Gli analisti di NordVPN stimano che miliardi di cookie rubati vengano venduti sul dark web e su Telegram. Circa il 7-9% di questi cookie è ancora attivo e può essere utilizzato dagli aggressori.

Secondo i ricercatori, attualmente i criminali possono acquistare più di 93,7 miliardi di cookie online. I cookie possono sembrare innocui, ma nelle mani sbagliate diventano chiavi digitali per accedere alle informazioni più personali. “Ciò che è stato progettato per comodità è ora una vulnerabilità crescente che viene sfruttata dai criminali informatici di tutto il mondo”, afferma Adrianus Warmenhoven.

NordVPN avverte che la stragrande maggioranza dei cookie rubati (90,25%) contiene dati identificativi volti a identificare gli utenti e a inviare pubblicità mirata. I cookie possono contenere anche dati come nomi, indirizzi di casa e indirizzi email, dati sulla posizione, password e numeri di telefono. Tuttavia, si segnala che tali informazioni sono presenti solo nello 0,5% di tutti i cookie rubati.

I cookie possono anche contenere informazioni sulle sessioni utente. Secondo gli esperti, più di 1,2 miliardi di questi file sono ancora attivi (circa il 6% del totale) e sono generalmente considerati il ​​problema più grave.

I criminali informatici possono utilizzare i cookie di sessione per impersonare altre persone sui siti web, autenticarsi a vari servizi senza utilizzare credenziali e, in molti casi, bypassare l’autenticazione a più fattori. Pertanto, i cookie di sessione sono molto interessanti per i criminali informatici, che possono utilizzarli per raccogliere informazioni da caselle di posta, applicazioni bancarie, sistemi aziendali e così via.

I cookie cadono più spesso nelle mani dei criminali grazie agli infostealer. Il leader in questo ambito, secondo i ricercatori, è Redline stealer (il 44% di tutti i cookie rilevati era associato a lui). Il secondo, terzo e quarto posto della lista sono occupati da Vidar, LummaC2 e Meta, sebbene le forze dell’ordine abbiano intrapreso azioni legali contro gli ultimi due (così come contro Redline).

Il costo di accesso a questi strumenti dannosi è relativamente basso, considerando l’enorme profitto che si può ricavare dal furto delle risorse digitali degli utenti. Lumma, ad esempio, può essere acquistato per soli 250 dollari, mentre Redline e Meta costano solo 150 dollari per il set di funzionalità base.

Gli esperti raccomandano inoltre di aggiornare regolarmente i dispositivi e di installare le patch più recenti se la priorità è prevenire infezioni da stealer e altri malware. Sarebbe inoltre consigliabile cancellare regolarmente la cronologia del browser ed eliminare i cookie non necessari. “Molti utenti non si rendono conto che le sessioni attive possono persistere anche dopo la chiusura del browser”, afferma Warmenhoven. “Cancellare questi dati aiuta a ridurre le possibilità di accessi non autorizzati”.

L'articolo Tanta Roba. 93 miliardi di cookie rubati! La nuova miniera d’oro degli hacker sul Dark Web proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

Here are some events we hope you can make:

• Friday, June 13th, 6-8pm: Join us at the Boston Dyke March. We would love your help on the march;
• Sunday, June 15th, 10am-4pm: Attend our party conference in Somerville. Details at our conference page;
• Tuesday, June 17th, 6pm: Map surveillance cameras in Cambridge. Meet at Cambridge Kiosk (former Out of Town News), Harvard Square;
• Saturday, June 21st: Join us at the Boxborough Fifers Day. Tell us if you will help us at the table.

masspirates.org/blog/2025/06/0…

With few exceptions, amateur radio is a notably sedentary pursuit. Yes, some hams will set up in a national or state park for a “Parks on the Air” activation, and particularly energetic operators may climb a mountain for “Summits on the Air,” but most hams spend a lot of time firmly planted in a comfortable chair, spinning the dials in search of distant signals or familiar callsigns to add to their logbook.

There’s another exception to the band-surfing tendencies of hams: fox hunting. Generally undertaken at a field day event, fox hunts pit hams against each other in a search for a small hidden transmitter, using directional antennas and portable receivers to zero in on often faint signals. It’s all in good fun, but fox hunts serve a more serious purpose: they train hams in the finer points of radio direction finding, a skill that can be used to track down everything from manmade noise sources to unlicensed operators. Or, as was done in the 1940s, to ferret out foreign agents using shortwave radio to transmit intelligence overseas.

That was the primary mission of the Radio Intelligence Division, a rapidly assembled organization tasked with protecting the United States by monitoring the airwaves and searching for spies. The RID proved to be remarkably effective during the war years, in part because it drew heavily from the amateur radio community to populate its many field stations, but also because it brought an engineering mindset to the problem of finding needles in a radio haystack.

Winds of War

America’s involvement in World War II was similar to Hemingway’s description of the process of going bankrupt: Gradually, then suddenly. Reeling from the effects of the Great Depression, the United States had little interest in European affairs and no appetite for intervention in what increasingly appeared to be a brewing military conflict. This isolationist attitude persisted through the 1930s, surviving even the recognized start of hostilities with Hitler’s sweep into Poland in 1939, at least for the general public.

But behind the scenes, long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, precipitous changes were afoot. War in Europe was clearly destined from the outset to engulf the world, and in the 1940s there was only one technology with a truly global reach: radio. The ether would soon be abuzz with signals directing troop movements, coordinating maritime activities, or, most concerningly, agents using spy radios to transmit vital intelligence to foreign governments. To be deaf to such signals would be an unacceptable risk to any nation that fancied itself a world power, even if it hadn’t yet taken a side in the conflict.

It was in that context that US President Franklin Roosevelt approved an emergency request from the Federal Communications Commission in 1940 for $1.6 million to fund a National Defense Operations section. The group would be part of the engineering department within the FCC and was tasked with detecting and eliminating any illegal transmissions originating from within the country. This was aided by an order in June of that year which prohibited the 51,000 US amateur radio operators from making any international contacts, and an order four months later for hams to submit to fingerprinting and proof of citizenship.

A Ham’s Ham

George Sterling (W1AE/W3DF). FCC commissioner in 1940, he organized and guided RID during the war. Source: National Assoc. of Broadcasters, 1948
The man behind the formation of the NDO was George Sterling. To call Sterling an early adopter of amateur radio would be an understatement. He plunged into radio as a hobby in 1908 at the tender age of 14, just a few years after Marconi and others demonstrated the potential of radio. He was licensed immediately after the passage of the Radio Act of 1927, callsign 1AE (later W1AE), and continued to experiment with spark gap stations. When the United States entered World War I, Sterling served for 19 months in France as an instructor in the Signal Corps, later organizing and operating the Corps’ first radio intelligence unit to locate enemy positions based on their radio transmissions.

After a brief post-war stint as a wireless operator in the Merchant Marine, Sterling returned to the US to begin a career in the federal government with a series of radio engineering and regulatory jobs. He rose through the ranks over the 1920s and 1930s, eventually becoming Assistant Chief of the FCC Field Division in 1937, in charge of radio engineering for the entire nation. It was on the strength of his performance in that role that he was tapped to be the first — and as it would turn out, only — chief of the NDO, which was quickly raised to the level of a new division within the FCC and renamed the Radio Intelligence Division.

To adequately protect the homeland, the RID needed a truly national footprint. Detecting shortwave transmissions is simple enough; any single location with enough radio equipment and a suitable antenna could catch most transmissions originating from within the US or its territories. But Sterling’s experience in France taught him that a network of listening stations would be needed to accurately triangulate on a source and provide a physical location for follow-up investigation.

The network that Sterling built would eventually comprise twelve primary stations scattered around the US and its territories, including Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Each primary station reported directly to RID headquarters in Washington, DC, by telephone, telegraph, or teletype. Each primary station supported up to a few dozen secondary stations, with further coastal monitoring stations set up as the war ground on and German U-boats became an increasingly common threat. The network would eventually comprise over 100 stations stretched from coast to coast and beyond, staffed by almost 900 agents.

Searching the Ether

The job of staffing these stations with skilled radio operators wasn’t easy, but Sterling knew he had a ready and willing pool to pull from: his fellow hams. Recently silenced and eager to put their skills to the test, hams signed up in droves for the RID. About 80% of the RID staff were composed of current or former amateur radio operators, including the enforcement branch of sworn officers who carried badges and guns. They were the sharp end of the spear, tasked with the “last mile” search for illicit transmitters and possible confrontation with foreign agents.

But before the fedora-sporting, Tommy-gun toting G-men could swoop in to make their arrest came the tedious process of detecting and classifying potentially illicit signals. This task was made easier by an emergency order issued on December 8, 1941, the day after the Pearl Harbor attack, forbidding all amateur radio transmissions below 56 MHz. This reduced the number of targets the RID listening stations had to sort through, but the high-frequency bands cover a lot of turf, and listening to all that spectrum at the same time required a little in-house innovation.

Today, monitoring wide swaths of the spectrum is relatively easy, but in the 1940s, it was another story. Providing this capability fell to RID engineers James Veatch and William Hoffert, who invented an aperiodic receiver that covered everything from 50 kHz to 60 MHz. Called the SSR-201, this radio used a grid-leak detector to rectify and amplify all signals picked up by the antenna. A bridge circuit connected the output of the detector to an audio amplifier, with the option to switch an audio oscillator into the circuit so that continuous wave transmissions — the spy’s operating mode of choice — could be monitored. There was also an audio-triggered relay that could start and stop an external recorder, allowing for unattended operation.
SSR-201 aperiodic receiver, used by the RID to track down clandestine transmitters. Note the “Magic Eye” indicator. Source: Steve Ellington (N4LQ)
The SSR-201 and a later variant, the K-series, were built by Kann Manufacturing, a somewhat grand name for a modest enterprise operating out of the Baltimore, Maryland, basement of Manuel Kann (W3ZK), a ham enlisted by the RID to mass produce the receiver. Working with a small team of radio hobbyists and broadcast engineers mainly working after hours, Kann Manufacturing managed to make about 200 of the all-band receivers by the end of the war, mainly for the RID but also for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the forerunner of the CIA, as well as the intelligence services of other allied nations.

These aperiodic receivers were fairly limited in terms of sensitivity and lacked directional capability, and so were good only for a first pass scan of a specific area for the presence of a signal. Consequently, they were often used in places where enemy transmitters were likely to operate, such as major cities near foreign embassies. This application relied on the built-in relay in the receiver to trigger a remote alarm or turn on a recorder, giving the radio its nickname: “The Watchdog.” The receivers were also often mounted in mobile patrol vehicles that would prowl likely locations for espionage, such as Army bases and seaports. Much later in the war, RID mobile units would drive through remote locations such as the woods around Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and an arid plateau in the high desert near Los Alamos, New Mexico, for reasons that would soon become all too obvious.

Radio G-Men

Adcock-type goniometer radio direction finder. The dipole array could be rotated 360 degrees from inside the shack to pinpoint a bearing to the transmitter. Source: Radio Boulevard
Once a candidate signal was detected and headquarters alerted to its frequency, characteristics, and perhaps even its contents, orders went out to the primary stations to begin triangulation. Primary stations were equipped with radio direction finding (RDF) equipment, including the Adcock-type goniometer. These were generally wooden structures elevated above the ground with a distinctive Adcock antenna on the roof of the shack. The antenna was a variation on the Adcock array using two vertical dipoles on a steerable mount. The dipoles were connected to the receiving gear in the shack 180 degrees out of phase. This produced a radiation pattern with very strong nulls broadside to the antenna, making it possible for operators to determine the precise angle to the source by rotating the antenna array until the signal is minimized. Multiple stations would report the angle to the target to headquarters, where it would be mapped out and a rough location determined by where the lines intersected.

With a rough location determined, RID mobile teams would hit the streets. RID had a fleet of mobile units based on commercial Ford and Hudson models, custom-built for undercover work. Radio gear partially filled the back seat area, power supplies filled the trunk, and a small steerable loop antenna could be deployed through the roof for radio direction finding on the go. Mobile units were also equipped with special radio sets for communicating back to their primary station, using the VHF band to avoid creating unwanted targets for the other stations to monitor.

Mobile units were generally capable of narrowing the source of a transmission down to a city block or so, but locating the people behind the transmission required legwork. Armed RID enforcement agents would set out in search of the transmitter, often aided by a device dubbed “The Snifter.” This was a field-strength meter specially built for covert operations; small enough to be pocketed and monitored through headphones styled to look like a hearing aid, the agents could use the Snifter to ferret out the spy, hopefully catching them in the act and sealing their fate.

A Job (Too) Well Done

For a hastily assembled organization, the RID was remarkably effective. Originally tasked with monitoring the entire United States and its territories, that scope very quickly expanded to include almost every country in South America, where the Nazi regime found support and encouragement. Between 1940 and 1944, the RID investigated tens of thousands, resulting in 400 unlicensed stations being silenced. Not all of these were nefarious; one unlucky teenager in Portland, Oregon, ran afoul of the RID by hooking an antenna up to a record player so he could play DJ to his girlfriend down the street. But other operations led to the capture of 200 spies, including a shipping executive who used his ships to refuel Nazi U-boats operating in the Gulf of Mexico, and the famous Dusquense Spy Ring operating on Long Island.

Thanks in large part to the technical prowess of the hams populating its ranks, the RID’s success contained the seeds of its downfall. Normally, such an important self-defense task as preventing radio espionage would fall to the Army or Navy, but neither organization had the technical expertise in 1940, nor did they have the time to learn given how woefully unprepared they were for the coming war. Both branches eventually caught up, though, and neither appreciated a bunch of civilians mucking around on their turf. Turf battles ensued, politics came into it, and by 1944, budget cuts effectively ended the RID as a standalone agency.

hackaday.com/2025/06/04/high-s…

Alex de Vries-Gao, dottorando presso l’Istituto per la ricerca ambientale dell’Università di Amsterdam, ha pubblicato un articolo in cui stima quanta elettricità le aziende di intelligenza artificiale spendono per generare risposte agli utenti.

Il suo lavoro, pubblicato sulla rivista Joule, si basa su una metodologia piuttosto semplice: ha analizzato i volumi di produzione e utilizzo dei chip di intelligenza artificiale, i report sui ricavi e i dati dei dispositivi dei data center per stimare il consumo energetico attuale e futuro.

Secondo l’Agenzia Internazionale per l’Energia, nel 2024 i data center consumeranno fino all’1,5% di tutta l’elettricità mondiale , una cifra in rapida crescita. L’intelligenza artificiale è solo uno dei compiti che svolgono: una parte significativa dell’energia è destinata, ad esempio, all’archiviazione dei dati nel cloud e al mining di criptovalute.

Tuttavia, l’esecuzione e la manutenzione di modelli linguistici di grandi dimensioni come ChatGPT richiedono enormi risorse di calcolo. Alcuni sviluppatori di intelligenza artificiale hanno già iniziato a costruire le proprie centrali elettriche per far fronte al carico crescente. Allo stesso tempo, come osserva de Vries-Gao, le aziende sono sempre meno disponibili a condividere i dati sui propri consumi energetici, il che rende difficile valutare in modo indipendente la reale portata del problema.

Nel suo lavoro, il ricercatore ha basato il suo lavoro sui chip prodotti dalla TSMC di Taiwan , il più grande produttore di componenti per aziende come Nvidia. Ha poi confrontato le informazioni open source sul consumo energetico di vari hardware di intelligenza artificiale e sul relativo carico. Mettendo insieme tutti questi dati, è arrivato a una cifra approssimativa: nel 2024 i servizi di intelligenza artificiale potrebbero consumare circa 82 terawattora di elettricità, una quantità paragonabile al consumo annuo di tutta la Svizzera.

Se la domanda di intelligenza artificiale continua a raddoppiare come avviene ora, entro la fine dell’anno le applicazioni di intelligenza artificiale potrebbero consumare quasi la metà di tutti i data center del mondo in termini di consumo energetico.

E questo non è solo un problema economico, ma anche ambientale. Se la maggior parte dei data center fosse alimentata dalla normale rete elettrica, l’enorme crescita dell’intelligenza artificiale provocherebbe un aumento significativo delle emissioni di gas serra, poiché una parte considerevole dell’energia mondiale è ancora generata da centrali elettriche a carbone. Tuttavia, i ricercatori stanno già studiando i modi in cui il consumo energetico dei sistemi di intelligenza artificiale può essere sfruttato dagli aggressori per portare a termine attacchi.

L'articolo L’intelligenza artificiale ora consuma più della Svizzera: il report che fa tremare il futuro digitale proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.

WELCOME BACK TO ANOTHER DIGITAL POLITICS. I'm Mark Scott, and I've joined a yearlong taskforce to help the United Kingdom figure out how to implement its upcoming social media data access rules. We're looking for a PostDoc to help with that work — check that out here and spread the word (or apply!)

— There are a lot of misconceptions about nascent rules to oversee social media. Let's unpack what is really going on in 2025.

— The way the internet currently operates is under threat. That should worry us all.

— The speed of AI oversight has significantly slowed over the last two years. Here's a chart that explains that.

Let's get started.

MANY OF US SPEND A LOT OF TIME ON SOCIAL MEDIA. There's no shade in that. It's just the truth. And despite all the great things that TikTok, Instagram and YouTube can do, there are also some serious downsides. That includes: automated algorithmic recommender systems designed to keep us scrolling; masses of coordinated spam and inauthentic behavior; hate speech, terrorist content, and child sexual abuse material; foreign interference, most notably targeted at elections.

The thing with social media is that it's a tool. One that can be used for both good and bad. But as we hurtle toward the middle of 2025, we're living in a bizarro world where there are a lot of half-truths and falsehoods about regulator- and platform-led efforts to quell the bad stuff online. Ironically, these platform governance efforts are designed to weed out half-truths and falsehoods before they have real-world harm.

Without getting too binary, the dividing line falls between those who believe any form of platform governance equates to illegal attempts to quell people's legitimate free speech rights and those who believe platforms must do more to stop the spread of harmful content online. The split has taken on an increasingly geopolitical turn after the Donald Trump administration made repeated claims international platform governance regimes — in places like the European Union, United Kingdom and Brazil — were unfairly targeting US citizens and firms.

The truth is a lot more mundane than that. In reality, the likes of the EU's Digital Services Act and UK's Online Safety Act (disclaimer: I sit on an independent board advising the UK's regulator, so anything I say here is done so in a personal capacity) are almost exclusively transparency efforts to 1) get social media companies to explain how they go about their business; 2) allow regulators to hold these firms to account for their internal policies; and 3) provide an opportunity for social media users to seek redress if they believe their content has been mishandled.

Thanks for reading the free monthly version of Digital Politics. Paid subscribers receive at least one newsletter a week. If that sounds like your jam, please sign up here.

Here's what paid subscribers read in May:
— Here are three short-term ways to boost transatlantic ties on tech; the long-term effects of annulling Romania's presidential election because of alleged online hijinks; the democratic world's media ecosystems are degrading quickly. More here.
— How Washington is giving up its role as a leader within international tech policymaking; how Brussels has embraced its inner "MAGA" to promote a more muscular approach on digital to the world. More here.
— Western policymakers are shifting away from greater oversight of AI; the India-Pakistan conflict demonstrates how online falsehoods still affect offline conflict; companies are more responsible than governments/users for combating online hate speech. More here.
— The tide toward digital sovereignty will lead to increased digital barriers between countries; Romania's presidential election was rife with online shenanigans; the cost of using the most advanced AI models has fallen 280-fold. More here.
— Europe and the US are making it easier for AI companies to operate without oversight; transatlantic data flows are still on shaky ground; digital sovereignty may lead to a 4.5 percent reduction in the global economy. More here.

That has led to a series of uber-wonky risk assessments and independent audits, under the EU's platform governance regime (see here), that outline — in too much detail, frankly — all the machinations social media companies go through to comply with their existing terms of service. Only if these firms do not live up to these internal checks and other now legally-mandated platform governance rules will regulators step in. London is expected to carry out its more targeted risk assessment asks in the coming months.

So far, only X, formerly Twitter, has been issued a so-called statement of objections, or charge sheet, under the Digital Services Act. I have no inside knowledge of when a final decision will come. But, given that Brussels announced its preliminary findings last summer, I would expect X to face a fine and series of remedies by September. If that does happen, expect a likely pushback from Washington over claims that Brussels is implementing a protectionist, free speech-bashing racket to promote its own interest because it can't create its own global tech champions. Sigh.

Such accusations miss the point. They miss the point because if you scratch just a little below the surface, existing platform governance rules are mostly failing. What regulators are quickly finding out is that social media companies are complex machines — ones that, as of 2025, are taking a more adversarial approach to how outsiders question how they function. That means regulatory agencies, many of which have newly-minted, but as yet untested, powers, are finding themselves with too few resources to really get under the hood to mitigate potential harm.

What that has led to — as we saw in Romania's aborted first-round presidential election last year — is an often kneejerk reaction by politicians eager to use platform governance regimes in ways that they were never intended.

No, these online safety regimes are not about limiting people's speech. No, they are not about combating (Russian) foreign interference. No, they are not about hobbling a growing economic adversary (read: the United States) via hefty fines. They should be viewed as a legally-mandated reminder to social media giants that they need to abide by their own internal content policies.

In reality, the current state of play for most Western platform governance rules is middling, at best. Most regulators are still underpowered to do their jobs. Many of the actual oversight is not yet in place. And the growing adversarial stance of many social media platforms means that much of the goodwill necessary to conduct routine, daily oversight is waning quickly (at least in public).

Before I get angry emails, it's also true we are still very early into these untested regimes. No one has ever tried to institute mandatory oversight for such globe-spanning platforms before. It was never going to be easy, simple or without failure. I would argue you need to view "success" over a 3-5 year time horizon — not via a first volley of fines coming out from Brussels, London or elsewhere.

What I do worry about, however, is that for most citizens in countries with these platform governance rules, there is little, if any, demonstration of their online experiences improving through such greater oversight. Confronted with a growing minority who claim such regulation is censorship, the failure to show any meaningful upside to these rules for average voters leaves an opportunity for those who would seek to weaponize any form of platform governance via the lens of an illegal threat to fundamental free speech rights.

I have been critical of online safety rules — including the growing desire to implement so-called age verification technology to ensure minors do not get access to certain types of content online. But when you take a hard look at what the likes of Brussels and Canberra are doing on platform governance, there's just no way to view that work as illegal censorship. At best, it's a faulty effort to require global tech companies to be transparent, equitable and forthcoming about how their existing internal safeguards are designed and implemented to keep users safe online.

I contrast that with a number of US state-based rules aimed at reducing access to online content — often for somewhat valid reasons — and it's hard not to feel troubled by such rules.

Currently, 17 US states have implemented age verification rules to stop children from accessing porn sites within their borders. That is a valid choice for policymakers to make. But it also means, given the draconian nature of age verification that requires everyone to prove they are of age before accessing such material, these sites have also become inaccessible to adults — in a way, I would argue, that is an unfair restriction of their rights to access information.

It's weird to be in a position as a defender of pornography. I make no moral judgement on such material. But I do worry that in an effort to protect children from this material, US policymakers — and, now, many of their international counterparts — are entering a platform governance quagmire that gives lawmakers too much say over what can, and can't, be accessed over the internet.

At their imperfect best, platform governance rules are a tool to hold social media companies to account for what they have promised to do to keep people safe online. It is about transparency and accountability — and nothing more.

But this shift toward verifying who can access content via the internet is something that we should all be concerned about. It is an over-reach — often done in the name of protecting children — that veers from the basic tenets of platform transparency toward the creation of a growing list, designed by politicians, of content that people can not access online.

Chart of the Week

REGULAR DIGITAL POLITICS READERS will already be aware of how policymakers' interest in setting new guardrails for artificial intelligence has significantly dwindled in recent months.

But researchers at Stanford and Harvard devised this handy timeline for global AI governance that shows a steady stream of national, regional and international efforts to corral AI — until 2025.

What has come, so far this year, is primarily White House executive orders, including one that revoked Washington's previous pledge to promote AI safeguards.

The blue bars equate to "soft laws," the yellow bars to "hard law proposed," the green bars to "hard law passed" and the red bars to "hard law revoked."
Source: Sacha Alanoca, et al.

The open internet is in jeopardy

FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO AREN'T GENERATION X (or maybe Elderly Millennials), you won't remember a time before the internet was omnipresent. But the digitally-focused social and economic boom over the last 30 years — as well as some serious problems created by technology — has been predicated on a few basic underlying principles. Those date back to the early days of the world wide web, and focus on: 1) a decentralized and bottom-up oversight of the online world; and 2) a multi-stakeholder model that includes companies, civil society groups, academics and governments working together.

This two-pronged strategy allowed for a rapid growth of internet usage, the creation of international protocols to ensure underlying infrastructure communicated with each other, and the ability for anyone (caveat: with the technical and financial resources) to participate in what had been, in many ways, a golden era of digitally-powered economic and social gain.

That structure, however, is now in serious jeopardy.

When government officials, industry executives and civil society groups meet in Lillestrøm, Norway for the annual United Nations Internet Governance Forum later this month, the future of such a decentralized, inclusive model for how the internet will develop over the next decade is in question. I get it. It's hard to get excited or animated about the inner workings of internet governance policy. But stick with me.

Ever since China became a serious player in the world of technology twenty(ish) years ago, Beijing and its authoritarian allies have been pushing for greater government control over how the internet works. That makes sense. If you're a state that has a say over almost all aspects of citizens' lives, then giving them carte blanche to surf the web — often finding information about how repressive these regimes actually are — is not going to work.

In response, the US has led the pushback against such government control. In part, that is an economic choice to support American tech firms that have been the main benefactors of a free, interoperable internet. But it also plays to Washington's long-standing pledge to promote human rights and democratic values worldwide — including via the internet.

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That status-quo is going through a major transition. China (and, to a lesser extent Russia) has been successful in wooing other countries, many from the Global Majority, to its cause. That's why the UN's recent Convention against Cybercrime was such a worry. It placed, for the first time, countries in the driving seat around internet governance policy that many fear will become the new normal.

At the same time, the US is forgoing its traditional leadership position in promoting a more open, multi-stakeholder approach to internet governance. Much is still up in the air with how the Trump 2.0 administration will approach these topics. But initial negotiations — often in opaque UN gatherings most of us have never heard of — linked to new internet standards have seen Washington pull back from its vocal backing of how the current internet model functions.

This shift will not be felt overnight. But, gradually, countries are taking on a stronger governance position in the world of technology that is fundamentally different from how these networks developed over decades. Many politicians want greater control over digital at a time when local citizens are becoming more digitally-aware.

Without the US leading the charge to keep the internet open, interoperable and mulit-stakeholder, it's likely China will have an easier chance to push its top-down approach in the years to come. That would be a mistake — one that will be felt across the world unless democracies (beyond the US) start to advocate publicly for a return to how the internet has worked for generations.

What I'm reading

— The US State Department chastised European countries for failing to uphold their democratic principles, including related to online speech. More here.

— The Institute for Strategic Dialogue goes deep on what the "manosphere" is and its impact on online culture. More here.

— The Canadian Centre for Child Protection produced a podcast series about Project Arachnid that detects and removes child sexual abuse images. More here.

— Australia's eSafety Commissioner wrote a position paper on so-called "immersive technologies" and their potential harms. More here.

— Researchers unpack the difficulties in accessing social media data via the EU's Digital Services Act. More here.

digitalpolitics.co/newsletter0…

Ahoy Pirates,

Our next PPI board meeting will take place on 24.06.2025 at 20:00 UTC / 22:00 CEST.

Prior to that meeting on Tuesday, 10 June 2025, 14:00 UTC in the same Jitsi board room, we will hold a special IGF SCUBA working group meeting.

All official PPI proceedings, Board meetings included, are open to the public. Feel free to stop by. We’ll be happy to have you.

Where:jitsi.pirati.cz/PPI-Board

Minutes of last meeting: wiki.pp-international.net/wiki…

All of our meetings are posted to our calendar: pp-international.net/calendar/

We look forward to seeing visitors.

Thank you for your support,

The Board of PPI

pp-international.net/2025/06/b…

Si è conclusa recentemente presso la Scuola Superiore di Polizia in Roma una settimana di corso in materia di cybercrime, dedicato ad una delegazione di funzionari della Royal Malaysia Police (rmp.gov.my/).

L’iniziativa mira a rafforzare la cooperazione dell’Italia con i Paesi del sud-est asiatico ed in particolare con la Malesia.

Il corso, organizzato dall’Area di staff per le Relazioni internazionali del capo della Polizia, con la collaborazione della Direzione centrale per la polizia scientifica e la sicurezza cibernetica, ha avuto il sostegno finanziario della Direzione Generale Mondializzazione e Questioni Globali del Ministero degli Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale.

Il badge della RMP

L’attività è stata coordinata dall’area di staff per le Relazioni internazionali.

Il programma didattico, focalizzato sulle metodologie, tecniche investigative e buone pratiche in materia di cybercrime, tra cui pedopornografia online, protezione delle infrastrutture critiche, truffe online e l’uso dell’intelligenza artificiale, è stato predisposto con il Servizio polizia postale e sicurezza cibernetica, che ne ha curato le docenze.

Un significativo apprezzamento è stato espresso dai colleghi malesi, i quali hanno riconosciuto una valenza fondamentale per la conoscenza reciproca dei sistemi, degli strumenti e delle buone pratiche adottate nel contrasto alle organizzazioni criminali transnazionali ed ai fenomeni criminali nei settori del cybercrime e della cybersecurity.

Particolarmente apprezzate sono state anche le visite alle strutture di eccellenza della Polizia di Stato, quali il Centro nazionale anticrimine informatico per la protezione delle infrastrutture critiche (C.N.A.I.P.I.C.), il Centro nazionale per il contrasto alla pedopornografia online (C.N.C.P.O.) e il Commissariato di P.S. on-line.

La delegazione malese ha rinnovato l’auspicio per una prosecuzione di questi momenti formativi, da programmare sulla base di comuni esigenze, individuando settori prioritari condivisi, volti a rafforzare la capacità e la resilienza della Royal Malaysia Police, rispetto alle sfide ed alle minacce poste da una criminalità sempre più fluida e transnazionale. Queste iniziative consentono, come evidenziato dagli stessi esperti stranieri, di rafforzare le competenze della loro Polizia e la resilienza del loro Paese rispetto alle sfide ed alle minacce poste da una criminalità sempre più transnazionale, traendo spunti e know how dall’esperienza maturata negli anni dalla Polizia di Stato italiana.

#cybercrime #cooperazioneinternazionaledipolizia # Poliziapostale #poliziadistato #RoyalMalaysiaPolice

Nell’ambito del progetto di integrazione dell’Unione Europea “Facility supporting Serbia in Achieving the Objectives of Chapter 24: justice, freedom and security”, recentemente una delegazione di funzionari della Polizia della Repubblica di Serbia ha fatto visita al Comando Unità Forestali, Ambientali e Agroalimentari Carabinieri (#CUFAA).
Il gruppo ha preso parte alla presentazione dei settori di competenza del CUFAA, approfondendo così la specialità dell’Arma sul fronte della tutela ambientale, di salvaguardia del patrimonio della biodiversità e della sicurezza alimentare.

La visita ha riguardato anche le specifiche attività: del Nucleo Informativo Antincendio Boschivo (#NIAB), fiore all’occhiello del Comando in materia di prevenzione e repressione dei reati, e quelle del Raggruppamento #CITES in materia di tutela delle specie animali e vegetali minacciate di estinzione, oltre a quelle di sicurezza ambientale ed energetica.

La delegazione ha mostrato interesse per le informazioni raccolte durante l’incontro, avendo la polizia Serba da poco tempo attivato, nell'ambito della Polizia Criminale del Ministero dell’Interno, una specifica Unità per la repressione dei crimini ambientali e la protezione dell’ambiente. La visita, infatti, è parte di una trasferta nel nostro Paese con obiettivo di studio specifico sul contrasto ai crimini ambientali.

#criminiambientali #poliziaserba #Armadeicarabinieri

Non ho quasi mai alcuna reazione ai miei post, né commenti, né like, né condivisioni. Su Facebook avevo 100-150 amici e ogni post aveva qualche like, qualche commento, qualche condivisione. Mi sembra di non esistere.

Qualche giorno fa ho messo un post di test chiedendo a chi lo leggeva se era visibile e ho avuto una sola reazione (tra l'altro, di una persona iscritta a questa stessa istanza).

A me sono venute in mente due possibili spiegazioni, ma magari ce ne sono anche altre, non so.

1. La mia uscita da Facebook ha coinciso con un calo verticale della mia capacità di scrivere o condividere cose che interessino qualcun altro oltre a me;

2. Non ho capito bene come funziona il Fediverso e per qualche motivo i miei post invece di arrivare alle migliaia di persone che lo affollano (come mi aspetterei) non arrivano a nessun'altra istanza (o arrivano in un numero insignificante di istanze), benché io usi sempre la permission "public".

Ci sono altre spiegazioni che mi sfuggono?