If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Around 11 PM, Eastern time, on Sunday, a server in a data center somewhere fell over. It’s becoming routine, really. Xbox’s status page logged it the way you’d log rain. By Monday morning it had grown teeth. People lost their logins. Apps stayed shut, the store stayed dark, plenty of downloaded games stayed frozen. Fine. That’s the bargain you strike for digital, and everyone struck it with eyes open. Then came the part nobody struck. The disc games balked too. The disc. The physical object. The one in the tray, spinning, bought with actual money at an actual shop. Xbox’s own status page conceded that players “may have problems” with disc games, and the internet duly confirmed it. The license, it said, couldn’t be verified. The console, you see, phones home before it will let a disc spin. The disc is a pass that works only when a building three states away agrees to open the door for you. Xbox was making progress on recovery. It said so itself at 5:26 PM, on X, assuring everyone that most players “should be able to launch titles and complete purchases again.” GamesRadar clocked the support account at 7:54 AM, “just checking in” on the sign-in and game-launch business. By 9:43 AM it had “identified the issue,” resolution “pending.” Pending pulled a long stretch that day. The company stayed silent on requests for comment. It had a lot goin on. Days earlier, PlayStation had suffered an outage of its own. And back on the first of July, Sony had already posted the destination: physical disc production for new PlayStation games stops in January 2028. Senior director Sid Shuman put it down to “shifting trends in consumer preference.” After that date, new games arrive as downloads. Sony describes killing the disc as a chance to “align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today,” which is press-release for: we checked the register, and you’d mostly stopped buying them. Digital already brings in 20% of the company’s gaming revenue. The discs were the rounding error. The numbers dig the grave regardless. Physical is 3% of Sony’s gaming revenue now, half what it was in 2020, the year the PS5 turned up with a drive still in it. TechRadar counted seven PlayStation games that sold more than 100,000 physical copies in the US this year. Seven. There is a holdout. Shawn Layden, who used to run the place, reckons the PS6 won’t completely drop discs, on the theory that going all-digital might irritate the customers across 170-odd countries who still enjoy owning a thing. By Monday evening the disc games came back, though Xbox warned that digital and backward-compatible titles might still stall. The tray whirred, the license got verified, the door swung open. And the disc you paid for went back to being what it had been around 11 PM: a shiny promise that a company somewhere will go on letting you use the thing you bought. Own nothing, the slogan goes, and be happy. It’s half right. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Xbox Outage Stops Players From Launching Physical Disc Games appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The Justice Department is asking a federal court in Atlanta to treat a man’s erasure of his own phone as destruction of property, in the first known US prosecution built on a phone’s duress password. Samuel Tunick faces one count under Title 18, Section 2232(a), a statute covering the destruction of property to stop the government from taking it. Prosecutors say he handed Customs and Border Protection officers a passcode that deleted the contents of his Google Pixel instead of unlocking it. His lawyers appeared before the court for the first time on Monday, arguing that officers ran a custodial interrogation without Miranda warnings, denied him a lawyer, and searched him unlawfully. They want everything obtained from the encounter suppressed. CBP pulled Tunick into secondary inspection at Hartsfield-Jackson on January 24, 2025, as he returned from the Dominican Republic. An FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force officer and an FBI special agent had coordinated with CBP in advance to question and search him on arrival. The account comes from the defense filing, which draws on the government’s own reports. Officers from CBP’s Tactical Terrorism Response Team opened by telling him they were “looking for people who are pedophiles.” Officers never read Tunick his Miranda rights. He said early in the interview that he did not want to keep talking without a lawyer, then asked to call one repeatedly. Questioning continued. One officer told him his refusal to talk gave them authority to go through his phone. When he asked again about his attorney, an officer told him customs and immigration work was a different matter, “and we have search authority, we don’t need a warrant.” Tunick eventually provided a password for his phone and his e-reader. The screen “went blank, flashed several times and the phone appeared to restart,” according to the government’s report. Officers seized the devices anyway and told him they would be returned after thirty days. A third officer took him to another room for a pat-down that was not recorded. A DHS agent then told him he was free to leave once the other agents were finished with him. The government’s reports contain no indication that anyone suspected Tunick of carrying illegal images, his lawyers wrote. The reports record an interest in his association with Defend the Atlanta Forest, the movement opposing the clearing of the South River Forest for the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center. Opponents call the 85-acre, $115 million police facility Cop City. Federal documents label the movement an “Anti-Government, Anti-Authority Violent Extremist Group.” Tunick has not been charged with any offense connected to it. Eleventh Circuit precedent favors the government. Its 2018 ruling in United States v. Touset permits forensic searches of electronic devices at the border with no warrant, no probable cause, and no individualized suspicion. Tunick’s lawyers cite decisions from the First, Fourth, and Ninth Circuits going the other way, including a Fourth Circuit holding that warrantless border searches of devices cannot be used to hunt for evidence of domestic crime. They also argue that surrendering a passcode is testimonial, relying on a 2012 Eleventh Circuit decision that decrypting and producing the contents of a hard drive triggers Fifth Amendment protection. Courts allow suspicionless border searches to keep contraband out of the country. The accusation here is that data left a phone rather than entered the United States, and digital files move across borders over the internet anyway. A ruling on the motion is not expected before the end of October. GrapheneOS, the hardened Android build that replaces the stock software on Pixel devices, lets an owner set a second PIN or password that irreversibly wipes the device and any installed eSIMs when entered at a credential prompt. No confirmation dialog appears, and nothing distinguishes it from a normal unlock. Bill Budington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Runa Sandvik, founder of the security firm Granitt, both said they had seen no comparable prosecution. Sandvik said she had discussed the scenario with activists and journalists for years and advised travelers to leave sensitive data off devices they carry across borders rather than count on wiping it. Christophe Boutry told the Guardian the prosecution “sends the message that [GrapheneOS] is criminal by default.” Matthew Dodge, an assistant federal public defender on Tunick’s legal team, said the statute is rarely seen in an indictment. Tunick was arrested about ten months after the airport stop. His crowdfunding page says he was pulled over for a purported tail light fault and cuffed by FBI and DHS officers when he stepped out of the car. He has pleaded not guilty. The single-count indictment  accuses him of acting to delete the digital contents of a Google Pixel to impair the government’s lawful authority to take it, in violation of Title 18 of what the document calls the “Untied States Code.” If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post GrapheneOS Wipe at Airport Leads to Federal Charge in Atlanta appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

This Post is for Paid Supporters Reclaim your digital freedom. Get the latest on censorship and surveillance, and learn how to fight back. Subscribe Already a supporter? Sign In. The post Can You Escape the Device Identifiers? appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The Court of Justice of the European Union has ruled on that a VPN provider cannot be held liable for copyright infringement when its users route around a geoblock. The court described VPNs as lawful technical tools that people may legitimately use. The finding removes the argument that privacy software makes its makers party to whatever their customers do with it. We obtained a copy of the ruling for you here. The Second Chamber delivered the judgment in Case C-788/24, Anne Frank Fonds v Anne Frank Stichting and Others, on a reference from the Dutch Supreme Court. The ruling cannot be appealed. Advocate General Athanasios Rantos had reached the same conclusion in January. The court held that a VPN provider “does not give end users access to a protected work” and does not play an “indispensable role” in any act of communication. Where a geoblock fails and a protected work reaches readers it was meant to exclude, responsibility stays with whoever put the work online. The court placed VPN operators alongside the intermediaries it declined to hold liable in earlier cases, including YouTube. French courts have been moving the other way. Canal+, which holds French rights to the Premier League and Top 14, has won orders requiring NordVPN, ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Proton and Surfshark to block pirate sports streaming sites for their French subscribers. A French court ordered Proton in late January to filter around thirty domains under a dynamic injunction the regulator Arcom can extend to new addresses without a fresh hearing. Those orders rest on the French Sports Code rather than copyright law, so they do not collide with Luxembourg directly. Proton has said it intends to bring the question of VPN blocking to the CJEU itself. Anne Frank’s manuscripts are in the public domain in Belgium and around 60 other countries. Parts of the text stay under Dutch copyright until 2037. The Anne Frank Stichting, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Association for Research in and Access to Historical Texts published a free scholarly edition on a Belgian-hosted website in September 2021. The site blocked visitors from countries where the work is still protected. Dutch readers get a notice saying the edition “cannot be made available in all countries, due to copyright considerations.” The Anne Frank Fonds, the Swiss foundation holding the Dutch rights, sued to force the site offline. Its argument was that a block anyone can defeat with a consumer VPN protects nothing, so the institutions were communicating the work to the Dutch public regardless of what their filters did. The judges rejected that. Geoblocking built to the state of the art keeps a website out of the countries it excludes, and the possibility of circumvention “cannot, in itself and in all circumstances, be a decisive factor” in finding those measures inadequate. A publisher that blocks a territory has shown who its audience is not. The court refused to require the subscriptions or login accounts the Fonds wanted, holding that such demands would disproportionately restrict free access for readers in countries where the text belongs to the public. A geographic filter asks a reader for nothing. An account asks for a name, an address to send mail to, and a record of which manuscripts that person opened. The site’s self-declaration prompt, which asks visitors to confirm they are in a country where the work is free, does not do the job on its own, the judges said. Arnout Groen, a lawyer for the Fonds, said the court had treated geoblocking as “a tick-in-the-box exercise” instead of an ongoing duty that keeps pace with technology. He said the judges ignored other indications that the website was aimed at Dutch readers and that the decision opens the door to misuse. The Dutch Supreme Court must now decide whether the geoblocking the institutions deployed met the state-of-the-art standard. If it did, the publication does not infringe Dutch copyright. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post EU Court Rules VPN Providers Not Liable When Users Bypass Geoblocks appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Government officials in Canada are contacting people at their homes over social media posts written months or years ago, according to the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF). The legal advocacy group says the reports began arriving after Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, cleared Parliament. The law received royal assent on June 18 and came into force on July 18, expanding Canada’s “hate speech” offenses, raising penalties, and eliminating defenses that had limited prosecutions for what the state calls hate-related expression. “We are receiving reports that some Canadians are being contacted at their homes by government officials about social media posts made months or even years ago,” the JCCF wrote. “These reports come after the passage of Bill C-9, the Combatting Hate Act, which expands Canada’s hate speech laws by creating new offences, increasing penalties, and removing certain legal safeguards that previously limited prosecutions for hate-related expression.” The Act makes hate-motivated crime a standalone offense and creates new charges for intimidating or obstructing people at places of worship, schools, and community centers. It also criminalizes the public display of symbols used by listed terrorist groups, two Nazi symbols, and a noose. Maximum sentences climb across the board. The JCCF’s reading of the bill puts the increases at two years to five for lesser offenses, five to ten for the next tier, and up to life imprisonment for the most serious hate-motivated crimes. The law defines hatred as “an emotion of an intense and extreme nature that is clearly associated with vilification and detestation.” Police and prosecutors decide which posts meet that description. Bill C-9 also removes the good-faith defense that had shielded religious opinion under the Criminal Code, which let a person avoid conviction for expressing, in good faith, an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a religious text. Moore says the change reaches directly into how these cases will be handled. “Bill C-9 will directly impact investigation and prosecution decisions concerning religious expression which possibly could have been viewed as good faith expression based on a religious text,” he said. The bill removes another safeguard as well. Prosecutors no longer need the attorney general’s consent to bring hate speech charges. Justice Minister Sean Fraser says the change was built for speed. “By removing this step, law enforcement would be able to act quickly,” he said. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Canada’s New “Hate” Law Is Already at People’s Doors appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.