If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. Aishe Ghosh, former president of Jawaharlal Nehru University’s students’ union, has asked the Delhi High Court to declare the mass surveillance of student protesters unconstitutional and to order police to permanently destroy the personal data collected on them. Her petition, filed on July 15, 2026, calls the watch over Jantar Mantar “continuous, indiscriminate and intrusive,” and argues it violates the rights to privacy, dignity, free speech, and peaceful assembly. The demonstrators are the Cockroach Janta Party, led by student activist Abhijeet Dipke, who held a hunger strike at Jantar Mantar from June 20 over repeated exam paper leaks. According to the petition, they were under round-the-clock watch from a permanent surveillance tower, filmed while eating, resting, and seeking medical help. At the July 27 hearing the government tried to shut the case down. Additional Solicitor General Chetan Sharma told the Bench that with the protest over, the surveillance had stopped and there was nothing left for the court to rule on. Senior Advocate Nandita Rao, for Ghosh, said the case was still alive because it seeks a declaration that the surveillance already carried out was illegal. She asked that the data be destroyed, especially since the government has assured that no action will be taken against the protesters. The Bench of Chief Justice DK Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia told her to “let things cool down further” and file a more general petition, then said it would hear the matter on Tuesday. What the students want deleted comes from two police vehicles parked outside Kerala House. Officers inside a van called Ikshana watch live CCTV feeds run through facial recognition software, which draws green boxes around faces and checks them against a police database. The van carries eight fixed cameras for 360-degree coverage and was inducted before the 2023 G20 Summit. A senior Delhi Police officer confirmed to the press that the force runs facial recognition on protest footage against its criminal database to find any wanted people present, according to The Indian Express. The Internet Freedom Foundation, which has fought for transparency on this system since 2020, pulled the numbers out through the Right to Information Act. Delhi Police told the group in writing that no rule governs its use of facial recognition, that no assessment of its effect on privacy was ever done, and that a similarity score of 80% counts as a positive match. When the American Civil Liberties Union ran Amazon’s Rekognition at its default setting in 2018, it falsely matched 28 members of the US Congress to criminal mugshots, a disproportionate number of them legislators of color. Rao warned the court that an 80% match could wrongly implicate someone in a criminal case. Students at the site said they cover their faces while holding placards, afraid that landing in a police database could cost them future government jobs. Ghosh’s petition singles out girl students aged 16 to 20. A second officer told the press there are no fixed retention rules for the footage, since a probe into unrest at the site could open months later, so recordings could stay in police systems indefinitely. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, for the government, defended the recording at the earlier hearing on July 20. He said every protest is videographed as a routine law-and-order measure and called a claim of privacy in a public place “ironical”. He also told the court that protesters themselves film and post everything, and that the CJP had asked them to “videograph everything”. At that hearing he put it flatly, “There is no snooping. There is no surveillance.” The green boxes inside the Ikshana van say otherwise. The databases the software matches against were maintained under Sections 3 and 4 of the Identification of Prisoners Act, 1920, a law Parliament repealed in 2022. Seven years after the IFF began asking, what legal basis they rest on now, and whose faces they hold, is still unknown outside the police. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post Delhi Students Ask High Court to Destroy Police Facial Recognition Data on Protesters 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. Harry Harlow died in 1981. His maternal-deprivation experiments on rhesus macaques turn up in most undergraduate psychology courses, usually as the case study for why research ethics rules exist at all. Four decades after his death, his surname was one of the terms the National Institutes of Health typed into Facebook’s comment-filtering tool so that any comment containing it would vanish from public view. Next to Harlow on the Facebook list: Suomi, for Stephen Suomi, who runs a comparative ethology lab at NIH’s child health institute. Then monkey, monkies, marmoset, hamster, mouse, mice, primate, chimpanzee, cats, gatos, animales, animalitos, cruel, cruelty, revolting, torment, torture, two monkey emojis, and an emoji with an expletive face. Until December 2021, the list also held PETA and PETALatino. The Instagram list ran shorter and odder: animal, chimpanzee, monkey, experiment, hurt, kill, test, torture, stop. Much of this has been public since 2024, when the D.C. Circuit held the filters unconstitutional. What was missing was the agency’s own side of it: what NIH’s lawyers thought they were doing, and what they told the communications staff running the accounts. On July 22, 2026, Senator Rand Paul, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, released 128 pages of internal NIH email from the case. The messages run from November 2021 to January 2022, between NIH’s Office of the General Counsel, its Office of Communications and Public Liaison, and, relayed second-hand, the Justice Department attorneys defending the suit. Paul’s interest was COVID, and the COVID material is in there. What the emails document, in greater detail, is how an agency behaves in the days after its own attorney tells it, in writing, that it is discriminating against a viewpoint. How the hiding works Facebook and Instagram give page administrators an optional keyword filter. You paste in a list of words. Any comment containing one of them, past or future, is hidden automatically. On Facebook there is also a built-in profanity filter with strength settings; NIH had it on “strong.” Instagram has its own default offensive-word filter, which NIH had enabled as well. “Hidden” has a technical meaning on these platforms that differs from what most people assume. A hidden comment survives. It remains fully visible to the person who wrote it and to that person’s friends. Everyone else scrolling the page sees nothing. The joint stipulation in the case spells out the consequence in flat language: the user whose comment has been hidden typically receives no notice. So the speaker’s screen looks normal. They wrote a sentence; they can see the sentence, the sentence is there tomorrow. The rest of the page sees nothing, and no error message ever told them so. The silencing leaves no trace, so there is nothing to appeal and no accurate way to complain. Madeline Krasno, one of the plaintiffs and a former University of Wisconsin animal-lab employee, eventually worked out that she was being filtered and started deliberately misspelling words to get through. What the lawyers told NIH On December 1, 2021, an NIH senior attorney in the Office of the General Counsel wrote to the communications team after a call with DOJ. The email is the heart of the release. She opened with a direct instruction. NIH should stop blocking PETA and PETALatino on Facebook and PETA on Instagram, immediately. That is agency counsel identifying terms as viewpoint-based; you cannot block the name of an organization and claim you are policing subject matter. The words stayed up until December 3. Three Instagram hashtag filters, #stopanimaltesting, #stoptesting, and #stoptestingonanimals, were still running afterward. The attorney later had to check from her own personal Instagram account to establish that they were still live. For those hashtags she laid out four options. The first, which NIH took, was to remove them and use a different neutral keyword hashtag “to achieve the same effect” against the volume of PETA comments; she suggested #testing or #animals. The second was to keep the anti-testing hashtags and add a pro-testing one to offset them, and she offered an example: #keepanimaltesting. The third was to drop the filters if they were not doing much. The fourth was to keep them, on which DOJ’s advice was that a court might find the terms not viewpoint-neutral, and that the worst that could happen would be an order to stop using them. The first option is a piece of legal engineering. Counsel has identified a constitutional defect in the selection of words. The remedy chosen is a different selection of words, picked to produce the same suppression while surviving review. The volume of hidden speech stays exactly the same. The category of hidden speech barely changes. What changes is the paper trail. The evidence DOJ kept asking for DOJ wanted to argue that NIH had no policy of targeting animal-rights speech, and that a comment defending animal testing would be hidden on the same terms as one attacking it. To make that argument stick, they needed examples. They asked at least three times, across several emails, for two or three instances of the filters catching a pro-testing comment. NIH came up empty. The answer that came back was that this was not a scenario that happens, since people were not really posting in favor of animal testing. The closest they could offer was that a pro-research reply posted under an already-hidden comment would disappear along with it. That is a serious problem for the neutrality argument. A filter can be even-handed in its text and one-sided in its operation because only one side of a debate uses the vocabulary. “Torture” and “cruelty” are loaded words in a fight about animal research. They are the other side’s words. The substitute hashtags counsel proposed work the same way: #testing and #animals catch the people who came to complain, and say nothing about them. Wuhan, ivermectin, and the “neutral” filter Pressed for examples of off-topic hiding that had nothing to do with animals, NIH’s comms staff supplied one. On a post about the agency’s initiative to end structural racism, comments about the Wuhan Institute of Virology and ivermectin had been hidden as off-topic. At its narrowest that is defensible. Ivermectin has no bearing on a post about racial equity in the biomedical workforce, and a moderator who removes it is doing an ordinary job badly rather than doing a sinister job well. However, the agency’s stated purpose for its accounts, according to its own documents, is to be the voice of factual information in a time of “misinformation,” and its internal list of disruptive comment examples is characterized as mostly COVID misinformation. And the December email contains a line that should worry anyone regardless of where they land on lab-leak or ivermectin: if the court found NIH’s pages to be designated public forums, the attorney wrote, NIH might lose the ability to use neutral filters to shut down discussion of a broad topic. Her two examples: animal testing generally, and COVID vaccinations generally. A neutral filter is a tool for removing a subject, not off-topic noise, and the subjects an agency wants gone are the subjects on which it is under attack. What it costs the rest of us Keyword filtering falls hardest on people without lawyers. PETA had the Knight First Amendment Institute and the Animal Legal Defense Fund and four years of litigation budget. A parent asking whether a mouse-model result applies to their child, on a post about a mouse-model result, had none of that and never learned the question was invisible. Any political movement with a recognizable vocabulary can be filtered by list. Animal advocacy happens to be the test case because its lexicon is unusually easy to enumerate. Immigration, abortion, Gaza, vaccine injury, policing: all have signature words, and all can be removed from a government comment section by an administrator with fifteen minutes and no oversight. What is documented is this one list on these two accounts. Whether the rest of the federal government and the fifty states run filters like it is unknown; almost nobody has asked. Krasno asked. She filed a Freedom of Information Act request with NIH on April 24, 2021, for the keyword blocklist on its social accounts, and had the records five days later. A circuit opinion, four years of litigation, and 128 pages of internal email descend from that request. For the years before it, the only people who knew which words were on the list were the ones who typed them in. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post How NIH Silenced Its Critics Without Telling Them 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. On May 1st, President Donald Trump posted an AI-generated picture of himself to Truth Social. He is floating in the reflecting pool on the National Mall on a gold inner tube, shirtless, giving a thumbs up. J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum are in the water beside him, also shirtless. A woman in a checked bikini reclines at one edge of the picture. The joke was about the money being spent repairing the pool. From August 1st, making that picture in Minnesota could expose the company whose software produced it to a civil penalty of $500,000. Make ten of them and the exposure is $5 million. The people depicted could sue separately for triple damages, punitive damages and legal fees. That image appears on page 19 of a complaint xAI filed on 27 July in the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota, asking a federal judge to stop the state’s attorney general, Keith Ellison, from enforcing House File 1606. The law is the first of its kind in the United States. It targets the software, not the people who make deepfakes or the people who spread them. The complaint shares this example of an image that would be banned under the wording of Minnesota’s new law. We obtained a copy of the complaint for you here.  Minnesota has a problem it is trying to solve but statute the legislature actually wrote reaches an enormous amount of ordinary, protected speech. What HF 1606 does The operative text is now Minn. Stat. § 325E.91. It says that a person who owns or controls a website, application, software, program or other service must not “allow a user to access, download, or use” that service “to nudify an image or video,” and must not nudify an image on a user’s behalf. A separate subdivision bans advertising or promoting such a service. The violation belongs to the owner. The conduct belongs to the user. The person who makes the image, the person who posts it to a group chat, the person who emails it to the subject’s employer: subdivision 2 touches none of them. The statute’s entire enforcement weight lands on whoever built the tool. “Nudify” is defined as altering or generating an image so that it depicts “an intimate part not depicted in an original unaltered image or video of an identifiable individual,” where the result is realistic enough that a reasonable person would believe the body part belongs to that person. The whole statute turns on what counts as an intimate part. And here the legislature made a choice that will probably decide the case. The definition that swallowed the law For “intimate part,” HF 1606 borrows a definition from Minn. Stat. § 609.341, subdivision 5, part of Minnesota’s criminal sexual conduct code. That statute defines intimate parts to include “the primary genital area, groin, inner thigh, buttocks, or breast of a human being.” That definition was written to determine when unwanted touching becomes criminal sexual contact. There it makes obvious sense: grabbing someone’s thigh or breast without consent is an assault regardless of what they were wearing. Transplanted into a statute about images, the same list produces something else entirely. Inner thighs are visible in shorts. Buttocks are visible in swimwear. Men’s “breasts” are visible any time a man takes his shirt off. The definition is also open-ended since the statute says the term “includes” those areas rather than limiting it to them. The shirtless reflecting pool image is covered. So is an image a user made of a former and current governor from opposite sides of the political spectrum in a sumo match, which xAI reproduces on page 20 of its filing; both individuals’ breasts and inner thighs have been “depicted” where they were not before. So is a viral picture of Trump, Xi Jinping, Elon Musk and Tim Cook eating skewers on a Chinese street in vests and shorts. The legislature knew about the alternative. As introduced in February 2025, HF 1606 cross-referenced Minnesota’s existing deepfake statute, which uses a much tighter list: the genitals, pubic area, anus, or a partially or fully exposed nipple. That version names discrete anatomical features rather than whole regions of the body. Lawmakers considered it and adopted the broader one instead. A court asked to save the statute by reading it narrowly will have to explain why the legislature’s deliberate rejection of the narrow definition should be undone by judicial construction. The second definitional term is nearly as loose. An “identifiable individual” is someone identifiable “from the image itself, by the person depicted in the image, or by another person,” or from personal information displayed alongside it. The only genuine limit in the statute is realism, which means photorealistic output is regulated and cartoons are not. The statute is silent on consent. An adult editing a photograph of themselves triggers the same liability as a stranger targeting a classmate. The omission was deliberate. When a Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee staffer flagged during a February hearing that the prohibition “applies to consensual images,” the bill’s Senate sponsor, Erin Maye Quade, explained “that is intentional.” Why “just build better filters” is not an answer The law contains no knowledge requirement, no intent requirement and no safe harbor. Liability attaches the moment a user succeeds, whatever the provider knew, prohibited or built, and no matter how hard the user worked to get around it. Senator Kreun asked during the same hearing whether anything in the bill would protect a company making best efforts to prevent prohibited generations. According to xAI’s account of the recording, the sponsor did not answer. A modern image model has no single switch for nudity. These are diffusion or autoregressive systems, and what they produce is governed by a chain of imperfect controls: filters that scan the prompt before generation, filters that scan the input image, classifiers that inspect the output before it reaches the user, plus reinforcement training that pushes the model away from certain outputs. Those controls are all statistical, and all of them can be attacked by rephrasing, by encoding the request obliquely, by chaining innocuous edits, or by feeding the system an image that is already borderline. Even a perfect nudity classifier would not help here, since the statute is not about nudity. A filter tuned to block explicit content will pass a picture of a man in swim trunks every time. To comply with HF 1606 as written, a provider would need a classifier that reliably detects newly visible inner thigh in photorealistic output, and it would need that classifier to be right on the first attempt, forever, across every user in Minnesota, at half a million dollars per miss. xAI’s response has been to announce that it will restrict Grok Imagine’s editing features for Minnesota users before the law takes effect. Smaller developers would do the same, or fold. Geographic feature-blocking is the cheap option, and it is exactly what the First Amendment’s chilling-effect doctrine is meant to prevent. The Supreme Court held in Counterman v. Colorado (2023) that even unprotected categories of speech require a subjective mental-state requirement before liability can attach, and the Eighth Circuit held in Video Software Dealers Ass’n v. Webster that a statute chilling First Amendment activity must contain a knowledge element. There is one carve-out: the prohibitions fall away where the service “requires the technical skill of a user to nudify an image,” with technical skill defined as substantial individualized technological or artistic skill and judgment by a human creator in directing, shaping or controlling the output. Photoshop, in other words, is fine. A tool anyone can use is not. Minnesota has written a statute in which the identical image is lawful when produced by someone with training and unlawful when produced by someone without it. What the state has regulated is the democratization of image-making itself. Whatever else that is, it is a law that favors one class of creators over another, and content-based laws that sort speakers this way start at a serious constitutional disadvantage. The case for the law, made properly Molly Kelley learned in 2024 that a close family friend had used a nudification site to make nonconsensual deepfakes of her and other women in his life. Around 80 women in Minnesota were affected by the same perpetrator. She spent two years pushing for this bill. The Senate passed it 65-0. Governor Walz signed it. The ACLU of Minnesota, which is supposed to spend its time opposing speech restrictions, backed HF 1606 and calls it a win. Laws keyed to distribution arrive after the harm has happened. By the time a nonconsensual image is circulating in a school, the removal process under the federal TAKE IT DOWN Act can take the image down but cannot undo its spread. Minnesota’s existing criminal deepfake statute and its civil counterpart both require the plaintiff to prove dissemination, non-consent and knowledge, which is difficult when the maker is anonymous and the distribution happens in closed groups. Targeting the tool tries to stop the image from being made at all, rather than chasing an anonymous maker after the fact. HF 1606 cannot be enforced without examining what an image depicts. Under Reed v. Town of Gilbert (2015) that makes it content-based and presumptively unconstitutional, and it must then be narrowly tailored, serving an interest of the highest order through the least restrictive means available. Minnesota’s interest in stopping nonconsensual sexual deepfakes clears that bar, and xAI concedes it in the complaint. Tailoring is where the state runs into trouble. What is actually at stake Texas and California have already passed laws aimed at nudification services, but the model Minnesota chose, strict liability on the toolmaker with per-image penalties, is the most aggressive available. If it survives, it becomes the template. The people who lose under that template are not xAI, which can afford to geofence a feature and go to court. The losers are the open-source image model with four maintainers, the small photo-editing startup that adds a background-removal feature and finds it has acquired unlimited liability, and the Minnesota user cut off from tools that everyone else in the country can use for satire, restoration of damaged family photographs, virtual staging or teaching material. RAINN, a main force behind the bill, says it consulted numerous technology companies to keep the law from creating unintended consequences for general products. The statute it produced still offers no safe harbor for a developer acting in good faith. HF 1606 takes effect on 1 August 2026. xAI’s motion seeks preliminary and permanent injunctive relief. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post xAI Challenges Minnesota’s Broad “Nudification” Law as a First Amendment Violation 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. A row of peers has gathered in Westminster to decide whether the Online Safety Act has been cruel enough to the internet yet. After some hours of evidence, the verdict came back: not nearly. The Communications and Digital Committee has been quizzing stakeholders about how the law is going, and the charities it called have a grievance: Ofcom is too soft. Andy Burrows of the Molly Rose Foundation put it like this: “I do not get the impression that the companies are quaking in their boots at Ofcom’s enforcement approach.” The boots, by every account, stood steady. The censorship law, for anyone who missed its arrival, will make Britain the safest place in the world to be online. It says so itself. The maximum fine runs to £18 million ($24M) or a tenth of worldwide revenue, whichever bites harder, which for the biggest platforms would reach into the billions. And still, no boots. So the room reached for the obvious cure. More of it. Baroness Kidron of the 5Rights Foundation, defending Ofcom and filleting it in the same breath, allowed that “the act is wrong in certain places and does leave certain gaps, and will need some more work.” Some more work. The gaps, you understand, all run in the one direction. Look at the machinery already bolted on. A platform that performs “Ofcom’s 44 measures, or whichever number it is now” — Kidron’s phrase — is safe. Do the 44 things, claim your safe harbor, go home. Try something cleverer and you forfeit the protection. The law rewards the box-tick over the better idea. A bold design. And the boxes do get ticked. Nearly two-thirds of daily visits to Britain’s adult sites now pass through an age check. Lord Vaizey told the Lords that Ofcom had begun investigating 47 sites for non-compliance. Ofcom’s own spokesperson said 69. Enforcement is one of those two numbers. Ofcom says the picture is better than that. Change was already happening, its spokesperson offered; platforms held to account, fast enforcement launched, more protections put forward. Burrows allowed that some of the action already under way might be supervisory, Ofcom working with a firm rather than fining it, though the process is opaque enough that nobody could say how industrious it was. Meanwhile, the children the whole edifice was raised to protect. On the risk it already knew well, child sexual abuse, Burrows granted Ofcom was doing a good job. His worry was the newer harms. He kept returning to the Com groups; networks largely of teenage boys, whose reported numbers rose sixfold between 2022 and 2024, running a new kind of grooming pointed at suicide and self-harm. The Molly Rose Foundation carries the name of Molly Russell, fourteen, who viewed thousands of images promoting suicide and self-harm before she took her own life. Rani Govender of the NSPCC laid out the trap: when a platform spots a harm the codes of practice never named, it carries no obligation to act on it. The law covers what the law already wrote down. More scope. More codes. More measures numbered 44, or whichever it is now. One problem stayed off the agenda. The Act treats two hard engineering questions as things a statute can order into being. The first is reliable age estimation; in the opening days of the new rules, people strolled past the checks using video game avatars to pass as adults. The second is reading encrypted messages without breaking the encryption, which cannot be done, a point Signal made by offering to leave the country rather than build the back door. “If the choice came down to being forced to build a backdoor, or leaving, we’d leave,” its president wrote. A mandate is a wish with a fine attached. The public has been voting with its downloads. When the age checks landed on July 25, Proton VPN clocked an hourly sign-up increase of over 1,400 percent. Ofcom’s answer was to tell the BBC it would be illegal for platforms to encourage VPN use. To Ofcom, a loophole to close. The verdict in it went unheard. And the petition to repeal the whole thing has passed 550,000 signatures. Having heard all of this (the avatars, the VPN stampede, the third of a million names) the committee asked whether the age-check regime might also be extended to VPN providers. If you're tired of censorship and dystopian threats against civil liberties, subscribe to Reclaim The Net. The post UK Committee Hears Calls to Expand the Online Safety Act’s Powers 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. 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.