Gamercoollo

The European Union has a new law called the Digital Markets Act that makes big tech companies show users a clear choice of web browsers on their phones. Since the law started in 2024 more than 6 million people have picked Firefox as their main browser through these choice screens which is about one new user every 10 seconds. People who choose Firefox this way really like it and keep using it five times more than people who find Firefox in other ways. A study from top researchers shows the same thing because in the EU Firefox users on iPhones jumped 113% because of the law while on Android phones the increase was 12% with the biggest change on Apple phones where Safari used to be the only easy choice.

New Google accounts now only get 5 GB of free storage. You can unlock the full 15 GB, BUT only if you verify your phone number 🤡 MEGA gives you 20 GB free with end-to-end encryption, no phone number needed. 4x what Google offers unverified AND still more than their full 15 GB. Get your free 20 GB encrypted storage and keep the privacy of your phone number mega.io/?mct=may15x

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‼️🚨 ALARMING: Google now treats privacy as suspicious behavior by default. Users of GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, /e/OS, and other deGoogled Android phones are being locked out of millions of websites unless they install the exact Google Play Services software they deliberately removed. GrapheneOS is recommended by the EFF and used by journalists, lawyers, and activists in high-risk environments. The audience most likely to read Google's data practices and refuse its terms is now flagged as fraudulent for that exact decision. What happened?: ▪️ Google announced "Cloud Fraud Defense" at Cloud Next on April 22-23, 2026, branding it "the next evolution of reCAPTCHA." Existing reCAPTCHA customers were auto-migrated. ▪️ When the system flags traffic as suspicious, the old click-the-bus puzzle is gone. Users get a QR code instead. ▪️ Scanning the QR code requires Google Play Services running on the device. Internet Archive snapshots show this requirement has been live since at least October 2025, silently rolled out for 7 months before anyone noticed. ▪️ No Play Services = no QR scan = locked out. The bigger picture: ▪️ Google already tried this in 2023. It was called Web Environment Integrity (WEI), and it would have let Google decide which devices were "real enough" to access the web. Standards bodies and the public pushed back hard, and Google killed it. Three years later, the same idea is back, just hidden behind a QR code instead of a browser feature. ▪️ reCAPTCHA runs on millions of websites. Every developer who keeps using it is now, by default, telling deGoogled Android users they're not welcome...

Roblox will no longer allow games to sell gamepasses from other games starting from May 29th. As a mandatory replacement, Roblox is introducing the Transfers API. You must be age-checked or have a linked parental account to either receive or send Robux. Any Robux will immediately be received upon you accepting the Robux. You will receive 90% of the Robux, instead of the previous 60%; however, 10% still goes to the game's creator. To send Robux, you must be subscribed to Roblox Plus. Roblox currently only allows a 1,000 Robux maximum to be sent per month. You will not be able to cancel any transfer. Additionally, you can transfer Robux on the "Buy Robux" page or by donating it to a user's page. If you are under the age of 18, your parent must approve each transfer request. Any request not accepted within a week will be sent back to the person who initially sent it. Any Robux earned from transfers are not DevEx-able.

Another reminder that Google just doesn’t want to bother with Android 😭 Gemini on iOS (left) vs. Gemini on Android (right)

Your 2FA shouldn't come with an *asterisk* ❌ So you set up a strong password then added Google Authenticator for 2FA. It feels secure. But if cloud sync is on, your OTP secrets sit on Google's servers with no end-to-end encryption. Security researchers confirmed it in 2023 and Google has yet to fix it. 🤷‍♂️

The biggest threat to Google's ad business isn't Meta or Apple. It's a man with a text editor who doesn't even accept donations 🤯 Meet Raymond Hill. > Nobody knows his real face. > Nobody knows his background. > Goes by "gorhill" online. That's it. > In 2014 quietly built an ad blocker. Alone. > No team. No funding. No company. Just code. > Called it uBlock Origin. > Free. Open source. No strings attached. > Every other ad blocker was taking money from advertisers. > Letting "acceptable ads" through for a fee. > He refused. Completely. 💀 > People tried to donate. He said no. > Companies tried to buy him out. He said no. > Brave offered to bring him on. He said no. > Said accepting money in any form could compromise him. > So he just... kept building. For free. For years. > Grew to 40 million users across Chrome and Firefox. > Became the most popular Firefox extension in history. 🚀 > Then Google came for him. > Manifest V3 — a Chrome update that quietly gutted ad blockers. > Every major ad blocker bent the knee and adapted. > He refused. Said the new system was fundamentally inferior. > Google removed uBlock Origin from Chrome. Entirely. > He didn't beg. Didn't negotiate. Didn't compromise. > Just told everyone switch to Firefox. > Mozilla then made a mistake reviewing his extension. > Disabled it over false claims. > He publicly proved every claim wrong. Line by line. > Then pulled the extension himself. On his own terms. > Fought Google. Fought Mozilla. Both times alone. > Still maintains the project today. Still unpaid. > Still refuses every dollar sent his way. > Said "It stopped being a hobby when it felt like a tedious job. So I made it mine again." > No money. No team. No name. Just took on trillion-dollar Google and made them blink The trillion-dollar ad empire is genuinely scared of one developer with a text editor Absolute Legend 🗿 🔥

The FCC has unanimously voted to advance a proposal banning all laboratories in China, including Hong Kong, from certifying electronic devices sold in the United States. Citing national security risks in the testing and certification process, this rule would affect roughly 75% of electronics bound for the U.S. market. Manufacturers would need to use testing facilities in the U.S. or approved countries instead. The proposal is now open for public comments before a final decision.

A Russian court has ordered a foreign man to leave the country because of an online review he wrote about a leather skirt. In September 2025, the man bought a faux leather skirt on the big Russian shopping site Wildberries and he posted photos of himself wearing it and wrote: “What a lovely little skirt! It hides not just the flaws in my figure, but also the fact that I’m a guy.” The court in the Tula area said the review promoted “non-traditional sexual relations,” which is against Russian law. They gave him five days in detention and ordered his deportation. The man asked the court not to send him away, but the judge ruled against him.

Popping up all round London… #sayNo #digitalID

EU Vice-President “suggests”restricting VPNs to prevent citizens from circumventing EU's age-restrictions of the Internet EU Vice-President Henna Virkkunen is helping roll out a new EU age verification app. But the app can be bypassed with simple tools like a VPN When a reporter asked how the EU will stop kids from using VPNs to get around the rules, Virkkunen said: “It’s difficult, of course, to have the technological solutions that there’s no way to circumvent … it’s also an important part of next steps to look at [the issue] that it shouldn’t be circumvented.”

‼️🇺🇸 Utah is about to become the first US state to legally target VPN use as part of online age verification. The law goes into effect Wednesday, May 6, 2026. 🔴 If you are physically located in Utah, you count as a Utah user, regardless of whether you use a VPN, proxy, or any other tool to disguise your location. Websites are now legally responsible for age-verifying you anyway. 🔴 Sites that handle "material harmful to minors" are banned from sharing instructions on how to use a VPN, or from offering any means to bypass geofencing. The EFF calls this a "liability trap." Websites cannot reliably tell where a VPN user actually is, so the safest legal move is either to block every known VPN IP outright, or to force ID-based age verification on every visitor worldwide. Either path subjects millions of users to invasive identity checks, regardless of where they actually live. The Cato Institute put it bluntly. When a policy can be defeated by a privacy tool millions of people legitimately use, the policy is the problem. The collateral damage is, as always, the people who actually need VPNs: 🔴 Journalists protecting sources 🔴 Domestic abuse survivors hiding from stalkers 🔴 Activists in hostile environments 🔴 Remote workers tunneling into corporate networks 🔴 Travelers banking from abroad 🔴 Anyone who simply does not want their ISP, employer, or data brokers reading their traffic This is not staying in Utah. The UK's Children's Commissioner has called VPNs a "loophole that needs closing." France's Minister Delegate for AI and Digital Affairs has named VPNs as "the next topic on my list." The EU is rolling out age verification across all 27 member states by end of 2026, with EVP Henna Virkkunen openly admitting they have no plan for VPN bypass yet. Utah is leading by example. EFF: "Attacks on VPNs are, at their core, attacks on the tools that enable digital privacy."

Everyone's been waiting for "the European Amazon" for 20 years. Turns out it might be a discount grocery chain. Dutch Central Bank just picked Lidl as its cloud provider. Not AWS. Not Google. Not Microsoft. Lidl. The reason: trust in US tech is eroding across European institutions. Data sovereignty rulings, the political climate, tariff drama. Every quarter the case for sitting on top of US infrastructure gets harder to defend. So Europe is decoupling. Quietly. Contract by contract. While everyone watches the political theatre. Lidl pulled in nearly €2B from cloud last year. All infrastructure built inside the EU. The "European alternative" people have been waiting for? Turns out it's a grocery chain that's been quietly investing for years. If a discount supermarket can win central bank cloud contracts, is US big tech's moat in Europe thinner than anyone admits? Last place anyone was looking. First to deliver.

The UK government is considering new rules on social media for children under 16. Some people in the House of Lords want a strict ban, saying it should start in 12 months, but the government wants more time and could take up to 3 years. Australia introduced a ban for under-16s in December 2025, but it has not worked well. Surveys show more than 60% of teens aged 12 to 15 still use the main platforms. A full ban would require age checks and ID verification for everyone online, and we know how many data breaches occur these days. As I always said parental controls are a better way, the tools let parents set time limits, block certain apps or features and control children's activities.

> Google will put more restrictions on sideloading on certified Android phones starting September 2026 in (Brazil, Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand) > Devs will have to verify their real identity with Google just to sideload (not even in the Play Store) Eventually it’s probably gonna come to the whole world Soon your phone won’t belong to you anymore They’ll decide what can and cannot be on it This is just the beginning Crazy times we live in

The Roblox Plus discount feature is currently causing a major issue in PLS DONATE, preventing you from buying any gamepass worth 10 or more Robux. If this will impact your playing experience, hold out on buying Roblox Plus for the time being.

❗️🇩🇪 Germany says Signal is unsuitable for official communications. Members of the Bundestag have been formally urged to switch from Signal to Wire, after a Russian intelligence operation compromised the Signal account of Bundestag President Julia Klöckner. The choice of Wire is also strategic. Wire is a German company, headquartered in Berlin, operating under EU jurisdiction. The German federal cybersecurity agency BSI has approved Wire Bund for the exchange of classified information up to VS-NfD ("Restricted, For Official Use Only"). The platform is GDPR-compliant, NIS2-aligned, and self-hostable on European infrastructure. Signal, by contrast, is a US-based non-profit subject to the US CLOUD Act. The CLOUD Act allows American authorities to compel data access from US-headquartered providers regardless of where the data is physically stored. For a European parliament communicating about defence, foreign policy, or intelligence cooperation, that is a structural problem before you even reach the phishing question. Two operational reasons Wire is harder to phish: 🔴 Registration uses an email address, not a phone number 🔴 The email address is not visible to third parties Signal binds accounts to phone numbers. Anyone who knows your number can attempt to contact you, and enterprise controls like Single Sign-On are difficult to apply. The push is not new. Bundestag Vice-President Andrea Lindholz previously called for the same migration and proposed an outright ban on Signal for official parliamentary devices. Important context. This is not a vulnerability in Signal's encryption protocol. The Signal protocol remains the gold standard for end-to-end encryption. The attacks succeed at the human and account-recovery layer, the layer Signal's phone-number-based identity model exposes by design. The Bundestag move fits a much larger European pattern. Brussels is pushing GAIA-X for sovereign cloud, the EUDI Wallet for digital identity, and now Wire for parliamentary communications. The throughline is the same: reduce dependence on US-headquartered infrastructure, especially for anything touching classified or politically sensitive data. Germany is now the highest-profile government to formally treat Signal as unsuitable for official communications. The replacement is European. Other EU members will be watching as Germany takes the lead.

A Spanish judge has ordered Cloudflare to block access from its CDN network to several websites that offer pirated football streams. It is the same court handling a complaint filed by LaLiga and Telefónica against Cloudflare and its CEO, Matthew Prince. The two companies accuse Prince of crimes against: -intellectual property -obstruction of justice -threats -coercion Cloudflare CEO always publicly criticized IP blocking measures in Spain and warned that such blocks could risk lives if they ever hit critical services. Prince was due to appear in court on April 7 but did not travel to Spain. The judge has now sent a formal request to U.S. authorities about the case but no one knows if Cloudflare will comply. The company uses a security feature called Encrypted Client Hello (ECH), and hides domain names during connections, making it impossible for Spanish internet providers to block just the illegal sites without also affecting thousands of legitimate websites that share the same infrastructure. Only Cloudflare can carry out a clean block at the domain level.

Greece is now pushing social media age verification and calling for EU-wide tools. Ireland is testing digital ID for the same purpose. I’m fed up with this direction. Every few months, another government seems to decide the answer to online safety is more ID checks, more verification layers, and more infrastructure tying real-world identity to everyday internet use. Protecting kids matters, but protecting peoples privacy matters as well.