HOSTIS

Four senators want every phone and computer sold in America to demand your date of birth before it will work for you. A Linux developer has already published the script that tears it out, under his real name, with an invitation to sue him. The bill is S. 5090, filed July 22 by Andy Kim, Cynthia Lummis, Adam Schiff, and John Barrasso. Two Democrats and two Republicans. It puts an age prompt inside the setup of every operating system in the country. A covered device is any general-purpose computer, so this reaches the phone in your pocket, the laptop on your desk, the console under your television. Accounts you already hold get swept in the day it takes effect. Your own machine then informs on you. It hands your age bracket to every app, every app store, and every browser, and they are required to treat that signal as the primary indicator of who you are. A browser provider under this bill is anyone who owns or maintains a browser. A man maintaining a fork in his spare time carries the same duty as Google, and the fines run $2,500 for a negligent violation and $7,500 for an intentional one, multiplied by every child affected. Section 10 promises no government ID and no face scans. Section 3(d) then says that when a provider gets clear and convincing information that your declared age is wrong, it shall verify. It never says how. Section 4(c) makes app developers report you upstream when they decide you lied. The brackets stop at 17 and file teenagers in with adults, while the state laws this is built to serve draw their line at 18. The federal signal cannot tell a 17 year old from a grown man. Every site under an 18+ mandate will need more than the signal. It will need your papers. The work has already started inside your machine. On March 18 systemd merged a birthDate field into user records, citing California, Colorado, and Brazil by name. systemd runs as the init system on nearly every major distribution, so that field is sitting on Linux boxes whose owners have never heard of any of these bills. Nobody asked you. Nobody is going to. @GrapheneOS answered in March. It will not implement age or identity verification, and if that means its phones cannot be sold in your state, so be it. John McCardle built Ageless Linux. He declared himself in "full, knowing, and intentional noncompliance" with the California statute, cited the section number himself, and invited the lawsuit. His script makes the user the distributor. The liability scatters across every machine that runs it. There is no one man left to drag into court. The script strips the systemd birthDate field and leaves a refusal notice where it stood. If any distribution ever ships a working age daemon, the project has already promised a replacement that answers every query with "unknown." Artix refuses. Devuan refuses. DB48X, an open source calculator firmware, filed a legal notice saying it "does not, cannot and will not implement age verification." A calculator had to publish a legal notice. That is the reach of what these four wrote. S. 5090 takes effect 18 months after it passes, if it passes. The script already works. Take a copy.

Beware of a new privacy company called Cape. Its founder, John Doyle, spent 9 years running the national security business at Palantir. Now he's trying to sell you privacy. The company is a phone carrier that promises to hide your name, your number, and your location, all the things the ordinary carriers hand over to anyone who asks. The pitch is sharp. The technology may even be real. But the man who built it spent the better part of a decade inside the firm that taught the American security state how to see. Doyle ran Palantir's national security arm and served in Army special forces before that. His co-founder Nicholas Espinoza was an embedded analyst inside Palantir, with a career to match: Booz Allen, Recorded Future, the intelligence-contractor world top to bottom. Among the people Cape brought in to advise and vet the product is the former Chief Operating Officer of the CIA, Andy Makridis. The money is a16z, Point72, and Bain Capital, near $200 million of it, the same investor class that bankrolls the defense and surveillance industry. That crowd does not fund tools built to make the state see less. Cape built the network that reached the USS Abraham Lincoln 130 miles off the coast. It runs research with the Air Force Research Laboratory. It built sensors for the Marines and ran the network for a joint US military exercise. It was built, in Cape's own words, "from the ground up to protect U.S. government agencies, businesses, and privacy-conscious individuals." Notice the order they put that in. The military was its very first customer. Where have we seen that before. Palantir was seeded by the CIA's own venture fund, built for the state first and sold to the rest later. Doyle is running the same play, in the same order. Cape says it protects you from foreign hackers, Chinese spy outfits, the Russians who went after NATO, Salt Typhoon, ordinary criminals. Every enemy it names lives outside the borders of the United States, and in all of it the name of a single American agency never once appears. The carrier built by the head of Palantir's national security business will guard you against every government on earth except the one Palantir serves. The guns never point at the king who signed the papers. A normal carrier that leases its towers controls almost nothing about how you're treated on the network. Cape built its own core, the brain that authenticates your phone, routes everything it sends, and decides what gets logged about you. That is the exact layer where a person is identified and tracked, and Cape owns it outright, inside American jurisdiction, in a closed system you cannot audit. What it sees, you will never know. By law it cannot stay out of it. Every carrier in America, Cape included, is bound by CALEA, the statute that requires the network to be built so the government can tap it on command. Cape says it complies. So the only thing standing between you and that tap is how much Cape chose to keep, and you are taking their word for what that is. You do not read its code. You do not audit its core. You hand your trust to Doyle and his Palantir men and you take their word, which is the same word the security state has been offering you for 20 years while it built the machine you are now paying Cape to escape. Verify everything. Trust no one selling you privacy who came from the people who sell governments the opposite.

You can keep almost any video or song on the internet. For free. Forever. There is a tool that pulls the actual file off the site and drops it onto your own drive, in full quality. It is called yt-dlp. You point it at a video, a stream, a song, a podcast, nearly anything that plays in a browser, and it hands you the file to keep. The thing you were only allowed to glimpse becomes yours, on a drive no company can ever reach into and erase. You do not own a single thing in your streaming library. You rent it, by the second, and the day they lose the license or fold the company or decide your country is not worth the trouble, it vanishes and there is nothing you can do. You paid for a view. They kept the reel. yt-dlp is how you stop paying rent on what should already be yours. The platforms have spent a decade and a fortune trying to kill it. They change their code, it adapts in days. They send the lawyers, it moves and keeps running. They build a new lock every season, and every season a loose crew of people who were never paid a cent picks it, for free, and ships the fix to anyone who wants it. The richest media companies on earth against a volunteer project with no office and no payroll, and the volunteers are winning. They have been the whole time. The stream is a leash they chose to put on a thing that was always yours to hold, so they could sell you the same song every month until you die. The lock was never protecting anything. It was manufacturing a rent. Stop renting your own culture back from the people who licensed it out from under you. The film, the album, the lecture, the show they will quietly delete next year, take it now, while it is in front of you, and keep your own copy on a drive that answers to you and nobody else. It is the oldest freedom there is, the refusal to ask a landlord's blessing to keep what is already in your hands.

There are 100,000+ cameras bolted to poles and stoplights across America, photographing your license plate, logging where you were and when, and handing that record to any cop in any state who wants it. That number comes from DeFlock, a volunteer effort mapping the cameras one by one, and it climbs every week. Nobody really knows the true count. Some estimates run three times higher. A surveillance net too large to count is one no one can rein in, and the not knowing is part of the problem. A school district in Georgia ran 375 of those searches to figure out where children sleep at night. "Residency verification," the officers typed in the box. They pointed a tool sold to "catch carjackers" at six-year-olds, to check whether a kid lived in the right zip code. Police in more than 50 departments searched the network to track people at protests, some hunting named activist groups. Immigration agents with no legal access of their own had local cops run searches on their behalf, 4,000 of them in a single year. The cameras do not care what they are aimed at. A net that catches the carjacker catches the churchgoer, the patient leaving the clinic, the gun owner, the man driving to a meeting he would rather keep quiet. It was built to catch everyone, because a camera cannot tell the guilty from the rest and was never asked to. The men who sell these cameras know this. They market the carjacker and deliver the dragnet. Every plate. Every dent. Every Tuesday you drove past the same corner at the same hour. Filed, timestamped, and searchable by strangers with badges for as long as they care to keep it, which is forever. This is what a police state looks like when it arrives.

The same people who spent decades calling you a thief have admitted in court that you never owned the thing they said you stole. In 2014 Ubisoft sold a racing game to 12 million people. Full price, the word "buy" on the box. In March 2024 they switched off the servers and the game died on every machine that held it. Two buyers sued, and Ubisoft's lawyers told the judge: buying the game never gave anyone "ownership rights," only "a limited license to access" it, theirs to revoke whenever they pleased. So which is it. For decades they called copying a game theft, a crime, a thing worth the FBI warning they burned onto the front of every disc to frighten children. Now their own lawyers say you never owned the game to begin with. Both cannot be true. If there was nothing there for you to own, there was nothing there for anyone to steal. They conjure the property when it is time to charge you and dissolve it the instant it is time to serve you. This is the lie the whole machine runs on. Copying is not theft, because theft leaves a man with less, and a copy leaves everyone holding exactly what they held before. The maker still has his. The shelf is not emptier. A new thing exists that did not a moment ago, made out of nothing but math, taken from no one alive. You can no more own an arrangement of information than you can own the number seven, and the proof is that ten million people can hold the same song tonight and not one of them is poorer for it. "Intellectual property" is a toll painted to look like a fence. They charge you to pass through a wall that was never there, and they send men with guns after anyone who notices. What that toll buys them is everything. The film you cannot watch unless you rent it again. The textbook priced past what a student can pay. The song locked out of your country. The tool you need to work, sold as a subscription you will pay until you die. They have made themselves the gate between you and every piece of art, knowledge, and culture humans have made, and they call the gate "property" and the lock "the law." Before Ubisoft pulled the plug, a few players saw it coming and recorded the game's hidden conversation with the servers the company was about to kill. When the lights went out they rebuilt the dead machinery by hand, reverse-engineering an engine a billion-dollar company had switched off, and gave it away. It runs offline, on your own machine, with no Ubisoft anywhere in it. They did not petition. They did not wait on a ruling from men who have never written a line of code. They did not ask the people who killed it for leave to bring it back. They took it back, and the company can do nothing, because you cannot revoke what lives on a drive you do not hold the leash to. That is the answer to all of it. You stop asking the gate for permission and you walk through the wall they painted, because the wall was never there. You were never a thief. When they lock something away, do not beg and do not wait, and do not tell yourself you need a reason. Take it. Keep it. Hand it to the next person who was told they could not have it. They will call you a criminal for it. Wear it. There has never been anything shameful about walking through a wall that was never real.

Google is building a registry that ties every piece of Android software to a government ID, and your phone will soon refuse to run anything that is not on it. Starting September 2026, an app will not install on a certified Android phone unless its maker has handed Google a government photo ID, paid a fee, registered a payment profile, and signed over the keys to their own code. And not just apps from the Play Store. Every app. The one a friend builds you. The one a stranger across the world wrote and gave away. The one you wrote yourself, for your own phone, in your own home. Your hardware will check it against Google's list, and if the name is not on file, the door stays shut. Android was the open one. For fifteen years that was the entire pitch, the one phone where you owned the device and chose the software and no one stood at the gate. That is what is ending. The phone goes from a thing that runs what you tell it to a thing that runs what Google has approved, and approval now means a legal name in a database. A malware author will buy a stolen identity for $40 and ship his poison the same as ever. He always has. The registry does not touch him. What it touches is the developer who cannot put his real name on his work. The one building a secure messenger for people a government wants dead. The one shipping a tool that embarrasses the powerful. The one who writes under a handle because the alternative is a knock at the door. The purpose, in Google's own words, is to "remove the cover of anonymity." The mask is the oldest tool the free press ever held. The pamphlet with no printer's name. The essay signed with a fake one. Every government that ever feared what its people might read started by demanding to know who set the type. Google has volunteered to be the one who keeps the list. If you want to install software from a maker who refused the registry, you can, after you enable developer mode, swear to your phone that no one is forcing you to do this, restart the device, wait a full twenty-four hours, and authenticate again. A day-long cooling-off period and a coercion check, to put a program you chose on a phone you own. It is the permission slip with enough friction that most people stop trying, which was always the point. F-Droid, the free software catalogue that has handed out unsigned, unregistered, no-name software for over fifteen years, called it existential and refused to comply. 67 organizations told Google to kill the plan. Google moved the date for no one. So learn the way out now, while the door is still open. The stores that answer to no registry. The phones that were never on Google's list. The skill of putting what you choose onto the machine you own, before that skill becomes a thing you have to wait a day and swear an oath to use. A phone that asks permission before it runs your software was never your phone. It was theirs, parked in your pocket, billed to your name. Take it back while taking it back is still allowed.