Bonus entry in the Big Tech's War on Users series. Parts 1 and 2 are the actual argument. This is just a good example that arrived on schedule. Apple is currently working on a fix for a bug that locked at least one iPhone user out of his device for months. The cause: somewhere between iOS 18 and iOS 26.4, the...

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....

Microsoft rebuilt Windows Recall from scratch. A researcher broke it again in a few weeks. Microsoft's response: that's not a vulnerability. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. You remember Recall. Microsoft announced it in May 2024 as the flagship feature of their new Copilot+ AI PCs. It would take...

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....

The NSA issued a warning today: reboot your router weekly, change default passwords, update firmware, replace end-of-life hardware. Good advice. Genuinely. Do those things. Also: the same federal government that issued this warning is the one that banned new foreign router models in March, has yet to approve a single...

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,...

On March 23rd, the FCC quietly dropped a rule that affects the router sitting in your home right now. Most coverage treated it as a tech story. A few treated it as a national security story. Almost nobody followed the thread to where it actually leads. Pull the thread. Editorial note: This post refers to both...

Look, I get it. We're all supposed to be excited about passkeys and "passwordless authentication" because some tech companies decided passwords are too hard for us mere mortals to handle. But here's the thing nobody wants to admit: the current implementation of passkeys and mandatory OTPs is a disaster that's making the...