2023 CypherPunk New Years Wrap-up:

17 Huge, Suppressed, or Wicked Stories of the Year

(fast, light, and fun read with just 2-3 sentences on each)

17. Tutanota suddenly stopped supporting Tor Browser, leading to potential fingerprinting, as Canadian police allege it’s a honeypot in court.  Tutanota denies this claims.

16. Microsoft’s Email Software was hacked by the Chinese, becoming my favorite talking point to promote self-hosted open source email

15. Reddit failed to ban front-ends.  After a long blackout battle in which many third party apps broke, I still use farside link/teddit on a regular basis

14. Signal is beta testing usernames, to hide your phone number. Although right now though you still need a phone number to use it.

13. Tor adds Proof of Work to Onions to reduce DDoS.  And Tor expands their browser’s width, making it more useable for a daily driver as less websites break

12. Canada begins forcing podcasts to register with the government to stop "misinformation", which is really just criticism of the government

11. United Kingdom says they would arrest the Rumble creators if they don’t demonetize Russell Brand, despite him not being convicted of any crimes.  Separately, Rumble blocks Brazilian IPs instead of giving in to the Brazil government’s censorship requests

10. Thankfully the European Union’s “chat control” FAILED to pass, this WOULD have essentially banned end-to-end encryption. However they DID pass the “Digital Services” act which forces big tech to stop using targeted advertising and holds them accountable for content on the platform.  This has a chilling censorship effect, since if you post something on a platform, the platform is responsible

9. Apple bans Glenn Beck from their podcast store, and I’m only listing this story to highlight the need for people to switch to AntennaPod and RSS feeds.

8. The Jan 6 footage was revealed, to surprisingly show that security guards had given a peaceful welcoming guided tour to the supposed insurrection riot leader.

7. Right before publishing an interview with the Jan 6th Ex-Capitol Police Chief stating that a large part of the crowd was government informants, Tucker Carlson was abruptly canceled from Fox News.  He then moved over to Twitter and his audience grew even larger, representing a big change in the dynamics of power for media.

6. Amethyst, 0xchat, and others launch gift wrapped DMs on Nostr, giving metadata privacy to those that use it.  A new version of gift wrap DMs (v3) has been coded and will be coming in the future to all clients, including gossip, but it has to be externally audited first.

5. Nostr’s Gossip client plans to add Tor Onion Node support, as Gossip’s developer told Simplified Privacy in first-hand conversation.  This would be a game changer for censorship because it would eliminate nodes reliance on government DNS

4. The United Kingdom is among the countries with the most surveillance cameras per person.  Protestors took to the streets to smash these cameras to reject a climate bill that would use the cameras to get the license plates of car models that pollute more to fine the owners.

3. Argentina elects Libertarian-leaning Javier Milei to abolish the central bank and peg to the USD.  Supporters point out that anti-fiat sentiment is spreading, while critics point out that he would strengthen the US dollar empire.

2. Nigerians protest in the street to reject their CBDC.  The corrupt government tyranny known as eNaria, has failed in Nigeria

1. Colorado state court removes Donald Trump from the ballot, despite him not being convicted of a crime.  This will now go to the Supreme Court and will be a big decision, because once one state can remove him, they all can.  Will Democrats allow democracy?

Happy new years from Simplified Privacy!  Sources for this article can be found here:
https://simplifiedprivacy.com/cypherpunk2023/