This collaboration with Google underscores the importance of web archiving and expands the reach of the Wayback Machine, making it even easier for users to access and explore archived content.

• https://blog.archive.org/2024/09/11/new-feature-alert-access-archived-webpages-directly-through-google-search/

Proton, the Swiss creators of privacy-focused products like Proton Mail and ProtonVPN, recently released the latest product in their ever-growing lineup: Proton Wallet. Announced at the end of July 2024, it promotes itself as "an easy-to-use, self-custodial" Bitcoin wallet that will ostensibly make financial freedom more attainable for everyone.

It may well be that Proton Wallet is the easiest way to start using Bitcoin, but is a Bitcoin wallet the solution people need to improve their financial privacy?

Contrary to popular belief, cryptocurrency is not an inherently private transactional system.

Had Proton Wallet added support for Monero or a similarly private cryptocurrency, they could have single-handedly boosted a financial system that is actually private by default by a significant degree. In my eyes, failing to do so in favor of the market leader is an unfortunate step back from their "privacy by default" mantra.

Proton Wallet seems like a product that doesn't know its own place in the world.

Is it meant to save us from the tyranny of payment processors like PayPal who can freeze your funds at a whim?

Or, was Bitcoin chosen to give us independence from fiat currency, including stablecoins, entirely?

However, if Proton Wallet wasn't meant for all that, if it was simply meant to bring privacy to Bitcoin, then it's certainly a failure.

Proton hasn't taken any risks with this product, meaning it's really only good for satisfying a singular belief: That Bitcoin is just inherently good, and anything to promote Bitcoin is inherently good as well. I don't share these fanatical beliefs of Bitcoin maximalists, however, when Bitcoin is demonstrably lacking in a wide variety of ways.

Personally, I'm a bit of a cryptocurrency pessimist in general, but I can see some appeal for the technology in very specific areas. Unfortunately, Proton Wallet doesn't seem to fit in to a useful niche in any meaningful way. The functionality it does support is extremely basic, even by Bitcoin standards, and it simply doesn't provide enough value over the existing marketplace.

If you're an existing Proton user simply looking for a place to store some Bitcoin you already have sitting around, Proton Wallet might be perfectly adequate. For everyone else, I don't see this product being too useful. Bitcoin is still far too volatile to be a solid investment or used as a safe store of value if you crave financial independence and sovereignty, and Proton Wallet simply isn't adequate for paying for things privately online.

Imagine your car playing you an ad based on your destination, vehicle information—and listening to your conversations.

Ford has patented a system that, per the filing, would use several different sources of information to customize ad content to play in your car. One such information stream that this hypothetical system would use to determine what sort of ads to serve could be could be the voice commands you’ve given to the car. It could also identify your voice and recognize you and your ad preferences, and those of your passengers. Finally, it could listen to your conversations and determine if it’s better to serve you a visual ad while you’re talking, or an audio ad when there’s a lull in the conversation.

If the system described in the patent knew that you were headed to the mall on the freeway based on destination information from the nav system and vehicle speed, it could consider how many ads to serve in the time you’ll be in the car, and whether to serve them on a screen or based through the audio system. If you respond more positively to audio ads, it might serve you more of those—how does every five minutes sound?

But what if the weather’s bad, traffic is heavy, and you’re chatting away with your passenger? Ford describes the system using the external sensors to perceive traffic levels and weather, and the internal microphone to understand conversational cadence, to “regulate the number (and relevance) of ads shown” to the occupants. Using the GPS, if it knows you’ve parked near a store, it might serve you ads relevant to that retail location. Got passengers? Maybe you get an audio ad, and they get a visual one.

Given how consumers feel about advertising and in-car privacy, it is difficult to imagine an implementation of this system that wouldn’t generate blowback. But again, the patent isn’t describing some imminent implementation; it just protects Ford’s IP that describes a possible system. That said, with the encroachment of subscription-based features, perhaps it’s only a matter of time before you’re accepting a $20/month discount to let your new Ford play you ads on your commute.

Discord isn’t exactly known for generous file-sharing limits, still, the messaging app offered a 25MB limit to free users. The company has now updated its support page to reflect the upload limit for free users has been lowered to 10MB.

A judge in Ohio has issued a temporary restraining order against a security researcher who presented evidence that a recent ransomware attack on the city of Columbus scooped up reams of sensitive personal information, contradicting claims made by city officials.

The order, issued by a judge in Ohio's Franklin County, came after the city of Columbus fell victim to a ransomware attack on July 18 that siphoned 6.5 terabytes of the city’s data. A ransomware group known as Rhysida took credit for the attack and offered to auction off the data with a starting bid of about $1.7 million in bitcoin. On August 8, after the auction failed to find a bidder, Rhysida released what it said was about 45 percent of the stolen data on the group’s dark web site, which is accessible to anyone with a TOR browser.

Columbus Mayor Andrew Ginther said on August 13 that a “breakthrough” in the city’s forensic investigation of the breach found that the sensitive files Rhysida obtained were either encrypted or corrupted, making them “unusable” to the thieves. Ginther went on to say the data’s lack of integrity was likely the reason the ransomware group had been unable to auction off the data.

Shortly after Ginther made his remarks, security researcher David Leroy Ross contacted local news outlets and presented evidence that showed the data Rhysida published was fully intact and contained highly sensitive information regarding city employees and residents. Ross, who uses the alias Connor Goodwolf, presented screenshots and other data that showed the files Rhysida had posted included names from domestic violence cases and Social Security numbers for police officers and crime victims. Some of the data spanned years.

On Thursday, the city of Columbus sued Ross for alleged damages for criminal acts, invasion of privacy, negligence, and civil conversion. The lawsuit claimed that downloading documents from a dark web site run by ransomware attackers amounted to him “interacting” with them and required special expertise and tools.

For Android users seeking a privacy-focused browser, Privacy Guides recommends Mull:

Mull is a privacy oriented and deblobbed Android browser based on Firefox. Compared to Firefox, it offers much greater fingerprinting protection out of the box, and disables JavaScript Just-in-Time (JIT) compilation for enhanced security. It also removes all proprietary elements from Firefox, such as replacing Google Play Services references.

Mull enables many features upstreamed by the Tor uplift project using preferences from Arkenfox. Proprietary blobs are removed from Mozilla's code using the scripts developed for Fennec F-Droid.

X briefly discouraged users from viewing a link to an NPR story about Donald Trump's recent visit to Arlington National Cemetery, raising questions about whether the Elon Musk-owned platform is putting its thumb on the scale for the former president.

On Thursday, NPR reporter Stephen Fowler posted a link to a story in which he quoted an Army official who said that an employee at Arlington National Cemetery was “abruptly pushed aside” during an event attended by Trump and members of his campaign earlier this week. The outlet had previously reported that there was a “physical altercation” at the event with campaign staff over federal laws barring campaign activities at the cemetery.

Some users on X who attempted to click a link to the story were greeted with a warning message saying that X deemed that “this link may be unsafe.” It stated that it could be malicious, violent, spammy or otherwise violate the platform’s rules, but didn't explain why the link was flagged. Fowler posted a thread on X, each tweet of which contained a link to his story — the warning appeared to affect the first two instances of the link but not others, for reasons unknown. It’s highly unusual for such a warning to appear before a link to a mainstream website. Other links to NPR, as well as other coverage of Trump’s visit to Arlington, don’t appear to have such a label.

In a statement to an NPR reporter, an X spokesperson claimed the warning appeared due to a "false positive" and that it had been corrected. The company didn't explain further.

Notably, Musk has been a vocal supporter of Trump this election, and recently held a lengthy live streamed conversation with him on X. Musk has also publicly feuded with NPR in the past, adding a “state affiliated media” label to its account for several months last year. NPR hasn’t posted from its main account on X since the label was added last April.

Last week, Microsoft mentioned in a support document that it was formally deprecating Windows' 39-year-old Control Panel applets. But following widespread reporting of the change, Microsoft has either backtracked or clarified its language to remove the note about Control Panel being deprecated in favor of the Settings app. Here's what the original post said, as also preserved by the Internet Wayback Machine (emphasis ours):

"The Control Panel is a feature that's been part of Windows for a long time. It provides a centralized location to view and manipulate system settings and controls," the support page explains. "Through a series of applets, you can adjust various options ranging from system time and date to hardware settings, network configurations, and more. The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience."

The current version of the page has changed that last sentence considerably. It now says that "many of the settings in Control Panel are in the process of being migrated to the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience."

It's not clear whether this reflects a policy change or just a clarification of language. We've asked Microsoft whether it has changed plans to deprecate the Control Pane or if the original version of the support page was just incorrect in the first place, and we'll update if we receive a response.

Peloton is in something of a financial rut lately, and we all know what companies do when that happens. They take it out on consumers. To that end, the exercise machine maker just announced it will be charging a $95 “used equipment activation fee” to anyone who buys one of its machines on the secondhand market, according to a report by CNBC.

The company made this announcement in its Q4 2024 shareholder letter. The fairly exorbitant fee will apply to any machine bought directly from a previous owner, meaning anything purchased via Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace or, heck, even a neighbor down the street. Without tithing $95 to the church of Peloton, the machine won’t have access to any of the classes or features the company has become known for.

The company says this activation fee is just to ensure that new members “receive the same high-quality onboarding experience Peloton is known for.” In a recent earnings call, however, a company representative was more transparent, calling the fee a “source of incremental revenue and gross profit,” according to The Verge.

The standard Bike, for instance, sells new for nearly $1,500, but you can pick up a used one online for $300 to $500. Now, that price goes up to $400 to $600. Peloton also requires a monthly membership fee to access content, which is around $44.