New Russian law criminalizes online searches for controversial content
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/07/17/russia-internet-censorship/

New Russian law criminalizes online searches for controversial content
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/07/17/russia-internet-censorship/
Honestly this is evil enough Mastodon
itself should issue regular warnings.
Including importantly to new users,
during the setup and joining process.
Some exciting #stigmerge updates to share!
All stigmerge peers are now seeders -- there are no #leechers in official stigmerge releases. Sharing is caring! #veilid private routing mitigates the privacy hazards normally associated with sharing content over public networks directly.
Peers gossip with each other _constantly_, advertising themselves and discovering new neighbors -- and they store these contact lists in the #veilid DHT like a pheromone trail. So even when an original seeder is long gone and goes offline -- if just one of its last-known neighbors is online, future travelers still have a chance to join a live swarm of active peers.
Fetchers can balance downloads among multiple peers, gravitating towards the most productive ones.
It's also super-easy to run stigmerge from an OCI container now (#Docker or #Podman as you like).
Check out the updated README for more details -- and the 0.5.6 release to try these new superpowers out for yourself!
https://github.com/cmars/stigmerge
https://github.com/cmars/stigmerge/releases/tag/stigmerge-v0.5.6
This is what happens when you allow absentee landlords - and apparently anonymous ones as well, to run things.
Labou, the Tories and Reform approve - after all who is funding them?
Today at the @firstdotorg conference, we’re presenting Draugnet, an open-source, lightweight submission tool designed to make sharing cyber threat intelligence easier.
Run I2P-Snark to torrent anonymously.
No public IPs exposed.
No centralized trackers used.
Resistant by design.
#I2P #Torrenting #Anonymity
Thanks to everyone who joined our Tor Operator AMA on Reddit and Mastodon! Your questions helped highlight the challenges and rewards of running Tor relays, but also highlighted the importance of Tor relays for online privacy.
The Tor network thrives on its community of operators. If you're thinking of running a relay, join the operators channel on Matrix/IRC, mailing list, or forums. We're there to help you get started!
Join us today for an Ask Me Anything (AMA) session with experienced large-scale Tor operators!
Whether you're a privacy advocate, a network enthusiast, a developer, or just curious – we want to hear from you :).
Post your questions on Mastodon by using #TorOps or on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TOR/comments/1la9zgw/tor_operators_ask_me_anything/.
Reading scientific reports about Monero's environmental impact.
If anyone knows any further about this, I'm open for an unbiased talk about this topic, I would like to learn more.
I just read a piece about #Palantir in the latest issue [June 2025] of the #DSA newsletter, "In These Times." A very timely piece indeed!
Palantir and American #TechnoFascism
"A new recruitment campaign appeared on the elite U.S. college campus last April. In schools such as Carnegie Mellon, Cornell and Penn, posters glued to bus stops, with black background, issued a disturbing warning: the time has come for reckoning for the West, before accusing most technology companies of not considering the national interest when they decide what should be built. On the contrary, Palantir, the defense contractor specializing in data analysis and responsible for this recruitment campaign, stated that he does not merely build technological products - to guarantee the future of the United States, but, in fact, to dominate.
"The implicit message of advertising reflects the conviction of Palantir's leaders, including founder #PeterThiel and Chief Executive Officer #AlexKarp, that Silicon Valley's real mandate is to consolidate the military supremacy of the United States and the West, a nostalgic reaction to the happy days of the Cold War and its merger between state, engineering and capital.
"In this version of technological #nationalism, the make America great again translates into an impulse for dominance, of course, against foreign adversaries but also against the "Woke capital," effeminate consumerism and a university system dedicated to social justice and diversity (the Palantir posters were published together with a new initiative that invites talented high school students to "judge the indoctrination" of higher education in exchange for a four-month Palantir scholarship).
"Palantir has strong reason to organize his recruiting career. Although critics retangled when their shares plummeted briefly after Trump's tariff announcement, Palantir's stock market capitalization currently exceeds $270 billion, more than triple its value last September. In addition, the company's ability to establish high-level contacts among national security personnel has generated a series of government contracts linked to the acceleration of #Trumpist #authoritarianism.
"Palantir has already collaborated with #ElonMusk's #SpaceX and the AI and robo robotor #Anduril (another tech company with the theme of The Lord of the Rings led by another #FarRight businessman) to begin building Trump's #GoldenDome, an American version of #Israel's Iron Dome air defense system. It is also working with Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (#DOGE) to create an app programming interface that will allow #HomelandSecurity to track tax data for more undocumented taxpayers to expel.
"In April, Palantir, who has long boasted of his collaborations with military, police and border agents, won a $29.8 million contract with #ICE to improve his #dystopian Immigration Lifecycle Operating System. That is, it is intended to provide molecular and real-time information on immigrants that the government seeks to monitor, arrest and expel. The company is preparing to review ICE's investigative case management system to better track target populations across hundreds of data categories, from eye color to tattoos, job management and social security numbers.
"Palantir's #fascist research and development does not stop at the borders of the United States: the company and Karp have proclaimed their ideological and material support for Israel, which carries out the genocide in Gaza. In January 2024, during an extraordinary board meeting in Tel Aviv, the company announced its strategic alliance with the Israeli Ministry of Defense, providing it with technology for war, possibly including its Artificial Intelligence Platform, sold as a way to incorporate language models-fueled chatbots into real-time decision-making processes in war zones. The company's leadership has made it clear that its conception of Western supremacy implies the uncompromising defense of Zionism abroad and far-right nationalism in the country.
"In all this, it has become clear that Palantir represents the alliance between the technology industry and authoritarian nationalism much more than Musk's clumsy Nazi salutes, sensationalist pronatalism or trolling 'dark #MAGA.' As technology academic Jathan Sadowski recently wrote, 'From the beginning, Palantir's purpose has been to provide... the ontological plan to fascism, helping his ideological objectives come true materially.
"In other words, Palantir is building the digital infrastructure to integrate the multiple forms of violence and state control on which contemporary #authoritarianism is based: from the software needed for mass deportations to AI used in wars against #ColonizedPeoples.
"But Palantir not only builds to dominate, he also wants to tell us why. Less than a month after Trump's inauguration, Karp published his book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, written with the head of Palantir's affairs, Nicolas W. - Zamiska. The book is a strange and prolific mix of neoconservative texts, pseudo-erudite reflections and corporate pamphlets (and apparently shows strong signs of possible use of artificial intelligence).
"In its attempt to unite the praise of Silicon Valley engineers with a strident demand for rearmament from the West, The Technological Republic draws a vision of the future in which the intuitions about creativity, taken from the study of swarms of bees or Jackson Pollock's paintings, are put at the service of ensuring a broad spectrum technological dominance. At the centre is the regret that a compact liberal elite has exhausted the moral courage and technological dynamism of the West just as it faces the revolution of artificial intelligence and emerging Chinese hegemony. After the vague rhetoric of the cultural war, it is not difficult to perceive Karp and Palantir's angry reaction to the #resistance organized by technological workers through campaigns such as '#NoTechForIce or #TechWorkersCoalition' to the project of building to dominate.
"Just as Karp has underlined his company's commitment to Israeli supremacy, so does his book speak of a 'left' chased by the spectre of #Palestine. The executive director of a company that reaps huge profits from surveillance and data extraction systems, aimed at expelling dissidents and undocumented people, Karp writes with contempt of those who want to remain anonymous during Israel's war camps in #Gaza. Quote a student who says, 'If I give my name, I lose my future.' With an astonishing lack of self-consciousness he comments: 'The protective veil of #anonymity could [...] rob this generation of the opportunity to develop an instinct for true mastery of an idea, of the reward of victory in the public square, as well as the costs of defeat.
"This is the same book that, in a variant of the conspiracy theory of cultural Marxism, Edward Said's Orientalism is the main culprit of the emasculation of an academic world built around Western civilization and, therefore, as one more factor in the hesitant technological supremacy of the United States. As Karp states, the book of the Palestinian-American critic has destabilized - a whole way of being an academic in the university establishment, has been the vehicle through which the academic world would be remade.
"The Technological Republic reveals that contemporary #TechnoNationalism and #TechnoMilitarism have nothing to do with building infrastructure for state control and violence, but also with the promotion of an indistinguishable ideology of those who try to sell you something. Palantir reaps benefits not only from the way fear of migrants, artificial intelligence, the upcoming wars waged by drone swarms, mobilizes the resources of governments, but also from speech and uproar. His company's stock market capitalization has quadrupled in the past year, far surpassing revenue-derived growth. This vacuum is filled with speculation, that is, with words and ideas about the future. The future Karp sells is one in which the alternative is ruin (China geopolitical supremacy) or (American) dominance. Behind all the complaints of The Technological Republic about the crisis of confidence in the West, what Karp really wants us to believe is in Palantir, that is, the old business of war, racism and repression marketed through a brilliant new interface."
[Original - in Spanish]
https://ficciondelarazon.org/2025/05/14/alberto-toscano-palantir-y-el-tecno-fascismo-estadounidense/
Tails 6.16, a privacy-focused Linux distro, is out now with Tor Browser 14.5.3 and kernel 6.1.140.
https://linuxiac.com/tails-6-16-arrives-with-updated-tor-browser/
Happy Families: new certificates for faster and easier relay management
Tor has launched Oniux, a new tool for anonymizing any Linux app’s network traffic via the Tor network.
Unlike previous solutions like Torsocks, Oniux uses Linux namespaces to isolate apps at the kernel level, ensuring leak-proof anonymity even with malicious apps.
Though experimental, Oniux could be a game-changer for enhanced privacy on Linux.
"When launching privacy-critical apps and services, developers want to make sure that every packet really only goes through Tor. One mistyped proxy setting–or a single system-call outside the SOCKS wrapper–and your data is suddenly on the line.
That's why today, we are excited to introduce oniux: a small command-line utility providing Tor network isolation for third-party applications using Linux namespaces. Built on Arti, and onionmasq, oniux drop-ships any Linux program into its own network namespace to route it through Tor and strips away the potential for data leaks. If your work, activism, or research demands rock-solid traffic isolation, oniux delivers it."
https://blog.torproject.org/introducing-oniux-tor-isolation-using-linux-namespaces/