If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Washington has finally found a monster big enough for bipartisan unity: the attention economy. In a moment of rare cross-aisle cooperation, lawmakers have introduced two censorship-heavy bills and a tax scheme under the banner of the UnAnxious Generation package. The name, borrowed from Jonathan Haidt’s pop-psychology hit The Anxious Generation, reveals the obvious pitch: Congress will save America’s children from Silicon Valley through online regulation and speech controls. Representative Jake Auchincloss of Massachusetts, who has built a career out of publicly scolding tech companies, says he’s going “directly at their jugular.” The plan: tie legal immunity to content “moderation,” tax the ad money, and make sure kids can’t get near an app without producing an “Age Signal.” If that sounds like a euphemism for surveillance, that’s because it is. The first bill, the Deepfake Liability Act, revises Section 230, the sacred shield that lets platforms host your political rants, memes, and conspiracy reels without getting sued for them. Under the new proposal, that immunity becomes conditional on a vague “duty of care” to prevent deepfake porn, cyberstalking, and “digital forgeries.” TIME’s report doesn’t define that last term, which could be a problem since it sounds like anything from fake celebrity videos to an unflattering AI meme of your senator. If “digital forgery” turns out to include parody or satire, every political cartoonist might suddenly need a lawyer on speed dial. Auchincloss insists the goal is accountability, not censorship. “If a company knows it’ll be liable for deepfake porn, cyberstalking, or AI-created content, that becomes a board-level problem,” he says. In other words, a law designed to make executives sweat. But with AI-generated content specifically excluded from Section 230 protections, the bill effectively redefines the internet’s liability protections. Next up is the Parents Over Platforms Act, which reads like a spy’s dream version of child safety. The idea is to require mobile app stores and developers to “assure” user ages through “commercially reasonable efforts.” Developers must “determine whether a user is an Adult or a Minor with a reasonable level of certainty.” How they’re supposed to do that without collecting more personal data is unclear. Privacy advocates might want to sit down for this one. The bill’s co-sponsor, Republican Erin Houchin of Indiana, says it comes from personal experience. Her daughter, age 13, “hacked around our parental controls” and started chatting with strangers. “My goal is to put parents back in the driver’s seat,” she says. Fair enough, but that driver’s seat now comes with a dashboard full of federal switches and levers. If passed, parents would input their children’s ages into the app store, which would then transmit the “Age Signal” to every app. Kids under 13 would be locked out of restricted platforms. The potential for data errors and cross-app confusion seems baked in, but Congress appears unbothered. Rounding out the trio is the Education Not Endless Scrolling Act, which would slap a 50 percent tax on digital ad revenue over $2.5 billion. The money would fund tutoring programs, local journalism, and technical education. Auchincloss explains, “This is for the major social media corporations, not the recipe blogs.” He adds, “These social media corporations have made hundreds of billions of dollars making us angrier, lonelier, and sadder, and they have no accountability to the American public.” The proposal reads like a moral tax: the government will collect penance for every click. Both Auchincloss and Houchin frame their effort as a bipartisan stand for the children, launching a “Kids Online Safety Caucus” to formalize their alliance. Houchin puts it simply: “Good policy supersedes politics.” It’s a line you usually hear right before an entire generation of digital policy disasters. The timing is no accident. Congress is now flooded with “child safety” bills. Auchincloss says he’s tired of waiting. “I don’t like to be passive or wait for the ground to shift,” he says. “I am trying to be an earthquake.” It’s a fitting metaphor, though he might consider what happens after the shaking stops. Once the dust settles, the UnAnxious Generation may find that the cure for digital anxiety looks a lot like preemptive censorship and surveillance wrapped in a moral crusade. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Congress Goes Parental on Social Media and Your Privacy appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. India’s communications ministry has quietly instructed major smartphone makers to embed a government-operated cybersecurity app into every new device sold in the country. The directive, dated November 28 and shared privately with select companies, gives them 90 days to comply. The order requires the Sanchar Saathi app to come pre-installed on all new phones and prevents users from deleting it. Devices already in the supply chain must receive the app through a software update. The confidential instruction applies to companies including Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, Vivo, and Oppo. Officials describe the move as part of a national strategy to reduce the growing wave of cyber fraud and phone-related crimes. Sanchar Saathi connects to a central database that allows users and authorities to locate, block, and deactivate lost or stolen phones. Government data shows the app has had notable reach since its launch in January. It has helped trace more than 700,000 missing phones and blocked over 3.7 million devices identified as stolen or counterfeit. Officials also report that more than 30 million fraudulent connections have been shut down using its systems. The ministry says the requirement is aimed at preventing manipulation of IMEI numbers, which are unique identification codes assigned to each phone. Duplicate or falsified IMEIs are often used in mobile scams and the resale of stolen handsets. The government argues that embedding Sanchar Saathi in all devices will strengthen network security and make stolen phones harder to exploit. Apple is expected to resist the mandate. The company’s policy prohibits preloading government or third-party software on iPhones before sale, a position that has previously caused tension with Indian regulators. If Apple were to comply with India’s directive and begin pre-installing the Sanchar Saathi app on iPhones, it could set a precedent with far-reaching consequences. A single concession of this nature would signal to governments worldwide that Apple’s long-standing policy against mandatory app installations can be bent under pressure. Other authorities, citing national security or consumer protection, might then feel justified in demanding that Apple and other smartphone manufacturers preload their own state-backed applications. Once that door is opened, it becomes increasingly difficult to close. The risk goes beyond simple software management. Government-mandated apps often come with expansive access permissions, sometimes including location data, call records, or network identifiers. Even if such access is officially limited to cybersecurity or theft prevention, the potential for mission creep is significant. Future administrations could expand those powers quietly through updates or legal amendments, turning what began as a security tool into a mechanism for data monitoring and behavioral tracking. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post India Orders Smartphone Makers to Pre-Install Non-Removable App appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. At a recent Q&A with readers of The European Business Registry Association (EBRA Group), French President Emmanuel Macron sounded like a man exhausted by the open internet. “We are not necessarily aware of it,” he began, describing a Europe under siege from fake news online. The French president, flanked by reporters from the country’s biggest regional press group, outlined what could only be described as a national security doctrine for memes. He called it an “informational and cognitive war.” The plan, delivered between polite applause and nodding journalists, is a major expansion of France’s digital control architecture: fast-track censorship orders, new powers for state agencies, a legal war against “false accounts,” criminal liability for platforms, and a promise to ban social media for anyone under fifteen, enforced by the same age-checking system used for pornography. The speech was a kind of legislative fever dream, where misinformation, harassment, and child protection were all conflated into a single moral emergency requiring more state authority and faster judicial reflexes. Macron’s frustration was clear. He wants the ability to hit delete. France already has a government office for this, Viginum, an agency dedicated to tracking “foreign digital interference.” But according to Macron, the only thing it can currently do is “ask for the withdrawal of all this information when they are identified as interference.” That, he complained, is “extremely long, complicated, slow.” His solution is a “real system of platform responsibility.” Platforms should be treated like newspapers, liable for anything that slips through their servers. “If there was false information pushed into one of the EBRA Group’s titles,” Macron told the assembled journalists, “I would ask you to remove it or to vigilize it.” That last word, a Macronism worthy of its own ministry, roughly translates to “do more censorship, faster.” The president seems genuinely vexed that online speech is not easier to delete. He recounted the case of a viral post claiming that France had sent 1,000 legionnaires to Ukraine, a story he said “circulated and was seen millions of times.” His conclusion: the internet needs to be industrially managed, with “teams on a daily basis” fighting disinformation like a standing army. When Macron talks about online control, the vocabulary veers from bureaucratic to clinical. He praised prebunking, a tactic where the government “prepares the minds for this vigilance” by preemptively flagging narratives as false before they spread. In this world, the public is a population to be inoculated. “This is the battle that must be fought before the elections,” he said. “It is not normal to have these hidden armies.” The metaphor of war suits Macron. Fake accounts are combatants, misinformation is a weapon, and the French voter is a battlefield to be defended from thought contamination. His answer is “to ban them, because that’s the basis of everything.” Macron’s relationship with Silicon Valley has all the warmth of a tax audit. When he is not fighting “foreign powers,” he is fighting the Americans themselves, or at least their tech companies. “The big companies behind the US administration…want to continue to make the most money without any responsibility,” he said, accusing Washington of trying to “remove” the European Union’s new censorship law, the Digital Services Act. That law, which gives EU governments new tools to regulate online speech, has been too slow for Macron’s taste. He said some French cases have been “in front of the Commission for two years.” To fix that, he wants more national control, faster judicial takedowns, and tougher European enforcement. “We have to harden our law,” he said. The president’s solution to online chaos is to extend France’s “fake news” law, originally designed for election-related falsehoods, to everyday citizens. Victims of “false information” or “information that is an attempt to your dignity” could soon request a court order forcing removal within 48 hours. Macron’s own grievances made the proposal sound personal. “We are totally stripped of our rights,” he said, referring to online rumors about his wife. His conclusion: platforms “must have an editorial responsibility.” In other words, social networks should function like newspapers, except with billions of contributors and government-mandated content filters. Then came the family values portion of the show. Macron announced that France will “ban social media before the age of 15,” invoking the moral precedent of the old wine ban for minors. “Sixty years ago, we served wine to kids,” he said. “We have banned it.” The comparison, TikTok as Bordeaux, was vintage Macron: earnest, vaguely absurd, and wholly confident. The enforcement mechanism will be an age verification digital ID system. Platforms will be required to check user ages through “techniques that are completely re-de-stabilized,” a phrase that left even the translators blinking. It is worth noting that the law banning under-15s from social media already exists. It just has not been implemented yet. Macron’s plan, he explained, is to make sure this “digital majority” becomes real through national law and European backing. Macron closed by promising that France will introduce the necessary “law texts” in early 2026, along with a “series of European initiatives.” The idea, he said, is to be “better armed” before the next wave of online interference. It was an oddly militarized image for a policy about content moderation, but perhaps fitting. The president seems to see himself less as a politician than as commander of a vast information garrison, defending France’s cognitive borders against chaos, memes, and unruly teenagers with smartphones. The plan’s success depends on how far the French public is willing to go in trading digital freedom for digital hygiene. Macron calls it responsibility. His critics might call it paternalism with a dashboard. Either way, France is about to find out what happens when a liberal democracy decides to put the internet on probation. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Macron’s Mission to Muzzle the Internet appeared first on Reclaim The Net.

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.