If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. A new desktop suite from the Collabora Productivity aims to bring the familiarity of its cloud-based tools to users who prefer to work offline. The company, best known for developing Collabora Online (COOL), a web-based open source alternative to Google Docs and Microsoft 365, has released Collabora Office, a version that runs directly on a user’s device without any need for internet access. With this release, Collabora wants to deliver the same clear, tabbed layout of its online platform in a self-contained desktop application. The suite allows users to create and edit documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and drawings entirely offline, yet keeps full compatibility with Microsoft Office and Open Document formats. Collabora Office mirrors the clean look of the online edition but processes everything locally. Users can edit a report remotely and later reconnect with shared projects when they’re back online, with no extra software or conversions required. Unlike some long-standing office suites, this one avoids overcomplicated menus and extensive configuration layers. Collabora says its goal is to keep the interface focused on the most common user actions. The package is open source, handles all data locally by default, and skips Java components to reduce system requirements and installation size. Built upon the LibreOffice core, which Collabora contributes to, the new software integrates the company’s browser-style interface to maintain consistency across platforms. “We’re excited to bring a first release of Collabora Office to the desktop, letting desktop users work both on-line and off-line in comfort. We look forward to working with and gaining valuable feedback from our partners, customers, users and community,” said Michael Meeks, CEO of Collabora Productivity. “This release provides an opportunity to see the direction of Collabora Productivity’s products, and as an open source company, we love to work with others to shape and collaborate on new features,” he added. Alongside this version, Collabora is keeping Collabora Office Classic, a long-term supported edition designed for users who prefer the traditional LibreOffice-style layout, broader configuration controls, and advanced macro and database tools. Both will continue to be updated in parallel to suit different workflows. Collabora Office is already available for download on Windows 11, macOS 15 Sequoia and later, and Linux x86_64 through Flatpak. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Collabora Launches Offline Office Suite for Windows, Mac, Linux appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Russia’s communications regulator, Roskomnadzor, has warned that WhatsApp may be taken offline across the country if it continues to reject compliance with national data laws. The dispute follows a round of restrictions in August that limited some WhatsApp and Telegram calls. Officials said that foreign-owned services, including Meta’s subsidiaries, had refused to provide user data to investigators in cases tied to fraud and terrorism. On Friday, Roskomnadzor restated its position that WhatsApp had not followed the country’s legal requirements intended to “prevent and combat crime.” WhatsApp has accused Moscow of trying to cut off millions of users from secure private communication. For many Russians, this confrontation could determine whether encrypted conversations remain accessible at all. At the same time, the government is promoting MAX, a state-backed messaging app presented as a “safer” national alternative. A close look at the app reveals that it could allow officials to track users more closely, while state media has denied any such possibility. The crackdown on communication platforms coincides with widespread internet disruptions. Over the past several months, mobile data shutdowns have affected dozens of regions, with authorities saying the outages are meant to counter Ukrainian drone attacks. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Russia Threatens to Block WhatsApp as Government Promotes State-Run MAX App appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The European Union has a habit of turning its worst temporary ideas into permanent fixtures. This time it is “Chat Control 1.0,” the 2021 law that lets tech companies scan everyone’s private messages in the name of child protection. It was supposed to be a stopgap measure, a temporary derogation of privacy rights until proper evidence came in. Now, if you’ve been following our previous reporting, you’ll know the Council wants to make it permanent, even though the Commission’s own 2025 evaluation report admits it has no evidence the thing actually works. We obtained a copy of the report for you here. The report doesn’t even hide the chaos. It confesses to missing data, unproven results, and error rates that would embarrass a basic software experiment. Yet its conclusion jumps from “available data are insufficient” to “there are no indications that the derogation is not proportionate.” That is bureaucratic logic at its blandest. The Commission’s Section 3 conclusion includes the sentence “the available data are insufficient to provide a definitive answer” on proportionality, followed immediately by “there are no indications that the derogation is not proportionate.” In plain language, they can’t prove the policy isn’t violating rights, but since they can’t prove that it is, they will treat it as acceptable. The same report admits it can’t even connect the dots between all that scanning and any convictions. Section 2.2.3 states: “It is not currently possible…to establish a clear link between these convictions and the reports submitted by providers.” Germany and Spain didn’t provide usable figures. If hundreds of thousands of reports are generated, 708,894 in 2024, and the Commission still cannot point to outcomes, the structure functions more as noise than support for police work. Officers face huge piles of irrelevant material while real cases remain unresolved. The technology is just as unstable as the policy. Yubo reported error rates of 20 percent in 2023 and 13 percent in 2024, and those figures exclude human review. Former Commissioner Johansson and the German Police have said the true rate is far higher. The Commission also admits that providers “did not use the standard form for reporting” and that Member States sent in “fragmented and incomplete” data. France received roughly 150,000 reports from NCMEC, yet it can’t say clearly what happened to most of them. The EU built a continent-wide surveillance scheme, but can’t get the participants to follow basic reporting rules. In practice, the structure leaves US platforms acting as informal police while the EU attempts to assemble a puzzle with missing pieces. Turning this temporary measure into a permanent rule would be negligent. The system has high error rates, no proven results, and oversight that barely functions. The Regulation fails the basic legal tests it was supposed to meet. The Council’s plan exposes what Chat Control has become, a symbolic gesture that lets policymakers claim progress while the machinery underneath produces confusion, false positives, and unanswered questions. The only thing the EU has measured with certainty is the distance between its stated goals and the system it built. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post EU Push to Make Message Scanning Permanent Despite Evidence of Failure and Privacy Risks appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant has returned to court in a dispute that could determine how much informal pressure the government can apply to online platforms to hide lawful content. The regulator’s appeal stems from its attempt to persuade X to block a post by journalist Celine Baumgarten, an action later ruled unlawful by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT). In May 2024, eSafety used X’s legal compliance portal to request that the platform geoblock Baumgarten’s post about a “queer club” running inside a Melbourne primary school. X restricted access to the post for Australian users for two months. Baumgarten, represented by the Free Speech Union (FSU) of Australia, successfully challenged the restriction in the AAT earlier this year, with the Tribunal finding that eSafety had acted improperly. The agency has since appealed that outcome. Before the Federal Court, eSafety alleged that the issue was not its authority but its intent, trying to convince the court that the AAT “misunderstood the relevance of intention” and that “there was nothing coercive about it using X’s dedicated legal portal to send the informal notice.” The regulator framed the move as an administrative communication rather than a directive. As you might expect, judges appeared unconvinced. Reports from the FSU, which attended the hearing, described the bench as skeptical of eSafety’s interpretation of its own powers. Justice Jonathan Beach questioned whether eSafety was misusing its submissions “to rewrite the case,” asked whether “the problem is eSafety practice,” and indicated doubt about several of its arguments. Chief Justice Debra Mortimer pressed the agency on whether it was “asking the court to find facts because its attack on ATT’s findings wasn’t going so well,” said she was “perplexed” by eSafety’s approach, and called its reasoning “very unsatisfactory.” Justice James Horan asked whether eSafety was relying on “a non-existent power.” The dispute reaches beyond a single post. By issuing informal “requests” through private channels, the regulator can prompt platforms to suppress speech without invoking its formal powers, leaving no paper trail of a compulsory order and no clear right of appeal. The case now tests whether eSafety can rely on voluntary compliance mechanisms to achieve outcomes that would otherwise require formal legal authority. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Australian Court Questions eSafety’s Power in X Free Speech Appeal appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

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File this one under "Sudden Respect," our NewsBusters classification for instances of the liberal media praising a conservative person or publication expressing an opinion supportive of the Democrat party line at the momemt. It happened on today's CNN This Morning, when host Audie Cornish approvingly cited Andrew C. McCarthy of National Review, apropos the reported second strike on a narco boat that was allegedly intended to kill two survivors of the first strike. Wrote McCarthy, a former Assistant United States Attorney: "If this happened as described in the Post report, it was, at best, a war crime under federal law." Here's a suggestion: what if Audie were to occasionally cite National Review when it makes the case in opposition to the liberal talking point o' the day? The CNN segment went on to knock Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is said to have ordered the second strike, for posting a meme of the children's story character Franklin the Turtle firing on a boat of narco terrorists. Said Cornish wryly: "[It] "doesn't feel like you could kind of meme your way out of it."   Also, CNN Senior Media Analyst Sara Fischer bizarrely suggested that Democrats have hit on a "winning issue," which is "preserving democracy" from Trump. That was not a winning issue for Kamala Harris last year. I've seen in the past few months, there's been so much drama around whether it's been lawful use of the National Guard to go into cities and to sort of temper whatever illegal action they say is happening there.  You feel this sense that the military is being used for political purposes, broadly speaking, whether it's here at home or it's internationally.  And I think Democrats are seeing that as a key issue ahead of the midterms next year. It plays into this issue that was a winning one for them around preserving democracy. PS: At the end of the segment, Cornish teased an upcoming discussion of the shooting at a children's birthday celebration in Stockton, California in which four people, including three children, were killed. The mayor of Stockton has called it "domestic terrorism," saying it was "gang violence." But Cornish lamented, "Is no place safe from gun violence?" Yeah, those doggone guns, up to their violent ways again. Here's the transcript. CNN This Morning 12/1/25 6:06 am ET AUDIE CORNISH: Sara, there's two reasons why we're talking about this today, and I think why Americans would care about it. One, there has been a question about whether or not we are effectively somehow [chuckles]going to war with Venezuela.  But two, you saw Mark Kelly there. Democrats just finished getting in a battle saying, hey troops, pay attention to unlawful orders, illegal orders. And then you have various Republicans coming out and saying, was this unlawful? Was this illegal? It feels like it's sort of undermines what the White House has been saying.  SARA FISCHER: The wording matters a lot here, Audie. When you say we're in a war on drugs, one of the things that Republicans have come out and said is, if this is something that you're going to characterize as a war, that's why we're going to view these as war crimes. So you don't get to have it both ways.  And then, too, on the Republicans coming out against this, I've seen in the past few months, there's been so much drama around whether it's been lawful use of the National Guard to go into cities and to sort of temper whatever illegal action they say is happening there.  You feel this sense that the military is being used for political purposes, broadly speaking, whether it's here at home or it's internationally.  And I think Democrats are seeing that as a key issue ahead of the midterms next year. It plays into this issue that was a winning one for them around preserving democracy. And so I think that they're going to continue to hone in on that. Republicans, of course, hate that narrative. But the fact that you have so many coming out and saying that this could be a potential war crime means that they don't want to be on the wrong side of history.  CORNISH: Yeah, I was seeing, one more thing I want to show you guys. The National Review, you had commentator Andrew McCarthy saying: "If this happened, as described in the Post report, it was, at best, a war crime under federal law. It's a serious matter. The administration's defense cannot be 'we killed them because our plan is to use lethal force.'"  The way people are talking about this doesn't feel like you could kind of meme your way out of it.  MICHELLE PRICE: Yeah, and the Secretary of Defense last night was posting, of a children's book, of a character gleefully killing what he called narco terrorists. So he seemed to be embracing this as kind of a joke that there was any kind of backlash. There did not seem to be any kind of reflection or commentary that they were taking it seriously when you're posting images and memes like this.  CORNISH: Yeah, and I'll be interested to see what other Republicans talk this week, if this investigation actually goes any further.  You guys stay with me. We've got a lot more to talk about today. Coming up on CNN This Morning, a mass shooting at a child's birthday party. Is no place safe from gun violence?