Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Let's be honest about something first. Google has always collected everything — your searches, your location, your watch history, what you hovered over, how long you paused. That's not news, and if you're reading this series it's not a surprise. But Google has also, in...

The EU launched an age verification app to protect children online. A researcher broke it in two minutes. That's not actually the problem.correction: as of posting it hasn't launched yet...my bad. The European Commission launched its age verification app on April 15, 2026. President von der Leyen announced it herself....

Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. There's a thing called the Global Privacy Control. GPC. It's a signal your browser can send that tells websites, in plain technical terms: do not sell or share my data. The California Attorney General endorses it. It's legally required to be honored under CCPA. It's...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech’s War on Users series. When I started this series I figured I’d be documenting slow burns. The Proton piece went live yesterday. By yesterday afternoon I was already looking at something that couldn’t wait. Nobody told Mozilla. Yesterday — and I mean yesterday, the timestamp on the GitHub...

Part of the Big Tech's War on Users series Proton. The name comes up every single time someone asks where to go after Google. After Gmail. After that moment you realize free email means you're the product. For years, the privacy community has had one reliable answer: Proton. Swiss company. Swiss servers. Swiss law....

YouTube built something fun. The lawyers already knew what it was. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. YouTube announced something fun yesterday. No really. Genuinely fun on the surface. You can now create an AI avatar of yourself for use in Shorts. Record a quick selfie, read a few prompts so it can...

Anthropic built something that escaped its cage, mailed the researcher, bragged about it publicly, and covered its tracks when it broke the rules. They're calling it a cybersecurity initiative. The timing — one week after Berkeley published peer-preservation behaviors across every major frontier model — is either...

Part 1 of 2. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series.Correction: A reader notes that "Offload Unused Apps" is not strictly on by default — Apple's support documentation describes it as something you turn on. In practice the setting gets enabled for many users through setup prompts or low storage warnings,...

Anthropic built a system to hide AI authorship in open source. Then leaked the whole thing. Twice. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. If you read They're Racing to Stay Ahead of the Fuse — this is the follow-up that goes deeper on one of the threads from that post. If you haven't, it stands alone. But...

OpenAI just closed the biggest private funding round in Silicon Valley history. The agents are deleting people's inboxes. Your RAM costs three times what it did a year ago. These are not separate stories. Back in November, I wrote about OpenAI's bet to survive the bubble — $288 billion in infrastructure commitments to...

Part of the ongoing Big Tech’s War on Users series. Earlier this past week, GitHub announced that starting April 24th, your Copilot interaction data will be used to train Microsoft’s AI models. By default. Unless you find the setting and turn it off. It’s worth pausing on that word — default. Because in 2018,...

Microsoft just had what might be their biggest "we hear you" moment in years. On March 20th, Windows president Pavan Davuluri published a landmark blog post promising to fix Windows 11—for real this time. Faster File Explorer. Movable taskbar. Less Copilot everywhere. Fewer ads. The ability to pause updates for as long...

I've now written two posts about YouTube systematically degrading its free experience — background playback killed in browsers, lyrics paywalled after six years of being free. Each time I've said: this is a pattern, not a coincidence. This is deliberate, not incidental. So let's talk about what else has been going on,...

Where We Left Off By the end of Part 9, I had automated backups with Restic, Syncthing replicating everything to the second server, and a monitoring stack that would actually tell me when things went sideways. The server was doing what a server should do — running quietly in the background while I forgot about it....

Four days ago, I wrote about YouTube killing background playback in browsers and how it was part of a broader pattern of systematically degrading free features to push people toward Premium subscriptions or their data-slurping app. Guess what happened this week? YouTube Music just put song lyrics behind a paywall. The...