We need to build a decentralised internet quickly using I2P or something similar and scale and decentralise quickly. VPN’s will be the first to go then TOR after they attempt to control the exit nodes .

We need to show the governments that we are allowed to use encryption and Wikipedia and not be treated as criminals for wanting privacy .

I cant even think of any legit reason to do this. To protect children? The government does not care about children. Its why so many suffer in poverty. Watching tits online is the least of their problems.

The only reasons i can think of is control. Forcing people to give up more information about themselves. Because knowledge is power.

It's really simple.

The western democracies want to create a universal digital ID wallet and have that be required to access any site.

There are a lot of reasons they could want this. For example, there are probably tens of millions of fake accounts controlled by adversarial nations which are used to sow extremism and disinformation online. It is impossible for counterintelligence to detect these at scale. We can see the corrosive effects that social media is having on society, there are countries actively working to make the problem worse but we have no tools to stop them.

This is also why there is a big push to limit children from accessing social media. They're often the targets for these campaigns because they're easily manipulated and have a lot of free time to spread the misinformation once they're indoctrinated.

I don't think a digital ID is the way to solve this problem. But, we're not being asked or informed about why it is happening. They're, instead, trying to ram these measures through using moral panic about children so anybody opposing them is easily dismissed as "not caring about The Children" or "supporting sex trafficking/pedophiles/predators".

I understand the situation, but they're trying to go around the democratic process by not talking about the problems.

The problem of social manipulation via bots isn't limited to intelligence operations, though I would argue that this is the most immediate danger.

We're also seeing a huge spike in advertising bots pretending to be normal users just to push goods and services.

Because of these motives social media has become less about bringing people together and more about extracting information from people in order to more efficiently manipulate them.

It's causing social media to become actively dangerous to society in general. Ensuring that everyone is a human is an essential first step for having ethical online social interactions.

Just look at the difference in conversations on Lemmy vs Reddit. Sure, there are some assholes here and there but it's largely a calm place where you can have an actual conversation.

This is how online discourse used to be from the early BBS days right up until Facebook and algorithmically curated feeds discovered that fear, outrage and anger are the best drivers of engagement.

Now, in addition to the platform's manipulation (which is largely commercially motivated) we have LLMs which let anybody with funding create massive armies of fake people who can dynamically insert themselves into conversations in order to push any messaging you can imagine.

It's a bad situation that needs an immediate solution.

I just don't like that the solution has been decided on, in secret, by western democracies and is being forcefully implemented in a manner that also allows intelligence/law enforcement a backdoor into everything. (A digital ID also makes it very easy to view every users complete Internet history because that data is tagged with the users actual identity).

The security guys aren’t interested in quantum computing either. Because it doesn’t exist yet. The report’s author seems surprised that “several interviewees believe that quantum computing is in an overhyped phase.”

If and when quantum computing does start making waves, I expect the security guys will start loudly crowing about it.

Its ostensible ability to break most regular encryption schemes over its knee would be a complete fucking nightmare for them, that's for sure.

Considering that several companies are planning on using nuclear power to run ai data services, instead of providing power to cities.

Google turns to nuclear to power AI data centres

How is Amazon Using Nuclear to Power AI & Reach Net Zero?

I'm pro-nuclear power, but why not use those reactors and replace fossil fuel sites instead? We don't ai to consume that much power, which in turn requires morec graphite/uranium/thorium mining, which causes direct environmental damage

Google turns to nuclear to power AI data centres

The tech giant says it will use energy from small reactors to power its use of artificial intelligence.

^{João da Silva (BBC News)}

I think this is a bad faith argument because it focuses specifically on chatgpt and how much resources it uses. The article itself even goes on to say that this is actually only 1-3% of total AI use.

People don't give a shit about chatgpt specifically. When they complain about chatgpt they are using it as a surrogate for ai in general.

And yes, the amount of electricity from ai is quite significant.
iea.org/news/ai-is-set-to-driv…

It projects that electricity demand from data centres worldwide is set to more than double by 2030 to around 945 terawatt-hours (TWh), slightly more than the entire electricity consumption of Japan today. AI will be the most significant driver of this increase, with electricity demand from AI-optimised data centres projected to more than quadruple by 2030.

I'm not opposed to ai, I use a lot of AI tools locally on my own PC. I'm aware of how little electricity they consume when I am just using for a few minutes a day.
But the problem is when it's being crammed into EVERYTHING, I can't just say I'm generating a few images per day or doing 5 LLM queries. Because it's running on 100 Google searches that I perform, every website I visit will be using it for various purposes, applications I use will be implementing it for all kinds of things, shopping sites will be generating images of every product with me in the product image. AI is popping up everywhere, and the overall picture is that yes, this is contributing significantly to electricity demand, and the vast majority of that is not for developing new drugs, it's for stupid shit like preventing me from clicking away from Google onto the website that they sourced an answer from.