News Commentary

Lately there has been an increase in discussions about the use of end-to-end encryption for consumers. The most blatant attack on privacy I have read about is the so-called EU Chat Control. But there are other regulations as well, such as the UK Online Safety Bill. Chat Control (EU) Let’s begin with the European Union, and what is usually called Chat Control. This regulation aims to protect children from abuse by forcing both hosting and communications services to reduce the risk of the service being used for Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) by ...

It has recently been reported by The Guardian that Saudi Arabia has taken serious steps to influence the information available at Wikipedia. The investigations began after two volunteers at Wikipedia were put in jail for “swaying public opinion” and “violating public morals.” Since then Saudi Arabia seems to have stepped up their efforts to influence the public view. An internal investigation at Wikimedia showed that all of their administrators in the country were government agents. Since Wikipedia relies on their volunteers to maintain the information on the site, they have had to create a structure of trust to ensure the quality of the information. The Saudi Arabian agents had managed to raise to the level of administrators, whom are authorized to edit or delete contents, as well as blocking lower level users edits from being published. ...

I’ve lately seen multiple bug bounty hunters on twitter (and other platforms) proudly exclaiming that hacking is not a crime. They are not wrong, but I think the answer needs to be a bit more nuanced. So here is my take on hacking. Hacking is not inherently a crime, but neither is it automatically never criminal. I would compare it with lighting a fire. There are instances where it is helpful and legal (eg. lighting a campfire), but there are at least as many ways of doing it illegally (eg. burning down a building). The act of lighting a fire can be good or bad, legal or illegal, ethical or unethical. Everything depends on how you do it. ...