No, the US is not accusing Europe of forced labor. EU foreign minister Kallas is lying, as usual. What the White House is saying, is that the EU is not doing enough to prevent the import (and re-export) of products involving forced labor. That's hypocritical, but also true. The EU Directive to fix that won't take effect until next year. Ironically this will impact American companies, presumably triggering more tariffs.

The White House

Actions by the United States in the Investigations under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 of the Acts, Policies, and Practices of 60 Economies Related to the Failure of Each Economy to Impose and Effectively Enforce a Prohibition on the Importation of Goods Produced with Forced Labor

MEMORANDUM FOR THE UNITED STATES TRADE REPRESENTATIVE Subject:       Actions by the United States in the Investigations under Section 301 of ...

I'll be impressed if a single miner produces a block that's guaranteed to be orphaned by normal nodes, except by accident* while attempting to virtue signal. * = e.g. running Knots initially to just signal support, forgetting to switch back to Core once signaling is mandatory. Not everyone understands that the consequence of mandatory signaling is that your node won't see the most proof-of-work tip. View quoted note →

MAGA MEV

Engadget

There

The API is supposed to deliver posts from

I would not run software by people who prefer writing snarky tweets to rationalize their bugs, instead of tests that either prevent the bug or document the intended behavior. (e.g. if downgrading is unsafe, bump a version somewhere so old nodes refuse to start) View quoted note →

"It's estimated that a few hundred Dutch crypto investors became a 'digital resident' of Palau [...] for $288 [...]. Several large crypto exchanges accept this ID, the FD found" - a Dutch financial newspaper prints on their Saturday frontpage. Interesting, tell me more! :-)

Where were you in 2014, Ben? :-) It's fascinating to watch a repeat of the bitcoin-miners-boil-the-ocean madness, and the same counter arguments, just at a 100x bigger scale, and involving nation state actors. I wonder, if China had embraced Bitcoin back in the day rather than ban it, if they'd run the same campaigns to discourage mining in the US? Would Alex de Vries have his own TV station? Anyway, honeybadger didn't care, and I doubt AI will either.

Knaken (colloquial Dutch for former ƒ2.50 coins) was preemptively declared bankrupt by the court, at the request of the public prosecutor. The reasoning is interesting. Because: 1. They didn't inform customers that €7 million is missing (for unknown reasons) 2. They locked users out of their accounts 3. They discouraged customers to take action This makes it difficult for customers to assess their legal options and to request bankruptcy themselves. https://www.rechtspraak.nl/organisatie-en-contact/organisatie/rechtbanken/rechtbank-rotterdam/nieuws/2026/07/knaken-cryptohandel-b.v.-failliet-verklaard

Guess who's back? https://bitcoinexplainedpodcast.com/@nado/episodes/aaron-and-sjors-discuss-whats-new-in-bitcoin-core-v31

My impression from reading more about the EU Digital Wallet project is that it originally had nothing to do with age verification. It was supposed to be a handy tool for a digital drivers license, for opening a bank account online abroad, making a digital signature, etc.. For such applications the privacy trade-offs were probably fine. Sure, the Dutch government can see that you just opened a German bank account. But they'd be notified of that anyway. Where it gets more dubious is the requirement that large social networks support it for login. Then the government can see which accounts you have. And lock you out of them! But realistically nobody would use that, it'd be some obscure option on the signup screen. But then it got hijacked by the age-verification gang, headed by Von der Leyen herself - so coming straight from the top. Because these apps will (initially) be the only way to do age verification, they go from a niche option to the default and effectively mandatory. And so what a started as a handy way to open a bank account after moving abroad, turns into a mass surveillance and censorship machine. None of this is excusable, and the people voting for it knew (or were willfully ignorant, no moral difference) this would happen. But it's useful to understand the dynamics.

One reason to not flee The Netherlands over the upcoming unrealized capital gains tax, is that I'm looking forward to sue the government once they claim such forks are gains that I should pay taxes over. Precisely because of the reasons here: claiming the forks is work, and dangerous work at that. So it should be taxed as income, if and only if I do such work. View quoted note →

I appreciate that the Dutch government at least open sources their dystopian age verification wallet project. It makes it possible to more accurately pin down where the privacy and censorship problems are. I would encourage others in the EU to look for what their country is up to. First concrete issue found: they use a deterministic hash of the national identification number (SSN-like) as a recovery (and blacklisting) mechanism.

GitHub

BSN based recovery mechanism weakens privacy · Issue #38 · MinBZK/nl-wallet

According to the server code1 and recovery_usecase.md, each user gets a unique and permanent recovery code, derived from their BSN: hex(HMAC-SHA256...

Ondertussen, aan het front tussen HRIF.eu en DNB:

Waag Mastodon

Human Rights in Finance (EU) (@hrifeu@waag.social)

Bijlagen: 1 afbeelding Beste mensen, eigenlijk is onze vakantie al een week bezig. Maar we worden door DNB op een ongelofelijke manier lastig geva...

Good to occasionally get your phone checked.

The Citizen Lab

Espionage Against the European Parliament: Member of Committee Investigating Spyware Hacked with Pegasus - The Citizen Lab

We found that former Member of the European Parliament Stelios Kouloglou was hacked with Pegasus spyware while serving on the PEGA committee, which...

A seventeen minute (pre-emptive) blackout on a Sunday morning, affecting 18k households, is somewhat concerning (and newsworthy here). But it's not "channel rug, time for UPS" long. RAID 1 for channel management data is never a bad idea though.

Netbeheerders schrikken van uitschakelen stroomnet Tilburg: 'Zeer ongebruikelijk'

Hoe het kon dat het stroomnet in Tilburg ineens overbelast dreigde te raken, is nog onduidelijk. Netbeheerder Enexis zegt dat het onderzoek loopt.