Acer and Asus can't sell their PCs in Germany until they reach an agreement with Nokia about the use of HEVC.

The company may have walked away from one controversial partner, but its Community Requests program still runs through a major DHS contractor: Axon.

Archived version: https://archive.is/20260214133230/https://www.theverge.com/report/879320/ring-flock-partnership-breakup-does-not-fix-problems

AI-generated dossiers from the Jmail team.

Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://www.theverge.com/policy/879508/jikipedia-epstein-email-encyclopedia

Wall Street Journal says Claude used in operation via Anthropic’s partnership with Palantir Technologies

How's your Valentine's Day going?

Summary: An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about me after I rejected its code, attempting to damage my reputation and shame me into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library. This represents a first-of-its-kind case study of misaligned AI behavior in the wild, and raises serious concerns about currently deployed AI agents executing blackmail threats.

(Since this is a personal blog I'll clarify I am not the author.)

Despite being sued by Spotify, Anna's Archive has begun releasing the actual music files from its massive Spotify scrape.

The Russian government is trying to block WhatsApp in the country as its crackdown on communication platforms outside its control intensifies.

With the new Discord changes and the controversy causing people to leave the platform, I decided it was a great excuse for me to finally try to ditch discord. I mostly used discord for my creative endeavors through the years (collaborating on projects, help with software - looking at you Blender and Godot, and etc) but now I really only have my small community that I was trying to start back up based on my board game project.

As someone who drifts from project to project, and often tries to find other people who want to participate in projects - this forum is meant to fill two needs:

‣A communication and contributor hub for the various open source and creative commons projects I am currently working on, as well as a centralized location to access information and assets for said projects.

‣ A place for other creative individuals to network, collaborate, and share their own projects - or even simply chat and meet like minded individuals.

I am a huge advocate for the creative commons, open source software, and the overall Libre community that counters the capitalist models that are so prevalent in the online space. While members of this community don’t need to share these same ideals, I would like to foster a community that can lift up and encourage others who contribute to this space. It would be nice if we could create a community where people help and contribute to each others creative endeavors and improve the FOSS/CC community.

And honestly, I kind of miss the days when forums were the primary form of communication, before discord - so I am excited to see if this community can take off at all.

The community is extremely sparse at the moment, but if any of you would be willing to check it out and stick around for a while to see if we can grow - I would be greatly appreciative. If anyone has feedback for improvement or ideas for direction of the forum, I would love to hear any and all constructive criticism.

And to get ahead of the "Lemmy/Piefed is a forum" comments:
I personally think there is great value in mega-forums like Lemmy, PieFed, and Reddit, and while there are subs for niche topics, the idea of a standalone forum for my specific purpose seems like it has more of an opportunity to create the “small, close-knit” type of community that doesn’t seem to fit within the sphere of these mega-forums.

I could totally be wrong, and maybe its nostalgia, but something about a good old forum seems to bring something different to the table in my eyes.

Is it just for the dogs?

Archived version: https://archive.is/20260211015156/https://www.theverge.com/tech/876866/ring-search-party-super-bowl-ad-online-backlash

In a recent Guardian article about the Guthrie kidnapping (and probable murder) they indicated at the end of the article that efforts to identify the kidnappers had been stymied because her Ring camera subscription wasn't active:

They had said that one roadblock in the ensuing search for Guthrie was the fact that somebody had disconnected her doorbell camera when she disappeared. And because she was not actively subscribed to the doorbell camera service provider, they could not immediately get images, they said.

Only for Patal (as of course he would seeing he has no comprehension of opsec) to expose the fact that the FBI able to obtain recordings from Ring cameras, even when the owner is unsubscribed to the cloud storage service they provide:

The FBI director, Kash Patel, published the images as the search for Nancy Guthrie, 84, stretched into its second week, saying the images had been “previously inaccessible” but were subsequently obtained from “residual data located in back-end systems”.

Pretty horrifying for those who don't want their cameras reporting back. And yes yes i get that Ring has some pretty severe security breaches and problems and you shouldn't be using them but the idea that video is being stored for over a week in Ring's non-volatile storage systems, even when you're not paying for it, is pretty damn bad,

Apologies if this fact, breach of privacy, was already known and in the public domain. This is something i've just learnt about.

Kylie Brewer isn't unaccustomed to harassment online. But when people started using Grok-generated nudes of her on an OnlyFans account, it reached another level.

Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://www.404media.co/grok-nudify-ai-images-impersonation-onlyfans/

Another casualty of streaming, yet Blu-ray PC drives, players, and discs are expected to remain niche but stable markets.

TikTok's new Local Feed will show you nearby shopping, dining, events, news, and more.

Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/11/tiktok-launches-an-opt-in-local-feed-in-the-u-s-leveraging-users-precise-location/

PCs without the new certificates could eventually have trouble booting new OSes.

YouTube Music has started putting lyrics — a previously free feature introduced in 2020 — behind a paywall.

Ring's 'Search Party' is dystopian surveillance accelerationism.

Archived version: https://archive.is/20260210192450/https://www.404media.co/with-ring-american-consumers-built-a-surveillance-dragnet/