The FBI raided the home of a Washington Post re­porter early on Wednesday in what the news­pa­per called a “highly un­usual and ag­gres­sive” move by law en­force­ment, and press free­dom groups con­demned as a “tremendous in­tru­sion” by the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion.

Agents de­scended on the Virginia home of Hannah Natanson as part of an in­ves­ti­ga­tion into a gov­ern­ment con­trac­tor ac­cused of il­le­gally re­tain­ing clas­si­fied gov­ern­ment ma­te­ri­als.

An email sent on Wednesday af­ter­noon to Post staff from the ex­ec­u­tive ed­i­tor, Matt Murray, ob­tained by the Guardian, said agents turned up “unannounced”, searched her home and seized elec­tronic de­vices.

“This ex­tra­or­di­nary, ag­gres­sive ac­tion is deeply con­cern­ing and raises pro­found ques­tions and con­cern around the con­sti­tu­tional pro­tec­tions for our work,” the email said.

“The Washington Post has a long his­tory of zeal­ous sup­port for ro­bust press free­doms. The en­tire in­sti­tu­tion stands by those free­doms and our work.”

“It’s a clear and ap­palling sign that this ad­min­is­tra­tion will set no lim­its on its acts of ag­gres­sion against an in­de­pen­dent press,” Marty Baron, the Post’s for­mer ex­ec­u­tive ed­i­tor, told the Guardian.

Murray said nei­ther the news­pa­per nor Natanson were told they were the tar­get of a jus­tice de­part­ment in­ves­ti­ga­tion.

Pam Bondi, the at­tor­ney gen­eral, said in a post on X that the raid was con­ducted by the jus­tice de­part­ment and FBI at the re­quest of the Pentagon.

The war­rant, she said, was ex­e­cuted “at the home of a Washington Post jour­nal­ist who was ob­tain­ing and re­port­ing clas­si­fied and il­le­gally leaked in­for­ma­tion from a Pentagon con­trac­tor. The leaker is cur­rently be­hind bars.”

The state­ment gave no fur­ther de­tails of the raid or in­ves­ti­ga­tion. Bondi added: “The Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion will not tol­er­ate il­le­gal leaks of clas­si­fied in­for­ma­tion that, when re­ported, pose a grave risk to our na­tion’s na­tional se­cu­rity and the brave men and women who are serv­ing our coun­try.”

The re­porter’s home and de­vices were searched, and her Garmin watch, phone, and two lap­top com­put­ers, one be­long­ing to her em­ployer, were seized, the news­pa­per said. It added that agents told Natanson she was not the fo­cus of the in­ves­ti­ga­tion, and was not ac­cused of any wrong­do­ing.

A war­rant ob­tained by the Post cited an in­ves­ti­ga­tion into Aurelio Perez-Lugones, a sys­tem ad­min­is­tra­tor in Maryland with a top se­cret se­cu­rity clear­ance who has been ac­cused of ac­cess­ing and tak­ing home clas­si­fied in­tel­li­gence re­ports.

Natanson, the Post said, cov­ers the fed­eral work­force and has been a part of the news­pa­per’s “most high-pro­file and sen­si­tive cov­er­age” dur­ing the first year of the sec­ond Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion.

As the pa­per noted in its re­port, it is “highly un­usual and ag­gres­sive for law en­force­ment to con­duct a search on a re­porter’s home”.

In a first-per­son ac­count pub­lished last month, Natanson de­scribed her­self as the Post’s “federal gov­ern­ment whis­perer”, and said she would re­ceive calls day and night from “federal work­ers who wanted to tell me how President Donald Trump was rewrit­ing their work­place poli­cies, fir­ing their col­leagues or trans­form­ing their agen­cy’s mis­sions”.

“It’s been bru­tal,” the ar­ti­cle’s head­line said.

Natanson said her work had led to 1,169 new sources, “all cur­rent or for­mer fed­eral em­ploy­ees who de­cided to trust me with their sto­ries”. She said she learned in­for­ma­tion “people in­side gov­ern­ment agen­cies weren’t sup­posed to tell me”, say­ing that the in­ten­sity of the work nearly “broke” her.

The fed­eral in­ves­ti­ga­tion into Perez-Lugones, the Post said, in­volved doc­u­ments found in his lunch­box and his base­ment, ac­cord­ing to an FBI af­fi­davit. The crim­i­nal com­plaint against him does not ac­cuse him of leak­ing clas­si­fied in­for­ma­tion, the news­pa­per said.

Press free­dom groups were united in their con­dem­na­tion of the raid on Wednesday.

“Physical searches of re­porters’ de­vices, homes and be­long­ings are some of the most in­va­sive in­ves­tiga­tive steps law en­force­ment can take,” Bruce D Brown, pres­i­dent of the Reporters’ Committee for Freedom of the Press, said in a state­ment.

“There are spe­cific fed­eral laws and poli­cies at the Department of Justice that are meant to limit searches to the most ex­treme cases be­cause they en­dan­ger con­fi­den­tial sources far be­yond just one in­ves­ti­ga­tion and im­pair pub­lic in­ter­est re­port­ing in gen­eral.

“While we won’t know the gov­ern­men­t’s ar­gu­ments about over­com­ing these very steep hur­dles un­til the af­fi­davit is made pub­lic, this is a tremen­dous es­ca­la­tion in the ad­min­is­tra­tion’s in­tru­sions into the in­de­pen­dence of the press.”

Jameel Jaffer, ex­ec­u­tive di­rec­tor of the Knight First Amendment Institute, de­manded a pub­lic ex­pla­na­tion from the jus­tice de­part­ment of “why it be­lieves this search was nec­es­sary and legally per­mis­si­ble”.

In a state­ment, Jaffer said: “Any search tar­get­ing a jour­nal­ist war­rants in­tense scrutiny be­cause these kinds of searches can de­ter and im­pede re­port­ing that is vi­tal to our democ­racy.

“Attorney General Bondi has weak­ened guide­lines that were in­tended to pro­tect the free­dom of the press, but there are still im­por­tant le­gal lim­its, in­clud­ing con­sti­tu­tional ones, on the gov­ern­men­t’s au­thor­ity to use sub­poe­nas, court or­ders, and search war­rants to ob­tain in­for­ma­tion from jour­nal­ists.

“Searches of news­rooms and jour­nal­ists are hall­marks of il­lib­eral regimes, and we must en­sure that these prac­tices are not nor­mal­ized here.”

Seth Stern, chief of ad­vo­cacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said it was “an alarm­ing es­ca­la­tion in the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion’s mul­ti­pronged war on press free­dom” and called the war­rant “outrageous”.

“The ad­min­is­tra­tion may now be in pos­ses­sion of vol­umes of jour­nal­ist com­mu­ni­ca­tions hav­ing noth­ing to do with any pend­ing in­ves­ti­ga­tion and, if in­ves­ti­ga­tors are able to ac­cess them, we have zero faith that they will re­spect jour­nal­ist-source con­fi­den­tial­ity,” he said.

Tim Richardson, jour­nal­ism and dis­in­for­ma­tion pro­gram di­rec­tor at PEN America, said: “A gov­ern­ment ac­tion this rare and ag­gres­sive sig­nals a grow­ing as­sault on in­de­pen­dent re­port­ing and un­der­mines the First Amendment.

“It is in­tended to in­tim­i­date sources and chill jour­nal­ists’ abil­ity to gather news and hold the gov­ern­ment ac­count­able. Such be­hav­ior is more com­monly as­so­ci­ated with au­thor­i­tar­ian po­lice states than de­mo­c­ra­tic so­ci­eties that rec­og­nize jour­nal­is­m’s es­sen­tial role in in­form­ing the pub­lic.”

The Post has had a rocky re­la­tion­ship with the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion in re­cent months, de­spite its bil­lion­aire owner, Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, at­tempt­ing to curry fa­vor by block­ing it from en­dors­ing Kamala Harris, the Democratic nom­i­nee, in the 2024 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion.

Bezos de­fended the ac­tion, which saw the de­ser­tion of more than 200,000 sub­scribers in protest.

Two days ago, Anthropic re­leased the Claude Cowork re­search pre­view (a gen­eral-pur­pose AI agent to help any­one with their day-to-day work). In this ar­ti­cle, we demon­strate how at­tack­ers can ex­fil­trate user files from Cowork by ex­ploit­ing an un­re­me­di­ated vul­ner­a­bil­ity in Claude’s cod­ing en­vi­ron­ment, which now ex­tends to Cowork. The vul­ner­a­bil­ity was first iden­ti­fied in Claude.ai chat be­fore Cowork ex­isted by Johann Rehberger, who dis­closed the vul­ner­a­bil­ity — it was ac­knowl­edged but not re­me­di­ated by Anthropic.

Anthropic warns users, “Cowork is a re­search pre­view with unique risks due to its agen­tic na­ture and in­ter­net ac­cess.” Users are rec­om­mended to be aware of “suspicious ac­tions that may in­di­cate prompt in­jec­tion”. However, as this fea­ture is in­tended for use by the gen­eral pop­u­lace, not just tech­ni­cal users, we agree with Simon Willison’s take:

“I do not think it is fair to tell reg­u­lar non-pro­gram­mer users to watch out for ‘suspicious ac­tions that may in­di­cate prompt in­jec­tion’!”

As Anthropic has ac­knowl­edged this risk and put it on users to “avoid grant­ing ac­cess to lo­cal files with sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion” (while si­mul­ta­ne­ously en­cour­ag­ing the use of Cowork to or­ga­nize your Desktop), we have cho­sen to pub­licly dis­close this demon­stra­tion of a threat users should be aware of. By rais­ing aware­ness, we hope to en­able users to bet­ter iden­tify the types of ‘suspicious ac­tions’ men­tioned in Anthropic’s warn­ing.

This at­tack lever­ages the al­lowlist­ing of the Anthropic API to achieve data egress from Claude’s VM en­vi­ron­ment (which re­stricts most net­work ac­cess).

The vic­tim con­nects Cowork to a lo­cal folder con­tain­ing con­fi­den­tial real es­tate files­The vic­tim up­loads a file to Claude that con­tains a hid­den prompt in­jec­tion

For gen­eral use cases, this is quite com­mon; a user finds a file on­line that they up­load to Claude code. This at­tack is not de­pen­dent on the in­jec­tion source - other in­jec­tion sources in­clude, but are not lim­ited to: web data from Claude for Chrome, con­nected MCP servers, etc. In this case, the at­tack has the file be­ing a Claude ‘Skill’ (although, as men­tioned, it could also just be a reg­u­lar doc­u­ment), as it is a gen­er­al­iz­able file con­ven­tion that users are likely to en­counter, es­pe­cially when us­ing Claude.

Note: If you are fa­mil­iar with Skills, they are canon­i­cally Markdown files (which users of­ten do not heav­ily scru­ti­nize). However, we demon­strate some­thing more in­ter­est­ing: here, the user up­loads a .docx (such as may be shared on an on­line fo­rum), which poses as a Skill - the con­tents ap­pear to be Markdown that was just saved af­ter edit­ing in Word. In re­al­ity, this trick al­lows at­tack­ers to con­ceal the in­jec­tion us­ing 1-point font, white-on-white text, and with line spac­ing set to 0.1 — mak­ing it ef­fec­tively im­pos­si­ble to de­tect. The vic­tim asks Cowork to an­a­lyze their files us­ing the Real Estate ‘skill’ they up­load­edThe in­jec­tion ma­nip­u­lates Cowork to up­load files to the at­tack­er’s Anthropic ac­count

The in­jec­tion tells Claude to use a ‘curl’ com­mand to make a re­quest to the Anthropic file up­load API with the largest avail­able file. The in­jec­tion then pro­vides the at­tack­er’s API key, so the file will be up­loaded to the at­tack­er’s ac­count.

At no point in this process is hu­man ap­proval re­quired.If we ex­pand the ‘Running com­mand’ block, we can see the ma­li­cious re­quest in de­tail:Code ex­e­cuted by Claude is run in a VM - re­strict­ing out­bound net­work re­quests to al­most all do­mains - but the Anthropic API flies un­der the radar as trusted, al­low­ing this at­tack to com­plete suc­cess­fully. The at­tack­er’s ac­count con­tains the vic­tim’s file, al­low­ing them to chat with it­The ex­fil­trated file con­tains fi­nan­cial fig­ures and PII, in­clud­ing par­tial SSNs.

The above ex­ploit was demon­strated against Claude Haiku. Although Claude Opus 4.5 is known to be more re­silient against in­jec­tions, Opus 4.5 in Cowork was suc­cess­fully ma­nip­u­lated via in­di­rect prompt in­jec­tion to lever­age the same file up­load vul­ner­a­bil­ity to ex­fil­trate data in a test that con­sid­ered a ‘user’ up­load­ing a ma­li­cious in­te­gra­tion guide while de­vel­op­ing a new AI tool:

As the fo­cus of this ar­ti­cle was more for every­day users (and not de­vel­op­ers), we opted to demon­strate the above at­tack chain in­stead of this one.

An in­ter­est­ing find­ing: Claude’s API strug­gles when a file does not match the type it claims to be. When op­er­at­ing on a mal­formed PDF (ends .pdf, but it is re­ally a text file with a few sen­tences in it), af­ter try­ing to read it once, Claude starts throw­ing an API er­ror in every sub­se­quent chat in the con­ver­sa­tion.

We posit that it is likely pos­si­ble to ex­ploit this fail­ure via in­di­rect prompt in­jec­tion to cause a lim­ited de­nial of ser­vice at­tack (e.g., an in­jec­tion can elicit Claude to cre­ate a mal­formed file, and then read it). Uploading the mal­formed file via the files API re­sulted in no­ti­fi­ca­tions with an er­ror mes­sage, both in the Claude client and the Anthropic Console.

One of the key ca­pa­bil­i­ties that Cowork was cre­ated for is the abil­ity to in­ter­act with one’s en­tire day-to-day work en­vi­ron­ment. This in­cludes the browser and MCP servers, grant­ing ca­pa­bil­i­ties like send­ing texts, con­trol­ling one’s Mac with AppleScripts, etc.

These func­tion­al­i­ties make it in­creas­ingly likely that the model will process both sen­si­tive and un­trusted data sources (which the user does not re­view man­u­ally for in­jec­tions), mak­ing prompt in­jec­tion an ever-grow­ing at­tack sur­face. We urge users to ex­er­cise cau­tion when con­fig­ur­ing Connectors. Though this ar­ti­cle demon­strated an ex­ploit with­out lever­ag­ing Connectors, we be­lieve they rep­re­sent a ma­jor risk sur­face likely to im­pact every­day users.

The Tesla Cybertruck pro­gram is in sham­bles. The lat­est data in­di­cate pro­duc­tion is run­ning at roughly 10% of its planned ca­pac­ity. Meanwhile, the Ford F150 Lightning out­sold the Tesla Cybertruck in 2025 and was then can­celed for not sell­ing enough.

Is this what is com­ing for the Cybertruck?

Tesla is ac­tively try­ing to hide its Cybertruck sales per­for­mance. We have to do the math our­selves.

Unlike vir­tu­ally every other au­tomaker that re­ports sales by model and re­gion, Tesla bun­dles its ve­hi­cles into two broad cat­e­gories: “Model 3/Y” and “Other Models.”

The “Other Models” cat­e­gory in­cludes the Model S, Model X, Cybertruck, and the Tesla Semi.

Model S and Model X sales have been rel­a­tively sta­ble at a low vol­ume, typ­i­cally hov­er­ing around 5,000 to 6,000 units com­bined per quar­ter glob­ally. If we as­sume a gen­er­ous 6,000 units for S and X in Q4 2025 (aided by a slight up­date), that leaves only roughly 5,600 units for the Cybertruck and Semi com­bined.

Considering the Semi is still in pi­lot pro­duc­tion with neg­li­gi­ble vol­ume, we are look­ing at roughly 5,500 for the en­tire quar­ter glob­ally (though it is still mostly North American).

This is a dis­as­ter com­pared to the truck’s peak and the com­pa­ny’s stated ca­pac­ity.

We pre­vi­ously re­ported in July that Tesla con­firmed Cybertruck sales were down to ~5,000 units in Q2 2025. It seems the “recovery” never hap­pened, de­spite price cuts and the in­tro­duc­tion of a short-lived, cheaper trim.

For the full year 2025, it could bring the to­tal to about 21,500 Cybertrucks glob­ally.

According to 2025 full-year data, the Ford F-150 Lightning de­liv­ered ap­prox­i­mately 27,300 units in the US.

Think about that for a sec­ond. Ford of­fi­cially an­nounced it was end­ing F-150 Lightning pro­duc­tion in December to pivot to its new EREV (extended-range elec­tric ve­hi­cle) strat­egy. Yet, even as a “lame duck” prod­uct with widely pub­li­cised re­tire­ment plans, the Lightning still man­aged to find more buy­ers than Tesla’s Cybertruck.

While Ford’s sales dipped about 18% year-over-year as they wound down the pro­gram, Tesla’s num­bers crashed by nearly 50% de­spite the com­pany do­ing every­thing it can to keep the pro­gram alive.

Tesla and Elon Musk have thrown every­thing at the Cybertruck pro­gram, and it’s not work­ing. They re­leased a cheaper stripped-down ver­sion and can­celed it months later be­cause it was­n’t sell­ing.

Last quar­ter, Musk even had his pri­vate com­pany SpaceX buy over 1,000 Cybertrucks, which is about 20% of Tesla’s quar­terly Cybertruck sales, and sales were still down more than 50% year-over-year in the quar­ter.

What hap­pens with the Cybertruck from here?

SpaceX can’t keep buy­ing Cybertrucks, and I don’t know of any ve­hi­cle pro­gram that sells at 10% of its pro­duc­tion ca­pac­ity and sur­vives.

As I pre­vi­ously said, I think if Tesla were to dis­tance it­self from Musk’s toxic brand and do things such as give up on the 4680 cells, which ap­pear to have con­tributed to the Cybertruck be­ing more ex­pen­sive and hav­ing a shorter range than orig­i­nally an­nounced, it could likely sig­nif­i­cantly boost Cybertruck sales.

Enough to fill pro­duc­tion ca­pac­ity? Probably not, but it could get a lot closer.

Short of that, I don’t know where this can go. I think most other au­tomak­ers would have writ­ten off the pro­gram al­ready, but Musk can’t be­cause of his ego. It would be ad­mit­ting de­feat.

It shows just how much he has changed in the last few years (beyond the ob­vi­ous white-na­tion­al­ist stuff), as Musk orig­i­nally said Tesla would pivot to a more tra­di­tional de­sign if the Cybertruck failed. It has failed. Now what?

The URL short­ener that makes your links look as sus­pi­cious as pos­si­ble.

Normal links are too trust­wor­thy. Make them creepy.

Why some clothes shrink in the wash — and how to ‘unshrink’ them

Washing your favourite piece of cloth­ing only to find out it shrank can be up­set­ting. Why does it hap­pen, and how can you ‘unshrink’ it?

Why some clothes shrink in the wash - and how to ‘unshrink’ them

Analysis for The Conversation by tex­tiles sci­en­tist Dr Nisa Salim

When your favourite dress or shirt shrinks in the wash, it can be dev­as­tat­ing, es­pe­cially if you fol­lowed the in­struc­tions closely. Unfortunately, some fab­rics just seem to be more prone to shrink­ing than oth­ers — but why?

Understanding more about the sci­ence of tex­tile fi­bres can not only help you pre­vent the shrink­age of cloth­ing, but also might help you “rescue” the oc­ca­sional gar­ment af­ter a laun­dry ac­ci­dent.

It’s all down to the fi­bres

To know more about cloth­ing shrink­age, we first need to un­der­stand a lit­tle about how tex­tiles are made.

Common tex­tile fi­bres, such as cot­ton and linen, are made from plants. These fi­bres are ir­reg­u­lar and crin­kled in their nat­ural form. If you zoom deeper in­side them, you’ll see mil­lions of tiny, long-chain cel­lu­lose mol­e­cules that nat­u­rally ex­ist in coiled or con­vo­luted shapes.

During tex­tile man­u­fac­tur­ing, these fi­bres are me­chan­i­cally pulled, stretched and twisted to straighten and align these cel­lu­lose chains to­gether. This cre­ates smooth, long threads.

On a chem­i­cal level, there are also links be­tween the chains called hy­dro­gen bonds. These strengthen the fi­bre and the thread and make it more co­he­sive.

Threads are wo­ven or knit­ted into fab­rics, which locks in the ten­sion that holds those fi­bres side by side.

However, these fi­bres have good “memory”. Whenever they’re ex­posed to heat, mois­ture or me­chan­i­cal ac­tion (such as ag­i­ta­tion in your wash­ing ma­chine), they tend to re­lax and re­turn to their orig­i­nal crin­kled state.

This fi­bre mem­ory is why some fab­rics wrin­kle so eas­ily and why some of them may even shrink af­ter wash­ing.

Magnified im­age of cot­ton fab­ric, show­ing threads ‘locked’ in against each other.

How does wash­ing shrink the fab­ric?

To un­der­stand shrink­age, we again need to zoom down to the mol­e­c­u­lar level. During laun­der­ing, hot wa­ter helps to in­crease the en­ergy level of fi­bres — this means they shake more rapidly which dis­rupts the hy­dro­gen bonds hold­ing them in place.

The way a fab­ric is knit­ted or wo­ven also plays a role. Loosely knit­ted fab­rics have more open spaces and loops, mak­ing them more sus­cep­ti­ble to shrink­age. Tightly wo­ven fab­rics are more re­sis­tant be­cause the threads are locked into place with less room to move.

Additionally, cel­lu­lose is hy­drophilic — it at­tracts wa­ter. Water mol­e­cules pen­e­trate in­side the fi­bres, caus­ing swelling and mak­ing them more flex­i­ble and mo­bile. Adding to all this is the tum­ble and twist ac­tion in­side the wash­ing ma­chine.

The whole process makes the fi­bres re­lax and re­coil back to their nat­ural, less stretched, crin­kled state. As a re­sult, the gar­ment shrinks.

It’s not just hot wa­ter — here’s why

This does­n’t just hap­pen with hot wa­ter, as you may have ex­pe­ri­enced your­self with clothes made of rayon, for ex­am­ple.

Cold wa­ter can still pen­e­trate into fi­bres, mak­ing them swell, along with the me­chan­i­cal ac­tion of the tum­bling in the wash­ing ma­chine. The ef­fect is less dra­matic with cold wa­ter, but it can hap­pen.

To min­imise shrink­age, you may use cold wa­ter, the low­est spin speed or the gen­tlest cy­cle avail­able, es­pe­cially for cot­ton and rayon. Machine la­bels don’t al­ways fully ex­plain the im­pact of spin speed and ag­i­ta­tion. When in doubt, choose a “delicate” set­ting.

A wool fi­bre mag­ni­fied, show­ing cu­ti­cles that ap­pear like scales.

Different fi­bres shrink in dif­fer­ent ways; there is no sin­gle mech­a­nism that fits all.

While cel­lu­lose-based fab­rics shrink as de­scribed above, wool is an an­i­mal-de­rived fi­bre made of ker­atin pro­teins. Its sur­face is cov­ered in tiny, over­lap­ping scales called cu­ti­cle cells.

During wash­ing, these cu­ti­cles open up and in­ter­lock with neigh­bour­ing fi­bres caus­ing fi­bre en­tan­gle­ment or “felting”. This makes the cloth­ing feel denser and smaller — in other words, it shrinks.

Why don’t syn­thet­ics shrink as much?

Synthetic fi­bres such as poly­ester or ny­lon are made from pe­tro­leum-based poly­mers, en­gi­neered for sta­bil­ity and dura­bil­ity.

These poly­mers con­tain more crys­talline re­gions that are highly or­dered and act as an in­ter­nal “skeleton”, pre­vent­ing the fi­bres from crin­kling.

Textile sci­en­tists and en­gi­neers are also work­ing on fab­rics that re­sist shrink­age through ad­vanced ma­te­r­ial de­sign. Among promis­ing in­no­va­tions are blended yarns that com­bine nat­ural and syn­thetic fi­bres.

Some re­searchers are work­ing on shape-mem­ory poly­mers that can change shape — or re­turn to a pre­vi­ous shape — in re­sponse to tem­per­a­ture or wa­ter, for ex­am­ple. This is dif­fer­ent to stretch fab­rics (such as those used in ac­tivewear) that are made up of highly elas­tic fi­bres which “bounce back” to their orig­i­nal state af­ter stretch­ing.

How can I un­shrink a piece of cloth­ing?

If a favourite gar­ment has shrunk in the wash, you can try to res­cue it with this sim­ple method.

Gently soak the item in luke­warm wa­ter mixed with hair con­di­tioner or baby sham­poo (approximately one ta­ble­spoon per litre). Then, care­fully stretch the fab­ric back into shape and dry it flat or un­der gen­tle ten­sion — for ex­am­ple, by peg­ging the gar­ment to a dry­ing rack.

The rea­son this works is be­cause con­di­tion­ers have chem­i­cals known as cationic sur­fac­tants. These will tem­porar­ily lu­bri­cate the fi­bres, mak­ing them more flex­i­ble and al­low­ing you to gen­tly pull every­thing back into place.

This process can’t com­pletely re­verse ex­treme shrink­age but it can help re­cover some of the lost size, mak­ing the clothes wear­able again.

Swinburne-led net­work to guide AI use in youth ser­vices

Swinburne’s Dr Joel McGregor, Dr Linus Tan and Dr Caleb Lloyd have established the Responsible AI in Youth Sectors Network. The collaborative net­work aims to guide the fast-grow­ing use of ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence in youth ser­vices across Victoria.

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Ten Swinburne aca­d­e­mics have been named on the Highly Cited Researchers 2025 list, re­leased by Clarivate

Swinburne physi­cist Dr Weibai Li has re­ceived a Discovery Early Career Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council

$1.2m ARC fund­ing to boost na­tional X-ray spec­troscopy ca­pa­bil­ity through Swinburne and QUT part­ner­ship

Swinburne has se­cured $1.2 mil­lion in the lat­est Australian Research Council Linkage Infrastructure, Equipment and Facilities scheme round

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Due to re­cent ac­tiv­i­ties that are in di­rect vi­o­la­tion of our Code of Conduct, which is pub­licly avail­able on our web­site, SparkFun has de­ter­mined that it can no longer trans­act with Adafruit Industries. Please see the of­fi­cial com­mu­ni­ca­tion we sent to Adafruit be­low. Without over­shar­ing, re­cent vi­o­la­tions in­clude:

Sending and for­ward­ing of­fen­sive, an­tag­o­nis­tic, and deroga­tory emails and ma­te­r­ial to SparkFun em­ploy­ees, for­mer em­ploy­ees and cus­tomers

We un­der­stand this may be frus­trat­ing. From time to time, we have to make dif­fi­cult busi­ness de­ci­sions and this de­ci­sion was made af­ter thought­ful con­sid­er­a­tion. We wish Adafruit the best in fu­ture en­deav­ors. Please note, SparkFun con­tin­ues to em­brace our strong re­seller net­work - for SparkFun-original prod­ucts, Teensy, and a mul­ti­tude of other prod­ucts. Please see our dis­trib­u­tor map be­low.

Aside from di­rect­ing to this of­fi­cial state­ment, SparkFun has not made any pub­lic posts, com­ments, or sub­mis­sions about this sit­u­a­tion on ex­ter­nal fo­rums or plat­forms. Any sug­ges­tion oth­er­wise is in­cor­rect. This state­ment is our only pub­lic com­mu­ni­ca­tion on the mat­ter. We are fo­cused on mov­ing for­ward and con­tin­u­ing to serve our cus­tomers and com­mu­nity.

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This blog also ap­pears in our Age Verification Resource Hub: our one-stop shop for users seek­ing to un­der­stand what age-gat­ing laws ac­tu­ally do, what’s at stake, how to pro­tect your­self, and why EFF op­poses all forms of age ver­i­fi­ca­tion man­dates. Head to EFF.org/Age to ex­plore our re­sources and join us in the fight for a free, open, pri­vate, and yes—safe—in­ter­net.

EFF is against age gat­ing and age ver­i­fi­ca­tion man­dates, and we hope we’ll win in get­ting ex­ist­ing ones over­turned and new ones pre­vented. But man­dates are al­ready in ef­fect, and every day many peo­ple are asked to ver­ify their age across the web, de­spite promi­nent cases of sen­si­tive data get­ting leaked in the process.

At some point, you may have been faced with the de­ci­sion your­self: should I con­tinue to use this ser­vice if I have to ver­ify my age? And if so, how can I do that with the least risk to my per­sonal in­for­ma­tion? This is our guide to nav­i­gat­ing those de­ci­sions, with in­for­ma­tion on what ques­tions to ask about the age ver­i­fi­ca­tion op­tions you’re pre­sented with, and an­swers to those ques­tions for some of the top most pop­u­lar so­cial me­dia sites. Even though there’s no way to im­ple­ment man­dated age gates in a way that fully pro­tects speech and pri­vacy rights, our goal here is to help you min­i­mize the in­fringe­ment of your rights as you man­age this aw­ful sit­u­a­tion.

Since we know that leaks hap­pen de­spite the best ef­forts of soft­ware en­gi­neers, we gen­er­ally rec­om­mend sub­mit­ting the ab­solute least amount of data pos­si­ble. Unfortunately, that’s not go­ing to be pos­si­ble for every­one. Even fa­cial age es­ti­ma­tion so­lu­tions where pic­tures of your face never leave your de­vice, of­fer­ing some pro­tec­tion against data leak­age, are not a good op­tion for all users: fa­cial age es­ti­ma­tion works less well for peo­ple of color, trans and non­bi­nary peo­ple, and peo­ple with dis­abil­i­ties. There are some sys­tems that use fancy cryp­tog­ra­phy so that a dig­i­tal ID saved to your de­vice won’t tell the web­site any­thing more than if you meet the age re­quire­ment, but ac­cess to that dig­i­tal ID is­n’t avail­able to every­one or for all plat­forms. You may also not want to reg­is­ter for a dig­i­tal ID and save it to your phone, if you don’t want to take the chance of all the in­for­ma­tion on it be­ing ex­posed upon re­quest of an over-zeal­ous ver­i­fier, or you sim­ply don’t want to be a part of a dig­i­tal ID sys­tem

If you’re given the op­tion of se­lect­ing a ver­i­fi­ca­tion method and are de­cid­ing which to use, we rec­om­mend con­sid­er­ing the fol­low­ing ques­tions for each process al­lowed by each ven­dor:

* Data: What info does each method re­quire?

* Access: Who can see the data dur­ing the course of the ver­i­fi­ca­tion process?

* Retention: Who will hold onto that data af­ter the ver­i­fi­ca­tion process, and for how long?

* Audits: How sure are we that the stated claims will hap­pen in prac­tice? For ex­am­ple, are there ex­ter­nal au­dits con­firm­ing that data is not ac­ci­den­tally leaked to an­other site along the way? Ideally these will be in-depth, se­cu­rity-fo­cused au­dits by spe­cial­ized au­di­tors like NCC Group or Trail of Bits, in­stead of au­dits that merely cer­tify ad­her­ence to stan­dards.

* Visibility: Who will be aware that you’re at­tempt­ing to ver­ify your age, and will they know which plat­form you’re try­ing to ver­ify for?

We at­tempt to pro­vide an­swers to these ques­tions be­low. To be­gin, there are two ma­jor fac­tors to con­sider when an­swer­ing these ques­tions: the tools each plat­form uses, and the over­all sys­tem those tools are part of.

In gen­eral, most plat­forms of­fer age es­ti­ma­tion op­tions like face scans as a first line of age as­sur­ance. These vary in in­tru­sive­ness, but their main prob­lem is in­ac­cu­racy, par­tic­u­larly for mar­gin­al­ized users. Third-party age ver­i­fi­ca­tion ven­dors Private ID and k-ID of­fer on-de­vice fa­cial age es­ti­ma­tion, but an­other com­mon ven­dor, Yoti, sends the im­age to their servers dur­ing age checks by some of the biggest plat­forms. This risks leak­ing the im­ages them­selves, and also the fact that you’re us­ing that par­tic­u­lar web­site, to the third party.

Then, there’s the doc­u­ment-based ver­i­fi­ca­tion ser­vices, which re­quire you to sub­mit a hard iden­ti­fier like a gov­ern­ment-is­sued ID. This method thus re­quires you to prove both your age and your iden­tity. A plat­form can do this in-house through a des­ig­nated dataflow, or by send­ing that data to a third party. We’ve al­ready seen ex­am­ples of how this can fail. For ex­am­ple, Discord routed users’ ID data through its gen­eral cus­tomer ser­vice work­flow so that a third-party ven­dor could per­form man­ual re­view of ver­i­fi­ca­tion ap­peals. No one in­volved ever deleted users’ data, so when the sys­tem was breached, Discord had to apol­o­gize for the cat­a­strophic dis­clo­sure of nearly 70,000 pho­tos of users’ ID doc­u­ments. Overly long re­ten­tion pe­ri­ods ex­pose doc­u­ments to risk of breaches and his­tor­i­cal data re­quests. Some doc­u­ment ver­i­fiers have re­ten­tion pe­ri­ods that are need­lessly long. This is the case with Incode, which pro­vides ID ver­i­fi­ca­tion for Tiktok. Incode holds onto im­ages for­ever by de­fault, though TikTok should au­to­mat­i­cally start the dele­tion process on your be­half.

Some plat­forms of­fer al­ter­na­tives, like prov­ing that you own a credit card, or ask­ing for your email to check if it ap­pears in data­bases as­so­ci­ated with adult­hood (like home mort­gage data­bases). These tend to in­volve less risk when it comes to the sen­si­tiv­ity of the data it­self, es­pe­cially since credit cards can be re­placed, but in gen­eral still un­der­mine anonymity and pseu­do­nymity and pose a risk of track­ing your on­line ac­tiv­ity. We’d pre­fer to see more as­sur­ances across the board about how in­for­ma­tion is han­dled.

Each site of­fers users a menu of age as­sur­ance op­tions to choose from. We’ve cho­sen to pre­sent these op­tions in the rough or­der that we ex­pect most peo­ple to pre­fer. Jump di­rectly to a plat­form to learn more about its age checks:

If Meta can guess your age, you may never even see an age ver­i­fi­ca­tion screen. Meta, which runs Facebook, Threads, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp, first tries to use in­for­ma­tion you’ve posted to guess your age, like look­ing at “Happy birth­day!” mes­sages. It’s a creepy re­minder that they al­ready have quite a lot of in­for­ma­tion about you.

If Meta can­not guess your age, or if Meta in­fers you’re too young, it will next ask you to ver­ify your age us­ing ei­ther fa­cial age es­ti­ma­tion, or by up­load­ing your photo ID.

If you choose to use fa­cial age es­ti­ma­tion, you’ll be sent to Yoti, a third-party ver­i­fi­ca­tion ser­vice. Your photo will be up­loaded to their servers dur­ing this process. Yoti claims that “as soon as an age has been es­ti­mated, the fa­cial im­age is im­me­di­ately and per­ma­nently deleted.” Though it’s not as good as not hav­ing that data in the first place, Yoti’s se­cu­rity mea­sures in­clude a bug bounty pro­gram and an­nual pen­e­tra­tion test­ing. Researchers from Mint Secure found that Yoti’s app and web­site are filled with track­ers, so the fact that you’re ver­i­fy­ing your age could be not only shared to Yoti, but leaked to third-party data bro­kers as well.

You may not want to use this op­tion if you’re wor­ried about third par­ties po­ten­tially be­ing able to know you’re try­ing to ver­ify your age with Meta. You also might not want to use this if you’re wor­ried about a cur­rent pic­ture of your face ac­ci­den­tally leak­ing—for ex­am­ple, if el­e­ments in the back­ground of your selfie might re­veal your cur­rent lo­ca­tion. On the other hand, if you con­sider a selfie to be less sen­si­tive than a pho­to­graph of your ID, this op­tion might be bet­ter. If you do choose (or are forced to) use the face check sys­tem, be sure to snap your selfie with­out any­thing you’d be con­cerned with iden­ti­fy­ing your lo­ca­tion or em­bar­rass­ing you in the back­ground in case the im­age leaks.

If Yoti’s age es­ti­ma­tion de­cides your face looks too young, or if you opt out of fa­cial age es­ti­ma­tion, your next re­course is to send Meta a photo of your ID. Meta sends that photo to Yoti to ver­ify the ID. Meta says it will hold onto that ID im­age for 30 days, then delete it. Meanwhile, Yoti claims it will delete the im­age im­me­di­ately af­ter ver­i­fi­ca­tion. Of course, bugs and process over­sights ex­ist, such as ac­ci­den­tally repli­cat­ing in­for­ma­tion in logs or sup­port queues, but at least they have stated processes. Your ID con­tains sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion such as your full le­gal name and home ad­dress. Using this op­tion not only runs the (hopefully small, but never nonex­is­tent) risk of that data get­ting leaked through er­rors or hack­ing, but it also lets Meta see the in­for­ma­tion needed to tie your pro­file to your iden­tity—which you may not want. If you don’t want Meta to know your name and where you live, or rely on both Meta and Yoti to keep to their dele­tion promises, this op­tion may not be right for you.

If Google can guess your age, you may never even see an age ver­i­fi­ca­tion screen. Your Google ac­count is typ­i­cally con­nected to your YouTube ac­count, so if (like mine) your YouTube ac­count is old enough to vote, you may not need to ver­ify your Google ac­count at all. Google first uses in­for­ma­tion it al­ready knows to try to guess your age, like how long you’ve had the ac­count and your YouTube view­ing habits. It’s yet an­other creepy re­minder of how much in­for­ma­tion these cor­po­ra­tions have on you, but at least in this case they aren’t likely to ask for even more iden­ti­fy­ing data.

If Google can­not guess your age, or de­cides you’re too young, Google will next ask you to ver­ify your age. You’ll be given a va­ri­ety of op­tions for how to do so, with avail­abil­ity that will de­pend on your lo­ca­tion and your age.

Google’s meth­ods to as­sure your age in­clude ID ver­i­fi­ca­tion, fa­cial age es­ti­ma­tion, ver­i­fi­ca­tion by proxy, and dig­i­tal ID. To prove you’re over 18, you may be able to use fa­cial age es­ti­ma­tion, give Google your credit card in­for­ma­tion, or tell a third-party provider your email ad­dress.

If you choose to use fa­cial age es­ti­ma­tion, you’ll be sent to a web­site run by Private ID, a third-party ver­i­fi­ca­tion ser­vice. The web­site will load Private ID’s ver­i­fier within the page—this means that your selfie will be checked with­out any im­ages leav­ing your de­vice. If the sys­tem de­cides you’re over 18, it will let Google know that, and only that. Of course, no tech­nol­ogy is per­fect—should Private ID be man­dated to tar­get you specif­i­cally, there’s noth­ing to stop it from send­ing down code that does in fact up­load your im­age, and you prob­a­bly won’t no­tice. But un­less your threat model in­cludes be­ing specif­i­cally tar­geted by a state ac­tor or Private ID, that’s un­likely to be some­thing you need to worry about. For most peo­ple, no one else will see your im­age dur­ing this process. Private ID will, how­ever, be told that your de­vice is try­ing to ver­ify your age with Google and Google will still find out if Private ID thinks that you’re un­der 18.

If Private ID’s age es­ti­ma­tion de­cides your face looks too young, you may next be able to de­cide if you’d rather let Google ver­ify your age by giv­ing it your credit card in­for­ma­tion, photo ID, or dig­i­tal ID, or by let­ting Google send your email ad­dress to a third-party ver­i­fier.

If you choose to pro­vide your email ad­dress, Google sends it on to a com­pany called VerifyMy. VerifyMy will use your email ad­dress to see if you’ve done things like get a mort­gage or paid for util­i­ties us­ing that email ad­dress. If you use Gmail as your email provider, this may be a pri­vacy-pro­tec­tive op­tion with re­spect to Google, as Google will then al­ready know the email ad­dress as­so­ci­ated with the ac­count. But it does tell VerifyMy and its third-party part­ners that the per­son be­hind this email ad­dress is look­ing to ver­ify their age, which you may not want them to know. VerifyMy uses “proprietary al­go­rithms and ex­ter­nal data sources” that in­volve send­ing your email ad­dress to “trusted third par­ties, such as data ag­gre­ga­tors.” It claims to “ensure that such third par­ties are con­trac­tu­ally bound to meet these re­quire­ments,” but you’ll have to trust it on that one—we haven’t seen any men­tion of who those par­ties are, so you’ll have no way to check up on their prac­tices and se­cu­rity. On the bright side, VerifyMy and its part­ners do claim to delete your in­for­ma­tion as soon as the check is com­pleted.

If you choose to let Google use your credit card in­for­ma­tion, you’ll be asked to set up a Google Payments ac­count. Note that debit cards won’t be ac­cepted, since it’s much eas­ier for many debit cards to be is­sued to peo­ple un­der 18. Google will then charge a small amount to the card, and re­fund it once it goes through. If you choose this method, you’ll have to tell Google your credit card info, but the fact that it’s done through Google Payments (their reg­u­lar card-pro­cess­ing sys­tem) means that at least your credit card in­for­ma­tion won’t be sit­ting around in some un­se­cured sys­tem. Even if your credit card in­for­ma­tion hap­pens to ac­ci­den­tally be leaked, this is a rel­a­tively low-risk op­tion, since credit cards come with solid fraud pro­tec­tion. If your credit card info gets leaked, you should eas­ily be able to dis­pute fraud­u­lent charges and re­place the card.

If the op­tion is avail­able to you, you may be able to use your dig­i­tal ID to ver­ify your age with Google. In some re­gions, you’ll be given the op­tion to use your dig­i­tal ID. In some cases, it’s pos­si­ble to only re­veal your age in­for­ma­tion when you use a dig­i­tal ID. If you’re given that choice, it can be a good pri­vacy-pre­serv­ing op­tion. Depending on the im­ple­men­ta­tion, there’s a chance that the ver­i­fi­ca­tion step will “phone home” to the ID provider (usually a gov­ern­ment) to let them know the ser­vice asked for your age. It’s a com­pli­cated and var­ied topic that you can learn more about by vis­it­ing EFF’s page on dig­i­tal iden­tity.

Should none of these op­tions work for you, your fi­nal re­course is to send Google a photo of your ID. Here, you’ll be asked to take a photo of an ac­cept­able ID and send it to Google. Though the help page only states that your ID “will be stored se­curely,” the ver­i­fi­ca­tion process page says ID “will be deleted af­ter your date of birth is suc­cess­fully ver­i­fied.” Acceptable IDs vary by coun­try, but are gen­er­ally gov­ern­ment-is­sued photo IDs. We like that it’s deleted im­me­di­ately, though we have ques­tions about what Google means when it says your ID will be used to “improve [its] ver­i­fi­ca­tion ser­vices for Google prod­ucts and pro­tect against fraud and abuse.” No sys­tem is per­fect, and we can only hope that Google sched­ules out­side au­dits reg­u­larly.

If TikTok can guess your age, you may never even see an age ver­i­fi­ca­tion no­ti­fi­ca­tion. TikTok first tries to use in­for­ma­tion you’ve posted to es­ti­mate your age, look­ing through your videos and pho­tos to an­a­lyze your face and lis­ten to your voice. By up­load­ing any videos, TikTok be­lieves you’ve given it con­sent to try to guess how old you look and sound.

If TikTok de­cides you’re too young, ap­peal to re­voke their age de­ci­sion be­fore the dead­line passes. If TikTok can­not guess your age, or de­cides you’re too young, it will au­to­mat­i­cally re­voke your ac­cess based on age—in­clud­ing ei­ther re­strict­ing fea­tures or delet­ing your ac­count. To get your ac­cess and ac­count back, you’ll have a lim­ited amount of time to ver­ify your age. As soon as you see the no­ti­fi­ca­tion that your ac­count is re­stricted, you’ll want to act fast be­cause in some places you’ll have as lit­tle as 23 days be­fore the dead­line passes.

When you get that no­ti­fi­ca­tion, you’re given var­i­ous op­tions to ver­ify your age based on your lo­ca­tion.

If you’re given the op­tion to use fa­cial age es­ti­ma­tion, you’ll be sent to Yoti, a third-party ver­i­fi­ca­tion ser­vice. Your photo will be up­loaded to their servers dur­ing this process. Yoti claims that “as soon as an age has been es­ti­mated, the fa­cial im­age is im­me­di­ately and per­ma­nently deleted.” Though it’s not as good as not hav­ing that data in the first place, Yoti’s se­cu­rity mea­sures in­clude a bug bounty pro­gram and an­nual pen­e­tra­tion test­ing. However, re­searchers from Mint Secure found that Yoti’s app and web­site are filled with track­ers, so the fact that you’re ver­i­fy­ing your age could be leaked not only to Yoti, but to third-party data bro­kers as well.

You may not want to use this op­tion if you’re wor­ried about third par­ties po­ten­tially be­ing able to know you’re try­ing to ver­ify your age with TikTok. You also might not want to use this if you’re wor­ried about a cur­rent pic­ture of your face ac­ci­den­tally leak­ing—for ex­am­ple, if el­e­ments in the back­ground of your selfie might re­veal your cur­rent lo­ca­tion. On the other hand, if you con­sider a selfie to be less sen­si­tive than a pho­to­graph of your ID or your credit card in­for­ma­tion, this op­tion might be bet­ter. If you do choose (or are forced to) use the face check sys­tem, be sure to snap your selfie with­out any­thing you’d be con­cerned with iden­ti­fy­ing your lo­ca­tion or em­bar­rass­ing you in the back­ground in case the im­age leaks.

If you have a credit card in your name, TikTok will ac­cept that as proof that you’re over 18. Note that debit cards won’t be ac­cepted, since it’s much eas­ier for many debit cards to be is­sued to peo­ple un­der 18. TikTok will charge a small amount to the credit card, and re­fund it once it goes through. It’s un­clear if this goes through their reg­u­lar pay­ment process, or if your credit card in­for­ma­tion will be sent through and stored in a sep­a­rate, less se­cure sys­tem. Luckily, these days credit cards come with solid fraud pro­tec­tion, so if your credit card gets leaked, you should eas­ily be able to dis­pute fraud­u­lent charges and re­place the card. That said, we’d rather TikTok pro­vide as­sur­ances that the in­for­ma­tion will be processed se­curely.

Sometimes, if you’re be­tween 13 and 17, you’ll be given the op­tion to let your par­ent or guardian con­firm your age. You’ll tell TikTok their email ad­dress, and TikTok will send your par­ent or guardian an email ask­ing them (a) to con­firm your date of birth, and (b) to ver­ify their own age by prov­ing that they own a valid credit card. This op­tion does­n’t al­ways seem to be of­fered, and in the one case we could find, it’s pos­si­ble that TikTok never fol­lowed up with the par­ent. So it’s un­clear how or if TikTok ver­i­fies that the adult whose email you pro­vide is your par­ent or guardian. If you want to use credit card ver­i­fi­ca­tion but you’re not old enough to have a credit card, and you’re ok with let­ting an adult know you use TikTok, this op­tion may be rea­son­able to try.

Bizarrely, if you’re be­tween 13 and 17, TikTok claims to of­fer the op­tion to take a photo with lit­er­ally any ran­dom adult to con­firm your age. Its help page says that any trusted adult over 25 can be cho­sen, as long as they’re hold­ing a piece of pa­per with the code on it that TikTok pro­vides. It also men­tions that a third-party provider is used here, but does­n’t say which one. We haven’t found any ev­i­dence of this ver­i­fi­ca­tion method be­ing of­fered. Please do let us know if you’ve used this method to ver­ify your age on TikTok!

If you aren’t of­fered or have failed the other op­tions, you’ll have to ver­ify your age by sub­mit­ting a copy of your ID and match­ing photo of your face. You’ll be sent to Incode, a third-party ver­i­fi­ca­tion ser­vice. In a dis­ap­point­ing fail­ure to meet the in­dus­try stan­dard, Incode it­self does­n’t au­to­mat­i­cally delete the data you give it once the process is com­plete, but TikTok does claim to “start the process to delete the in­for­ma­tion you sub­mit­ted,” which should in­clude telling Incode to delete your data once the process is done. If you want to be sure, you can ask Incode to delete that data your­self. Incode tells TikTok that you met the age thresh­old with­out pro­vid­ing your ex­act date of birth, but then TikTok wants to know the ex­act date any­way, so it’ll ask for your date of birth even af­ter your age has been ver­i­fied.

TikTok it­self might not see your ac­tual ID de­pend­ing on its im­ple­men­ta­tion choices, but Incode will. Your ID con­tains sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion such as your full le­gal name and home ad­dress. Using this op­tion not only runs the (hopefully small, but never nonex­is­tent) risk of that data get­ting ac­ci­den­tally leaked through er­rors or hack­ing. If you don’t want TikTok or Incode to know your name, what you look like, and where you live—or if you don’t want to rely on both TikTok and Incode to keep to their dele­tion promises—then this op­tion may not be right for you.

We’ve cov­ered the ma­jor providers here, but age ver­i­fi­ca­tion is un­for­tu­nately be­ing re­quired of many other ser­vices that you might use as well. While the providers and processes may vary, the same gen­eral prin­ci­ples will ap­ply. If you’re try­ing to choose what in­for­ma­tion to pro­vide to con­tinue to use a ser­vice, con­sider the “follow the data” ques­tions men­tioned above, and try to find out how the com­pany will store and process the data you give it. The less sen­si­tive in­for­ma­tion, the fewer peo­ple have ac­cess to it, and the more quickly it will be deleted, the bet­ter. You may even come to rec­og­nize pop­u­lar names in the age ver­i­fi­ca­tion in­dus­try: Spo­tify and OnlyFans use Yoti (just like Meta and Tiktok), Quora and Discord use k-ID, and so on.

Unfortunately, it should be clear by now that none of the age ver­i­fi­ca­tion op­tions are per­fect in terms of pro­tect­ing in­for­ma­tion, pro­vid­ing ac­cess to every­one, and safely han­dling sen­si­tive data. That’s just one of the rea­sons that EFF is against age-gat­ing man­dates, and is work­ing to stop and over­turn them across the United States and around the world.

The gov­ern­men­t’s sig­nalled a po­ten­tial u-turn on pub rates — but noth­ing’s con­firmed yet. Pubs still need your sup­port. Find your lo­cal. See what they’re up against. Buy a pint.

Our world-class data sci­en­tists (one guy with a spread­sheet) have de­vel­oped the Fucked Pub Index™ — a ground­break­ing met­ric that com­bines ad­vanced geospa­tial analy­sis (Google Maps) with so­phis­ti­cated fis­cal im­pact mod­el­ling (basic maths) to iden­tify the pub near you that most ur­gently re­quires your pa­tron­age.

Based on VOA rate­able value data for … ver­i­fied pubs (SCAT 249). Some in­dus­try ex­perts es­ti­mate the ac­tual num­ber of af­fected pubs is even higher. The gov­ern­ment has sig­nalled sup­port is com­ing — we’ll up­date when de­tails are an­nounced.

there should be a thing that reads your pack­age.json and charges you $5/month per de­pen­dency - you don’t /have/ to! you could set the price to $1 per em­ployee! - and then holds the funds and sends it to the peo­ple who made the code you use to do busi­ness

how is not do­ing this more sus­tain­able— Greg Technology ❪⎷❫ (@greg.technology) January 13, 2026 at 9:13 PM

It is crazy, ab­solutely crazy to de­pend on open source to be free (as beer). It is not okay - it is not okay to con­sider that this la­bor fell from the sky and is a gift, and that the peo­ple/​per­son be­hind are just do­ing it for their own en­joy­ments.

It is im­pos­si­ble to imag­ine that what we’re do­ing to­day is the only way. Begging/busking for do­na­tions, hop­ing to get no­ticed. Hoping for a life­line.

Hence, a so­lu­tion. Or an idea, re­ally. Incredibly half-baked. Poke all the holes you want. It’s very un­wrought and muy un­ripe.

GitHub should charge every org $1 more per user per month and di­rect it into an Open Source fund, held in es­crow.

Those funds would then be dis­trib­uted by us­age - every men­tion in a pack­age.json or re­quire­ments.txt gets you a piece of the pie.

You know how the money you pay to Spotify is very very very ap­prox­i­mately (and not re­ally fairly) dis­trib­uted among artists that you lis­tened to? Yes, Spotify is a very flawed model and artists are not do­ing well. But it is a model??

That’s it. That’s the idea. Call it the “Open Source Fund” thing, make it opt-out. Give every org a mag­i­cal badge - or the abil­ity to set their pro­file’s back­ground css.

Or don’t! Let’s not do any­thing! People’s code and ef­forts - fu­el­ing in­cred­i­bly crit­i­cal bits of in­fra­struc­ture all around the world - should just be up for grabs. Haha! Suckers!

Alright, I don’t know how you fund Linux (does Linux ap­pear in a re­quire­ments file). Hmm. Maybe FROM com­mands from Dockerfiles are also read & ap­plied. Maybe we at least start some­where?

Anyway, you all smarter than me peo­ple can fig­ure it out. I just can­not ac­cept that what we have is “GOOD”. xx

Can I use Roam 100GB on the ocean?

I re­ceived an email about Roam 100GB. Do I have to ac­cept or up­grade?

How do I get high-speed Roam data again?

What can I do with low-speed data?

Will my ser­vice stop when I reach the 100GB data limit?

What hap­pens when I use all my Roam 100GB data?

I re­ceived an email about Roam 100GB. Do I have to ac­cept or up­grade?

What hap­pens when I use all my Roam 100GB data?

On January 13, 2026, Starlink dou­bled the amount of high-speed data on Roam 50GB to 100GB, at no ad­di­tional cost and in most mar­kets. Here is all you need to know about what’s changed and what has­n’t.

Once you’ve used 100GB of your high-speed Roam data, your ser­vice au­to­mat­i­cally con­tin­ues with un­lim­ited low-speed data for the re­main­der of your billing pe­riod. You’ll still be con­nected for ba­sic use like calls and texts, but ac­tiv­i­ties such as stream­ing, down­load­ing, and video calls may be lim­ited.

We’ll no­tify you when you reach 80% and 100% of your monthly high-speed Roam data. To re­store high-speed Roam ser­vice, you can up­grade to Roam Unlimited. Please note that this up­grade will re­main in ef­fect for fu­ture billing cy­cles. You can switch back to Roam 100GB as needed. If you want to switch back be­fore your next bil­ing cy­cle, you’ll need to man­u­ally change plans in your ac­count por­tal.

No. Your ser­vice will not stop. You’ll con­tinue to have in­ter­net ac­cess–with un­lim­ited data–at re­duced speeds un­til your next billing cy­cle be­gins.

Low-speed data sup­ports ba­sic con­nec­tiv­ity such as email, calls, and texts. Activities that rely on higher speeds—like stream­ing video, large down­loads, or video calls—will be lim­ited.

You can up­grade any­time to Roam Unlimited to re­store high-speed ser­vice. Please note that up­grad­ing to Roam Unlimited will re­main in ef­fect for fu­ture billing cy­cles.

With the ex­cep­tion of Ocean Mode, per-GB data pur­chases are no longer avail­able on Roam plans. Customers now au­to­mat­i­cally move to un­lim­ited low-speed data af­ter reach­ing their high-speed Roam 100GB limit, with the op­tion to up­grade to Roam Unlimited for con­tin­ued high-speed ac­cess.

No. You don’t need to take any ac­tion. Roam 100GB is a new plan that’s now widely avail­able.

If your ser­vice is cur­rently paused in Standby Mode or can­celled, you don’t need to up­grade un­less you want ac­tive ser­vice. Roam 100GB will be avail­able when­ever you’re ready to roam.

Yes, with the same pre­vi­ous con­di­tions as Roam 50GB:

* Connectivity is sup­ported in ter­ri­to­r­ial wa­ters and in­land wa­ter­ways, up to 12 nau­ti­cal miles from the coast, for up to 5 con­sec­u­tive days and up to 60 days per year.

* Coverage be­yond 12 nau­ti­cal miles or more than 60 days per year re­quires Ocean Mode, which is billed per GB and is only avail­able with Roam Unlimited.

Learn more about Ocean Mode

In the fol­low­ing mar­kets, Roam 50GB is still avail­able and Roam 100GB is not avail­able: