Wait until they figure out regular people can just use photoshop to hand make photorealistic depictions and regular CAD software to make gun parts. Better license computer use, too.
Long ago, Canonical did some shady stuff with the now-deprecated apt-key "net-update" signing validation for updating of GnuPG keys over the network, an exclusive Ubuntu "feature" Debian didn't even adopt that in theory allowed the same thing.
First I thought CVE-2012-3587 was incompetence... but then seeing CVE-2012-0954 after it, I couldn't help think something more was at bay as something connected to a nation state. It does not surprise me in the least to see nation state attackers exploiting N++. Because I've also on very sensitive enterprise PAM systems in F500/research/academia, and about 10% of the time it felt like I'd see Notepad++ on internet-connected systems used for security tooling because vanilla notepad is indeed garbage. It does not surprise me at all this has been used as an attack vector.
If you cannot tolerate “Russian bots” or “Chinese bots,” then you do not truly stand for free speech. It really is that simple.
Free speech, by definition, exists to protect speech that someone finds offensive or objectionable. If everyone only said things that others agreed with, there would be no need for free speech protections at all. In a genuine marketplace of ideas, it is astonishing that anyone would claim the right to censor others, or to strip them of their humanity by dismissing them as mere robots or agents rather than people with sincere views.
Yet we are increasingly binding ourselves (and even “authorized” bots) in chains of verified identity, deliberately suppressing anonymity. Imposing a “zero-trust” architecture on society inevitably leads to totalitarianism.
The right to express ideas without personal attribution has always been a cornerstone of free speech and a free society. It is now being redefined and demonized as mere “bot activity.” While real bots certainly exist (as they have since the days of spam) many accounts labeled as bots are simply human beings who choose anonymity because they hold controversial opinions they do not wish to have traced back to them.
Companies like Cloudflare are among the leaders in this shift by building frameworks ostensibly to monetize AI bot traffic. The consequence, however, is the effective end of online anonymity. When anonymity is forbidden, freedom itself disappears.