From: https://forum.hackliberty.org/t/the-future-of-hack-liberty-and-the-death-of-federation/224

Problems with Lemmy

Data Replication, Moderation, and Abuse

All the data replication and moderation issues from Matrix also apply to Lemmy. This one of the underlying flaws of all federated services. Lemmy admins can be held liable for hosting illegal content that is being replicated over the federation. It also makes Lemmy servers easy targets to be taken down by malicious adversaries.

deFederation

Despite being "de-centralized", there is censorship in the form of "de-federation", which effectively removes "wrong-think" servers from the global audience on Lemmy. Even though there is claimed decentralization, a large majority of users congregate on the same few servers.

Censorship is hard, let the community do it!

Any posts that don't adhere to the Lemmy hive mind are immediately down voted, which is effectively a shadow ban that anyone can do by clicking the down vote

The FBI visited my house today for free speech acts they knew were not crimes.

You can see the shame on their faces.

This is the Democratic regime manifest.

At Least 7 of the 9/11 Hijackers are Still Alive

National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

Outline of the 9/11 Plot

The muscle hijackers 'picked by bin Ladin':

• Satam al Suqami
• Wail and Waleed al Shehri (two brothers) Alive
• Abdul Aziz al Omari Alive
• Fayez Banihammad (from the UAE)
• Ahmed al Ghamdi
• Hamza al Ghamdi
• Mohand al Shehri Alive
• Saeed al Ghamdi Alive
• Ahmad al Haznawi
• Ahmed al Nami Alive
• Majed Moqed
• Salem al Hazmi (the brother of Nawaf al Hazmi)

How can the 9/11 Commission be taken seriously when they refer to 9/11 'hijackers' who are still alive?

Some of the suspects apparently used the stolen identities of at least five Saudis who worked in the airline industry as pilots, mechanics, and flight attendants — people who would have had increased access in airports, a Saudi government official told the Sun-Sentinel.

American Airlines Flight 11

• Aircraft: Boei

SUPPRESSED DETAILS OF CRIMINAL INSIDER TRADING LEAD DIRECTLY INTO THE CIA's HIGHEST RANKS

CIA EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR "BUZZY" KRONGARD MANAGED FIRM THAT HANDLED "PUT" OPTIONS ON UAL

by Michael C. Ruppert

[© COPYRIGHT, 2001, Michael C. Ruppert and FTW Publications, www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved. - May be reprinted or distributed for non-profit purposes only.]

FTW, October 9, 2001

Although uniformly ignored by the mainstream U.S. media, there is abundant and clear evidence that a number of transactions in financial markets indicated specific (criminal) foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the case of at least one of these trades -- which has left a $2.5 million prize unclaimed -- the firm used to place the "put options" on United Airlines stock was, until 1998, managed by the man who is now in the number three Executive Director position at the Central Intelligence Agency. Until 1997 A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard had been Chair

In June 2001, Cooper would make a prediction that would earn him the legacy as the man who predicted the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Cooper pulled on historical threads of tragic events and tied them to what he saw as the government and media colluding to make a boogeyman out of Osama bin Laden. Cooper predicted an awful event would soon occur in the United States and that the country’s leaders would blame it on bin Laden.

On Sept. 11, 2001, the day his prophecy was realized, Cooper stayed on air for 10 hours. According to audio archived on the Cooper tribute website, BeholdAMessenger, in the initial hours after the attack, Cooper theorized the towers of the World Trade Center came down by controlled demolition.

A suspected developer of a new malware strain called Styx Stealer made a “significant operational security error” and leaked data from his computer, including details about clients and earnings, researchers have found.

Styx Stealer is “a powerful malware” capable of stealing browser data, instant messenger sessions from Telegram and Discord, and cryptocurrency. The Israel-based cybersecurity firm Check Point, which analyzed the malware, said that it was used against its customers, though further details were not provided.

“The developer made a fatal error and leaked data from his computer, which allowed Check Point to obtain a large amount of intelligence,” researchers said in a report published last week.

The developer of Styx Stealer was found to be linked to one of the Agent Tesla threat actors known as FucosReal, who

One of the largest companies that conducts background checks confirmed that it is the source of a data breach causing national outrage due to the millions of Social Security numbers leaked.

In a statement on Friday, National Public Data said it detected suspicious activity in its network in late December, and subsequently a hacker leaked certain tranches of data in April and throughout the summer.

“The incident is believed to have involved a third-party bad actor that was trying to hack into data in late December 2023, with potential leaks of certain data in April 2024 and summer 2024. We conducted an investigation and subsequent information has come to light,” the Florida-based company said.

“The information that was suspected of being breached contained name, email address, phone number, social security number, and mailing address(es).”

National Public Data said it “cooperated with law

Popular flight-tracking app FlightAware has admitted that it was exposing a bunch of users' data for more than three years.

It made the admission via a notification filed last week with Rob Bonta, California's attorney general, saying the leak began on January 1, 2021, but was only detected on July 25 of this year.

The incident was blamed on an unspecified configuration error. It led to the exposure of personal information, passwords, and various other personal data points you'd expect to see in a breach, depending on what information the user provided in their account.

The full list of potentially impacted data points is below:

• User ID
• Password
• Email address
• Full name
• Billing address
• Shipping address
• IP address
• Social media accounts
• Telephone numbers
• Year of birth
• Last four digits of your credit card number
• Information about aircraft owned
• Industry
• Title
• Pilot status (yes/no)
• Account activity (such as flights viewed and comments posted)
• Social Secu

A Kentucky man who hacked into a state registry and faked his own death to avoid paying child support was sentenced on Monday to 81 months in prison.

In January 2023, Jesse Kipf used stolen login credentials belonging to a physician to access the Hawaii Death Registry System, where he submitted and “certified” his own death — thereby avoiding paying more than $116,000 in owed child support.

He also hacked into other state death registry systems, as well as “governmental and corporate networks” using stolen credentials, and tried to sell access to those entities on the darkweb.

“Working in collaboration with our law enforcement partners, this defendant who hacked a variety of computer systems and maliciously stole the identity of others for his own personal gain, will now pay the price,” said Michael E. Stansbury, special

“Categorically unconstitutional” – that is how the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled about the use of geofence warrants.

The part of the Constitution that this type of warrant, that enables dragnet-style mass surveillance, violates is the Fourth Amendment, the court found.

This amendment is meant to protect citizens from unreasonable searches or seizures – but, said the court of appeals, what geofence warrants do is allow for the opposite: “General, exploratory rummaging.”

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

Geofencing works by essentially treating everyone who happens to be in a geographic area during a given time as a suspect, until established otherwise.

And, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a digital rights group, an outspoken critic that often gets involved in legal cases to argue against this method of investigation, welcomed the court’s decision, notin

You might still think about Eric Schmidt as a “(big) tech guy” and businessman, but his passion for (geo)politics was always evident, even while he served as Google’s CEO.

These days, Schmidt is the chair of the Special Competitive Studies Project (SCSP), a think tank that would like to position itself as a reference point to a military alliance, NATO, and get it to “monitor disinformation in real-time.”

SCSP’s ambition is no less than to help craft new national security strategies, always with an eye on the alleged attempts to increase disinformation (here AI is to blame) – but also ways to combat that, and here, SCSP says (the US) must strengthen its “AI competitiveness.”

The goal is to “win” what’s referred to as the techno-economic competition by 2030 – there’s that deadline, favored by many a controversial globalist initiative.

Here, the group would like NATO and its members to fight against what is described as AI disinformation, that new chapter in information warfare.

Schm

The Biden administration is working to expedite widespread adoption of digital IDs, including driver’s licenses, a draft executive order indicates.

Digital IDs are a contentious concept primarily because of the concentration of – eventually – the entirety of people’s sensitive private information in centralized databases controlled by the government, and on people’s phones, “client-side.”

That in turn brings up the issues of technical security, but also privacy, and the potential for dystopian-style mass surveillance.

Proponents, on the other hand, like to focus on the “convenience” that such a shift from physical to digital personal documents is promised to bring.

In the US, some states have started this process via digital driver’s licenses, and the executive order is urging (“strongly encouraging”) both federal and state authorities to accelerate this, as well as other types of digital ID.

Where this policy seems to be converging to is coming up, at long last, with a functional

In Brazil, a significant upheaval in digital privacy and access to information is unfolding, as a notable number of reputable VPN services—including NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark, and VyprVPN—have vanished from the local iOS App Store. This move is widely believed to comply with Brazilian authorities’ directives, reflecting a concerning trend towards online censorship.

This development is particularly alarming in light of the recent decision X made to shutdown its operations in the country. X terminated its operations after a protracted legal confrontation with Brazilian officials, who had accused the platform of insufficient efforts to combat disinformation, specifically its failure to block accounts spreading false information and hate speech. Despite the shutdown, X’s app is still accessible in Brazil.

![](https://links.hackliberty.o

California is one of the US states that have introduced digital license plates, amid opposition from a number of rights advocates.

Now, there is a legislative effort to have GPS location tracking embedded in these, to all intents and purposes, devices attached to the car.

Sponsored by Democrat Assemblywoman Lori Wilson, Bill 3138 is currently making its way through the state’s legislature. It refers to “License plates and registration cards: alternative devices,” and the bill has another sponsor – Reviver.

The company was founded by Neville Boston, formerly of the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), and promotes itself as the first digital license plates platform. It has made its way to both this proposal, and the law the current draft builds on – AB 984 (also sponsored by Wilson) – which was signed into law two years ago.

The problem with Reviver is that it has already had a security breach that allowed hackers to track those using the company’s digital plates in real-time. It doe

Free speech group the Foundation for Individual Rights (FIRE) has gone to court in a bid to block Texas state age verification law, Securing Children Online through Parental Empowerment Act (SCOPE Act, HB 18).

We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.

This largely Republican-backed law will take effect on September 1, starting when online platforms will be under obligation to register and verify the age of all users.

This will apply if “more than a third” of content on the platforms is considered “harmful” or “obscene.”

But FIRE believes this is a form of pressure to make sure sites collect biometric and ID data from adults in Texas as they access what is lawful (to them) content.

Hence the case, Students Engaged in Advancing Texas v. Paxton, where FIRE is suing state Attorney General Ken Paxton on behalf of four plaintiffs that the group says would

Although a lower court had dismissed the case, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has decided that Google will have to go to trial after all, for allegedly secretly collecting data from Chrome users, regardless of whether they chose to sync information from the browser with their Google account.

The class action lawsuit, Calhoun v. Google LLC., accuses the tech giant of using the browser, by far the most dominant in its market, to collect browsing history, IP addresses, unique browser identifiers, and persistent cookie identifiers – all without consent.

The case was initially filed in 2020 and then dismissed in December 2022, but now the appellate court – in a ruling signed by Judge Milan D. Smith Jr. – said that the decision failed to take into account, looking into Google’s disclosures, i.e., the privacy policy agreement, “whether a reasonable user reading

The push to develop digital ID and expand its use in the US is receiving a boost as the country’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is launching a new project.

NIST’s National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) has teamed up with 15 large financial and state institutions, as well as tech companies, to research and develop a way of integrating Mobile Driver’s License (mDL) into financial services. But according to NIST, this is just the start and the initial focus of the program.

The agreement represents an effort to tie in yet more areas of people’s lives in their digital ID (“customer identification program requirements” is how NIST’s announcement describes the focus of this particular initiative). These schemes are often criticized by rights advocates for their potential to be used as mass surv

The District Court for the Eastern District of New York has ruled that the US government must reverse course on its policy of warrantless searches of US (and foreign) nationals’ electronic devices as they enter the country.

We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here.

This is not the only court decision on this issue, while this particular outcome, requiring that border agents obtain court-issued orders before performing such searches, concerns the district that is the court’s seat – therefore also a major port of entry, JFK International Airport.

It was precisely at this airport that an event unfolded which set in motion a legal case. In 2022, US citizen Kurbonali Sultanov was coerced (he was told he “had no choice”) into surrendering his phone’s passport to border officers.

Sultanov later became a defendant in a criminal case but argued that evidence from the

The online digital ID age verification creep in the US continues from a number of directions, through “recommendations” and “studies” – essentially, the government is nudging the industry to move in the direction of implementing digital ID age verification tools.

At this point, it is happening via various initiatives and legislation, still, without being formally mandated.

One instance is a recommendation coming from the Biden-Harris Administration’s Kids Online Health and Safety Task Force, which is telling online service providers they should “develop and inform parents about age verification tools built into the app or available at the devic

Odysee, the blockchain-based video-sharing service, has announced that it will remove all advertisements from its platform effective immediately.

The company expressed confidence in its innovative monetization programs, which are designed to support creators financially while maintaining the platform’s operational costs. “We don’t need ads to make money as a platform,” the announcement read, highlighting their commitment to creating a more open and creatively free environment.

Odysee’s move comes at a time when many media platforms increasingly rely on advertising revenue, which can lead to conflicts of interest and potential demonetization from pro-censorship activists.

By eliminating ads, Odysee aims to set a new standard for platform independence and user-centric service.

The announcement also pointed to the aggressive advertising tactics employed by platforms like YouTube and others, whic