If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Australia’s eSafety Commissioner wants legal power to order social media companies to shield favored users from criticism and to suspend everyone piling on against them. Julie Inman Grant made the pitch on July 2, testifying to the Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, the government probe set up after the Bondi Beach terror attack. She calls the tool a “notification power.” What it does is let her office tell a platform that a particular Australian account is under heavy criticism and demand that the platform punish the accounts responsible. Her own description of the trigger runs to “insulting” and “ugly” comments stacking up beneath someone’s posts. “If there’s a pile-on, if there’s a brigade, if it’s meant to be an avalanche of online hate, we put the onus back on the platform to say, this Australian is being targeted,” she told the commission. “We expect you to protect their account and take action against all of those people that you can see… whether it’s you just suspend them or you take them away.” Watch the video here. She wants the power to reach across platforms, too. The current adult cyber-abuse rules frustrate her because they force her office to “look at that specific tweet” rather than the whole swarm of replies beneath it. The fix she wants hands platforms a standing order to police disapproval on her behalf. Grant does not think of this as censorship, of course. Asked about companies that frame their resistance as free speech, she said “it’s easy to slip a censorship label on just about anything,” and offered a softer account of her own work. “What we’re trying to do is minimize harm. Encourage as much speech as possible, but when it veers into the lane of hurting individuals, hurting communities, hurting society and undermining democracy, I think we all need to band together and take more of a stand.” The regulator asking for authority to suspend users in bulk says her goal is more speech. Who defines the harm that flips speech from protected to punishable? She does. Phrases like “hurting communities” and “undermining democracy” stretch far enough to cover most heated political argument, and the office reaching for them writes the definition. Much of her testimony was a complaint that the companies keep winning. eSafety has eight cases running against X Corp, and Grant said six of them were “led by X.” She cast the legal pushback as commercial greed dressed up in principle, accusing platforms of fighting “to be able to serve, share and monetize horrific content.” Asked whether she had actually seen platforms fight to monetize such material, she answered “I can’t imagine any other reason they would want to put it up there.” The clearest example she offered cuts against her. After the Wakely church stabbing of Assyrian bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, eSafety sent formal removal notices to Meta and X. “Meta applied within the hour, and then of course, X Corp said, ‘We’re not taking it down, we’ll see you in court,'” Grant said. X won the legal challenge. And the bishop whose stabbing she cited as the reason to censor went on to back Elon Musk and defend free speech from the pulpit in his first sermon after surviving the attack. The person eSafety said it was protecting did not want her protection. Grant wants more than the notification power. She told the commission her authority to tackle cyber abuse against adults sits at a “very high threshold” that holds her office back. She called for an online hate code that would push responsibility onto the platforms, something she said “we know they could roll that out tomorrow.” She warned of a world where “we’ve got the most powerful technology in the world, owned by the richest, wealthiest technologists in the world, but we’ve never had looser guardrails. That, to me, is a recipe for disaster.” Loose guardrails, in this telling, mean a regulator who has to convince an independent board before deleting a video, and companies willing to make her prove her case in court. The process worked, and she lost. Her fix is to ask for powers that route around it. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Australia’s Top Censor Wants Power Over The “Ratio” 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. Amazon finally has a reason for why its newest Fire TV Sticks won’t run any software you didn’t buy from Amazon. The reason is “malware.” Aidan Marcuss, the company’s vice president of Fire TV, went on the UK site Cord Busters to defend Vega OS, the Linux-based system now loaded onto the 2026 Fire TV Stick HD and the Fire TV Stick 4K Select. Both sticks kill sideloading, the ability to install apps from outside Amazon’s own store. Pressed on whether sideloading does any real harm, Marcuss went straight to security. “Apps that facilitate piracy, and other apps, can carry malware,” he said, adding that there is “a good amount of evidence that apps can carry unwanted code and behavior on them when they’re sideloaded.” More: https://reclaimthenet.org/stop-renting-access-to-your-own-movie-collection There is always some risk in sideloading your own software onto a device. It is also a tidy excuse to seal off hardware you already own. Sideloading gave Fire TV Stick owners the run of their own device. You could install an app Amazon never carried, swap in a launcher that hid the ads stacked across the home screen, or run an ad blocker Amazon would rather you skip. Vega ends all of it. The company that fills your screen with promotions now blocks the tools built to clear them away. Soccer broadcasters like DAZN and Sky Sports have blamed Fire TV Sticks for feeding illegal streams, and Amazon has already started reaching into people’s existing Fire TVs to remotely switch off sideloaded piracy apps. If you set aside the malware talk, what’s left is a familiar Big Tech move. Amazon built a cheaper, more locked-down box and removed your choice to use it however you want. Most buyers will never notice, because most buyers never sideload anything, and that is exactly what makes the change easy to push through. For now, the older Fire TV Stick 4K Plus and 4K Max remain the last models that still let you sideload. When those sell out, the door closes on Amazon’s side of the streaming market. Anyone who values an open device can still reach for Google TV hardware, where installing your own apps counts as a feature rather than a threat. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post The Malware Excuse Behind Amazon’s Locked-Down Fire Sticks 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. Two Metropolitan Police officers walked into a Chiswick pub on the evening of July 2nd, found a man having a drink with a friend, and asked him to step outside. He had broken no law, a point the officers themselves conceded on camera. His “offense,” such as it was, came down to a handful of tweets about a local councillor. In Britain, which is in the midst of a dark censorship nightmare, that now counts as reason enough to send two constables to your table on a warm London evening. The man is Alastair Hilton, a photographer who lives on a narrowboat and, until this week, an anonymous Chiswick regular. The councillor is Rick Rowe, a Green who took the Chiswick Riverside ward in May and lives, by Hilton’s account, close enough to the riverside pubs to complain about them almost daily. Between them sits one of the more absurd local rows Britain has produced this year, and one of the more telling. The dispute itself is almost sweet in its pettiness. Three pubs on Strand-on-the-Green, the City Barge, the Bell & Crown, and the Bull’s Head, have set tables beside the Thames for decades. Labour-run Hounslow Council told them to clear the furniture off the pavement, citing licensing and the Highways Act. Hilton, watching a corner of the neighborhood empty itself out on a sunny afternoon, reached for his phone. “This is the City Barge pub in Chiswick right now. What do you notice? It’s 3pm and they’re open,” he wrote on X. “It’s a sunny day. Yes, that’s right; they have had to remove all of the tables and chairs outside. They have had to destroy their own business.” The reason, as he saw it, ran like this. “Because Rick Rowe, a Green Party councillor on Hounslow council, who lives very, very, very close to this pub and complains about it almost daily, has banned all three pubs here on strand on the Green Chiswick, from having outside tables.” Strong words and a strong opinion, the sort of thing pubs and their regulars have shouted about since licensing began. No threat, no protest, no crime. But two officers turned up at his table. Source: @London_W4 What they wanted became clear on the video Hilton recorded and posted, which promptly went everywhere. One officer asks whether he is “aware that if you schedule a protest outside a councillor’s house that it’s an offense.” He adds that this is “just so you’re aware, as opposed to an insinuation or an accusation.” Hilton pushes back, telling them, “I haven’t scheduled any protest…I was at the Bell and Crown.” The officer tries again, warning that “your behavior that I have seen on certain posts could be construed as harassment.” There it is, the whole modern playbook in a few sentences. The police concede that no crime has happened, then warn about one that might, someday, theoretically happen, built entirely on a protest nobody has planned. A man has a pint, posts online, and finds himself lectured about hypothetical crimes he shows no sign of committing. The crime the officer reached for is brand new. The Crime and Policing Act 2026 created a fresh crime of protesting outside the home of a politician or public office-holder, and it came into force on June 29, three days before two officers used it to lean on a man for tweeting. A law meant as protection for public figures arrived, within seventy-two hours, as a tool for warning someone away from his own keyboard. Hilton explained it in his caption. “They admit on video (watch it!) that I did not break the law at all. They came to threaten me. To warn me off tweeting about councillors and the council.” Rowe tells a different story. He denies asking for the tables to go and says he had been trying to save them. “I have been working hard to ensure the council allows seating to remain while the licensing applications are reviewed,” he told LBC, adding that enforcement decisions sit with the Labour-run council, its officers and its cabinet. The council, for its part, talks about pavement licences and obstruction, wheelchair users and emergency access, the familiar furniture of bureaucratic caution. Take all of it at face value. None of it explains the visit to the pub. After the backlash, the council backed down. The pubs keep their seating while they sort out the paperwork, and the tables are back by the river. Hilton’s tweets did their job, which is the part authorities rarely want to admit, because effective public objection to a council decision is exactly the kind of speech a functioning town runs on. The lesson a lot of quieter people will take from Chiswick is the one nobody wrote down. Post about your councillor and you might get a knock, or a tap on the shoulder in your local, from officers who will tell you, very politely, that you have done nothing wrong while making sure you feel watched. That is how a chilling effect works. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post UK Police Warn Man Over Pub Tweets 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. Ireland has switched on the first working pieces of its state digital ID. The version citizens can now download is the opening move in something larger than a convenience app. Built on top of the existing MyGovID login, the Government Digital Wallet begins the slow removal of anonymous dealings with the Irish state, with anonymous access to large parts of the internet not far behind. The pressure comes from Brussels, where eIDAS 2, formally EU Regulation 2024/1183, requires member states to make at least one EU Digital Identity Wallet available to citizens, residents and businesses by the end of 2026. Ireland’s Department of Public Expenditure has described its own scheme as designed around meeting “Ireland’s legal obligations under the EU’s eIDAS 2 Regulation,” a phrasing that gives the game away. The wallet exists because the law requires it, not because Irish people asked for a government app that holds their identity. Sold as convenience, the wallet holds digital versions of a driving licence, birth certificate, European Health Insurance Card and other official documents, ready to be shown from a phone. Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers says it will “make it simpler for people to verify their identity, apply for supports and access entitlements,” and his framing leans hard on user control. “The wallet is designed so that all personal data is fully protected, and the user stays in control of what information they put in the wallet and choose to share. Only the details needed for a service will be shared, and nothing more,” Chambers says. What those assurances cover is how the wallet shares data, not the larger change sitting under them. A single government-issued credential now stands between a person and the services they need, and when the wallet proves who you are, it also records that the proof happened, tied to a verified legal identity instead of a throwaway username. Convenience and traceability ship in the same download. Beyond storing documents, the wallet reaches into how people get online. Ireland has wired age verification into the system, and Minister of State Frank Feighan says it will “be able to facilitate secure age verification capability as set out in Digital Ireland and the implementation of the Online Safety Code,” the regime pushing online platforms to check how old their users are. By the end of 2027, the largest platforms operating in the country are expected to accept the wallet, which sketches a near future where signing in to a mainstream social network runs through a state ID. A system that confirms you are over 18 also confirms who you are, where the government has you on file, and which service you passed through to get there. Age assurance and identity assurance are the same transaction with different labels, and the identity half is the costly one for anyone who would rather not be catalogued. The strongest card the government holds is adoption. Ireland’s Central Statistics Office puts digital ID use, through services like MyGovID, at roughly eight in ten people, so much of the population has been walked toward this point over several years. Wide use is a poor proxy for consent to what the wallet becomes once private companies and platforms plug into it. Brussels sells the whole project as a privacy upgrade. The European Commission says “threats to digital privacy have become apparent, with people increasingly worried about profiling and surveillance,” and it promises a wallet built with “privacy and security at the heart of the project.” The design does lean on data minimization, with a service seeing only the field it asks for. Concentrating verification in the hands of the state is the other half of the picture, and it turns the government into the fixed point that more and more of daily life has to authenticate against. None of this lands in a country with a clean record on holding sensitive data. The 2021 ransomware attack on the Health Service Executive tore through roughly 80 percent of the health service’s IT systems and exposed patient information, the kind of history that makes a central store of verified identities look less like a vault and more like a target. Today, the wallet is opt-in, a testing phase rather than a mandate. The end-2026 deadline is written into EU law, public bodies will have to accept the wallet, and the private-sector obligations arrive a year after that. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Ireland’s New Digital Wallet Turns MyGovID Into a National ID appeared first on Reclaim The Net: Free Speech, Privacy, Digital Rights.

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