iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Ximo F. Verde

Complexly @complexly.org · 30/07/2026

Eons: Life and Death on Pangea is a new six episode series from the team at @pbseons.bsky.social, and you can watch the first two episodes right now at PBS.org/eons, or in the free PBS app!

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 21/06/2026

The Myth of SpaceX ▶ The company has mutated into something that defies both comparison and logic | Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 13/06/2026

The world’s first trillionaire is a killer ▶ Elon Musk’s empire of wealth is built on suffering | The Verge www.theverge.com/tech/949259/...

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 07/06/2026

Revenge of The Business Idiot by @edzitron.com | www.wheresyoured.at/the-revenge-...

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Reposted by Ximo F. Verde

The Verge @theverge.com · 21/04/2026

"In the place of problem-solving technology, companies have jumped on successive bandwagons like NFTs, the metaverse, and LLMs. What these all have in common is that they are not built to really solve a market problem. They are built to make VCs and companies rich." Read more: buff.ly/Yu2AUFy

Verge headline: Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want
by Elizabeth Lopatto

Illustration of a brain melting in the sun

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 24/03/2026

Treason in the Futures Markets ▶ People close to Trump are trading based on national secrets | Paul Krugman paulkrugman.substack.com/p/treason-in...

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Reposted by Ximo F. Verde

404 Media @404media.co · 24/02/2026

NEW: A hobbyist has created Nearby Glasses, an app that warns you if someone close by is wearing smart glasses. 404 Media spoke to the creator who said he was inspired by our coverage that uncovers how men are wearing Meta's Ray-Bans to covertly film massage parlor workers.

404media.co

This App Warns You if Someone Is Wearing Smart Glasses Nearby

The creator of Nearby Glasses made the app after reading 404 Media's coverage of how people are using Meta's Ray-Bans smartglasses to film people without their knowledge or consent. “I consider it to ...

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Reposted by Ximo F. Verde

RickyFTW @rickyftw.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Oddly, this video was put on 24hr review by YouTube. First time I’ve seen that but it’s def not appearing on feeds, not even my personal one which I use to test. So I’d appreciate if you watched shared and liked! youtu.be/KRzlPZ--vb0?...

youtu.be

ICE Retreats: The Battle for Minneapolis is Over?? - News Dump

YouTube video by Internet Today

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 28/01/2026

What AI “remembers” about you is privacy’s next frontier ▶ Agents’ technical underpinnings create the potential for breaches that expose the entire mosaic of your life | MIT Technology Review www.technologyreview.com/2026/01/28/1...

Personalized, interactive AI systems are built to act on our behalf, maintain context across conversations, and improve our ability to carry out all sorts of tasks, from booking travel to filing taxes. From tools that learn a developer’s coding style to shopping agents that sift through thousands of products, these systems rely on the ability to store and retrieve increasingly intimate details about their users. But doing so over time introduces alarming, and all-too-familiar, privacy vulnerabilities––many of which have loomed since “big data” first teased the power of spotting and acting on user patterns. Worse, AI agents now appear poised to plow through whatever safeguards had been adopted to avoid those vulnerabilities.

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 22/01/2026

Wind and solar overtook fossil fuels for EU power generation in 2025, report finds ▶ Researchers say event described as ‘major tipping point’ for clean energy in era of destabilised politics | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/environment/...

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 10/01/2026

Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards ▶ X’s deepfake porn feature clearly violates app store guidelines. Why won’t Apple and Google pull it? | The Verge www.theverge.com/policy/85990...

You know what’s “offensive and sexualized,” you worthless fucking cowards? Nonconsensual AI-generated images of women in bikinis spreading their legs, and of children with so-called “donut glaze” on their faces — which, by the way, were being generated at a rate of one per minute. I’d also call that “offensive, insensitive, upsetting, intended to disgust, in exceptionally poor taste” and especially “just plain creepy”! Do you need a back brace to stand up straight, buddy? Because at this point, I am certain you haven’t got a single vertebra.

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

‘We have a new role’: mayors across the world increasingly taking on society’s biggest challenges ▶ From Budapest to BCN, NY to Paris, mayors are increasingly being thrust on to the political frontlines as they face down the rise of the far right | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

“Basically we’re saying that if there’s any place in Europe where European values and democracies are being defended, it is in our cities,” he said. “For the most part, cities, whether in the United States or Europe, continue to be bastions of open, inclusive societies, where progressives are the majority.”

He contrasted the practical solutions being offered by the mayors’ alliance – from pushing for EU funding for affordable housing to crackdowns on tourist lets – with the far right’s scapegoating. “We all know that where the far right is already governing, things haven’t changed at all,” he said. “The difference is that hate speech has made inroads, along with division and confrontation, while the rights we all fought for have been eroded.”

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

Chipwrecked ▶ Nvidia has built an empire on circular deals for chips. Can anything knock it down? | The Verge www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

theverge.com

Chipwrecked: Can Nvidia avoid the crash?

What happens if the GPU-backed loans go south?

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 22/12/2025

Billionaires want data centers everywhere, including space ▶ Astronomers and environmental scientists are skeptical | The Verge www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Some experts say it would not be smooth sailing, however. The group of satellites would need to travel through millions of pieces of space debris, or “a minefield of random objects, each moving at 17,000 miles an hour,” Mojtaba Akhavan-Tafti, associate research scientist of space sciences and engineering at the University of Michigan, explained to The Verge. This space debris is especially concentrated in popular orbits like the Sun-synchronous orbit. This is why Google’s plan is looking, well, “a little iffy,” he said. Dodging each object requires a tiny propulsion to move out of the way. For context, Akhavan-Tafti wrote in a recent Fortune article that the approximately 8,300 Starlink satellites made over 140,000 such maneuvers in just the first half of 2025. Given the close proximity of each satellite in Google’s plan, Akhavan-Tafti thinks that the entire constellation, rather than each individual satellite, would need to move out of the way of any incoming debris. “That’s really the big challenge,” he said.

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

Demand-driven inflation vs tariffs-fueled inflation, by Justin Wolfers, Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of Michigan | The Prof G Pod – Scott Galloway youtu.be/xA9nRaI71dw?...

youtu.be

The Biggest Disruption Is Yet to Come — ft. Justin Wolfers

YouTube video by The Prof G Pod – Scott Galloway

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 11/12/2025

How one controversial startup hopes to cool the planet ▶ And why many scientists are freaked out about the first serious for-profit company moving into the solar geoengineering field | MIT Technology Review www.technologyreview.com/2025/12/10/1...

But numerous researchers focused on solar geoengineering are deeply skeptical that Stardust will line up the government customers it would need to carry out a global deployment as early as 2035, the plan described in its earlier investor materials—and aghast at the suggestion that it ever expected to move that fast. They’re also highly critical of the idea that a company would take on the high-stakes task of setting the global temperature, rather than leaving it to publicly funded research programs.

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 10/12/2025

The war on disinformation is a losing battle ▶ How the systems that fight misinformation and disinformation became misconstrued and dismantled | The Verge www.theverge.com/features/839...

theverge.com

The disinformation wars are here

How Joe Biden’s administration caved to the right in the battle for truth.

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Reposted by Ximo F. Verde

Mike Stabile @mikestabile.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

"Elon’s entire incoherent free speech framework collapses into a single coherent principle: speech I like is protected, speech I don’t like should be punished. This is what happens when someone who never understood the actual principles of free speech tries to cosplay as a free speech absolutist."

techdirt.com

Three Tweets That Capture The Entire Elon Musk Free Speech Con

We’ve spent years calling out what a hypocrite Elon Musk is on free speech. But sometimes the universe Elon hands you a gift: three tweets in the span of a little over a week that demonstrate…

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Reposted by Ximo F. Verde

European Commission @ec.europa.eu · 05/12/2025

Today, we fined X for non-compliance with transparency obligations under the DSA. We're holding X accountable for: 🔹Deceptive design of its ‘blue checkmark’ 🔹Lack of transparency of its advertising repository 🔹Failure to provide access to public data for researchers link.europa.eu/bcmC87

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 05/12/2025

‘Cultivate resistance’: policy paper lays bare Trump support for Europe’s far right ▶ Text signed by president seems to echo ‘great replacement’ theory, saying Europe faces ‘civilisational erasure’ | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

theguardian.com

‘Cultivate resistance’: policy paper lays bare Trump support for Europe’s far right

Text signed by president seems to echo ‘great replacement’ theory, saying Europe faces ‘civilisational erasure’

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 01/12/2025

Buy the sky and sell the sky and lift your arms up to the sky and ask the sky and ask the sky Don't fall on me

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 30/11/2025

If you wanna make the world a better place Take a look at yourself and then make the change You gotta get it right while you got the time 'Cause when you close your heart Then you close your mind

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 26/11/2025

Large language mistake ▶ Cutting-edge research shows language is not the same as intelligence. The entire AI bubble is built on ignoring it | The Verge www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

The AI hype machine relentlessly promotes the idea that we’re on the verge of creating something as intelligent as humans, or even “superintelligence” that will dwarf our own cognitive capacities. If we gather tons of data about the world, and combine this with ever more powerful computing power (read: Nvidia chips) to improve our statistical correlations, then presto, we’ll have AGI. Scaling is all we need.

But this theory is seriously scientifically flawed. LLMs are simply tools that emulate the communicative function of language, not the separate and distinct cognitive process of thinking and reasoning, no matter how many data centers we build.

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

Microsoft tries to head off the “novel security risks” of Windows 11 AI agents ▶ Agents with read/write access to your files create big security, privacy issues | Ars Technica arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025...

But these safeguards and monitoring capabilities don’t change the fact that you’re exposing yourself to privacy and security risks by using AI agents. They’ll be able to request read and write access to most of the files in your user account—by default, anything in the Documents, Downloads, Desktop, Music, Pictures, and Videos folders. They’ll have access to any apps that have been installed for all users on the PC (apps that have only been installed in your user account won’t be accessible to the agent, and it will also be possible for users to install apps that only their agents can access.) And agents can potentially be vulnerable to hijacking that exposes your data to attackers—Microsoft specifically mentions “cross-prompt injection (XPIA), where malicious content embedded in UI elements or documents can override agent instructions, leading to unintended actions like data exfiltration or malware installation.”

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 04/11/2025

LLMs show a “highly unreliable” capacity to describe their own internal processes ▶ Anthropic finds some LLM “self-awareness,” but “failures of introspection remain the norm.” | Ars Technica arstechnica.com/ai/2025/11/l...

The full paper on “Emergent Introspective Awareness in Large Language Models” uses some interesting methods to separate out the metaphorical “thought process” represented by an LLM’s artificial neurons from simple text output that purports to represent that process. In the end, though, the research finds that current AI models are “highly unreliable” at describing their own inner workings and that “failures of introspection remain the norm.”

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 28/10/2025

I tried OpenAI’s new Atlas browser but I still don’t know what it’s for ▶ My impression is that it is little more than cynicism masquerading as software | MIT Technology Review www.technologyreview.com/2025/10/27/1...

It’s been hard for me to understand why Atlas exists. Who is this browser for, exactly? Who is its customer? And the answer I have come to there is that Atlas is for OpenAI. The real customer, the true end user of Atlas, is not the person browsing websites, it is the company collecting data about what and how that person is browsing.

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Reposted by Ximo F. Verde

404 Media @404media.co · 24/10/2025

NEW: an a16z-backed startup called Doublespeed promises clients can “orchestrate actions on thousands of social accounts through both bulk content creation and deployment.” Essentially an AI-powered bot service in violation of all major social media platforms www.404media.co/a16z-backed-...

404media.co

a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of ‘Synthetic Influencers’ to Manipulate Social Media as a Service

Andreessen Horowitz is funding a company that clearly violates the inauthentic behavior policies of every major social media platform.

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

Satellites Are Leaking the World’s Secrets: Calls, Texts, Military and Corporate Data ▶ With just $800 in basic equipment, researchers found a stunning variety of data sent by satellites unencrypted | Wired www.wired.com/story/satell...

For three years, the UCSD and UMD researchers developed and used an off-the-shelf, $800 satellite receiver system on the roof of a university building in the La Jolla seaside neighborhood of San Diego to pick up the communications of geosynchronous satellites in the small band of space visible from their Southern California vantage point. By simply pointing their dish at different satellites and spending months interpreting the obscure—but unprotected—signals they received from them, the researchers assembled an alarming collection of private data: They obtained samples of the contents of Americans’ calls and text messages on T-Mobile’s cellular network, data from airline passengers’ in-flight Wi-Fi browsing, communications to and from critical infrastructure such as electric utilities and offshore oil and gas platforms, and even US and Mexican military and law enforcement communications that revealed the locations of personnel, equipment, and facilities.

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 14/10/2025

Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement ▶ New design sets a high standard for post-quantum readiness | Ars Technica arstechnica.com/security/202...

arstechnica.com

Why Signal’s post-quantum makeover is an amazing engineering achievement

New design sets a high standard for post-quantum readiness.

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 09/10/2025

The EU has a secret weapon to counter Trump’s economic bullying. It’s time to use it ▶ The anti-coercion instrument, or ‘trade bazooka’, is designed to shield against foreign pressure | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

What is to be done? Europe’s anti-coercion instrument works by calculating the degree of the coercion and imposing counter-actions. Provided most European governments agree, the European Commission could kick US goods and services out of Europe’s market, or apply tariffs to them. It can strip their intellectual property rights, block their investments and require reparations as a condition of readmittance to Europe’s market.

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

Els veïns dels eixos verds de l’Eixample es planten i critiquen la gestió de la càrrega i descàrrega ▶ A més, reivindiquen que es mantingui tota la vegetació que es va plantejar des d'un inici en aquests carrers pacificats | Betevé beteve.cat/societat/que...

beteve.cat

Els veïns dels eixos verds de l'Eixample es planten i critiquen la gestió de la càrrega i descàrrega

El nou horari de càrrega i descàrrega als eixos verds de l'Eixample torna a incomplir-se un mes després d'haver entrat en funcionament.

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 07/10/2025

Global renewable energy generation surpasses coal for first time ▶ Record solar expansion and steady wind growth driving world’s shift away from fossil fuels in 2025, report finds | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/environment/...

theguardian.com

Global renewable energy generation surpasses coal for first time

Record solar expansion and steady wind growth driving world’s shift away from fossil fuels in 2025, report finds

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 02/10/2025

OpenAI’s Sora 2 Copyright Infringement Machine Features Nazi SpongeBobs and Criminal Pikachus ▶ The main use of Sora appears to generate brainrot of major beloved copyrighted characters + the millions of articles, images, and videos OpenAI has scraped | 404 Media www.404media.co/openais-sora...

The main immediate use of Sora so far appears to be to allow people to generate brainrot of major beloved copyrighted characters, to say nothing of the millions of articles, blogs, books, images, videos, photos, and pieces of art that OpenAI has scraped from people far less powerful than, say, Nintendo. As a reward for this wide scale theft, OpenAI gets a $500 billion valuation. And we get a tool that makes it even easier to flood the internet with slightly better looking bullshit at the low, low cost of nearly all of the intellectual property ever created by our species, the general concept of the nature of truth, the devaluation of art through an endless flooding of the zone, and the knock-on environmental, energy, and negative labor costs of this entire endeavor.

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

Revealed: Europe losing 600 football pitches of nature and crop land a day ▶ Investigation shows extent of green land lost across UK and mainland Europe to development from 2018 to 2023 | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Nature accounts for the majority of the losses, at about 900 sq km a year, but the research shows we are also building on agricultural land at a rate of about 600 sq km a year, with grave consequences for the continent’s food security and health.

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

Scientists make embryos from human skin DNA for first time ▶ The technique could overcome infertility due to old age or disease by using almost any cell in the body as the starting point for life | BBC News www.bbc.com/news/article...

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

AI ‘Workslop’ Is Killing Productivity and Making Workers Miserable ▶ AI slop is taking over workplaces | 404 Media www.404media.co/ai-workslop-...

A joint study by Stanford University researchers and a workplace performance consulting firm published in the Harvard Business Review details the plight of workers who have to fix their colleagues’ AI-generated “workslop,” which they describe as work content that “masquerades as good work, but lacks the substance to meaningfully advance a given task.” The research, based on a survey of 1,150 workers, is the latest analysis to suggest that the injection of AI tools into the workplace has not resulted in some magic productivity boom and instead has just increased the amount of time that workers say they spend fixing low-quality AI-generated “work.”

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 23/09/2025

Trump is waging culture war on Europe by promoting rightwing allies, report finds ▶ Study says US president seeks to interfere in elections and ‘move the ideological centre of gravity’ in European politics | The Guardian www.theguardian.com/world/2025/s...

The study suggests conditions are “ripe” for European leaders to walk off Trump’s “film set”. Polling shows European sentiment – the sense of belonging to a common space, sharing a common future and subscribing to common values – is strong, it says.

Eurobarometer data shows citizen trust in the EU is at its highest since 2007 and has risen in 12 countries – most sharply in Sweden, France, Denmark and Portugal – since Trump returned to the White House. Majorities in almost all feel attached to the EU.

Hardly any party now wants to leave the EU, and majorities in all but three countries (Romania, Poland and the Czech Republic) say the role of the EU in protecting Europe’s citizens against global crises and security risks must become more important.

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 19/09/2025

'Enough is enough' by Chumbawamba & Credit To The Nation, from the 1994 album 'Anarchy' www.youtube.com/watch?v=cD0R...

youtube.com

Chumbawamba & Credit To The Nation - Enough Is Enough

YouTube video by RileyELFuk

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 12/09/2025

The Software Engineers Paid to Fix Vibe Coded Messes ▶ LinkedIn has been joking about “vibe coding cleanup specialists,” but it’s actually a growing profession | 404 Media www.404media.co/the-software...

The alleged benefit of vibe coding, which refers to the practice of building software with AI-coding tools without much attention to the underlying code, is that it allows anyone to build a piece of software very quickly and easily. As we’ve previously reported, in reality, vibe coded projects could result in security issues or a recipe app that generates recipes for “Cyanide Ice Cream.” If the resulting software is so poor you need to hire a human specialist software engineer to come in and rewrite the vibe coded software, it defeats the entire purpose.

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 10/09/2025

When surgical tools don’t fit: how gender bias in design puts female surgeons at risk ▶ Built for men, used by everyone | The Conversation theconversation.com/when-surgica...

In vascular and cardiac surgery, precision and power go hand in hand. These procedures require surgeons to maintain awkward positions for extended periods, often in high-pressure situations. Even without design flaws, the risk of muscle and joint strain is significant. But when a handle is too big to grip securely, or a control requires more force than a surgeon can comfortably exert, that risk increases sharply and disproportionately for women.

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

Massive Leak Shows How a Chinese Company Is Exporting the Great Firewall to the World ▶ Geedge Networks, a company w ties 2 the founder of China’s mass censorship infra, is selling its censorship & surveillance systems to ≥ 4 other countries in Asia and Africa | Wired www.wired.com/story/geedge...

Researchers who reviewed the leaked material found that the company is able to package advanced surveillance capabilities into what amounts to a commercialized version of the Great Firewall—a wholesale solution with both hardware that can be installed in any telecom data center and software operated by local government officers. The documents also discuss desired functions that the company is working on, such as cyberattack-for-hire and geofencing certain users.

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Reposted by Ximo F. Verde

RickyFTW @rickyftw.bsky.social · 09/09/2025

this should work now... Merch for the first time in half a decade, and more designs coming internettoday.myshopify.com

internettoday.myshopify.com

Internet Today Merch

Merch for the YouTube Channel Internet Today

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

Former WhatsApp security boss in lawsuit likens Meta’s culture to a “cult” | ▶ Meta allegedly prioritized user growth over security, lawsuit said | Ars Technica arstechnica.com/security/202...

Shortly after assuming that role, the lawsuit said, Baig “discovered systemic cybersecurity failures that posed serious risks to user data.” During a red-team exercise designed to find and exploit security vulnerabilities so they can be fixed, Baig said he found that roughly 1,500 engineers inside the messenger division had “unrestricted access to user data, including personal information covered by the FTC Privacy Order, and could move or steal such data without detection or audit trail.”

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Ximo F. Verde @ximofverde.bsky.social · 04/09/2025

AI Generated 'Boring History' Videos Are Flooding YouTube and Drowning Out Real History | ▶ "These AI videos are just repeating things that are on the internet, so you end up with a very simplified version of the past." | 404 Media www.404media.co/ai-generated...

404media.co

AI Generated 'Boring History' Videos Are Flooding YouTube and Drowning Out Real History

"These AI videos are just repeating things that are on the internet, so you end up with a very simplified version of the past."

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Reposted by Ximo F. Verde

ESA Operations @operations.esa.int · 28/08/2025

Seeing double! ESA's Izaña-2 laser ranging station has begun to track space debris from the Spanish island of Tenerife. In the future, engineers hope to use such lasers to nudge small debris off of a collision course with a satellite. Full documentary at: www.esa.int/ESA_Multimed...

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