TLDW:

Brazil is requiring OS level age verification by march 17th, 2026.

New York about to vote on a law that would "require all manufacturers of internet-enabled devices, operating systems, or application stores to conduct commercially reason-able and technically feasible age assurance for users at the point of device activation."

In order to “incentivize” age verification, The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has announced that they will ignore COPPA violations for software performing age verification.

Users of Meta's AI smart glasses in Europe may be unknowingly sharing intimate video and sensitive financial information with moderators outside of the bloc, according to a report from Sweden's Svenska Dagbladet released last week. Employees in Kenya doing AI "annotation" told the journalists that they've seen people nude, using the toilet and engaging in sexual activity, along with credit card numbers and other sensitive information.

I know, the title is not very "not-the-onion-y". But the piece of news is: Spanish Foreign Minister Albares was in a radio interview while Leavit said that. So he basically spent her live in a national radio station, in one of the most listened programs of the country.

The black pirate flag was the first thing I noticed.

Although I had seen the Jolly Roger image of a skull and crossbones before, this one was distinct: a grinning cartoon skull wearing a straw hat — the flag of a fictional gang of pirates fighting oppression and corruption in the Japanese anime series “One Piece.”

When it first started appearing in early 2025 on the TikTok and Instagram feeds of young people taking to the streets during protests in Indonesia, I paid it little heed. That was until my 13-year-old daughter pointed out that the “Straw Hat Jolly Roger” had started circulating on social media in reference to my home country of Nepal.

The One Piece pirate flag — now heralded globally as a symbol of youth resistance — first started showing up in Nepal in early September 2025. Within days it had caught digital fire, culminating in a youth-led uprising that would topple Nepal’s government, leave the country’s political class reeling, and stun the nation’s mainstream media over its failure to understand power, shape narrative, and comprehend the ways in which a new generation was mobilizing.

As a journalist who has covered Nepal and the region for over two decades, I’m still processing those historic few days in September. What I find most unsettling is the fact that my teenage children — who insist they don’t follow any mainstream news — saw it coming long before I did.

The dramatic turn of events in Nepal, and the manner in which they unfolded, have since become a template of sorts for protests in many countries, led by a generation that insists on defining its own narratives, employing digital tools, and spreading its message through internet memes, Instagram Reels, and posts on video gaming platforms like Discord. Since the Nepal uprising there have been similar protests in Madagascar, Morocco, Peru, Bulgaria, and beyond, where governments have been swiftly overthrown or leaders have been put on notice by a groundswell that starts on social media. Many participants in these movements, especially in Nepal, identify as members of Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012 and currently between 13 and 28 years old.

These spontaneous, youth-led, social media-driven uprisings across several countries appear to be less anchored in a shared global ideology, according to experts, but instead in a common grievance: the sense of a broken social contract.

“The level of conflict in these societies comes from that big chasm between a rapidly changing society and political systems that don’t keep up,” said Aboubakr Jamaï, a Moroccan journalist (and 2007-08 Nieman Fellow) who has studied protests from the February 20 Movement in Morocco during the Arab Spring uprisings, to the more recent Gen Z-led protests around the world.

In many of these countries, corruption — often manifested in failing government services — emerges as a core grievance that’s central to young people’s sense of frustration. A report by Bloomberg Economics — which used a machine-learning model to analyze 22 million data points related to youth-led global protests — has come to a similar conclusion: Rising inequality, unemployment, and corruption are strong predictors of youth-led unrest. The same analysis highlights several global hot spots that are at heightened risk of upheaval in the near future, including Angola, Guatemala, the Republic of Congo, and Malaysia.

“This generation does not benefit from what their grandparents, and to some extent their parents, received,” Jamaï said. “They feel short-changed.”

On an evening in late January, Emily was driving through her Minneapolis neighborhood doing something that had become part of her routine in recent weeks: patrolling for ICE.

Emily, who NPR is only identifying by her first name because she fears retribution from the federal government, says she followed an ICE vehicle at a safe distance into a parking lot. "And then someone leaned out of the passenger side of that SUV and took a picture of me and my car," she says.

Emily says she decided to leave at that point, but the SUV made a sudden U-turn and barreled towards her, braking next to her driver's side window. A female agent wearing a gaiter-style mask rolled down the window, leaned out — and addressed Emily by name.

Source Website— Author Post about.

• Tilde News.

In this workshop we collectively examine the infrastructure behind the Internet by building a our own (prototype) server on an old smartphone.

Since the democratisation of the Internet in the 90s, the operations and communications we perform on the Internet have kept rising massively. Nowadays, we often hear about the cloud, as a way to describe all the online services that we access daily, such as emails, social media, data storage, video-streaming, AI chat bots, etc. But what does the Internet look like behind this fog screen?

YggTorrent, the largest francophone torrent community, has shut down permanently following a devastating hack.

I can never seem to get the page to load, the prpgress bar is always stuck when trying to access the webpage.

Ubisoft has just released the first piece of concept art for Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced, finally confirming its long-awaited remake that has been rumored for years.

Continuwuity - a self-hostable Matrix Homeserver - just got a new release.

It's not april fools yet

It is not too late https://www.forbrukerradet.no/breakingfree

Hello everyone!

Journiv is a self-hosted private journaling application that puts you in complete control of your personal reflections. Built with privacy and simplicity at its core, Journiv offers comprehensive journaling capabilities including mood tracking, prompt-based journaling, media uploads, analytics, and advanced search. All while keeping your data on your own infrastructure.

Journiv beta.21 is out with many new requested features:

• Daylio Import (#58). Watch demo
• Detailed mood, activity and goal tracking (#218, #57)
• Moment first architecture which allow users to do quick log and then add narrative later. Blogpost
• Automated goal tracking based on logged activities
• HEIC support (#215)
• OIDC Only support (#91)
• and much more...

Learn More

• Spin up Journiv
• Github
• Watch other demo videos
• Want to just try a demo? https://demo.almostadatacenter.com/ (Thanks to JasonFieldz for hosting a demo instance): username: demo@test.com password: Demo1234

Maybe humans just need to hibernate through February and March, I dunno man.

The full article that was hinted at in interviews last week.

There are likely a few reasons behind this shift. One is that several recent PlayStation games have not sold well on PC.

Interesting...

But the strategy has been muddled and confused many players. Most PC releases arrived months or years after the games came to PlayStation. The cadence was never consistent, and the announcements appeared to be haphazard. The company also upset PC players by asking them to create PlayStation Network accounts to access many of the games.

I love Horizon: Zero Dawn. I have not played Horizon: Forbidden West. By the time it came to PC, Sony started making PSN logins necessary to even authenticate the game in the first place, which is basically just the worst kind of DRM. They've reverted this policy, but now I don't trust them. They put out a handful of games on GOG where I don't have to trust them, and I'll probably still pick a few of those up one day, but Forbidden West isn't there. Seems to me that they have no idea how badly they screwed up this rollout themselves. Oh, Uncharted 4 didn't do too well on PC? Where are the PC versions of Uncharted 1-3? Where can I play the original God of War trilogy? I'm not buying a PlayStation no matter how many exclusives you lock up there, so I'll just continue to not play your handful of exclusives.

Anyway, that's my two cents.