I’ve been dis­ap­pointed by lo­cal mod­els in the past. But then I checked Qwen 3.6, and I was in awe. For me it’s the first lo­cal model that ac­tu­ally makes sense as a gen­eral in­tel­li­gence.

It comes in two vari­ants, a mix­ture-of-ex­perts model Qwen 3.6 35B A3B, and a dense Qwen 3.6 27B - slower, but more pow­er­ful. The one I rec­om­mend!

Let me share my im­pres­sions, and show that you can run it too.

It’s hot, lit­er­ally. When my knees started to melt, I grabbed a phone-at­tached ther­mal cam­era and took a photo.

Qwen 3.6, right­fully, got a lot of cov­er­age on Hacker News. The most com­mon state­ment about Qwen 3.6 27B is that it punches above its weight - see Will it Mythos?. And I think it is a well-de­served sen­ti­ment. It will make your com­puter hot, but it’s worth it!

Testing the wa­ters

Simon Willison uses “penguins on a bi­cy­cle” as a smoke test (see for Qwen 3.6 35B A3B and then Qwen 3.6 27B). I usu­ally go with con­strained writ­ing.

A year ago these kinds of things were state of the art, need­ing a unique, and in­sanely ex­pen­sive GPT-4.5, see vibe trans­lat­ing Quantum Flytrap.

I also asked it to write an 8 line poem about Zouk dance and quan­tum physics, see the tran­script. The thought process made sense, both in terms of de­lib­er­a­tion on quan­tum terms, and rhymes.

Then I asked in OpenCode to cre­ate a hexag­o­nal minesweeper us­ing pnpm. It worked:

It worked on the first go, from a sin­gle prompt, with a proper Node pack­age. The mix­ture-of-ex­perts Qwen 3.6 35B A3B was faster… but ig­nored my in­struc­tion to cre­ate a pack­age, and did it in a sin­gle in­dex.html.

Real work

Sure, cre­ative writ­ing about quan­tum me­chan­ics, or yet an­other clone of a minesweeper, is rarely a day job. But Qwen 3.6 27B is de­cent at reg­u­lar tasks as well.

Prompt by a friend, Maciej Cielecki, at AI Tinkerers Warsaw.

It worked for a few min­utes and cre­ated this:

A land­ing page by Qwen 3.6 27B — view the live page.

By stan­dards of cur­rent fron­tier mod­els, it’s un­re­mark­able. But it is al­ready a prac­ti­cal job. It worked, was re­ac­tive, de­faults were nice - all from a sin­gle, short prompt.

Running Qwen 3.6 lo­cally with llama.cpp

Running lo­cal mod­els is eas­ier than ever. A few CLI lines and you’re off.

I rec­om­mend llama.cpp - a di­rect, open source tool that al­lows run­ning mod­els on var­i­ous de­vices. You don’t need Ollama, and frankly - I would rec­om­mend against us­ing that on eth­i­cal grounds.

First, we go to Hugging Face, to get proper quan­ti­za­tion, i.e. a model with re­duced size - pop­u­lar ones are by un­sloth or bar­towski, among oth­ers. Default mod­els usu­ally come with BF16 pre­ci­sion. A com­mon 8-bit quan­ti­za­tion saves half the space at al­most no cost to qual­ity. Going fur­ther down the road, mod­els are smaller (and po­ten­tially - faster), but at the cost of qual­ity, see this com­par­i­son for 27B and an­other one for 35B A3B.

We grab un­sloth/​Qwen3.6 – 27B-MTP-GGUF:Q8_0, an 8-bit quan­ti­za­tion with sup­port for multi-to­ken pre­dic­tion (MTP).

llama-server -hf un­sloth/​Qwen3.6 – 27B-MTP-GGUF:Q8_0 \ –spec-type draft-mtp -ngl 999 -fa on -c 65536 –port 8080

What it does:

-hf un­sloth/​Qwen3.6 – 27B-MTP-GGUF:Q8_0 grabs from Hugging Face, on the next runs will reuse that

-m ~/models/Qwen3.6 – 27B-Q8_0.gguf use in­stead if you al­ready have it

draft-mtp we use a fast model to pre­dict sub­se­quent to­kens, speeds up things

-ngl 999 for putting all lay­ers to GPU

-fa on flash at­ten­tion is on

-c 65536 con­text size set to 64k to­kens (this we can tweak, as Qwen 3.6 27B na­tive con­text is 256k)

–port 8080 bet­ter to pin port, as it will be used by other con­figs

If you open http://​127.0.0.1:8080, you can di­rectly chat with it.

Precisely the same server can be used for vibe cod­ing. Choice of agent de­pends both on one’s goal and sub­jec­tive taste - for an all-around OpenCode, min­i­mal­is­tic Pi, and self-im­prov­ing Hermes.

For OpenCode, it is as sim­ple as adding to ~/.config/opencode/opencode.jsonc:

{ “$schema”: “https://​open­code.ai/​con­fig.json”, “provider”: { “llama”: { “name”: “llama.cpp (local)”, “npm”: “@ai-sdk/openai-compatible”, “options”: { “baseURL”: “http://​127.0.0.1:8080/​v1”, “apiKey”: “local” }, “models”: { “qwen3.6 – 27b”: { “name”: “Qwen3.6 – 27B Q8 +MTP” } } } }, “model”: “llama/qwen3.6 – 27b” }

If you just want to chat and are a big fan of Terminal, in­stead of llama-server use llama-cli:

llama-cli -hf un­sloth/​Qwen3.6 – 27B-MTP-GGUF:Q8_0 \ -ngl 999 -fa on -c 65536

Measuring per­for­mance

Is it fast enough?

I ran a few tests (source is here) on my Macbook Max M5 128 GB, run­ning it with and with­out multi-to­ken pre­dic­tion, and com­par­ing both with the 35B A3B model, and also a quan­tized DeepSeek V4 Flash ver­sion DwarfStar4.

to­kens / s

RAM

Qwen3.6 – 35B-A3B · 8-bit

MLX

85 tok/​s 85

37 GB RAM 37 GB

llama.cpp

93 tok/​s 93

44 GB RAM 44 GB

llama.cpp + MTP

105 tok/​s 105

45 GB RAM 45 GB

Qwen3.6 – 27B · 8-bit

MLX

17 tok/​s 17

28 GB RAM 28 GB

llama.cpp

18 tok/​s 18

41 GB RAM 41 GB

llama.cpp + MTP

32 tok/​s 32

42 GB RAM 42 GB

DeepSeek-V4-Flash · Q2–Q4

llama.cpp

33 tok/​s 33

103 GB RAM 103 GB

30 to­kens per sec­ond is not bad, well within typ­i­cal fron­tier model API range. While mlx-lm is pre­cisely tar­geted at Apple Silicon de­vices, and AI agents heav­ily rec­om­mend it, llama.cpp turned out to be faster. It was us­ing 95% of GPU, which means it is ef­fi­ciently us­ing avail­able re­sources.

Macbook Max M5 is a beast (at least for a lap­top), but on other de­vices it should also work de­cently. As you can see, both Qwen 3.6 vari­ants run within 48 GB of Apple Silicon’s shared RAM. A 4-bit quan­ti­za­tion are less than 18 GB and should run on 32 GB de­vice. On con­sumer Nvidia RTX cards, you need to quan­tize ag­gres­sively, but in­fer­ence runs even faster.

I set this up to­day on my 5090 at Q6_K quan­ti­za­tion and Q4_0 KV, got 50 to­kens/​s con­sis­tently at 123k con­text, us­ing ~28/32gb vram through LM Studio. - gfosco on the Hacker News

I set this up to­day on my 5090 at Q6_K quan­ti­za­tion and Q4_0 KV, got 50 to­kens/​s con­sis­tently at 123k con­text, us­ing ~28/32gb vram through LM Studio. - gfosco on the Hacker News

While 35B A3B is 3x faster, I pre­fer 27B. I’d rather gen­er­ate a third as much code, but of higher qual­ity.

How do they re­late to pre­vi­ous state of the art mod­els?

Manual in­spec­tion is great, but bench­marks help with ground­ing in­tu­itions. Here is the score from Artificial Analysis, com­par­ing it with fron­tier mod­els:

Gemma 4 31B

29

≈ late 2024

o1 / Claude 3.5 Sonnet

Qwen3.6 – 35B-A3B

32

≈ early 2025

o3 / Claude 4 Sonnet

Qwen3.6 – 27B

37

≈ mid 2025

GPT-5 / Claude Sonnet 4.5

DeepSeek-V4-Flash

40

≈ late 2025

GPT-5.2 / Claude Opus 4.5

A few more bench­marks are in these notes, but the spirit is sim­i­lar. Added here Gemma 4 31B, as a lot of peo­ple use this as the de­fault for lo­cal cod­ing. But both bench­marks and gen­eral sen­ti­ment on­line favour Qwen 3.6 27B by a large mar­gin.

Here there is a caveat - 8-bit quan­ti­za­tion of Qwen 3.6 likely does not af­fect re­sults much, but DwarfStar4 uses much more ag­gres­sive ones for DeepSeek V4 Flash, 2 – 4 bit. For sure it is worse than the full model. My per­sonal im­pres­sion is that within these quan­ti­za­tions Qwen 3.6 27B is as good as (or maybe slightly bet­ter than) DwarfStar4. Though, I won’t be sur­prised if for longer con­text pro­jects DS4 has an edge.

What’s next

I think we are en­ter­ing a fas­ci­nat­ing era, when it be­comes fea­si­ble to run one’s own mod­els.

The change will be pro­pelled fur­ther by the state of pro­pri­etary fron­tier mod­els. Claude Fable 5 was taken down. Other fron­tier mod­els run at a mas­sive sub­sidy, where pay­ing $100 a month gives us thou­sands worth in to­kens. Let’s use the dis­count while it lasts!

A lo­cally set model can be fine-tuned to our needs, and can­not be taken away. Businesses can use them for pro­pri­etary and sen­si­tive data. We can use them per­son­ally for of­fline pro­jects, or when we don’t feel com­fort­able shar­ing our deep­est se­crets, or med­ical data, with the US or China.

With the re­lease of fron­tier-level open-weight GLM 5.2, there is a new era. While Qwen 3.6 was the step­ping stone, even fron­tier GLM 5.2 can be run lo­cally. It won’t run on your Macbook or a sin­gle RTX 5090. But still, it is man­age­able with a com­pany bud­get.

Moreover, I strongly be­lieve that we will have mod­els smarter than cur­rent state of the art, while runnable on lo­cal de­vices, maybe even smart­phones. Current mod­els com­bine both raw in­tel­li­gence and fac­tual knowl­edge in the same weights. Future mod­els will likely sep­a­rate that, of­fload­ing a lot of knowl­edge to tool call­ing.

Discuss on Hacker News, LinkedIn, or X.

Seth Stern is the di­rec­tor of ad­vo­cacy for Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Jeremy Busby is a writer and ac­tivist in­car­cer­ated in Texas.

The Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion at­tack­ing the right to pub­lish or re­port in­for­ma­tion is a given at this point. The pres­i­dent has threat­ened jour­nal­ists for every­thing from ques­tion­ing the wis­dom of his failed war with Iran to touch­ing the peeled lin­ing of his ren­o­vated re­flect­ing pool.

Tantrums like those may now feel rou­tine, but this week marked a new front in Trump’s war on in­for­ma­tion: Daniel “Des” Sanchez Estrada was sen­tenced to 30 years in fed­eral prison for trans­port­ing a box of zines he did­n’t even write. He’s one of eight de­fen­dants sen­tenced on Tuesday to a com­bined 450 years — the first prison sen­tences against so-called “antifa” handed down un­der the frame­work of NSPM-7, President Donald Trump’s sweep­ing “counterterrorism” mem­o­ran­dum to clamp down on dis­sent from the left.

The pros­e­cu­tion’s the­ory was that Sanchez moved the zines, which dis­cussed an­ar­chism and other anti-gov­ern­ment ideas, to con­ceal ev­i­dence in the case against his wife, Maricela Rueda. Rueda at­tended a July 4, 2025, protest at the Prairieland im­mi­gra­tion jail in Texas where a po­lice of­fi­cer was shot. (She was not ac­cused of shoot­ing him or hav­ing any­thing to do with the shoot­ing but was her­self sen­tenced to 70 years.)

But that nu­ance is cold com­fort: It as­sumes that sim­ply pos­sess­ing years-old po­lit­i­cal pam­phlets that said noth­ing about the protest or shoot­ing could some­how con­sti­tute ev­i­dence of a crime. Sharing the po­lit­i­cal ide­ol­ogy of the shooter, the gov­ern­ment con­tended, meant Rueda and her co-de­fen­dants were cul­pa­ble for the shooter’s ac­tions — and by al­legedly at­tempt­ing to pre­vent of­fi­cers from find­ing out about Rueda’s ide­ol­ogy, Sanchez shared in the blame as well.

We’ve reached the point in the ero­sion of the First Amendment where the gov­ern­ment con­sid­ers pos­ses­sion of an­ar­chist zines and mem­ber­ship in a ter­ror­ist cell to be more or less the same thing. Once the box of zines was dis­cov­ered, there was no need to prove Rueda planned or had any idea that any­one would be shot at the protest.

What’s worse is that this will likely only ramp up the ad­min­is­tra­tion’s ef­forts to crim­i­nal­ize be­ing in pos­ses­sion of in­for­ma­tion. Whatever you may think of for­mer CNN host Don Lemon, he’s no an­ar­chist or ex­trem­ist, and the con­tent of his broad­casts bears lit­tle re­sem­blance to the zines Sanchez was con­victed of trans­port­ing. And yet, af­ter in­dict­ing him and in­de­pen­dent jour­nal­ist Georgia Fort on friv­o­lous charges re­lat­ing to their livestream­ing of a protest at a Minnesota church, the gov­ern­ment sought a war­rant to ob­tain the iden­ti­ties of sub­scribers to their YouTube chan­nels.

This will likely only ramp up the ad­min­is­tra­tion’s ef­forts to crim­i­nal­ize be­ing in pos­ses­sion of in­for­ma­tion.

This will likely only ramp up the ad­min­is­tra­tion’s ef­forts to crim­i­nal­ize be­ing in pos­ses­sion of in­for­ma­tion.

Fortunately, a judge re­jected that war­rant. But it’s a chill­ing rev­e­la­tion of the ad­min­is­tra­tion’s modus operandi. Lemon and Fort’s YouTube sub­scribers would, of course, have no knowl­edge of what hap­pened at the church protest be­yond what was pub­licly broad­cast. Their iden­ti­ties are as ir­rel­e­vant to whether Lemon and Fort com­mit­ted a crime as the box of zines was to Rueda’s case. The only con­ceiv­able rea­son the gov­ern­ment might want a list of YouTube sub­scribers is to keep an eye on peo­ple who watch dis­fa­vored shows.

And let’s say some­one who’d watched Lemon and Fort’s livestreams and then heard about their ar­rests had cleared their browser his­tory be­cause they (rightly) feared the ad­min­is­tra­tion might tar­get them. Could they then be pros­e­cuted for con­ceal­ing ev­i­dence un­der the same logic ap­plied to Sanchez? If they’d down­loaded the video, could they be ac­cused of pos­sess­ing con­tra­band? Would for­ward­ing a link equate to traf­fick­ing?

It all sounds pre­pos­ter­ous, but vir­tu­ally noth­ing is too ab­surd for this Department of Justice. In fact, it’s al­ready ar­gued that doc­u­ments in­ves­tiga­tive re­porters re­ceive from whistle­blower sources can con­sti­tute con­tra­band. (It’s worth point­ing out that Joe Biden’s DOJ used this same logic when it pur­sued its own ridicu­lous “transporting” of in­for­ma­tion case against Project Veritas for mov­ing Ashley Biden’s di­ary across state lines).

These friv­o­lous ac­tions cre­ate a catch-22 for all Americans. The more peo­ple are in­ves­ti­gated for en­gag­ing with ideas the ad­min­is­tra­tion deems dan­ger­ously anti-gov­ern­ment, the more likely oth­ers are to con­ceal ev­i­dence of their own con­tro­ver­sial be­liefs — not be­cause they are ev­i­dence of any real crime but be­cause pros­e­cu­tors are out of con­trol. But if they do so, they risk in­crim­i­nat­ing them­selves.

NSPM-7, which was is­sued last September, tasks fed­eral agen­cies with dis­man­tling net­works of “anti-fascist” ac­tors, a pur­posely overly broad term since ex­panded to in­clude those with “extreme view­points on im­mi­gra­tion, rad­i­cal gen­der ide­ol­ogy, and anti-Amer­i­can sen­ti­ment.”

Given that an­tifa, as a sin­gu­lar, co­he­sive or­ga­ni­za­tion, is a fig­ment of the right’s imag­i­na­tion, agents can­not ac­com­plish that task by un­cov­er­ing a mem­ber­ship reg­istry. They can only do so by iden­ti­fy­ing peo­ple with view­points they con­sider “extreme,” like anti-ICE pro­test­ers of­fi­cers have told they’re be­ing added to watch­lists, or pro-Pales­tine opin­ion writ­ers they’ve sought to de­port.

In Chicago and other cities ICE in­vaded, ac­tivists and or­ga­niz­ers pack­aged whis­tles and zines to dis­trib­ute to res­i­dents. Under the logic of NSPM-7 and Sanchez Estrada’s con­vic­tion, that is a net­work of ac­tors en­gaged in or­ga­nized po­lit­i­cal vi­o­lence. If you read one of their zines, you could be deemed a mem­ber of an il­licit en­ter­prise, and if you hide one, you’re cov­er­ing for crim­i­nals.

The gov­ern­ment ar­gued that the Prairieland de­fen­dants are dif­fer­ent. One pros­e­cu­tor said: “People with that kind of ex­trem­ist be­liefs need ex­tra time in prison. They be­lieve vi­o­lence is jus­ti­fied.” U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor, in hand­ing down the sen­tences, re­port­edly said he wanted to “send a mes­sage to any­one who shares a sim­i­lar ide­ol­ogy.” But lots of peo­ple be­lieve po­lit­i­cal vi­o­lence is some­times jus­ti­fied. If some­one who be­lieves punch­ing Nazis is jus­ti­fied at­tends an anti-Nazi protest where some­one else punches a Nazi, are they at risk of be­ing con­victed of as­sault along­side the ac­tual as­sailant, par­tic­u­larly if they have some anti-Nazi lit­er­a­ture on their book­shelf? The an­swer is far less ob­vi­ous than it used to be.

The ad­min­is­tra­tion has vowed the Prairieland case “will not be the last” of its kind. We must take it at its word. The next one might also in­volve pro­test­ers from the po­lit­i­cal fringes rather than or­di­nary Americans read­ing, say, The Intercept, or watch­ing Don Lemon on YouTube. But what about the one af­ter that? We’re not as far away as you might think. Stephen Miller has called the whole Democratic Party a “domestic ex­trem­ist or­ga­ni­za­tion” — clearly in­vok­ing the lan­guage of NSPM-7. Trump has la­beled his po­lit­i­cal op­po­nents “the en­emy within” and the press “the en­emy of the peo­ple.”

Whoever said slip­pery slopes are a fal­lacy never met Donald Trump. If Sanchez Estrada in­deed moved the zines be­cause he fore­saw their be­ing used to tie his wife to a nonex­is­tent ter­ror­ist net­work and a shoot­ing, he should be com­mended for his pre­science. Maybe more of us should think like Sanchez Estrada.

Or would that be a crime?

To use the Mastodon web ap­pli­ca­tion, please en­able JavaScript. Alternatively, try one of the na­tive apps for Mastodon for your plat­form.

The Internet is the most pow­er­ful com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool ever cre­ated, yet the in­fra­struc­ture un­der­pin­ning it has been lever­aged by the tech in­dus­try to ex­tract our data and ex­ploit our at­ten­tion. The Human-Centered Computing Foundation seeks to change this dy­namic by cre­at­ing an al­ter­na­tive ar­chi­tec­ture for the web. As an ap­proved par­tic­i­pant in ICANN’s Applicant Support Program (ASP), we are of­fi­cially launch­ing our cam­paign to se­cure a new Top-Level Domain (TLD) ded­i­cated en­tirely to eth­i­cal, hu­man-cen­tered tech­nol­ogy.

To ex­plore our vi­sion for how a hu­man-cen­tered TLD would func­tion, read, down­load, and share our full ini­tia­tive overview be­low:

The US supreme court has ruled that law en­force­men­t’s use of sprawl­ing war­rants that sweep up smart­phone lo­ca­tion data re­quires pri­vacy pro­tec­tions un­der the fourth amend­ment, in a boost to crit­ics who view their use as an un­con­sti­tu­tional drag­net.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote the ma­jor­ity opin­ion, which held that the sen­si­tive data scooped up by “geofence war­rants” counts as a fourth amend­ment search, and of­fers in­di­vid­u­als a “reasonable ex­pec­ta­tion of pri­vacy”, even if they may be in a pub­lic area.

“An in­di­vid­ual has a rea­son­able ex­pec­ta­tion of pri­vacy in records about his cell phone’s lo­ca­tion, and po­lice in­trude on that con­sti­tu­tion­ally pro­tected in­ter­est when they de­mand the in­for­ma­tion — even though for only a lim­ited time, and from a third-party tech com­pany,” Kagan wrote.

The judges ruled 6 – 3 in Chatrie v US, against the gov­ern­ment, in a case that has been widely viewed as a test of how pri­vacy rights trans­late into a new dig­i­tal era.

The use of ge­ofence war­rants is wide­spread, and gives law en­force­ment agen­cies the power to com­pel tech com­pa­nies to hand over sen­si­tive cell phone data from peo­ple at or near crime scenes. The war­rants al­low po­lice and the FBI to col­lect this in­for­ma­tion from in­di­vid­u­als within the ra­dius of a vir­tual “fence” dur­ing a par­tic­u­lar time­frame. But they are not re­stricted to re­quest­ing data for pre­cise tar­gets.

The Chatrie case fo­cuses on lo­cal po­lice’s pur­suit of an armed bank rob­ber in Richmond, Virginia. He fled with $195,000. Law en­force­ment tracked Okello Chatrie down through their use of ge­ofence war­rants. Chatrie had opted in to an op­tional Google “location his­tory” fea­ture that doc­u­mented his lo­ca­tion every few min­utes. He was even­tu­ally sen­tenced to 12 years in prison, af­ter plead­ing guilty.

Chatrie’s lawyers ar­gued that this search was overly broad and vi­o­lated his fourth amend­ment rights, which pro­tects in­di­vid­u­als from “unreasonable search and seizure”. Lawyers said that po­lice’s use of ge­ofence war­rants amounted to an of­fi­cial “search” un­der the fourth amend­ment, and did­n’t meet the con­sti­tu­tion’s re­quire­ments for one.

The gov­ern­ment had ar­gued that ac­cess­ing only a short amount of cell­phone lo­ca­tion in­for­ma­tion means this tac­tic does not count as a fourth amend­ment search and ac­cord­ingly, should not be af­forded the same pri­vacy pro­tec­tions. But the judges in the ma­jor­ity dis­agreed.

The judges in the ma­jor­ity opin­ion also wrote that the gov­ern­men­t’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of gen­er­at­ing lo­ca­tion his­tory as a vol­un­tary choice is “meritless”.

They sug­gested that peo­ple aren’t choos­ing to share pri­vate in­for­ma­tion with third par­ties and the gov­ern­ment “just by do­ing the or­di­nary thing cell­phone users do”. “The point of car­ry­ing smart­phones is to use what is on them,” in­clud­ing the apps and ser­vices they pro­vide — many of which use lo­ca­tion data to cus­tomize a user’s ex­pe­ri­ence, they said.

“That ar­gu­ment ig­nores how and why Google users turn on lo­ca­tion his­tory: Google re­peat­edly prompts users to turn on the ser­vice, of­ten warn­ing that de­vices will not ‘work cor­rect­ly’ oth­er­wise, while not dis­clos­ing in that prompt how fre­quently users’ lo­ca­tion in­for­ma­tion would be recorded, how pre­cise it would be, or how it might be given to the gov­ern­ment,” they wrote.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “even short-term mon­i­tor­ing” of a per­son’s phys­i­cal move­ments can pro­vide “a wealth of de­tail about [his] fa­mil­ial, po­lit­i­cal, pro­fes­sional, re­li­gious, and sex­ual as­so­ci­a­tions”. She high­lighted ex­am­ples of a per­son’s trips to “the psy­chi­a­trist, the plas­tic sur­geon, the abor­tion clinic, the Aids treat­ment cen­ter, the strip club, the crim­i­nal de­fense at­tor­ney, [or] the by-the hour mo­tel”.

Privacy ad­vo­cates share her con­cerns that ge­ofence war­rants can be overly broad in the area they tar­get, as well as the length of time they cover. “If the gov­ern­ment does­n’t need to … link some­thing to a crime, it could mon­i­tor a protest or an abor­tion clinic or a gun range or a church or an AA meet­ing or a doc­tor’s of­fice,” Matthew Tokson, a law pro­fes­sor at the University of Utah, said.

While the ma­jor­ity opin­ion noted that po­lice con­ducted a fourth amend­ment search by ac­cess­ing Chatrie’s lo­ca­tion his­tory data, they noted that the court of ap­peals will weigh in on whether the “search was rea­son­able, mean­ing that each of its steps was prop­erly de­scribed with par­tic­u­lar­ity and found to be sup­ported by prob­a­ble cause”.

Law en­force­ment has said they need ge­ofence war­rants to find sus­pects and wit­nesses — af­ter reach­ing dead ends. The US gov­ern­ment, for its part, has ar­gued that peo­ple can’t have a “reasonable ex­pec­ta­tion of pri­vacy” when they are in pub­lic and have al­lowed a third party com­pany, such as Google, to col­lect and an­a­lyze phone lo­ca­tion data.

The gov­ern­ment noted in its le­gal fil­ings that “only about one-third of ac­tive Google ac­count hold­ers ac­tu­ally opted into the lo­ca­tion his­tory ser­vice”; Chatrie’s lawyers noted in court doc­u­ments that this amounted to more than 500 mil­lion Google users. Even Google has ac­knowl­edged in le­gal fil­ings for the case that ge­ofence searches “often run a high risk of sweep­ing in in­no­cent users–some­times thou­sands of them.” The tech com­pany said that it’s com­mon for these in­quiries to cover pri­vate homes, apart­ment build­ings, gov­ern­ment build­ings, ho­tels, places of wor­ship, busy roads, and other lo­ca­tions that law en­force­ment has­n’t iden­ti­fied prob­a­ble cause to search.

The rul­ing marks the first time the US supreme court is con­sid­er­ing the scope of the fourth amend­ment since a land­mark 2018 pri­vacy rul­ing. At the time, judges de­cided in a 5 – 4 de­ci­sion that the gov­ern­ment gen­er­ally needs a war­rant to track a per­son’s cell­phone lo­ca­tion his­tory.

Paul Ohm, a law pro­fes­sor at Georgetown University, said “today is a very good day for con­sti­tu­tional pri­vacy.” He added: “The court reaf­firmed that the po­lice need a search war­rant to turn pri­vate ser­vices like Google’s lo­ca­tion track­ing into a state sur­veil­lance tool.”

Posted By Paul Kafasis on June 26th, 2026

With last year’s re­lease of MacOS 26 (Tahoe), Apple made a mess of app icons. In the first be­tas of MacOS 27 (Golden Gate), how­ever, there are signs of a turn­around. We’re urg­ing Apple to con­tinue mak­ing im­prove­ments, by restor­ing the abil­ity for MacOS app icons to have dis­tinct shapes.

Apple’s Liquid Glass App Icons

In Tahoe, Apple mod­i­fied the icons for dozens of their first-party apps to give them a “Liquid Glass” ap­pear­ance. The changes were a sub­stan­tial re­gres­sion, lead­ing to blurry, dumbed-down icons.

With the re­cently un­veiled Golden Gate, Apple has again up­dated their MacOS app icons. This time, how­ever, the changes are gen­uine im­prove­ments. Here’s the re­fined Automator icon, for ex­am­ple:

The newer icon is sharper, with su­per­flu­ous Liquid Glass re­moved. Dozens of Apple’s apps have seen sim­i­lar up­dates. The re­sult is that Golden Gate’s icons are su­pe­rior to Tahoe’s, as this com­par­i­son from Basic Apple Guy shows. Seeing these im­prove­ments led me to think about an­other fix Apple should make in MacOS.

The Problem of Tahoe’s Dictated Squircles

With the Tahoe re­lease, Apple did­n’t just mess with their own icons. They also dic­tated the shape of every third-party app icon, forc­ing them to adopt the same pre­scribed squir­cle. Any icon that failed to do so found it­self shrunk down and im­pris­oned in an ugly gray back­ground, in or­der to fit Apple’s de­sired aes­thetic.

To avoid this icon jail, de­vel­op­ers were forced to re­design their icons to match Apple’s pre­ferred form. After decades of beau­ti­ful, mem­o­rable Mac icons in vary­ing shapes, Tahoe flat­tened per­son­al­ity to ob­tain bland uni­for­mity. The plat­form is worse for it.

Past icons weren’t just more ex­pres­sive. They were also more us­able. Having dis­tinct shapes pro­vided a use­ful way to tell icons apart. Tahoe elim­i­nates that cue by forc­ing every­thing into the same squir­cle, leav­ing color as the pri­mary way to tell icons apart at a glance.

That falls down if you’ve got color vi­sion de­fi­ciency, or even just mul­ti­ple icons with sim­i­lar color schemes.1 I’m look­ing at you, Slack and Photos. I have to look closely, be­cause it’s so dif­fi­cult to tell you apart now.

It Doesn’t Have to Be Like This

Apple’s pro­hi­bi­tion on shapes is a step back­ward for both us­abil­ity and cre­ativ­ity in app icons. Icons are now harder to dis­tin­guish be­cause they’re no longer al­lowed to be dis­tinc­tive. But there’s no tech­ni­cal rea­son for it. Apple could, and should, once again al­low icons to take on a wide va­ri­ety of shapes.

It’s clear that some peo­ple within Apple rec­og­nize that the tran­si­tion to Liquid Glass in­tro­duced mis­takes. They also ap­pear to have the au­thor­ity to fix those mis­takes. Refinements to Apple’s own icons in Golden Gate are a wel­come course cor­rec­tion, as is the much-cel­e­brated Liquid Glass opac­ity slider. It’s time to cor­rect the mis­take of ban­ning icon shapes as well.2

Apple should stop forc­ing every icon into the same squir­cle. Let’s re­turn to a world of gor­geous app icons like these:

Free the icons.

With color now so crit­i­cal to tell icons apart, it should be no sur­prise that the new “Clear” and “Tinted” icon styles added in Tahoe are see­ing so lit­tle up­take. As Adam Engst noted, “[I]t’s nearly im­pos­si­ble to iden­tify a par­tic­u­lar app when they’re all clear or tinted squir­cles, as you can see be­low. My brain just shuts down when it sees them.”

I’m not sure this “Tinted” style would be a good idea even if these icons had dis­tinct shapes, but I know it’s a very bad one given their uni­for­mity. ↩︎

With color now so crit­i­cal to tell icons apart, it should be no sur­prise that the new “Clear” and “Tinted” icon styles added in Tahoe are see­ing so lit­tle up­take. As Adam Engst noted, “[I]t’s nearly im­pos­si­ble to iden­tify a par­tic­u­lar app when they’re all clear or tinted squir­cles, as you can see be­low. My brain just shuts down when it sees them.”

I’m not sure this “Tinted” style would be a good idea even if these icons had dis­tinct shapes, but I know it’s a very bad one given their uni­for­mity. ↩︎

For folks within Apple, this was feed­back filed as FB23388490 (“Third-Party App Icons Should Not Be Restricted to Apple’s Dictated Squircle Shape”). I imag­ine it is a du­pli­cate many times over. ↩︎

For folks within Apple, this was feed­back filed as FB23388490 (“Third-Party App Icons Should Not Be Restricted to Apple’s Dictated Squircle Shape”). I imag­ine it is a du­pli­cate many times over. ↩︎

Reference #18.8132817.1782824521.8388c4

https://​er­rors.edge­suite.net/​18.8132817.1782824521.8388c4

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Home > Piracy >

For years, right­sh­old­ers have pushed for broader site block­ing or­ders, with no di­rect li­a­bil­ity if these re­sult in overblock­ing. EuroISPA, which rep­re­sents over 3,300 European in­ter­net ser­vice providers, is now ask­ing the EU Commission to change that. The as­so­ci­a­tion points to a se­ries of overblock­ing in­ci­dents in Italy, Spain, and else­where, where right­sh­old­ers were not held ac­count­able.

Last year, EuroISPA warned the European Commission that site block­ing was be­com­ing dis­pro­por­tion­ate.

Fast-forward a year, and the providers’ con­cerns have only grown.

In a new fil­ing to the Commission’s on­go­ing as­sess­ment of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive, EuroISPA once again sounds the alarm, point­ing out that the piracy block­ing cli­mate in some coun­tries is get­ting more ex­treme.

EuroISPA starts by ex­plic­itly ref­er­enc­ing the Commission’s own con­clu­sions. Its eval­u­a­tion of the 2023 Recommendation on com­bat­ing piracy of live events con­cluded that the mea­sures had “limited pos­i­tive ef­fects” and did not lead to a sub­stan­tial re­duc­tion in piracy.

“This find­ing is an im­por­tant base­line for this con­sul­ta­tion: it sug­gests that in many cases the prob­lem lies in the en­force­ment of ex­ist­ing law, not in a gap in the leg­isla­tive frame­work,” the ISP or­ga­ni­za­tion notes.

The European Commission should pri­or­i­tize the im­ple­men­ta­tion of cur­rent law, in­stead of in­tro­duc­ing any new en­force­ment oblig­a­tions, the fil­ing ar­gues. That does­n’t mean that every­thing is func­tion­ing fine now. On the con­trary, the ISPs flag a myr­iad of overblock­ing in­ci­dents.

Blocking Goes Beyond ISPs

In re­cent years, site block­ing or­ders have ex­panded to other in­ter­me­di­aries, in­clud­ing DNS re­solvers and VPN providers. This is prob­lem­atic, EuroISPA ar­gues, as these ser­vices have no di­rect link to the in­fring­ing con­tent and of­ten lack the tech­ni­cal means to im­ple­ment ge­o­graph­i­cally re­stricted blocks.

This ex­pan­sion, com­bined with var­i­ous overblock­ing in­ci­dents through­out Europe, is prob­lem­atic, the ISP as­so­ci­a­tion notes, while list­ing var­i­ous ex­am­ples.

In Italy, Piracy Shield’s IP-level block­ing caused col­lat­eral dam­age to over 7,700 do­main names. In ad­di­tion, a Portuguese host­ing provider lost email con­nec­tiv­ity with Italian cus­tomers for 16 days. When Cloudflare de­clined to com­ply with block­ing de­mands, Italy’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions reg­u­la­tor AGCOM fined it 14 mil­lion eu­ros.

In Spain, LaLiga ob­tained a block­ing or­der that tar­geted shared IP ad­dresses, which were also used by thou­sands of le­git­i­mate sites. EuroISPA says that mil­lions of Spanish in­ter­net users have lost ac­cess to bank­ing apps, de­vel­oper tools, and pay­ment plat­forms, as a re­sult of the site block­ing mea­sures.

In Belgium and France, site block­ing is also ex­pand­ing. Cisco pulled OpenDNS from France in 2024 and Belgium in 2025, af­ter be­ing or­dered to block pi­rate sites. It re­sumed its ser­vice in Belgium when it ap­pealed this de­ci­sion, which could have far-reach­ing con­se­quences.

“The out­come of that ap­peal may have sig­nif­i­cant con­se­quences for the scope of fu­ture block­ing or­ders across the EU, as the trend of ex­tend­ing oblig­a­tions to DNS re­solvers and VPN providers con­tin­ues to grow across Member States,” EuroISPA notes.

Overblocking Accountability

The ISP or­ga­ni­za­tion cites the CEPS re­port pub­lished in April, which cau­tioned against IP-address block­ing.

The same re­port also rec­om­mended that right­sh­old­ers should be held li­able for overblock­ing dam­age. EuroISPA is now mak­ing the same de­mand di­rectly to the Commission. This does­n’t re­quire any new leg­is­la­tion, as EU’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED) sup­ports it.

EuroISPA ar­gues that “rightsholders should be held ac­count­able” for “collateral dam­age caused by over­broad block­ing ac­tions, with com­pen­sa­tion mech­a­nisms that are clearly de­fined and en­force­able.”

The ISP or­ga­ni­za­tion also ar­gued against the rapid block­ing re­quire­ments, which re­quire ser­vices to im­ple­ment block­ades in a short time­frame. That would in­clude Italy, where providers have to take ac­tion within 30 min­utes, which can be prob­lem­atic for smaller com­pa­nies.

“The cur­rent ab­sence of such mech­a­nisms cre­ates a struc­tural bur­den that falls dis­pro­por­tion­ately on smaller providers,” the sub­mis­sion notes.

Whether the Commission will pick up these sug­ges­tions has yet to be seen. For now, the CDSM re­view con­tin­ues, which will un­doubt­edly also see calls from right­sh­old­ers to fur­ther ex­pand the cur­rent site block­ing pow­ers.

—

A copy of EuroISPA’s sub­mis­sion to the European Commission’s CDSM re­view is avail­able here (pdf).

My name is Daniel Connell. I pro­to­type and de­velop ba­sic tech­nolo­gies which any­one can make us­ing re­cy­cled ma­te­ri­als and sim­ple tools.

The aim is for every­one every­where to be able to build and main­tain their own in­fra­struc­ture; pro­duc­ing their own en­ergy, food, clean wa­ter, com­mu­ni­ca­tions, and any­thing else they need.

All de­signs are open source and li­cense free for any pur­pose, and full con­struc­tion tu­to­ri­als and how-tos are avail­able here.

The Facebook group is also a good place to ask ques­tions and post re­sults from your own builds.

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