Microsoft Threat Intelligence has discovered a macOS vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-31199, that could allow attackers to steal private data of files normally protected by Transparency, Consent, and Control (TCC), including the ability to extract …
“Without these safeguards, Mr. Barber eventually developed full-blown PTSD, which he is currently still being treated for,” the former mod's lawyer said.
By publishing its guidelines under Article 28 of the Digital Services Act, the European Commission has taken a major step towards social media bans that will undermine privacy, expression, and participation rights for young people that are already en…
Presentata la nuova Comunità Energetica Rinnovabile Solidale per energia pulita e locale, inclusione sociale e sostenibilità
GEECO è un progetto partito dal basso, che ha coinvolto diverse realtà del terzo settore e del mondo cooperativo. Le risorse gene
Presentata la nuova Comunità Energetica Rinnovabile Solidale per energia pulita e locale, inclusione sociale e sostenibilità
GEECO è un progetto partito dal basso, che ha coinvolto diverse realtà del terzo settore e del mondo cooperativo. Le risorse generate dalla condivisione dell’energia verranno reimpiegate in progetti a impatto sociale e ambientale
In May, a woman in Kansas sued Chaturbate, claiming that it was the site’s fault that her teenage son found her old laptop unlocked in a closet and used it to access porn without age verification in place.
Sounds like a parenting problem to me, but go ahead and blame porn. People like this should have to pay the legal fees of the defendants. Would anti-slapp (or whatever it’s called) apply here?
“Without these safeguards, Mr. Barber eventually developed full-blown PTSD, which he is currently still being treated for,” the former mod's lawyer said.
There's a difference between being naive and a dumbass. The website has been known for problems for the entire existence of it. This guy's a dumbass. If he didn't wanna see gore and CP he shouldn't of been a porn site mod...
I mean, by that same logic, we shouldn't offer mental health counseling to first responders because they knew what they were getting into when they signed up for it. You can say there's a difference between naiveté and stupidity, but it's entirely arbitrary.
Idk man, I feel like you're really missing the point here. If you're going to hire people to do a job that involves exposure to traumatic material, you need to provide resources for them to process and recover from it.
I had a friend who was a firefighter who 100% agreed with that. He said if you don't want to see nasty shit like limbs torn apart in car accidents then go flip burgers.
If you're going to hire people to do a job that involves exposure to traumatic material, you need to provide resources for them to process and recover from it.
I don't agree. The person in question knew what they were getting int, if not they'd have left at the first incident and noped out. They're just teying to make coin of this.
Well, I've been a paramedic for a long time, a paramedic instructor for half as long, and a firefighter longer than either of the other two. Your friend sounds like a pompous dipshit, and his attitude is the reason we keep killing ourselves.
The ones who think they're coping just fine are usually taking it out on their body or their family, in my experience. If you are exposed to shit like that at work, it always catches up with you eventually. Some people last years, some last decades, and some last one call. It's the nature of the work.
Which is why you should always provide those resources. It saves lives. I really don't see anything to suggest that the plaintiff is lying about having PTSD or is just trying to make money; I think that's just the social stigma of PTSD providing you with rationalizations for your own problematic beliefs.
On 8 October 2024 I received an email from Hetzner. This was a forwarded abuse report. As is standard practice in the web hosting business Hetzner forwarded this to me so I could take action on it. This was no ordinary abuse report.
Hetzner and reliable do not belong in the same sentence.
Cheap yes, reliable no.
I've been using them for my company a lot because of how cheap they are, but compared to other European competitors (like OVH) they are complete garbage. Their pricing is the only redeeming factor.
The Schwartz Group (parent company of Lidl) is currently building a German cloud platform, which sounds a lot more promising.
Canada, too. For the last two years, Canada has entrusted sensitive statistical information to Microsoft. We should be treating MS with the same skepticism we currently reserve for Huawei.
As an EU citizen, I don't find the idea of the US government having access to my data nearly as frightening as the idea of my own government getting into my accounts.
I thought gdpr forced companies to store data securely in the eu. Are they saying they'll transfer that data to the us to give Trump access, cause that's a gdpr violation and should result in fines and eventual removal from the eu market.
There are provisions. I don't remember the exact name of it, but basically, the US says "yah, these business are legit ok, you see?" and the EU is like "oh, ok, deal". This includes the big providers and a handful of others, obviously.
Listen, I'm extremely anti-trump but the guy has a point. Evil things can be evil regardless of who is in charge, but we only seem to care when the narrative shifts in certain directions. Why didn't we care about this back then?
I haven't used a Microsoft product in my personal life in twenty years. One of the primary reasons for that is that I don't trust them with my privacy. People (gestures broadly at the tech space) have been expressing similar sentiment for decades.
We are not a monolith, and some people have cared about these things while others have not.
For those who only just began caring, I find it entirely reasonable that when the top of the pyramid wasn't Trump, someone who there are a great many reasons to distrust, they weren't as worried about it.
If you didn't care about it until recently, only you can answer the question you have asked.
All of which is far more of an answer than the sheer whataboutism merited.
Oh I most certainly cared back then, just felt like nobody wanted to listen to me. Full Linux, grapheneos stack with no google play services, no Microsoft, nearly free of google (replacing gmail is going to be a monumental task, but it's my last one).
I think my point is kinda that the whataboutism poster I blocked might have needed a reminder that the idea that "no one cared until it was Trump" is just another pro-Trump attempt to rewrite history, and untrue on the face of it, because it has never been difficult in the age of MS dominance to find knowledgeable people expressing these concerns.
However, and going back to my original comment and my underlying frustration that I've entertained this whataboutism for this long, like all examples of whataboutism it's nothing but a waste of time where we all circlejerk about how of course we all cared about it even before Trump while simultaneously failing to call out the original statement of "no one cared until Trump" as the obvious bullshit that it is, on top of being whataboutism.
So now I get to walk away smugly congratulating myself for how thoroughly I've exposed the whataboutism and the bullshit, meanwhile all the time you and I spent thinking about and typing this could have been spent thinking up creative methods of civil disobedience, or otherwise doing something more valuable than impotently demonstrating what an inane point was made in the first place.
So next time, I'm just stopping at Goodbye, and the downvoters can fuck themselves.
Only if they aren't using customer provided encryption keys (is using blob/bucket storage) or an equivalent approach to encryption at rest, and make sure they're doing standard TLS for encryption in flight.
It's absolutely possible, and standard for any decent organization, to build their cloud architectures to fully account for the cloud provider potentially accessing your data without authorization. I've personally had such design conversations multiple times.
In the case of Germany: confidential computing tech ensures all data is encrypted in storage and in memory, shielded even against data center employees / hosting providers. I imagine that's become the standard for most countries.
I mean. They're a USA company. Of course they would be required to follow the laws of the country in which they HQ. Did anyone think anything different?
Well pretty sure local laws here say that certain data should stay within the countries borders (like data from accounting firms) so I hope they also encrypted everything to prevent this carrot from accessing it.
While true, in the past, MS has shown us they don't care about national laws. I'm not saying they don't e2ee, I'm saying they might not be following this particular national law due to their own national laws. I don't know.
Hmm. Policies might say so. Not every business follow policies, whether they are their own or imposed ones, though. Business going all "it's ok, our provider have the correct certifications for data handling" are definitely a thing.
It is possible to do things correctly. The question is, is it done often, and is it done on hardware you can trust. I'm somewhat confident if I run my services on bare metal, the provider would have a hard time getting my encryption keys, although it's not impossible even in this situation. How many people do so with VPS and managed instances, where snooping around the runtime and exfiltrating data unbeknownst to the user is trivial?
Also, beyond that, how many fall for the convenience of things like SSE, whether it's with customer provided keys or not? That should be a red flag, but people find it oh so convenient.
We're bound to see stuff bubble out where "we did all the right things" boils down to clicking a checkbox in some web UI and be done with it in the future.
Again for Germany, it's handled by a single provider, and they absolutely do utilize CoCo tech. (Source: I work at one of the involved companies, sorry, not going to be more specific)
Bruv, the United States government could get any information they wanted if it was stored on US Soil since the dawn of the US. The only thing stopping them was effort.
And I'm assuming anywhere else that microsoft operates (the entire world) would be the same too, no? I don't know why this rhetoric would be specific to the EU.
It's weird that this was something that Microsoft would have to admit, considering "The CLOUD Act" has made this mandatory for all US based companies anywhere they operate in the world. This has been a law since 2018.
So how are American companies any different then Chinese? Everyone always says Chinese companies have to listen to their government. Never got how American companies would be any different.
They're not different at all - the CLOUD Act (2018) and FISA courts already gave the US govt near-complete access to American tech companies' data regarldess of where it's physically stored, we just don't talk about it as much as we do with China.
(unofficial video)Lyrics:Your cellphone, your wallet, your time, your ideas.No bar-code, no party, no ID, no beers.Your bankcard, your license, your thoughts...
I have been saying this for more than a decade. Shit like this is why privacy laws and stuff regarding warrants and other stuff need to be expanded to private entities as much, if not more so, than government agencies. In the past the idea of a company having that much access to people's information was unthinkable, and in almost everyone's mind it was governments we needed to be worried about.
But that hasn't been true since the 90s at least with credit cards being used for most stuff and internet purchases being the norm for almost everything.
Governments in the past needed something to ask for permission to look into you... but companies never did, and since the only thing governments need to do is either buy it or ask nicely it makes many protections kinda moot. The fact that many countries want a strict surveillance state over everyone means even the classic protections we had for a brief while are disappearing, too.
If there ever is a 2nd enlightenment with protections for people it needs to make the stuff written in the 18th and 19th century look like children's toys in comparison.
If you say 'but what about terrorism and bad people?' Look around you. They still exist and still rarely get caught unless they fuck up badly. Most of the time it still due to informants and people talking to authorities. In the US the murder rate resolution is only 50% (and that is just arrested and charged, not convicted) and this is because there is a massive distrust of the police. In other countries people are more likely to assist the police and/or they take their jobs far more seriously in terms of forensics... and on top of that they usually have a far lower murder rate which allows more time and resources to be funneled into solving major crimes.
Better to let 100 guilty men go than 1 innocent person convicted is the usual motto, but they don't believe that in practice. In reality they are very much kill them all and let God sort out his own. And we can't keep allowing that shit to happen.
If the EU doesn't combine forces to get out of this tech-dependency, than what do we have the EU for? I am a big fan the EU, it's doing many things for us already, but I'm really hoping we can work our way out of this together, and I hope we choose the FOSS-route so that we significantly help the world forward
I think our problem is a mix of corruption and tech illiteracy in the European parliament. People are either too deep in the pockets of silicon valley, or they are lazy fucks who don't understand anything about computers and are unwilling to learn, so they keep believing "Windows is easier".
Then those EU firms should immediately make getting out of anything and everything Microsoft a top priority. As a US citizen, all our government and companies understand is personal profit and personal data hording. So make it hurt where they will feel it.
U have several fork of android some are great. The issue is I need google service for a lot of proprietary app like uber, banking app etc. Linux phone exist but without an appstore it s useless
That's kind of the point. The EU could theoretically demand some Linux support from banks. It wouldn't be a popular decision at first, but the consumer protection agency is capable of that, banks are capable of that, and it would help a lot. I don't think it would happen, it's cheaper for banks to lobby against it than do a bare minimum, lobbying is cheaper than anything, but still, neat idea.
I have another question: why do some eras seem to be so free for technology to evolve and open to new entrants to create their designs and mods and why do other eras feel like traps set by investors and enclosures for consumers? The 80s/90s felt great for technology, but today it feels like they all want to take anyone's capacity to do anything beyond being a dumb paying consumer away...like they're covering all possible outcomes to come out enslaving everyone. Why didn't they do that in the 80s/90s? Am I looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses?
It's SO funny how apparently for almost 20 years we (as in the west outside the USA) decided that using Chinese cloud platforms or networking hardware was dangerous and to be avoided, but private US companies? Nothing to see here!
Silver lining of the orange man is that maybe countries will wake up and smell the digital sovereignty that we sorely lack.
Im excited to announce EASY UPLOAD3R, a new drag-and-drop upload feature that provides a new way you can upload content! What Is It?
EASY UPLOAD3R is a powerful client-side tool that processes your media files directly in your browser using WebAssembly (WASM) technology: 100% Client-Side Processing: Your files never leave your computer during analysis - everything happens locally in your browser High-Performance: Leverages WebAssembly for near-native speed processing Privacy: No server uploads required for metadata extraction Streamlined Workflow: A complete drag-and-drop solution that handles the entire upload preparation process
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Simply drag your media file onto the EASY UPLOAD3R drop area, and it will automatically: Generate a properly formatted torrent file Extract comprehensive MediaInfo data Create multiple high-quality screenshots at random timestamps Upload screenshots to ImgBB with direct linking Format everything into a professional BBCode description Populate all relevant form fields
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EASY UPLOAD3R currently works best with: Remuxes WEB-DL Encodes Blu-ray disc support is actively being developed and will be available in a future update.
Technical Details?
EASY UPLOAD3R uses several WebAssembly modules: FFmpeg: For media processing, screenshot generation, and format detection MediaInfo: For extracting comprehensive technical metadata Cryptographic Libraries: For secure torrent hash generation and verification OpenCV: For intelligent scene detection when generating screenshots
We Want Your Feedback!
EASY UPLOAD3R is currently in Early Access, and we'd love to hear from you: Are you experiencing any bugs or issues? Which additional features would you like to see? How has it improved your uploading workflow? Are there specific file formats or media types you'd like better support for?
Please share your thoughts. Your feedback is needed as we continue to enhance this feature. The traditional uploading methods manually and via API are still available of course. EASY UPLOAD3R more so targets home users and not so much seedbox users that can use one of many upload scripts that interacts with UNiT3Ds {JSON} API.
I wanted to share an amazing tech forum that I recently discovered, specifically tailored for users in India: TechEnclave! This forum is packed with fantastic tech topics and features a marketplace that is an absolute banger!
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Se venite fermati da un rapinatore armato e gli consegnate tutto quello che avete, sicuramente tornerete a casa pensando che “poteva andare peggio”, e il pensiero di avere “evitato il peggio” vi sarà di sollievo e consolazione. Allo stesso tempo, non penserete certo di aver concluso con il rapinatore un grande accordo, tantomeno un accordo equo o giusto. È quello che è successo con l’accordo sui dazi tra Stati Uniti e Unione Europea, e questo finale dice molto sia di loro che di noi: anzi, di noi dice proprio la cosa più importante di tutte.
Come avremmo potuto evitare questa situazione quando l'Unione Europea è costellata da partiti euroscettici? E infatti mi sembra che tutti i governi in questione si ritengano più o meno soddisfatti del risultato ottenuto
I trust my friends and our friendship, some of them has anxiety that make it very stressful to reach out, luckily I don't so I don't mind keeping in touch for both our sake.
Not everything need to be an exchange and there's no need to constantly second guess our relationships.
Google gemini pro and google one 2TB storage for 1 year just for 25$. Much less than the original price. instant activation in to your own mail or if you want a new mail that is also okay. message me instantly.
This is our release v1.8.3. We did a lot of changes to our activity pub code and started to add testing of it. We did a lot of improvements on the UI and added more options for the user. We also im...
La formula del “paga o acconsenti” non è un’esclusiva dell’universo #Meta. Un approccio che sta attirando l’attenzione delle autorità europee. La Commissione UE multò Meta per 200 milioni di euro (ritenendo che il sistema violasse il #DMA ), con un ordine di modifica del modello #takeitorleaveit , con l’obbligo di garantire scelte realmente libere agli utenti.
Mastodon.Uno è la principale comunità mastodon italiana.
Con 77.000 iscritti è il più grande nodo Mastodon italiano: anima ambientalista a supporto della privacy e del mondo Open Source.
La formula del “paga o acconsenti” non è un’esclusiva dell’universo #Meta. Un approccio che sta attirando l’attenzione delle autorità europee. La Commissione UE multò Meta per 200 milioni di euro (ritenendo che il sistema violasse il #DMA ), con un ordine di modifica del modello #takeitorleaveit , con l’obbligo di garantire scelte realmente libere agli utenti.
L'idea sembrava semplice: attraversare la Spagna con le proprie truppe con il benestare di Franco, conquistare Gibilterra con un assalto lampo e poi consegnare il promontorio al dittatore spagnolo. L'Operazione Félix, come fu chiamata, sembrava favorire entrambi.
Tuttavia, Hitler si imbatté nell'inaspettato rifiuto del suo presunto alleato. Sebbene Franco simpatizzasse con l'Asse e avesse inviato truppe volontarie sul fronte russo, la Spagna era appena uscita da una devastante guerra civile e non era in condizioni di entrare in una guerra mondiale: il suo esercito era debole e il dittatore temeva le ritorsioni britanniche se avesse abbandonato la neutralità.
A metà del 1940, con la Francia appena sconfitta e il Regno Unito che resisteva da solo, Hitler vide un'occasione unica per dare il colpo di grazia ai suoi nemici: chiudere il Mediterraneo conquistando Gibilterra , l'enclave britannica a sud della pe…
Yeah, I also read it the opposite way as the author wrote it: 469 people were warned by Google after their government failed to warn them.
It's not Google's job to track and warn people about earthquakes, their job is to make sure their alert system accepts/distributes government safety warnings, which to my knowledge works just fine.
Yeah, I get "severe weather" notifications on my phone, even when the storm isn't super concerning (and certainly not in my area). I do make decisions based on that, and I get plenty of notice.
None of this is sourced from Google, it's purely our government's notification system.
There's a free app built into Android phones. It can detect seismic waves, which are different than say a truck driving by. These waves are automatically reported, and if enough of these reports are made Google sends out a warning. This is free and is still being developed, this headline sucks.
Google may have had a moral responsibility to share information if they possessed it, but ultimately, isn't it the government's duty to warn its citizens about such disasters? After all, they are the ones responsible for the safety of the people they govern.
Is Google solely responsible for earthquake notifications? For a system they describe as a safety net it’s pretty concerning it’s being relied on so much.
An error message appears saying "The following are not allowed: no zionist, no zionists" when users try to add the phrase to their bios, but any number of other phrases about political and religious preferences are allowed.
Does the EU already have legislation demanding the age verification? I’ve so far only heard about the UK‘s Online Safety Act being effective since last week, but not about anything in the EU (yet).
At least the EU is somewhat privacy friendly here (excluding the Google tie in) compared to whatever data sharing and privacy mess the UK has obligated people to do with sharing ID pictures or selfies.
Proving you are 18+ through zero knowledge proof (i.e. other party gets no more information than being 18+) where the proof is generated on your own device locally based on a government signed date of birth (government only issues an ID, doesn't see what you do exactly) is probably the least privacy intrusive way to do this, barring not checking anything at all.
Is there other platforms that are out there estimating our ages?
I know the whole age gate thing - being in the UK, believe me, I know. I've just never had a service go "we can't show you content. No, don't tell us your age, we'll work it out from the data we've collected from you".
I've got no idea, but it's not the estimation of age it's that the EU now requires all sites offering adult content to confirm age. the idea of an AI estimating age over having to provide physical ID seems safer than the way most are doing it or going to do it.
Dopo una lunga attesa, gli astronomi hanno finalmente visto la compagna stellare della famosa stella Betelgeuse. Questa stella compagna orbita attorno a Betelgeuse in un'orbita incredibilmente stretta, il che potrebbe spiegare uno dei misteri di lunga data di Betelgeuse. La stella, tuttavia, è condannata e il team dietro questa scoperta prevede che Betelgeuse la cannibalizzerà tra poche migliaia di anni.
Il fatto che Betelgeuse sia una delle stelle più luminose del cielo sulla Terra, visibile ad occhio nudo, ne ha fatto uno dei corpi celesti più noti. E da quando i primi astronomi hanno iniziato a ispezionare questo apparecchio nel cielo notturno, sono rimasti sconcertati dal fatto che la sua luminosità varia per periodi di sei anni.
Scoperto il primo caso di una stella che è sopravvissuta all'incontro ravvicinato con un buco nero supermassiccio ed è poi tornata a sfidarlo una seconda volta: la sua impresa è testimoniata da due brillamenti osservati nello stesso punto dello spazio profondo a distanza di quasi due anni, come riportato su The Astrophysical Journal Letters da un gruppo internazionale di astronomi guidato dall'Università di Tel Aviv.
Nel cuore di ogni grande galassia si nasconde un buco nero supermassiccio che ha una massa pari a milioni o miliardi di volte quella del Sole.
Da settembre a ottobre 2025 lo splendido Palazzo Milzetti – Museo Nazionale dell’Età Neoclassica in Romagna – ospita SPAZIALITÀ SONORE, rassegna che unisce musica, danza e performance dal vivo in un’esperienza immersiva e multisensoriale.
Il progetto, nato dalla collaborazione tra Compagnia IRIS, WAM! Festival e Conservatorio “Giuseppe Verdi” di Ravenna, con il sostegno della Direzione Generale Spettacolo del Ministero della Cultura, porta a Faenza un dialogo tra arti contemporanee e patrimonio storico.
Settembre è dedicato alla musica con “Suoni a Palazzo”, quattro concerti curati dal Conservatorio: 6 settembre Saxofono Ensemble, 13 clavicembali e flauto, 20 chitarre, 27 quartetto d’archi con flauto. Ogni concerto sarà arricchito da improvvisazioni di danza di Anna Clara Conti, in dialogo con gli ambienti del palazzo.
Ottobre è il mese della danza contemporanea, con spettacoli e incontri di Compagnia IRIS e WAM! Festival. Tra i titoli: 4 ottobre Vier Letzte Lieder (Compagnia Iris), 5 ottobre That’s all (Artemis Danza), 11 ottobre laboratorio “La danza della Fortuna”, 18 ottobre Unusual Suite (Club Alieno/Centro 21) e Double Bill (DNA), 19 ottobre chiusura con Harleking (Panzetti-Ticconi).
Il cartellone comprende anche i talk “Le radici e le ali” del critico Michele Pascarella, dedicati ai legami tra danza, arte e letteratura.
“Vogliamo abitare luoghi che diventino case delle arti, creando partecipazione e connessioni” sottolinea Valentina Caggio di Compagnia IRIS.
Gli eventi sono compresi nel biglietto d’ingresso al museo (5 euro, ridotto 2; gratuito la prima domenica del mese). Prenotazione consigliata: iristeatrodanza@gmail.com – tel. 349 2500963.
Programma completo su: palazzomilzetti.cultura.gov.it – wamfestival.com. Palazzo Milzetti, Via Tonducci 15, Faenza (RA). Tel. 0546 26493.
Per due mesi, da settembre a ottobre 2025, lo splendido Palazzo Milzetti – Museo Nazionale dell’Età Neoclassica in Romagna – si trasforma in un crocevia di musica, danza e performance dal vivo con SPAZIALITÀ SONORE, una rassegna che fonde arti...
A lot of introductions to using a shell — whether it’s Linux, one of the BSDs, the Mac (or even Windows using WSL!) — show examples that are a bit on the light side (looking at you, cowsay ?
) or dump cryptical command sequences on the unwary newbie that
A lot of introductions to using a shell — whether it’s Linux, one of the BSDs, the Mac (or even Windows using WSL!) — show examples that are a bit on the light side (looking at you, cowsay 😅) or dump cryptical command sequences on the unwary newbie that make an inscription in hieroglyphs on an Egyptian temple column look easy. Both approaches make sense. The first one tries not to scare people when they use the command line, while the second one shows how powerful it is compared to clicking around in a GUI. But they don’t really explain the advantages of a shell or the UNIX idea of “do one thing and do it well“.
An introduction should be easy to understand and follow, show a real-world use case, and ideally require more effort when trying to do the same task in a graphical environment. A few years back, I was planning a weekend workshop about using the command line for data analysis, and I came up with an idea for a example called “The Bard and The Shell” that I’d like to share. I hope it’s useful when someone asks why so many of us prefer the command line for certain tasks.
It shows some common commands (not too many to make it easy to follow), the advantages of the idea of pipelining, and iteratively solving a problem. We’re going to find out the 25 most-used words in Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing“. If you’re working with a GUI, you’ll quickly see that it’s not as simple as it seems. It’s not easy to log the steps you need to take to get the results you’re looking for.
First, we need the text of the Bard. You can find it online, but you can also download the text file containing “Much Ado About Nothing” from: arminhanisch.de/data/muchado.z…. Just unzip the file and put the muchado.txt file in a directory of your choice. Now let’s get this show on the road. I’m using bash for this example, but this should work with other shells too (we will keep the fact that there are different shells, each with its own dedicated following, for a later post 😉). Open a terminal window and change to the directory where you put the muchado.txt file (using the cd command).
The first step when analyzing the text to find the most frequent words is to convert it so that each word is on its own line. We’ll be using the tr command for this. tr stands for “translate“. Like the name says, it’s a command-line utility for translating or deleting characters. It supports a bunch of different transformations. You can change text to uppercase or lowercase, squeeze repeating characters, delete specific characters, and do basic find and replace. You can also use it with UNIX pipes to support more complex translations.
Let’s turn the Bard’s work into a long list of words, one per line. cat muchado.txt | tr '[:blank:]' '\n' This finds any instance of whitespace (the :blank: class) and replaces it with a newline character. The output will be a very long list of over 22,000 lines of text, so you might want to just read along for the time being or wait until your terminal window finishes displaying the words.
The next step is to take out all the punctuation, quotes, and other stuff. So, we just send the output of the last command to a new call to tr and then another. The backslash is great for making our command line more readable by continuing it to the next line. cat muchado.txt | tr '[:blank:]' '\n' \ | tr -d '[:punct:]' \ | tr -d "'" We don’t want to distinguish between a “You” and a “you” because they’re the same word, so we’re going to convert everything to lowercase, again using the mighty tr command. tr also gives us character classes for this, so we don’t have to specify every letter of the alphabet and its lowercase counterpart. cat muchado.txt | tr '[:blank:]' '\n' \ | tr -d '[:punct:]' \ | tr -d "'" \ | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' I don’t want to bore you with tr over and over, so for our next task of removing empty lines (no word, no need to check), we’ll switch to another command named grep. grep stands for Global Regular Expression Print. If you will continue using the shell, you’ll learn the meaning of a lot of these cryptic abbreviations. 😎 Anyway, how to get rid of empty lines with grep? Like so: cat muchado.txt | tr '[:blank:]' '\n' \ | tr -d '[:punct:]' \ | tr -d "'" \ | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' \ | grep -e '^$' -v Now, let’s sort all these words alphabetically. You’ve got to do this step first because the next step, which is to remove all the duplicates and count them, needs its input to be sorted. cat muchado.txt | tr '[:blank:]' '\n' \ | tr -d '[:punct:]' \ | tr -d "'" \ | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' \ | grep -e '^$' -v \ | sort Now that looks a lot more orderly. Here’s a fun fact: the last word is “zeal” and it only appears once in the whole text. Maybe you weren’t too zealous William? 😂 Alright, let’s go ahead and remove all the duplicates while we’re counting them. cat muchado.txt | tr '[:blank:]' '\n' \ | tr -d '[:punct:]' \ | tr -d "'" \ | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' \ | grep -e '^$' -v \ | sort \ | uniq -c There are less than 3,000 words in the output. Looks like you can read Shakespeare even if you don’t speak English perfectly. How do I know that? Just as an aside, I’m using the wc command (word count) to do all the counting. Want to know how many lines your output has? Just add wc with the -l option (for lines) to the command. Yes, wc can also count words and characters. cat muchado.txt | tr '[:blank:]' '\n' \ | tr -d '[:punct:]' \ | tr -d "'" \ | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' \ | grep -e '^$' -v \ | sort \ | uniq -c \ | wc -l This will not output the long list of words, but just the number 2978. OK, back to our task…
We want this list sorted by count in reverse order. There’s a command for this, and it’s called sort (what a surprise 😁). It also has a bunch of options, but we’ll only use two: n for numericical sorting and r for reverse. cat muchado.txt | tr '[:blank:]' '\n' \ | tr -d '[:punct:]' \ | tr -d "'" \ | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' \ | grep -e '^$' -v \ | sort \ | uniq -c \ | sort -nr We’re getting closer. We just need to make sure we’re outputting only the first 25 lines. The command to filter out only the start of a stream of lines is called head and it takes the number of lines as an option. And yes, you got it right: if you want to get the last part of a list of lines, you’d use the command tail. 😉 cat muchado.txt | tr '[:blank:]' '\n' \ | tr -d '[:punct:]' \ | tr -d "'" \ | tr '[:upper:]' '[:lower:]' \ | grep -e '^$' -v \ | sort \ | uniq -c \ | sort -nr \ | head -n 25 And there you have it—the most frequently used 25 words from “Much Ado About Nothing“: 694 i 628 and 581 the 491 you 485 a 428 to 360 of 311 in 302 is 291 that 281 my 256 it 250 not 223 her 220 for 219 me 212 don 200 he 199 with 199 will 198 benedick 196 claudio 182 your 182 be 173 but IMHO that’s a great way to get started with “data science on the command line” and see how flexible and useful the command line tools and the concept of pipelines can be to solve a specific task. Taking a look at Shakespeare through the lens of a one-liner…
Da un lato all’altro delle società distopiche illustrate da generazioni di narratori, ricorrono domande pregne di significati sostanziali: chi controlla i controllori? Chi potrà impedire a coloro che hanno ricevuto il mandato del comando, di ottenere…
The couple took Alex's faeces, blended it with saline, passed it through a sieve, put the slurry into an enema bottle and "then head down, bum up, squeeze it in"
Woman meets frog, frog leads woman to man, man and woman fall in love," she says.
"Man cures woman's incurable illness with his magic poo, thus breaking the curse.
I volunteered to donante my poop to my parter... Different outcome 🙁
The science seems to indicate this has the potential to fix a lot of illnesses, but I am beyond skeptical of anyone claiming that it can cure mental illness. Especially something as complex as bipolar disorder.
At least they're good at imagining all the ways in which you can hurt yourself way beforehand...and making sure you don't do them...or anything else :/
I wonder what it was that made Pornhub cooperate this time around. Iirc in texas and france they just "left" instead of implementing the age verification.
Age verification is as secure and private as promised, and it's left at that. I like to call this "the miracle", and we all know those don't happen.
Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but a government asks for "access to data to prevent crime" - things degenerate from there. This is the "systemic failure" scenario.
Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but new scams evolve around it to make it dangerous. This would be the "criminal element" scenario.
Age verification is not as secure and private as promised, and a leak occurs destroying lives and careers. This is the "system failure" scenario.
Age verification is as secure and private as promised, but a few companies start scraping and selling data, leading to widespread harms. This is the "unethical merchant" scenario, and the most likely outcome.
All in all, there is only one "ok" scenario, and a lot of horrific ones. The math says we're entirely boned \^_\^
In theory, it isn't hard to make it work, give everybody born on the same day a specific UUID and use that to authenticate with a database if it is true or false. Store the ID somewhere where the person has access to (ID/Passport/Digital passport etc) and it should be enough. Get IT persons and accountants to regularly audit it for security and if they keep logs/don't have UUID's per person etc.
But that's not how it seems to work for the UK at this time
I feel like people are downplaying how dangerous even the possibility of #2 is. A lot of nations are already targeting the LGBTQ community on a regular basis and this would massively assist to streamline persecution of "certain" citizens as well as the rapid spread of religious dogma. Both the U.S. and Australia are current testing grounds for these outcomes.
It is privacy invading, morality policing, de-anonymizing, state surveillance.
Nothing less.
PS. If you want to download a video from a site that doesn't have a download button, use the Inspect feature (right click on the page, not the video, and click inspect)
*On the Network tab - Sort by size. Reload page. Find the video. Open the video in new tab. It will be just the video. Right click and save as, or click the download button, or click the 3 dot menu button and select download.
On Firefox you can often bypass this entirely by shift + right click. And should see a save video as option. If not, the inspect feature works the same.
For hls/TS videos (m3u8 streams), if you reallllly want, you can copy the link for the stream and use VLC to convert the stream to a file.
This also often lets you download at higher resolution than they offer to download.
Yes, I porn.
*forgot Network tab
And thanks for all the suggestions. I'd rather not install browser plugins if I can do it without. CLI tools are cool though. The less I need to install the better.
Note: this isn't free but I use 1DM+. It has it's own browser that filters out the videos for download. It won't work with YouTube and a bunch of other websites because Google acts like a little bitch to the developer.
I'd imagine you'd need a browser that has developer tools, which is far less common on mobile. A simpler solution would be to use a separate app that just takes the page URL and downloads the video for you, such as this one: f-droid.org/en/packages/com.ju…
No worries! In a lot of sites you'll find the embeded video or picture in a link in the source code. However, I haven't figured tried to get this to work on YouTube in mobile browsers so that might not work
Its easier to just sail the torrential high seas and get that 4k h265 quality shit that sites keep for paying members only. Once you know the models name its easy to get their entire collection.
Since the earliest days of the internet, governments have been scheming to gain control over the dissemination of content - to have authority over what people can and cannot see.
Autocracies like Russia, China and North Korea simply established censorships regimes, but the best that western governments have generally been able to do is ban content that is illegal in and of itself, like child porn. Their goal, all along, has been to establish systems by which to censor content that is not in and of itself illegal.
If that's been their goal for decades then there would be something written down to that effect. Policy statements, press releases, meeting minutes.... Got anything?
Of course there is no public evidence. It's just a very probable speculation that governments want to control the internet.
Back in the days of newspapers/radio/tv, governments had control as they could easily go after news outlets.
However, with internet, they lost this power. They have been trying hard to regain the power of controlling information. The latest success was masking moderation as child protection.
There is a long history of proposed bills, and other legal maneuvers, to require ID for things like age verification, and other purposes, from around the world, dating back to the 90s. When COPPA was in the proposal state there was tons of discussion about ID requirements, it was ultimately struck down, but the conversation was being had.
I can remember this being discussed on CSPAN back when I was in high school, in the 90s.
That's just not true. People (including competent enough) are well willing to make the society worse for everyone if they are going to be gentry. That's been this way for all of human history, thinking otherwise is that new thing of the 90s, when American exceptionalism has been expanded into "post-Cold-War globalist" world exceptionalism, similarly to how Judaism expanded into Christianity.
But that's not going to stop governments from trying, and mostly succeeding, since beating their censorship will require both the will and the ability to break the law. Granted that their systems will certainly be flawed, it will still require at least some minimal technical ability to beat them, which will put it out of reach of many.
And it will also provide the governments with a handy fallback charge to bring against pretty much anyone they deem troublesome enough, since they'll almost certainly be among those who are breaking the law by beating the system.
All the big adult sites will probably just die or at least shrivel in popularity. Most Europeans simply will not use whatever "tell Brussels or London where or what what you are watching" option is. In the place of the big sites there will be a billion shady and likely virus-lottery proxy sites whose only selling point is that they do not do age checking or require registration. Those then get occasionally smacked down by Brussels, just to be replaced with 10 more clones the by the next week. On the side piracy and vpns will thrive. Kids will not be protected nor will people's privacy, quality will be worse.
I would also bet that when the landscape decentralizes there will be a lot more cp, revenge and peep-videos and other illegal shit in the mix that will get through through the cracks since massive established sites had to actually fear shutdown and losing all revenue unless they had robust gatekeeping mechanisms. If Brussels wants your 2 month life-expectancy site dead anyway, because of it's only selling point of having to show id, then why really bother with the quality control of the material. Especially if site holder has no personal qualms about that stuff.
I would also bet that when the landscape decentralizes there will be a lot more cp, revenge and peep-videos and other illegal shit in the mix that will get through through the cracks since massive established sites had to actually fear shutdown and losing all revenue unless they had robust gatekeeping mechanisms.
There are technical solutions for p2p sharing with moderation. Not to prevent bad people from sharing their stuff, but to keep spaces clean for those who don't want to see it.
This is also true for communication, which is why Fediverse is not good enough. Hosted servers should be an optional part of the infrastructure, and the data (users, communities, posts ...) shouldn't be connected to them. Like with torrents you can host a torrent tracker, and you can host a BTDHT node, and you can automatically download and seed rare torrents, and none of this is connected to whatever people hosting major trackers decide.
NOSTR gets that part right, but the user experience its authors imagine is not for me.
EDIT: Forgot my main point - my main point is that you might find yourself in a whitelisted Internet where such decentralized solutions won't be available. They'll be detected, they'll be illegal and punishable by fines.
Yeah, even though I hate the whole thing, I can't deny it brings me joy to hear about "VPN use surge", centralized sites dying in favor of shady clones, etc. I'd take total wild west any day over somewhat-free-but-very-polite-mild-and-centralized status quo of yesterday's internet. The only problem is that there's no guarantee people actually go that wild. They already did with VPNs, but regarding big site alternatives - I'm not so sure.
I would also bet that when the landscape decentralizes there will be a lot more cp, revenge and peep-videos and other illegal shit in the mix
Oh, count on it. I remember the early days of the internet and file sharing. There was no validation or accountability and you really could stumble on some of the most terrible stuff without meaning to.
Ok, I have already been asked to enter a credit card to verify my age on yt a few times before. It was pretty annoying, really, given how much google already knows about me.
Somehow I'm pretty sure Google already had that information. You've never used Google Wallet to pay on the go? No? How about your Android keyboard to fill in some banking form?
Who supports it? Fascists. It’s about controlling access to information and robbing the populace of privacy at the same time. An oppressive, authoritarian police state needs tools to maintain control. These are the tools.
It's not "support", it's already been done in practice.
What they are finishing right now is the convenient way. To surveil 97% instead of 94%. And to make it official to reduce expenses.
And sorry, but "moderate leftists" are those who made it happen, first dreaming how on big centrally moderated platforms the "bad" speech and people will be censored (how irritating it was that in the free Web those people could write whatever they wanted) and theirs won't be, and propaganda won't flourish, and after that dreaming how they can demand loudly enough that the platforms would work for them and not for themselves.
I perfectly remember how people loving Steinbeck and expressing anarchist views would look at me like at an enemy for saying that Facebook, Twitter etc are bad and a trap, and such hierarchical systems can't be good. That arrogant obnoxious "see, in the real society we collectively press for our rights and the rules are made and obeyed", yes, I've met fools who told me things like that. Where's your society now, bitch.
It's the parents that wont face the fact that it's them paying for their kids internet access.
Parents intentionally and deliberately pay for their kids to access this shit. But none of them want to accept that when it can all be someone elses fault.
Age verification has it's place online, but not for porn. That is just gonna push peopel to worse sites.
For gambling and stock market sites and the like I can understand it, but I would prefer if we wouldn't need to send our ID to those sites. Heck if Valve would implement it I could actually gamble on steam again cause currently I cannot open a Tf2 crate ...
That’s not age verification, that’s KYC (know your customer) which includes age verification. I agree, KYC has its place on the net, but this is definitely not it.
We're at or reaching a tipping point where I'm not sure that's true anymore.
Most people with kids now are (roughly) in their 20s-40s. At the older end of that range, you have some gen-xers who might have missed the boat on computer literacy, but by and large we're talking about millennials and older gen-z at this point. Kids who grew up with the internet, probably very clearly remember their family getting their first computer if they didn't already have one when they were born, had computer classes in school, etc.
And we're running into an issue where younger Gen z and alpha in many cases are less computer literate in many ways. A lot of them aren't really learning to use a computer so much as they are smartphones and tablets, and I'm not knocking how useful those devices can be, I do damn-near everything I need to do on my phone, but they are limited compared to a PC and don't really offer as much of an opportunity to learn how computers work.
There's a ton of exceptions to that of course, some of my millennial friends are still clueless about how to do basic things on a computer, and some children today are of course learning how to do anything and everything on a computer or even on a phone.
But overall, I don't think there's as much disparity in technological literacy between the children and parents of today as there was in previous generations, and in some ways that trend may have even reversed.
There are SO MANY parents that are not willing to teach and monitor their kids online safety. I would even say most parents don't take that responsibility themselves.
Totally in agreement. I think a bigger part of the issue is most people are completely tech illiterate. People can’t tell a computer from a monitor anymore and then we expect them to outsmart a kid with nothing better to do than stare at a screen for hours on end who will no doubt figure out ways around things. There has to be some feeling on the parents part of defeat. If only the politicians knew what the fuck they were doing we might get actual regulations for engineers to implement proper controls. The percentage of parents attempting to monitor their children appropriately while also having enough tech knowledge has to be low.
It's more like who supports this in theory vs. who supports this how it's written and implemented.
Realistically, no one should love how easy it is for anyone of any age to go to any search engine and search for (Edit) "sex" and just get a million images of genitals and porn. I'm not a parent, but I know my parents when I was a teenager would have loved something like this. Kids are sneaky and smart, and this is a blanket thing parents think will once again put porn behind a barrier.
In a perfect world, a system could very easily exist that would 1) allow for a super-secure government owned digital ID system that isn't a surveillance nightmare, 2) that system use a hash to verify over 18 age anonymously in real time. That's how it's supposed to work with digital IDs - only the data you need to verify is displayed to a vendor. Over 18 is a binary yes/no - a full DOB or name isn't even needed.
The government ID wallet or site would use a no-log system to generate a hash value for you when you ask for one. You ask your ID app or site for an age verification hash. You get one that's valid for about 2 minutes. Copy, paste as needed. The site uses the hash to only know "is this person over 18 or not?" and nothing else. The ID system shouldn't keep the logs of which site asked back to confirm "is this hash valid?" This is exactly as secure as going to a liquor store with your passport or ID card and having tape over the name, address, and doc number. It's even better because your face is not displayed, and your actual DOB should not be displayed either.
However, in our present shitty reality, companies who are trying to get contracts for these systems can't help but feed their existing, and lucrative, addiction to selling our data and using poor security to store that data. So they want your Google/Apple/Samsung wallets connected to a government system that is actually ran by a 3rd party vendor with questionable security practices, and to provide far more information because no one has set an international standard for neither digital ID checks, nor IDs in general, enough to make it anything less than the surveillance state nightmare that is holding a government ID with all your info, while you move your face around and give them a 3D face scan that the platform doesn't keep, but the verification company does.
Realistically, no one should love how easy it is for anyone of any age to go to any search engine and search for “boobs” and just get a million images of boobs.
First. let's not pretend the idea of a kid seeing "boobs" is in any way shape or form actually harmful. Pushing that taboo is why there is any issue in the first place.
Second: This is always a slippery slope. Even if we gave the benefit of the doubt that these things are done in with honest intentions, someone will abuse the system eventually. At least in the US the fascists have already laid out intention to classify LGBTQ people as "porn" in an effort to both silence us online and ban us in public. And what of the countless queer kids in an abusive home?
And even without someone explicitly exploiting it, there had already been instances where kids who were being actively sexually abused by the adults in their life were blocked from resources that could get them help because of content blocking like this.
Thirdly: People can take responsibility for their crotch spawn and be a fucking parent.
Saying "boobs" was trying to be subtle about it - any child of any age is at all times, unless their parents filter their device, 3 clicks and 3 letters (autocomplete could even oopsie that for them) away from seeing very explicit images. It's absurd to think that it's "puritanical" to have nothing in between 10 years olds (or younger) being able to so easily access pull on porn. This isn't about what you personally want or care about, this is also about the fact that every country in the world has this same issue. Taboos are cultural, but you don't set the culture of Honduras, or Gabon, or France, or India. So each cultural context needs to be respected, not only your personal cultural context.
It shouldn't need to be a slippery slope is the thing. In technical terms, this isn't even a heavy lift. To my original point, it's the in theory part of this I support because, in a perfect world, giving everyone the tools to effectively accomplish this isn't hard. But it's a lot of work that is actually fairly technical or fairly terrible from a privacy standpoint to place adult content filters on a child's devices. Not every parent has the skills to do this, and so when a blanket option is available that is sold as a solution like this, of course they'll go for it. But, as I said before, in our current shitty reality, we only have the worst of all worlds - a system that exists to exploit trying to limit a system that exists to exploit, all baked into a system that exists to exploit, and kids still able to see porn online easily.
I'm very much a staunch privacy advocate, and I won't fucking touch a digital ID system because it's nothing but a surveillance state level at this point to persecute specifically trans people and brown people - for now. I see the writing on the wall with this, and it's terrifying. And no one is going to force this into the working system category, so it's just going to be the shitpile system designed to victimize added to the systems of exploitation.
Hard disagree with your initial premise that seeing boobs in google images is somehow a bad thing. What is it supposed to achieve? Hide the existence of breasts from kids until they turn 18? Thats absurdly repressive.
Fine, changed the search term to "sex." Fewer letters in fact. I was trying to just provide a subtle example, I didn't expect people to need to be hit over the head with it.
So you love the idea of young children seeing porn? Because studies and surveys routinely find that kids as young as 7 are seeing porn online, and many under age 12. Really? You think that's perfectly fine for a 12, 10, or 7 year old with granma's iPad doing an image search and getting even accidental porn?
And hey, I spent my teen years scouring the earth for playboys and staying up until 3 am to catch boobs in R rated movies. I get it. I'm not saying that any system or method will prevent anyome from seeing all adult content their whole life short of being Amish. But as a tender 13 year old, did I need to see all the porn in the universe? Probably not. Adding friction (pun not intended) to general access, without violating privacy, is all I'm saying might be a good idea.
Nah 7 year olds should not be using any internet without parental controls either way so the protection is absolutely moot here. Also your "sex" example returns absolutely zero sexual content on google, Bing or duckduckgo images while boob does.
Also tbh I'm not particularly convinced that seeing porn is all that damaging. Doing quick research it seems that there are no proven damages or development impacts and real actual danger of porn is teaching teens and young adults distorted views of sex and gender roles. Seems like kids in your example aren't even capable of such frameworks to begin with.
So despite how nasty it sounds there's no convincing evidence that its even a real danger. In fact, it seems like exposure to violent images like gore and freak accidents thats having real damage.
If you have some oposing evidence I'd gladly take a look but I'm really unconvinced here that googling boob could be in any way detrimental.
OK.... So, the initial question was "how could anyone support this?" right?
I'm simply explaining how some people see the argument. I never said I see it like this.
So I'm by no means defending any of this other than it being technically possible, and at that, this falls far short of anything resembling acceptable in my book.
Parents who vote and would support this would do so based on limited technical knowledge and a total ideological investment in "preventing" any exposure. Which, we agree, is idiotic.
Y'all really need to chill out with your pitchforks.
Parental controls for internet use have been around since the 90s. There are even some vintage porn sites that have been running since then that have ads for them. I know this. I saw them back in 1999 and 2000... when I was an underage guy looking at porn online.
a lot of people. The other day I saw a post on mastodon by some politician or someone in the UK stating that if people find any site that is geoblocking the UK because of the age verification to report it to some link he provided. it was boosted A LOT with a lot of replies in support.
If you don't have a legal entity that can go to UK court, you don't even need to block them, let them block you, you did nothing wrong you don't have to accommodate them.
One of the biggest problems with human societies is that parents, by necessity, have their brains broken and, due to modern values/life, are under constant strain. Being a parent means (generally) the kid is priority 1, then there's everything else. This is a necessary irrationality, but if this means you have to do the occasional genocide or violate someone else's civil rights to 'keep our kids safe' then, by god, those people are just going to have to suck it up and die. Sometimes, if you have the time, you can talk some people around and remind them, one day their kids are going to have to live in society as one of those 'someone else's and won't always be their precious little baby, but almost no one has the time and energy for a more nuanced thought than 'save the babies!' much less if they also have to work 48 hours, commute 10 hours, and parent their kid(s) for 167 hours each week.
It plays quite well with the “I think about things for two seconds, and mostly think with my lower intestine” crowd.
They hear “kids shouldn’t be able to access porn” and they think yeah what’s wrong with that. Then they hear “Democrats want your kids to get porn” and they hit share.
these laws are all about control and tracking what you do online. they make the internet MORE dangerous, because (as with everything the government restricts or bans) there will be a black market, which is always more dangerous and exposes people to more things than they were looking for in the first place. you think dark web providers are gonna make you upload your id to stay compliant? no, they’re gonna continue anonymously operating through TOR and serve up some very questionably sourced content to those teens that are searching “boobs” and can no longer access pornhub
There is so much of it on the internet in general that you can’t really do much about it. On top of the fact it is still all over torrent websites as well.
I am aware of many, I am just saying looking at the dark web is not a good idea because... well... OK we're all adults here. That's where all the CP is and I have no interest in seeing that shit.
That’s a kinda not true tho. There is a fuck ton of cp on the clear web. The only thing I can say, is that Twitter usedtohave a lot of spam posts with links to cp.
I actively avoid those. I used to go on the chan forums but after seeing people just posting random attachments and someone saying 'get that kiddie shit out of here' before it stayed up for a while I turned tail and ran from those and never looked back.
That’s what this is going to become. And that’s another point to this. They can just go after people using the dark net claim it was for kiddie porn even if it wasn't. the masses will just believe them.
Sucks, because it's going global and we can't seem to stop it. I'm fine with laws to age gate in terms of a button you click. If some kid is willing to say they're 15... well, let's make sure people are treating them as a 15 year old. But... making everyone deal with real verification is at best going to further entrench big business, and at worst, destroy the internet we love. And it raises the question: are trans teenagers talking to each other now creating adult content because the UK hates trans people?
For porn and games etc. that should be enough yes, but for online gambling, opening stock market accounts etc we do need actual verification, but there are tons of methods of doing it so that the site only gets a true or false (18 or above) and the government gets obfuscated URL's so that the government doesn't know what you visited.
If I'm opening a stock market account, I'm trusting them with generating my tax receipts! If I don't feel comfortable trusting them to hold my personal data directly, I probably should choose a different brokerage...
Edit: Anyways, I'm annoyed enough that everyone has gone to phone based 2 factor that requires me to buy a phone and keep it on a cell network, so you can imagine how much I despise even an easier version of this.
After making the comment, I realised that stockbrokers need full KYC anyway.
You can use OTP codes without a phone, since you can buy OTP keychains. Which don't require any form of internet connection, same with the physical Passkey's.
Canada currently has a bill looking to do the same thing. AFAIK, Australia's already passed one, many US states are looking at them individually. The EU is looking at frameworks for it. I suppose there will be some places that won't, but this is increasingly looking like what governments have decided to do, and rather than geofencing, once a large number of money-making territories want this, I think most corporations will do it globally, and smaller sites simply won't be able to run.
I think that's the tech side windfall, the age checking is entirely to put road blocks infront of boobies. They it will force places to just not service those regions because of the hurdles of convincing enough people to give their ID, some will, and more over time.
And it now gives I people a reason to actually create fake IDs or just more identity theft uses. Raise the value of obtaining people's ID is the windfall for the data rapers
Age-checking is just a backdoor to force everyone on the internet to identify themselves. Nobody cares about the kids, they care about purging the internet of political dissent and opposition.
Man... When I was younger I used to fake my age, I know that some kid's still going to find a way to bypass the system like giving their parent's verification IDs or something..
What is it with Neo-Liberal governments and implementing over-reaching state controls that will eventually grant a tyrant unprecedented levels of control over public life?
Because they want to privatize all aspects of living so that a handful of exorbitantly wealthy people can build larger hoards. There's no end to it; it's a mental disease, enabled by Capitalism and the death of real Labor laws and rights.
Every industry should have unions that actively work to dismantle owner authoritarianism, but for 40 years Boomers have been paving the way for every awful piece of shit "business owner" to have some idolized place at the top of our society. And of course, the knock-on effect of that over time is that the pieces of shit have carved into the legislative and political arenas that provided even a modicum of worker/commoner protections. The digital divide is just a coefficient on the slippery slope.
Because it was meant as a "soft ban". First you make it troublesome to access porn, but also blame the providers if kids are circumventing it in any shape or form (no section 230-esque protections). This, alongside with payment processors, act as a chokehold on the industry, and also on the LGBTQIA+ community as a whole if you can read between the lines. The long game is to make it unpopular enough in a few years, that it can be easily outlawed.
Oggi Windows (e si, ormai la mia vita è al così basso punto in cui finisco necessariamente per prendere da esso questi spunti, tra l’altro per niente interessanti), sulla schermata di blocco, propone qualcosa di tanto semplice a dirsi quanto insolito: “Coniglietto sfacciato passeggia sullo schermo“, perché a quanto pare oggi è l’ottantacinquesimo (85°) anniversario […]
Oggi Windows (e si, ormai la mia vita è al così basso punto in cui finisco necessariamente per prendere da esso questi spunti, tra l’altro per niente interessanti), sulla schermata di blocco, propone qualcosa di tanto semplice a dirsi quanto insolito: “Coniglietto sfacciato passeggia sullo schermo“, perché a quanto pare oggi è l’ottantacinquesimo (85°) anniversario di Bugs Bunny… numero anche questo a dir poco strano per festeggiare, ma magari a qualcuno in Microsoft piaceva, va bene così. In pieno stile consigli di Bing, cliccando sulla scheda si apre pagina una ricerca dove a primo impatto query, sottotitolo e corpo non sembrano centrare, anche se in realtà guardando bene si… Il fatto però è che sono rimasta di sasso a leggere questa descrizione, perché, a pensarci bene, è più vera di quanto sembra. Veramente Bugs Bunny è un coniglietto sfacciato… con quel fare fiero, o come si mangia la carota e nei momenti peggiori dice “che succede amico?“… è eccessivamente irriverente. Se fosse un utente di Internet, i giornalisti lo appellerebbero come “l’hacker troll noto come 4chan“, secondo me… che roba oh.
The EU is currently developing a whitelabel app to perform privacy-preserving (at least in theory) age verification to be adopted and personalized in the coming months by member states. The app is open source and available here: github.com/eu-digital-identity….
Problem is, the app is planning to include remote attestation feature to verify the integrity of the app: github.com/eu-digital-identity…. This is supposed to provide assurance to the age verification service that the app being used is authentic and running on a genuine operating system. Genuine in the case of Android means:
The operating system was licensed by Google
The app was downloaded from the Play Store (thus requiring a Google account)
Device security checks have passed
While there is value to verify device security, this strongly ties the app to many Google properties and services, because those checks won't pass on an aftermarket Android OS, even those which increase security significantly like GrapheneOS, because the app plans to use Google "Play Integrity", which only allows Google licensed systems instead of the standard Android attestation feature to verify systems.
This also means that even though you can compile the app, you won't be able to use it, because it won't come from the Play Store and thus the age verification service will reject it.
So is there a way to apply pressure on the EU to think this through first? Surely they could have different ways that doesn't lock them in to google services.
According to the users in that issue, the mere application of the API is illegal, as is the dependency. Sooo I dunno what kind of PACs there are in the EU but I would be leaning on and contributing to those.
I do feel like that’s a precarious state to leave this in, especially if they’re developing the backend for it.
Is there even enough momentum for a SKG-style wave of coverage? It would need to be justified properly by citing things like the Tea app data leak, to make a strong case (to political pencil pushers) for the danger of tying personal information to profiles or even to platforms. Otherwise the only thing they’ll see is “gamers want to make porn accessible to children”.
I don’t know. This whole situation boils my blood because I really care about online anonymity, and this is kind of nightmare scenario shit for me. I’m not even in the UK or EU.
To avoid people from simply copying the "age proof" and having others reuse it, a nonce/private key combo is needed. To protect that key a DRM style locked down device is necessary. Conveniently removing your ability to know what your device is doing, just a "trust us".
Seeing the EU doesn't make any popular hardware, their plan will always rely on either Asian or US manufacturers implementing the black-box "safety" chip.
It's that "whatever way" that is difficult. This proposal merely shifts the problem: now the login to that 3rd party can be shared, and age verification subverted.
1) the user 2) the age-gated site 3) the age verification service
The site (2) sends the request to the user (1), who passes it on to the service (3) where it is signed and returned the same way. The request comes with a nonce and a time stamp, making reuse difficult. An unusual volume of requests from a single user will be detected by the service.
Strictly speaking, neither needs to know the actual identity. However, the point is that both are supposed to receive information about the user's age. I'm not really sure what your point is.
both are supposed to receive information about the user's age
Yes, that's the point. They should be receiving information about age, and age only. Therefore they lack the information to detect reuse.
If they are able to detect reuse, they receive more (and personal identifying) information. Which shouldn't be the case.
The only known way to include a nonce, without releasing identifying information to the 3rd parties, is using a DRM like chip. This results in the sovereignty and trust issues I referred to earlier.
The site would only know that the user's age is being vouched for by some government-approved service. It would not be able to use this to track the user across different devices/IPs, and so on.
The service would only know that the user is requesting that their age be vouched for. It would not know for what. Of course, they would have to know your age somehow. EG they could be selling access in shops, like alcohol is sold in shops. The shop checks the ID. The service then only knows that you have login credentials bought in some shop. Presumably these credentials would not remain valid for long.
They could use any other scheme, as well. Maybe you do have to upload an ID, but they have to delete it immediately afterward. And because the service has to be in the EU, government-certified with regular inspections, that's safe enough.
In any case, the user would have to have access to some sort of account on the service. Activity related to that account would be tracked.
If that is not good enough, then your worries are not about data protection. My worries are not. I reject this for different reasons.
is being vouched for by some government-approved service.
The reverse is also a necessity: the government approved service should not be allowed to know who and for what a proof of age is requested.
And because the service has to be in the EU, government-certified with regular inspections, that's safe enough
Of course not: both intentional and unintentional leaking of this information already happens, regularly. That information should simply not be captured, at all!
Additionally, what happens to, for example, the people in Hungary(*)? If the middle man government service knows when and who is requesting proof-of-age, it's easy to de-anonymise for example users of gay porn sites.
The 3rd party solution, as you present it, sounds terribly dangerous!
(*) Hungary as a contemporary example of a near despot leader, but more will pop up in EU over the coming years.
The reverse is also a necessity: the government approved service should not be allowed to know who and for what a proof of age is requested.
It would send the proof to you. It would not know what you do with it. I gave an example in the previous post how the identity of the user could be hidden from the service.
If the middle man government service knows when and who is requesting proof-of-age, it’s easy to de-anonymise for example users of gay porn sites.
It would be a lot easier to get that information from the ISP.
If it is about hiding some data handled by the app, that will be instantly extracted. There are plenty of people with full integrity on rooted phones. It's really annoying to set up and keep going, and requiring that would fuck over most rooted phone/custom os users, but someone to fully inspect and leak everything about the app will always be popping up.
If it is about hiding some data handled by the app, that will be instantly extracted.
Look at the design of DRM chips. They bake the key into hardware. Some keys have been leaked, I think playstation 2 is an example, but typically by a source inside the company.
That applies to play integrity, and a lot of getting that working is juggling various signatures and keys. The suggestion above which I replied to was instead about software-managed keys, something handed to the app which it then stores, where the google drm is polled to get that sacred piece of data. Since this is present in the software, it can be plainly read by the user on rooted devices, which hardware-based keys cannot.
Play integrity is hardware based, but the eu app is software based, merely polling googles hardware based stuff somewhere in the process.
I understand. In the context of digital sovereignty, even if the linked shitty implementation is discarded (as it should be), every correct implementation will require magic DRM-like chip. This chip will be made by a US or Asian manufacturer, as the EU has no manufacturing.
Is it tied to my real identity? If not it seems to me that it should be sufficient as to serve as a security this phone is legit and not emulated/compromised.
In the eu, phone numbers by law are tied to state identities. And the phone provider can naturally resolve their sim IDs down to the phone number they are assigned to. Anything related to celltower interactions is PII.
Yeah no. Requiring anything Google for something as basic as this violates the GDPR. If they go through with this, it's one legal case until they have to revise it.
Edit: German eID works on any Android btw., flawless actually. I sure hope I can use that for verification
EID and equivalents are great for a lot of things, but do you want your porn site to know who you are? The new app is supposed to verify your age but not give out your PII. Not sure eID can do that?
Der Personalausweis verfügt seit 2010 über eine elektronische Identitätsfunktion (eID). Welche Daten sind auf dem Ausweis hinterlegt und was ist bei der Nutzung zu beachten?
That Flathub app is unofficial afaik, which is why I don't use it. Normally I wouldn't care, but this seems important enough to not use a repackaged version
I wouldn't be too sure. Data protection mainly binds private actors. Any data processing demanded by law is legal. You'd really have to know the finer points of the law to judge if this is ok.
The GDPR also applies to public institutions as far as I'm aware - but most importantly the concern here is Google and data collected by Google. This data collection is in no way necessary to provide the age verification service. Most of it is not even related to it. The state legally cannot force you to agree to some corporations (i.e. Google's) terms, even if we completely ignore the GDPR.
Data processing mandated by law is legal. Governments can pass laws, unlike private actors. Public institutions are bound by GDPR, but can also rely on provisions that give them greater leeway.
I don't see how that this is in any way necessary, either. But a judge may be convinced by the claim that this is industry standard best practice to keep the app safe. In any case, there may be some finer points to the law.
The state legally cannot force you to agree to some corporations (i.e. Google’s) terms,
I'm not too sure about that, either. For example, when you are out of work, the state will cause you trouble if you do not find offered jobs acceptable.
It's another question, if not having access to age-gated content is so bad as to force you to do anything. Minors nominally have the same rights as full citizens, and they are to be denied access, too.
Apparently this is illegal to implement as of right now, but it’s not helping the feeling of technological doomerism I get whenever I think about this whole identity verification situation.
Someone jumped at me for comparing EU and MAGA to Stalin's and Hitler's regimes, quote, "arguing in newspapers whose worker class has been liberated more". Like they are not equal at all and all such.
What is it with everyone being obsessed with porn censorship suddenly? Why is this a trend?
At first I thought it's about control and data gathering, but this seems like too much of a genuine attempt at such a system. Why is the government so obsessed with parenting and nannying the citizens?
This has been discussed a while back, at least here in NL as far as I know it started because of legalising online gambling for which you need to be identified. Also, due to GDPR, businesses aren't allowed to make copies of ID's/passports/driving licences any more which is required for certain businesses (notaries, accountants, etc). In my office we currently use some kind of identification software, but it isn't anonyms because well we wouldn't be able to do our job.
There is a bit of a conflict between the laws requiring certain companies to identify their clients and GDPR in basis, but there is something in GDPR that allows these companies to still collect the relevant data and use it or to verify the data and not store it depending on the use case.
The whole use case thing is even the reason why companies are allowed to collect data from you. You couldn't get anything delivered if this exception wasn't there, because they wouldn't be allowed to progress your address.
At least that's what I gathered from the Dutch implementation the AVG, when I last read it a couple years ago.
This is just my speculation, so take it as you will. The EU has been pushing for digital ID cards for quite a while, and this is just another attempt. The last serious attempt was the Covid vaccination passport, but so many people still opted for paper certs, and the rest deleted the app when vaccination was no longer mandatory, that it failed again. So, now the authorities are becoming smart and trying to go through the vector that has a proven record of driving technological change: porn.
Too many bots online 😁 I'd like to know if I'm talking to a real sockpuppet when I'm online 😁...but just for that and only share data from my "wallet id" on a strict need to know basis.
Why is the government so obsessed with parenting and nannying the citizens?
I think it's because people from outside the traditional political families are getting popular votes.
For the established politicians, blaming "the internet" and building a supressing censorship machine is easier than looking in the mirror and seeing where the discontent comes from.
Been wondering myself. It's certainly part of the general right-ward trend. Societies are becoming more illiberal. It's not just the right that is moving to the right.
Obscenity laws have always been about enforcing the "correct" sexuality. Protecting minors meant preventing them from becoming "confused"; ie becoming LGBTQ.
You also have growing nationalism. In Europe, people are saying we should enforce "our laws" and "our values" against meddling foreigners (ie Big Tech). It often sounds a lot like the rants against the "globalists" that have been a staple among the US far right for decades. Age verification is part of that.
For example, Germany has long enforced age verification within its borders. It's part of the whole over-regulation thing that makes competitive tech companies almost impossible in Europe. For some reason, Europeans have trouble accepting that. You can see it here on Lemmy. The solution must be to enshittify everything to level the playing field.
The legal precedent for gaining the ability to ban content under the guise of preventing the dissemination of "obscenity" allows the future banning of "obscene" political opinions and "obscene" dissent.
Once the "obscene" political content is banned, the language will change to "offensive".
After "offensive" content is banned, then the language will change to "inappropriate".
After "inappropriate", the language will change to "oppositional".
If you believe this is a "slippery slope" fallacy, then as a counterpoint, I would refer to the actual history of the term "politically correct":
In the early-to-mid 20th century, the phrase politically correct was used to describe strict adherence to a range of ideological orthodoxies within politics. In 1934, The New York Times reported that Nazi Germany was granting reporting permits "only to pure 'Aryans' whose opinions are politically correct".
[5]The term political correctness first appeared in Marxist–Leninist vocabulary following the Russian Revolution of 1917. At that time, it was used to describe strict adherence to the policies and principles of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, that is, the party line.[24] Later in the United States, the phrase came to be associated with accusations of dogmatism in debates between communists and socialists. According to American educator Herbert Kohl, writing about debates in New York in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The term "politically correct" was used disparagingly, to refer to someone whose loyalty to the CP line overrode compassion, and led to bad politics. It was used by Socialists against Communists, and was meant to separate out Socialists who believed in egalitarian moral ideas from dogmatic Communists who would advocate and defend party positions regardless of their moral substance.
— "Uncommon Differences", The Lion and the Unicorn[4]
You're right but the example you gave seems to illustrate a different effect that's almost opposite — let me explain.
The phrase "politically correct" is language which meant something very specific, that was then hijacked by the far-right into the culture war where its meaning could be hollowed out/watered down to just mean basically "polite", then used interchangeably in a motte-and-bailey style between the two meanings whenever useful, basically a weaponized fallacy designed to scare and confuse people — and you know that's exactly what it's doing by because no right-winger can define what this boogeyman really means. This has been done before with things like: Critical Race Theory, DEI, cancel culture, woke, cultural Marxism, cultural bolshevism/judeo bolshevism (if you go back far enough), "Great Replacement", "illegals", the list goes on.
I see your point. I should've limited my citation to the phrase's authoritarian origins from the early 20th century.
To clarify, the slippery slope towards "political correctness" I wanted to describe is a sort of corporate techno-feudalist language bereft of any real political philosophy or moral epistemology. It is the language of LinkedIn, the "angel investor class", financiers, cavalier buzzwords, sweeping overgeneralizations, and hyperbole. Yet, fundamentally, it will aim to erase any class awareness, empiricism, or contempt for arbitrary authority. The idea is to impose an avaricious financial-might-makes-right for whatever-we-believe-right-now way of thinking in every human being.
What I want to convey is that there is an unspoken effort by authoritarians of the so-called "left" and "right" who unapologetically yearn for the hybridization of both Huxley's A Brave New World and Orwell's 1984 dystopian models, sometimes loudly proclaimed and other times subconsciously suggested.
I get what you mean. You're saying we're sliding towards something that brings back political correctness in its original definition, and I agree with you.
The idea is to impose an avaricious financial-might-makes-right
This resonates a lot. I'd argue we're already there. All this talk of "meritocracy" (fallaciously opposed to "DEI"), the prosperity gospel (that one's even older), it's all been promoting this idea of worthiness determined by net worth. Totalitarianism needs a socially accepted might-makes-right narrative wherever it can find it, then that can be the foundation for the fascist dogma/cult that will justify the regime's existence and legitimize its disregard for human life. Bonus points if you can make that might-makes-right narrative sound righteous (e.g. "merit" determines that you "deserve" your wealth, when really it's a circular argument: merit is never questioned for those who have the wealth, it's always assumed because how else could they have made that much money!).
In addition to the other answers, I want to add that the anti-porn stuff gives them the reason they need to force you into a more monitored environment. In which, everything you do is tracked. Your instinct is right imo. They want Google monitoring your mobile device as the primary piece. It's legislative market capture and fascism at the same time. No one company has to have all the info on you, but in forcing you to confirm yourself they make it so half a dozen can report on you if your habits trigger something. Half the technology is already in place as it's been built under the guise of better ad targeting.
Govt. say "to protect children, you have to install this app, under these conditions"
You want to protect childrens, so you do so
Govt. say "to protect this or that, we have to impose approved gates on many websites, based on the app you installed before"
You want to protect this or that, so you accept it
Govt. say "fuck you, you whatever is not in line with the fucking biggot at the helm of your country/federation/whatever, now we know what you do, we control what's allowed, and anything to get around the blocks is illegal and will land you in jail. Fuck you again, fucker."
You're a happy little plant in a pot.
Basically, it's not about porn. It's not about protecting kids. It's not about helping "victims of abuse". If anything, it's putting all these in more danger, along with everyone else.
Most western governments look at the ability of some of the more authoritarian places ability to just snap there fingers and make the entire internet go away with great envy.
Excuse me, censorship is not good in any way. The people should have the power to decide what they want to see, and what they want to say. Not government officials nor private platform owners.
What's going on with Europe lately? You all really want GOOGLE of all mega corps in control of your identity?
You're going the opposite way, it should be your right to install an alternate OS on your phone. If anything they should be banning Google licensed Android.
Its not the populace, our politicians just like in the US have gone rogue. People are voting for the nutters due to anti immigration propaganda and so increasingly getting far right. Its happening across the entire western world and its bad news for everyone.
Except this isn't even the right wing nutters doing it. These are mainstream politicians executing their power grabbing neolib agenda, with very little democratic oversight or public debate.
No one is laughing... We're horrified how the people who have been screaming "freedom" and being obnoxious about how much more free they are than anyone else in the entire universe, seem to love getting enslaved while being obnoxious about how cool it is to be enslaved.
Europe has its problems. We've had them for generations, and right now they're getting worse. But at least we have a culture of fighting back, something americans don't.
But at least we have a culture of fighting back, something americans don’t.
Talk is cheap. Prove it in the coming years. I really hope you're right, because I want SOMEWHERE to not be either a coporate fascist hellholle or a collapsed country in the future..
In Hungary, we still have people who think fascism is when "evil people do evil things for the sake of evil", so when fascists want to hurt Roma, LGBTQIA+, etc. people, no one dares to call them fascists as long as said people have "receipts" in the form of cobbled together statistics, and have a not too cruel solution.
Dude, I keep telling my possibly AfD voting cousin we're just a few years behind the US if things continue as they do. Our politicians aren't better people, they're just sneakier for now.
How long before that extends to PCs and non-Windows OSes are blocked? Also, add non-Chrome browsers to that as well (that includes Edge, Chromium, Brave, etc. as well as Firefox and its forks).
I've got access to the beta of the Surf app. Some thoughts:
some stuff I really liked:
rss works (though no custom URLs yet, just what they already scraped)
you get lemmy, mastodon, bluesky, threads all together
you can make your own feeds and check what other people made (like a custom timeline, or topic-specific like “NBA”, “woodworking”, “retro gaming stuff”)
has different modes: you can switch between videos, articles, podcasts depending on the feed
but also...
can’t add your own RSS feeds (huge miss)
some feeds break and show no posts even when they’re active (ok, it's still a beta)
YouTube videos have ads (not into that—I support creators through patreon, affiliate links, whatever. not ads)
feeds you create are public by default unless you manually change it
not open source. built on open protocols, sure. but the app is locked up. (HUGE MISS)
all that said, I really believe: better feeds = better experience = better shot at the fediverse going mainstream.
anyone else tried it?
do you know anyone building an open source version of this? is that even realistic?
Beautiful and futuristic iOS third party client for Mastodon, Misskey, Bluesky, and Nostr. Gallery mode, video reel, local ML powered For You feed keeps your timeline interesting!
China News: China has commenced construction of a major dam on the Brahmaputra River in Tibet, near the Indian border, with Premier Li Qiang present at the ground
Hm, I'm going to need some software engineers to critique an idea I have that could at least partially solve the fears people have about their personal details being tied to their porn habits.
The system will be called the Adult Content Verification System (or Wank Card if you want to be funny). It's a physical card, printed by the government with a unique key printed on it. Those cards are then sold by any shop that has an alcohol license (premises or personal). You go in, show your ID to the clerk, buy the card. That card is proof that you're over 18, but it is not directly tied to you, you just have to be over 18 to buy it. The punishment for selling a Wank Card to someone under the age of 18 is the same as if you sold alcohol to someone under 18.
When you go to the porn site, they check if you're from the UK, they check if you have a key associated with your account. If not, they ask for one, you provide the key to the site, the site does an API call to https://wankcard.gov.uk/api/verify with the site's API key (freely generated, but you could even make the api public if you want) and the key on the card, gets a response saying "Yep! This is a valid key!" and hey presto, free to wank and nobody knows it's you! If you don't have an account, the verification would have to be tied to a cookie or something that disappears after a while for all you anonymous people.
As a result, you can both prove that you're over 18 (because you have the card) and some company over in San Francisco doesn't get your personal data, because you never actually record it anywhere. All you have is keys, and while yes, the government could record "Oh this key was used to verify on this site", they'd have to know which shop the key was bought from, who sold it, and who bought it, which is a lot more difficult to do unless the shopkeeper keeps records of everyone he's ever sold to.
So... Good idea? Bad idea? Better than the current approach anyway, I think.
“Reddit has stressed that this system is only to verify users' age, and it has no interest in your identity. Lee further stated that Persona won't know what subreddits you visit, and has promised it won't keep users' uploaded images more than seven days.”
I'll never forget how he changed users' text without them knowing it before the 2016 election. Reddit was going downhill before, but that was a turning point.
I don't care that those original commenters were (likely) pieces of shit, and the people who he made the comments insult were definitely pieces of shit, putting words into people's mouths to make them fight each other is unforgivable. Even if you put out a shitty apology.
Not only was the apology horrible, but for any user on that platform for YEARS: obviously puts the thought in their head that spez could be changing their words by directly editing the db, and getting them put on a list for wrong-speak. Sure, that's possible with any DB, but he proved it was actually something being done on that site. Given his role, a major red flag, as this type of action would normally result in someone being fired.
Reddit has since IPOd and is going to probably do well as a stock because of all the information it harvests from users.
A VPN future? Haha. Not if they don't want to. There are many ways to prevent VPN from operating when you're a government.
You can just plain ban encryption, which sounds really crazy, but yeah, they're trying to.
You can just say "it's illegal to use a VPN". It'll technically still work, but if there's a trace of trafic from your house to a known VPN endpoint, you're it! Great!
They can force custom proprietary spying software on your devices. Sounds equally crazy as the thing above, right? But rest assured they're ALSO trying to do that. Multiple times, even. And in some places… they did. Of course, nothing forces you to have such software on your device. Especially if your devices are not supported; it also turns into a "you have to buy this or that big name device, everything else's de-facto illegal! Fuck you, we're the government!". And if you get caught for whatever, and your phone, PC, or anything isn't "compliant"? Bam. Guilty.
Plenty of option. All of them completely stupid and would weaken both privacy, individuals, and governments at large. It never stopped legislation from being pushed forward.
They can force custom proprietary spying software on your devices. - That would block Linux from their borders, which means goodbye Steam Deck in the UK among other things.
Seems to be a way of making Bluesky style feeds with Mastodon-style services, well that's what I gather from reading the FAQ. They don't actually explain what this is anywhere.
Channel is basically a white label instance of PatchWork, which is a Mastodon fork with custom feeds and community curation tools.
The main intent behind the project is to help existing communities and organizations get onto the Fediverse, and have some curation capabilities. Ideally, it can be used to get a large amount of people and accounts onto the network with minimal friction.
I always liked the concept of Matrix, and still actively use it, but there's some serious jank. Synapse is generally bloated and not fun to run an instance, Dendrite is perpetually in Beta, and the clients themselves range from adequate to awful. The default Element client on Android is so broken for me that I'm forced to use Element X, because I can't even log in with Element.
It's disappointing, but there's a ton of issues that aren't so easy to resolve. New Vector and the Element Foundation are basically two separate entities that have some kind of hard split between them, neither of which seems to have the money necessary to support comprehensive development. The protocol is said to be bloated and overtly complex, and trying to develop a client or a server implementation is something of a nightmare.
I want to see Matrix succeed, I think a lot of people see the potential of what it could be. I'm not sure it'll ever get there.
I always liked the concept of Matrix, and still actively use it, but there’s some serious jank.
I use Element as well as Beeper, which is at its core an Element client based on network bridging. I'm a big fan of Matrix, but it isn't as approachable as other messaging services and requires some technical know-how to use effectively.
The thing is... What alternatives are there? Signal can't be trusted (on the very same website there is an article about it). I'm not using closed source alternatives, Simplex is kinda shady too tbh and I'm not even sure I could get anyone to use it.
I don't like Matrix/Element either but sadly its the best open source chat solution we have.
XMPP is significantly less decentralized, allowing them to """cut corners""" compared to Matrix protocol implementation, and scale significantly better. (In heavy quotes, as XMPP isn't really cutting corners, but true decentralization requires more work to achieve seemingly "the same result")
An XMPP or IRC channel with a few thousand users is no problem, wheras Matrix can have problems with that. On the other hand, any one Matrix homeserver going down does not impact users that aren't specifically on that homeserver, whereas XMPP is centralized enough that it can take down a whole channel.
Meanwhile IRC is a 90s protocol that doesn't make any sense in the modern world of mainly mobile devices.
XMPP also doesn't change much, the last proper addition to the protocol (from what I can tell, on the website) was 2024-08-30 xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0004.h…
This specification defines an XMPP protocol extension for data forms that can be used in workflows such as service configuration as well as for application-specific data description and reporting.
XMPP doesn't change very very often, but there's actually tons of XEPs that are in common use and are considered functionally essential for a modern client, and with much higher numbers than XEP-0004
The good news, though, is that mostly you as the user don't need to care about those! Most of the modern clients agree on the core set and thus interoperate fine for most normal things. And most XEPs have a fallback in case the receiver doesn't support the same XEPs.
I'm general XMPP as a protocol is a lightweight core that supports an interesting soup of modules (in the form of XEPs) to make it a real messenger in the modern sense. And I think that's neat! But you can't really judge the core to say how often things change.
Most of the modern clients agree on the core set and thus interoperate fine for most normal things.
So you think it is a sane solution to mark essential features as optional extensions and then have a wink-wink, nudge-nudge agreement of which of these "optional" extensions are actually mandatory? Instead of having essential features be part of the core protocol?
But more importantly, XMPP sucks because it does not have one back-end implementation like Vodozemac for Matrix. So let alone being unable to have security audits, you are forcing client developers to roll their own implementation of the e2ee, with likely little to no experience with cyber-security, and just hoping they will make no mistakes. You know, implementing encryption that even experts have hard time getting right.
Honestly, I struggle with this myself. On the one hand I like the diversity of clients; it feels like a sign of strength of the community and protocol that there are many options that have different values. But the cost of this diversity is that it makes things more complicated to coordinate, and different people with different values have different opinions on what a chat client should even want for features.
Something like Slack or Discord can roll out a server feature and client feature to all their clients all at the same time and have a unified experience. But the whole benefit of FLOSS is that anyone can fork the client to make changes, and the whole point of an open protocol is that multiple independent clients can interoperate, and so there's a kind of irony in me wanting those things, but those things producing a fractured output.
So I think XMPP, as a protocol, does the best compromise. These differences between clients and servers aren't just random changes in behaviour or undocumented features, they're named, numbered, alterations that live somewhere and are advertised in the built-in "discovery" protocols. The protocol format itself is extensible, so unexpected content can be passed alongside known content in a message or a server response and the clients all know to ignore anything they don't understand, and virtually all of the XEPs are designed with some kind of backwards compatibility in mind for how this feature might degrade when sent to a non-supported client.
It isn't perfect, but I think perfection is impossible here. A single server and client that everyone uses and keeps up to date religiously with forced upgrades is best for cohesiveness, but worst for "freedom", and a free-for-all where people just make random individual changes and everything is always broken isn't really a community, and XMPP sits in the middle and has a menu of documented deviations for clients to advertise and choose.
As for security, that can be mostly solved with libraries, independent of the rest of the client or server implementation. Like, most clients used libsignal for their crypto, so that could in theory be audited and bug-fixed and all clients would benefit. Again, not perfect, there's always room at the interface between the client code and the library code that's unique, but it's not as bad as rolling your own crypto.
I am yet to see a universal tool that is good at everything. Trying to cram all use-cases into one network results in mediocre results at best and usually even worse.
There is no reason to combine a person to person messenger like signal and community based one like discord into one network. That is why I like the Matrix approach of 1 backend library and many frontends so you can have your pick of clients without messing up the protocol.
Even having the fallbacks for missing features does not solve the issue. The experience for the average person will still be bad. While you and I may enjoy doing research on which client is best for us, most users will see the sub-par experience and leave for a corporate solution that "just works".
i feel like it shouldnt be this hard, but I'm not the one developing matrix, nor XMPP, nor the 3rd smaller option you the reader is wanting me to list that I am unaware of
For me Matrix is fine, I can use IRC, Whatsapp and Discord with it. But Element is not my cup of tea, especially with Firefox as it doesn't play any videos other users are sharing. The same videos work fine with Cinny.
The fact that many Discord and IRC channels (servers?) block Matrix connections has drastically reduced its usefulness for me. When I was running my own Matrix server, I could have gotten around it by using a puppet, but Synapse is such a hog I had to shut it down, and most of the IRC rooms I want to use don't allow Matrix proxies.
We really need to stop abandoning existing foss projects and thinking a whole new thing needs to be invented. Free and open-source software is not a product, it doesn't abide by the same rules and relationships that proprietary tech does.
It's more organic. It's also a commons that we can continue to draw on, and reshape. If I recall correctly, there were something like three different vector graphic editors from the same codebase before Inkscape managed to be the one that gained traction.
Matrix isn't perfect, but abandoning it just to reinvent it all over again just because some people really need a thing that works like Discord, even though Discord is absolute hot garbage; is just going to re-create all the same problems. Matrix today is better than it was two years ago. And Matrix in a year will be better from now.
Honestly, setting up things using Docker Compose is generally a question of copying and pasting and editing the file locations.
The moment you need SSL and/or a reverse proxy it becomes a bit more complex, but once you set up a reverse proxy once you can generally expand that to your other applications.
Something like a Synology nas makes it very easy and to some extend even the Truenas apps are kinda easy.
Xinjiang’s official organ donation rate is shockingly low. So why is China planning to open six new organ transplant facilities in the region
"The expansion suggests that the Chinese authorities are expecting to increase the numbers of transplants performed in Xinjiang. However, this is puzzling as there is no reason why the demand for transplants should suddenly go up in Xinjiang,” Rogers explained. “From what we know about alleged voluntary donations, the rates are quite low in Xinjiang. So the question is, why are these facilities planned?”
Rogers noted one chilling possibility: that “murdered prisoners of conscience (i.e., Uyghurs held in detention camps)” could be a source of transplanted organs.
This suggestion becomes even more concerning when considering the extensive surveillance and repression that Uyghurs face in the region. Detainees in the many internment camps in Xinjiang have reported being subjected to forced blood tests, ultrasounds, and organ-focused medical scans. These procedures align with organ compatibility testing, raising fears that Uyghurs are being prepped for organ harvesting while in detention.
David Matas, an international human rights lawyer who has investigated forced organ harvesting in China, questioned the very possibility of voluntary organ donation in Xinjiang. “The concept of informed, voluntary consent is meaningless in Xinjiang’s carceral environment,” Matas said. “Given the systemic repression, any claim that donations are voluntary should be treated with the utmost skepticism.”
The new transplant facilities will be distributed across Urumqi and other regions of northern, southern, and eastern Xinjiang. Experts argue that the sheer scale of this expansion is disproportionate to Xinjiang’s voluntary donation rate and overall capacity, suggesting that the Chinese authorities may be relying on unethical methods to source organs.
Nobody is defending the Moonies, especially not this current affairs publication owned by a Japanese media corporation. Here's plenty of examples of them calling out the Unification Church: thediplomat.com/tag/unificatio…
Launched in 2001, Ambassadors for Peace is the largest and most diverse network of peace leaders. As of 2020, there are more than 100,000 Ambassadors for Peace from 160 countries who come from all walks of life representing many races, religions, nationalities, and cultures
Literally she has no other ties to the Moonies/unification church, and how about the human right lawyer she directly quotes.
Results 445 included studies reported on outcomes of 85 477 transplants. 412 (92.5%) failed to report whether or not organs were sourced from executed prisoners; and 439 (99%) failed to report that organ sources gave consent for transplantation. In contrast, 324 (73%) reported approval from an IRB. Of the papers claiming that no prisoners’ organs were involved in the transplants, 19 of them involved 2688 transplants that took place prior to 2010, when there was no volunteer donor programme in China.
Anyway, keep spreading that there is no genocide propaganda.
Two months after the Trump administration all but shut down its foreign news services in Asia, China is gaining significant ground in the information war, building toward a regional propaganda monopoly, including in areas where U.S.-backed outlets once reported on Beijing’s harsh treatment of ethnic minorities.
The U.S. decision to shut down much of RFA’s shortwave broadcasting in Asia is one of several cases where the Trump administration — which views China as America’s biggest rival — has yielded the adversary a strategic advantage.
Eleonora
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