This week's Surveillance Report covers age verification laws closing in on the whole
internet with one major exception,
AI cameras on school buses which are looking for police
access,
a push to end nationwide license plate tracking,
plus our usual data breaches,
threats,
and open source updates.
Welcome everybody to the Techlore Surveillance Support, your essential weekly tech news hosted
by yours truly,
Henry from Techlore,
delivering deep analysis on the latest threats to security
privacy, and digital freedom,
and empowering you to reclaim control and defend your rights.
Only announcement I have is I really appreciate you all stepping up and saying that you like the
new open source section.
So that was really good feedback because it's nice to hear what you guys
don't like, but also what you do like. So I know what to keep and not change.
So we're going to
keep that format going.
Thank you all for sharing your feedback.
And let's get into the main story.
There's two ways of looking at the story.
There is the pessimistic way and the optimistic way.
And I'm personally looking at this in the optimistic way where people are being rewarded for making good decisions about which operating systems to choose to use,
right?
A little bit of context to back up here a little bit.
Both Colorado and California have been proposing operating system-based age verification laws.
Under those original laws that both states were proposing,
operating systems would be required to request a user's age or birth date during device setup and then expose an age bracket signal to apps and app stores.
This obviously led to a ton of backlash for obvious privacy concerns,
but even more downstream of that and even more curious questions revolved around, well, what about operating systems that are open source or decentralized?
There is no central authority.
How do you enforce this kind of thing?
It seems like this wasn't really thought out.
In Colorado,
there's a very major manufacturer of Linux computers called System76,
and their CEO was pretty much going back and forth with the senator in Colorado,
as that's the state they're based out of, for a long time to try to push for an open source exemption.
And finally, they actually got it in Colorado.
The extra good news now is that California is kind of following in those footsteps,
too.
They're saying we don't really want to target open source.
We don't want to target Linux.
And so this is going to probably exempt almost every mainstream Linux distribution,
including Debian, Fedora,
Ubuntu,
Arch, Mint,
etc.
Now, the really important thing to take away from this is that if you're completely against this age verification outright,
which I think is quite a legitimate take to have, this doesn't actually remove the Digital Age Assurance Act,
right?
This act still exists.
Nothing else really changed.
All this has done is it's narrowed the definition of who actually has to pretty much follow this law.
And so instead of it being any operating system provider,
now it's just targeting commercial platforms with proprietary app ecosystems.
Because now I believe the definition is essentially an operating system that comes with an app store from the same, I guess, vendor.
So in this case, Apple ships with an iPhone that comes with the iOS app store.
Google ships their devices that comes with the Google Play Store.
So all of these devices would be included.
Now where things get a little bit interesting,
and this is where I think the real controversy still is to be seen, is what about SteamOS?
I'm not a gamer,
but essentially SteamOS runs on Linux.
It's a Linux-based operating system,
but it actually ships out of the box with its own app store, which is Steam.
Now, this is still being developed.
This hasn't actually gone through anything yet.
This is just a new proposal of the bill.
And so this is still an important thing to fight for.
And I think really the takeaway and what I really want to drive home, I want to drive home the optimistic message today from the highlight story because we see a lot of doomerism when it comes to politics,
when it comes to getting involved in these issues.
But I think it's really important for us to see these as actual signals that we can really make an impact.
It's specifically cited that this was done because of backlash from the open source community,
from the EFF, from Linux distributions,
from all of you who use Linux distributions.
You guys all spoke up,
and it really did make a difference.
It started with Colorado.
California was like, okay, wait, yeah, that actually does make sense.
People are angry about this, and this is something we should modify.
So I don't think that this bill is exactly where I want it to be right now.
But the reality is that all of you people who said something made a real freaking difference.
And on top of that, it rewards all of you who are already using operating systems that respect you,
right?
So I think that's really what's awesome here is that my biggest,
well,
one of my biggest issues with this previously is that if you were using an open source operating system, your whole goal was to avoid all this digital exploitation,
to avoid these platforms that don't care about you, to avoid big tech companies,
which is really what I think these bills are trying to target.
Yet they're still penalizing you guys who already got away from it, which I think is grossly unfair.
And so I think that this avoids at least that problem of this bill.
And I hope that other countries that are proposing this age verification stuff follow suit,
because I think this is at minimum, this is like raising the floor a little bit.
At minimum,
safe technologies should not be impacted by this legislation as they are already safe technologies.
We don't need to add further friction points to keep people away from using those.
We should incentivize their usage and make those big tech platforms maybe a little bit harder to access,
but not via these systems that I think have other problems,
right?
I think age verification has a ton of other problems that maybe isn't even directly relevant to the story.
Again, I'm trying to cover the optimistic side of this one this week.
Keep pushing,
keep fighting.
I know not everybody here is in California or Colorado,
and this stuff's being proposed everywhere.
So this is a good thing to point to.
And if you are contacting your representatives,
which you should be doing because it makes a difference,
as we see in stories like this,
point to California,
point to Colorado,
have actual things that set precedent and be like, hey,
look what they did.
You see why they're doing this?
Yeah,
take note.
I want you to do that or else I won't vote you in next time there's an election.
So say those things,
get involved.
It makes a difference.
And now let's move on.
This next story is quite egregious.
So this is an archived version as it's technically a paywealth article,
but I'll do my best to still get you the core details so you guys know what's going on.
So there's a company called Bus Patrol.
And this is meant to keep children safe.
We know the whole thing.
And this is on school buses.
And maybe this had noble intentions from the get-go,
maybe.
But either way, these are AI-powered cameras in tens of thousands of school buses around the U.S.,
for many of you, is terrifying as a concept to put experimental technology and have questionable
privacy practices collecting not just adult data, but kids' data. And they don't have a choice.
They probably have to get to school.
We can get into all those problems.
But that's almost
completely superseded by what's going on here,
which is covered by 404.
Because now they're
turning all of those cameras into automatic license plate readers,
also called ALPRs,
capturing the location of every vehicle the buses drive past, giving that data to law enforcement,
Isn't that unbelievable?
So this is actually transforming school buses into roaming surveillance vehicles,
taking a technology that was originally designed to issue tickets to people illegally passing stop buses and using it for much wider and general law enforcement,
likely without a warrant.
That's mostly quoting from 404.
Now, there are leaked bus patrol documents.
These are leaked internal documents from the company themselves,
saying that internally they acknowledge how controversial the plan is to collect and share this data, pointing specifically to concerns about ICE,
immigration and customs enforcement.
But the company emphasizes the likely success of selling the angle of protecting children, which means internally they literally know that they can just spout this keep the children safe nonsense,
and then people won't care.
Now, they have not responded to requests for comment. I think something that is worth flagging, it's always important to see who is funding what and why.
The incentives align a certain way.
Pretty much according to the source of knowledge of the plans,
after GI Partners,
an investment firm, invested $300 million into Bus Patrol,
it has been pushing the company to find these alternative revenue streams.
So besides just how egregious the story is,
I think nobody should be okay with this.
Like even if you're okay with the AI technology being used on kids, which is untested,
which has questionable privacy practices,
the reality is we see this just now instantly become a surveillance tool that impacts everybody.
And that was never the original intention of this.
We see this pattern all the time with these tools where they might start with a good purpose,
but because there's no regulation around this stuff, because anybody can just go ahead and change its purpose day two,
we see this happen constantly with surveillance technology, and it's how we see the scope constantly increase.
Now,
another takeaway I have for this is overall just funding and thinking about incentives.
This is something that I'm always looking for when I'm picking the tools I use personally in my life, but I think it almost always boils down to what the overall incentives are for a company.
When something has its own subscription model, when there aren't really that many or any third-party investors,
when they are completely dedicated to keeping you a bit safer online,
that is typically where we get a sweet spot and where we see these companies that exist for over a decade and they are consistently committed to the user.
What we've seen in the past is services that magically come up out of nowhere.
They have VC funding,
and then they make a big splash out of nowhere, it seems.
And then people get really excited for it, and then they rug pull all their users because they changed something,
or because they changed the CEO,
or because they literally just disappear because it was never a sustainable business model.
And the investors didn't get what they wanted out of it,
or they completely shift direction because investors want to get their money back.
So I'm not completely anti-VC per se.
I just am quite skeptical of when something has VC funding because it's a lot harder,
I think, to stick to those core values.
And I think when it comes to technology, it's meant to keep children safe.
I don't know why needing to make money out of something and making it profitable should ever be more important than the overall mission of keeping children safer.
So those are my thoughts on that.
I would love to hear what you think.
It's quite a nasty story.
Okay, coming soon, we actually have some positive news.
Again,
on the politics angle,
we have the data breaches,
we have the threats,
and we have the open source updates.
But before then,
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Thank you all to our techlorians for making this possible.
And maybe you'll be one of them soon.
So thank you all for tuning in.
And now back to some good news.
Now I want to be quite direct here.
This is potentially good news,
right?
This hasn't passed yet, but it's got me very excited.
So this is a bipartisan,
right?
Which means left and right actually agree on something.
Crazy.
This is an amendment that would end police license plate tracking nationwide.
This is actually quite relevant to the last story we just covered.
And this has to do with a federal highway bill of all things,
which strips funds from cities and states unless they kill their ALPR programs,
which we just talked about as automatic license plate readers.
There's literally just a single sentence in this bill,
and it says a recipient of assistance under Title 23 United States Code
may not use automatic license plate readers for any purpose other than tolling.
So only when you go through a toll booth are they allowed.
Otherwise, they are not allowed.
Well,
I guess they won't get funding.
Title 23 funds about a quarter of all public road mileage in the U.S., including most state and county arteries,
and many city streets where ALPR cameras are becoming ubiquitous.
Conditioning that funding on a ban of the technology would, in practical effect, force any state, county, or municipality that takes federal highway money, which is essentially all of them, to either remove the cameras or restructure their use around only tolling.
If you want to read the article,
there's a lot of commentary from various people,
but
the actual people involved in the bill and the actual people like Flock did not respond
to Wired, so I have no notable quotes from the main parties who are involved in this
fight.
Now, I think this is quite exciting.
I've been continually shocked back here by the number of things proposed that are only
proposed by one party when I think it would actually be a win for both parties to get
behind it.
And so this is one of those rare wins.
Now, this is not passed.
This is an introduction of the amendment,
but I am hopeful.
And this is something that you can contact your representatives about.
Again, if you just contact your representatives and say,
hey, I support this amendment.
I want ALPRs banned.
I have problems with their privacy.
I have problems with the digital rights and the fact that they invade our digital rights.
But I think they should still be used for tolls and just basic necessities that actually make sense.
That's great.
I think really what this points to, and I think what this is really targeting, is why is a private company harvesting all this data, profiting all of this data in a public setting?
These are public government-funded roads,
and we are putting private technology on those roads,
which is essentially just funneling all that data to public law enforcement,
because law enforcement isn't legally allowed to get all of that data themselves.
It is such an obvious,
egregious,
I keep saying egregious a lot today,
misuse of power.
And I don't think people should be against this.
It's the difference between having due process,
having someone have to get a warrant,
versus just having dragnet surveillance that gets everybody caught in the mix when they have done nothing wrong.
So this is something that you should follow.
Get involved.
Tell your representatives you support it.
And I would love to see this pass.
Oh my gosh, this passed?
We can celebrate somehow.
I don't know.
How do you think we should celebrate if this passes?
We should do something fun.
I'm open to ideas and I would seriously consider doing it.
So if you have ideas on how we can celebrate when good things happen,
let me know.
Very open to it.
All right, everybody,
we now have the defense bulletin.
We have the three subsections here, which are the data breaches,
the threats,
and the open source updates.
We're going to start with the data breaches here, which is Trump Mobile has confirmed that it exposed customers'
personal data,
including phone numbers and home addresses.
There's actually not much more details about this yet.
This is linked to a third-party platform provider.
They didn't name the provider,
but this leaks just about all sensitive information for anybody who purchased these phones,
which in today's political climate is probably not the best thing to happen for somebody who bought a Trump-branded phone.
So this is quite unfortunate.
Data breaches are never good,
regardless of who it impacts.
And I will say that the one problem I have with this is this final sentence.
Walker,
who is a spokesperson for the Trump phone,
is evaluating whether it needs to notify customers of the exposure of their personal data.
Mr. Walker,
Mr.
Chris Walker,
Mr.
Spokesperson for the Trump-branded phone maker,
Chris Walker,
let me tell you something.
There are legal responsibilities, and there's what's the right thing to do.
And I think in this situation,
there is a right thing to do, which is you leaked all of your
customers'
phone numbers,
home addresses,
mailing addresses,
cell phone numbers,
and order identifiers,
email addresses to the open internet.
To me, this screams a lack of confidence from a company,
regardless of who it is. I would be saying this if it was the Biden mobile phone, if it was the
Kanye mobile phone, if it was the Cardi B mobile phone.
That is a ridiculous sentence that infuriates
me.
It's just, if there is a public data breach,
you might as well get ahead of it and tell your
audience and let them know what went wrong.
Up next, we had a 7-Eleven data breach, which exposed
the information of 185,000 people.
Now, this is actually an update.
If you follow the podcast,
we already started talking about this story, but now we're getting more details,
which is really
what's going on here. So they were hit by the Shiny Hunters extortion gang.
And now we actually
have more definitive information,
which is 183,000 people were impacted.
This is now on
Have I Been Pwned? And so if you're using a password manager that includes Have I Been Pwned
or you're subscribed to Have I Been Pwned directly via using your email so you can track this kind of
stuff, you should be notified by now if you were impacted by this.
And this is another company
that's being a little bit shady because the reason we know this is because Have I Been Pwned actually
analyzed the data leaked by the group and then pretty much collected that and sent it to Bleeping
Computer.
And now we know why that happened.
7-Eleven,
though, did not actually reply when
Bleeping Computer reached out to confirm the claims and share the number of affected individuals.
So this is another company that simply does not want to take this seriously.
And this is overall
a problem.
I don't know why these companies don't think data breaches deserve any kind of disclosure
or discussion with the people who are using their services.
It's a basic way to establish trust.
Now,
Shiny Hunters is staying busy because they also hit a U.S.
telecommunications giant charter communications,
which has also confirmed it suffered a data breach after the same extortion group threatened to leak stolen data unless a ransom is paid.
We're probably going to get updates about this as this develops.
This is pretty early on in the whole saga where they got hit by ransomware.
Now they're going to have to negotiate,
figure out what to do.
But apparently they stole 40 million records containing personal information of consumer and business customers.
So we'll keep you updated, stay subscribed,
and I'll be sure to follow up on this story.
This one's a little bit smaller, but Kash Patel, who I believe is the FBI director, yes, he pretty much had his clothing brand website,
which I didn't know existed,
but he did have one, and it was shut down after reports that it was hacked.
So apparently what happened is that it was hacked, and it had malware that was served on it and InfoStealer,
which,
as TechCrunch says,
is a type of malicious software designed to infect victims and steal their credentials and passwords.
And so if you were on this website purchasing anything,
definitely be aware of this.
Try to update your browser.
All right, so now we're going to go into the threats, which are things that can impact you,
software you're using,
and are just good things to be aware of because it could impact your safety online.
There's millions of AI agents that were hit by a critical vulnerability in an open source package.
Again, there's this open source package that tons of things are dependent on.
And now all those things are,
you know,
potentially vulnerable.
If you're curious what the package is, it's called Starlet, which is an open source framework that its developer says receives 325 million downloads per week.
This is the base of FastAPI and other widely used frameworks for building services in Python apps,
as well as many others.
And so if you are a bit more technical and you are using any of these things,
apparently, I think I read this could hit some MCPs and stuff like that.
But if you are a bit more technical, it's worth putting this on your radar.
This actually got a severity rating of a 7 out of 10.
This one's quite fascinating.
Google has published exploit code that impacts itself.
I wish I could explain this,
but yes,
Google came forward and published exploit code for an unfixed vulnerability in its Chromium browser code base that threatens millions of people using Chrome,
Microsoft Edge,
and literally all other Chromium-based browsers.
So that includes Brave,
Ivaldi,
etc.
This apparently exploits the Browser Fetch programming interface,
which is a standard that allows long videos and other large files to be downloaded in the background.
So an attacker now can use the exploit to create a connection for monitoring some aspect of a user's browser usage and as a proxy for viewing sites and launching denial of service attacks.
Depending on the browser, the connections either reopen or remain open even after it or the device running it has rebooted.
Now, this went unfixed for 42 months and counting because it still has not been fixed.
And Google reps did not respond to questions asking how and why they published the vulnerability.
Now, there is a statement they made to the public that said they're aware of the code publication,
which I hope they are.
They're the ones who published it, and they are working on a fix, which I hope they are.
They're the ones who published it.
And also,
Firefox and Safari were unaffected by this specifically because they don't support that browser fetching feature.
So I honestly cannot even begin to tell you what happened here.
I am hoping we get some answer because this should be an entertaining answer to get.
But in the meantime,
it is not so entertaining because if you use any Chromium-based browser,
this is a problem.
Now, in fairness to Google,
they did remove the post,
but it still remains available on
archive sites along with the exploit code.
So the damage has been done.
Now,
the sad thing is I haven't actually seen a direct mention from Ars Technica or other
sources about how you can be a bit more preventative about this issue.
I don't think that I should just tell people stop using Chromium-based browsers.
I don't think that it's been shown to be used in the wild that often and that the actual
severity of this is that extreme.
But either way, if you do have, if you're specifically concerned about this issue,
it might be safer to at least have a Firefox-based browser and or a Safari-based browser that you can lean on as a backup.
So that is my best advice I could share with you right now.
But stay subscribed because this could have some entertaining updates.
Okay,
so we have been covering this other character who is known as Nightmare Eclipse,
who is a disgruntled researcher,
hacker.
I don't know their formal titles,
but they've been going back and forth against Microsoft.
Pretty much Microsoft did something to make them very angry.
And so now they are pretty much finding every zero day they can.
Now,
one of the ones that they found was something called Red Sun and Undefend.
These were previously found and they were Microsoft Defender zero day exploits that were used in attacks.
And this is just an update that Microsoft has started rolling out security patches for those two vulnerabilities.
Get yourself updated and you should be fine against that attack.
There's another zero day exploited in the wild from Trend Micro for Apex One.
Given this is more enterprise focused, I'm just going to say if you're using Apex One,
this is something to look into and it's going to be in the show notes.
This next exploit has to do with Ghost CMS, which is actually what we use for our website.
It's an open source kind of newsletter blogging platform.
It's technically called a CMS.
And what this could do is it allowed attackers to read data from the website database,
including the admin API keys.
Now, the fix for this issue was actually released on February 19th.
So this has been fixed for a long time.
Really,
the update here is that lots of sites still have not updated to version 6.19.1 or later.
For context,
the latest release at the time of recording is 6.42.
So they are quite a bit ahead.
So this is really just a PSA that if you know anybody who's using Ghost and are not using an update version,
they should probably update.
And if any of you are curious,
we're actually using Ghost hosted from Ghost themselves.
And so we're always automatically running the latest version.
I think self-hosting that much user data is a little bit too much risk that I'm willing to take right now.
Okay, this is another vulnerability that impacts the Knowledge Deliver learning management system
to deploy the Godzilla web shell.
If you know anything about this and this impacts you, check it out in the show notes.
We also have a Linux kernel flaw that lets unprivileged users access root-only files
and execute arbitrary commands as root.
We've already talked a lot about these in the last several weeks.
Pretty much, though, the TLDR upstream patches and distribution updates are already available for this.
So just a takeaway.
If you want to learn more about it, please do.
But the takeaway for most of you out there, update your Linux distros and make sure that you have the latest patches.
This next one is quite novel,
and I don't think there's anything too actionable about this right now.
But pretty much,
Mullvad published a blog post.
Mullvad is the open source VPN provider.
Pretty much saying that they are aware of a fingerprinting issue.
So you're able to tell users apart that are connecting to the same Mullvad servers,
which impacts Mullvad users.
And they also have a separate blog that is linked in that first one that I'll also leave in the show notes,
which covers the new mitigation rollout and which servers have those new mitigations applied.
And as you can see, as of a couple days ago,
they already have a list growing of some servers that have mitigations applied.
I am not sure if this is a Mullvad-specific issue.
That wasn't something they really clearly said or disclosed.
So I wish I could say if this was just a broad VPN issue at the time of recording or if this is something that only impacted Mullvad.
I would have a hard time believing this only impacts Mullvad,
but I think it would be cool to see somebody who knows a bit more about this step forward and kind of share some light on how this impacts other VPN providers as well, since I know not everybody's using Mullvad.
All right, this one I'm not giving too much attention to right now because it's a bit silly,
I think, at the time of recording.
Pretty much the Texas Attorney General is suing Meta, you know, people who own Facebook,
WhatsApp,
all these, Instagram,
over claims that WhatsApp doesn't actually provide end-to-end encryption.
Now,
we covered a story a few months ago about how there's this overall rumor that WhatsApp is not end-to-end encrypted.
And for the record, I cannot stand Facebook.
I cannot stand Meta.
I don't like WhatsApp.
So these are not companies I enjoy.
With that said,
we don't have any evidence or reason to believe that it doesn't actually have end-to-end encryption.
and you might be going, Henry, but these are not privacy-friendly companies.
And I'd say, you're right.
They don't need to break end-to-end encryption to still be privacy invasive.
And that's where we get into metadata,
which is a very, very well-understood thing that WhatsApp does do.
WhatsApp collects who talks to who at what time,
from what location.
They now have ads in WhatsApp,
so it's definitely being targeted towards you and what you're doing,
and it ties it to your other Facebook and meta traffic.
This is well known.
They don't need to access the content of your messages
to still grossly invade in your life.
There are three cryptographers,
which I'll echo this overall sentiment,
which says we are not aware of any concrete evidence that WhatsApp has broken their promise of end-to-end encryption.
The contents of the complaint do not provide any evidence otherwise.
So I'm not here to ever intentionally defend Meta,
defend WhatsApp,
defend Facebook,
defend any big tech company.
But I like to be real and I like to actually point fingers at what's actually wrong with something and not just make something up because otherwise,
how can we actually act rationally and act as best as we can to a situation?
So I think that as of right now,
there's no reason for me to tell you that WhatsApp doesn't have end-to-end encryption.
I think that's silly until there's evidence to prove otherwise.
But I think what I will tell you is that it is still a Facebook product.
It still has ads built into it.
It still is built on the surveillance economy.
It still collects metadata of who you talk to.
It is still a privacy-invasive service.
And it does not have the same protections as something like Signal, Session, SimpleX, Briar, any actual privacy-first messenger.
That is what I have to say right now.
Stay subscribed.
we might get more updates on this one.
All right, everybody.
And now we get into the open source section,
which many of you enjoyed last week.
Thank you for sharing.
And now we're going to do it again.
So Tails 7.8 has been launched.
This is the open source operating system
that runs everything through Tor.
They have removed Thunderbird,
but they specifically say you can still install it.
So don't be angry if you use Thunderbird and Tails.
However,
10 of you do that.
They also fix some security vulnerabilities
and they kind of go through the upgrade process.
So really exciting stuff there.
We also have a designing Firefox for the future blog from Mozilla.
So it seems like they're planning some big redesigns across the Firefox browser.
And just looking at the screenshots,
I think it looks okay.
They're kind of going through the design language and what they're trying to get users to feel.
They say yours to shape.
You know, I'd say this is more just priming people for what to expect going forward for the redesign.
I think the first thing they're targeting is the settings.
the new settings page.
Design is very taste forward,
right?
Like some people are going to look this
and think it looks like absolute poop.
Some people are going to look this
and think it looks awesome.
Just my first glances at the screenshot,
I think this looks really clean
and I think it looks like a much more modern version
of the current Firefox.
So there's nothing too polarizing in this to me,
just looking at it,
other than the fact it looks like
a more modern version of Firefox.
So I'm excited for this.
I'm excited for a cleaner version of Firefox.
I like redesigns maybe more than other people
and tech do,
but that's just me. I know that no matter what you do, when you redesign something,
you're going to get all the people who, like the old one,
who speak up.
Tuda,
who is the end-to-end
encrypted open source email provider,
has some fun updates here.
So they have easier inbox rules,
so you can set different things that happen when certain emails come in to do certain things.
They also have a faster sync and also a faster search.
And if you're watching the video on Apple,
Spotify,
YouTube,
wherever.
There's actually a nice GIF that they show you here, which shows how
much faster it is loading before and now,
which is really exciting.
They also tease some things
coming soon as well,
like improvements to calendar reminders,
Tudor Drive, and Open Beta, which I have
tried.
So if you want to learn more about Tudor Drive, I did a whole video breaking that down and
what the first kind of look looks like and what my initial thoughts were kind of reviewing that.
So I'll leave that video as well in the show notes if you guys want to check that out.
This is source available technically,
but Vivaldi,
the browser,
has what they're calling their biggest design overhaul ever.
And so they're going through all the different themes that they have.
They have a Zen theme.
They have the typical Vivaldi theme.
And I think,
okay, so let me be real with you here.
My biggest issue with Vivaldi leading up until now for a long time has been that it is just too much for me.
Like I'm somebody who wants just the bare minimum in my software.
I don't want too much customization.
I just want enough customization.
And Vivaldi, for those of you who don't know,
is extremely powerful to the point
where I just got so overwhelmed using it.
That's not to say it's not a great browser
and that it's not for the right person,
but for me, it's overwhelming.
But I think one way they're addressing this is now here,
where when you're setting it up,
or at least you can do this after the onboarding as well,
you can choose a style.
And one of the styles is simple.
There's classic,
there's vertical, there's auto-high,
there's vertical right, and there's also bottom.
So they have these pre-built styles
that allow you to just quickly set something.
And so for someone like me,
that simple one actually looks more attractive.
So I think after I record,
I'm going to go ahead and download Vivaldi again.
Maybe try the simple mode,
see if it clicks better for me.
I'm always trying out new browsers.
Almost none of them stick for me personally,
but I want to give this a shot.
It looks like a pretty cool little redesign.
And I've actually interviewed their CEO,
John von Tetschner,
I believe is how you say it.
Maybe I got that wrong.
Maybe I got that right.
But either way,
I interviewed him on Techlore Talks,
which is our sister podcast.
It's also on YouTube as well, and it's on video.
So I'll also leave that link in the show notes
if you guys want to learn more from Vivaldi's CEO himself.
All right, now we just have a...
I'm going to go through these quickly,
but Linux had a few updates.
Linux Mint got some updates,
which included a snappier file explorer,
native screenshot tools,
and some network improvements.
There's other updates that you can find in the show notes.
Rhino Linux hit 2026.1,
which brings Lemuri Desktop.
I have not heard of that desktop environment before,
So that is a new one for me.
But they also have some other fixes as well.
MX Linux has released updated kernels
and a multi-kernel boot support.
That's version 25.2.
And so if you want to learn more about this MX Linux update,
that's also in the show notes.
And then Alma Linux hit version 9.8 and 10.2 stable,
which is now available for all major platforms.
It includes some pretty key fixes
based on just a quick skim of the article.
And that is another project
that I have interviewed their team members for on Techlore Talks.
And so if you want to check out Techlore Talks,
I will leave a link to that in the show notes as well.
If you're on Apple or Spotify,
that is also accessible to you guys as well
if you guys want to check out some interviews
with some of these open source projects.
And without further ado,
that concludes this week's Techlore surveillance report.
If you guys enjoyed this analysis
and it helped you reclaim control,
you can become a Techlorian
by visiting the link in the show notes.
I kind of already covered middle of the episode,
what that looks like and what you get for that.
But it's a huge way of supporting this podcast
and making it possible
so we can keep publishing this every single week.
You'll get access to our exclusive communities.
You'll get access to my private RSS feed throughout the week.
You can still help out a lot by leaving a rating,
sharing this episode with people in your life
to help spread digital freedom to them.
And I just want to thank you all for listening,
for being here,
and I'll see you in the next episode of Surveillance Report.
It's always a pleasure to be here.
And I just want to thank you all for listening
and taking this a bit more seriously in your life.
See you all next week.
See you soon.