Tuesday Newsday: Breaches, Coups, & Failed Censorship

Welcome back to another edition of Tuesday Newsday™. This week, we have a delectable smorgasbord of deep-fried bite-size news quippets; we're going to journey around the world, starting our trip in the US's very own Lone Star State, Texas.

Texas Bill HB1811 was struck down by a legal injunction less than 24 hours before it was due to go into enforcement due to a lawsuit filed by the Free Speech Coalition. The bill was a copy-paste of the bill passed in Louisiana at the beginning of 2023, mandating that website owners verify their user's age before granting them access to content deemed "harmful to minors."

Last week (before the injunction), I reached out to several different offices in the state of Texas, including the attorney general, the office of the governor, and the office of the author of the bill himself. I wanted to ask them a simple question: How does the state of Texas plan on enforcing this law?

Nobody was able to answer this question. Fortunately for the people of Texas, this injunction came just in time. The issue of how the state plans to enforce this blatantly unconstitutional law remains to be seen.

Golf equipment manufacturer Callaway suffered a data breach with roughly 1.1 million affected. The sensitive data that was leaked included:
- Full names
- Shipping addresses
- Email addresses
- Phone numbers
- Order histories
- Account passwords
- Answers to security questions

I'm sure all that data they collected was TOTALLY stored in a safe and secure manner

Gabon joins the list of countries undergoing a coup d'état at the moment. The West African nation has seen the same family in power since 1967. The coup started hours after the (now ousted) President, Ali Bongo Ondimba, declared himself victorious.
- As of Sep 4, General Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema (cousin of ousted President Bongo FYI) was unanimously voted to be the president of the transitional council by his soldiers. They have promised to return power to the people by organizing free, transparent, and credible elections.

A Saudi Man with an anonymous Twitter (fuck you x.com) account with less than ten followers has been sentenced to death after retweeting (x'ing??) a post critical of Mohammad bin Salman

Apple pulls a 180° turn and now supports the right to repair (yes, you read that right). It's now the Scientologists we have to worry about. You may be wondering, why the hell are the Scientologists against the right to repair? Surely they must already get enough money from Tom Cruises' tithing payments, right? Wrong. They are arguing that this new law will jeopardize the use of their E-Meter machines, used as part of their "auditing" ritual.

Sometimes the unlikeliest of allies team up to fuck over the rest of us

If you've kept reading until this point, congrats, you're basically done now (and I love you). The key takeaways from this week are: Your golf clubs don't need an email address attached, Texas can't even figure out how to properly censor their own people, & the final boss against the right to repair has entered the arena. I'd be willing to bet that you weren't expecting to read sentences like that today, but then again, this year seems to be constantly one-upping itself almost every week.

Make sure to come back next week for more tasty news bites; I'll be in the kitchen all week. While you surf online, don't forget to keep that Windscribe connection activated (and browse safely, of course!) If you don't have Windscribe already, it's never too late to join our tribe: sign up today!