Vort3x | Cybersalon | October 15, 2025
Vort3x, published on the 15th of each month, aims to pick out significant developments in the intersection of computers, freedom, privacy, and security for friends near and far. The views expressed in these stories do not necessarily reflect those of Cybersalon, either individually or collectively.
Prepared by Wendy M. Grossman.
Contents: Cybersalon events | News | Features | Diary
Cybersalon Events
Tap, Scan and Verify: The Future of Digital ID and Digital Money
21st October 6pm, Committee Room 16
Join us for a pivotal discussion at House of Commons on the new plans for Digital ID for UK and it’s implications for future of money and payments.
With John McDonnell MP, Wendy Grossman (Net.Wars), James Meadway (Macrodose Podcast), David Birch (author of Money in Metaverse)
Chair: Eva Pascoe (Cybersalon.org)
More details about the event here
NEWS
UK’s Keir Starmer Plans Mandatory Digital IDs
———————————————————————-
At the Labour Party conference, UK prime minister Keir Starmer announced he would introduce, by the end of this Parliament, digital IDs that would be mandatory for right-to-work checks, calling them an “enormous opportunity for the UK”, Andrew Sparrow reports at the Guardian. Within a few days, a petition opposing the IDs had amassed 2.8 million signatures. At Open Democracy, Aman Sethi compares Starmer’s “Brit card” to India’s Aadhar, which his years of investigation find has brought mass surveillance, denial of services to the elderly, poor, and infirm, and compromised safety and security, and has fundamentally changed the relationship between citizens and the state. At net.wars, Wendy M. Grossman recounts the history of ID cards in the UK: frequently proposed, always with a different stated purpose. Finally, at The Times, Oliver Wright reports that Palantir says it will not seek contracts around the digital ID because it was not included in Labour’s manifesto at the election and therefore lacks democratic legitimacy.
Comment: Given that those applying for jobs already have to prove their right to work, it’s unclear why adding a new document will change anything. What it can do, though, is enable the UK government to build a database of those who have the right to work and, if it goes on as suggested to use these IDs for access to government services, those to exclude. There are many reasons why digital IDs could be useful for individuals, but UK government proposals for ID cards have historically been conceived for the benefit of government processes, not daily life.
Microsoft Ends Support for Windows 10
———————————————————————
Microsoft will end technical support and security and feature updates for Windows 10 on October 14, the company states on its support website. The company says customers should install Windows 11 on their existing hardware if they can or buy new machines, or pay for a year of Extended Security Updates. At Tom’s Hardware, Andrew E. Freedman reports that the organization end of 10 is pushing instead for people to install Linux on their old machines. The Public Interest Research Group has published an open letter calling on Microsoft head Satya Nadella to automatically extend support free of charge to save 400 million computers from ending up as landfill. Finally, at Rest of World, Yashraj Sharma reports on the massive streams of ewaste that wind up in India, which is pressuring its decades-old network of recycling companies to formalize. In 2022, the world produced 82% more ewaste than in 2010, and the number rises by about 2 million metric tons per year.
Comment: In 2014, when Microsoft ceased support for Windows XP, it was 13 years old; Windows 10 was introduced just ten years ago in 2015. Microsoft is going the wrong way in shortening the life of its operating systems – at our collective expense.
Deal is Reached to Keep TikTok in US
———————————————————————-
A deal has been reached that will keep TikTok available in the US, Clare Duffy reports at CNN. If completed, control of TikTok’s US operations along with a copy of its algorithm will pass to a new joint venture based in the US with majority American investors and board of directors. Among the investors will be private equity company Silver Lake and Fox Corp. ByteDance will retain a less than 20% stake, and the algorithm will be retrained on US data, following which it will be monitored by the software company Oracle.
UK Government Orders Apple to Backdoor Encryption for UK Users
———————————————————————-
At the Financial Times, Anna Gross and Tim Bradshaw report that the UK government has ordered Apple to provide access to British users’ encrypted cloud backups. This follows the US announcement that the UK had withdrawn its demand for access to Americans’ data. Experts warn, however, that undermining encryption for one group of users undermines it for everyone. At its support site, Apple says that it can no longer offer its Advanced Data Protection in the UK to new users. Those who already have it turned on will be given a period of time in which to disable it in order to retain access to their iCloud accounts.
Comment: The UK government has been arguing with the laws of mathematics since about 1991. There remains no such thing as a magic hole that only “good guys” can use.
OpenAI Finds That Large Language Models’ False Results Cannot Be Fixed
———————————————————————-
OpenAI researchers have published the results of a study that shows that large language models will always produce plausible but false outputs due to fundamental mathematical constraints and LLMs’ statistical properties, Gyana Swain reports at ComputerWorld. The study proves mathematically that this will remain true no matter how much the technology improves. At Ars Technica, Jonathan M. Gitlin reports that Tesla had three crashes on the first day of its test of robotaxis in Austin, Texas. Gitlin also notes that two Tesla owners who planned to let Full-Self-Drive pilot a Model Y the 2,415 miles from Los Angeles to Jacksonville, Florida crashed and broke the car’s suspension after 60 miles. Also at Ars Technica, Benj Edwards reports that another new study finds that chatbots cannot adapt to Persian social rituals, in which sellers and buyers engage in a ritual of refusal and counter-refusal.
Comment: The entertainment aspect of mocking the flawed technology aside, a crucial part of learning to live with these advanced systems will be learning when – and especially when not – to trust them and with what.
FEATURES & ANALYSIS
Venture Capitalists Say China Has Made Some Sectors Uninvestable Elsewhere
————————————————————–
In this article at Bloomberg, Alastair Marsh reports that a group of eight Western venture capitalists who took a road trip across China to visit factories, startup investors, and company founders say that China’s advances in the energy transition have made some sectors uninvestable. China has raced ahead toward a low-carbon future in the fields of battery manufacturing and recycling, electrolysers, solar, and wind hardware. At Rest of World, Selina Cheng reports that nearly 20,000 scientists of Chinese origin who built their careers in the US left the country between 2010 and 2021, many returning to China. Simultaneously, Beijing is offering generous relocation subsidies to lure them back. Meanwhile, the energy think tank Ember reports that in the first half of 2025 fossil fuel use fell in China and India but grew in the US and EU.
Comment: In the 2021 book Blockchain Chicken Farm and Other Stories of Tech in China’s Countryside, Xiaowei Wang travels across China to view a variety of technological projects. While some seem to add little genuine progress, many make you wonder why we aren’t doing this sort of thing.
Former Twitterers Build Blacksky
————————————————————–
In this article at Non-Profit Quarterly, Isaiah Thompson chronicles the attempt to build Blacksky, an online Black community that began organizing on Bluesky as part of the shift there from X in the wake of the 2024 US presidential election. The project is led by young technologist Rudy Fraser, who tells Thompson, “The Internet has kind of been anti-Black from the very beginning.” Maintaining Black Twitter was labor-intensive work and relied on the community to build its own cultural practices. On Bluesky, Fraser is able to write code to automate some of it, building filters for hate speech and protection from harassment, and tools to help moderators.
Meta Blocks Pro-Choice Abortion Activists
——————————————————————–
At EFF’s blog, Lisa Femia reports that Meta has begun removing or shadow-banning accounts and posts belonging to pro-choice abortion advocates even though they don’t break any of the platform’s rules. In addition, Meta’s advertising policies are vague about what qualifies under exceptions for educational content.
Wikimedia Says Accusations of Left-Wing Bias Lack Understanding
———————————————————————-
In this article at Ars Technica, Jon Brodkin analyzes Wikimedia’s lawyer’s response to US Senator Ted Cruz accusing Wikipedia of left-wing bias, which lawyer Jacob Rogers says shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how Wikipedia works. There is no central control; instead, articles are openly discussed and updated by the site’s many volunteers, who reach consensus through rigorous referencing and discussion on each article’s Talk Page. The easiest way to correct a perceived flaw is to become one of those volunteers. In an opinion piece, The Lever warns that factual reporting is being accused of liberal bias after a notification from NewsGuard, which issues ratings of news sites on their reliability and transparency for sale to advertisers and technology companies, that its site doesn’t qualify for its highest rating, “High Credibility” because it “appears to advance a liberal perspective, which is not disclosed to the reader”. After pushback in which The Lever pointed out its referencing, factual basis, and mission statement, NewsGuard withdrew the downrating.
AI Bubble bust is near
——————————————————————–
In this article at Fortune, Beatrice Nolan raises the alarm that an AI bubble is about to burst following Oracle’s announcement of a $300 billion deal with OpenAI based on a second deal securing a stockpile of Nvidia GPUs. Financial analysts warn that the $300 billion is included in Oracle’s announced $455 billion performance obligations, which have sent its stock to a new high, and far exceed OpenAI’s $12 billion in annual revenue. At his blog, Ed Zitron crunches the numbers to conclude that there is not enough capital to build what OpenAI is promising, He goes on to examine every promise OpenAI CEO is making. At Pluralistic, Cory Doctorow cites Zitron and argues that where the web’s early ecommerce companies also had absurdly high valuations, every technological generation of what they were doing got cheaper. By contrast, AI companies are in the opposite situation: every generation gets vastly more expensive. At Bloomberg, Emily Forgash and Agnee Ghosh parse the complex web of interlinked “circular” deals that are supporting AI companies’ finances. They write, “Never before has so much money been spent so rapidly on a technology that, for all its potential, remains largely unproven as an avenue for profit-making.” Finally, at the Guardian, Kalyeena Makortoff reports that the Bank of England is also warning of the increasing risk of a “sudden correction” in global markets.
DIARY
—————————————-
November 7-8, 2025
Bolzano, Italy
For over two years, FediForum has been bringing together the people who move the Fediverse and broader Open Social Web forward in a series of online events with global participation. FediForum is now expanding the conversation by hosting the first in-person event, in partnership with the international free software conference SFSCON.
—————————————-
November 7-8, 2025
Bolzano, Italy
The South Tyrol Free Software Conference, SFSCON, is one of Europe’s most established annual conferences on Free Software. SFSCON promotes the use of Free Software in digital infrastructures as a tool to achieve greater innovation and competitiveness. Here decision-makers and developers meet, learn and get inspired.
—————————————-
November 7-9, 2025
Barcelona, Spain
Mozilla Festival is where passionate individuals unite to build a better Internet. Reclaiming the Internet starts with all of us. At the Mozilla Festival, participants unlearn defaults, rethink power, share bold ideas and have thoughtful discussions that drive real change. Join us in shaping a digital future that’s more open, inclusive, and firmly grounded in fundamental rights.
—————————————-
November 10-13. 2025
Lisbon, Portugal
“The world’s largest technology conference.” Founded in 2009, Web Summit focuses on Internet and emerging technologies, marketing, and venture capitalism. Partners range from Fortune 500 companies to start-ups, and attendees represent all levels and sectors of the global technology industry.
—————————————-
November 12, 2025
Washington, DC, USA
The Privacy + Security Forum brings together seasoned thought leaders in privacy and security. Participants are from Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, Dubai, Dublin, London, Mexico City, Montreal, Paris, Seoul, Tokyo, Zürich and, of course, from across the U.S. Network with privacy professionals, security professionals, chief information officers, attorneys, academics, experts from NGOs & think tanks, technologists, policymakers, and everyone else with strong ties to the privacy and security community.
Chaos Communication Congress 2025
—————————————-
December 27-30, 2025
Leipzig, Germany
Europe’s largest hacker conference, the Congress, now in its 39th year, has become a Europe-wide renowned event with more than 17,000 participants annually, drawing an ever-growing group of international guests.
—————————————-
February 3-4,. 2026
London, UK
SOOCon is the UK’s Open Technology Conference – Open Source Software, Open Hardware, Open Data, Open Standards, and AI Openness.
—————————————-
February 23, 2026
Washington, DC, USA
The State of the Net Conference Series is hosted by the Internet Education Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public and policymakers about the potential of a decentralized global Internet to promote communications, commerce and democracy. IEF works closely with leaders on Capitol Hill and in the private sector to host the most important debates in Internet policy. IEF’s board of directors comprises public interest groups, corporations, and associations representative of the diversity of the Internet community.
—————————————-
February 28, 2026
London, UK, and online
Now in its fourteenth edition, State of the Browser is a yearly one-day, single-track conference with widely-varying talks about the modern web, accessibility, web standards, and more, organised by London Web Standards.
—————————————-
March 3-5, 2026
Berkeley, CA, USA
The fifth ACM symposium on computer science and law is the flagship conference for the emerging field of computer science and law. It brings together a community—scholars, practicing lawyers, and computing professionals—who are fluent both in computational thinking and its rigorous mathematical formalisms and in legal scholarship and thought with its equally rigorous yet human-centric set of principles, methodologies, and goals. Central to the study of “computer science and law” is the creation of a body of scholarship aimed towards the co-design of law and computing technology to promote social goals. We seek papers that combine rigorous technical computer-science reasoning with rigorous legal analysis to integrate the two disciplines.
—————————————-
April 13-16, 2026
Boulder, CO, USA
For over 75 years, the Conference on World Affairs (CWA) has brought together global leaders and experts from a wide range of fields to spark lively, thought-provoking conversations on the most pressing issues of our time. Free and open to all—whether in person at CU Boulder or via livestream—CWA is designed to inform, inspire, and engage diverse audiences.
—————————————-
April 25-26, 2026
Manchester, UK
OggCamp is an unconference celebrating Free Culture, Free and Open Source Software, hardware hacking, digital rights, and all manner of collaborative cultural activities and is committed to creating a conference that is as inclusive as possible. If you’ve got a story to tell, no matter your background or current status, whether it’s your first talk or you’ve loads of experience, as long as the talk is connected (somehow) to our theme then we want to know about it.
—————————————-
May 5-8, 2026
Lusaka, Zambia and online
Our goal for RightsCon 2026 is to strike a balance between a clear, familiar structure and the flexibility to respond to a rapidly changing digital landscape. At a time when the digital rights sector is facing unprecedented pressure and uncertainty, from political volatility to disruptive emerging technologies, we want to ensure that the program is able to address urgent, time-sensitive issues, while maintaining a stable foundation for participants to prepare and engage meaningfully.
JOBS
From our friends at Democracy Forum – new jobs at civic society orgs
