Vort3x | Cybersalon | July 15, 2026
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
NEWS
Wikipedia 25th anniversary – Congrats to Ed Saperia (founder of Newspeak House) on his nomination for Silver Award in recognition of his long term support for the movement for Open Knowledge! Well deserved Ed !!!
A few glasses were raised at 25th birthday party, celebrating also 15 years of Wikimedia UK
Hot off the press: Open Rights Group issued a new report on The Case for Digital Sovereignty for UK (with intro from Lord Clement-Jones, MPs Sian Berry and Clive Lewis, written by Jim Killock with support by Wendy Grossman and ORG team).
It notes that from national security, e-privacy, geopolitical independence and economic strategy, UK should aim to accomplish Digital Sovereignty in a speedy and technically robust way. Surely it is not too much to ask for the country to have control over it’s data, technology and security of it’s digital infrastructure?
Report here (choice of PDF, epub or other formats
Read and feedback your views asap (to [email protected]) before 1/9/2026 to be ready for the party conference launch
US flip flops on AI Governance – who is allowed the Big Bazooka of AI models?
From initial ban on the models on 12th June to partial removal of restrictions a month later, US administration is having a go at establishing export controls and preference for US ‘Approved Only” companies. This raises a whole range of new security questions for UK and ‘mid-powers’
Shenanigans on E-Privacy: EU Commission Maneuvers Vote for Chat Control
On July 9, the European Parliament extended Chat Control, a temporary exception to the ePrivacy directive that allows but does not require platforms such as WhatsApp and Gmail to scan private messages for child sexual abuse material, for two more years, even though a majority of MEPs presented voted to reject it, Stefan Krempl reports at Heise Online. Clark Johnson explains at Tech Times that the measure expired in April, but the Christian Democrats EPP group, supported by the Council and the European Commission, brought it back through a strategic maneuver: after the European Parliament rejected it in March, the European Commission adopted the original text as the Council’s second reading position, which procedural rules require an absolute majority to reject, At the law’s first adoption in 2021, Meta, Google, and Microsoft opted in immediately.
Comment: There will be a lot of opposition to both Chat Control itself, which is the subject of ongoing moves toward new legislation, and the way the European Commission and Christian Democrats manipulated procedures to override the Parliamentary majority.
World’s Largest Data Center Canceled Due to Land Rights Litigation
The developer QTS, owned by Blackstone, has terminated its plan to build over 800 acres of the 2,100-acre, 22 million-square-foot “Virginia Digital Gateway” data center, which would have been the largest in the world, after years of legal disputes with local residents and historical preservation groups, Etiido Uko reports at Tom’s Hardware.
Other stakeholders had already pulled out due to the extended litigation. The site, at the edge of the historic Manassas National Battlefield Park, will remain under its former rural zoning restrictions. QTS pulled out after Virginia courts ruled the county’s zoning approval void due to improper public notice. At the Guardian, Sanya Mansoor reports that In Pennsylvania, where more than 50 data centers are planned, protests are growing and Stacy Garrity, the Republican candidate challenging incumbent Democratic governor Josh Shapiro, has called for a three-year “pause” on construction.
At Tom’s Hardware, Jowi Morales reports on local governments calling for moratoriums so they can think through the issues in Tennessee, Texas, and Seattle. Finally, Claire Marshall Watkins reports in East London Lines that local residents and the council are opposing a data center in Truman Brewery on Brick Lane intended to speed high-frequency trading because they would rather prioritize affordable housing.
Scams Plague Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis
The UK money saving expert Martin Lewis is finding his face and name being used in deepfakes and AI-generated messages to target people with scams and fake investments, Paula Cocozza reports at the Guardian. Lewis, who has become a widely trusted financial adviser, says he is finding the attacks impossible to stop and warns that he never advertises anything. At Rest of World, Soumya Gupta publishes an excerpt from her new book, Bharat Bluff, which explores the scams that exploit Indians’ trust on WhatsApp, Facebook, and Google, among others.
Comment: The more trusted you are, the more vulnerable your followers are to scams that exploit that trust.
Waymos Freeze in July 4 San Francisco Traffic
Videos show a number of Waymos frozen and blocking congested San Francisco traffic following a fireworks display near the Golden Gate Bridge on July 4, Dennis Romero reports at NBC News. The company says it is working on ways to improve the cars’ resilience during disruptions. Another car caught fire after driving over fireworks that had been set off. At CBS News, Aimee Picchi reported in mid-June that Waymo was recalling 3,900 cars after a number drove into construction zones. In London, the BBC reports that residents in East London have been awakened in the middle of the night by Waymo test cars repeatedly getting stuck in their small cul-de-sac and beeping loudly while backing out. At TechCrunch, Sean O’Kane reports that the National Transportation Safety Board and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are both investigating a crash in which a Tesla in Full Self Drive mode drove into a house and killed a 76-year-old woman. At ArsTechnica, Ashley Belanger adds that Tesla claims that FSB is not responsible for the crash, though the car’s driver says it was engaged at the time.
Comment: The Waymo stories all have in common the problem that self-driving cars have no one on-site to solve problems when they arise. Some of the frozen cars simply ran out of battery, a problem that also afflicts human drivers but is worse when no one can guide the car to the side of the road. The Tesla story is a question of assigning liability, an issue that will take years to resolve.
UK’s ITV Plans to Sell Broadcast Arm to Sky
ITV has agreed to sell its broadcast channels and streaming service to Sky, now owned by the US cable company Comcast, for $2.1 billion, subject to regulatory approval, Paul Sandle and Sarah Young report at Reuters. ITV would retain its production studios. Comcast announced in June it would spin out its Sky and NBC Universal subsidiaries. At The Guardian, Michael Savage reports that staff at the BBC’s Radio 4 Today program have been ordered to prioritize making content for TikTok, Instagram, and other digital platforms over traditional TV and radio. Coupled with staff cuts, the move leads insiders to worry that the BBC is undercutting its own relevance to the life of the nation. At the Financial Times, Daniel Thomas reports that the BBC and Channel 4 are in talks to merge their streaming services in order to create a stronger competitor to the US giants.
Comment: All these stories are signs of the times: “linear TV” – that is, traditional broadcast TV schedules – continues to decline except for live sports and breaking news, and national broadcasters must adapt throughout that and the rise of giant foreign streaming services. However, those realities don’t necessarily make it a good idea to allow such an important independent public service broadcaster to pass into foreign ownership or for two of the UK’s major broadcast news sources to consolidate into one.
FEATURES & ANALYSIS
Humans Power World Cup “AI” Data Analytics
In this article at Rest of World, Rina Chandran and Michael Beltran highlight the human labelers and businesses behind the statistics, data analytics, and other information offered to players, broadcasters, and the betting and gaming industries. Over the last 20 years, almost all parts of football have been filled with sensors, from the ball itself to players’ clothing and shoes. Football clubs rely on this data to plan training, prevent injury, and plot strategy. A small handful of companies control all this data; the workers labeling it all are often football players themselves, and are largely based in cities like Manila, Cairo, Channai, and Ternopil.
Comment: As so often, what seems like AI is humans all the way down.
Scientists Use AI Tools to Read Inside a Burned Papyrus Scroll
AI has helped read the inside of a burned, carbonized papyrus scroll without unrolling it, Ian Sample reports at the Guardian. The achievement is part of the Vesuvius Challenge, founded on work by University of Kentucky scientist Brent Seales, who pioneered training machine learning algorithms to read the writing inside papyrus scrolls by spotting subtle differences in the internal fibers as seen on X-ray images. Now remains the even more difficult task of trying to understand the text.
Comment: Once in a while, technology really does seem like magic.
Sony Plans 2028 End of Physical Media for Playstation
In this article at the Guardian, Keith Stuart considers Sony’s announcement that it will stop producing physical media for the Playstation in 2028. It has also deleted 550 movies from the libraries of owners who have paid for the films because its licensing agreement with Studio Canal has ended. Stuart goes on to note Sony’s lack of understanding of fan culture and the rising preference for physical media among Gen Z. At Eurogramer, Sherif Saed finds that a petition set up by Canadian retailer PNP Games to protest Sony’s decision about physical media has amassed 170,000 signatures (and counting). In other forms of protest, Sy Boles reports at the Harvard Gazette that there is a trend toward digging out old iPods, which stored music offline, and taking up offline hobbies. At Rest of World, Ananya Bhattacharya reports that India has launched a series of hackathons to build offline AI tools based on open source models.
Comment: Gen Z has learned from watching companies delete purchased content. Small wonder they’ve learned from it – and that also feeds into the resistance to data collection and forced use of AI by opting for offline technology.
AI Fuels Massive Rise in Google’s Energy Use
In this blog posting, Ketan Joshi analyzes Google’s latest annual report and finds that the rise in the company’s energy use from 2024 to 2025 is the largest in company history, jumping from 31 terawatt hours to 43 and outstripping Microsoft. These companies’ energy use is rising fast. At the Guardian, Blake Montgomery, Nick Robins-Early, and Dara Kerr look at the similar rise in energy use at Amazon and Meta as well as Google, finding that in all cases AI investment is causing their carbon emissions to rise.
Comment: This is not the kind of hockey-stick growth companies usually seek.
In this interview at the Guardian, child safety campaigner Baroness Beeban Kidron discusses her new book, Users and the experiences that led her to set up the Five Rights Foundation, push for online child safety, and oppose a technology industry she believes is out of control. At Bloomberg, Signal CEO Meredith Whittaker warns that the push for online safety risks building pervasive surveillance. Whittaker believes that people care about privacy, but that the stakes are obscure, especially in the face of the world’s many other problems.
Comment: Compare and contrast. Kidron also cares about privacy; Whittaker also deplores child sexual abuse.
DIARY
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August 6-9, 2026
Las Vegas, Nevada, USA
DEF CON is one of the oldest continuously running hacker conventions around, and also one of the largest.
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August 6-9, 2026
Vancouver, BC, Canada
A Canadian conference for decentralized social networks and the social web.
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August 14-16, 2026
New York, NY, USA
HOPE 26 will be the seventeenth Hackers On Planet Earth event. This promises to be a memorable event. It is open to all hackers, makers, tinkerers, experimenters, artists, educators and anyone else with an interest in exploring and improving the world we live in, and sharing knowledge with others. HOPE is an all-ages event with multiple simultaneous sessions and many other things to do throughout the weekend.
International Congress on Love and Sex with Robots
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August 21-22, 2026
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
The latest edition of LSR will include topics such as robotics, sextech, and psychology.
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August 28-30, 2026
Paris, France
State of the Map is the annual event for all mappers and OpenStreetMap users. In 2026 the State of the Map conference will be taking place in Paris and online. It will be a three day conference packed with talks, workshops, discussion rounds and more.
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October 6-7, 2026
Online
Most of FediForum will be an unconference. That means that you, the attendee, will help determine what subjects are discussed. So bring your session ideas! You can mention some during registration, but you can change your mind until the very morning of FediForum when we together make the agenda. We will also again see speed demos of cool Open Social Web software using open protocols such as ActivityPub and ATProtocol.
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October 7, 2026
Belvol, Luxembourg
OSCL aims to create a vibrant and inclusive platform where public sector organizations, innovators, business leaders, humanitarian/non-governmental organizations, and enthusiasts can connect, share knowledge, and collaborate on the future of open source technologies. OSCL is a balanced conference where technical and non-technical people can meet to discuss the real-world impact of open source, from code and infrastructure to community, businesses and institutions.
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October 28-30, 2026
Barcelona, Spain
Mozilla Festival, aka MozFest, is three days of bold conversations, hands-on building, and ideas worth traveling for. This year’s event is partnering with the City of Barcelona and taking part in Open Tech Week — a city-wide celebration of the people shaping a better digital world.
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November 4-6, 2026
Washington, DC, USA
The Privacy + Security Forum brings together the most seasoned thought leaders in the areas of privacy and security law for rigorous deep-dive sessions that deliver hands-on activities and practical takeaways for conference participants.
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November 9-12, 2026
Lisbon, Portugal
Web Summit runs the world’s largest technology events, connecting people and ideas that change the world. Web Summit’s mission has been to create software that enables meaningful connections between the CEOs, founders, investors, media, politicians and cultural figureheads who are reshaping the world
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November 13-14, 2026
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.
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December 14-18, 2026
Nairobi, Kenya
The 21st annual meeting of the Internet Governance Forum, which serves to bring people together from various stakeholder groups in discussions on digital public policy, is expected to draw more htan 9,000 participants from 165 countries to contribute their perspectives on the most pressing issues, priorities, and challenges in the governance of digital technologies.
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December 27-30, 2026
Hamburg, Germany
Over the last 40 years, the Chaos Communication Congress has become a Europe-wide renowned event with more than 17,000 participants annually, drawing an ever-growing group of international guests.
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February 9-10, 2027
London, UK
The 2027 State of Open Con will focus on Open Technology including open source software, open hardware, open data, open innovation, open standards, and the value that the open community brings to the UK and its digital economy. Alongside a diverse range of topics, the event promises to include a diverse range of speakers and participants.
Computers, Privacy, and Data Protection
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March 8-11, 2027
CPDP offers the cutting edge in legal, regulatory, academic and technological development in privacy and data protection, gathering cademics, lawyers, practitioners, policy-makers, industry and civil society from all over the world. Held annually in Brussels, CPDP offers an arena to exchange ideas and discuss the latest emerging issues and trends. This unique multidisciplinary formula has served to make CPDP one of the leading data protection and privacy conferences in Europe and around the world.
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April 26-30, 2027
Venice, Italy
The Venice Privacy Symposium aims to promote international dialogue, cooperation and knowledge sharing on data regulation, compliance, and innovative technologies and to present top level experts shedding light on the latest developments in data governance, regulatory compliance and innovative technologies.
