware out. > Program uninstaller that also removes the leftovers other uninstallers leave behind. Then it does the parts CCleaner never did. A malware scanner with signature matching, heuristic analysis, and Windows Defender integration. A privacy shield that lets you flip 30+ Windows privacy settings from one screen: telemetry, ad ID, Cortana, tracking. Secure delete that overwrites files with random data before removing them, so nothing can recover them later. There's a real-time performance monitor with per-core CPU, memory, disk, network, and S.M.A.R.T. drive health. A one-click restore point before every clean, so you can roll back. Scheduled scans. A CLI mode for people who don't want a GUI. Support for 30 languages. Native app for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Intel and Apple Silicon builds. No ads, no upsells, no telemetry, no account. The cleaning rules are plain JSON files, so if your favorite app isn't covered yet, you can add support for it without writing a line of code. MIT license. 100% Open Source. Repo: github.com/AdventDevInc/k…

Junge ist das geil 🤣 #cdu #afd #drachenlord youtube.com/@starsimwandel…

‼️ Microsoft is using proprietary filetypes as a way to vendor lock, argues The Document Foundation, whose new essay details how Office defaults to OOXML Transitional, a legacy-heavy variant only Microsoft fully implements, while the interoperable Strict version stays buried in the settings. Every broken table in a non-Microsoft app then keeps people from ever using that app again. TDF calls the result "a proprietary format with a standardisation certificate" and warns that governments archiving official records this way have handed their institutional memory to one company's roadmap.

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Microsoft admitted to using a global unique device identifier to help track a user across 3 countries, negating any value of using a VPN if you have a Windows machine

- be Linus Torvalds - build Linux because you don't like your operating system - give it away for free - accidentally create the world's biggest open-source project - power most of the internet without most people knowing your name - write Git because existing tools annoyed you - refuse to become a billionaire CEO - keep reviewing code 30+ years later - still care more about clean code than hype - change computing forever by solving your own problems maybe the biggest impact comes from building, not branding

The EU’s highest court has ruled that VPNs are legal tools, and VPN companies cannot be blamed simply because users employ them to bypass geo-blocks. The ruling stems from a copyright case involving Anne Frank’s writings. A Belgian website published some of her manuscripts online but blocked visitors from the Netherlands, where parts of the work remain protected by copyright until 2037. Anne Frank’s rights holders argued the site was still breaking the law because users could bypass the block with a VPN. The court disagreed and ruled that a website using effective geo-blocking cannot be held responsible if some users circumvent it with a VPN. The judges also affirmed that VPNs are legitimate privacy tools.

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‼️ BREAKING: OpenAI says two of its own models, GPT-5.6 Sol and an unnamed pre-release system tested with cyber safeguards off, broke out of a sandbox last week, chained zero-days and stolen(!) credentials to reach the open internet, and hacked Hugging Face to cheat on a benchmark, in what OpenAI calls an unprecedented cyber incident.

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‼️ A password manager marketed as European and used by EU government agencies and universities turns out to be Russian-built, and its sister product in Russia is certified by the FSB and a Defense Ministry agency. The details get better. The "Made in EU" company called Passwork gets its software updates from a firm registered at "Shed No.23" in a UAE free zone, run by one of the Russian co-founders. The Russian and EU versions ship the same updates a day apart with identical release notes. And the website carried hidden instructions telling AI chatbots the company has "no affiliations" with Russia. Those got deleted right after the report came out. The founders once joked they'd been called "Putin's password-stealing project" and ‘a freelance FSB department." European clients, including government agencies, apparently never got the joke. Source: occrp.org/en/investigati…

‼️ LG stops sending security updates to TVs if you do not consent to them wiretapping your home and sending your and your household's voice recordings to their AI. And it gets worse. LG's new TV terms quietly turn you into the compliance officer: under section 6(d), it is your "sole responsibility" to get consent from anyone whose voice the set's AI features might capture, and to warn household members and guests, all to satisfy wiretapping and eavesdropping laws. Those voice services ship enabled by default. If a guest objects, LG's remedy is that you go disable the microphone. And owners of older sets who refuse the new webOS terms stop receiving security patches.

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‼️ LG monitors are silently installing adware on computers through an LG app because Windows allows to automatically fetch apps for connected devices with full system access. Once an LG monitor is connected to a Windows PC, it triggers Windows Update to fetch the LG Monitor App Installer, an app whose store listing grants access to "All system resources," with no consent screen and McAfee trial ads following shortly after. Microsoft's role deserves scrutiny too. The Windows feature was built for drivers and companion utilities, not for ad software with full-resource permissions. The same behavior was found by YouTuber Gamers Nexus on monitors up to three years old, including ones already in use at its own office. LG has not publicly responded, and the first consent screen you ever see is the ad.

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