Notices by Ian Brown 👨🏻‍💻 (1br0wn@eupolicy.social)

@toddz @ArmchairEgyptologist @EUCommission Full details here https://www.ianbrown.tech/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Security-privacy-and-the-European-Commissions-proposed-iOS-interoperability-requirements-for-connected-devices-under-the-Digital-Markets-Act.pdf

Had to check that one wasn’t @theonion
From: @feed
https://www.404media.co/closure-ink-ai-chatbot-ghosted-ex/

Sure #ICC staff will all be delighted to use a Linux distribution with zero exposure to the US and its allies, or secondary sanctions. Ditto an Office replacement. Anything else? 🤡
From: @WaywardTarheel
https://mastodon.social/@WaywardTarheel/114513400291891517

If you are an occasional #Signal user on your iPhone, you might want to check the app now.

#Apple seems to have further tightened the #iOS strangulation of resources to rarely used apps, so much so that Signal cannot even provide a notification there is a message waiting.

A number of friends -- even a professor of computer science at Cambridge of my acquaintance 🫣 -- have entirely missed important messages from me due to this.

The @EUCommission has ordered Apple to fix this under the #DMA 👏🏻

NICE! @ivory now showing proper previews of Bluesky links, looking just like a quote-post of a native Fediverse post! #Interoperability for the win! /cc @wavesblog

I have two hypotheses why the conventional IO/competition economics view of #interoperability understates its benefits, perhaps due to slight technological complexity in understanding its potential:

1. Fully interoperable tools can be plugged together in all sorts of unexpected combinations. See eg #Unix or #bridgyfed

2. Interoperability lets a single function (eg auto-translation) be developed once in a single tool, then applied across a range of interoperable services. /1

#AI refuseniks of the world, unite! "I read a really great phrase recently that said something along the lines of 'why would I bother to read something someone couldn't be bothered to write' and that is such a powerful statement and one that aligns absolutely with my views." h/t @tforcworc https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c15q5qzdjqxo

@ianbrown.tech Hi @pfefferle! Love love love your #ActivityPub plugin for #WordPress! 😍

Any thoughts on this thread? Thanks! https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2cxgdrgtsmrbqnjkwyplmp43/post/3lns5xetjek27

‘Universities such as #Columbia, with its 87 Nobel laureates, are global public goods, reliant on the American ecosystem. Much of their research couldn’t be done elsewhere. Bill Clinton called the US “the indispensable nation”. For universities, it is.’
https://on.ft.com/4hX9jvq

🤢 “#Zuckerberg, in short, turns out to be a giant man-baby suffering from a severe case of the Dunning-Kruger effect, whereby people overestimate their own cognitive abilities.” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/13/careless-people-by-sarah-wynn-williams-review-zuckerberg-and-me

‘Of course, Trump is a vandal. But in tearing down the status quo he does no more than confirm the obvious — that the elite coalition that favoured US global leadership has lost its political grip. If Europe wants something it likes to call a “rules-based order”, it will have to make it for itself.’
https://on.ft.com/3Fc9TIb

Trump DoJ antitrust chief nominee Gail “Slater embodies the unlikely alignment of progressives who support tough antitrust enforcement and a new generation of populist conservatives helmed by vice-president JD Vance, who has called for the break-up of Google.”
https://on.ft.com/4hfVYOu

The UK Home Office (interior ministry) appears to have forgotten entirely about the "independent" Technical Advisory Board #TAB whose advice it legally must take when #Apple appeals its secret order ("Technical Capability Notice” leaked to the Washington Post) to compromise #iPhone/ #ADP security worldwide to enable future surveillance by the UK 🤡🤡
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/366619028/Apple-British-techies-to-advise-on-devastating-UK-global-crypto-power-grab

‘Yakoob has paid “substantial” damages and costs for his publication of the video, removed the posts and agreed not to post them again. It is thought to be the first case of a political “#deepfake” — images or video edited or generated using #AI — being subject to a legal settlement in the UK.’
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/law/article/i-doorknocked-for-labour-then-racist-deepfake-ruined-my-life-fn6xxc5dc

#TikTok “cannot necessarily make Taiwanese youth identify with the Chinese nation or agree to unification with #China”, says Eric Hsu, a researcher at the Taiwanese think-tank Doublethink Lab who is working on the first systematic survey of TikTok’s impact on Taiwanese society. “But it can probably lower their apprehension towards China and their will to resist.” 🧐 #Taiwan
https://www.ft.com/content/e25ee12b-3a4a-4a15-bd5e-0f5fb410e856

“Much of the debate about #Huawei has centred on the question of whether the firm is an arm of the Chinese government… the question is irrelevant…because all communications companies, of whatever nationality, do their government’s bidding when it comes to security; and if tensions between two countries are on the rise, governments understandably want to keep each other’s firms out of their communications networks.” 💯
https://www.thetimes.com/article/46a37c19-f517-4173-bca3-268d7bfb2a7c?shareToken=a1c29d3f75e322f6f6cb0787138ca863

A 🇬🇧 government spokesman said that “technology now makes it possible for digital identities to be more secure than physical ones, but we remain clear that they will not be made mandatory.”
https://www.thetimes.com/article/cb6eca06-d9af-42c5-a17e-b1e18d9ea8d3?shareToken=e0352c26aff24b938569401d30fa8348

#Relx ‘now holds 290mn US unique identities, 13bn names and addresses, 8bn vehicle records, 9bn device records, and 3bn digital identities. That is a lot of data, never mind the 16bn keyboard, mouse, sensor and touch transactions that it processes annually. About 80% of its revenues come from the US, where privacy laws are looser than in Europe.’ #GDPR
https://on.ft.com/426chd5

German Greens MEP @alexandrageese@bonn.social defined the problem as follows: “Elon #Musk chatting with #AfD leader Alice Weidel on X is covered by freedom of expression. His algorithmic manipulation, [which] is intentionally flooding German X timelines with far-right propaganda and drowning out progressive content, is not.”
From: @alderik
https://eupolicy.social/@alderik/113786022258085595

‘The [#CrowdStrike] incident has heightened scrutiny from regulators and business leaders over the extent of access that third-party software vendors have to the core, or kernel, of Microsoft’s #Windows operating systems. Bugs in the #kernel, such as CrowdStrike’s faulty update, can quickly crash an entire system… “If anything, the migration that results from this incident might be away from Microsoft, not CrowdStrike,” [Forrester analyst Allie] Mellen said.‘
https://www.ft.com/content/e98e0d35-38f4-476e-bd22-7f74162df5b4