Polycarp Nakamoto priv/acc

‼️🇺🇸 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."

NEW: Claude-powered AI coding agent deletes entire company database in 9 seconds — backups zapped, after Cursor tool powered by Anthropic's Claude goes rogue — Tom's Hardware

Your smart home is not yours. Amazon hired thousands of contractors to listen to Echo recordings from people's living rooms. Bloomberg broke the story. Amazon never asked. Ring handed doorbell footage to police 11 times in a single year without a warrant and without telling the owner. In March 2025, Amazon killed local voice processing on Echo. Every word you say to Alexa now goes to Amazon's cloud. By default. Forever. Your Samsung TV watches what you watch. Your Roomba maps every room. Your thermostat knows when you leave home. And now they want you to pay for it. Alexa+: $19.99/month. Ring Protect Plus: $20/month. Nest Aware Plus: $20/month, up 33% in 2025. You pay them to spy on you. Monthly. Forever. In 2022, Insteon shut down without warning. Lights, switches, thermostats, all bricked overnight. Ten years of hardware, dead. There is one app that controls every smart device on the planet. Locally. On your hardware. Without a single byte sent to Amazon, Google, or Ring. It is called Home Assistant. 86,200+ stars on GitHub. 2,000+ built-in integrations. Lights, locks, cameras, thermostats, vacuums, blinds, EV chargers, solar inverters, doorbells, sprinklers. If a smart device exists, Home Assistant probably controls it. Here's what it does: → Works with Alexa, Google Home, Apple HomeKit, SmartThings, Matter, Thread, Zigbee, Z-Wave. → Voice control with your own local assistant. Wake word detection on your own hardware. Nothing sent to any cloud. → Build automations in 30 seconds. "When I leave home, lock the doors and turn off the lights." → Real-time energy dashboard. Spot the vampire devices. → Local AI cameras. Detect people, cars, animals. Footage stays on your drive. → Custom dashboards on any phone, tablet, or wall display. Here's the wildest part: When AWS goes down, Alexa stops working. When Google has an outage, Nest cameras go dark. When Ring servers throttle, your doorbell freezes. Home Assistant runs on your hardware. The internet can be down. Your house still listens. Your lights still respond. Your locks still work. The day Insteon shut down, Home Assistant users kept their lights on. Owned by the Open Home Foundation. A Swiss non-profit. It cannot be sold. It cannot go subscription. It cannot paywall a feature. Ever. Alexa+ + Ring + Nest: $720/year in subscriptions. Home Assistant: $0. Forever. Every integration. Every automation. Every device. Runs on a $50 Raspberry Pi. Runs on an old laptop. Runs in Docker on your NAS. The Home Assistant Green box is $99 once and never charges again. 86,200+ stars. 37,300+ forks. 425+ contributors. Apache-2.0 license. Active since 2013. Your home. Your data. Your rules. 100% Open Source. (Link in the comments)

This new open-source bitcoin wallet called ‘Cryobrick’, invented by a team of developers in India, can be hidden on old cellphones and disguised as any app.

basically: anthropic sneakily turned down how hard claude thinks before editing code, changed the default from "high" to "medium" effort, and hid the reasoning from session logs. all without telling users. an amd director had 7k sessions of telemetry to prove the degradation was real and measurable (not just vibes). anthropic admitted to the changes. there's a workaround (use "/effort max"). the uncomfortable part is most users had no data to notice it happened at all.

Claude Mythos is the start of the end. I think this is my psychosis moment.

society needs to grapple with the reality of a mythos-level model being open source in <12 months. i’m not sure we are prepared.

30 second explanation of the MemPalace by Milla Jovovich. By day she’s filming action movies, walking Miu Miu fashion shows, and being a mom. By night she’s coding. She’s the most creative, brilliant, and hilarious person I know. I’m honored to be working with her on this project… more to come.