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Pentagon announces it has killed four men in another boat strike in Pacific
The latest strike was the first in nearly three weeks. It comes as the Pentagon and the White House have struggled to answer questions about the legal basis for the campaign to kill suspected drug smugglers with military strikes, with US lawmakers promising to investigate the first such attack, in September, in which two survivors clinging to wreckage were killed in a follow-on strike.Hegseth has faced increasing scrutiny over the 2 September strike following a report from the Washington Post that the defense secretary had verbally directed the military to "kill them all". On Thursday, a Democratic lawmaker introduced articles of impeachment against Hegseth, pointing to the boat strike and a report that found he broke rules by sharing information about an attack on Signal, but such an effort is unlikely to succeed.
Experts urge release of boat strike video as US admiral denies ‘kill them all’ order
Democrat Jim Himes calls footage ‘one of the most troubling scenes’ he’s observed in public serviceJoseph Gedeon (The Guardian)
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Belly of the Beast videos about Cuba channel hosted on PeerTube.wtf
cross-posted from: expressional.social/users/Pete…
Belly of the Beast videos about Cuba channel hosted on PeerTube.wtf
is now caught up with the collection on YouTube. From now on, new #videos from YouTube will be quickly loaded to #PeerTube as well. [The previous Cuddly.Tube channel will be taken down soon.]URL: peertube.wtf/c/cuba/_botb/_vid…
Also significant is the expansion of playlists. BotB produces a lot of videos, and it is sometimes difficult to find what you are looking for. I spent some time going through the collection and adding playlists.
If you set up a login on PeerTube.wtf, you could also develop and save your own private playlists. But logins are not necessary to browse videos on PeerTube.wtf.
One playlist that will probably get a lot of use is Cuba and #Palestine, which contains 17 videos.
When you get a chance, please check them out.
#LetCubaLive #EndTheEmbargo #Solidarity #FreePalestine
#politics #BellyOfTheBeast #Cuba #Gaza
Belly of the Beast videos about Cuba channel hosted on PeerTube.wtf
is now caught up with the collection on YouTube. From now on, new #videos from YouTube will be quickly loaded to #PeerTube as well. [The previous Cuddly.Tube channel will be taken down soon.]URL: peertube.wtf/c/cuba_botb_video…
Also significant is the expansion of playlists. BotB produces a lot of videos, and it is sometimes difficult to find what you are looking for. I spent some time going through the collection and adding playlists.
If you set up a login on PeerTube.wtf, you could also develop and save your own private playlists. But logins are not necessary to browse videos on PeerTube.wtf.
One playlist that will probably get a lot of use is Cuba and #Palestine, which contains 17 videos.
When you get a chance, please check them out.
#LetCubaLive #EndTheEmbargo #Solidarity #FreePalestine
#politics #BellyOfTheBeast #Cuba #Gaza
Belly of the Beast videos about Cuba channel hosted on PeerTube.wtf
cross-posted from: expressional.social/users/Pete…
Belly of the Beast video channel hosted on PeerTube.wtf
is now caught up with the collection on YouTube. From now on, new #videos from YouTube will be quickly loaded to #PeerTube as well. [The previous Cuddly.Tube channel will be taken down soon.]URL: peertube.wtf/c/cuba/_botb/_vid…
Also significant is the expansion of playlists. BotB produces a lot of videos, and it is sometimes difficult to find what you are looking for. I spent some time going through the collection and adding playlists.
If you set up a login on PeerTube.wtf, you could also develop and save your own private playlists. But logins are not necessary to browse videos on PeerTube.wtf.
One playlist that will probably get a lot of use is Cuba and #Palestine, which contains 17 videos.
When you get a chance, please check them out.
#LetCubaLive #EndTheEmbargo #Solidarity #FreePalestine
#politics #BellyOfTheBeast #Cuba #Gaza
Belly of the Beast videos about Cuba channel hosted on PeerTube.wtf
is now caught up with the collection on YouTube. From now on, new #videos from YouTube will be quickly loaded to #PeerTube as well. [The previous Cuddly.Tube channel will be taken down soon.]URL: peertube.wtf/c/cuba_botb_video…
Also significant is the expansion of playlists. BotB produces a lot of videos, and it is sometimes difficult to find what you are looking for. I spent some time going through the collection and adding playlists.
If you set up a login on PeerTube.wtf, you could also develop and save your own private playlists. But logins are not necessary to browse videos on PeerTube.wtf.
One playlist that will probably get a lot of use is Cuba and #Palestine, which contains 17 videos.
When you get a chance, please check them out.
#LetCubaLive #EndTheEmbargo #Solidarity #FreePalestine
#politics #BellyOfTheBeast #Cuba #Gaza
PFAS: France's tap water is widely polluted with TFA, the most common 'forever chemical'
PFAS: France's tap water is widely polluted with TFA, the most common 'forever chemical'
A French state health agency analyzed over 600 samples of drinking water. 92% of them contained traces of trifluoroacetic acid (TFA), the smallest PFAS molecule, which is suspected to be toxic.Stéphane Mandard (Le Monde)
Greek unions reaffirm solidarity with Palestine after West Bank visit
cross-posted from: hexbear.net/post/6931655
cross-posted from: news.abolish.capital/post/1138…
The All-Workers’ Militant Front organized a solidarity visit to trade unions in the West Bank, witnessing firsthand the violence faced by Palestinian workers under occupation.The post Greek unions reaffirm solidarity with Palestine after West Bank visit appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.
Around the time the so-called ceasefire in the Gaza Strip was announced, the Greek All-Workers’ Militant Front (PAME) organized a solidarity visit to trade unions in Palestine. During their trip, PAME’s delegation met with labor organizations in the West Bank and traveled to refugee camps and communities that face regular attacks by Israeli settlers.
The delegation, which included PAME Secretariat member Giorgos Perros and Markos Bekris from the dockworkers’ organization ENEDEP, witnessed firsthand the daily reality of workers in the West Bank. “Every day, at the checkpoints of the army of the murderous state of Israel, thousands of Palestinians are subjected to humiliating inspections, waiting for hours in the heat or cold just to reach their workplace,” PAME described. “Every day they risk their lives under the barrel of a gun, struggling to earn a day’s wage to feed their families.”
Since the beginning of the genocide, PAME added, unemployment in the West Bank has reached roughly 70%. As Israel continues to deny work permits to Palestinian workers, many have been left with no option but to attempt risky crossings in search of occasional work. Several workers have been killed, and many more injured, trying to bypass the apartheid wall erected by Israeli authorities, including during the delegation’s visit, as documented by the media organization 902.gr.
The trade unionists also collected testimonies from agricultural workers and farmers whose land continues to be confiscated by Israeli authorities or seized by settlers, as well as from people from refugee camps, violently expelled from their homes and forced into schools or other makeshift shelters. This pattern of violence only escalated throughout the genocide and has continued despite the ceasefire announcement.
“The unrelenting, murderous attacks, even after the so-called ‘truce’ of October 10, 2025, with a gun held to the head of the Palestinian people, show that the crime has never stopped,” PAME wrote in a declaration published on November 29, the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People. “The working class and the people of Greece stand on the right side of history, against the slaughterhouses and wars of the imperialists, asserting the inalienable right of all peoples to live in peace in their own homeland.”
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Someone broke it down for me like this, and I haven't forgotten since:
Bour: because they're boring
Geo: because they want to control the earth
Isie: because life would be so much more isie without them
Gaza family incinerated in Israeli air strike on ‘safe zone’
Israel burned a Palestinian family to death in their tent while bombing a displacement camp and a nearby hospital in southern Gaza.
The victims included a father and his two children, aged eight and 10.
Israel has violated its ceasefire deal with Hamas at least 591 times in the 55 days since it took effect, resulting in the deaths of at least 366 people.
Updates: Israel kills Palestinian civilians in Gaza as it bombs Lebanon
Despite the ceasefire with Hamas, Israeli has killed nearly 370 Palestinians since October 10 without US criticism.Stephen Quillen (Al Jazeera)
Black holes may be hiding something that changes everything
Black holes may be hiding something that changes everything
We know that black holes are strange, but they could be hiding something even weirder beyond their horizonsGideon Koekoek (Aeon)
Manufacturer issues remote kill command to disable smart vacuum after engineer blocks it from collecting data — user revives it with custom hardware and Python scripts to run offline
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China discovers a 'mega deposit' of 490 million tons of lithium ore
Mega deposit contains 490 million tons of lithium-bearing rock - Earth.com
China confirms a huge lithium ore deposit, a strategic find that could strengthen its battery supply chain and disrupt the global market.Adrian Villellas (Earth.com)
Italy Slams Brakes on NATO Program to Buy US Weapons for Ukraine
Italy Slams Brakes on NATO Program to Buy US Weapons for Ukraine
Italy’s foreign minister said it would be “premature” for his country to participate in a NATO program to buy US weapons for Ukraine in light of ongoing peace negotiations.Donato Paolo Mancini (Bloomberg)
Thunderbirds F-16 crashes during California training flight
US Air Force Thunderbirds F-16 crashes during California training flight, pilot ejects safely
A Lockheed Martin F-16 from the US Air Force Thunderbirds demonstration team has crashed during a training flight in California, with the pilot ejecting safely and remaining in stable condition.Ryan Finnerty (Flight Global)
‘Fantastic news’: Ford welcomes ICE plan to order Ontario armoured vehicles | Globalnews.ca
‘Fantastic news’: Ford welcomes ICE plan to order Ontario armoured vehicles
Reports emerged this week of U.S. government procurement plans to order 20 Senator vehicles for its ICE officers, a move worth roughly $10 million.Isaac Callan (Global News)
‘Fantastic news’: Ford welcomes ICE plan to order Ontario armoured vehicles | Globalnews.ca
‘Fantastic news’: Ford welcomes ICE plan to order Ontario armoured vehicles
Reports emerged this week of U.S. government procurement plans to order 20 Senator vehicles for its ICE officers, a move worth roughly $10 million.Isaac Callan (Global News)
Fraud probe risks plunging EU into biggest crisis in decades
Fraud probe risks plunging EU into biggest crisis in decades
“People who don’t like von der Leyen will use this against her,” an EU official said after two prominent European figures were taken into custody.Zoya Sheftalovich (POLITICO)
High levels of ‘forever chemical’ found in cereal products across Europe – study
High levels of ‘forever chemical’ found in cereal products across Europe – study
Pesticide Action Network Europe study finds average concentrations 100 times higher than in tap waterHelena Horton (The Guardian)
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Israel 'bulldozed bodies' of Palestinian it killed at Gaza aid sites into unmarked graves
Israel 'bulldozed bodies' of Palestinian it killed at Gaza aid sites into unmarked graves
A CNN investigation has revealed that Israeli soldiers bulldozed the bodies of Palestinians killed while trying to access humanitarian aid near the Zikim crossing into northern Gaza.Tamara Turki (Middle East Eye)
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The Former Israeli Spies Overseeing US Government Cyber Security
Axonius is commonly described as an American company. While its headquarters and administrative functions are in New York, its founders, senior executives, and its primary financiers are all Israeli, and, critically, its software and engineering functions are based in Tel Aviv. Axonius has more than eight-hundred employees, and a search of LinkedIn profiles confirms that a majority of Axonius's engineers in Tel Aviv have a background in Israeli military intelligence.Perhaps none of this matters, and Axonius is simply indicative of the sleazy, symbiotic nature of the relationship between the US and its colonial outpost.
This would be a fair argument if it wasn't for Israel's long history of espionage in the United States. From recruiting Hollywood producers who ran front companies that stole nuclear technologies, to selling bugged software to foreign governments, spying (especially cyber spying), has been central to Israel's foreign policy. Robert Maxwell, the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, was a spy for Israel, and a significant amount of circumstantial evidence suggests Jeffrey Epstein was also an Israeli military intelligence asset. More recently, during Trump's first term, Israel planted miniature spying devices around the White House and other US government buildings in Washington DC to monitor US officials.
Arnon Milchan And Israel's Nuke Program
It seems he was no ordinary spy.Michael B Kelley (Business Insider)
Report: 20% of all US aid to Afghanistan was ‘wasted’
Report: 20% of all US aid to Afghanistan was ‘wasted’
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction issued a scathing final analysisConnor Echols (Responsible Statecraft)
United Nations paid $11M to Syrian security firm owned by Assad intelligence services, documents show
For over a decade, U.N. aid agencies poured millions into the company despite warnings from human rights advocates.
U.N. agencies “had no viable alternative and therefore proceeded to engage Shorouk despite the elevated risk profile,” the country team wrote to ICIJ. “Shorouk provided better value for money.”
Well okay then.
The US, UK, and Israeli imperialists already got what they wanted: Assad deposed by the moderate rebels1 that they’d funded & armed, so what’s the point of this smear campaign now? Why kick a dead horse? Just to jab at the UN for not dancing to their tune?
Many details of the Western propaganda and interference schemes in Syria are still unknown, locked in classified internal government and corporate documents. Yet the few leaks and investigative reports we have reveal an extensive, well-funded, years-long propaganda and disinformation warfare campaign waged first against the Syrian government but perhaps more intensely against Western publics. Through groups like the White Helmets and the media they produced, Western governments and corporations backed up their multi-billion-dollar effort to flood Syria with weapons and fighters with propaganda and civil society campaigns worth about a billion dollars. These facilitated rebel administrations on the ground and helped sell a simplified whitewashed narrative of the Syrian Civil War and build war fervor for Western intervention. This built off historical precedents, committed by the same people who engaged in similar campaigns in other Muslim majority countries.
- Salafi-Jihadist warlords ↩︎
Directing the Moderate Rebels: Syria as a Digital Age Crucible for Information and Propaganda Warfare
By Ben Arthur Thomason A decade into Syria’s catastrophe as one of the deadliest wars of the 21st century, we can take greater stock of its effects not just on geopolitics and Syria itself, but on imperial management strategies, information warfa…Ben Arthur Thomason (Hampton Institute)
A New Anonymous Phone Carrier Lets You Sign Up With Nothing but a Zip Code
Privacy stalwart Nicholas Merrill spent a decade fighting an FBI surveillance order. Now he wants to sell you phone service—without knowing almost anything about you.
Nicholas Merrill has spent his career fighting government surveillance. But he would really rather you didn’t call what he’s selling now a “burner phone.”
Yes, he dreams of a future where anyone in the US can get a working smartphone—complete with cellular coverage and data—without revealing their identity, even to the phone company. But to call such anonymous phones “burners” suggests that they’re for something illegal, shady, or at least subversive. The term calls to mind drug dealers or deep-throat confidential sources in parking garages.
With his new startup, Merrill says he instead wants to offer cellular service for your existing phone that makes near-total mobile privacy the permanent, boring default of daily life in the US. “We're not looking to cater to people doing bad things,” says Merrill. “We're trying to help people feel more comfortable living their normal lives, where they're not doing anything wrong, and not feel watched and exploited by giant surveillance and data mining operations. I think it’s not controversial to say the vast majority of people want that.”
That’s the thinking behind Phreeli, the phone carrier startup Merrill launched today, designed to be the most privacy-focused cellular provider available to Americans. Phreeli, as in, “speak freely,” aims to give its user a different sort of privacy from the kind that can be had with end-to-end encrypted texting and calling tools like Signal or WhatsApp. Those apps hide the content of conversations, or even, in Signal’s case, metadata like the identities of who is talking to whom. Phreeli instead wants to offer actual anonymity. It can’t help government agencies or data brokers obtain users’ identifying information because it has almost none to share. The only piece of information the company records about its users when they sign up for a Phreeli phone number is, in fact, a mere ZIP code. That’s the minimum personal data Merrill has determined his company is legally required to keep about its customers for tax purposes.
By asking users for almost no identifiable information, Merrill wants to protect them from one of the most intractable privacy problems in modern technology: Despite whatever surveillance-resistant communications apps you might use, phone carriers will always know which of their customers’ phones are connecting to which cell towers and when. Carriers have frequently handed that information over to data brokers willing to pay for it—or any FBI or ICE agent that demands it with a court order
Merrill has some firsthand experience with those demands. Starting in 2004, he fought a landmark, decade-plus legal battle against the FBI and the Department of Justice. As the owner of an internet service provider in the post-9/11 era, Merrill had received a secret order from the bureau to hand over data on a particular user—and he refused. After that, he spent another 15 years building and managing the Calyx Institute, a nonprofit that offers privacy tools like a snooping-resistant version of Android and a free VPN that collects no logs of its users’ activities. “Nick is somebody who is extremely principled and willing to take a stand for his principles,” says Cindy Cohn, who as executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation has led the group’s own decades-long fight against government surveillance. “He's careful and thoughtful, but also, at a certain level, kind of fearless.”
Nicholas Merrill with a copy of the National Security Letter he received from the FBI in 2004, ordering him to give up data on one of his customers. He refused, fought a decade-plus court battle—and won.
More recently, Merrill began to realize he had a chance to achieve a win against surveillance at a more fundamental level: by becoming the phone company. “I started to realize that if I controlled the mobile provider, there would be even more opportunities to create privacy for people,” Merrill says. “If we were able to set up our own network of cell towers globally, we can set the privacy policies of what those towers see and collect.”
Building or buying cell towers across the US for billions of dollars, of course, was not within the budget of Merrill’s dozen-person startup. So he’s created the next best thing: a so-called mobile virtual network operator, or MVNO, a kind of virtual phone carrier that pays one of the big, established ones—in Phreeli’s case, T-Mobile—to use its infrastructure.
The result is something like a cellular prophylactic. The towers are T-Mobile’s, but the contracts with users—and the decisions about what private data to require from them—are Phreeli’s. “You can't control the towers. But what can you do?” he says. “You can separate the personally identifiable information of a person from their activities on the phone system.”
Signing up a customer for phone service without knowing their name is, surprisingly, legal in all 50 states, Merrill says. Anonymously accepting money from users—with payment options other than envelopes of cash—presents more technical challenges. To that end, Phreeli has implemented a new encryption system it calls Double-Blind Armadillo, based on cutting-edge cryptographic protocols known as zero-knowledge proofs. Through a kind of mathematical sleight of hand, those crypto functions are capable of tasks like confirming that a certain phone has had its monthly service paid for, but without keeping any record that links a specific credit card number to that phone. Phreeli users can also pay their bills (or rather, prepay them, since Phreeli has no way to track down anonymous users who owe them money) with tough-to-trace cryptocurrency like Zcash or Monero.
Phreeli users can, however, choose to set their own dials for secrecy versus convenience. If they offer an email address at signup, they can more easily recover their account if their phone is lost. To get a SIM card, they can give their mailing address—which Merrill says Phreeli will promptly delete after the SIM ships—or they can download the digital equivalent known as an eSIM, even, if they choose, from a site Phreeli will host on the Tor anonymity network.
Phreeli’s “armadillo” analogy—the animal also serves as the mascot in its logo—is meant to capture this sliding scale of privacy that Phreeli offers its users: Armadillos always have a layer of armor, but they can choose whether to expose their vulnerable underbelly or curl into a fully protected ball.
Even if users choose the less paranoid side of that spectrum of options, Merrill argues, his company will still be significantly less surveillance-friendly than existing phone companies, which have long represented one of the weakest links in the tech world’s privacy protections. All major US cellular carriers comply, for instance, with law enforcement surveillance orders like “tower dumps” that hand over data to the government on every phone that connected to a particular cell tower during a certain time. They’ve also happily, repeatedly handed over your data to corporate interests: Last year the Federal Communications Commission fined AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile nearly $200 million for selling users’ personal information, including their locations, to data brokers. (AT&T’s fine was later overturned by an appeals court ruling intended to limit the FCC’s enforcement powers.) Many data brokers in turn sell the information to federal agencies, including ICE and other parts of the DHS, offering an all-too-easy end run around restrictions on those agencies’ domestic spying.
Phreeli doesn’t promise to be a surveillance panacea. Even if your cellular carrier isn’t tying your movements to your identity, the operating system of whatever phone you sign up with might be. Even your mobile apps can track you.
But for a startup seeking to be the country’s most privacy-focused mobile carrier, the bar is low. “The goal of this phone company I'm starting is to be more private than the three biggest phone carriers in the US. That’s the promise we’re going to massively overdeliver on,” says Merrill. “I don’t think there’s any way we can mess that up.”
Merrill’s not-entirely-voluntary decision to spend the last 20-plus years as a privacy diehard began with three pages of paper that arrived at his office on a February day in New York in 2004. An FBI agent knocked on the door of his small internet service provider firm called Calyx, headquartered in a warehouse space a block from the Holland Tunnel in Manhattan. When Merrill answered, he found an older man with parted white hair, dressed in a trench coat like a comic book G-man, who handed him an envelope.
Merrill opened it and read the letter while the agent waited. The first and second paragraphs told him he was hereby ordered to hand over virtually all information he possessed for one of his customers, identified by their email address, explaining that this demand was authorized by a law he’d later learn was part of the Patriot Act. The third paragraph informed him he couldn’t tell anyone he’d even received this letter—a gag order.
Then the agent departed without answering any of Merrill’s questions. He was left to decide what to do, entirely alone.
Merrill was struck immediately by the fact that the letter had no signature from a judge. He had in fact been handed a so-called National Security Letter, or NSL, a rarely seen and highly controversial tool of the Bush administration that allowed the FBI to demand information without a warrant, so long as it was related to “national security.”
Calyx’s actual business, since he’d first launched the company in the early ’90s with a bank of modems in the nonfunctional fireplace of a New York apartment, had evolved into hosting the websites of big corporate customers like Mitsubishi and Ikea. But Merrill used that revenue stream to give pro bono or subsidized web hosting to nonprofit clients he supported like the Marijuana Policy Project and Indymedia—and to offer fast internet connections to a few friends and acquaintances like the one named in this surveillance order.
Merrill has never publicly revealed the identity of the NSL's target, and he declined to share it with WIRED. But he knew this particular customer, and he certainly didn’t strike Merrill as a national security threat. If he were, Merrill thought, why not just get a warrant? The customer would later tell Merrill he had in fact been pressured by the FBI to become an informant—and had refused. The bureau, he told Merrill, had then retaliated by putting him on the no-fly list and pressuring employers not to hire him. (The FBI didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment on the case.)
Merrill immediately decided to risk disobeying the gag order—on pain of what consequences, he had no idea—and called his lawyer, who told him to go to the New York affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, which happened to be one of Calyx’s web-hosting clients. After a few minutes in a cab, Merrill was talking to a young attorney named Jameel Jaffer in the ACLU’s Financial District office. “I wish I could say that we reassured him with our expertise on the NSL statute, but that's not how it went down,” Jaffer says. “We had never seen one of these before.”
Merrill, meanwhile, knew that every lawyer he showed the letter to might represent another count in his impending prosecution. “I was terrified,” he says. “I kind of assumed someone could just come to my place that night, throw a hood over my head, and drag me away.”
Phreeli will use a novel encryption system called DoubleBlind Armadillo—based on cutting edge crypto protocols known as...
Phreeli will use a novel encryption system called Double-Blind Armadillo—based on cutting edge crypto protocols known as zero-knowledge proofs—to pull of tricks like accepting credit card payments from customers without keeping any record that ties that payment information to their particular phone.
Despite his fears, Merrill never complied with the FBI’s letter. Instead, he decided to fight its constitutionality in court, with the help of pro bono representation from the ACLU and later the Yale Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic. That fight would last 11 years and entirely commandeer his life.
Merrill and his lawyers argued that the NSL represented an unconstitutional search and a violation of his free-speech rights—and they won. But Congress only amended the NSL statute, leaving the provision about its gag order intact, and the legal battle dragged out for years longer. Even after the NSL was rescinded altogether, Merrill continued to fight for the right to talk about its existence. “This was a time when so many people in his position were essentially cowering under their desks. But he felt an obligation as a citizen to speak out about surveillance powers that he thought had gone too far,” says Jaffer, who represented Merrill for the first six years of that courtroom war. “He impressed me with his courage.”
Battling the FBI took over Merrill’s life to the degree that he eventually shut down his ISP for lack of time or will to run the business and instead took a series of IT jobs. “I felt too much weight on my shoulders,” he says. “I was just constantly on the phone with lawyers, and I was scared all the time.”
By 2010, Merrill had won the right to publicly name himself as the NSL’s recipient. By 2015 he’d beaten the gag order entirely and released the full letter with only the target’s name redacted. But Merrill and the ACLU never got the Supreme Court precedent they wanted from the case. Instead, the Patriot Act itself was amended to reign in NSLs’ unconstitutional powers.
In the meantime, those years of endless bureaucratic legal struggles had left Merrill disillusioned with judicial or even legislative action as a way to protect privacy. Instead, he decided to try a different approach. “The third way to fight surveillance is with technology,” he says. “That was my big realization.”
So, just after Merrill won the legal right to go public with his NSL battle in 2010, he founded the Calyx Institute, a nonprofit that shared a name with his old ISP but was instead focused on building free privacy tools and services. The privacy-focused version of Google’s Android OS it would develop, designed to strip out data-tracking tools and use Signal by default for calls and texts, would eventually have close to 100,000 users. It ran servers for anonymous, encrypted instant messaging over the chat protocol XMPP with around 300,000 users. The institute also offered a VPN service and ran servers that comprised part of the volunteer-based Tor anonymity network, tools that Merrill estimates were used by millions.
As he became a cause célèbre and then a standout activist in the digital privacy world over those years, Merrill says he started to become aware of the growing problem of untrustworthy cellular providers in an increasingly phone-dependent world. He’d sometimes come across anti-surveillance hard-liners determined to avoid giving any personal information to cellular carriers, who bought SIM cards with cash and signed up for prepaid plans with false names. Some even avoided cell service altogether, using phones they connected only to Wi-Fi. “Eventually those people never got invites to any parties,” Merrill says.
All these schemes, he knew, were legal enough. So why not a phone company that only collects minimal personal information—or none—from its normal, non-extremist customers? As early as 2019, he had already consulted with lawyers and incorporated Phreeli as a company. He decided on the for-profit startup route after learning that the 501c3 statute can’t apply to a telecom firm. Only last year, he finally raised $5 million, mostly from one angel investor. (Merrill declined to name the person. Naturally, they value their privacy.)
Building a system that could function like a normal phone company—and accept users’ payments like one—without storing virtually any identifying information on those customers presented a distinct challenge. To solve it, Merrill consulted with Zooko Wilcox, one of the creators of Zcash, perhaps the closest thing in the world to actual anonymous cryptocurrency. The Z in Zcash stands for “zero-knowledge proofs,” a relatively new form of crypto system that has allowed Zcash’s users to prove things (like who has paid whom) while keeping all information (like their identities, or even the amount of payments) fully encrypted.
For Phreeli, Wilcox suggested a related but slightly different system: so-called “zero-knowledge access passes.” Wilcox compares the system to people showing their driver’s license at the door of a club. “You’ve got to give your home address to the bouncer,” Wilcox says incredulously. The magical properties of zero knowledge proofs, he says, would allow you to generate an unforgeable crypto credential that proves you’re over 21 and then show that to the doorman without revealing your name, address, or even your age. “A process that previously required identification gets replaced by something that only requires authorization,” Wilcox says. “See the difference?”
The same trick will now let Phreeli users prove they’ve prepaid their phone bill without connecting their name, address, or any payment information to their phone records—even if they pay with a credit card. The result, Merrill says, will be a user experience for most customers that’s not very different from their existing phone carrier, but with a radically different level of data collection.
As for Wilcox, he’s long been one of that small group of privacy zealots who buys his SIM cards in cash with a fake name. But he hopes Phreeli will offer an easier path—not just for people like him, but for normies too.
“I don't know of anybody who's ever offered this credibly before,” says Wilcox. “Not the usual telecom-strip-mining-your-data phone, not a black-hoodie hacker phone, but a privacy-is-normal phone.”
Even so, enough tech companies have pitched privacy as a feature for their commercial product that jaded consumers may not buy into a for-profit telecom like Phreeli purporting to offer anonymity. But the EFF’s Cohn says that Merrill’s track record shows he’s not just using the fight against surveillance as a marketing gimmick to sell something. “Having watched Nick for a long time, it's all a means to an end for him,” she says. “And the end is privacy for everyone.”
Merrill may not like the implications of describing Phreeli as a cellular carrier where every phone is a burner phone. But there’s little doubt that some of the company’s customers will use its privacy protections for crime—just as with every surveillance-resistant tool, from Signal to Tor to briefcases of cash.
Phreeli won’t, at least, offer a platform for spammers and robocallers, Merrill says. Even without knowing users’ identities, he says the company will block that kind of bad behavior by limiting how many calls and texts users are allowed, and banning users who appear to be gaming the system. “If people think this is going to be a safe haven for abusing the phone network, that’s not going to work,” Merrill says.
But some customers of his phone company will, to Merrill’s regret, do bad things, he says—just as they sometimes used to with pay phones, that anonymous, cash-based phone service that once existed on every block of American cities. “You put a quarter in, you didn’t need to identify yourself, and you could call whoever you wanted,” he reminisces. “And 99.9 percent of the time, people weren't doing bad stuff.” The small minority who were, he argues, didn’t justify the involuntary societal slide into the cellular panopticon we all live in today, where a phone call not tied to freely traded data on the caller’s identity is a rare phenomenon.
“The pendulum has swung so far in favor of total information awareness,” says Merrill, using an intelligence term of the Bush administration whose surveillance order set him on this path 21 years ago. “Things that we used to be able to take for granted have slipped through our fingers.”
“Other phone companies are selling an apartment that comes with no curtains—where the windows are incompatible with curtains,” Merrill says. “We’re trying to say, no, curtains are normal. Privacy is normal.”
https://www.wired.com/story/new-anonymous-phone-carrier-sign-up-with-nothing-but-a-zip-code/
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![eremeya • 3y ago [--] I have set up Mint, T-Mobile prepaid, att prepaid, and cricket accounts without using personal info. Upvote 7 Downvote spinifex23 • 3y ago [--] I have a T-Mobile pre-paid for app development that I paid for with cash. To top it up, I just buy refill cards. If you're worried about being IDed with a camera during checkout? A nice, floppy hat from a thrift store might help. And don't forget a nice, large mask! COVID is still around! Upvote 3 Downvote [deleted] • 3y ago [--] There’s a minimart near me who still does phone PINs from a card terminal, they even have MVNOs like AMP’d mobile and other defunct ones in there. No cameras, no security besides bars on the doors and windows. I suspect the owner has some ‘personal security’ under the counter, so he doesn’t care much to add cameras. I go there because I can get every prepaid PIN under the sun and there’s never a line, not because of the anonymity though.](https://poliverso.org/photo/link/373989 "eremeya • 3y ago [--] I have set up Mint, T-Mobile prepaid, att prepaid, and cricket accounts without using personal info. Upvote 7 Downvote spinifex23 • 3y ago [--] I have a T-Mobile pre-paid for app development that I paid for with cash. To top it up, I just buy refill cards. If you're worried about being IDed with a camera during checkout? A nice, floppy hat from a thrift store might help. And don't forget a nice, large mask! COVID is still around! Upvote 3 Downvote [deleted] • 3y ago [--] There’s a minimart near me who still does phone PINs from a card terminal, they even have MVNOs like AMP’d mobile and other defunct ones in there. No cameras, no security besides bars on the doors and windows. I suspect the owner has some ‘personal security’ under the counter, so he doesn’t care much to add cameras. I go there because I can get every prepaid PIN under the sun and there’s never a line, not because of the anonymity though.")
FWIW I'm not recommending or not this service but they are :
- based in the US, yet
- provide international roaming
- e-SIMs (so nothing to send)
so it might be interesting in some cases for people not living in the US.
Bootloader Unlock Wall of Shame
GitHub - zenfyrdev/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shame: Keeping track of companies that "care about your data 🥺"
Keeping track of companies that "care about your data 🥺" - zenfyrdev/bootloader-unlock-wall-of-shameGitHub
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Moscow not against Kiev taking care of its security, but not at Russia's expense — Putin
Moscow not against Kiev taking care of its security, but not at Russia's expense — Putin
The Russian leader recalled that there are general agreements to the effect that the security of one state cannot be guaranteed at the expense of the security of othersTASS
Russia did not annex Crimea, but extended helping hand to its people — Putin
Russia did not annex Crimea, but extended helping hand to its people — Putin
According to the Russian leader, the residents of Crimea recognized that they had become part of an independent Ukraine following the Soviet Union's collapseTASS
Four countries to boycott Eurovision 2026 as Israel cleared to compete
Ireland, Spain, Slovenia and the Netherlands will boycott next year’s Eurovision after Israel was given the all-clear to compete in the 2026 song contest despite calls by several participating broadcasters for its exclusion over the war in Gaza.
No vote on Israel’s participation was held on Thursday at the general assembly of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the body that organises the hugely popular international annual singing competition.
Instead, participating broadcasters voted only to introduce new rules designed to stop governments and third parties from disproportionately promoting songs to influence voters.
Four countries to boycott Eurovision 2026 as Israel cleared to compete
Ireland, Spain, Slovenia and the Netherlands pull out after decision not to hold vote on Israel’s participationPhilip Oltermann (The Guardian)
Ireland, Spain, Slovenia and the Netherlands to boycott Eurovision 2026, as Israel allowed to compete
Ireland, Spain, Slovenia and the Netherlands will boycott next year’s Eurovision after Israel was given the all-clear to compete in the 2026 song contest despite calls by several participating broadcasters for its exclusion over the war in Gaza.
No vote on Israel’s participation was held on Thursday at the general assembly of the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), the body that organises the hugely popular international annual singing competition.
Instead, participating broadcasters voted only to introduce new rules designed to stop governments and third parties from disproportionately promoting songs to influence voters.
Four countries to boycott Eurovision 2026 as Israel cleared to compete
Ireland, Spain, Slovenia and the Netherlands pull out after decision not to hold vote on Israel’s participationPhilip Oltermann (The Guardian)
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Israel-backed gang leader killed in Gaza; Israel strikes Lebanon amid talks; ICE in New Orleans
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/39867577
Israeli attacks kill six people across Gaza, with 16 others injured, in the past 24 hours. Yasser Abu Shabab, leader of Israel-backed gang, is killed. Israeli tanks roll into Gaza City. Israel and Hamas trade casualties in Rafah. Israeli forces used bulldozers to hide the bodies of Palestinians killed while seeking aid at Zikim. President Donald Trump says the ceasefire is “moving along.” Israel strikes four towns in southern Lebanon in a new military operation announced Thursday. Lebanon and Israel hold first direct talks in 40 years. Israeli raids near Tubas in the West Bank. Israel is building a fence through the Jordan Valley, on the model of its West Bank wall. DHS launches another raid in a major American city, this time in New Orleans. Trump pardons Democrat Rep. Henry Cuellar on his bribery case, primarily because he shares his right-wing immigration views. Legal experts warn Microsoft about its complicity in the Gaza genocide. Changes in medical record-keeping at the Department of Veterans Affairs portend disaster. Romanian navy intercepts a Ukrainian-manufactured drone. Indian police kill 12 Maoist rebels in Chhattisgarh. A bomb in northwestern Pakistan kills three police officers, while Afghanistan-Pakistan talks stall. Fighting intensifies in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.
Israel-backed gang leader killed in Gaza; Israel strikes Lebanon amid talks; ICE in New Orleans
Israeli attacks kill six people across Gaza, with 16 others injured, in the past 24 hours. Yasser Abu Shabab, leader of Israel-backed gang, is killed. Israeli tanks roll into Gaza City. Israel and Hamas trade casualties in Rafah. Israeli forces used bulldozers to hide the bodies of Palestinians killed while seeking aid at Zikim. President Donald Trump says the ceasefire is “moving along.” Israel strikes four towns in southern Lebanon in a new military operation announced Thursday. Lebanon and Israel hold first direct talks in 40 years. Israeli raids near Tubas in the West Bank. Israel is building a fence through the Jordan Valley, on the model of its West Bank wall. DHS launches another raid in a major American city, this time in New Orleans. Trump pardons Democrat Rep. Henry Cuellar on his bribery case, primarily because he shares his right-wing immigration views. Legal experts warn Microsoft about its complicity in the Gaza genocide. Changes in medical record-keeping at the Department of Veterans Affairs portend disaster. Romanian navy intercepts a Ukrainian-manufactured drone. Indian police kill 12 Maoist rebels in Chhattisgarh. A bomb in northwestern Pakistan kills three police officers, while Afghanistan-Pakistan talks stall. Fighting intensifies in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.Israel-backed gang leader killed in Gaza; Israel strikes Lebanon amid talks; ICE in New Orleans
Drop Site Daily: December 4, 2025Drop Site News
Earth Just Got Slammed By a Surprise Solar Flare. Why Didn’t Scientists See It Coming?
Earth Just Got Slammed By a Surprise Solar Flare. Why Didn’t Scientists See It Coming?
Scientists can usually spot coronal mass ejections before they mess with GPS and cause power outages—but this one snuck past coronagraphs and satellites.Elizabeth Rayne (Popular Mechanics)
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Dutch pull out of Eurovision Song Festival due to Israel
The Netherlands will not take part in next year’s Eurovision Song Contest following the decision by organiser EBU not to exclude Israel.
Public broadcasting company NPO said no other broadcaster will step in to send a Dutch entry after AvroTros’s withdrawal, although it will ensure the contest is still broadcast for Dutch viewers.
European public broadcasters met at the EBU headquarters in Geneva to discuss the future of Eurovision on Thursday. AvroTros, together with broadcasters from Ireland, Iceland, Spain and Slovenia, had argued that Israel’s public broadcaster should be barred because of the war in Gaza.
AvroTros also said the Israeli government had used the contest as a “political instrument”, pointing to a government-run promotional campaign for the country’s entry.
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Weird issues after swapping GPU from nVidia to AMD: audio crackling and mouse cursor "lagging" and going crazy
PoP_OS 22.04.
Recently upgraded GPU and went from nVidia to AMD. Since AMD drivers are already baked into the kernel, I simply uninstalled nVidia ones by
sudo apt purge ~nnvidiabut after doing so and rebooting with the new GPU, the game I had been playing until minutes before the swap started giving me an unbearable amount of audio crackling, mainly (but not exclusively) when there's audio besides the one from the game playing (e.g. background music player).
Searching online I found out it's an issue with pipewire, and found someone mentioning a solution that edited the quantum values, though that didn't work for me; specifically, making default.clock.quantum larger.
The second issue happens everywhere but fullscreen applications (e.g. games): if I quickly draw circles with my mouse, at some point the pointer starts drifting away in erratic ways, even though I'm still drawing circles with my mouse; other times, especially when there's a windowed app (such as FreeTube while playing a video), even simply moving the mouse across the screen results in the pointer lagging behind as if the screen were jelly, and if I start drawing circles, the video stutters to the point of freezing.
Now, the audio issue is extremely problematic since I have to keep volume very low, as even an average volume means crackling is loud to the point it hurts my ears; the jelly-pointer is less of an issue, but still very annoying.
Any ideas?
Anyone who had these issues and is now on PoP 24 beta? Long shot, but it releases next week and if the issue was fixed for you, I'll wait, otherwise I might just try a different distro.
Thanks in advance!
Finally got my Linux laptop at work
I work in a corporation with an IT-department that is all in on whatever Microsoft is offering. My team has for some time gotten more and more autonomy in tooling as IT is overloaded and forced to relinquish some control, but we still rely on them for supplying compliant machines that have access to our resources.
I requested a Linux machine just over 5 months ago, and I finally got it this week. It is running Ubuntu with GNOME, not my first choice, but the only thing that is Microsoft Intune compliant as far as I know.
So far it is such a relief. A better specced machine with less bloat running on it. It should be far between any OOM-issue I get now... Slightly annoying having to use Edge for any service requiring corporate SSO, but I'll swallow that pill...
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NimaMag
in reply to NimaMag • • •In short, orphaned children from Ukraine were flown to Antalya where they were sexually abused and then were pressured to sign papers saying everything was consensual.
The incident was covered up by Turkey and Ukraine.
DylanMc6 [any, any]
in reply to NimaMag • • •eldavi
in reply to DylanMc6 [any, any] • • •DylanMc6 [any, any]
in reply to eldavi • • •