Georgios Kontaxis

- Rooster: Both runways are cratered. How we gonna get in the air? Mav, this is a taxiway, not a runway. This is a very *short* taxiway, Mav.
- Mav: Just hang on.

Kohler has dropped the "end-to-end encryption" language from their website. It now reads "data encryption at rest and in transit."

Kohler Can Access Data and Pictures from Toilet Camera It Describes as “End-to-End Encrypted” - /var/log/simon Claimed end-to-end privacy doesn’t fully conceal your rear-end data

When your toilet has a camera and its "end-to-end data encryption" turns out to be sharing the data with the manufacturer over HTTPS. 🤷‍♂️ And by the way the manufacturer may use your data to train its toilet AI. varlogsimon.leaflet.pub/3m6zrw6k2bs2p

We've given up decentralization to purchase a little temporary convenience and now we have neither decentralization nor convenience.

HTTPS by default One year from now, with the release of Chrome 154 in October 2026, we will change the default settings of Chrome to enable “Always Use Secu...

It's time to make HTTPS the web's default, and reap the full security benefit from years worth of HTTPS adoption!
security.googleblog.com/2025/10/http...

Στις 5 Νοεμβρίου λήγει η διορία της διαδικασίας έκδοσης του Προσωπικού Αριθμού.Με τη γεννήτρια γραμμάτων προσωπικού αριθμού μπορείτε να επιλέξετε εσείς έναν καλό συνδυασμό γραμμάτων για τον προσωπικό σας αριθμό. Θα τη βρείτε στο www.balab.aueb.gr/genpa/

Europe’s cookie law messed up the internet. Brussels wants to fix it. The European Commission wants to take a bite out of privacy rules that force websites to run cookie banners.

Europe’s privacy regulations have brought Internet users face to face with myriads of annoying cookie-consent prompts. But they’ve also highlighted how ubiquitous online activity tracking and targeting is. We should focus on making such threats to privacy less common. www.politico.eu/article/euro...

Why I Choose Email Over Messaging

My colleagues and friends know that I prefer to communicate with them via email rather than chat messaging. There are many benefits in such a choice. You may want to consider them and adopt the same stance.

www.spinellis.gr/blog/2025092...

Version 0.16 WriteFreely v0.16 is finally here, and it brings a ton of improvements, especially for the fediverse! We've also fixed some long-standing...

We've just released #WriteFreely v0.16, with a ton of improvements for the fediverse, including support for Likes, the Creator tag, and better look for your articles on microblogging platforms!

Read about all the new changes and grab the latest version on our blog: blog.writefreely.org/version-0-16

Google Scholar Is Doomed Academia built entire careers on a free Google service with zero guarantees. What could go wrong?

Since search is dead, how soon do you think Google Scholar is headed for the Google Graveyard? I'm betting it's soon, and academia is NOT prepared

German court rules Meta tracking technology violates European privacy laws The court in Leipzig ruled that Meta must pay €5,000 ($5,900) to a German Facebook user who sued the platform for embedding tracking technology in third-party websites — a ruling that could open the d...

The ruling, which holds that Meta tracking tech violates GDPR, sets precedent which the court acknowledged will allow countless FB users to sue w/o “explicitly demonstrating individual damages.” Experts: Decision leaves countless websites, apps exposed to huge fines
therecord.media/german-court...

Call Center Workers Are Tired of Being Mistaken for AI As more workers are asked by strangers if they're bots, surreal conversations are prompting introspection in the industry about what it means to be human.

“In Australia, Canada, Greece and the US, call center agents say they’ve been repeatedly mistaken for AI. These people, who spend hours talking to strangers, are experiencing surreal conversations, where customers ask them to prove they are not machines.”

📅 500 days from now will mark the 30th anniversary of Aleph One’s “Smashing the Stack for Fun and Profit”.

🛡️ Today, CISA and NSA released a joint guide on reducing memory-related vulnerabilities in software. 🙏
www.cisa.gov/resources-to...

💭 How much progress can we make before this milestone?

If I were designing the Airdrop user interface I would make sure that destination devices don’t randomly slide out from under your mouse and get replaced with other devices, ever. Just saying.

Those are the buttons you press to activate the flux capacitor after you hit 88 mph.

Mullvad has partnered with Obscura VPN | Mullvad VPN Today we are announcing a partnership with Obscura VPN, a newly launched two-party VPN service that uses our WireGuard VPN servers as its “exit hop”.

Excited to see two-hop VPN architectures gaining traction in the industry! I remember pitching the idea to my colleagues at Apple and feeling super optimistic about network privacy when iCloud Relay launched. Now @obscura.net and @mullvad.bsky.social are here too. (mullvad.net/en/blog/mull...)

Introducing Defense against AI-guided Traffic Analysis (DAITA) | Mullvad VPN Even if you have encrypted your traffic with a VPN (or the Tor Network), advanced traffic analysis is a growing threat against your privacy. Therefore, we now introduce DAITA.

Someone passed this along: Mullvad is debuting a new traffic-analysis prevention service that adds generated cover traffic and uses constant packet sizes. mullvad.net/en/blog/intr...

Folks: remember that your iMessages (and text messages) are typically backed up to Apple as part of your iCloud backup. If you don’t have Advanced Data Protection turned on, those may be readable by Apple, governments with warrants, and anyone who hacks Apple.

New public statement from Apple:

“As of Friday, February 21, Apple can no longer offer Advanced Data Protection as a feature to new users in the UK.”

Keep in mind that iMessages _once backed up to iCloud_ are only encrypted if you have ADP. So that encryption is broken if/when you (or the person/people you talk to) back up to an iCloud account without ADP.

Apple yanks encrypted storage in U.K. instead of allowing backdoor access Apple disabled its most secure data storage offering for new customers in the United Kingdom on Friday rather than comply with a secret government order.

Breaking: Apple pulls end-to-end encrypted storage option from UK after secret order for a back door. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Your privacy is very important to us. This is why we're sharing your data with our 278 advertising partners, and our partners' 4,728 partners, and their partners' 87,392 partners, UNDER THE FOLLOWING TERMS

Every time there’s a data breach where the last four credit card digits are exposed people shrug it off. Data minimization works.

The one place where end-to-end encryption is “weakest”, ie where deployment rates are lowest, is *cloud backup*. This is, coincidentally, one of the best places for governments to obtain data.

AI prompt results aren’t protected by copyright, says US Copyright Office AI prompts are different from Jackson Pollock’s paintings, apparently.

AI prompt results aren’t protected by copyright, says US Copyright Office

Wiz Research Uncovers Exposed DeepSeek Database Leaking Sensitive Information, Including Chat History | Wiz Blog A publicly accessible database belonging to DeepSeek allowed full control over database operations, including the ability to access internal data. The exposure includes over a million lines of log str...

Chatting with A.I. can be pretty sensitive. Why was chat history stored server-side? www.wiz.io/blog/wiz-res...

Valuable lessons from the failure of OCSP. www.feistyduck.com/newsletter/i...

New attacks on load address prediction, affects Apple Silicon. predictors.fail

Our new research paper just posted! It asks whether dark patterns (manipulative online interfaces) can thwart users who are trying to make privacy-protective choices on a video streaming site. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.... We find that dark patterns are very potent even when users have that goal.