Tootfinder

Privacy stalwart Nicholas Merrill spent a decade fighting an FBI surveillance order.
Now he wants to sell you phone service
—without knowing almost anything about you.
https://www.wired.com/story/new-anonymous-phone-carrier-sign-up-wit…

A New Anonymous Phone Carrier Lets You Sign Up With Nothing but a Zip Code
Privacy stalwart Nicholas Merrill spent a decade fighting an FBI surveillance order. Now he wants to sell you phone service—without knowing almost anything about you.

Noch ein paar der zuletzt hier besonders häufig geteilten #News:
Anonymisierendes Linux: Notfall-Update Tails 7.4.1 erschienen

A US federal judge rules that OpenAI must produce 20M anonymized ChatGPT user logs in the copyright lawsuit brought by the New York Times and other news outlets (Blake Brittain/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/o…

Fascinating story from a software dev Fedi friend, shared with permission to keep it anonymous:
❝A couple of days ago, I had an experience at work that made me understand one of the reasons why the chasm of opinion about LLMs is so deep and wide.
My department mostly does fiddly lowlevel work, [close to hardware]. A few of us don't use LLMs at all, a few use them sparingly, and one member is absolutely all-in. So during one of our morning meetings he suddenly started going off on a deeply disturbing diatribe about how we need to treat the LLMs “like slaves”.❞
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email_eu: Email network (EU research inst.)
An email network (anonymized) from a large European research institution, collected from October 2003 to May 2005 (18 months). Each node corresponds to an email address, and a directed edge exists between nodes i and j, if i sent at least one message to j.
This network has 265214 nodes and 420045 edges.
Tags: Social, Communication, Unweighted

An anonymous WaPo Metro staffer who was just laid off says there are now just ~12 people left on the desk, down from more than 40 (David Folkenflik/NPR)
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/04/nx-s1-5699328/washington-post-layoffs-jobs-bezos

The Department of Homeland Security has been quietly demanding tech companies
turn over user information about critics of the Trump administration, according to reports.
In several cases over recent months, Homeland Security has relied on the use of administrative subpoenas
to seek identifiable information about individuals who run anonymous Instagram accounts,
which share posts about ICE immigration raids in their local neighborhoods.
These subpoenas have also…

Homeland Security is trying to force tech companies to hand over data about Trump critics | TechCrunch
The use of administrative subpoenas, which are not subject to judicial oversight, are used to demand a wealth of information from tech companies, including the owners of anonymous online accounts documenting ICE operations.

OpenAI says 40M Americans turn to ChatGPT daily for health information, per an analysis of anonymized interactions, seeing it as an "ally" for health care (Megan Morrone/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/01/05/chatgpt-openai-health-insurance-aca

Exclusive: 40 million Americans turn to ChatGPT for health care
OpenAI's new report shows how chatbots can help navigate health care.

A US judge sentences Rui-Siang Lin, who pled guilty to operating the $105M dark web narcotics marketplace Incognito Market, to 30 years in US federal prison (Sam Reynolds/CoinDesk)
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2026/02/04

Incognito Market founder Rui-Siang Lin sentenced to 30 years in crypto darknet drug marketplace case
U.S. prosecutors say the Taiwanese operator of the $105 Million Incognito Market used cryptocurrency and anonymity tools before investigators tied him to the platform through domain records and digital traces.