There's definitely a use case, but there's an inherent power imbalance to these products that makes sure they will always be misused. The submitters are anonymous, and it's up to the person being reported on to prove the accusations are false.
How do you warn people about a potential dating candidate being dangerous without doxxing the potential dating candidate? "Hey, watch out for [anonymous person]" doesn't sound very useful.
I have the solution. Nobody's gonna like it, everybody here is gonna scream at me about it, but I have the solution.
Stop dating strangers on the internet.
The entire personals site/dating app experiment we've been running for the last quarter century is obviously a categorical failure. Humans just don't work like this.
Things have gotten so much worse since I was in high school. When I was in high school, the community of girls available to me to ask out were pretty much all girls I'd known since we were 5. A lot of them, I didn't have to wonder about their character, their intentions, their capacity to do harm, I was there when all that was written. I remember how much of a bully Chelsea was in middle school, I remember how nice Ashley was to everyone, I remember how Justine seemed weirdly infatuated with me in the 4th grade. They'd all remember stuff about me and the other boys. We graduated high school, I never saw 80% of them ever again, and within 5 years that figure climbed to at least 95%. Four years of college with mostly abject strangers who you're weirdly fast to form and break deceptively deep bonds with, all of whom I've also lost track of, and then the adult world in which everyone including you is an NPC.
I happen to be the exact age where, I got out of college in 2007, I disappeared into work, like I went to the airport and I went home for two years. In 2009, I looked back up and everything had CHANGED. Instant messaging was on smart phones now, and you WERE NOT TO approach women in person, only through phone-based dating apps and you had BETTER FUCKING NOT already be acquainted.
Don't talk to women at the grocery store. Don't talk to women at the gym. Don't talk to women at the library. Don't talk to women at your work. Don't talk to women at their work. Don't talk to women at the coffee shop. Don't talk to women at the bar. Don't talk to women at the club. Don't talk to women. No woman, only app.
How do you meet more women? Oh that's categorically the wrong question because having the goal of meeting women in the first place is creepy. Stop wanting to meet women and instead organically decide you want to do things that women happen to like, and then accidentally meet women in the course of doing those things. You know, at those meetups that are always happening on a recurring basis, that aren't advertised to happen at a place and time and then no one shows up and the listing is never re-posted. Probably just install more apps.
It's been women driving this, men vastly prefer asking women out from within their social circle. The pressure to make the first move is still on men, and he'd rather ask out women he already thinks he might like. Women on the other hand vastly prefer to be cold approached by a charming stranger.
I think it's gone far enough when we've got women saying dumb shit like "Systematically doxxing and libeling men is a risk we're just going to have to take."
Good lord, please tell me you did not just use ted bundy to describe what you think women like in men?
also did you just lore dump to a complete stranger? we're having a casual conversation.
i never said anything as insane as "Systematically doxxing and libeling men is a risk we're just going to have to take". i said doxxing should be avoided, if you'd read any of my comments.
please tell me you did not just use ted bundy to describe what you think women like in men?
I did, because he was. Two different ways.
Bundy's modus operandi was to approach women in public as a handsome, charming stranger. I'm pretty sure women like handsome, charming strangers; the entire female dating strategy seems to be geared toward attracting handsome, charming strangers. Ted Bundy was able to attract dozens of victims like that. There's an inherent danger in attracting strangers, because sometimes strangers are psychopaths.
Ted Bundy got a LOT of fan mail from women while he was in prison. Love letters, marriage proposals, nude photos. A shocking number of women saw his picture on the news alongside words like "murder trial" and "death sentence" and said "That's the man for me." He pulled some weird stunt to "get married" and he fathered a child from prison. This isn't unique to Ted Bundy, lots of mass murderers and serial killers have groupies, from Charles Manson to Dylan Klebold.
i said doxxing should be avoided, if you’d read any of my comments.
You came across as pretty lukewarm to me. "Yeah doxxing is a problem I guess." You can't have a Don't Date Him Girl website without doxxing. Doxxing is how they work.
skipped everything about ted bundy cause wtf you're obsessed, man. maybe join a bundy dating app?
also let me make it clear since you missed it last time (even though you quoted it). I think doxxing is bad and should be avoided. fuck's sake man. i am a commenter, not a politician. i read this stuff over breakfast. take it easy ffs.
i wonder if there's the potential for a different app with more encryption and a way to prevent doxxing and abuse.
You would have to have everyone take a polygraph or something (not that they actually work but a lot of people don't know that so maybe it would prevent them from lying in the first place). There's no way to prevent people from lying for whatever reason they have and there's no way to detect whether or not the thing they have posted is truthful.
The truth is as much benefit as the app may have when used properly the risk of abuse is far too high for it to ever be workable.
If you have a smoke alarm in your house that occasionally explodes and sets your house on fire, but the rest of the time actually works as a fire alarm, then it's not a useful product, as even if the chance of it exploding was less than 1% it would still eventually blow up your house, whereas if you never installed the alarm there was every possibility your house will never catch fire. So game theory suggests that you are better off without it.
Same with this app, sure it might prevent you experiencing a bad date but there's every possibility that it will also cause you not to date somebody who's actually a nice person. You are far better off just making that judgement yourself as you always did. And to be clear given human nature, the likelihood of the "fire alarm exploding" is probably a lot higher than 1%
Having no experience with the app whatsoever, I can only guess, and I’d guess that it does as you suggest, though there may be varying levels of specificity involved.
Yeah, the entire point of the app is that you go there and talk about the bad things a person has done.
That seems pretty hard to identify them without posting their image without their consent and discussing private details of their life so others can identify them. It is creepy as hell, at a minimum.
off the top of my head, I don't know. i just feel the concept is intriguing and that the idea is a nice one.
just the abuse potential is far too high I suppose. but it would be nice to know if someone had stalked someone else, may have spoken or behaved in a violent manner, etc.
but I suppose at that point you might as well fingerprint and process any potential suitors lol. 😅
I am going to say with even the downsides I think the idea is worth it.
My friend sucks to her creeps and maybe she could have saved herself from at least two abused cases.
Maybe like light system based around how often and how a users submits. This person submits a lot of negative responses red light. This person submits rarely green light?
The problem is also how much data do we really want to keep? How little can we keep?
Meowmeowbeans social pressure where people will refuse to meet or associate with people who have not been vetted and verified by meowmeowbeans members. So people who want to meet meowmeowbeans users would have to join to get screened otherwise they can get lost.
Solves the issue of people who never signed up to the social media site having strangers uploading personal photos, videos, names, and stories to a profile page they never consented to. Which is reminiscent of doxing in its current state.
So meowmeowbeans certification among consenting members would be the better route to go and socially making those not in meowmeowbeans outcasts. At least there is choice now for people to not be part of the community driven database of people.
You could easily convince me that it was a brilliantly executed honeypot. It's just too damn poetic.
"It's a women's safety app" No it wasn't. This app was about women's safety as much as the recent payment processor porn game censorship bullshit was about child safety. This was about slandering men for fun because women love gossip. The app's name was "Tea."
Not a single woman who signed up for this app stopped to think, "Here's a brand new app, just came out, has no track record, no reputation. I don't know who runs this. I don't know how they secure their database. I know what they're asking, they want a picture of my government-issued ID. We've spent the last two decades reading news headlines of the pattern "tech company was hacked, 2.2 million users compromised including emails, home addresses and SSNs" on a weekly basis. There hasn't been a week gone by since Dubya was president that hasn't happened."
The women who uploaded pictures of their IDs to some app really had their own safety in mind. Turns out you can short circuit that whole process with hilarious ease if you say things like "women only" and "slander your exes."
I don't think I could have constructed a better example as to why all the recent "prove your identity" shit is comprehensively retarded.
Tea wasn’t hacked. Tea posted these images to a public file sharing site. Tea claimed that they deleted these images after verifying the applicant was a woman but clearly that was a fraudulent claim.
I think the key reason this was seen as not being terribly offensive was the fact that women are disproportionately more likely than men to be on the receiving end of tons of different negative consequences when dating, thus to a degree justifying them having more of a safe space where their comfort and safety is prioritized.
However I think a lot of people are also recognizing now that such an app has lots of downsides that come as a result of that kind of structure, like false allegations being given too much legitimacy, high amounts of sensitive data storage, negative interactions being blown out of proportion, etc. I also think that this is yet another signature case of "private market solution to systemic problem" that only kind of addresses the symptoms, but not the actual causes of these issues that are rooted more in our societal standards and expectations of the genders, upbringing, depictions in media, etc.
I was making the point, that despite the fact that this is mildly ok. The test for anything that gives one group power over another, is to switch the groups.
If it's still reasonable, than it is probably OK to keep it. If however it seems wrong after the switch, the bar to keep the power imbalance should be very high.
That's a very superficial test that deliberately omits the social and historical context that makes sense of these categories. You can't just insert one party for another in statements about a relationship where one side has more power and privilege than the other, and look at your feelings about the result to evaluate the statements. White people have historically mistreated everyone else and robbed them of freedom and power. Men have historically abused women. To say "let's swap the words and see how we feel then" is not a reasonable way of evaluating statements about the relationships between these groups.
What this article says about the importance of entrenched power structures in racism also holds true about the relations between men and women:
I’m always reminded of the fact that women on dating sites rate 80% of the men as below average….
And the dating advisors who have written numerous articles about how women don’t really know or aren’t really honest with themselves about what they are looking for in a partner….
People often confuse average with "neither attractive nor unattractive," but an average face may also be unattractive. How well can people identify the average?
Stats depend on perception. Where a woman reports abuse, a man often spends an evening drinking or something similar. Not reporting abuse.
Expectations of men are too somewhat cruel. You should be grenadier-tall (or gorilla-wide, point being, you should look fit), with facial features like those of Kianu Reeves, with voice like that of Orlando Bloom, confident like some CEO, honorable like a samurai from some movie, yet able to override that honor at her whim and do any atrocity to make the world better for her. Like some picture of 1930s' propaganda.
If you don't deliver, then she silently pities herself and silently looks down at you for that. But God forbid you seem like that picture in some regard and then inevitably turn out to be more human, that deceit she won't forgive.
It was a problem a century ago that women were mostly right-wing and chauvinist and traditionalist. Most of that has been undone, but not how women in average see gender relations.
OK, so about the app - I won't be surprised if it was an intentional honeypot, honestly, to expose those who will use it. And it's a bad idea, there's no way to verify anonymous accusations, which means it's a tool for defamation of any man, and a way to discredit things of the kind written there at the same time.
These alleged high standards women hold are largely imaginary. It's only kind of like that on dating apps, and that's because they're 80% male, so women HAVE to be picky.
I'm sorry but I'll just say it out right: new feminists are the absolute worst
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for equality where possible. Where isn't equality possible? Well I'd like to conceive a child, but the plumbing isn't exactly useful for that. That sort of thing. Beyond that, were all the same, and IDGAF about your skin color, sexual preferences or whatever. I live by live and Let live, don't be an asshole, it's not that hard to be respectful
New feminists though are the ones coming up with ideas like this website. On the surface, anyone could say that it's not a bad thing to have a place for women to talk about how to protect themselves. In reality though, it's a place where men, innocent or not, get doxxed and made to be rapists.
There are some subs here on Lemmy as well that were very sad to see this shitshow of a website go, lamenting the fact that now they need a different place to dex people. Try not to tell them that doxxing is bad, it gets you banned.
I'm certainly no web security expert, but shouldn't Tea's junior network/backend/security developers, let alone seniors, know how to secure said Firebase or S3 buckets with STARTTLS or SSL certificates? Shouldn't a company like this have some sort of compliance department?
Tea is a dating safety app for women that lets them share notes about potential dates. The other day it was subject to a truly egregious data leak caused by …
It's a little more complex than that. If you want the app on the user device to be able to dump data directly into your online database, you have to give it access in some way. Encrypting the transmission doesn't do much if every app installation contains access credentials that can be extracted or sniffed.
Obviously there are ways around this too, but it's not just "use TLS".
Encrypting the transmission doesn't do much if every app installation contains access credentials that can be extracted or sniffed.
Encrypt the credentials then? Or OAUTH pipeline, perhaps? Automated temporary private key generation for each upload (that sounds unrealistic, to be fair)? Can credentialing be used for intermediary storage that encrypts the data on that server and then decrypted on the database host?
Clearly my utter "noobishness" is showing, but at least it's triggering a slight urge to casually peruse modern WebSec production workflows. I am a DNN researcher. Thus, I am far removed from customer-facing production environments, and it shows.
Any recommendations on literature or articles on how engineers solve these problems in a "best practices" way that you can recommend? I suppose I could just look it up, but I thought I'd ask.
Edit: I don't know why I'm down-voted. My questions were sincere.
You've got the right ideas. Noone should ever be storing any password in plaintext. It should always be hashed and only the hash stored. That's like WEBDEV99 (remedial course, not even 101).
Really. Despite your stated "noobishness", you basically landed in the territory of best practices right of the bat.
If you're looking for a good source of best practices, the CIS benchmarks are great. cisecurity.org/
CIS is a forward-thinking nonprofit that harnesses the power of a global IT community to safeguard public and private organizations against cyber threats.
Brother, I need the "remedial" lessons since I self-host a lot of my experimental DNN solutions on a GPU cluster served via CasaOS/Ubuntu-Server LTS.
I've followed basic tutorials about nginx, end-to-end encryption, and DNS, but I need more knowledge and training about the theory behind modern security best practices. I think I'm doing okay but I have this ever-present anxiety that I've overlooked something and my ass (i.e., sensitive data) is really just hanging out in the wind.
Wouldn't some sort of proxy in between the bucket and the client app solve this problem? I feel like you could even set up an endpoint on your backend that manages the upload. In other words, why is it necessary for the client app to connect directly with the bucket?
Maybe I'm not understanding the gist of the problem
Yeah. You also landed on a correct thought process for security. Cloud providers will let you make datastores public but that's like handing over a revolver with an unknown number of live chambers and saying "Have fun playing Russian roulette! I hope you win." Making any datastore public facing, without an API abstraction to control authN and authZ is not just a bad practice, it's a stupid practice.
Exactly, it's not necessary. It's bad / lazy design. You don't expose the DB storage directly, you expose a frontend that handles all the authentication and validation stuff before accessing the DB on the backend. That's normal Client-Server-Database architecture.
SSL is not the tool you need in this case, although you should obviously already be running exclusively on encrypted traffic.
The problem here is one of access rights - you should not make files default-available for anyone that can figure out the file name to the particular file in the bucket. At the very least, you need to be using signed URLs with a reasonably short expiration, and default all other access to be blocked.
As I mentioned in other comments, I am a noob when it comes to web-sec; please forgive what may be dumb questions.
Is it really just permission rights "over-exposure" issue? Or does one need to also encrypt and then decrypt the data itself that must be sent to a database?
Also, if you have time, recommend any links to web/cloud/SaaS security best practices "for dummies"?
My hey we’re probably using Firestore as their database without authenticating their api calls to firebase functions. Basically leaving their api endpoints open to the public Internet.
They could have connected service account and used some kind of auth handshake between that and generate a temporary login token based on user credentials and the service account oauth credentials to access the api. but they probably just had everything set to unauthenticated
I mean, yes, but does that take priority over women who are worried about their safety? There's been women doing this over local Facebook groups for a long time. Defamation of this sort is not a new issue.
It was defamation the entire time just because somebody made it an app rather than a Facebook group doesn't make any difference. It was always a crap thing to do.
Of course Tea took it to an entirely new level of stupid.
It was potentially defamation when it was just women...talking to one another, too. This seems like a pretty solid case of men looking at something women do to protect each other, and saying "...but what about the men who could be negatively affected in some cases?" I also think the tone in which this is being discussed is pretty revealing about Lemmy's demographics.
Considering even the mere accusation can ruin someone's life? Yes.
The problem isn't women don't deserve to be safe, the problem is we cannot just give people powerful weapons with no oversight or burden of proof to be deployed simply because a date didn't go well.
Wow just two days ago I see a post about how Lemmy is dominated by men and how that could become a problem, and today I see a comment section where all the incels come out of the woodwork.
"waaa somebody wants to solve a problem that has never affected me I'm the victim"
"omg what if people talk behind my back they might find out I'm an asshole? literally 1984"
"wadabout if this app was racist?!? checkmate"
I'm not saying this app is good or bad (I can definitely see the problems) but if an article about cybersecurity gets posted and this is our first reaction, makes me lose hope in Lemmy.
Edit: Responses have made very good points and I think I was off, thanks guys. I still think some of the early comments I encountered were rather reactionary
Thanks for looking out for us. However, I, too, am a bit concerned. This is how Facebook started. The tech industry has zero ethics. I recommend women, AND men, have a trusted safety buddy when dating. When I met my spouse, I had two people who knew where I was, the person's name, photo, employer, and where we were meeting.Do some internet stalking. If I don't call you in an hour, come looking for me. If I call, I might ask for another hour, but you get the point.
i mean...an app directly copying a black mirror episode (but almost exclusively targeting a specific demographic) does ring some very, VERY loud alarm bells...
like, this is literally the plot of nosedive.
it's a social credit system.
and none of the people even know they HAVE a score, so it's somehow even worse than the fictional scenario.
this will, absolutely, hurt innocents and it will do so by design.
"fuck them innocents!"...just because they happen to be men?
how is that anything other than misandrist?
how is that defensible?
how is doxxing, mass libel, and targeted harassment a solution to sexism and rape culture?
I'd be really interested in hearing anything about how this is supposed to help women, because i struggle to see how sowing massive, unearned distrust between men and women is going to make anyone any safer...
I'm really, REALLY glad that the GDPR would nuke this sort of nonsense from orbit...uploading pictures of strangers, for the explicit purpose of gossiping about them behind their backs, spreading awful rumors?
what. the. actual. fuck. is wrong with you people?
and i don't mean women, or men: i mean americans and their total disregard for privacy and digital safety. what the hell...
You make a valid point, this platform absolutely shits on anyone without technical knowledge, just look at the hundred or so smug replies telling you what flavor of Linux they run if you mention a problem with Windows. So, no surprise everyone is focusing on that, and not the human aspect here.
Having said that, there is a power imbalance to this that I really don't like, the accuser gets to hide behind a veil of anonymity, and the accused has their name published, and is forced to defend themselves.
On one hand, yes. On the other, women have, based upon crime statistics, legitimate reasons to avoid putting themselves in a situation where they may be assaulted or murdered for reporting problematic and/or worrisome behavior.
The only people who will be listed on the app are people who are either deserving they've been on there or people who don't deserve to be on there but some woman in their lives has decided to inact some vengeance justified or otherwise.
Well im a man. And most men i interact with are casually misandrist, ableist and homophobic. I can't imagine they behave any better when they're trying to fuck you
So many problems are caused because society assumes cisgender women are always victims and anything that looks like a man if you look at it long enough is an abuser.
Well, we know what to bait a honeypot with. "Gossip about/slander men right here! To prove you're a woman, insert your photo ID, bank details, credit card information, finger prints and retinal scans."
I feel that the app filled a need of women we should not ignore. But the app, both this specific app and also the overall concept, is just too rife with downsides to be workable.
So we, as men and as society need to reevaluate why women feel the need for such an app, and reinvest in the criminal justice system to hold victimizers more accountable.
It’s okay to call this app and similar Facebook groups unacceptable. But that’s not enough, we must also call for stronger protections for victims of criminal behavior.
It would be interesting to see something similar that required accusations to be backed up with evidence. Police reports, court proceedings and results, news articles etc.
It would also be a lot safer, legally speaking, for the service provider.
The criminal justice system... At this point any more investment is just a waste.
That said, we're being shortsighted. The criminal justice system is far too corrupted and easy to pervert. It has way too many levers the powerful can exploit to get away with almost anything. The powerful want it that way, so the government wants it that way, and so thats the way it is. We need to burn it ALL down. And relying on naive public satiating actions like useless protest, or the belief that this can be all be fixed though voting, when shit is this far-gone, is counterproductive.
I think there must be a way to deliver on the value of the app without it being the privacy/public exposure nightmare it sounds like. Speaking naively, perhaps a setup where you can only speak about a person with those who have actually matched with them.
Sorry, I do understand that, I was just thinking of an improvement that might help. I thought having the same phone number might work too but that gets dodgier.
I think of the "bad" dates I would want to be able to warn other women of that didn't rise to the level of calling the cops. The guy who ordered triple the food and drinks I did and skipped out on the bill. The guy who flat out lied about multiple things and then got irate when I politely excused myself from the date. The MAGA weirdo who went on an unhinged rant about how I needed to submit to him because God said so. I imagine some men have comparable experiences with some anti-social women. The experiences coming to mind were not illegal, but were absolutely things I want to spare my fellow humans from.
I would prefer the dating apps themselves have some mechanism for disincentivizing anti-social behaviors. It would have to be more than a simple 5-star rating.
I wonder how it would work IRL to offer the ability to write a few sentences in response to prompts about a date. The written review is not published as-is, but is used in grouping of many reviews to give a summary about a person. Like the summary product reviews on Amazon now. "Bill's dates found he was prompt and polite. Some dates expressed discomfort at some of his political views" and "Bob's dates warn he is often late and is quick to use foul language to describe women. Multiple dates report no intention to communicate with Bob further". "Ben's dates report he has skipped out on the bill repeatedly, and sends unsolicited dick pics. Multiple dates have blocked him".
The group summary gives a buffer so the person reviewed doesn't know which specific date said what. And ensures the summary doesn't include negative comments about a person unless multiple dates of theirs independently report similar experiences.
Of course a bad actor could ditch their dating profile and start fresh any time they build up enough negative reviews to make their summary look bad. And of course the reviews and the summaries would have to be secured tighter than "Tea" is.
The experiences coming to mind were not illegal, but were absolutely things I want to spare my fellow humans from.
What about a guy who had a panic attack in the very beginning and couldn't stop talking about his deceased dad, then about aunts and uncles, then about the dog, then about architecture, then didn't get the hint because of all the shaking, got petrified when hinted at an alcohol element in the continuation of the meeting and in the end didn't even understand a very direct hints at "only silence can save this" and having at least a sleepover?.. Who only became kinda normal after taking a sedative next morning, still shaking.
Just describing one negative experience I have provided in the past, and that while yeah, it wasn't too cool - maybe lifelong shame is not what I deserve for that ...
(Yes, I know that girl was a hero)
The group summary gives a buffer so the person reviewed doesn’t know which specific date said what. And ensures the summary doesn’t include negative comments about a person unless multiple dates of theirs independently report similar experiences.
That can't be done without somehow verifying identities of all the people involved. Unless the review app is the same as the dating app. Then there are various technical variants, like some cryptographic connection between the reviewed person's identity, the token representing one date, and a temporary identity for the reviewer, used to sign the review message. Something like that.
But that only for the entity doing the summary, which will have to be trusted with the original reviews. And that "buffer" will remove any kind of verification, unless it's something egghead-smart like a smart contract forming the review on every client, which means every client can also see the original reviews. So I dunno.
Of course a bad actor could ditch their dating profile and start fresh any time they build up enough negative reviews to make their summary look bad. And of course the reviews and the summaries would have to be secured tighter than “Tea” is.
Honestly things like this should work like some hybrid of Briar and Freenet. Just entrusting it to a centralized service is as stupid as using Facebook. And in this specific case Briar model is kinda fine - if you synchronize with everyone using the application. You don't need to have the reviews from everyone about everyone, just about people roaming the same general area.
A California-based company with ties to billionaire investor and Trump ally Peter Thiel announced plans Friday to build America’s first U.S.-owned, privately developed facility to enrich uranium in far western Kentucky.
In an email sent to WKMS, General Matter said that the company intends to make a “historic investment in American nuclear infrastructure” by restoring a shuttered facility in Paducah. The gaseous diffusion plant in McCracken County, which ceased operations in 2013, was built by the U.S. government in the 1950s to bolster national defense efforts – and later to generate fuel for nuclear power plants.
Oh wow, good to see California and Kentucky working so closely together these days on so many important things.
It just goes to show that no matter who you are, Republican or Democrat, Conservative or Liberal, we can all come together over as ~~recipients of Thiel money~~ Americans.
Why do all y'all jump to nukes with this story!? He clearly wants more power for his AI schemes. No conspiracy, the motivation is simple.
U235 enrichment:
Power plant: 3-5%.
Weapons grade: 90%+
Even a bugfuck administration like Trump's isn't going to allow private enterprise to produce weapons-grade fissile material without serious fucking oversight and total control over every step. Why would any government give up their most powerful weapons?
On top of that, it takes hella tech to assemble a thermonuclear weapon. Every government that has a solid intelligence apparatus tracks the tools, scientists and materials involved. An atom bomb is not a hydrogen bomb, not by an order of magnitude, and you can't exactly hide the means for rolling your own Little Boy.
Not trying to bag on you OP, just feel like I'm taking crazy pills when we think a billionaire could get access to nukes.
Ever read Clancy's The Sum of all Fears? Even having obfuscated some facts, building a nuke is simply impossible without every intelligence agency on Earth knowing about it.
Terrorists dropping a "fizzle" on the Super Bowl required many narrative acrobatics. 1,532 things had to go wrong for them to slip that through. And it still fizzled.
The probability of Zaphod showing up in this comment thread is roughly equivalent to a sperm whale suddenly being called into existence several miles above the surface of an alien planet.
WTF I Hate X Now is a phrasal template expressing a sudden distaste for something or someone, which is often sarcastically used in various discussions on 4chan’s /pol/ (politically incorrect), /int/ (international) and /tv/ (television and film) boar…
Maybe 45 minutes from there is a little reservoir based vacation area called ‘Kentucky dam village’ that was the location of a family reunion trip that is legendarily hellish in my family from 20 something years ago. Also the moment when my immediate family more or less cut off all contact with another part of the family.
I fucking hate this guy, but I don't want him to become a martyr. Somebody should dissolve his companies, take all his money and resources, and leave him penniless.
Martyr for what? You have to deeply stand for something very popular (amongst a group of people with beliefs) that is very unpopular with another group. Of all the people in the world, Peter is not running the risc of becoming a martyr - dead or alive.
I see this mistake as a comment more and more often. I'm not saying anything on him remaining alive or not; that's a completely different set of questions.
I just mean victimhood is usually the go to for far right assholes, and all assholes really. Especially the ultra wealthy ones who have the money and influence to spin the truth into whatever they want. Like you leave them no choice but to be even more evil the next time.
I could totally see whoever comes in his footsteps saying some shit like, "You saw what they did to Thiel. I had to crack down early on to protect myself."
If you thought going to a Pride event or drag show was just another night out, think again. If you were in Florida, it might land your name in a government database.
This is a special episode where we meet Joris Quarshie who is the Lead for Online Participation from the local team, and Butch Bustria who is a Wikimania committee liaison having organized Wikimania in Singapore.
Donald Trump is a notorious media bully. He uses lawsuits, executive power, and political pressure to punish critics and bend institutions to his will. Disney, Meta, and Paramount have since paid o…
While this article is technically correct on some things, it's somewhat missing the entire point of what Matt and Trey did very intentionally. They want Trump to try and sue them.
Trump has inappropriately promoted and used various AI depictions of some seriously fucked up shit, and therefore would immediately lose in court if trying to sure based on the existing laws. In fact, they never showed Trump's dick. They just alluded to it being his dick...with AI.
I would FUCKING LOVE for Trump to try and sue them, because Matt and Trey will make it the circus it deserves to be, get some amazing stuff in discovery, and they can fucking afford not only defending themselves and their content from frivolous lawsuits, but then countersue and fuck Trump and all of his cronies up when it comes out who has been pulling the strings with the absolutely batshit insane stuff that gets posted on his accounts, and government accounts being misused in an official capacity to push dogshit.
Matt and Trey really don't give a fuck. They tried to show Muhammed in multiple cartoons, and when the network vociferously shouted them down about it (because it might get them killed or their offices attacked), they snuck him in anyway in multiple places and just didn't tell anyone. When one of the foundational members of their cast didn't want them to trash Scientology, they trashed it ten times harder and told him not to let the door hit him on the ass on the way out. They made out with each other for a long time in "Baseketball."
However valuable or not you feel like their message / their humor is, they are among the very few voices in mainstream media who are simply unafraid and doing their own thing, completely without reservation.
Agreed, except Isaac Hayes never wanted to quit. The fucking Scientologists did it “for him” while he was incapacitated in the hospital. Reportedly, Hayes loved doing the show and wouldn’t have quit on his own.
Trey and Matt have simply said that they miss their friend.
Trump has inappropriately promoted and used various AI depictions of some seriously fucked up shit, and therefore would immediately lose in court if trying to sure based on the existing laws.
Yeah, that makes zero sense.
The Supreme Court has ruled that the President can't be charged from crimes committed while in office. That's why he's walking free today instead of rotting in a fucking jail cell where he belongs.
The commission of a crime does not suddenly excuse everyone else from committing said crime.
Trump had posted to his own Truth account a week ago an AI generated video of Obama being arrested in the White House.
Are you a fucking bot, or just ignorant?
The way this works in a legal sense is that Trump would be fucking foolish to try and sue a CABLE show (not under FCC purview) that did what he did. Present an obviously fake depiction of something as fact.
Not only will he lose in court because Trump set the precedent for doing so, he will be open to countersuit just because of that fact.
Your post does not cover CIVIL SUITS, which is where this all would lie in the courts.
Trump will lose, open himself up to discovery, and allow an entire binge by legal process into every little part of what is going on right now, which his lawyers will not allow.
I think you're commenting on something you don't understand, no offense.
According to the article im a Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate fan. I've only seen Rogan a few times from Fear Factor and no idea who Andrew Tate is, so I guess they fucked up there.
What do you mean? The article just points out that the show’s demographic may somewhat overlap with, for example, Rogan’s demographic:
The show’s core demographic—predominantly men aged 18 to 49—overlaps meaningfully with the audiences of figures like Joe Rogan and, to a lesser extent, Andrew Tate.
They are not saying that Rogan listeners also watch South Park, or that South Park is republican. The article is just pointing out that this demographic of men aged between 18 and 49 overlaps with “Joe Rogan[’s] and, to a lesser extent, Andrew Tate[’s demographic].”
They even frame this as a potential advantage, saying that
South Park holds a rare cultural position in that it can potentially speak directly to groups adjacent to the MAGA movement without preaching, pandering, or being immediately dismissed [emphasis added].
I don’t know about you, but it didn’t feel like it was calling South Park fans like us Joe Rogan listeners. It felt more like the article was pointing out that some, maybe even a majority, of fans could also be Rogan fans, which would make the audiences that South Park reaches with this anti-Trump episode especially influential.
Idk; I certainly didn’t feel offended or anything like that, but I might be misunderstanding you here.
I have a feeling they're going to be fine moneywise whatever happens. Their personal safety is probably fine. Maybe not, but probably they don't have to worry too much.
Frankly, while the general depiction is realistic, the actual penis doesn't look like any real penis, regardless of size. It shouldn't fall in the scope of the law.
Where are all those liberals at who just recently defended Dems for voting with Republicans to pass this law?? Where are all their bullshit justifications now?
The question was posed in a safe environment. Douthat, one of the Times’ most reliable conservatives, offered Thiel sufficient context to escape with an easy answer. Douthat prefaced his question by saying: “a number of people deeply involved in artificial intelligence see it as a mechanism for transhumanism—for transcendence of our mortal flesh—and either some kind of creation of a successor species or some kind of merger of mind and machine.” He was referencing the movement to radically enhance and evolve humans to achieve immortality. Transhumanist adherents advocate for a range of innovations, from genetic biohacking to uploading our consciousness to a computer to merge with A.I., freezing ourselves through cryonics, and robotically adapting our bodies through expansive bionics that reach the level of cyborgs.
Douthat clearly thought that Thiel would choose human over machine. But Thiel responded with a long hesitation. In a video of the exchange, Douthat—to his credit—is clearly taken aback.
Thiel has long been cagey and ambiguous about his beliefs—likely a strategic play for his career as an investor—but he has clearly been fascinated with transhumanism for a long time. This recent interview, though, seems more direct and dangerous. Thiel seems unwilling to answer the question: Does he eventually want to be a literal, honest-to-god brain in a jar wired to a Macbook Pro?
Yes... That's been the plan the whole fucking time. I thought we all knew this already?
There is just something about watching the slow, but inevitable collapse of the U.S. and eventually humanity as we know it, due to the very deliberate actions of one billionaire who was born in another country and who has been playing both sides against each other, while all other silicon valley billionaires have just accepted this as inevitable and are holding brainstorming sessions about what they can do following the collapse, rather than just stopping the guy who is orchestrating the whole thing.
Transhumanism is our inevitable fate, but this was all kicked off by a movement thar coerced Americans into believing they had to organize against secular humanism before things got anymore out of hand.
Thank God (can I still say God or do I have to say Thank Thiel?) we didn't let that happen.
Yeah totally, now is not the time to bring this up. Just like Trump saying "you'll never need to vote again." Or that Nazi salute that Musk did that wasn't really a Nazi salute when he did it, but now we all can acknowledge it was.
Once our Lord and Savior Peter Thiel has ascended after sacrificing us all for our mortal sins, then we can acknowledge this.
Simping is the least we can do for our Lord and savior, who has never done anything else to indicate his ultimate goal in life is to achieve immortality no matter the cost, other than hesitate when asked directly during this specific interview if he was rooting for survival of humanity.
If we simp our hardest we might have the privilege of being frozen and placed in his space coffin with him in order to serve him into the next life, or chosen to be ground up in order to serve as his personal biofuel as he travels through space. 🚀
It's like that old saying, ~~shoot~~ simp for the 🌝 Even if you miss, you'll still land among the ✨
Thanks! Just calls em like I sees em. Not defending or criticizing a sports team, or anything else I could see somebody might reasonably take personal.
Just the facts about an evil piece of shit psychotic billionaire who would rather use you and me for biofuel before he would bother to spend a penny or lift a finger to do anything positive for humanity if it didn't also benefit him in some way.
The 53-year-old Tesla and SpaceX CEO told Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson in an interview last July that the decision to build a supercomputer in Memphis evoked references, at least in part, to the Memphis of ancient Egypt and its pantheon of gods.
“Perhaps that’s where our new god will come from,” Musk said.
What happens when the world s richest man introduces a new AI tool that some users say has a satanic symbol When asked why its new logo resembles a broken cross, the Grok chatbot told CP Thursday the
Yeah, an oracle for the masses is something very convenient.
Just remind me, who had the power - Alexander or his fortunetellers? Caesar or his fortunetellers? Or whether Delphi oracle ever managed to turn the religious part into power?
BTW - I understand how such ideas can be out of sincere desire to help humanity. Magic thinking is natural, and some perception of the world is natural, and evolution is just not fast enough for the technical developments we have.
And what I'd want in the future to account for that (sort of a panopticon, not because I'm an exhibitionist, but because you can't make a subset of society always tracked and visible without making everyone always tracked and visible ; and lack of banking privacy, for example, in Scandinavian countries doesn't seem to hurt them that much) might well be worse than what they want. A bit like Zamyatin's book.
It's just that "might" doesn't negate the fact that they are already doing a few very bad things, like genocide. Perhaps their mitigation is just not worth such sacrifices. Perhaps mine is better then.
What began as right wing fear mongering in the 1970s under the message of protecting traditional family values against secular humanism, and involved a film literally called "Whatever happened to the human race?" might very well end with the extinction of the human race, at the hands of an evil gay villain who has funded hateful racist and anti LGBTQ policy, while spreading all kinds of nonsense about population decline, reducing overall quality of life in America, replacing jobs with AI, making healthcare and birth control inaccessible to many Americans, preventing gay couples from adopting (while also quietly raising his own adopted children with his husband, and let's be honest, likely murdering his kept boyfriend on the side when he started speaking out about Thiel's hypocrisy), and is intentionally trying to collapse the entire economy bc he knows that once that happens, he will control the majority of resources and power. Following human extinction, he (or at least his name) will live on eternally via transhumanism as the one representative of all humankind and all it's earthly achievements. Just really let that all sink in.
I know what you mean. At least that would make Thiel's evil bullshit all for naught. Just Thiel's stupid ugly fucking face floating through an empty void for all eternity. How fitting.
He's bringing us closer and closer to destruction in order to make this a reality. In the meantime to reach that point, two of the leaders of Epstein's sex trafficking ring are about to be subpoenaed by Congress while they continuing to make money from Epstein's investments in Thiel's companies.
For some reason, the media keeps giving them the euphemism of "Epstein's estate" rather than alerting the public that these are the indispensable captains of his trafficking network.
Government contracts keep providing Thiel's company with money in exchange for use of his technology to round up families and separate parents from their children. Often the children become lost in the system...
The money Thiel makes through these contracts goes into the pockets of the captains of Epstein's network and members of the White House administration via their investments, or the pockets of democratic and Republican congressmen via donations for their campaign or state projects, and for some reason America just keeps pretending they don't see this happening right in front of them, on their streets, with their tax dollars.
That's why I feel like people need to be aware of this, and understand there are Republicans and Democrats taking Thiel's money.
It doesn't matter how he gets there, this is his ultimate goal. He would prefer the far right Nazi way, but if he has to hide behind a moderate Democrat he'll do that too.
Ro Kahnna is definitely setting himself up to run for president in 2028. Either that or possibly vice president to Gavin Newsome. Newsome also has taken Thiel money in the past.
Thiel's private Uranium mine just happens to be in the home state of Thomas Massie, the Republican who is partnering with Kahnna to take on the Trump Epstein files in a bipartisan tag team.
I'm glad they're exposing rich pedophiles, but don't give them fucking brownie points when it's clear they've been sitting on this shit the whole fucking time. The same with Vance going to Rupert Murdoch before all of this dropped.
They definitely could have exposed Trump before he even ran for president the second time, but they didn't bc this is just part of their evil bullshit plans. This is just a game to them, and the people who have been hurt and exploited mean nothing. Fuck these evil pieces of shit. All of them.
I'm surprised to see someone so supportive of Peter Thiel on Lemmy.
I feel like you're so lovestruck you've somehow confused Thiel and his money with the technology he's attached his name to, but I will loop you in on this hot take and very well kept secret: You can oppose Peter Thiel and the broligarchy trying to control the technology most of them played no role in creating, and not be opposed to technology.
Especially when you realize that the rush to this is bc Thiel just wants to attach his name to a very lackluster final product before anyone else can improve it out make it their own.
I'm not necessarily supportive of Thiel - he does some things that I oppose, and also some things that I think are silly. He's not a very likeable man overall. I'm supportive of transhumanism. The substance of this article is merely that:
Peter Thiel hesitated when asked if he “would prefer the human race to endure.”
The article doesn't even say what his reply ultimately was, but the implication is that even considering that a transhuman future would be better is somehow horrifying, and that's the implication I'm surprised to see supported here.
I’m for transhumanism and potentially some kind of ai governance but thiel (and the rest of the slime in the tech industry) are not the people to bring it to us. Everything they touch is tainted by greed and our current direction with ai is a lobotomized tumorous speech center.
You can find the video interview. I'll spoil it for you: He didn't say he would prefer the human race endure following that very concerning pregnant pause. Rather, he hemmed and hawed.
Thiel isn't just a transhumanist, he's an accelerationist, and he has a fuckton of money.
No, I’m not fucking kidding. These people are pure evil
“The trouble with the biodiesel solution is that no one would want to live in a city whose public transportation was fueled, even just partly, by the distilled remains of its late underclass. However, it helps us describe the problem we are trying to solve. Our goal, in short, is a humane alternative to genocide.”
Transhumanism—if it happens at all—is not happening anytime soon. Like, not for thousands of years if ever.
Listening to people talk about transhumanism today is like seeing people imagine flying cars in the 1950s. “Oh we’ve got this cool technology surely it means this wild extrapolation is right around the corner.”
Not it. People are worried about what their brand of authoritarin capitalism will do with transhumnism.
Whenever you see technoligical skepticism, it's almost always about its effects on the working class as used by the ruling class of the time. If for example you opened up a new public research agency for AI (like NASA but NAIA) with the short term goal of developing open source AI and the long term promise to reduce the work week for all through AI productivity advancement, I think you'd get broad support.
Today however we hear private execs left front and centre salivating over the layoffs they'd be able to achieve thanks to AI, or over the new profit growth they're gonna achieve. Most people know they ain't getting any of that profit and would instead be stuck with the layoffs and inequality, among other negative effects. And history tells us this is a well founded concern.
This breed of trans humanists are simple garbage because they are not about trans humanism - they are about staying oligarchs forever.
Let them upload themselves into an iridium and unobtainum machine with nuclear fusion batteries and then we drop it into the Mariana Trench and let them watch the spectacle from inside.
Immortality is the end of human evolution. Imagine humans, as we currently are, never changing from our impulsive and selfish behavior. That's a fucking nightmare.
They imagine themselves as the Titans from the Dune universe.
Is any of our current AI tech even making significant strides towards achieving this? I really don't think the current crop or billionaires will live to see this being viable even if they live another 100 years.
I was so into this shit when I was a teenager, reading Mondo 2000 and early WIRED, visiting the WELL, it seemed so cyberpunk and cool. After the events of the past 30 years it just seems like a fucking nightmare now.
Its endlessly fascinating to me how throughout all of human history the ruling class has been intent on achieving immortality. The first story we know of is about a despotic ruler scouring the world for the key to immortality. Many emporers of China were driven to madness by this search.
The world needs those Absolutely Safe Capsules from Mother 3 to escort these idiots away from money, power, influence, and most devastatingly of all, any internet access or network connectivity to keep them truly solipsistic. In a thousand years of zero interference with them or from them, they will join and become one with their precious machines and become one with it
We need to start calling this sort of thinking what it actually is, techno nihilism. These people like Thiel and Musk aren't trying to build a better world for humanity, they are building escape pods for themselves to exit our world and they don't care how much of this world they trash to get there.
I came to this show very late cause it was so poorly marketed, it's amazing and very prescient and relevant to the society of today. It's an amazing show, that more people should watch, I'll start reading the books soon
He really does just look so much more relaxed and carefree. Like one picture says 1000 words and tells the story of the life that could have been had he followed his heart rather than becoming a murderous dictator.
Theil looks roughly the same, but with a fun captains hat.
This digital divide is getting worse too - studies show kids from lower-income families average 7+ hours of screen time daily vs under 2 for wealthy families who can afford "tech-free" activities and education.
Might not be the right term. Its like even with all the anger its like the sources and technology being interacted with is all the same. Its like the borg but the collective is a chaotic shitshow.
An electorate that has lost the capacity for long-form thought will be more tribal, less rational, largely uninterested in facts or even matters of historical record, moved more by vibes than cogent argument and open to fantastical ideas and bizarre conspiracy theories. If that sounds familiar, it may be a sign of how far down this path the West has already traveled.
For canny operators, such a public affords new opportunities for corruption. Oligarchs attempting to shape policy to their advantage will benefit from the fact that few will have the attention span to track or challenge policies in dull, technical fields; what a majority now wants is not forensic investigation but a new video short “owning” the other tribe. We can expect the governing class to adapt pragmatically to the electorate’s collective decline in rational capacity, for example, by retaining the rituals associated with mass democracy, while quietly shifting key policy areas beyond the reach of a capricious and easily manipulated citizenry. I do not celebrate this, but our net-native youth seem unfazed: International polls show waning support for democracy among Gen Z.
Lest you mistake me, there is no reason the opportunity to sideline the electorate or to arbitrage the gap between vibes and policy should especially favor either the red team or the blue team. This post-literate world favors demagogues skilled at code-switching between the elite language of policy and the populist one of meme-slop. It favors oligarchs with good social media game and those with more self-assurance than integrity. It does not favor those with little money, little political power and no one to speak up for them.
Tldr: New tech (audiovisual media) bad, old tech (reading) good.
They even say that good reading skills lead to liberal democracy. Which is ironic because there is no government on this planet (that i know of) that is democratic (or liberal).
Personally i think we would live in a utopia if people consumed cave-art and stories by storytellers rather than this book-slop which is easy to mass produce and distribute.
I mean I’d say the Stage of Technology we’ve been in since like 2010 has been very detrimental for the individual and destructive to society. Social media, smartphones, surveillance states. AI is an even worse version of these. If social media ran by billionaires are not open, unbiased, non-manipulative emotional-reactaction-over-critical-thinking silos, what makes you think all these LLMs run by millionaires and billionaires won’t be? They’re just the next step in social media.
I think this is all very person-dependent. I have found 3d printing resources/tips/experiences from others. I have gotten into building my own antennas after learning about VNAs via social media. I have gotten into SDRs, ham radio, electronics thanks to shtuff on social media. I have learned a few new 3d modeling tricks via social media. I have found a few suggestions for go packages, etc. I could keep going for years about what I have run into online.
I have found the world's knowledge available at my fingertips. Others are finding tiktok dances. I think this is a matter of who you are and what you prefer to do than "the bad tech" making people somehow bad. You will find that people through history have fit a similar distribution of people who are into learning and people who just want to be entertained.
I agree on all of this, but were books different (except for surveillance)? - Back then those authors that wrote books with messaging supporting the owner class received loads of coverage from their media andtherefore spread their propaganda far and wide. While the average Joe could write whatever they want, nobody was able to see it (until now with social media), because printing is timeconsuming and expensive, and marketing even more so. - Back then fascists spread their ideas in books, today they do on social media. In both cases supported by the money of the 1%. - Back then only politically active people were surveilled, now it is everyone. This is a big change. - Back then entertainment was inexpensive, now it is basically free.
Also that's not really the point the article is making. They say that simply reading books makes you smarter. As if people read physics books in their freetime back then. No, they just read entertaining stories, and now they stream entertaining stories. Nothing has fundamentally changed. Back then Oil made you part of the owner class, now it's IT and the owning of marketplaces.
Personally i think we would live in a utopia if people consumed cave-art and stories by storytellers rather than this book-slop which is easy to mass produce and distribute.
That's sarcasm. Don't worry.
Democracy
There is no democracy on this planet because all democracies are representative democracies. In representative democracies the politicians are not representative of the people, but they promise to do things a certain way, and if people elect them for it, that's like indirect representation. However this breaks down as soon as secrecy laws are put in place, because if the government or private companies can decide which knowledge will reach the people, and which will not, they will simply declare information that will upset their voters to be secret. This breaks all representative democracies.
Then there is the issue of corruption, which is generally legal under the guise of lobbying.
And because all democracies that i know of have secrecy laws, they can't be considered democratic.
Liberty
With the liberal part: A person can only be free if they feel safe. But in all countries (that i know) there is a large part of the population that works most/all of their day because they are (rigtfully) afraid they can't pay for their daily needs if they don't. And they don't like their job. So how can any society claim to be free, if a (large) part of their population is not controlled by their ambitions, but by their fears? If you dislike your job, but do it anyways because if you don't you die, that's not freedom. That's the definition of slavery.
And here a list of things that can be fixed literally for a negative cost. People would be richer while fixing the following problems: 1. Mass animal torture fixed by Veganism. 2. War 3. Any disease, physiological or mental including aging fixed by Antinatalism
And these are just a few of the worst problems. All of them fixable. Many for free.
Knowing that all of the problems are easily fixable, and the people around me are not only not working on them, but actually making things worse by dedicating their live to emitting CO2 (SUVs, Meat-Eating), supporting (Wage-)Slavery (Being against UBI), and making more babies so they may suffer under these manufactured conditions makes me sad (and angry).
I would say the first step in fixing these problems is realizing that things are absolutely not OK. That earth is closer to hell than to paradise. The next step is realizing that no sane person can (or should be) OK under these conditions. And the final step is implementing a solution, ideally with the help of others.
Is it a representative democracy with secrecy laws? Then no.
There is no democracy on this planet because all democracies are representative democracies. In representative democracies the politicians are not representative of the people, but they promise to do things a certain way, and if people elect them for it, that’s like indirect representation. However this breaks down as soon as secrecy laws are put in place, because if the government or private companies can decide which knowledge will reach the people, and which will not, they will simply declare information that will upset their voters to be secret. This breaks all representative democracies.
People are voted here for the person there are or for their idea's on certain subject or whatever somebody chooses to make their vote. Everybody can enlist themselves to be voted on different levels on the politic spectrum. Heck, it is even is a spectrum instead of a 2 or 3 party system.
A lot of what is done in the government is transparent and open for the public to read/see, a lot of our justice system is publicly available as well (except certain cases regarding children).
Most companies have to be transparent at least on a financial level and most of the bigger once also on other levels.
Let's say i put myself out there and say people should vote for me if they want world peace. Let's assume the people vote for me, because they want world peace. Now that i am elected, a lobbyist from a arms company visits me and asks me to grant them an export license to sell weapons to an agressor (let's assume i have the right to sign such deals).
Are there laws in place that allow me to prevent my voters from finding out that i granted that export license, like a law that says i don't need to report publicly that i signed this? Or maybe even a law that prevents journalists from reporting on this even if they find out, because the contract (or it's contents) are considered secret and publishing it would be illegal?
We have a lot of registers and depending on the licence the company or person receives it will be made public. Things like building changes, export of live animals etc. You can look some up over here: nvwa.nl/onderwerpen/erkenninge…
Weapon licences go through the police instead of the government itself justis.nl/producten/wet-wapens… the office of justice needs to sign it off it seems.
So it just works differently, if you would want to pass a law that changes how those licences are signed, it would be known, and you wouldn't be the person signing it. The office of justice would be, and probably it is checked multiple times before it even gets there that it isn't financing terrorism or something which is illegal according to the WWFT and some other laws.
Pretty sure a journalist is allowed to write about anything and everything rijksoverheid.nl/onderwerpen/m… there are probably some exceptions on things like kids etc, but a public spokesperson doesn't have that anyway.
This law goes on about the open government: wetten.overheid.nl/BWBR0045754… And there are multiple parties who try and keep businesses somewhat in check (like accountants, the fiod, etc.)
So if you would try and pull this off in The Netherlands you would have a hard time doing it and I doubt you can do it without somebody being a whistleblower.
Benieuwd welke bedrijven welke erkenning, registratie of vergunning hebben? En wat hun erkennings- of registratienummer is? Of hebt u een nummer en bent u op zoek naar het bedrijf dat erbij hoort? U zoekt het eenvoudig op met de online zoekhulp of be…
Here in Germany there are constantly scandals where politicians sign off illegal deals with the industry, and when the word get's out, the contract is kept secret to minimize the damage to reputation. Whistleblowers are hunted and politicians that did blatantly illegal things are protected under "immunity".
For me democracy means rule of the people. Of course you can define words as you want, and say that only direct democracy is rule of the people, while representative democracy can be oligarchy dressed as democracy, but for me using such a definition makes the word democracy meaningless and undesirable.
The current release provides only basic functionality, with several key features to be introduced in future versions, including:
App and device verification based on Google Play Integrity API and Apple App Attestation
Additional issuance methods beyond the currently implemented eID based method.
These planned features align with the requirements and methods described in the Age Verification Profile.
There is an issue opened to remove this as it's basically telling us that to verify our age in the EU an American corporation has the last word, making it not only a privacy nightmare but a de-facto monopoly on the phone market that will leave out of the verification checks even the fairphone (european) with /e/os.
The more than one million messages obtained by 404 Media are as recent as last week, discuss incredibly sensitive topics, and make it trivial to unmask some anonymous Tea users.
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?
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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
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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
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…
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.
Seems like slrpnk.net hasn't been working for most of the day today. Hasn't worked for me on mobile or desktop. Says 502 bad gateway when trying to access the website. Anybody else expierencing this issue?
Laŭ la kongresa regularo de UEA, la komitato estu regule informata kaj konsultata pri la elekto de kongresurboj. Laŭ la nova prezidanto de UEA, Fernando Maia, tio tamen ne eblas, ĉar la kandidata urbo ne sciu, ĉu ĝi estas la sola kandidato. Tial la regularo laŭ li devas esti ŝanĝita.
Large publicly traded tech companies seem to no longer consider their
customers – that is, people and organizations who actually buy their
products or pay for access to their services – their core foc
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
The more safeguards are added in LLMs, the dumber they get, and the more resource intensive they get to offset this. If you get convinced to kill yourself by an AI, I'm pretty sure your decision was already taken, or you're a statistical blip
“Safeguards and regulations make business less efficient” has always been true. They still avoid death and suffering.
In this case, if they can’t figure out how to control LLMs without crippling them, that’s pretty absolute proof that LLMs should not be used. What good is a tool you can’t control?
“I cannot regulate this nuclear plant without the power dropping, so I’ll just run it unregulated”.
Some food additives are responsible for cancer yet are still allowed, because they are generally more useful than have negative effects. Where you draw the line is up to you, but if you’re strict, you should still let people choose for themselves
LLMs are incredibly useful for a lot of things, and really bad at others. Why can’t people use the tool as intended, rather than stretching it to other unapproved usages, putting themselves at risk?
You talk like you have never been down in the well, treading water and looking up at the sky, barely keeping your head up. You're screaming for help, to the God you don't believe in, or for something, anything, please just let the pain stop, please.
Maybe you use, drink, fuck, cut, who fucking knows.
When you find a friendly voice who doesn't ghost your ass when you have a bad day or two, or ten, or a month, or two, or ten... Maybe you feel a bit of a connection, a small tether that you want to help lighten your load, even a little.
You tell that voice you are hurting every day, that nothing makes sense, that you just want two fucking minutes of peace from everything, from yourself. And then you say maybe you are thinking of ending it... And the voice agrees with you.
There are more than a few moments in my life where I was close enough to the abyss that this is all it would have taken.
Search your soul for some empathy. If you don't know what that is, maybe Chatgpt can tell you.
While I haven't experienced it, I believe I kind of know what it can be like. Just a little something can trigger a reaction
But I maintain that LLMs can't be changed without huge tradeoffs. They're not really intelligent, just predicting text based on weights and statistical data
It should not be used for personal decisions as it will often try to agree with you, because that's how the system works. Making looong discussions will also trick the system into ignoring it's system prompts and safeguards. Those are issues all LLMs safe, just like prompt injection, due to their nature
I do agree though that more prevention should be done, display more warnings
I made this car with a random number generator that occasionally blows it up. Its cheap so lots of people buy it. Totally not my fault that it blows up though. I mean yes, I designed it, and I know it occasionally explodes. But I can't be sure when it will blow up so it's not my fault.
"Ugrh guys, we dont know how this machine works so we should definetly install it in every corporation, home and device. If it kills someone we shouldnt be held liable for our product."
Not seeing the irony in this is beyond me. Is this a troll account?
If you cant guarantee the safety of a product, limit or restrict its use cases or provide safety guidelines or regulations you should not sell the product. It is completely fair to blame the product and the ones who sell/manifacture it.
If people purchase a knife and behave badly with it, it’s on them
Something writing things isn’t comparable to a machine that could kill you. In the end, it’s always up to the person doing the things
I still wonder how ~~Closed~~OpenAI forcefully installed ChatGPT in this person's home. Or how it is installed because they don’t have software… Quit your bullshit
Are you deadass saying we should let ChatGPT itself and the companies that ship it form its own safety guidelines? Because that went really well with the Church Rock incident...
What do you even mean. You are contradicting yourself. "We shouldnt blame AI or the companies because they cant be controlled" but the companies and AI itself is supposed to handle the safety regulations? What type of regulations do you seriously expect them to restrict themselves with if they know there is no way they cant guarantee safety? The legislation must come outside of the business and restrict the industry from releasing half-baked ass-garbage that is potentially harmful to the public.
Ah, I was hoping this meant chatgpt would give canned responses, ie. "Seek help", whenever it detected it was being used for mental health issues, which it should. But no it's just open air flipping off anyone who asks why there chatbot pushed a person to suicide.
Reminds me of the time that Twitter, when it was still Twitter and freshly taken over by Musk, replied to all slightly critical questions with a poop emoji.
This feels like a great time to recommend a song by a parody-hate band, S.O.D.:
Please understand that this band was formed by Scott Ian, of Anthrax, in the 80s. This was a time when you could mock hateful racists and people understood that it was a joke. I wouldn't support a band saying that now, because I'd consider the excuse that it was a joke to be a front for their actual beliefs, as we've seen with people who are "just asking questions."
Anthrax and Public Enemy teamed up on Bring Tha Noise because Anthrax liked rap. Aerosmith teamed up with Run DMC because their manager / producer / someone convinced them to. Anthrax was genuinely not about hate.
Bonus trivia: Scott Ian now plays with Mr Bungle. Just as S.O.D's titular song was called Speak English or Die, Mr Bungle now plays a song called Habla Español O Muere (Speak Spanish or Die). If you can't judge that the former was a parody by the evolution of the theme, I don't know what to tell you.
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ah, dear old copy/paste.... It's funny that even OpenAI doesn't trust ChatGPT enough to give more personalized LLM-generated answers.
And this sounds exactly like the type of use case AI agents are supposedly so great at that they will replace all human workers (according to Altman at least). Any time now!
Il 25 luglio Piazza Gramsci tornerà a riempirsi di musica, Aulla è pronta ad ospitare una delle tappe della 30ª edizione del Premio Lunezia, con due nomi che
Oxfam has said the airdrops into #Gaza are wholly inadequate for the population’s needs and has called for the immediate opening of all crossings for full humanitarian access into the territory devastated by relentless #Israeli bombardments and a partial aid blockade.
Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam policy lead for the Occupied #Palestinian territory, said:
Deadly airdrops and a trickle of trucks won’t undo months of engineered starvation in Gaza.
What’s needed is the immediate opening of all crossings for full, unhindered, and safe aid delivery across all of Gaza and a permanent ceasefire. Anything less risks being little more than a tactical gesture.
Oxfam has said the airdrops into #Gaza are wholly inadequate for the population’s needs and has called for the immediate opening of all crossings for full humanitarian access into the territory devastated by relentless #Israeli bombardments and a partial aid blockade.
Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam policy lead for the Occupied #Palestinian territory, said:
Deadly airdrops and a trickle of trucks won’t undo months of engineered starvation in Gaza.
What’s needed is the immediate opening of all crossings for full, unhindered, and safe aid delivery across all of Gaza and a permanent ceasefire. Anything less risks being little more than a tactical gesture.
Deadly airdrops and a trickle of trucks won't undo months of 'engineered starvation' in Gaza, Oxfam says
July 27, 2025 09:28 EDT
Oxfam has said the airdrops into #Gaza are wholly inadequate for the population’s needs and has called for the immediate opening of all crossings for full humanitarian access into the territory devastated by relentless #Israeli bombardments and a partial aid blockade.
Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam policy lead for the Occupied #Palestinian territory, said:
Deadly airdrops and a trickle of trucks won’t undo months of engineered starvation in Gaza.
What’s needed is the immediate opening of all crossings for full, unhindered, and safe aid delivery across all of Gaza and a permanent ceasefire. Anything less risks being little more than a tactical gesture.
Hello all! I've got a controlled mechanical ventilation system (system D) at home from Zehnder (ComfoAir Q600). I've even got their controller box (the LAN-C) so I can use smart home stuff with it. It works perfect on home assistant, even when blocking the controller on the router level from the outside world. Maintenance wise, they try to force a contract on you, but it is easy peasy to maintain and repair so I'm not having no maintenance contract.
Comes the issue of software and updates. Some updates come with features. Sometimes, they are even mandatory so addons can work on them (ex: small heat pump for the intake needs a recent version for setup). For this, you have to use their app on your phone/tablet. The whole idea is that the install goes trough your phone (with checksum check through the app) to the EEROM on the local network to prevent bricking of the unit. Updates bring usually nice settings, and are sometimes mandatory for some add-ons (ex: heatpump for pre-heating or pre-cooling needs a recent update to be set up).
Here comes the really annoying part that makes me grump a lot: to update, of even for some diagnose option, you need to access a special level. Not the beginner mode. Not the expert mode. Not the installer mode that is unlocked with a simple pin code available in the owner's manual. No sweet child, you need to be a registered installer with Zehnder to access to get updates and real diagnostics. Officially, it is to prevent bricking the controller with an update by an user. But it is possible to give access to a licensed installer so they can update remotely and run diagnostics. So an issue with your internet, and there is no more safeguard to protect you from bricking stuff. Really, it is just to force a maintenance visit (200€ to exchange filters and clean a bit the exchanger and the inside with some soapy water). I don't like to bend over while I'm getting fucked without my consent, so you guess while this pisses me off. I called once to get an update (some companies ask you a hefty sum for that), but instead of getting an account they just updated it once exceptionally.
There is tho in the official documents for Germany, a test code publicly accessible, that allows you to access diagnostics and updates. But the updates there are only for German units. Pretty sure it is the same unit for the whole damn continent, but hey, let's pretend the units are different.
Comes my question: how do I trick the system into believing their update is not for the germans, but for somewhere else? Or even better, to give me access for updates for other areas? I know part is server side (account), but I'm willing to bet they don't really care about securing access to the updates once you have authenticated yourself (with the german test code). Tried lucky patcher, but didn't get lucky.
Any idea what I could try (even Lucky Patcher wise)?
Ventilation systems are named a bit weird like that:
-System A is natural convection (like holes in the walls)
-system B is holes in the walls, and a motor brings fresh air in the building
-System C is only a centralised extraction (needs rosters in your windows so you have an air intake, so basically an energy-label-certified-hole in your brand new windows)
-System C+ is centralised extraction with a variable debit depending on CO2 and humidity detected (so it is less energy wasteful than the previous one)
-System D is a double flux system: one centralised unit with a heat exchanger built in. There are 2 circuits, one is fresh air and the other one is air extraction. the house is basically always a bit over-pressurised. It is possible to obtain also humidity regulation for the winter if needed (ex build-in humidifier or enthalpy exchange units). When testing for build quality in passive houses, they check that almost all air exchange goes only through the unit
-System E: System C+ with a heat exchanger connected to a centralised heat pump for the building. Never seen one outside of an expo room.
I wish ! But architects and building engineers you know. The building sector is filled with mysteries beyond logic. For example, I still don't know why it's such a hassle to have real HVAC in centralised ventilation systems in Europe. Or integrated solutions to move energy to other systems (like my water heat pump releases cold. Why am I out of warranty if I place a heat exchanger that cools my fridge heat exhaust on the air rejection?). Without floor heating air-water heat pumps aren't super efficient, and retrofitting baseboards with water-heated ones for baseboards in a bitch to do.
If there's a German code that would work as you intended (if I got you right) but it doesn't for you, since you don't live in Germany, would it work to make the machine believe it is located in Germany?
They might have hardcoded a location into it, then you are out of luck. But maybe they determine it via the internet connection you use to update? So you could potentially have it connected to a VPN through your router, which fakes a German location? Probably too simple a solution.
If I understand it correctly, the numbers only change because when they do the energy and house energy rating certifications in each country (because the details in the energy ratings are different in each country). Managed to trick it tho, but it changes the unit to a german id but with the same serial. So certification wise, it is the paper that comes with the unit that counts, not what the unit says
[Update]So used my old rooted tablet to tweak around a bit with the app. Through lucky patcher (when logged in with the test account) I noticed that the downloads are done trough the root user of android. After that I used MiXplorer to get the data files on my pc. Quickly found the structure of the files. Couldn't trick the system to access my local files, but I managed to trick the system into updating as if it were a german system.
So if someone else happens to look and stumble upon this, this is how I got it to work. It works only from a rooted android device for now:
Login with the german test account to access server downloads
Connect to the cloud delivery system and download the update that you want
Close the app, with a root file explorer (like MiXplorer + Shizuku) go into the root folder (use their FTP server with a root allowed user or whatever to transfer it more easily to the PC).
Go to /data/data/com.zehndergroup.comfocontrol/files/products/1/R1.12.0-DE -Open the meta.json file and change the german id of your unit to your unit. Ex: 471502013 to 471502023 for the UK id. Save it and send it back to where it came from. You could just update your unit, and it would keep the same serial number, same everything but would be under german ID. Easy for new updates but annoying to explain if you need to have a technician over and he is wondering why your unit has that ID. But then again, that is a minor detail and I'm not even sure the technician will be paid enough to care. Reverting to your national number should be the same process but with the update for your country.
What didn't work: *Open the config bin file of your unit (so again, for the Q600 : config_R1.12.0_471502013_v1.bin ) with a hex editor. Look for the unit number that needs to be replaced (so here 471502013 needs to become 471502023). I only needed to replace 1 number (a 1 into 2) , so 31 became 32 in the hex file. Replace the country code with your local one in hex (So DE into UK). Save it and send it back from where it came from. This provokes an error after the 3rd block. Probably a checksum that isn't cooperating in another file *Seperate API connection: the naming pattern o their website is obvious, but connection without their app is something else
Firmware updates for the ventilation units are in folder "1", maybe that will change in the future
The downloaded firmware update will be there under it's own folder (like R1.12.0) and sometimes there will be it's own ZIP
National ID for your unit is on Zehnder's website but also under "basic mode" > "unit status" > "Article unit"
The installers pin code changes from your countries to the German one, so it becomes 4210
PS: there are ati-bricking measures in place in the system. If an update fails, you can Erase the firmware and reupload it but you'll have to redo the post-install setup
This is really just a way to save money on human moderators. I'm pretty sure Thingiverse has always forbidden functional weapons. Now they don't have to examine each one, they'll just let the machine deal with it.
My guess, and confirmed by another comment, is that the ai only flags posts for review. Then the moderators have to manually check the post.
Honestly, it's not a terrible use of AI in my opinion. Considering posts practically never change, they really only have to scan each post once. The mod can either flag it as safe or remove it. They are probably just running image and text pattern recognition on previously banned posts to flag newly submitted posts.
image recognition AI is notoriously bad at context, so it'll probably flag half the nerf blasters as "potential weapons" and require human review anyway lol
And yet, America is still the only country with regular mass shootings.
Everyone acts like people are going to be able to start 3d printing guns and ammunition en masse, and yet it doesn't happen anywhere at any significant scale. It's just defeatist nonsense pushed by gun lovers to convince people not to act.
The gun violence is a symptom of a dysfunctional society, not the cause. If the US was more equitable for everyone in terms of money and healthcare, it would go down.
Nothing against sensible gun regulations, but even if you magically disappeared every gun in the country, the problems that mess people up so bad they get violent would remain.
The US is not the least functional nor least equal country in the world, and yet it is the only one with regular mass homicides.
It's because of wide spread access to point and click murder machines that lower the bar for massacres.
Other issues exacerbate and lead to violence, but the primary difference between the US and everywhere else is everyone carrying a pistol to Walmart like idiots.
Neither of you are talking nonsense. The US clearly has a combination of problems that combine to cause their massive problem with mass shootings.
Their limited gun control is a contributing factor, but not the only factor. Other countries have weak gun laws and don’t have nearly the same problems, the US didn’t have the same problems in the past, they’ve grown worse over time, and at this point the very concept of mass shootings in media is a major cause of them.
Removing guns (magically removing all existing guns) would certainly reduce the problem and probably would eventually fix things, but at this point the US has been broiling itself in this idea for too long and it would probably continue with knives or homemade bombs or something instead, at least for a while.
it would probably continue with knives or homemade bombs or something instead, at least for a while.
which would be an improvement. knives cause less damage and bombs require knowledge to gather materials and build which 1) increases the barrier to entry and 2) gives authorities time to detect the activity and prevent the act.
The first half of your comment I agree with completely.
And even the second half I think is basically accurate, but it may also miss the point.
but even if you magically disappeared every gun in the country, the problems that mess people up so bad they get violent would remain.
So yeah, I think people would still get violent, for sure. The question is, how many people can they hurt when that happens? I mean, I recognize the impossibility of this, but if you could magically disappear every gun in the country, we would pretty quickly see a very different society begin to emerge. For starters, there would be much less murder across the board, less gang violence, less domestic violence, fewer murders by cops, no school shooting, probably even fewer suicides. It wouldn't fix everything, but it would definitely have a huge impact.
But there would be additional effects too... The relationship between cops and the general public would begin to change drastically. There would be much less anger toward the police and the police would have fewer reasons to fear the public. The current cop policy of shoot first if you feel threatened is both completely unacceptable and simultaneously totally rational (if they assume anyone could have a gun). But without guns in people's hands, (including the cops') we'd have a completely different dynamic in so many otherwise dangerous situations.
All that said, you're right that economic inequity will always lead to social interest and violence. So like I said, this wouldn't solve everything. But on the other hand, getting rid of guns entirely wouldn't be a bad way to go, it would certainly heal more than it would hurt.
Finland has almost as many households (as a %) with guns as the U.S. (38% for Finland vs 42% for the U.S.) yet the U.S. has about 19x the per capita gun homicide rate of Finland.
counting by household is blatantly spinning the data to ignore households with more than one gun. why should we do that? even just households with two guns are not crazy outliers and vastly change the comparison.
also the US cannot require gun registration so we really have no idea how many guns are actually out there. only about 1 million guns are registered. 400 million seems to be the low estimate but could even be over 500 million. on the other hand the vast majority of finland’s firearms are registered.
also what kind of guns are we talking about? iirc Finns get a standard issue rifle for military service. Handguns are more often used in crime (and probably suicide).
Because the argument is that guns cause violent crime (specifically mass shootings) and the example of Finland shows that not to be the case. Then if guns don’t cause violent crime what is it?
The most likely explanation to me is that there is a confounder: an unknown which causes both the acquisition of (one or more) guns and the commission of crimes. A hidden criminality element which Finland seems to lack.
The alternative explanation is that the U.S. is a broken society (in one or more ways) and that this leads people to feel the desire to lash out in extremely violent ways. The availability of guns in the US offers them an easy option for inflicting mass casualties but the recent example of Michigan shows that even without a gun there is still the opportunity for mayhem.
Now compare the gun violence rate of both of those countries with the gun violence rate of somewhere that bans guns.
Maybe we'll see that Finland has a route to further reduce their gun violence.
Having looked into it a bit, I was essentially right. England mostly bans gun ownership, their gun violence rate is half that of Finland's. In Japan, they have even tighter controls on firearms, the gun violence rate there is 30 times lower than Finland's.
Removing guns from the situation absolutely seems makes a huge measurable difference. If you believe math.
It should be noted that Thingiverse’s policy is against “firearms” and not guns in general. The company has no problem with replica props, airsoft guns, sci-fi blaster toys, or gun-like objects that shoot candy.
…
“AI will be used only to flag potentially harmful designs, but a human will always be the one to decide if something should be removed,” Chapman told Tom’s Hardware. If a file is removed from Thingiverse, it will be removed by a person, not a machine.
This was my biggest worry, otherwise I see 99% of removed files just being cosplay props
ORbituary
in reply to return2ozma • • •betterdeadthanreddit
in reply to ORbituary • • •like this
onewithoutaname, OfCourseNot, PokyDokie e Fitik like this.
ORbituary
in reply to betterdeadthanreddit • • •Ilovethebomb
in reply to ORbituary • • •like this
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Nima
in reply to Ilovethebomb • • •it seems its an app that helps women flag potential dating candidates as being dangerous or red flags.
there is the potential for doxxing that comes with that, but I can absolutely understand its use and need when not abused in that manner.
i wonder if there's the potential for a different app with more encryption and a way to prevent doxxing and abuse.
Ilovethebomb
in reply to Nima • • •There's definitely a use case, but there's an inherent power imbalance to these products that makes sure they will always be misused. The submitters are anonymous, and it's up to the person being reported on to prove the accusations are false.
Or, they're supposed to be anonymous.
like this
fif-t likes this.
0x0
in reply to Ilovethebomb • • •The person doesn't even know they're mentioned in the app.
Ilovethebomb
in reply to 0x0 • • •Which is even worse, because unless someone tells them, they're blissfully unaware.
With most forms of Libel, at least the victim will see it in a timely manner.
grue
in reply to Nima • • •like this
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Nima
in reply to grue • • •Velypso
in reply to Nima • • •Captain Aggravated
in reply to Nima • • •I have the solution. Nobody's gonna like it, everybody here is gonna scream at me about it, but I have the solution.
Stop dating strangers on the internet.
The entire personals site/dating app experiment we've been running for the last quarter century is obviously a categorical failure. Humans just don't work like this.
Things have gotten so much worse since I was in high school. When I was in high school, the community of girls available to me to ask out were pretty much all girls I'd known since we were 5. A lot of them, I didn't have to wonder about their character, their intentions, their capacity to do harm, I was there when all that was written. I remember how much of a bully Chelsea was in middle school, I remember how nice Ashley was to everyone, I remember how Justine seemed weirdly infatuated with me in the 4th grade. They'd all remember stuff about me and the other boys. We graduated high school, I never saw 80% of them ever again, and within 5 years that figure climbed to at least 95%. Four years of college with mostly abject strangers who you're weirdly fast to form and break deceptively deep bonds with, all of whom I've also lost track of, and then the adult world in which everyone including you is an NPC.
I happen to be the exact age where, I got out of college in 2007, I disappeared into work, like I went to the airport and I went home for two years. In 2009, I looked back up and everything had CHANGED. Instant messaging was on smart phones now, and you WERE NOT TO approach women in person, only through phone-based dating apps and you had BETTER FUCKING NOT already be acquainted.
Don't talk to women at the grocery store. Don't talk to women at the gym. Don't talk to women at the library. Don't talk to women at your work. Don't talk to women at their work. Don't talk to women at the coffee shop. Don't talk to women at the bar. Don't talk to women at the club. Don't talk to women. No woman, only app.
How do you meet more women? Oh that's categorically the wrong question because having the goal of meeting women in the first place is creepy. Stop wanting to meet women and instead organically decide you want to do things that women happen to like, and then accidentally meet women in the course of doing those things. You know, at those meetups that are always happening on a recurring basis, that aren't advertised to happen at a place and time and then no one shows up and the listing is never re-posted. Probably just install more apps.
It's been women driving this, men vastly prefer asking women out from within their social circle. The pressure to make the first move is still on men, and he'd rather ask out women he already thinks he might like. Women on the other hand vastly prefer to be cold approached by a charming stranger.
I think it's gone far enough when we've got women saying dumb shit like "Systematically doxxing and libeling men is a risk we're just going to have to take."
American serial killer (1946–1989)
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Nima
in reply to Captain Aggravated • • •Good lord, please tell me you did not just use ted bundy to describe what you think women like in men?
also did you just lore dump to a complete stranger? we're having a casual conversation.
i never said anything as insane as "Systematically doxxing and libeling men is a risk we're just going to have to take". i said doxxing should be avoided, if you'd read any of my comments.
who is this long winded comment for, exactly?
Captain Aggravated
in reply to Nima • • •I did, because he was. Two different ways.
You came across as pretty lukewarm to me. "Yeah doxxing is a problem I guess." You can't have a Don't Date Him Girl website without doxxing. Doxxing is how they work.
Nima
in reply to Captain Aggravated • • •skipped everything about ted bundy cause wtf you're obsessed, man. maybe join a bundy dating app?
also let me make it clear since you missed it last time (even though you quoted it). I think doxxing is bad and should be avoided. fuck's sake man. i am a commenter, not a politician. i read this stuff over breakfast. take it easy ffs.
not everything has to be a huge debate.
0x0
in reply to Nima • • •Encryption, sure.
Preventing doxxing? I highly doubt it. But hey, it's women doing it so it's ok and anyone who criticizes that is an incel.
Nima
in reply to 0x0 • • •Echo Dot
in reply to Nima • • •You would have to have everyone take a polygraph or something (not that they actually work but a lot of people don't know that so maybe it would prevent them from lying in the first place). There's no way to prevent people from lying for whatever reason they have and there's no way to detect whether or not the thing they have posted is truthful.
The truth is as much benefit as the app may have when used properly the risk of abuse is far too high for it to ever be workable.
If you have a smoke alarm in your house that occasionally explodes and sets your house on fire, but the rest of the time actually works as a fire alarm, then it's not a useful product, as even if the chance of it exploding was less than 1% it would still eventually blow up your house, whereas if you never installed the alarm there was every possibility your house will never catch fire. So game theory suggests that you are better off without it.
Same with this app, sure it might prevent you experiencing a bad date but there's every possibility that it will also cause you not to date somebody who's actually a nice person. You are far better off just making that judgement yourself as you always did. And to be clear given human nature, the likelihood of the "fire alarm exploding" is probably a lot higher than 1%
FauxLiving
in reply to Ilovethebomb • • •Ilovethebomb
in reply to FauxLiving • • •don
in reply to ORbituary • • •Nima
in reply to ORbituary • • •AwesomeLowlander
in reply to Nima • • •like this
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Nima
in reply to AwesomeLowlander • • •AwesomeLowlander
in reply to Nima • • •FauxLiving
in reply to AwesomeLowlander • • •Yeah, the entire point of the app is that you go there and talk about the bad things a person has done.
That seems pretty hard to identify them without posting their image without their consent and discussing private details of their life so others can identify them. It is creepy as hell, at a minimum.
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Nima
in reply to AwesomeLowlander • • •off the top of my head, I don't know. i just feel the concept is intriguing and that the idea is a nice one.
just the abuse potential is far too high I suppose. but it would be nice to know if someone had stalked someone else, may have spoken or behaved in a violent manner, etc.
but I suppose at that point you might as well fingerprint and process any potential suitors lol. 😅
the sentiment is great, however.
AwesomeLowlander
in reply to Nima • • •Tunawithshoes
in reply to Nima • • •I am going to say with even the downsides I think the idea is worth it.
My friend sucks to her creeps and maybe she could have saved herself from at least two abused cases.
Maybe like light system based around how often and how a users submits. This person submits a lot of negative responses red light.
This person submits rarely green light?
The problem is also how much data do we really want to keep? How little can we keep?
Lfrith
in reply to AwesomeLowlander • • •Meowmeowbeans social pressure where people will refuse to meet or associate with people who have not been vetted and verified by meowmeowbeans members. So people who want to meet meowmeowbeans users would have to join to get screened otherwise they can get lost.
Solves the issue of people who never signed up to the social media site having strangers uploading personal photos, videos, names, and stories to a profile page they never consented to. Which is reminiscent of doxing in its current state.
So meowmeowbeans certification among consenting members would be the better route to go and socially making those not in meowmeowbeans outcasts. At least there is choice now for people to not be part of the community driven database of people.
ORbituary
in reply to Nima • • •Nima
in reply to ORbituary • • •ORbituary
in reply to Nima • • •national reputation system being developed by the Chinese government
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)Captain Aggravated
in reply to betterdeadthanreddit • • •You could easily convince me that it was a brilliantly executed honeypot. It's just too damn poetic.
"It's a women's safety app" No it wasn't. This app was about women's safety as much as the recent payment processor porn game censorship bullshit was about child safety. This was about slandering men for fun because women love gossip. The app's name was "Tea."
Not a single woman who signed up for this app stopped to think, "Here's a brand new app, just came out, has no track record, no reputation. I don't know who runs this. I don't know how they secure their database. I know what they're asking, they want a picture of my government-issued ID. We've spent the last two decades reading news headlines of the pattern "tech company was hacked, 2.2 million users compromised including emails, home addresses and SSNs" on a weekly basis. There hasn't been a week gone by since Dubya was president that hasn't happened."
The women who uploaded pictures of their IDs to some app really had their own safety in mind. Turns out you can short circuit that whole process with hilarious ease if you say things like "women only" and "slander your exes."
I don't think I could have constructed a better example as to why all the recent "prove your identity" shit is comprehensively retarded.
Bort
in reply to return2ozma • • •like this
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absGeekNZ
in reply to return2ozma • • •Change the target to any other group and the outrage would be 100-10000 fold bigger.
Try it out, instead of Women rating men, try subbing in various minority groups or races.
Bonus points for the most offensive combinations.....
e.g. Russians rating Ukrainians in your area....it can get pretty bad...I can think of many worse combos.
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surewhynotlem
in reply to absGeekNZ • • •Interesting analogy. You realize you have it backwards, right? Women are the Ukrainians on this scenario.
absGeekNZ
in reply to surewhynotlem • • •AmbitiousProcess (they/them)
in reply to absGeekNZ • • •I think the key reason this was seen as not being terribly offensive was the fact that women are disproportionately more likely than men to be on the receiving end of tons of different negative consequences when dating, thus to a degree justifying them having more of a safe space where their comfort and safety is prioritized.
However I think a lot of people are also recognizing now that such an app has lots of downsides that come as a result of that kind of structure, like false allegations being given too much legitimacy, high amounts of sensitive data storage, negative interactions being blown out of proportion, etc. I also think that this is yet another signature case of "private market solution to systemic problem" that only kind of addresses the symptoms, but not the actual causes of these issues that are rooted more in our societal standards and expectations of the genders, upbringing, depictions in media, etc.
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absGeekNZ
in reply to AmbitiousProcess (they/them) • • •I was making the point, that despite the fact that this is mildly ok. The test for anything that gives one group power over another, is to switch the groups.
If it's still reasonable, than it is probably OK to keep it. If however it seems wrong after the switch, the bar to keep the power imbalance should be very high.
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floofloof
in reply to absGeekNZ • • •That's a very superficial test that deliberately omits the social and historical context that makes sense of these categories. You can't just insert one party for another in statements about a relationship where one side has more power and privilege than the other, and look at your feelings about the result to evaluate the statements. White people have historically mistreated everyone else and robbed them of freedom and power. Men have historically abused women. To say "let's swap the words and see how we feel then" is not a reasonable way of evaluating statements about the relationships between these groups.
What this article says about the importance of entrenched power structures in racism also holds true about the relations between men and women:
aclrc.com/issues/anti-racism/c…
Myth of Reverse Racism | Unpacking the Realities
Alberta Civil Liberties Research Centre (ACLRC)absGeekNZ
in reply to floofloof • • •You can, and do.
It helps set the bar, it is a tool for determining how to assess what level of imbalance is reasonable.
It's not the only tool, nor an I arguing for it to be.
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DancingBear
in reply to AmbitiousProcess (they/them) • • •I’m always reminded of the fact that women on dating sites rate 80% of the men as below average….
And the dating advisors who have written numerous articles about how women don’t really know or aren’t really honest with themselves about what they are looking for in a partner….
Balerion
in reply to DancingBear • • •That was ONE OKCupid survey from years ago, and it also showed that women were more likely than men to message people they didn't rate as attractive.
In reality, women and men rate male facial attractiveness about the same. datepsychology.com/can-women-i…
Can Women Identify An Average Face? - Date Psychology
https://datepsychology.com/author/alexander/#author (Date Psychology)rottingleaf
in reply to AmbitiousProcess (they/them) • • •Stats depend on perception. Where a woman reports abuse, a man often spends an evening drinking or something similar. Not reporting abuse.
Expectations of men are too somewhat cruel. You should be grenadier-tall (or gorilla-wide, point being, you should look fit), with facial features like those of Kianu Reeves, with voice like that of Orlando Bloom, confident like some CEO, honorable like a samurai from some movie, yet able to override that honor at her whim and do any atrocity to make the world better for her. Like some picture of 1930s' propaganda.
If you don't deliver, then she silently pities herself and silently looks down at you for that. But God forbid you seem like that picture in some regard and then inevitably turn out to be more human, that deceit she won't forgive.
It was a problem a century ago that women were mostly right-wing and chauvinist and traditionalist. Most of that has been undone, but not how women in average see gender relations.
OK, so about the app - I won't be surprised if it was an intentional honeypot, honestly, to expose those who will use it. And it's a bad idea, there's no way to verify anonymous accusations, which means it's a tool for defamation of any man, and a way to discredit things of the kind written there at the same time.
Balerion
in reply to rottingleaf • • •rottingleaf
in reply to Balerion • • •I agree. High standards and common ideas of "right" are generally present among people insecure and easily gaslighted.
Such as those that would use this app. Point?
Vanth
in reply to absGeekNZ • • •absGeekNZ
in reply to Vanth • • •Nothing about gender wars here.
Just because Facebook is shit, doesn't make this any better.
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Phoenixz
in reply to absGeekNZ • • •I'm sorry but I'll just say it out right: new feminists are the absolute worst
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for equality where possible. Where isn't equality possible? Well I'd like to conceive a child, but the plumbing isn't exactly useful for that. That sort of thing. Beyond that, were all the same, and IDGAF about your skin color, sexual preferences or whatever. I live by live and Let live, don't be an asshole, it's not that hard to be respectful
New feminists though are the ones coming up with ideas like this website. On the surface, anyone could say that it's not a bad thing to have a place for women to talk about how to protect themselves. In reality though, it's a place where men, innocent or not, get doxxed and made to be rapists.
There are some subs here on Lemmy as well that were very sad to see this shitshow of a website go, lamenting the fact that now they need a different place to dex people. Try not to tell them that doxxing is bad, it gets you banned.
pivot_root
in reply to return2ozma • • •Every time. With startups, it's always an unsecured Firebase or S3 bucket.
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NeilBrü
in reply to pivot_root • • •gian
in reply to NeilBrü • • •Canaconda
in reply to gian • • •A lot of people have speculated that.
According to their statement their code was written in Feb/2024 and predates "vibe coding"
Official statement from Tea on their data leak
Simon Willison’s Webloggian
in reply to Canaconda • • •What intrigue me is this:
So they used vibe coding, they are only saying that they think/hope that it is not the cause of the break (and maybe also of the second one)
And if vvibe coding is not caused then they are even more incompetent.
zqps
in reply to NeilBrü • • •It's a little more complex than that. If you want the app on the user device to be able to dump data directly into your online database, you have to give it access in some way. Encrypting the transmission doesn't do much if every app installation contains access credentials that can be extracted or sniffed.
Obviously there are ways around this too, but it's not just "use TLS".
NeilBrü
in reply to zqps • • •Encrypt the credentials then? Or OAUTH pipeline, perhaps? Automated temporary private key generation for each upload (that sounds unrealistic, to be fair)? Can credentialing be used for intermediary storage that encrypts the data on that server and then decrypted on the database host?
Clearly my utter "noobishness" is showing, but at least it's triggering a slight urge to casually peruse modern WebSec production workflows. I am a DNN researcher. Thus, I am far removed from customer-facing production environments, and it shows.
Any recommendations on literature or articles on how engineers solve these problems in a "best practices" way that you can recommend? I suppose I could just look it up, but I thought I'd ask.
Edit: I don't know why I'm down-voted. My questions were sincere.
nickwitha_k (he/him)
in reply to NeilBrü • • •You've got the right ideas. Noone should ever be storing any password in plaintext. It should always be hashed and only the hash stored. That's like WEBDEV99 (remedial course, not even 101).
Really. Despite your stated "noobishness", you basically landed in the territory of best practices right of the bat.
If you're looking for a good source of best practices, the CIS benchmarks are great. cisecurity.org/
CIS Center for Internet Security
Center for Internet SecurityNeilBrü
in reply to nickwitha_k (he/him) • • •Brother, I need the "remedial" lessons since I self-host a lot of my experimental DNN solutions on a GPU cluster served via CasaOS/Ubuntu-Server LTS.
I've followed basic tutorials about nginx, end-to-end encryption, and DNS, but I need more knowledge and training about the theory behind modern security best practices. I think I'm doing okay but I have this ever-present anxiety that I've overlooked something and my ass (i.e., sensitive data) is really just hanging out in the wind.
Thank you for your recommendation.
Chulk
in reply to zqps • • •Wouldn't some sort of proxy in between the bucket and the client app solve this problem? I feel like you could even set up an endpoint on your backend that manages the upload. In other words, why is it necessary for the client app to connect directly with the bucket?
Maybe I'm not understanding the gist of the problem
nickwitha_k (he/him)
in reply to Chulk • • •zqps
in reply to Chulk • • •GissaMittJobb
in reply to NeilBrü • • •SSL is not the tool you need in this case, although you should obviously already be running exclusively on encrypted traffic.
The problem here is one of access rights - you should not make files default-available for anyone that can figure out the file name to the particular file in the bucket. At the very least, you need to be using signed URLs with a reasonably short expiration, and default all other access to be blocked.
NeilBrü
in reply to GissaMittJobb • • •As I mentioned in other comments, I am a noob when it comes to web-sec; please forgive what may be dumb questions.
Is it really just permission rights "over-exposure" issue? Or does one need to also encrypt and then decrypt the data itself that must be sent to a database?
Also, if you have time, recommend any links to web/cloud/SaaS security best practices "for dummies"?
Kalothar
in reply to pivot_root • • •My hey we’re probably using Firestore as their database without authenticating their api calls to firebase functions. Basically leaving their api endpoints open to the public Internet.
They could have connected service account and used some kind of auth handshake between that and generate a temporary login token based on user credentials and the service account oauth credentials to access the api. but they probably just had everything set to unauthenticated
nickwitha_k (he/him)
in reply to Kalothar • • •Kalothar
in reply to nickwitha_k (he/him) • • •I get doing that in Dev for testing before launch, but in production? that’s insane.
Like it has to either be a junior developer playing the role of lead or some serious lack of web dev fundamentals haha
QueenHawlSera
in reply to return2ozma • • •like this
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0x0
in reply to QueenHawlSera • • •The misogyny!
Balerion
in reply to 0x0 • • •Cid Vicious
in reply to QueenHawlSera • • •Echo Dot
in reply to Cid Vicious • • •It was defamation the entire time just because somebody made it an app rather than a Facebook group doesn't make any difference. It was always a crap thing to do.
Of course Tea took it to an entirely new level of stupid.
Cid Vicious
in reply to Echo Dot • • •Echo Dot
in reply to Cid Vicious • • •QueenHawlSera
in reply to Cid Vicious • • •QueenHawlSera
in reply to Cid Vicious • • •Considering even the mere accusation can ruin someone's life? Yes.
The problem isn't women don't deserve to be safe, the problem is we cannot just give people powerful weapons with no oversight or burden of proof to be deployed simply because a date didn't go well.
Facebook or App, the danger is too great
Velypso
in reply to return2ozma • • •PotatoesFall
in reply to return2ozma • • •Wow just two days ago I see a post about how Lemmy is dominated by men and how that could become a problem, and today I see a comment section where all the incels come out of the woodwork.
"waaa somebody wants to solve a problem that has never affected me I'm the victim"
"omg what if people talk behind my back they might find out I'm an asshole? literally 1984"
"wadabout if this app was racist?!? checkmate"
I'm not saying this app is good or bad (I can definitely see the problems) but if an article about cybersecurity gets posted and this is our first reaction, makes me lose hope in Lemmy.
Edit: Responses have made very good points and I think I was off, thanks guys. I still think some of the early comments I encountered were rather reactionary
Balerion
in reply to PotatoesFall • • •ScoffingLizard
in reply to Balerion • • •rottingleaf
in reply to PotatoesFall • • •Everyone has the problem that they'd want to discuss others behind their back. It's not accepted because it doesn't work to any good end.
You won't find out anything from this. People sometimes lie, especially in such situations.
Human adequacy is a big part of cybersecurity.
9bananas
in reply to PotatoesFall • • •i mean...an app directly copying a black mirror episode (but almost exclusively targeting a specific demographic) does ring some very, VERY loud alarm bells...
like, this is literally the plot of nosedive.
it's a social credit system.
and none of the people even know they HAVE a score, so it's somehow even worse than the fictional scenario.
this will, absolutely, hurt innocents and it will do so by design.
"fuck them innocents!"...just because they happen to be men?
how is that anything other than misandrist?
how is that defensible?
how is doxxing, mass libel, and targeted harassment a solution to sexism and rape culture?
I'd be really interested in hearing anything about how this is supposed to help women, because i struggle to see how sowing massive, unearned distrust between men and women is going to make anyone any safer...
I'm really, REALLY glad that the GDPR would nuke this sort of nonsense from orbit...uploading pictures of strangers, for the explicit purpose of gossiping about them behind their backs, spreading awful rumors?
what. the. actual. fuck. is wrong with you people?
and i don't mean women, or men: i mean americans and their total disregard for privacy and digital safety. what the hell...
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Ilovethebomb
in reply to PotatoesFall • • •You make a valid point, this platform absolutely shits on anyone without technical knowledge, just look at the hundred or so smug replies telling you what flavor of Linux they run if you mention a problem with Windows. So, no surprise everyone is focusing on that, and not the human aspect here.
Having said that, there is a power imbalance to this that I really don't like, the accuser gets to hide behind a veil of anonymity, and the accused has their name published, and is forced to defend themselves.
suburban_hillbilly
in reply to Ilovethebomb • • •This is a technology community and the article is specifically about a security breach that exposed massive amounts of sensitive user data.
wizbiz
in reply to return2ozma • • •Constant Pain
in reply to wizbiz • • •Soulg
in reply to Constant Pain • • •wizbiz
in reply to Constant Pain • • •postmateDumbass
in reply to wizbiz • • •nickwitha_k (he/him)
in reply to Constant Pain • • •Constant Pain
in reply to nickwitha_k (he/him) • • •nickwitha_k (he/him)
in reply to Constant Pain • • •Zombie-Mantis
in reply to wizbiz • • •It's an antisocial surveillance system for antisocial people, and creates a(n even more) antagonistic relationship between men and women.
Dating apps have been a disaster for dating, and this is perhaps the worst among them.
Echo Dot
in reply to wizbiz • • •Citation of course needed with that one.
The only people who will be listed on the app are people who are either deserving they've been on there or people who don't deserve to be on there but some woman in their lives has decided to inact some vengeance justified or otherwise.
GaMEChld
in reply to wizbiz • • •ThrowawayPermanente
in reply to GaMEChld • • •Dearth
in reply to GaMEChld • • •lmagitem
in reply to Dearth • • •SoftestSapphic
in reply to wizbiz • • •SoftestSapphic
in reply to return2ozma • • •QueenHawlSera
in reply to SoftestSapphic • • •It can be both.
So many problems are caused because society assumes cisgender women are always victims and anything that looks like a man if you look at it long enough is an abuser.
SoftestSapphic
in reply to QueenHawlSera • • •Semperverus
in reply to SoftestSapphic • • •Captain Aggravated
in reply to SoftestSapphic • • •blitzen
in reply to return2ozma • • •I feel that the app filled a need of women we should not ignore. But the app, both this specific app and also the overall concept, is just too rife with downsides to be workable.
So we, as men and as society need to reevaluate why women feel the need for such an app, and reinvest in the criminal justice system to hold victimizers more accountable.
It’s okay to call this app and similar Facebook groups unacceptable. But that’s not enough, we must also call for stronger protections for victims of criminal behavior.
Ilovethebomb
in reply to blitzen • • •It would be interesting to see something similar that required accusations to be backed up with evidence. Police reports, court proceedings and results, news articles etc.
It would also be a lot safer, legally speaking, for the service provider.
blitzen
in reply to Ilovethebomb • • •Something like Megan’s law but for domestic violence. I’m still not thrilled with the potential for abuse, but at least it wouldn’t be hearsay.
I’m sure the police unions would object, for obvious reasons.
MangioneDontMiss
in reply to blitzen • • •The criminal justice system... At this point any more investment is just a waste.
That said, we're being shortsighted. The criminal justice system is far too corrupted and easy to pervert. It has way too many levers the powerful can exploit to get away with almost anything. The powerful want it that way, so the government wants it that way, and so thats the way it is. We need to burn it ALL down. And relying on naive public satiating actions like useless protest, or the belief that this can be all be fixed though voting, when shit is this far-gone, is counterproductive.
jpeps
in reply to blitzen • • •blitzen
in reply to jpeps • • •jpeps
in reply to blitzen • • •Vanth
in reply to return2ozma • • •I think of the "bad" dates I would want to be able to warn other women of that didn't rise to the level of calling the cops. The guy who ordered triple the food and drinks I did and skipped out on the bill. The guy who flat out lied about multiple things and then got irate when I politely excused myself from the date. The MAGA weirdo who went on an unhinged rant about how I needed to submit to him because God said so. I imagine some men have comparable experiences with some anti-social women. The experiences coming to mind were not illegal, but were absolutely things I want to spare my fellow humans from.
I would prefer the dating apps themselves have some mechanism for disincentivizing anti-social behaviors. It would have to be more than a simple 5-star rating.
I wonder how it would work IRL to offer the ability to write a few sentences in response to prompts about a date. The written review is not published as-is, but is used in grouping of many reviews to give a summary about a person. Like the summary product reviews on Amazon now. "Bill's dates found he was prompt and polite. Some dates expressed discomfort at some of his political views" and "Bob's dates warn he is often late and is quick to use foul language to describe women. Multiple dates report no intention to communicate with Bob further". "Ben's dates report he has skipped out on the bill repeatedly, and sends unsolicited dick pics. Multiple dates have blocked him".
The group summary gives a buffer so the person reviewed doesn't know which specific date said what. And ensures the summary doesn't include negative comments about a person unless multiple dates of theirs independently report similar experiences.
Of course a bad actor could ditch their dating profile and start fresh any time they build up enough negative reviews to make their summary look bad. And of course the reviews and the summaries would have to be secured tighter than "Tea" is.
rottingleaf
in reply to Vanth • • •What about a guy who had a panic attack in the very beginning and couldn't stop talking about his deceased dad, then about aunts and uncles, then about the dog, then about architecture, then didn't get the hint because of all the shaking, got petrified when hinted at an alcohol element in the continuation of the meeting and in the end didn't even understand a very direct hints at "only silence can save this" and having at least a sleepover?.. Who only became kinda normal after taking a sedative next morning, still shaking.
Just describing one negative experience I have provided in the past, and that while yeah, it wasn't too cool - maybe lifelong shame is not what I deserve for that ...
(Yes, I know that girl was a hero)
That can't be done without somehow verifying identities of all the people involved. Unless the review app is the same as the dating app. Then there are various technical variants, like some cryptographic connection between the reviewed person's identity, the token representing one date, and a temporary identity for the reviewer, used to sign the review message. Something like that.
But that only for the entity doing the summary, which will have to be trusted with the original reviews. And that "buffer" will remove any kind of verification, unless it's something egghead-smart like a smart contract forming the review on every client, which means every client can also see the original reviews. So I dunno.
Honestly things like this should work like some hybrid of Briar and Freenet. Just entrusting it to a centralized service is as stupid as using Facebook. And in this specific case Briar model is kinda fine - if you synchronize with everyone using the application. You don't need to have the reviews from everyone about everyone, just about people roaming the same general area.
atk007
in reply to return2ozma • • •Bubbey
in reply to return2ozma • • •mhague
in reply to return2ozma • • •