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The music industry has asked the EU to add yt-dlp, an open source video downloader, to its Counterfeit and Piracy Watch List. IFPI's submission even names the volunteer developers who maintain it. It also wants Cloudflare, GoDaddy and Verisign on the list, because apparently the company running .com is now a piracy concern.
LaLiga has gone after NordVPN, ProtonVPN, ExpressVPN and Surfshark over affiliate blogs it never names or links to. A Spanish court already threw out its last attempt to fine NordVPN.
The Commission insists the list makes no findings of legal violations. It just tells the world which lawful tools the entertainment industry would like to see gone...
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This is a pretty big deal: a new bill in Congress would let US courts order VPNs and DNS resolvers to block websites.
VPNs are explicitly named in a US site-blocking bill for the first time.
It’s being sold as an anti-piracy measure but once the legal machinery for blocking websites exists, the obvious question is where it goes from there.
And we’ve already seen how badly this can go. Spain’s anti-piracy blocking has swept up legitimate sites along with the targets...
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Australia's "eSafety" Commissioner wrote a rule requiring services to scan private messages. Then she decided it covered social media too, because DMs exist.
The Federal Court told her no when X challenged the invasive rule.
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Five groups that campaigned for Britain's Online Safety Act are now pushing age verification and digital ID bills in 21 US states and Congress.
Four of them are British.
One of them is the trade association for the companies that sell the age checks.
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Every law like this ends the same way. It doesn't work, so it gets bigger.
The Online Safety Act keeps failing upward. Each thing it can't do becomes a reason to give it more to do.
When people route around a bad law, you can take that as feedback or you can take it as a gap in enforcement. Britain has picked.
Nothing about the Online Safety Act has gone to plan, and not one person responsible has treated that as information.
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Google is trying to normalize biometrics one recovery option at a time.
They now want a short video of your face turning side to side, stored on their servers, so you can get back into your account. Encrypted at rest, they say. They still hold the key.
Passkeys and hardware keys already solve this without ever seeing your face. Google added the face scan anyway. That’s how the weird becomes normal.
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