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. 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 2 of 2. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Part 1 covered the privacy brand — the Google deal, iCloud, Meta, and what "we keep your data safe" actually means. This post is about the other half of Apple's brand: the idea that their judgment is worth the premium. That they know best. That the walled...

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...

Sam Altman just published a 13-page plan to save capitalism from AI. He's the one building the AI. His company won't be profitable until 2030. And this was somehow not the wildest thing that happened at OpenAI this week. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. If you haven't read They're Racing to Stay Ahead...

LinkedIn used to be useful. Job listings you could actually apply to, professional connections that occasionally meant something, a search that surfaced real opportunities. That era is mostly gone — buried under inspirational fluff posts, obscure humble-brags from people who can't say what they actually did because it...

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,...

Microsoft's own terms say don't trust Copilot with anything important. They'd also like $30 a seat to put it in your spreadsheets. Part of the ongoing Big Tech's War on Users series. Bonus drop — the ToS was too good to sit on. Microsoft's Terms of Use for Copilot recently attracted renewed attention from the internet,...

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,...

Last month, I closed out the Warner Bros. bidding war saga with this line: "Whether it's Netflix or Paramount holding the keys to Warner Bros., that part doesn't change. We're still paying $18/month for a streaming service that drops three episodes of a show and then makes us wait six months for the rest. The...