Vort3x | Cybersalon | September 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
10th October – New Big Fundraiser party for our colleagues at Newspeak House and celebrations of their 10 years Anniversary! UK Democracy is under threat, please support Newspeak squad with generous donations so they can keep doing their foundational work! Tickets here
21st October 6.30pm, House of Commons (Westminster, London)
Dollar, Stablecoins vs Sterling’s Future: Bold Moves or Missed Chances as Cashless Society wins
Invites to follow or DM @Cybrsalon on X
NEWS
Chrome stays home-Google avoids breakup in “Search “Antitrust Trial
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Under remedies issued by US District Court Judge Amit P. Mehta in the search antitrust case, Google will not be required to divest Chrome or Android and may continue paying companies like Apple and Mozilla to preference its search engine but may not make those deals exclusive and must share search data with competitors, Rebecca Bellan reports at TechCrunch. At the Wall Street Journal, Dan Gallegher calls the ruling a big win for Google – but an even bigger one for Apple, which gets to keep a near-costless estimated $20 billion a year in revenue. The judge writes that AI may change the market entirely; Gallegher agrees but says if it does the requirement to share search data will have no impact. At Pluralistic, Cory Doctorow says the ruling is the “worst possible outcome”, calling Google’s payments “bribes” to keep potential competitors out of the market and warning that Google’s management will not be humbled into changing behavior, as Microsoft’s were in 1995.
Comment: The vast majority of commentators believe that Google got off very lightly, considering that it was found guilty of abusing its dominant position. But is everyone fighting the old war when AI is coming?
Escape from AI monopolies – Switzerland Releases National Open Source LLM
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Switzerland has released its own Open Source national large language model, “Aspertus”, built entirely on publicly available data and conforming to data protection and copyright laws, Mariella Moon reports at Engadget. The three Swiss public institutions – Swiss Federal Technology Institute of Lausanne (EPFL), ETH Zurich and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) – that built Aspertus have also released both the datasets they used and detailed documentation and source code for its training process. The researchers say Aspertus proves that AI can be a form of public infrastructure. In a speech in the US, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says that the American technology stack should serve as a worldwide standard, including in China.
Comment: Two nations, two very different approaches. Huang’s approach is dangerous because it risks creating a monoculture where everything can always fail or succumb to attack in the same way. Switzerland provides a counterbalance to a nascent industry that appeared to be born “pre-monopolized”.
When Buy button really means ‘rent’ – new court case against Amazon Prime’s Use of “Buy”
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A lawsuit filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of California alleges that Amazon has used false and misleading advertising in the terms and conditions for its Prime Video service, which use the words “buy” and “purchase” to describe transactions that the company can change at any time like just renting a Movie or a Song, as Scharon Harding reports at Ars Technica. This case is likely to benefit from a new California law which specifically bans the practice. Can Amazon change meaning of words and get away with it?
How hackers scale up their criminal activity? Just ask AI Chatbots
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In a new report, Anthropic reveals that in a crime spree the company believes is unprecedented, a hacker used its Claude chatbot to research, attack, and extort at least 17 companies, Kevin Collier reports at CNBC. The hacker asked Claude to identify vulnerable companies, help write malicious software code, organize the stolen files, and analyze them for sensitive information that could be used for extortion. At Ars Technica, Benj Edwards warns that browser agents such as Anthropic’s new Claude for Chrome expose users to the risk that a website will trick the browser into harmful actions. Even after adding defenses, the risk remains substantial.
Comment: At the dawn of broadband, security specialists predicted it would enable attacks at a much bigger scale because of both increased speed and constant availability. The advent of generative AI with its new speed and scale, offers the same type of new opportunity to scale up criminality. AI optimizes hackers’ efficiency, while cybersecurity struggles with funding.
Type Goodbye on a Typepad as the old friendly blogging tool Shuts Down
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In this blog posting, Typepad explains that it will shut down on September 30 and that all its content – 22 years of blogs and comments – will be deleted. At Heise Online, Martin Holland reminds that Typepad was one of the reasons blogs became popular. Its technology, Moveable Type, was passed by WordPress, the site was bought by private equity, and five years ago it stopped taking new signups. Users are being told to move their content or lose it.
FEATURES & ANALYSIS
War in the Age of Smartphones
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In this podcast at Lawfare, Matthew Ford, an associate professor at Swedish Defense University and author of War in the Smartphone Age: Conflict, Connectivity, and the Crises at Our Fingertips, discusses the differences smartphones and other new technologies are bringing to both the practice of war and how the public perceives it. The collapsed context and algorithmic ordering make it easy to assemble a false picture. Also at Lawfare, Angela Toma asks if a disinformation campaign fueled by AI but without direction from a foreign state is “foreign interference”. The new form of global influence, she writes, is stateless, ambient, and infrastructural.
UK’s Online Safety Act Brings Panic to Games Industry
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In this article at Games Industry.biz, Jeremy Peel discusses the “frustration and panic” in the games industry as a result of the arrival of age verification requirements under the Online Safety Act. Peel goes on to explain what’s necessary to comply with the law, and the undue burden it imposes on smaller companies, which lack the resources to file the necessary risk assessments, and who depend on payment processors who will withdraw service if they’re unsure..
Digital Civic Space Is Shrinking
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In this posting at Global Voices, Muhammed Bello Buhari summarizes CIVICUS’ recent Synthesis Report, which finds that digital civic space is being eroded by shutdowns, surveillance, censorship, and biased algorithms, and, for civic society organizations, donor systems and platform dynamics. All regions are affected, but especially the Global South, where not only participation but survival is under threat. The report urges funders to make sustained, equitable investments and calls for platform accountability through power sharing and community governance.
Comment: At its dawn, the Internet was supposed to give a voice to the many who previously went unheard. Making it do so require persistent effort. What funding models should we support?
Finding a Return on AI Investment
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In this article at The New Yorker, John Cassidy digs into the MIT report that 95% of organizations investing in AI are seeing no return in the light of a second, from MIT’s Media Lab, that finds that almost half of all workers were using AI tools. If the dot-com bubble is any guide, the eventual winners will take years to emerge. At Heise Online, Eva-Maria Weiss reports that OpenAI and Google won a gold medal at the recent International Math Olympiad. Both competed under the same conditions as humans. At Futurism, Frank Landymore reports that new research finds that AI models display bias towards other AIs when asked to choose between human-and machine-generated content. At his blog, Mustafa Suleyman writes that “Seemingly Conscious AI” is coming, bringing the danger that humans will see consciousness where none exists and want to grant AIs rights and even citizenship.
Meta swings to the right and Nick Clegg is left behind – New Book a-coming
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In this article at the Guardian, Lisa O’Carroll and Gaby Hinsliff discuss Nick Clegg’s take on Silicon Valley and Westminster, based on HInsliff’s interview with Clegg and his new book, How to Save the Internet. Clegg, who was deputy prime minister to David Cameron and then vice-president of global affairs and communications at Facebook (later Meta). While he deplores the self-Silicon Valley ‘s culture of self-pity, he found Westminster more “insufferable”. In his interview with Gaby Hinsliff, Clegg discusses his departure from Silicon Valley following its turn to the political right shortly after the 2024 presidential election and years of pushing Facebook/Meta to stay out of politics. Finally, in an extract from his book, Clegg describes the very different culture he found when he left British politics to work for Facebook, changing from a culture of words to a culture of engineering.
DIARY
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September 26-29, 2025
Brussels, Belgium
The annual self-organized conference on digital rights and data protection draws people from across Europe and beyond to come together to advocate for freedom in the digitalized world, plan actions against attacks on civil liberties and increasing surveillance and seek discussions with decision-makers.
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September 30, 2025
Brussels, Belgium
Privacy Camp is organized by European Digital Rights (EDRi), in collaboration with its partners the Research Group on Law, Science, Technology & Society (LSTS) at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), Privacy Salon vzw, the Institute for European Studies (IEE) at Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles, the Institute of Information Law (IViR) at University of Amsterdam and the Racism and Technology Center.
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October 4, 2025
Boston, MA, USA
Instead of hosting one LibrePlanet conference in 2025, the Free Software Foundation is planning a jam-packed anniversary year, filled with several new and exciting activities in 2025, culminating in a final celebration in Boston in October.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
