Vort3x | Cybersalon | August 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
Cybersalon Events
Mozilla Festival. October 28-30, 2026
Barcelona, Spain
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. MozFest is looking for volunteers, if you get selected, Cybersalon has one fully funded travel grant to support your participation.
Update from Wikipedia Festival (Wikimania Paris July 2026)
Dark clouds on the horizon for the last ‘organic human’ knowledge platform, as tech bros harvest Wiki articles
NEWS
Apple Files Legal Challenge to UK Government
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Apple has filed a legal challenge with the UK’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal following the government request to grant it a backdoor into British users’ encrypted cloud data, Rachel Hall reports at the Guardian. Apple is seeking to challenge the government’s right to issue Technical Capability Notices under the Investigatory Powers Act. Separately, Privacy International and Liberty have already filed similar challenges.
Comment: After the US successfully got the UK to back down over the original TCN, which wanted Apple to undermine its advanced cloud encryption feature for all users worldwide, the government issued a new TCN repeating the request, but only for UK users. The 30-plus-year-old battles over access to encrypted data continue, with an added fillip that TCNs require the request to be kept secret.
Robotaxis Cleared to Operate in London
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Transport for London has granted private hire licenses on a year’s trial for 15 autonomous taxis owned by Wayve and operated in partnership with Uber, Matt de Prez reports at FleetNews. Trips are expected to begin later in late summer and will begin with a licensed private hire driver at the wheel. More than 100,000 Londoners have signed up to indicate interest. GMB, the private drivers’ union, opposes TfL’s decision. The Straits Times reports that US cities riders where robotaxis are already in operation are bearing unexpected costs when riders fall asleep or leave vehicle doors open.
Comment: London seems likely to be about to find out how much drivers do besides pilot the vehicle.
China Restricts AI Chatbot Relationships
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China has issued new regulations intended to curb dependence on AI chatbots, especially AI companions, a decision the Wall Street Journal and the Economist attribute to worries over the country’s slowing birthrate and fear that chatbots will substitute for real human relationships, Maggie Harrison Dupré reports at Futurism. The new rules also ban children from having AI relationships and require companies to alert their users’ emergency contacts if they appear to be in a mental health crisis. A Stanford research study has recommended that AI chatbots should not use language that suggests romantic attachment or misrepresent them as sentient.
Comment: Not necessarily for China’s reasons, but there are lots of people who would favor these rules. However, enforcement will be difficult, particularly as humans are so good at anthropomorphizing even inanimate objects.
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The social media platform X, part of SpaceXAI, has launched X Money for US Premium and Premium+ subscribers, Ashley Belanger reports at Ars Technica. The fledgling services has many limitations: for now, you can only send peer-to-peer payments to other X users who are over 18 and have access to X Money, and although it has a card you can add to Google Pay and Apple Pay, X Money lacks money transmitter licenses in New York and Massachusetts, two of the US’s biggest financial markets. Belanger warns that X can lock users out of their accounts if it detects suspicious activity, and that the company provides little in the way of customer service. At TechTimes, Clark Johnson notes that the bank backing X Money has twice been cited by the FIC for unsound banking practices and still carries an active FDIC consent order from 2023. X Money has no banking charter of its own. At Gizmodo, Matt Novak summarizes Elon Musk’s recent lengthy interview with the Economist, in which Musk predicted that money won’t matter in 2036, by which time he expects superintelligent robots to be running the world.
Comment: Ever since acquiring and rebranding Twitter, Elon Musk has said he intends to make it the “everything” app, something like China’s WeChat. Payments are a key part of this plan.
New Mexico Judge Fines Meta $567 Million
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A New Mexico state judge has ordered Meta to pay a record $567 million and make changes to its platform in a child safety case, Eli Tan reports at the New York Times. The money, which adds to the $375 million Meta was ordered to pay in the same case in March, will be paid into a fund to remedy damage the company has caused and provide mental health treatment. The judge ruled that Meta, as well as other platforms, is a significant contributing factor to the mental health crisis among New Mexico’s young people. Meta has said it will appeal.
FEATURES & ANALYSIS
Win for digital privacy- New UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham Cancels Digital ID
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Incoming UK prime minister Andy Burnham is dropping the digital ID plans announced by predecessor Keir Starmer in 2025 and is also expected to abolish the Department of Science, Industry, and Technology and spread its functions across several other departments, Karl Flinders reports at Computer Weekly. Burnham believes the money required to Industry groups such as TechUK and the Startup Coalition oppose breaking up DSIT on the basis that separating initiatives such as the Government Digital Service, the AI Safety Institute, and the Sovereign AI Fund will slow the pace at exactly the wrong time. Burnham has also said he intends to continue the previous government’s plan to in-source government work, including IT.
Publishers Consider Opting Out of Google Search
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In this article at AdWeek, Mark Stenberg reports that publishers are considering the “nuclear option” of opting out of Google search, Mark Stenberg reports at Ad Week. After September 15, Cloudflare will set the defaults for websites signing up for its content delivery service to block “multi-purpose crawlers” on any page that has ads, which will reject scraping for both AI training crawlers and search indexing. Google is not named in the plan, but unlike others, it has a single crawler for both purposes. The upshot will be to force publishers to consent to either both functions or neither. As search-driven traffic continues to shrink the once-unthinkable decision is becoming possible. Among the publishers Stenberg names are USA Today and the creator network Behiiv.
Comment: Not so long ago, publishers depended on search to send traffic their way. Then it was social media, particularly Twitter. Now…chatbots are getting all the traffic and rarely pass it on to the source.
Australian Social Media Ban Fails to Keep Teens Away
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In this article at Al Jazeera, Sarah Shamim reports that a new study from the Australian regulator shows that more than 80% of young teens and parents continue to use social media despite the official ban that came into effect in December 2025. The most common reason they were able to continue using the services was that the platform did not check their age. At the Guardian, Amelia Gentleman interviews Candice Odgers, a professor of developmental psychology at UC Irvine, whose 25 years of studies of adolescent mental health led her to oppose social media bans. From her close study of teens and their phones, Odgers agrees that adolescent mental health has deteriorated but says focusing solely on social media makes it impossible to discuss other solutions. Citing Jonathan Haidt’s insistence that social media is the cause, she says the data suggests correlation, not causation.
Meta Oversight Board Finds LLMs Repress Political Speech
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In this article, Reuters summarizes a study from the Meta-funded Oversight Board that finds that the large language models it tested are twice as likely to refuse to criticize repressive leaders and governments. The study included LLMs from Meta, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and DeepSeek. At its own site, the Oversight Board publishes the study in full and finds that refusals confuse users because they take many different forms. Sometimes the LLMs pointed to laws in a particular jurisdiction; at others, they said answers might put individuals at risk or create content that could escalate tension.
US Supreme Court Ruling Threatens EU-US Data Transfers
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In a blog posting, the NGO “noyb” says that the US Supreme Court ruling in Trump v. Slaughter, issued at the end of June “blew up” the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, which enables data flows under the General Data Protection Regulation by allowing the US president to control federal agencies, removing their independence. One of these is such the Federal Trade Commission, which the Framework relies on to provide redress and oversight. Noyb, founded by Max Schrems, famed for twice winning in the Court of Justice of the EU against previous EU-US data transfer arrangements, issued a call to repeal the Framework, and announced its intention to file a lawsuit aiming to allow the CJEU to annul the Framework. In an article at his blog, US privacy legal scholar Peter Swire argues that the decision only applies to the FTC’s commercial activities. The Data Protection Review Court, the redress mechanism created to satisfy the Court of Justice of the EU, which struck down previous EU-US data transfer arrangements because of US surveillance laws, in his view therefore remains independent.
Comment: This is a legally dense argument, but worth bearing in mind as the noyb case slowly proceeds.
DIARY
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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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 than 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 academics, lawyers, practitioners, policymakers, 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.
