Monthly Mosh Pit - Oct 26
Big Tech news is horrifying, but don't be angry about it every day. Instead focus your rage in the mosh pit once a month 🤘🏼 with our news roundup, then get back to your life!
Summary (click to open)
Hello fellow rebels! It was Black October 2026. So called because of a massive surge in published security vulnerabilities as well as being the month where consent became something that is given after the raid happened, like a dirty receipt slid under your door. Assuming you still have a door.
- The PHP programming language, which underpins approximately 70% of websites, had been allowing unauthenticated remote code execution for nearly 10 years. Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, Laravel . . if you use or develop in any of those you better have patched them. Or frankly just move everything off of PHP technology entirely.
- Ads now deliver zero click spyware via your ad blocker. Yes! More spyware. This is the way. Seriously though, check the legitimacy of your ad blocker.
- Infrastructure firm eMudhra issued 8 vulnerable certificates trusted by every browser. As a result anyone could create certificates and pretend to be legitimate websites and visitors would never know. This included banks. eMudhra's response? Complain that the coverage of their mistake was unfair and quit the certificate issuing business.
The Neglect Factory Formerly Known As Facebook were fined $25 billion for their handling of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. They paid. They yawned. Then they launched Muse which reads all your data across all their products and automatically opts you into providing data to help train their AI models. Whoop, whoop. Congratulations all! A full Meta boycott is the only way.
Google's ad revenue is in free fall. Their response? Build a new moat? Create a new product? Upsell existing clients? Nope. Trawl your personal emails and photos to glean additional data about you and then serve you more personalised advertising. But it's ok, they made recompense by felling 250,000 trees in Finland without permission to make way for an AI data centre.
Palantir received 44,000 NHS objections to the handling of patient data. Anthropic filed a redacted S-1 replete with losses - prompting a junk rating. Character.ai went bankrupt which is very in character for the maths behind AI products.
Some of it went the other way. EFF beat back DOGE's attempted federal employee data grab. Portuguese class action lawsuits went after addictive design. A 12 year old destroyed an AI chatbot in a poetry slam.
October is Octover. Update your apps, turn off all the things that listen, don't connect your fridges to the internet, subscribe to Carole Cadwalladr's Substack, watch the Musk documentary and delete something. After all, you're a rebel aren't you?
In the Big Tech cesspit
Here are all the Bit Tech stories from October 2026 that caught our eye. Let's open up this pit, people!
General
Alexander Hanff
👆🏼 watch the real time export of personal data, not consented to, as the top 100 websites are visited. This is what we've been warning about, but worse: the data is stolen before you have even clicked anything on the cookie banner 😬
https://www.404media.co/meta-ai-training-uk-eu/ Meta's new privacy policy allows them to take all your data, from any of their platforms, to train their paedo AI, Muse. If you're in the EU this article tells you how you can opt out. If not, or if you justifiably don't trust their opt-out, then stop using their products. You can do this easily by following our Big Tech Walkout free online courses.
Amanda Silberling
👆🏼 Musk might team up with Putin 🫣 to build satellites for internet. It fits the unspoken authoritarian narrative of the last few years, and they would have Trump in support.
It's bonkers that people willingly feed information into Meta products. The level of profiling detail in their Muse AI assistant is even creepier than social media standards, and even worse "Even people who don’t use Muse are subject to this mapping process by other people’s Muse agents." 🤢 And sure enough it turns out that Meta's Muse steals all your contacts info and conversations, and just for fun, exposes it to others 🤦♂️
Matt Burgess and Lily Hay Newman
👆🏼 We've been warning about the security and privacy nightmare that is the online ads system - and our worst fears are coming true. Zero click spyware delivered to phones via targeted ads? Dystopian nightmare. Here's Citizen Lab's exec summary of their report.
https://quad9.net/news/blog/au-revoir-france/ French courts have misunderstood the internet, and ruled against Quad9, an excellent Swiss private DNS provider (recommended by Mullvad). It's total nonsense and sadly is forcing Quad9 out of France.
https://noyb.eu/en/ai-eu-member-states-approve-digital-expropriation-europeans-ai-companies the GDPR has been kneecapped so that "companies should generally be permitted to do basically anything when using personal data "in the context of AI"" - in the approved rewrite to some of its clauses. EU citizens' privacy sold out for AI company profits 😔
Robert Booth
👆🏼 another 14 year old girl killed by social media algorithmic rabbit-hole hell, this time by TikTok. How big does the body count need to get before people boycott these products?
https://searchlightmagazine.com/2026/10/hate-pays-youtube-faces-scrutiny-over-millions-earned-from-hateful-content/ this is why we loathe the personalised ads business model: research process that Google's YouTube makes $millions from hate content. Profit from misery 🤢
https://www.heise.de/en/news/Google-now-allows-itself-to-use-Gmail-and-Photos-data-for-personalized-ads-11499576.html Still haven't ditched your Gmail account for a privacy respecting one? Here is proof that Google are deceptive, and despite reassurances in a recent privacy policy update, they do spy on your email and photos. Because duh!
Dharmesh Sahu
👆🏼 Alex Gibney's excellent new documentary, Musk, has been buried in cinemas - its run cut short by Tech bros closing ranks. It is highly rated though and we advise you to seek it out.
Steve Kopack
👆🏼 Google's shares drop in value as it's revealed that ad revenue has dropped due to their AI mode in search. Their response is to enshittify their AI mode with more ads 😂
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-who-won-the-2020-election-ai-mode-10-2026 why Big AI is unsuitable for search: bias. Google's AI mode in search cannot consistently tell you that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Guess who's agenda that encourages...
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-tells-capitals-to-halt-their-national-social-media-bans-for-a-year/ the EU has proposed a unified EU social media law called the Kids Act, and has forced all EU countries to pause their own social media bans (if they had already started preparing one).
Palantir
Robert Booth
👆🏼 more than 44,000 legal objections to Palantir's NHS platform have been filed.
https://arvidgrange.substack.com/p/investigation-eu-citizens-private just when you thought Chat Control couldn't get any worse (as a concept), we find out that the data that gets exfiltrated to the US goes off to Palantir 😳
Marcus Tsui
👆🏼 a close look at the ecosystem of surveillance and military-related startups that have sprung up from Palantir.
https://democracyforsale.substack.com/p/revealed-palantir-led-secret-review Palantir advise the MoD on procurement procedures, and magically get a massive contract. 😡Excellent exposure by Democracy For Sale, once again!
Death tech, smart spies and facial recognition
Tiffany Wertheimer
👆🏼 A slow down placed on Ukrainian drones is a reminder that Musk, an unstable white supremacist trillionaire con man, controls massive amounts of death tech via Starlink. And its happening via Trump.
https://privacyinternational.org/news-analysis/5635/revealed-skyrocketing-scale-uk-polices-secret-facial-recognition-searches Unfortunately facial recognition is gaining popularity with the UK police 😔. On top of this facial recognition continues its roll out in the UK supermarket Sainsbury's. And there's no way to opt out, despite it malfunctioning recently 😔
https://www.ibtimes.sg/some-meta-smart-glasses-secretly-recorded-conversations-owners-shocked-find-audio-transcripts-95166 surprise, surprise... Meta's pervert surveillance glasses secretly record when users were not aware. Why does a dog lick its balls?
https://www.404media.co/senators-wyden-markey-letter-to-meta-smart-glasses/ some resistance against Meta's pervert glasses
If you take part in The Big Tech Walkout then the issues in these newsletters will not affect you so badly. Start now, it's fun and easy, and can be done at your own pace:
Age verification & Digital ID
Skwawkbox
👆🏼 and there it is. Labour are truly captured and Burnham's initial insistence that he would drop digital ID was clearly a lie.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/10/29/over-16-id-social-media-ofcom/ and there goes the internet in the UK. We recommend you avoid those big tech platforms altogether anyway, but these ID rules amount to a surveillance power play on everybody still trapped in walled garden social media.
Big Tech vs democracy
AP and Reuters
👆🏼 Facebook interfering in elections again. This time in Brazil. Meta also approved fake AI generated ads in Brazil, targeting politics there.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwd094x57p32o after cozying up to big tech when he was Technology Secretary for the UK government, Wes Streeting now tells us we should be preppers. Do they not see the connection? Or they do, and don't care because they're getting their brown envelopes full of cash?
https://web.archive.org/web/20261002090407/https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/02/lobbyist-palantir-martha-dalton-andy-burnham Palantir employee is tight with UK prime minister Andy Burnham. Plus ca change...
14.10.2026
👆🏼 This investigation uncovers a collaboration between Trump, Musk (X) and US extreme Christian group ADF. They have put in a sustained effort (and a lot of $) to undermine EU Digital regulation. It followed a €120m fine the EU issued to X for breaches of the DSA.
In the AI bubble
👆🏼 The State of Texas is suing OpenAI for lying to the public about the safety of its product. Finally someone is standing up and calling bullshit on these Big AI firms.
https://newscord.org/article/anthropic-files-ipo-prospectus-with-16286-billion-revenue-and-8075-billion-net-l--Story_20261026_Anthropicfilesforpotc5876306 Anthropic have filed the first draft of their S-1, the document that sets out their finances ahead of an IPO. And the finances are ugly. On top of that a lot is redacted.
Reem Al-Dosari
👆🏼 and it gets worse for Anthropic: Blackstone are saying they will not rate them as "investment grade" following the listing. I.e. not worth investing in as there is a high chance they will default on their debt. Oops.
https://www.404media.co/someone-torturing-llms-in-a-robot-prison-has-triggered-the-dumbest-debate-in-ai-yet/ AI torture chamber? Wtf
https://www.404media.co/humans-reading-copilot-prompts-images/ Microsoft Co-pilot AI prompts are being monitored by humans to "review the quality of Copilot’s output". There's quite a bit of porn-style stuff. But even for 'normal' text and images - did you know someone might be looking at it? Let's not forget the report in 2024 showing that Meta exploits Global South workers to train its AI.
Jason Koebler
👆🏼 Character.ai is bankrupt. Is this the first domino to fall in the AI bubble demise?
https://www.404media.co/chatgpt-ads-target-your-phone-number-email/ ads in ChatGPT are creepy, insecure (data-wise) and invasive. Surprise, surprise...
Julie Bort
👆🏼 after billions in investment, and shoving Copilot down their customers' throats, Microsoft state that you can't trust frontier AI models. They have developed protections against "insider threat" agent hacks.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2594390-the-roots-of-ai-fear-in-the-west-are-cultural-not-technological/ is the attitude to AI in the West too theological? This article contrasts our view to that of people in China.
Miranda Bryant
👆🏼 google munching forests in Finland so they can build a massive data center.
https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/30/cracks-are-emerging-in-the-ai-spending-boom/ signs of investor nervousness over AI spending on data centers by the big tech firms. 🫧
The PHP scare
October was notable for the PHP scare, wherea vulnerability in that programming language (used by more than 70% of websites) was found using advanced AI. This article suggests that a large amount of the internet's critical architecture might be vulnerable in this way, now that AI can expose it. To us this speaks to how Big Tech has ascended on the hard work of open source volunteers to make themselves incredibly rich, but have not given anything back in terms of infrastructure security. This is typical of big tech's selfish greedy approach.
If you take part in The Big Tech Walkout then the issues in these newsletters will not affect you so badly. Start now, it's fun and easy, and can be done at your own pace:
It's not all bad!
NewsCord
👆🏼 Norway to put temporary ban on pervert AI glasses (such as Meta's raybans) 🥳
https://edri.org/our-work/d3-brings-class-actions-on-addictive-design-against-facebook-instagram-tiktok-and-youtube/ A Portuguese organisation has filed several lawsuits against Meta, TikTok and Google for addictive design! 🥳
Kali Hays
👆🏼 Meta fined $25bn for lying about its data privacy practices -related to the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Finally it is proved in court that they systematically lie to us 🥳
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/10/victory-court-rules-opms-disclosure-personal-records-doge-unlawful EFF scores a victory in court: it WAS illegal for DOGE to take all that federal employee data 🥳
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/oct/26/12-year-old-wins-australian-poetry-slam-chatgpt Children see the problem with Big AI clearly. And this 12 year old won a competition with a poem trashing ChatGPT. Nice work, young fella 🥳
👆🏼 (YouTube link) Special rapporteur to the UN, Francesca Albanese, addressed the UN in October to tell them that the blood of the Israeli genocide is on the media's hands too. She labels it "information control", and accuses big tech of having a hand in it. Good to hear sometime stating this on an important stage 🥳
https://www.404media.co/reverse-engineer-anything-is-the-new-wild-west-of-ai/ one of our major complaints about big corporation proprietary software is that they can remove r features on a whim, put them behind a new paywall, or suddenly introduce data-leaking ads. A recent new craze is to "reverse engineer" apps like smart TVs and remove ads, or restore features. Power and choice back in your hands 🥳
If you take part in The Big Tech Walkout then the issues in these newsletters will not affect you so badly. Start now, it's fun and easy, and can be done at your own pace:
Tech tip of the month
Filen is a replacement for Google Drive. It is fully E2EE (End to End Encrypted) and will store and preview any kind of file. The E2EE aspect is crucial: Google, Microsoft, Apple - they all scan your files and train their AI on them. With E2EE that is impossible. Filen are based in Germany, and the app serves as a great backup option too: it has several sync modes (one way, both ways etc). It also has a good Linux app, as well as for all platforms. It also contains a good notes section, for all your most important notes.
Book recommendation
The Tech Coup, by Marietje Schaake, is a well researched view of how Big Tech have moved into the sphere of governance and control. Schaake used to be in the European Parliament so she say Big Tech influence and lobbying first hand. The implication is clear: democracy is under threat from these massive tech corporations.
Blog recommendation
This post, from Carole Cadwalladr's Substack, shows how 3 stories: the Meta/Brazil, Meta/$25b fine, and Musk/Ukraine Starlink stories we list above are all linked. We strongly recommend you read it - her warnings have all been verified after 10 years of being hounded as a conspiracy theorist, so you'd be as well to take her seriously now.
Film recommendation
This video interview of Gil Durán by DW News is great (YouTube link). He talks about his book, The Nerd Reich, outlining the tech bros' plot to delete democracy.
Rebel Tech Alliance is a non-profit dedicated to getting as many people off big tech products as possible. Why? Because that reduces screen addiction and the surveillance economy, which in turn reduces the surveillance state. And that's just good news all round.
