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選挙では消費税減税をうたった高市早苗首相ですが、減税は一向に進みません。筆者によると、消費税率を０％にした場合、POSシステムに影響が出るらしいです。かといってこのままでいいわけないので、早めの準備を求む。 　食料品への […]

　59年にわたって続いた月刊誌『マスコミ市民』が２０２６年３月号で終わりを迎えた。最後の半年、わたしはにわか編集委員として最後を看取る役割の一端を任された。この老舗の雑誌がどんな足跡を刻んできたのかを確かめたくて、創刊号 […]

　眩いばかりの陽光と、心地よいそよ風を直に感じたくて、海に面する２階の仕事場の窓を開け放し、原稿に向かっていた。するとチュピチュピーッという声とともに、黒い三角形の影が矢のような速さで部屋の中に入り、ひと回りした後、また […]

リコー製Web Image Monitorを実装している複数のレーザープリンタおよび複合機（MFP）には、オープンリダイレクトの脆弱性が存在します。

2026年04月28日（現地時間）、米国CISAがCISA ICS Advisory / ICS Medical Advisoryを公表しました。

IDrive Cloud Backup Client for Windowsには権限昇格の脆弱性が存在します。

JPCERT/CCが提供するLogonTracerには、複数の脆弱性があります。この問題は、当該製品を修正済みのバージョンに更新することで解決します。詳細は、JPCERT/CCが提供する情報を参照してください。

法務省が「不法滞在者ゼロプラン」を発表してから来月で1年が経過する。（藤ヶ谷魁）

The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967 recently announced a study addressing the killings and attacks against Palestinian journalists and media workers, the destruction of media infrastructure in Gaza, and the production and dissemination of narratives that may enable, justify, or incite international crimes. 

As part of this consultation, EFF contributed a submission that identifies a significant deterioration of press freedom and free expression in the period since October 2023, including an increase in censorship and wave of killings of journalists; adding to an already pervasive censorship and surveillance regime for Palestinians. 

In particular, concerns raised in our submission relate to:

1. Government takedown requests 
2. Disinformation and content moderation
3. Attacks on internet infrastructure

The concerns about censorship in Palestine are ever increasing, and include multiple international forums. Ending the deliberate digital isolation of the Palestinian people is critical to protecting fundamental human rights.

Read the briefing in full here.

情報通信審議会　情報通信技術分科会　IPネットワーク設備委員会 電気通信事業におけるパブリッククラウドシステム利用に関する検討作業班（第3回）

高齢者・障害者向けの新たなICT機器等の研究開発に対する補助金 「デジタル・ディバイド解消のための技術等研究開発推進事業」の補助金交付決定

令和8年に申請を受け付けるBS放送に係る基幹放送局に関する免許方針を定める訓令案等に関する意見募集

2025年度　青少年のインターネット・リテラシー指標等に係る調査結果の公表

令和8年岩手県大槌町の林野火災による被害に係る普通交付税（6月定例交付分）の繰上げ交付

A U.S. citizen who teaches Persian poetry classes online is suddenly unable to receive payments or access funds when his account is flagged and frozen by Paypal and its subsidiary Venmo. A Muslim city councilwoman in New York City has a Venmo payment blocked because she uses the name of a Bangladeshi restaurant in the transaction. Online hubs for erotic storytelling repeatedly lose their payment accounts. Others active in drug legalization fights struggle to keep their bank accounts.

These may sound like one-off issues, but they are not. They occur with frightening regularity, as former EFF Activism Director and Chief Program Officer, Rainey Reitman, who left EFF in 2022, describes in her new book, Transaction Denied. The book sheds new light on a serious problem that often hides in the shadows, and pushes us to ask an increasingly important question: “Is it ever OK for financial intermediaries to act as the arbiters of online expression?"  

Both a storyteller and an advocate, Rainey exposes hidden systems of power that shape our choices, our speech, and, ultimately, our society. - Cindy Cohn

Reitman makes her case about the impact of financial institutions and payment intermediaries shutting down accounts and inhibiting transactions through compelling individual stories, some of which have not been shared before. The people impacted are diverse: authors, teachers, journalists, elected politicians, and more are suddenly unable to retrieve or receive funds, with little explanation, transparency, or recourse. Reitman shows the reasons are frequently speech-related, resulting often from arbitrary corporate policy, a broad (mis)interpretation of the law, or in response to pressure from anti-speech advocates. 

In the example of the Persian poetry teacher, the blocking is due to the highly risk averse interpretation of U.S. sanctions on Iran—sanctions aimed at deterring weapons development or terrorism instead snared a poetry professor and a New York city councilwoman. Reitman demonstrates how these sanctions, and others, have an outsized impact on Muslims.

But Transaction Denied is also a guide for those interested in fighting for free speech. The book covers over a decade of successful campaigns and shows that advocacy can win the day—and is sometimes necessary to counter pro-censorship campaigns. Reitman offers a behind-the-scenes view of the campaign to help restore the Stripe account of the Nifty Archive Alliance, a nonprofit which supports the Nifty Archive, a hub of erotic storytelling for the queer community since 1992. She covers EFF's successful coalition and campaign to restore the PayPal account of Smashwords, a hub for self-published fiction. And in what has become a critical moment for free speech and free press, she describes how several EFF staff members and two EFF board members became the seed for a new nonprofit, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, which continues to partner with EFF today in advancing the rights of journalists.

It’s a banner time for books by EFF staff members and friends. If you're concerned about how online privacy has changed over the last three decades, read EFF Executive Director Cindy Cohn's book, Privacy Defender, released in May. (All proceeds from the sale of hard copies of Privacy’s Defender are being donated to EFF, so your book order will help EFF continue fighting for the principles Cindy holds dear.) If you are worried about the individuals trapped in a system where massive financial companies can shut down their individual accounts, effectively locking up their access to money, based entirely on their speech, grab Transaction Denied, released earlier this month, at Beacon Press, Amazon, and Bookshop.org. (Half of the author proceeds go to Freedom of the Press Foundation.) 

More likely—you'll want both books on your shelf. Happy reading! 

　　ご存じ長年TBS『報道特集』キャスターを務めたテレビ記者・金平さんが国内各地で行った講演の記録だ。　聴衆は、労働組合や市民団体、高校生などと幅広いが、問題意識は一貫している。本書のサブタイトルにある通り「SNS」をめぐる問題と「公共」とされるものが溶け出してしまっている問題だ。そして、それらに対峙すべきメディア自体が抱える問題も。　SNSが席巻する様は今まで私たちが社会の基盤を形成していると信じてきたものが、見る影もなく崩れ去ろうとするかのようだ。そこに金平さんが極めて危..

The 29th session of the Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD) just took place in April 2026. It became a valuable opportunity to discuss the subsequent challenge of putting the…

If you want to overthrow Big Tech, you’ll need Section 230. The paradigm shift being built with the Open Social Web can put communities back in control of social media infrastructure, and finally end our dependency on enshitified corporate giants. But while these incumbents can overcome multimillion-dollar lawsuits, the small host revolution could be picked off one by one without the protections offered by 230.

The internet as we know it is built on Section 230, a law from the 90s that generally says internet users are legally responsible for their own speech — not the services hosting their speech. The purpose of 230 was to enable diverse forums for speech online, which defined the early internet. These scattered online communities have since been largely captured by a handful of multi-billion dollar companies that found profit in controlling your voice online. While critics are rightly concerned about this new corporate influence and surveillance, some look to diminishing Section 230 as the nuclear option to regain control. 

The thing is, that would be a huge gift to Big Tech, and detrimental to our best shot at actually undermining corporate and state control of speech online. 

Dethroning Big Tech

We’re fed up with legacy social media trapping us in walled gardens, where the world's biggest companies like Google and Meta call the shots. Our communities, and our voices, are being held hostage as billionaires’ platforms surveil, betray, and censor us. We’re not alone in this frustration, and fortunately, people are collaborating globally to build another way forward: the Open Social Web. 

This new infrastructure puts the public’s interest first by reclaiming the principles of interoperability and decentralization from the early internet. In short, it puts protocols over platforms and lets people own their connections with others. Whether you choose a Fediverse app like Mastodon or an ATmosphere app like Bluesky, your audience and community stay within reach. It’s a vision of social media akin to our lives offline: you decide who to be in touch with and how, and no central authority can threaten to snuff out those connections. It’s social media for humans, not advertisers and authoritarians.

Behind that vision is a beautiful mess of protocols bringing open social media to life. Each protocol is a unique language for applications, determining how and where messages are sent. While this means there is great variety to these projects, it also means everyone who spins up a server, develops an app, or otherwise hosts others’ speech has skin in the game when it comes to defending Section 230.

What exactly is Section 230?

Section 230 protects freedom of expression online by protecting US intermediaries that make the internet work. Passed in 1996 to preserve new bubbling communities online, 230 enshrined important protections for free expression and the ability to block or filter speech you don’t want on your site. One portion is credited as the “26 words that created the internet”:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” 

In other words, this bipartisan law recognizes that speech online relies on intermediaries — services that deliver messages between users — and holding them potentially liable for any message they deliver would only stifle that speech. Intuitively, when harmful speech occurs, the speaker should be the one held accountable. The effect is that most civil suits against users and services based on others' speech can quickly be dismissed, avoiding the most expensive parts of civil litigation. 

Section 230 was never a license to host anything online, however. It does not protect companies that create illegal or harmful content. Nor does Section 230 protect companies from intellectual property claims. 

What Section 230 has enabled is the freedom and flexibility for online communities to self-organize. Without the specter of one bad actor exposing the host(s) to serious legal threats, intermediaries can moderate how they see fit or even defer to volunteers within these communities.

Why the Open Social Web Needs Section 230

The superpower of decentralized systems like the Fediverse is the ability for thousands of small hosts to each shoulder some of the burdens of hosting. No single site can assert itself as a necessary intermediary for everyone; instead, all must collaborate to ensure messages reach the intended audience. The result is something superior to any one design or mandate. It is an ecosystem that is greater than the sum of its parts, resilient to disruptions, and enables free experimentation with different approaches to community governance.

The open social web’s kryptonite though, is the liability participants can face as intermediaries. A greater potential for liability comes with more interference from powerful interests in the form of legal threats, more monetary costs, and less space for nuance in moderation. And in practice, participants may simply stop hosting to avoid those risks. The end result is only the biggest and most resourced options can survive.

This isn’t just about the hosts in the Open Social Web, like Mastodon instances or Bluesky PDSes. In the U.S., Section 230’s protections extend to internet users when they distribute another person’s speech. For example, Section 230 protects a user who forwards an email with a defamatory statement. On the open social web, that means when you pass along a message to others through sharing, boosting, and quoting, you’re not liable for the other user’s speech. The alternative would be a web where one misclick could open you up to a defamation lawsuit.

Section 230 also applies to the infrastructure stack, too, like Internet service providers, content delivery networks, and domain or hosting providers. Protections even extend to the new experimental infrastructures of decentralized mesh networks.

Beyond the existential risks to the feasibility of indie decentralized projects in the United States, weakening 230 protections would also make services worse. Being able to customize your social media experience from highly-curated to totally laissez-faire in the open social web is only possible when the law allows space for private experiments in moderation approaches. The algorithmically driven firehose forced on users by antiquated social media giants is driven by the financial interests of advertisers, and would only be more tightly controlled in a post-230 world.

Defending 230

Laws aimed at changing 230 protections put decentralized projects like the open social web in a uniquely precarious position. That is why we urge lawmakers to take careful consideration of these impacts. It is also why the proponents and builders of a better web must be vigilant defenders of the legal tools that make their work possible. 

The open social web embodies what we are protecting with Section 230. It’s our best chance at building a truly democratic public interest internet, where communities are in control.