they were under threat from the US Trade Representative, who told them that America would whack us with tariffs if we failed to arrange a hospitable environment for America's tech companies.

Well, I don't know if you've heard, but Trump whacked us with tariffs anyway. When someone threatens to burn your house down unless you do as you're told, and they burn your house down anyway, you don't have to keep taking their orders. Indeed, you're a sucker if you do.

In the 15 years since we capitulated to America's policy demands, US Big Tech has grown too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care.

“peak indifference”: a political phenomenon, when people who have denied an urgent problem begin to self-radicalize, not because of activists or public education, but because the problem has caught up with them, personally.

This has been a long, long time coming. Long before Trump, the Snowden revelations made it clear that the US government had weaponized its position as the world's IT export powerhouse and the interchange hub for the world's transoceanic fiber links, and was actively spying on everyone – allies and foes, presidents and plebs – to attain geopolitical and commercial advantages for America. Even after that stark reminder, the world continued to putter along, knowing that the US had planted demolition charges in its digital infrastructure, but praying that the "rules-based international order" would stop America from pushing the button.

Follow your weird, ladies and gentlemen. Forget trying
to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace your nerditude.
In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible
obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years,
"woo the muse of the odd." A good science fiction story is not a
"good story" with a polite whiff of rocket fuel in it. A good
science fiction story is something that knows it is science
fiction and plunges through that and comes roaring out of the
other side. Computer entertainment should not be more like
movies, it shouldn't be more like books, it should be more like
computer entertainment, SO MUCH MORE LIKE COMPUTER ENTERTAINMENT
THAT IT RIPS THROUGH THE LIMITS AND IS SIMPLY IMPOSSIBLE TO
IGNORE!

I don't think you can last by meeting the contemporary public
taste, the taste from the last quarterly report. I don't think
you can last by following demographics and carefully meeting
expectations. I don't know many works of art that last that are
condescending. I don't know many works of art that last that are
deliberately stupid. You may be a geek, you may have geek
written all over you; you should aim to be one geek they'll
never forget. Don't aim to be civilized. Don't hope that
straight people will keep you on as some kind of pet. To hell
with them; they put you here. You should fully realize what
society has made of you and take a terrible revenge. Get weird.
Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly,
thoroughly weird and don't do it halfway, put every ounce of
horsepower you have behind it. Have the artistic courage to
recognize your own significance in culture!

The culture that feels the most dangerous, and, thus, exciting to young people, will be what you can’t see online. And the most dangerous thing for platforms is not racist garbage. It’s unmonetizeable content. The “metric” that will matter most going forward will not be the numbers at the bottom of a post or video, but the human beings in a room that left their house to experience something. Which, of course, will be filmed and put back online. You can’t escape the matrix entirely.

In Kooperation mit Schleswig-Holstein will Mecklenburg-Vorpommern die öffentliche Verwaltung auf unabhängige Lösungen mit offenen Standards umstellen.

Im Landkreis Harz ist das Problem der digitalen Souveränität bereits gelöst. Zumindest an den Schulen. Tausende Schülerinnen und Schüler im Landkreis Harz arbeiten auf gebrauchten Business-Computern. Auf denen läuft als Betriebssystem eine Linux-Version. E

.Johanna Müller, Lehrerin an der Gemeinschaftsschule "Hagenberg" in Gernrode, sagt: "Ich unterrichte keine Marke, sondern ich unterrichte Kompetenzen. Textverarbeitung, Textstrukturierung oder Tabellenkalkulation können mit LibreOffice genauso vermittelt werden wie mit Microsoft Office."

Die Rust-Implementierung sudo-rs zeigt beim Eintippen von Passwörtern nun standardmäßig Sternchen an. Ein Bruch mit langer Unix-Tradition.

Ballooning memory prices are forecast to kill off entry-level PCs, leading to a decline in global shipments this year - and a similar effect is going to hit smartphones.

Analyst biz Gartner is projecting a drop in PC shipments of more than 10 percent during 2026, and a decline of around 8 percent for smartphones, all due to the AI-driven memory shortage.

Teurere Geräte, sinkende Verkäufe, weniger Einstiegsmodelle: Die Speicherkrise soll den PC- und Smartphonemarkt 2026 richtig hart treffen.

US-amerikanische Diplomaten sollen sich gegen die Bestrebungen anderer Staaten einsetzen, ihre Datennutzung stärker zu lokalisieren – und damit den Datentransfer in die USA einzuschränken. Das berichtet die Nachrichtenagentur Reuters unter Berufung auf ein Rundschreiben des US-Außenministeriums, das von Außenminister Marco Rubio unterzeichnet wurde.

Age verification is a reality on a growing number of social media platforms, requiring an ID or facial scan for full access to everything from YouTube to Roblox. The age-gating wave is coming along with calls for stronger child safety measures online, despite concerns about privacy, security, and censorship.

In the US, lawmakers are pushing forward bills like the App Store Accountability Act and Parents Over Platforms Act to have app stores themselves verify users’ ages.

Discord has delayed plans to roll out age verification globally after user backlash until later in 2026, but it hasn’t completely shelved them, even after a breach of a former vendor last year that leaked some users’ scanned IDs. Meanwhile, other platforms, like ChatGPT and Google, are applying AI models to identify and lock down accounts suspected of being underage until some form of identity verification can prove the user is an adult.

Peter Thiel, co-founder of surveillance and data analytics company Palantir, is a major investor in Persona – the age verification provider used by major platforms including Reddit and Discord.

Thiel’s venture capital firm, Founders Fund, led Persona’s $150 million Series C funding round and $200 million Series D funding round, backing the rapid expansion of the US-based identity verification company.

Wer KI-Chatbots auffordert, starke Passwörter zu erstellen, erhält zwar sicher erscheinende Ergebnisse, jedoch sind die Passwörter leicht zu knacken.

"You have to essentially pre-deplatform yourself."

For young people, "the only things that have the level of scarcity and danger required to be seen as cool" are "whatever is unacceptable on those platforms." In other words, anything (and maybe only things) that're blocked or banned are a candidate to be cool. Cool people walk away from the places where you'd expect to find them and hang out in places that are culturally viewed as less important.

Den Diagnosen werden bei der Meldung spezielle Codes zugeordnet. Die Ärztekammer hat hier aber datenschutzrechtliche Bedenken: Die persönlichen Patientendaten werden nämlich unverschlüsselt bis an den Dachverband der Sozialversicherungen geschickt. Unkenntlich gemacht werden sie erst im letzten Schritt bei der Übermittlung ans Gesundheitsministerium.

Die Ärztekammer hat zudem datenschutzrechtliche Bedenken. Die Patientendaten würden bei der Weiterleitung von Diagnosen zwar anonymisiert – dies allerdings erst, nachdem sie schon mehrere Stellen passiert hätten, sagt der Sprecher der niedergelassenen Ärzte im Bundesland Salzburg, Christoph Fürthauer. „Die Ärztekammer hat immer vorgeschlagen, dass die Daten vor der Weitergabe aus der Ordination verschlüsselt werden. Diesen Vorschlag hat das Gesundheitsministerium aber leider nicht aufgenommen.“

In der Berichterstattung zum Großglockner-Prozess zeigten sich große Unterschiede zwischen österreichischen Boulevard- und Qualitätsmedien. Ausländische Medien hielten sich teils gar nicht an das österreichische Mediengesetz. Zu diesem Schluss kommt ein Salzburger Medienrechtsexperte.

“Top-down mandates to use large language models are crazy,” one employee told Wired. “If the tool were good, we’d all just use it.”

They’re also required to send weekly update emails to him, echoing Elon Musk’s DOGE requirement for federal staffers to summarize five weekly achievements in emails. (The requirement was mostly ignored, months before DOGE largely crumbled.)

Dorsey then reportedly uses generative AI to summarize his staffers’ emails. During the all-hands meeting, he noted that “performance anxiety” and “widespread concerns about layoffs” were clearly vexing staff.

ver the past week, I’ve watched left wing commentators on Bluesky, the niche short form blogging site that serves as an asylum for the millennials driven insane by unfettered internet access, discuss the idea that “the left hates technology.” This conversation has centered around a few high profile news events in the world of AI. A guy who works at an AI startup wrote a blog claiming that AI can

Live is complicated. Regardless of what your beliefs or politics or ethics are, the way that we set up our society and economy will often force you to act against them: You might not want to fly somewhere but your employer will not accept another mode of transportation, you want to eat vegan but are at some point in a situation where the best you can do is a vegetarian option.

Sometimes it’s not even our hand being forced but us not having the mental strength or priorities to do something: I could just not use WhatsApp because it is owned by Meta but my son’s daycare organizes everything through WhatsApp and do I really want to force my belief on all those very busy parents and caretakers or should I just bite the bullet and use the tool that seems to work for everyone – even though it’s not perfect?