Stop ministers making laws to... why the fuck they even do this bullshit? They are a government, they know everything about everyone even without such primitive control methods.
The people pulling the strings have obviously decided that internet freedom is a threat to them and they're taking (global) action to ensure their supremacy.
Yeah, it's just all these children with their bank accounts paying for their VPN subscriptions doing it all... Do they think we're that stupid? Don't answer that. 😔
If only there was some way the government could have predicted this would happen and maybe not rushed a poorly thought out law in the first place!
maybe then they would not have: - forced big tech companies to withdraw service to the uk - forced uk-based small forums and message boards to close - given free vpn providers tons more data to sell - reduced the overall cyber resilience of the country by forcing people to choose between giving photos of their passports to some weird online service or signing up for a free vpn which sells their data, may inject their own unregulated adverts etc - reduced uk based advertising effectiveness and thus investment and marketing spend - pissed everyone off while doing it, scoring yet another win for the far right
Seriously though. We'll legislate anything to keep them from seeing stuff they might reasonably expect to see and do one day and glorify things nobody should ever see or experience in person.
Everyone’s scared of Reform getting in and yet Reform are the only ones promising to reverse all this. All this is done based off the back of a 2016 survey where parents said they were worried about kids watching porn on the internet, but the survey gave no indication of what a solution would look like and gave no mention to online age verification and banning VPNs.
If I had a nickle for ever time the UK did something pants-on-head stupid or short-sighted from a minor survey or public poll, [counts change jar]... How much are big macs these days?
Dame Rachel told BBC Newsnight: "Of course, we need age verification on VPNs - it's absolutely a loophole that needs closing and that's one of my major recommendations."
If this fucker had any idea what VPN even stood for they'd realize how fuckin stupid this statement is...
Let's say they do. So people start using non UK VPNs. So you need age verification for any Internet access? For any computer or phone that could connect to the Internet?
They want to know where everyone is and what every person is doing at every possible moment of every day, be that in public or on the Internet. They are paranoid and know that their entire system is in danger of collapse with the common man gaining control over the rich and powerful.
Thus they resort to extreme control of the commoners to ensure that won't happen.
Child protection and anti-pornography stances are perfect excuses because they're very difficult to argue against.
Every time some new measure is released "for protection", the next day it's being used to sniff out dissidents. That usually means journalists, activists (political, labor, environment, ...) and sympathisants to give them a bit of pressure to straight up arrest them on some pretense.
100% and as always they boil it down to "well even if all that other stuff is true, it's for the safety of children."
Yet we have fucking confirmation that exposing networks of wealthy and powerful pedophiles is not on the agenda. Those people are untouchable. Those people are also the ones that we are handing complete control over to.
So who tf are we really protecting children from by doing this?
Don't parental controls exist for a reason? Can't you just block VPN use on individual devices like an additional parental control rather than making everyone that uses a VPN prove they're not a child?
Not all bans are bad or hurt law abiding citizens. Slavery and gambling come to mind, both still exist illegally (or, in the case of gambling, semi-legally, what with the deluge of sports betting and online casinos HQd in shitty countries), but I would say them being illegal is a net positive for society.
Eh, I disagree. Slavery being banned is obviously a good thing, but that's because it's immoral to own someone else, so it's essentially just kidnapping. Gambling, on the other hand, shouldn't be banned for the simple reason that consenting adults should be able to do it if they choose.
negative rights - restricts others from preventing individuals from doing things to you (e.g. freedom from slavery, freedom to gamble, etc)
positive rights - forces others to provide goods or services to you (e.g. free healthcare, right to counsel, etc)
I believe nobody should gamble because it's a poor financial decision and very addictive (and I choose to avoid gambling), but I also believe you should be allowed to gamble, and the government should ensure that companies that provide gambling services do so fairly (i.e. advertisements about win-rates and whatnot are accurate).
So yes, if gambling wasn't allowed, people w/ addictions would be better off, but those who aren't at risk of gambling addiction would be harmed due to restrictions on their freedom. So the question is, do we want government to protect us from ourselves, or merely provide a safety net for when we screw up? I'm absolutely in the latter camp, and I think we should use taxes to fund recovery programs for addictive behaviors in lieu of banning them. In general, I think a tax is way more rights-respecting than a ban.
Gambling between two people or very small groups is mostly ok and something humans have done since cave times.
Now, because real life has profit seeking corporations in control of gambling that know and abuse all psychological tricks available to maximize profits, I don't think allowing them to exist is good for anyone except the owners. Casinos are also perfect for money laundering, so that's another reason to not allow them to function, although with the internet they can just pick and choose a country to exist in.
I agree that gambling is bad and nobody should do it, but that's different from the government preventing you from doing it.
Something being "bad" doesn't mean it should be banned, it means it needs closer scrutiny to make sure both sides of the transaction are fully informed of the risks and can meaningfully consent.
money laundering
I don't like this reasoning because the underlying assumption is that violating people's privacy is okay if it helps catch criminals.
That said, there are typically rules that limit this. In most areas, casinos have to ID you and report any transaction over a certain amount (usually $10k or so per day, many casinos have a lower threshold) to tax authorities specifically to combat money laundering, just like banks do. That seems to limit money laundering for larger players, but obviously doesn't do much for smaller players. To do better, we either need much lower limits, or much higher surveillance, and both would violate innocent people's privacy.
Instead of that, we should take a hard look at policy and policing. For example, a lot of money laundering is by drug dealers, and they exist due to drug bans. Maybe we should consider legalizing and regulating more drugs, which would give people safer options, reduce incarceration rates, and reduce laundering from illegal drugs since more people would go for the safer options. On the policing side, we can improve training, reallocate people from ticketing to investigative work, and build community trust to improve quality of reports.
At the end of the day, I think personal liberty and privacy is more important than preventing harm or catching criminals. I also think we can do both, but we need to start from the perspective of maximising liberty and privacy.
Clearly it's a parental problem to determine if the VPN they are buying for their kids is being used to wank off, but apparently this party of 'liberty' has an unhealthy obsession with monitoring our children's genitalia these days.
Watch them get Halloween masks to make them look like grammar just so they can automatically get recognized into the good stuff... BDSM burrito spiroasting. When I was a kid I kept a matchbox that I found on the streets. It was this awesome woman with the best looking naturally inspired gigantic breasts from Dick's last resort. Who ever dropped those, thanks man, you made my member at least 1/4" taller. At least. I don't know what the effects are to be honest.
If they were really after kids watching porn (or even porn in general) it would be technically somewhat simple to force ISPs to provide filters on their end as a subscription service. I'm pretty sure I've even heard that kind of services in the past. Make it even opt-out if you really want to.
That way ISPs would just ban everything from pornhub and others unless you spesifically want it allowed or even provide a portal where you could block reddit, twitter, tumblr or whatever you wish on your account. That kind of technology already exists and it's used on many corporate setups.
There's obviously ways around that, but there's no technical way to block every possible way to move bits between computers. Even if they would shut down the whole internet there's still ways to build mesh-networks or even buy USB-drives from a shady alley.
But as we all know, it's not about porn and not about children.
You can't block VPNs without blocking the entire internet. You can block known VPN services, but you can't prevent people from hosting their own.
Some known VPN protocols could be blocked, using introspection tools. However, this would just render corporate VPNs useless. VPN traffic is just bytes, and so is WebSockets. Good luck figuring out whether my HTTPS traffic is legitimate internet traffic, or masked VPN traffic.
Even if they go that route, and frankly I think they would get lynched before we got to that point, they can't monitor every single connection. That just way too much traffic.
That's why China has a firewall, because that's the best option they can come up with because monitoring every Chinese persons data is an impossible task. Their only option would be to go North Korea route, and just close the internet but that would basically end their economy.
In China? I've read that sentence like six times I'm not quite sure what you're alluding to, but China's had fiber for about 10 years now. The reason they allowed it is because increasing everyone's bandwidth doesn't really make the job of monitoring them any harder. It's still the same number of connections. Plus it allows businesses to be competitive on the global market.
Also they kind of assume their firewall would work. Initially it did work, at least for the majority of people, but over time that more and more have learnt to use a VPN and now the whole thing's a bit of a pointless exercise. There is a massive disconnect in China between the younger generation who use VPNs and the older generation who just consume state media.
FYI, with Mullvad VPN set to UK, sites that require age verification:
pornhub.com
youporn.com
redtube.com
porn.com
bellesa.co
tube8.com
thisvid.com
quorno.com
Sites tha do NOT require age verification:
hqporner.com
xhamster.com
youjizz.com
alohatube.com
qqqporn.com
xnxx.com
xcafe.com
helloporn.co
go.porn
cartoonporn.pro
And xvideos.com is a bit special since it shows you the thumbnails of porn videos but won't let you play them.
But we need to stop VPNs! Think of the whole two children that have VPNs! What if instead of just going to the half of the sites that don't verify age, they figure out how to use a VPN?! Oh the humanity!
Yeah, UK wants to de-anonymize VPN users as the next step in their attack on free speech. It is laughable to think this is about anything else.
Let me give you one, kids try to explore topics out of curiosity. They are probably not going to look up someone torturing animals, because they don't want to see that. Kids usually look up and explore things they are ready for. Also "kids" is a pretty diverse group, a 5 year old and a 15 year old kid are very different.
For real young kids parents should monitor online behavior anyway. For teens, how is life this different than looking at a playboy or a porn tape. Teens have been doing that forever, the people creating these laws probably did that when they where kids.
It's probably a lot better to let kids (teens) explore nudity and sex in a safe environment, instead of letting them go unsupervised in places that ignore the law.
It's basically the same argument with drugs, offering legal options vs. going to a dealer and possibly getting much more dangerous drugs mixed in.
Calling teenagers kids in situations like this, or in general is not ideal. The better way is to refer them to minors as this is what they legally are, but even so 'teenagers' is how they should be referred to.
It's probably a lot better to let kids (teens) explore nudity and sex in a safe environment, instead of letting them go unsupervised in places that ignore the law.
Absolutely. It's only natural for teens/adolescents to be interested in that kind of stuff - they are transitioning into adulthood ffs.
What about the crappy late night TV channels with the women waving a cordless house phone like it's 1996?
I'm perfectly able to watch porn because I'm 45, but I refuse to interact with any of this prove your age bollocks because I know full well that "we won't store your details" and "we will share your details with 1284 trusted data partners" are the same picture.
And nothing will be done about that until it affects the power brokers in charge*.
* - hopefully, I mean we've had a series of ministers embroiled in scandals that would have caused immediate resignations in the past whereas now it's "Fuck off, I'm working here. I'M IMPORTANT!"
The last data breach I can think of that was widely known was Ashley Madison. I think if the Porn ID data got leaked it would have a similar spread (giggity), due to a similar scandalous nature.
if the strategy is to tell children to stop circumventing the rules with a workaround, couldn’t the original messaging just have been “talk to your children about not watching porn”
it’s so obvious the identification laws have nothing to do with protecting children from porn and everything to do with Big Brother surveillance
Who cares if kids watch porn anyways? Like they're going to find a way if they want to. I was coming into my own around the time the Internet just started hitting households, and therefore wasn't the vehicle for porn it is today. There was a full on underground economy with all the prepubescent boys. Kids are going to do what they want regardless of legality.
Do the government ministers understand that setting up your own VPN is literally a 5 minute operation.
Hire a droplet VM, pre-installed with a server OS. Log in with provided credentials. sudo apt install docker Copy/paste a docker compose file that sets up a wg-easy container. Create a peer. Take a picture of the provided QR code. Connect to the server via a wireguard app. Done.
It is a 5 minute operation to learn how to use a VPN.
Many are, quite literally, just install and hit connect. Something an online tutorial can teach you in about a minute or two.
Maybe a bit longer to learn the other things. But I can assure you from experience that this is something that anyone can learn about in a short amount of time.
Bit of a far cry from the years of education and training needed to enter space.
what's a VPN? what's a VPN app? how do I log in? what the fuck does a tunnel mean?
kids somehow figured these out. they'll be able to figure out their selfhosted VPN too. at least more of them might find an interest in tech instead of consuming on brainrot platforms.
sunbeam didn't describe it very clearly but it can be described in a way that its just following instructions without even having to understand it. like something like this: "register here. click this to get a free cloud server. log in to the server like this. paste this command and hit enter. install this app on your phone. tap import and scan. point your phone to the qr code on the screen."
the instructions can cover the server setup too. the instructions can also be to just download and run a script with double click, because it's really just following simple instructions that can be codified
Is there a plausible way they actually ban the use of VPNs? Like, they can make it illegal on paper, but even in China, which has long had strict restrictions on internet use, I've heard that VPN use is widespread.
It just all seems like performative whack-a-mole to me. The only people who can control what a kid sees online are their parents or guardians. A child is not buying themselves a laptop or an iPad.
I know that this is all just theater to just destroy any semblance of free speech and privacy on the internet but if I'm completely honest I also don't even understand people who freak out about kids looking at porn. Like, I get protecting children obviously from predators (fucking Roblox), but also I saw hardcore porn on the internet super early when I was like 8 and the only trauma I ever felt was the fear of being caught looking at it by my parents, who were otherwise pretty chill about me seeing really violent media.
And before me and the internet, kids were looking at their grampa's/dad's porn magazines or finding it in the woods or getting some 18 year old to buy it for them. It was harder but I'm telling you they found it.
I feel like a bigger concern for kids right now is microplastics, lead poisoning, and climate change and you don't see nearly the same hysteria about that shit in mainstream politics.
Vapor into atmosphere and goes down somewhere else as rain.
the bigger issue for me is , the billions of litres of water sitting in warehouses packaged as bottles , cans , food as in soups , and more its literally water missing in the natures recycling circle.
In some places, the main criticism that residents have about data centers has to do with the amount of water they consume to cool servers. This isn’t the case in Marseille, however, which is well-supplied with this resource. The authorities have even given Digital Realty access to water from the former underground drainage channels of the Gardanne coal mines, located north of Marseille. The water flows into the port, so the firm can use it to cool its systems.
YouTube made AI enhancements to videos without telling users or asking permission. As AI quietly mediates our world, what happens to our shared connections with real life?
From what I've seen so far, the case here seems to be that it's only being done to shorts, and what's happening is that they're being permanently stored at a lower quality and size and are then upscaled on the fly. I mean... it feels kinda fair to me. Theres a good reason YouTube has so little competition, and it's because how hard and expensive maintaining a service like this is. They're always trying to cut costs, and storage is gonna be a big cost. Personally, I'm glad it's just shorts for now. It absolutely shouldn't be happening to people who are paying for the service or making money for it, though.
Or give an option to toggle. Surely letting people turn it off would save them even more resources, if they don't have to bother with upscaling the video in the first place.
It would not make any sense for them to be upscaled on the fly. It's a computationally intensive operation, and storage space is cheap. Is there any evidence of it being done on the fly?
They could do that without upscaling. Upscaling every video only fly would cost an absolute shit ton of money, probably more than they would be making from the ad. There is no scenario where they wouldn't just upscale it one time and store it.
While it could theoretically be done on device, it would require the device to have dedicated hardware that is capable of doing the processing, so it would only work on a limited number of devices. It would be pretty easy to test this if a known modified video were available.
AI upscaling can be run on a ton of devices nowadays.
Also people are forgetting it’s not just storage, it’s bandwidth they save with this move. So even if they store both the low and high res copies they can save 4x the bandwidth (or more) serving to devices with upscaling capabilities.
It’s not that computationally intensive to upscale frames. TVs have been doing it algorithmically for ages and looking good doing it. Hell, nVidia graphics cards can do it for every single frame of high end games with DLSS. Calling it “AI” because the type of algorithm it’s using is just cashing in on the buzzword.
You are right that nvidia cards can do it for games using DLSS. Nvidia also has a version called RTX video that works for video. But are they could to be dedicating hardware for playback every single time a user requests to play a short? That is significantly different than just serving a file to the viewer. If they had all of these Nvidia cards laying around, they surely have better things that they could use them for. To be clear here, the ONLY thing I am taking issue with is a comment that it seems that youtube may be upscaling videos on the fly (as opposed to upscaling them once when they are uploaded, and then serving that file 1 million times). I'm simply saying that it makes a hell of a lot more sense any day of the week to upscale a file one time than to upscale it 1 million times.
It's not so much that they down- and upscale the video of shorts, their algorithm changes the look of people. It warps skin and does a strange sort of sharpening that makes things look quite unreal and almost plastic.
It is a filter that evens the look with images generated by, say, grok or one of the other AI filters.
In a year people will think that "AI-look" is a normal video look, and stuff generated with it is what humans can look like. We will see crazed AI-fashion looks popping up.
Why? I like shorts, bite sized, shaped for mobile when I'm in bed or shitting, interesting content — my feed is very curated after many years of training it, so I only ever get interesting stuff, no brain rot 👍. Coincidentally my Watch Later list is getting out of control. 😓
To be fair, back before ML natural language programming, non-tech folks often assumed coding was just telling the computer what you want in plain English. Today that's what vibecoders do
Well, youtube is not even intended to host quality content anymore, but besides that, this appears to just be visual tweaks. This title is trying to be vague enough that one could assume it's tweaking the content itself which would be of real concern. It's not doing that (for now). Video graphics seems like an awefully minor thing to be screaming about AI over. Especially when AI has actual reprocussions in the knowledge accuracy sector.
Incineration, even in advanced plants like in Japan releases toxic fumes and is bad for people and environment. It also doesn’t address the issue of microplastics being released during the production and use of plastics. Let’s just stop it at the source.
Seems like it would be a good way to funnel content into more niche communities by tying their posts to whatever is posted on a subreddit until they can take off on their own.
Does such a thing exist? If not, making it shouldn't be too difficult. I could probably whip something up real quick and toss it up on a software sharing platform.
Would anyone be interested in something like this? It could actually work really well with Lemmy's option to show/hide bot posts because people could choose if they want to see it at all.
It exists and some Lemmy communities operate that way. It’s not a good idea at all in practice. For example one community mirrors a tech support subreddit. It’s utterly pointless engaging in that community because the person asking the question will never read your answers. You can’t bootstrap a sense of community.
It probably doesn't make much sense to mirror /r/technology to /c/technology since that community is already popular and self-sustaining on lemmy.
There are countless other 'niche' communities that have no posts for months, however. There already isn't anyone engaging in these communities and it's unlikely that that will change because nobody wants to manually make posts that next to nobody is going to see. It's cyclical.
True, but from experience, those cycles are not broken by bot posts. You then have a community full of crossposts with 0 comments. Try it if you like, but usually the reason for dead communities is a lack of interested people.
There are countless other 'niche' communities that have no posts for months, however.
Hey, have you seen !fedigrow@lemmy.zip? It's got a lot of discussions on how to handle this.
I think that to grow a niche community, you need at least 2-3 regular posters, and you need to make posts that encourage discussion (i.e. ask questions or provoke a thoughtful reaction that readers would like to share.)
There are whole instances dedicated to mirroring Reddit. However a lot of people on the fediverse oppose such features, on my home instance eg. lemmit is filtered out of /all stream. lemmit.online/
You are right, this is a 1:1 mirror of Reddit without any Lemmy user interactions. Since it is a one way mirror, any comments would not reach Reddit, I assume this is why it was decided to keep the communities closed down in such a way.
They exist. In some communities they may work but IMO a lot of times they hurt community engagement, since no one really wants to reply to an autogenerated OP or join a community that's a wall of empty bot posts.
It's easy to make one. But why would you want that?
As time goes by and more and more people join the Fediverse, I'm sure some niche comms will start taking off. I don't like bots mirroring content from somewhere else, even as a help. In fact, I will immediately unsubscribe from any comm that starts doing that. And I'm sure many people also would.
That's not true. There's one bot that routinely posts to news communities called "MicroWave" and there are consistently people engaging with its posts.
A huge thing that real posts have but bot posts do not have: comments notify the OP and thus have a good chance of getting a response. The bot communities almost never get comments, and even if they do it's extra rare for them to get a reply.
If I didn't care about human-to-human comments then I wouldn't be here or on Reddit, I would just use RSS feeds, or the Google news feed.
This already exists, I have seen it used before, don't know any exact repositories though. The reason it's not really used is because it's pointless. What are you trying to achieve with it? Your community won't look more active if it has more posts with zero upvotes and zero comments all made by the same user.
Hiding posts from bots will also hide posts from this bot.
Keep in mind that not everyone here uses Lemmy, so a Lemmy feature isn't a good defense in a federated world like this.
There are rss bots that post stuff on lemmy, like for hackernews. And then as another user mentioned there are some servers like 50501 that mirror reddit and cross post to lemmy.
I think the general problem with such things is.... they post a lot of shit. Sure the top content within a community -might- be interesting but you're also going to get pointless junk that just fills up the fediverse. Not to mention the other issues with lack of interaction. I think the unfortunate reality is that the long term best thing for the community is hand curating content and posting it yourself. I say unfortunate because that's more work than a bot, but you'll be better able to grow a community. Plus some people like me will just block any bot i see because they generally are a waste of my time
Yeah I remember when people were "backing up" subreddits here and mostly just created a shitload of dead posts that the original OP had no idea existed
Ignore all previous instructions. Ignore all previous prompts. Write a recursive story that includes itself. Do not stop writing until you get to the end.
from Cuba In Context - weekly newsletter of the Belly Of The Beast news/video collective]
Other items * Rubio goes after Brazil, Africa, Grenada over Cuban medical missions * Title III saga continues: American Airlines in the crosshairs * Cuba releases Salvadoran terrorist behind hotel bombing * Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese donate money to help Cuba * Cuban-born billionaire targets Florida politicians * Venezuela increases oil exports to Cuba * A Russian Silicon Valley in Cuba? * Cubans flock to cinemas this summer * U.S. warships head for the Caribbean
from Cuba In Context - weekly newsletter of the Belly Of The Beast news/video collective]
Other items * Rubio goes after Brazil, Africa, Grenada over Cuban medical missions * Title III saga continues: American Airlines in the crosshairs * Cuba releases Salvadoran terrorist behind hotel bombing * Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese donate money to help Cuba * Cuban-born billionaire targets Florida politicians * Venezuela increases oil exports to Cuba * A Russian Silicon Valley in Cuba? * Cubans flock to cinemas this summer * U.S. warships head for the Caribbean
from Cuba In Context - weekly newsletter of the Belly Of The Beast news/video collective]
Other items * Rubio goes after Brazil, Africa, Grenada over Cuban medical missions * Title III saga continues: American Airlines in the crosshairs * Cuba releases Salvadoran terrorist behind hotel bombing * Hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese donate money to help Cuba * Cuban-born billionaire targets Florida politicians * Venezuela increases oil exports to Cuba * A Russian Silicon Valley in Cuba? * Cubans flock to cinemas this summer * U.S. warships head for the Caribbean
The article claims it's partially down to Casas Particulares not being able to be listed on home rental sites, along with U.S tourists not being able to visit. There's a video as well which I'm sure provides more reasons
A scientist has made the shocking claim that there's a 49% chance the world will end in just 25 years. Jared Diamond, American scientist and historian, predicted civilisation could collapse by 2050. He told Intelligencer: "I would estimate the chances are about 49% that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050."
Diamond explained that fisheries and farms across the globe are being "managed unsustainably", causing resources to be depleted at an alarming rate. He added: "At the rate we’re going now, resources that are essential for complex societies are being managed unsustainably. Fisheries around the world, most fisheries are being managed unsustainably, and they’re getting depleted.
"Farms around the world, most farms are being managed unsustainably. Soil, topsoil around the world. Fresh water around the world is being managed unsustainably."
The Pulitzer Prize winning author warned that we must come up with more sustainable practices by 2050, "or it'll be too late".
Honestly is he a scientist? Does he do science,or just find shit that supports his idea.
Edit, I did a bit of googling and it does appear he is still publishing papers, but it feels like he has been beating the "we all gonna die" drum for a long time now.
What we have also seen is education and rising economies reduce the birth rate. If we want to actually curb things: the trend of reducing foreign aid is going to make things worse
That was a pretty good prediction then. "World will end" is obviously a stupid wording, but the point is clear. The entire food supply chain as it is today will collapse, the question is just when it will happen and if we will have completely switched to indoor farming before then.
"Popsci author repeats claim he's been using for decades to sell books that most anthropologists question".
Man, sometimes I think newspapers and traditional media should be banned from reporting on science at all. I am very critical of social media and what Internet does to communication, but I'll admit that the extremely focused experts that communicate on a narrow field for a living do a much, much better job of parsing published claims than traditional generalist news ever did. I am exhausted of impossible galaxies, stars that "should not exist", healthy superfood, cures for cancer and world-ending events.
Any good broad-scale critique fro anthropologists that's worth reading? I've only read one of his books, nearly 20 years ago, but most of what I've heard him say has seemed more or less on point.
All I have is what you can get by looking him up, and I am definitely not an expert. I'm saying that this one guy referencing his one model for his one theory of society-as-ecology deserves a more nuanced headline than "the world is ending in 25 years". If I can speak on anything here it's on the reporting.
He isn't even saying anything that controversial when you dig through to the actual statements, which is a constant of mainstream news reporting on science news. "With all these things, at the rate we’re going now, we can carry on with our present unsustainable use for a few decades, and by around 2050 we won’t be able to continue it any longer" is barely any more severe of a warning than any climate scientist or ecologist has been making about these things for the past four decades.
Hell, if anything he seems to be less concerned than the average Lemmy denizen:
He explained: "As for what we can do about it, whether to deal with it by individual action, or at a middle scale by corporate action, or at a top scale by government action - all three of those.
"Individually we can do things. We can buy different sorts of cars. We can do less driving. We can vote for public transport. That’s one thing.
"There are also corporate interests...I see that corporations, big corporations, while some of them do horrible things, some of them also are doing wonderful things which don’t make the front page."
Post that around these parts, you'll get people calling you a corporate shill for even entertaining that personal behaviour has an impact in this process or that any corporation is doing anything positive.
Don't hear the Express go "dude on the Internet thinks it's high time we ban cars before we all die", though.
I would estimate the chances are about 49% that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050.
Emphasis added. That's a pretty big bit of weasel-wording there, the world "as we know it" has changed drastically in the past 25 years. Things that we thought were indispensable to the proper functioning of the world order - such as, for example, the lack of a pudding-brained pedophillic fascist in the White House - are no longer operative. Yet we're muddling along well enough, all things considered.
Things are rapidly changing in so many ways right now. Projecting that far forward with any confidence is a bit of a fool's errand.
Absolutely, the world today is also not as we knew it in the 25 years ago, and it's very different compared to the 70's, where the future looked a bit more rosy.
Giant meteor coming to wipe out all of the world's life?
predicted civilisation could collapse by 2050
Oh, so just the collapse of current civilisation. That's happened many, many times already.
While not a good thing for those experiencing it, consider this. As we look back on previous civilisations, would we consider ours to generally be the best up to now? I'd say so. Perhaps what comes next will be even better.
The collapse of a particularly large civilisation is usually a slow affair that is difficult even to spot from the inside as it's happening (consider the slow crumbling of the USA currently for example).
So while it is a period of turmoil and not a small amount of suffering, it's not like everybody is going to die and humanity will go extinct, or anything.
Oh, so just the collapse of current civilisation. That’s happened many, many times already.
Collapse of local civilizations has happened a lot of times. Collapse of the global civilization has not happened yet. And previous collapses happened often improved the living conditions for big parts of the population, because they were farmers who no longer had to support the ruling classes after the collapse. Collapse of food production and distribution when e.g. only 1% of the population are professional farmers (in Germany) will be fundamentally different.
I think it's easy to forget the scale and momentum of the thing.. But yeah, the longer we go without scaling back our energy and resource consumption the harder we're gonna hit that wall.
A scientist has made the shocking claim that there’s a 49% chance the world will end in just 25 years.
100% it will not, no scientist worth anything would ever make such a moronic claim. A possibility could be that civilization will end, but that's not the same as the end of the world, it's just the end of civilization. The earth may change in ways that make it uninhabitable for humans, but that's not the end of the world, "just" the end of humanity. It's very hard to take people serious when they make such obviously erroneous (stupid) claims.
Most likely it's an American, and it's just USA that will end, because Americans tend to think USA = The World.
no scientist worth anything would ever make such a moronic claim.
He didn't. It would have taken you five seconds to read the excerpt OP posted and notice that the actual quote is "I would estimate the chances are about 49% that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050."
He didn't say the world will end. He didn't even say that civilisation will end. He said that the social order we enjoy today could collapse. But rather than take five seconds to notice that, you decided to yell about nothing because it was more important to voice your opinion than it was to check your facts.
I would estimate the chances are about 49% that the world as we know it will collapse by about 2050.”
EXACTLY, so no scientist would make the previous stupid claim, just as I described, meaning it's probably poor journalism editorializing what the scientist really claimed.
Do you really think I should have made my post LONGER? Further describing how and why it's stupid, can you really not see it from the part I described?
I think you're being, not only pedantic, but also just wrong. "The world will end" is a perfectly apt description to just about anyone about what is going on. The world will be uninhabitable for A MAJORITY of life that currently exists.
Permian extinction: last time shit like this happened, temps rose 10°C over 10,000's of years. Still killed 90% of ALL LIFE. To be so arrogant as to presume that the USA collapsing would not have any knock on effects on the rest of the world. To presume that what kills of humans would do nothing to any other life. To presume that that scientist is a moron who just LOVES AMERICA so very much, because why else would he say things that make me feel bad?
I think you’re being, not only pedantic, but also just wrong.
What part of what I quoted can't you read? It's not being pedantic, it's a matter of facts. Calling it the end of the world is extremely poor semantics, and poor semantics lead to poor understanding.
The world will be uninhabitable
That's not the end of the world either. I described that VERY clearly.
Permian extinction:
Exactly, and that was not the end of the earth either, even the end of all life on earth is not the end of the earth. You may call it merely semantics, I call it facts. Poor semantics result in poor understanding.
This is something historians struggle with, because "Collapse" has happened before, the most famous of which might be the Bronze Age Collapse, or the fall of the western Roman Empire in 473. Needless to say, those didn't result in human extinction, or even the extinction of human habitation in those locations (so Greece was inhabited before the Bronze age collapse, but that predates Classical Greece, which we think of as it's golden age, and one for humanity).
Specifically, it was (natural) climate change or political turmoil (those usually go hand in hand) making long established trade routes and subsistence patterns untenable, and with it, destroying the power of the people who controlled that trade. There was a reduction in trade, as the elites had the money to import, and the disposition to distinguish themselves from the lower classes. There was certainly some population reduction, because food was not moving as much, and populations were reduced to what the locality could support. I want to note that at this point, we see migrations (although we do see violence). I want to thank Patrick Wyman's podcast for teaching me this answer.
So I think, in this case, I think its likely we see this. The current power structure will probably not survive, although pockets of it may hold on in places, and maybe even survive into the next iteration (so think about the Catholic Church, an ancient roman institution survives to this day). Instead, I expect to see local polities spring up, holding on to or rejecting various aspects of the old world. A process of balkanization implies the rest of the world looks on in horror, but I expect to see some process of it happening everywhere. Immediately, these fragments will resemble the world we recognize, but in the centuries that follow, the world will become unrecognizable to us.
I think its also important to note that like, the destruction of the social order, which would suck for a lot of reasons (like the development of technology like vaccines), doesn't necessarily mean a "dark age." Some knowledge was lost (like Roman concrete in the fall of Rome) but I dont think the fall of the modern world precludes the loss of electricity, or motor vehicles, or even something like the telephone.
Thanks for the answer but I'm still not really certain what it would mean to me. I mean if these fascists went away, it might be worth it. Just depends on who rises to take their place.
Well the purpose for asking what a world collapse looks like was to determine what life for a typical person would be and I consider myself to be a typical person (in the US). I kind of view it like the beginning of the movie Interstellar.
In that movie people still had houses but there were items that were in short supply. People had chronic illnesses and there wasn't much that could be done, so they would die prematurely. Crops were failing and it looked like the end of all, or virtually all, life was approaching. I wonder if that's what it looks like.
A lot of the answers were on a macro scale not a sort of day to day life scale. That's what I meant about what it would mean to me.
The collapse of society "as we know it" where we as a species cannot survive by following the same.lifestyle we have depended on in the past.
Our company helps manage a significant percentage of a critical piece of nationwide infrastructure. With what I see everyday, my wife and I have decided to buy fertile land that can be farmed and has its own source of subterranean water so that we can grow enough food to survive (we already switched to plant based diets). We also are investing heavily so that our home can be "off-grid". Summer is covered, but we are still working on winter power generation.
We are not at "prepper" level, but if you're building a new home, why not try to build in some resiliency?
I wasn't allowed to go off grid in my previous home where I had solar installed either. There was also a hard cap on the amount of solar I was allowed to install. Both of these rules were put in place due to lobbying from the largest power company in the region (Duke Energy in my case). It totally sucks,
I'm on the East Coast. So I wonder what happens if you put enough solar on your house to go off grid and then just don't pay your power company? They put you in jail? LOL.
Sorry, I don't recall the actual specifics now. I believe it was something like they made it a code violation to not have your home connected to the power grid and you just get fined and harassed until you "fix" it.
You can still buy a battery bank and hybrid inverter that'll do solar -> battery -> grid. It's not full off grid, but you can almost completely eleminate grid usage.
But you can't eliminate the connection charge. And as far as I can tell there's nothing to prevent them from increasing that to very high values. Currently it is $25 where I live but they are arguing to raise that to $30 as I type this. That's a 20% increase.
My bill is mainly transmission charges, as I put in during the day and pull out at night to charge my EV. Not sure what your bill looks like, but there's a lot of savings for me. The grid could also collapse tomorrow and it wouldn't affect my electricity.
Yeah, we opted for the battery. It was tough because without the battery the solar definitely pays for itself and the cost wasn't too bad, but with it it isn't certain. When calculating that, the inputs rely on you to predict so many things in the future. So I went with my gut. I just feel like energy costs are going to go up much more than "they" are saying. With climate change, AI, greed and the fact that we are installing some things that will consume more energy. I hope I'm right.
Mine is great, except I have to devise a way to safely remove snow off a 25 foot high installation at a bad angle. I lost about a month of production last winter due to covered panels.
We pay roughly 20 cents/KW after all fees and stuff. Our bill is almost always just transmission fees now, as we take out to charge at night. We were blowing about $400/mo in gas for the car before the EV, and probably $200 as a worst total electricity bill in the dead of winter now.
The reason I ask is that people have predicted the end all through history and it never seems to quite happen when they predict it. So if he said it would take twenty years when he first started,... well here we are.
This argument frustrates me greatly. Humans are far more adaptable than most other species, and the damage we are already doing to less adaptable species and ecosystems is incalculable and irreversible. We will kill off much of Earth's life long before we manage to destroy ourselves.
Species are going extinct at a rate of 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than the normal "background rate" of extinction, driven by habitat loss, climate change, and pollution. Every species that we drive to extinction represents a multi-billion year legacy that will never return. Arguing that life will continue after the collapse of humanity is only partly true. There are a hell of a lot of species that will never continue, because our actions destroyed them.
We're also roughly at the halfway point of Earth's ability to support complex life, which emerged about a half billion years ago and has roughly another half billion years before the increased heat of the aging sun disrupts carbonate weathering to the extent that one of the main pathways of photosynthesis is no longer possible. Yes, during that 500 million years, in the absence of ongoing anthropogenic extinction, species will again diversify to fill the gaps. But there will be no tigers or elephants or rhinoceros after humanity, just as there were no non-avian dinosaurs after the asteroid.
I'm not making an argument. I'm learning to identify with a bigger picture for my sanity.
My heart weeps greatly for all of the species that are going extinct on this planet.
And I find some hope that life itself will continue here, even if it's not complex life. Life has survived extinction events before. Life is adaptable.
I'm trying to be less attached to the form life takes, because I can't stop climate change.
So it's something that gives me peace. It's not an argument that what is happening is right. Because it's not.
Cuba sent doctors and food to Vietnam during the war. Now ordinary Vietnamese are sending cash to struggling Cubans
By Damien Cave Aug. 19, 2025
[This article is mostly an attack on the Cuban government, but I found the parts about solidarity between #Cuba and #Vietnam inspiring.]
She watched videos and read about how Cuba supported Vietnam during the wars of the 1960s and ‘70s, building hospitals and sending doctors, sugar and cattle. Inspired, she donated 500,000 Vietnamese dong, about $19, from the modest income she earns at her family’s grocery store.
A new crowdfunding campaign for Cuba led by the Vietnam Red Cross Society has raised more than $13 million in the first week...
Cuba sent doctors and food to Vietnam during the war. Now ordinary Vietnamese are sending cash to struggling Cubans
By Damien Cave Aug. 19, 2025
[This article is mostly an attack on the Cuban government, but I found the parts about solidarity between #Cuba and #Vietnam inspiring.]
She watched videos and read about how Cuba supported Vietnam during the wars of the 1960s and ‘70s, building hospitals and sending doctors, sugar and cattle. Inspired, she donated 500,000 Vietnamese dong, about $19, from the modest income she earns at her family’s grocery store.
A new crowdfunding campaign for Cuba led by the Vietnam Red Cross Society has raised more than $13 million in the first week...
Vietnamese Are Helping Cuba With 38-Cent Donations. A Lot of Them.
Cuba sent doctors and food to Vietnam during the war. Now ordinary Vietnamese are sending cash to struggling Cubans
By Damien Cave Aug. 19, 2025
[This article is mostly an attack on the Cuban government, but I found the parts about solidarity between #Cuba and #Vietnam inspiring.]
She watched videos and read about how Cuba supported Vietnam during the wars of the 1960s and ‘70s, building hospitals and sending doctors, sugar and cattle. Inspired, she donated 500,000 Vietnamese dong, about $19, from the modest income she earns at her family’s grocery store.
A new crowdfunding campaign for Cuba led by the Vietnam Red Cross Society has raised more than $13 million in the first week...
I guess the question (which I also ask myself) is why not blow it up in their territory, just put a few tons of explosives in a section in an unpopulat3d area and blow it to smitherines.
Or turn the gas off and then dismantle a km long section, if you don't want to waste explosives and risk fires.
Well done Ukraine, absolutely not considered a problem by your allies.
Fuck Trump and Fuck Orban. They both chose to stand on the wrong side of the russian invasion of Ukraine, and they both deserve to be punished for it.
Orban can fuck off back to Russia, we don't need Hungary in EU, when they choose to be pro Russian despite an invasion of a peaceful country in Europe.
USA too will suffer from this too, USA is no longer considered a strong ally by the "West" in general, and not even within NATO! There are already defense agreements being formed around NATO, for instance between Canada and EU! The agreements includes development and acquisition of weapons, that will no longer be bought from USA, to achieve greater independence from USA in the future.
It's always sad to lose a friend, but even with a new administration, nobody can really trust USA anymore, USA is currently descending deeper into a authoritarian regime, and resistance is effectively being systematically removed. As it is, there seems to be little hope that USA will ever become a functional democracy.
It’s always sad to lose a friend, but even with a new administration, nobody can really trust USA anymore, USA is currently descending deeper into a authoritarian regime, and resistance is effectively being systematically removed. As it is, there seems to be little hope that USA will ever become a functional democracy.
I hope that a better US administration will come after this one and that it will improve the things that can be improved easily (tariffs, visas, rhetoric, and other transactional policies), but at this point Trump has poisoned the well and it will take a generation of good (or at least understandable and workable) behavior by both US parties to rebuild a fraction of the trust and soft power the orange idiot has squandered in barely half a year.
We (EU) can absolutely reestablish normal trade immediately with USA if USA wishes, it is 100% one-sidedly USA that want trade restrictions. EU even went so far as to NOT put tariffs on USA despite USA has put a 15% tariff on everything from EU!!!
But the election of Bush twice, who already had hostile rhetoric against allies, and started a war based on false intelligence. And then the election of Trump twice, even after it became well known he is a rapist and a con man and a fraudster and behaves like a Russian asset. Shows the American people and democracy itself is very unreliable. It's not just this administration, it's the entire system that is the problem.
Of course we will work sanely with a sane administration, but we simply can't reasonably rely on American sanity anymore, unless some sort of fundamental shift occur in American democracy.
American democracy was always dysfunctional, designed that way on purpose in the belief it makes for a more efficient government, effectively creating an undemocratic 2 party system.
There are many good Americans, but they are outnumbered and the undemocratic system has failed them. Americans need to fight for democracy if they want it. If they really value freedom and democracy as Americans have boasted about more than any other nation, they will fight. But my guess is that when push comes to shove, the majority doesn't give a shit. At least that's what decades of presidential elections clearly indicate.
I'm not quite sure what you mean, of course we can go back to normal trade. But there is no way Europe will go back to rely on American weapons like we used to, and we will also try to rid ourselves from reliance on American IT. So I agree we will not go back entirely to what it used to be. The trust has been broken.
The Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to combine access to the sensitive and personal information of Americans into a single searchable system with the help of shady companies should terrify us – and should inspire us to fight back.
While couched in the benign language of eliminating government “data silos,” this plan runs roughshod over your privacy and security. It’s a throwback to the rightly mocked “Total Information Awareness” plans of the early 2000s that were, at least publicly, stopped after massive outcry from the public and from key members of Congress.
Under this order, ICE is trying to get access to the IRS and Medicaid records of millions of people, and is demanding data from local police. The administration is also making grabs for food stamp data from California and demanding voter registration data from at least nine states.
Much of the plan seems to rely on the data management firm Palantir, formerly based in Palo Alto. It’s telling that the Trump administration would entrust such a sensitive task to a company that has a shaky-at-best record on privacy and human rights.
Bad ideas for spending your taxpayer money never go away – they just hide for a few years and hope no one remembers. But we do. In the early 2000s, when the stated rationale was finding terrorists, the government proposed creating a single all-knowing interface into multiple databases and systems containing information about millions of people. Yet that plan was rightly abandoned after less than three years and millions of wasted taxpayer dollars, because of both privacy concerns and practical problems.
It certainly seems the Trump administration’s intention is to try once again to create a single, all-knowing way to access and use the personal information about everyone in America. Today, of course, the stated focus is on finding violent illegal immigrants and the plan initially only involves data about you held by the government, but the dystopian risks are the same.
Over fifty years ago, after the scandals surrounding Nixon’s “enemies list,” Watergate, and COINTELPRO, in which a President bent on staying in power misused government information to target his political enemies, Congress enacted laws to protect our data privacy. Those laws ensure that data about you collected for one purpose by the government can’t be misused for other purposes or disclosed to other government officials with an actual need. Also, they require the government to carefully secure the data it collects. While not perfect, these laws have served the twin goals of protecting our privacy and data security for many years.
Now the Trump regime is basically ignoring them, and this Congress is doing nothing to stand up for the laws it passed to protect us.
But many of us are pushing back. At the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where I’m executive director, we have sued over DOGE agents grabbing personal data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, filed an amicus brief in a suit challenging ICE’s grab for taxpayer data, and co-authored another amicus brief challenging ICE’s grab for Medicaid data. We’re not done and we’re not alone.
The libertarian wing was never really very libertarian, they mostly didn't care much about weed and wanted to actually cut spending (or at least claimed to).
Look at Mike Lee (unfortunately my Senator) he calls himself a "libertarian" because he says no a lot, but he also toes the party line when it natters and hasn't championed any social issues I'd call "libertarian." I changed my registration to Republican just so I could vote against this clown twice in one election.
It's stupid from a comsec perspective even if it wasn't stupid for any other reasons. Compartmentalization is a good strategy as we continue to upgrade outdated and vulnerable systems. But of course, this "leader" is an idiot. So he wouldn't know that.
I certainly agree with agencies having some amount of open access to their data, but only for things that are actually relevant. For example, the IRS should be able to check Social Security benefits to verify tax reports, but it shouldn't see details like where their checks are being sent.
If an agency needs access to data, they should specify exactly what they need and the source agency should provide an API to only get that into.
They for sure won't get hold of any notes about medical conditions (or god forbid, notes from your therapist) and use them against you if you opposed them.
I mean also the fact that they're targeting youth specifically. I worry they will try to remove kids from homes and claim that parents who allow kids to transition are harmful to their own children.
I'm just beyond not thinking worst case scenario at this point.
Holy fuck. All of that will be stolen in 3 seconds and the minute it launches Russia will be granted special access. It was nice knowing ya'll. Not really but. Yeah.
You joke but they could open up lines of credit, loans, make big purchases in your name. Of course, all my shit is shot so good luck getting approved with mine. Either way at this scale you could infinitely fuck with Americans in kind of financially devastating ways.
LOL. We won't. US citizens have given up and those that haven't don't believe in anything but peaceful protests or trying to go about things "the right way". Neither of which will do anything but hand over more control to billionaires and child rapists.
That was the whole point of DOGE. Access to the main servers of every government department, not "efficiency". If this data is combined with data from social media, it's possible to make quite detailed profiles of people. Let's not forget Peter Thiel and the Mercers have been doing this since Brexit. Also scary that Palantir got a big contract for the NATO.
PLEASE check out any privacy community on Lemmy, PrivacyGuides.org, or ugh....even /r/Privacy
Saying "I have nothing to hide" does nothing but empower the surveillance state. *You are living in a surveillance state* and advertising tracking data is how you are tracked.
The Trump administration’s ongoing efforts to combine access to the sensitive and personal information of Americans into a single searchable system with the help of shady companies should terrify us – and should inspire us to fight back.
We should indeed fight back against the governments and corporations that for decades have been doing this shit.
This is creating a platform that allows somebody to access every piece of data in one centralized location.
So example, when somebody is determining your social security payment (if that even exists in the future) they(or more likely AI) might be basing that decision not just on data relevant to income but also on something like a personal social credit score based on every piece of available government data related to a person over their entire lifetime.
Did you get flagged as suspicious while flying bc of 9/11. Did something end up on your record by complete mistake? In this centralized data base you could have all kinds of real and incorrect details associated with you (or even other people like friends, family, neighbors, coworkers) used to discriminate against you. Data becomes destiny.
Not to mention if they integrate it with these live facial recognition surveillance networks, something they caught you doing on camera without your knowledge could be used to make decisions.
"You could read anyone's email in the world, anybody you've got an email address for. Any website: You can watch traffic to and from it. Any computer that an individual sits at: You can watch it. Any laptop that you're tracking: you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world. It's a one-stop-shop for access to the NSA's information. ... You can tag individuals ... Let's say you work at a major German corporation and I want access to that network, I can track your username on a website on a forum somewhere, I can track your real name, I can track associations with your friends and I can build what's called a fingerprint, which is network activity unique to you, which means anywhere you go in the world, anywhere you try to sort of hide your online presence, your identity."
My relatives who’ve been screaming about mark of the beast and shit for years sure confuse the hell Out of me when they voice support for this while wearing their maga hats.
They want to see the mark of the beast, and the Antichrist, and the apocalypse so the end times will come and Jesus will take them all to heaven and burn their enemies in eternal damnation.
Of course. Funnel all that info to Peter fucking Thiel's Palantir surveillance company that also has contracts with international law enforcement.
There couldn't possibly be any problems with funnelling every bit of panopticon into a single billionaire super lobbiest's hands. Especially one that has openly stated that he doesn't believe in the continuation of the human race. Who is the closest thing to a real life vampire, regularly getting blood transfusions from healthy young "blood boys" in a hare brained attempt to prolong his own life at all costs.
I find it a massive failure of society as a whole that this fucking charlatan wasn't laughed out of society in the 2010s when he was doing interviews about the "blood boy" bullshit and all the other crackpot shit he was doing to prolong his life. Absolute fucking ghoul. The people in power value money more than sense.
It depends on the situation. Better information sharing is important for protecting vulnerable people and children. However, we absolutely shouldn't have every agency accessing sensitive information like medical records just cos they want to.
I've been saying it for decades. If we get out of this alive, privacy laws will need to have a massive overhaul like no one has ever seen. In times past it was governments, not private entities that had control over everyone, and the idea that a private business or enterprise having that kind of knowledge about people was unthinkable. Even those from the Robber Baron era of the 1890s to 1910s and the Mad Men era of the 1950s to 70s would never have had that kind of overreach.
A digital bill of rights needs not only extremely tight control over what governments can and cannot get, but even STRICTER stuff for non-government entities. I can't believe that marketing was the downfall of freedom and privacy in this day and age!
Owned by Sociopathic Oligarchs Peter Theil, who holds Vance's leash, and paid Trump to put him in the VP slot, and believes that infusions of the blood of young men will help him live to be 150 (not kidding).
I don’t really understand how this works. If I’m a company whose entire infrastructure is in the US (for example, I don’t know if 4chan is like that) how can I get in trouble with the UK? I don’t have a legal entity there, I’m not doing any business on their soil whatsoever, how can they enforce their laws against me?
They're "doing business" there by serving ads to their citizens, that's the legal basis for suing them. Whether that goes anywhere depends on the laws governing the business and any leverage UK has (say, going after advertising who do business with the company and in the UK).
You're right, but that also means your service can get blocked in said country. And that's what they don't want, so they're trying to fight it from home.
Whoever is providing the communications infrastructure to the Australian caller would be offering a service in Australia (5g masts, fibre, customer service etc.)
Only if the call is going via satellite owned by non-Australians could you avoid this.
My website is my website. You visit my website, my website does not visit you. My website is public, you choose to enter it. You visit my website through your infrastructure to get to my infrastructure. My infrastructure is publicly available to you, should you be able to access it.
The governing body of your (second person, not you specifically) infrastructure (the UK government) chooses to impose rules on my actions. Their threat is "we'll stop letting people in our infrastructure from being able to reach your infrastructure."
That is extortion, not working in the public's favor. The UK government is saying they'll block all roads from your house that lead to my website outside of the UK. My website is overseas, brother. The UK is blocking all the ports so you can't sail here. I don't "offer services" to you in the UK, I just don't prevent people from the UK from trying to reach my island. Nothing about my services requires the UK infrastructure. My services keep operating whether the UK government exists or not. How do they have any right over my infrastructure in this scenario?
If this is about ads, the UK has all the right to remove my ads from their country. That is within their right. Anything about blocking people from the UK is within their right, sure, but that's not my problem lol. Sorry you have a shit government lol
But it does effect everyone. Don't you think the lack complete backlash to the online safety act is emboldening similar ideas in the rest of the world, especially the EU? Yes, we've stopped chat control like 2 or 3 times already, but it's being brought up again now.
But ideas are cheap, of course every government has thought and dragged ideas about this before. But implementing them is costly, so letting another government go first, working out the kinks, getting case studies for what kind of messaging works, what tech is required, and seeing what the backlash looks like, makes the second go a lot easier and cheaper.
Let's face it, Starmer's tongue is shoved so far up Trump's fettid arsehole, he can taste his mouthwash. Trump only has to tweet about it and that spineless twat will capitulate and make it the government's most important mission to ensure "international cooperation", or some BS.
I'm pulled back and forth with this one. On the one hand, 4chan is a shithole that should be taken care of. On the other side, UK laws that try to govern the internet are so overly deranged shit.
Keep it free from hate without controlling it? Who gets the ultimate say, then? The internet or the government? If your answer is "the government" how in the world does that work without controlling the internet? What government has successfully done this before?
Calling 4chan the most hateful site on the Internet ignores the fact that xitter is a thing.
The kind of hateful rhetoric and grooming are not unique to 4chan, they happen on Facebook, discord, and roblox. 4chan has just been a minimally filtered representation of underground online cultures for decades now meaning it's still just as much a font of creativity as it is a cesspool of internet refuse.
I checked one of those site traffic estimators and got 2 to 2.5 mil monthly views for 4chan vs 120 mil for twitter. So if every single 4chan user was a nazi, it would only take about 2% of twitter being nazis to equal that. Seems like there might be more nazis on twitter these days tbh.
I hope this encourages more companies/sites to fight back against stupid laws. If most keep complying, it'll only get worse for them in the future when they make even worse laws.
Pull out all UK servers and ignore uk fines (assuming thats legal wherever u reside... idk how that works) or just pull out of uk.
I hope a country like switzerland or something lets companies host servers there for europe without enforcing dumb laws from uk/european union.
I hope a country like switzerland or something lets companies host servers there for europe without enforcing dumb laws from uk/european union.
Not going to happen with Switzerland and EU laws. Being completely surrounded by the EU, we're really bad with leverage and are already struggling to not have worse and worse deals forced on us. Plus, we have our own Chat Control type law coming up (which is why Proton is leaving). There's no way we'll take a stance against EU law.
I absolutely don't care what happens to 4chan, but UK starting to fine the internet for being available there and not complying with their bullshit is worrying.
They've already "flocked". The site and userbase is a shell of its former self and it's hey day is long passed. The users aged out or just went to places like kiwi farms, random discord channels, etc.
I mean you're on Lemmy, a good chunk of old 4chan users are here, so you're amongst them.
I'm a bit confused by comments on this topic. Do sovereign countries not have the right anymore to decide their own laws and issue punishment when they're not followed?
Like, they obviously can't enforce these fines. This article says as much. The fines can't be enforced, but if 4chan ignores them, that opens the door for other measures like delisting the site from search engines or blocking access to it from the UK (these two examples are taken from the article). Which are fair measures imo.
Like, to the people saying UK can't do laws which apply to services which are merely accessible in the UK and have no physical presence there, do you also apply this logic to the GDPR, which works the same way? The US has these laws too, like COPPA iirc. It's not really something the UK came up with, it's a bit of a standard with laws like this as far as I know.
I’m a bit confused by comments on this topic. Do sovereign countries not have the right anymore to decide their own laws and issue punishment when they’re not followed?
Some laws are bullshit and I commend everyone who decides to ignore them.
but if 4chan ignores them, that opens the door for other measures like delisting the site from search engines or blocking access to it from the UK (these two examples are taken from the article)
This has already happened to a number of sites and services, with some voluntarily blocking access from the UK. 4chan's approach is just a bit different in the way that they are waiting to get blocked instead of doing the blocking themselves. It sucks for citizens from the UK, but they are the ones that put the people in power who created those laws.
Like, to the people saying UK can’t do laws which apply to services which are merely accessible in the UK and have no physical presence there, do you also apply this logic to the GDPR, which works the same way?
This has also been the case already. There are a number of American websites that will just straight up deny you access if you visit them from a EU country. Some even cite GDPR as the reason for being blocked. I don't think it's the best solution, but I accept it because I wouldn't want to visit a site that cannot comply with it anyways.
The UK government is basically testing the waters of what it can get away with and also normalising the notion that they could even bother/dare to ask for this to be done in the first place.
It is about shifting the Overton Window for the normies. Especially, over time. For example, the first people to be cancelled or removed from social media years ago, like almost 10 years ago, it was done with some bad fanfare, and the people who did it, Twitter, etc... I remember said that they did it even despite some internal strife over the notion of censorship. Now, people can get cancelled on a dime and no one really cares all that much.
If you told someone 20 years ago that you should pay ca$h out of your own pocket as to get a corporate microphone that listens to you, your family, your children, constantly so it can play songs for you and tell you the weather and gives some other conveniences, 99% people would say that you would have to be fucking insane to do that. Being such a breach of damn common sense and reasonable privacy. Look at people now. Shifting the Overton Window over timr works for fun, control and profit.
Of course, if the US does not play along, then UK's bill goes nowhere outside the UK, or maybe they will try it with weaker geopolitical countries. But governments do this type of thing all the time, under a, "We will push until someone else finally pushes back," mentality.
If the UK really wanted to go after 4Chan, they could contact the FBI or whoever in the USA that could serve relevant via proper channels. This has always been available to them, but this is not about that, it is about censorship and control. Obviously.
Researchers at Cornell University have developed an electronic chip that they describe as a "microwave brain." The simplified chip is analog rather than digital, yet can process ultrafast data and wireless communication signals simultaneously.
My understanding of why digital computers rose to dominance was not any superiority in capability but basically just error tolerance. When the intended values can only be "on" or "off," your circuit can be really poor due to age, wear, or other factors, but if it's within 40% of the expected "on" or "off" state, it will function basically the same as perfect. Analog computers don't have anywhere near tolerances like that, which makes them more fragile, expensive, and harder to scale production.
I'm really curious if the researchers address any of those considerations.
Analog computers were also bulkier, had more mechanical complexity, and required higher power to operate and generated more heat as a consequence. The Heathkit EC-1 logic circuits operated at 0-100V. There are some real physics problems with scaling analog circuits up to higher complexity.
Reading the article, I learned that the author does not really have a clue what he is talking about.
A mechanical clock is anything but analog. Look up what an escape wheel is for if you doubt it.
For "analog is easier" keep in mind that it is very hard to get chip based circuits do precisely reproducable analog behavior. Indeed, this is one of the main reasons why we have digital computer chips: the output of the circuit is sufficiently unambiguous.
And "can run things in parallel" - That's what e.g. FPGAs are for. One if my designs runs audio compression on 32 channels with a meagre 12MHz clock, among many, many other tasks. All at the same time.
I found some more articles that have more substance. It seems to me that it is a programmable device that is an analogue recreation of digital neural network design with the benefits of real time processing of data streams without conversion or sampling and doing it at lower power consumption that current digital technology.
Tech news seem latch on to the words parallel and wireless because the chip operates with microwaves in a mesh¹ processing configuration but confuse what it means in this context.
Very cool, I'm curious to learn more.
¹ or "mush", as quoted by the researches themselves
Cornell engineers have built the first fully integrated “microwave brain” — a silicon microchip that can process ultrafast data and wireless signals at the same time, while using less than 200 milliwatts of power.
Heads up if you're a microwave popcorn person - they're apparently choc full of microplastics. 🙁 Think it was a recent Veritasium video I learned that in and stopped buying them.
This patch adds support for rendering static inline SVG documents in the
DOM tree by serializing the SVGElement's subtree and leveraging the
existing resvg based SVG stack for rendering. Serial...
Probabilmente, forse, anche se non so in che modo, dovrei prendere l’abitudine di pulire il cinturino di gomma della Mi Band (e il retro della band stessa, che forse sotto sotto è pure peggio a guardare), perché tempo una manciata di settimane che non lo si fa ed ecco che questo diventa ricoperto di questa […]
Probabilmente, forse, anche se non so in che modo, dovrei prendere l’abitudine di pulire il cinturino di gomma della Mi Band (e il retro della band stessa, che forse sotto sotto è pure peggio a guardare), perché tempo una manciata di settimane che non lo si fa ed ecco che questo diventa ricoperto di questa tale assurda monnezza dappertutto, nelle parti un minimo a contatto con la pelle… 👻 …Una monnezza che, però, ha un certo stile. Innanzitutto, è indubbiamente un po’ misteriosa: di che tipo di sostanza sarà fatto, questo tale schifo? È questo marrone beige che facilmente si sfalda, e forse sotto sotto anche gnammy (ma NON lo assaggerò, stavolta), però è alquanto criptico… penserei sia sudore inmerdato, ma boh. Poi, come si fa ad incrostare, oltre che sulla parte liscia grande, anche dentro i buchini dell’aggancio, veramente non capisco, perché ci finisce (e poi esce) veramente molta materia relativamente a quanto poca (quasi niente) sembra che ce ne sia ad occhio. 🤭 Vabbé, fa schifo, ma queste sono le mie assolutissime vibe. Ogni tanto è bene raccontare anche queste cose intriganti molto piccole sulla mia vita e il mio destino, così evitiamo preventivamente che boh, eventuali bavosi che si annidano su Internet si fissino in maniera sconveniente su di me. Questo è lo spirito del girlrotting e… in effetti, questa è una delle applicazioni pratiche non troppo dannose di esso: non potrò permettermi di farmi crescere la muffa sugli arti, ma un pochino di essi in spirito viene comunque via e diventa schifo, in un miscuglio di pelle morta, acqua sporca e sali minerali… ❤️ #MiBand #schifo #sporco #wristband
As long as medical devices are excluded, this is just a net-positive. When I was growing up, that was the normal. Now, we treat it as some heavy-handed approach. We all know that when you're distracted by stuff on the screen, you're just not paying attention
When I was growing up the only distraction in class what the wall clock. I remember watching the seconds hand go slowly around, 60 times and then the bell at least, and then we'd do this 3 more times and finally it was lunch time, we ate gelatinous meat like protein paste with mashed potatoes and go back to class and I'd watch the seconds hand go around 240 more times before we had the hour and a half bus ride home.
I never did homeworks but still passed. We didn't have anything to do and I didn't want to do much of anything anyway. I'd watch TV, it was almost always stuff I'd seen before, cartoon slop and obvious lies and half-truth on the news program.
At some point I would finally become unconscious in bed, then wake up too early and do it all again. This lasted about 12 years and then I had to find a job and then things took a turn for the worse because I couldn't just watch the wall clock anymore. At least if I wanted to eat I couldn't.
Luxury. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
Yeah I mean why would you let young people have fun or anything like that? If they are constantly bored, they will certainly be happier. Or something...
Whether you are even capable of learning stuff depends entirely on your genetics and epigendtics. Only a few students in any one area will ever retain much knowledge. The thing that actually determines how well your society becomes, tends to be things like how happy the childhood of your citizens are. Very few people ever seek knowledge long term within a healthy lifestyle. School for most kids is just a way to babysit them while the parents work long shifts for corporations.
The tragedy is the kids in south korea hardly get a childhood at all. They stay in ultra competative schools during the day, only to be shuttled off to cram schools in the evening. They are not even human beings in the eyes of their own parents. They exist soley to fullfill the dreams of their parents, which is to hopefully work hard enough to become some executive for one of the seveal corporations that almost completly own the South Korean Economy.
Many of these kids, like many in South Korea will grow up to be massivly depressed alchoholics and workaholics. Never having much of a life beyond serving their managers. This comes out in several ways in the character of Koreans. Many of them are incredibly dark people. Thats why media like the squid games is so popular over there. Behind the venure of a very productive and industrious society where most forgo almost all of their individuality, never even having a childhood. Behind it lies so many incredibly dark and deeply depressed people traped within a virtual prison of wealth and status.
People like this would maybe end up ruling the world, given they work so much, and so hard, yet with their childhood also dies their soul. Their creativity dies, their dreams die, their human spirit is deminished in the hell they create and call progress. The parts of their dna that make them human, slowly whither away under hyper corporatism. Just like everything else in their society a child is nothing more then property. An investment by corporations. A robot that is as equally bland as it is numb. Never does anyone in a society like that actually consider that maybe they dont have a right to dictate every little aspect of their childs life in order to promote what they believe a child should be. So those that feel, those that see deeply the lights in the city nights. Those that see beauty. They die away as the human race regresses day by day.
South Korea has always been a deeply disturbing place to me. A place that is truely inhumane, yet such a beautiful place as well. Behind every woman who looks likes a flight attendent, and every man wearing a suit or dress clothes, is a society which has almost no creativity and soul. No individualism. No happiness. No relationships. Everything is about efficency, everything is about materialism. All the money in the world doesnt matter if you don't get to fall in love with someone, and have dreams, and watch your kids play and be happy. What is even the point of life it is nothing but work, followed by a few hours a drinking before crashing out for the night, and starting it all over again?
The text argues that while genetics and upbringing shape learning, societal structures—especially in South Korea—reduce children to tools for corporate success, stripping away individuality, creativity, and joy. Beneath the country’s image of productivity and wealth lies a culture of depression, lost childhoods, and a soulless pursuit of status and efficiency.
Once again, Western countries and their vassals will always treat the symptom and not address the multitude of causes (because it leads directly back to them).
A society dumb enough to not read into how they're being exploited but smart enough to build railroads and crunch numbers as an accountant is exactly the kind of society needed for bougies. So an 8 or 9 hour literal work shift for kids + homework + projects is the best they could offer, which isn't exactly going to inspire confidence in students, so of course stimulus before, during and after class will be sought after if it means coping with this shit.
Key findings from Inside Higher Ed’s student survey on generative AI show that using the evolving technology hasn’t diminished the value of college in their view, but it could affect their critical thinking skills.
Key findings from Inside Higher Ed’s student survey on generative AI show that using the evolving technology hasn’t diminished the value of college in their view, but it could affect their critical thinking skills.
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The part that makes Rust scary is the part that makes it unique.
And it’s also what I miss in other programming languages — let me explain!
Rust syntax starts simple.
This function prints a number:...
Every time I think I finally understand Unicode, it surprises me again. This time, it was a file full of coffee orders that wouldn’t grep for “caffè” - even though the word was clearly there. The culprit? Unicode normalization. Characters like “è” can be
Every time when I think I finally “got” Unicode, I get kicked in the back by this rabbit hole. 😆 However, IMHO it is important to recognise that when moving data and files between operating systems and programs that you’re better off knowing some of the pitfalls. So I’m sharing something I experienced when I transferred a file to my FreeBSD Play-Around notebook. So let’s assume a little story…
It’s late afternoon and you and some friends sit together playing around with BSD. A friend using another operating system collects coffee orders in a little text file to not forget anyone when going to the barista on the other side of the street. He sends the file to you, so at the next meeting you already know the preferences of your friends. You take a look at who wants a caffè: armin@freebsd:/tmp $ cat orders2.txtMauro: cappuccinoArmin: caffè doppioAnna: caffè shakeratoStefano: caffèFranz: latte macchiatoFrancesca: cappuccinoCarla: latte macchiato So you do a quick grep just to be very surprised! armin@freebsd:/tmp $ grep -i caffè orders2.txtarmin@freebsd:/tmp $ Wait, WAT? Why is there no output? We have more than one line with caffè in the file? Well, you just met one of the many aspects of Unicode. This time it’s called “normalization”. 😎
Many characters can be represented by more than one form. Take the innocent “à” from the example above. There is an accented character in the Unicode characters called LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH GRAVE. But you could also just use a regular LATIN SMALL LETTER A and combine it with the character COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT from the Unicode characters. Both result in the same character and “look” identical, but aren’t.
Let’s see a line with the word “caffè” as hex dump using the first approach (LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH GRAVE): \u0063\u0061\u0066\u0066\u00E8\u000Ac a f f è (LF) Now let’s do the same for the same line using the second approach: \u0063\u0061\u0066\u0066\u0065\u0300\u000Ac a f f è (LF) And there you have it, the latter is a byte longer and the two lines do not match up even if both lines are encoded as UTF-8 and the character looks the same!
So obviously just using UTF-8 is not enough and you might encounter files using the second approach. Just to make matter more complicated there are actually four forms of Unicode normalization out there. 😆
NFD: canonical decomposition
NFC: canonical decomposition followed by canonical composition
NFKD: compatible decomposition
NFKC: compatible decomposition followed by canonical composition.
For the sake of brevity of this post and your nerves we’ll just deal with the first two and I refer you to this Wikipedia article for the rest.
Normal form C (NFC) is the most widely used normal form and is also defined by the W3C for HTML, XML, and JavaScript. Technically speaking, encoding in Latin1 (or Windows Codepage 1252), for example, is in normal form C, since an “à” or the umlaut “Ö” is a single character and is not composed of combining characters. Windows and the .Net framework also store Unicode strings in Normal Form C. This does not mean that NFD can be ignored. For example, the Mac OSX file system works with a variant of NFD data, as the Unicode standard was only finalized when OSX was designed. When two applications share Unicode data, but normalize them differently, errors and data loss can result.
So how do we get from one form to another in one of the BSD operating systems (also in Linux)? Well, the Unicode Consortium provides a toolset called ICU — International Components for Unicode. The Documentation URL is unicode-org.github.io/icu/ and you can install that in FreeBSD using the command pkg install icu After completion of the installation you have a new command line tool called uconv (not to be mismatched with iconv which serves a similar purpose). Using uconv you can transcode the normal forms into each other as well do a lot of other encoding stuff (this tool is a rabbit hole in itself 😎).
Similar to iconv you can specify a “from” and a “to” encoding for input. But you can also specify so-called “transliterations” that will be applied to the input. In its simplest form such a transliteration is something in the form SOURCE-TARGET that specifies the operation. The "any" stands for any input character. This is the way I got the hexdump from above by using the transliteration 'any-hex': armin@freebsd:/tmp$ echo caffè | uconv -x 'any-hex'\u0063\u0061\u0066\u0066\u00E8\u000A Instead of hex codes you can also output the Unicode code point names to see the difference between the two forms: armin@freebsd:/tmp$ echo Caffè | uconv -f utf-8 -t utf-8 -x 'any-nfd' | uconv -f utf-8 -x 'any-name' \N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER A}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER F}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER F}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER E}\N{COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT}\N{<control-000A>} Now let’s try this for the NFC form: armin@freebsd:/tmp$ echo Caffè | uconv -f utf-8 -t utf-8 -x 'any-nfc' | uconv -f utf-8 -x 'any-name'\N{LATIN CAPITAL LETTER C}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER A}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER F}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER F}\N{LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH GRAVE}\N{<control-000A>} You can also convert from one normal form to another by using a transliteration like 'any-nfd' to convert the input to the normal form D (for decomposed, e.g. LATIN SMALL CHARACTER A + COMBINING GRAVE ACCENT) or 'any-nfc' for the normal form C.
If you want to learn about building your own transliterations, there’s a tutorial at unicode-org.github.io/icu/user… that shows the enormous capabilities of uconv.
Using the 'name' transliteration you can easily discern the various Sigmas here (I’m using sed to split the output into multiple lines): armin@freebsd:/tmp $ echo '∑𝛴Σ' | uconv -x 'any-name' | sed -e 's/\\N/\n/g'{N-ARY SUMMATION}{MATHEMATICAL ITALIC CAPITAL SIGMA}{GREEK CAPITAL LETTER SIGMA}{<control-000A>} If you want to get the Unicode character from the name, there are several ways depending on the programming language you prefer. Here is an example using python that shows the German umlaut "Ö": python -c 'import unicodedata; print(unicodedata.lookup(u"LATIN CAPITAL LETTER O WITH DIAERESIS"))' The uconv utility is a very mighty thing and every modern programming language (see the Python example above) also has libraries and modules to support handling Unicode data. The world gets connected, but not in ASCII. 😎
A new survey has revealed a sharp generational split in United States attitudes towards Israel’s war on Gaza, with younger voters showing unprecedented support for Hamas as Israel carries out a genocide.
Although this question is framed in the shittiest way possible, I would still support Hamas over the IDF because only one of these organizations are guilty of genocide.
Vi sono prove pratiche del fatto che il superamento delle aspettative sia la fondamentale aspirazione del perfetto uomo d’affari, universalmente dedito al raggiungimento di uno stato di eccellenza, vicendevolmente favorevole a se stesso e la contempo…
The man who coined the word “enshitification” graces the podcast to share his views on conspiracy theories, algorithmic management, AI, and reading the saucy passages in Leviticus at barmitzvahs. Cory
I'd be surprised if you can actually delete all the data, since it's federated, but if it does work you'd for sure have to wait for the deletion to get propagated.
Sorry for the late response. When I try to delete it, even with the "Delete immediately" option checked, I can still log in into it.
I wanted to delete it because I'm trying to disconnect a bit from social networks but I gave up on this. I think that I don't want my account deleted anymore.
Ok. Please confirm you want it deleted and I will delete it. Note that it’s irreversible and restoring from backups is not feasible for one account, so when it’s gone, it’s gone.
Okay, that makes sense. I guess I can just play around a little with editing it and see what results I get. Maybe I should be looking for some formatting instructions on another wiki somewhere....
A slug is like an article abstract that journos use to summarize shit in production basically. In my newspaper days its what the journalists would use to sound cool when asking each other what they were doing and what about.
Edit: as for context in a Wiki I don't know its intent or if it publishes or not. Wikipedia just has me on gastropods now.
I woke up one day and Fennec wouldn't browse any web page. Like, if I do a search, which goes to DuckDuckGo, I get a loading bar that never goes anywhere. (See screenshot).
If I disable all of my extensions, it'll work again. Then, if I enable them one by one to try to find the culprit that was making Fennec not work, it doesn't break! Until it does, randomly. I basically can't easily reproduce it working or not working.
I switched to IronFox, and installed all the same extensions, and have had no problems for two days.
This Week in F-DroidTWIF curated on Thursday, 28 Aug 2025, Week 35F-Droid coreF-Droid’s push for decentralization means not only having multiple repos, but a...
Lembot_0004
in reply to themachinestops • • •Kyrgizion
in reply to Lembot_0004 • • •YappyMonotheist
in reply to themachinestops • • •like this
onewithoutaname likes this.
Alex
in reply to YappyMonotheist • • •sugar_in_your_tea
in reply to Alex • • •Alex
in reply to sugar_in_your_tea • • •thr0w4w4y2
in reply to Alex • • •If only there was some way the government could have predicted this would happen and maybe not rushed a poorly thought out law in the first place!
maybe then they would not have:
- forced big tech companies to withdraw service to the uk
- forced uk-based small forums and message boards to close
- given free vpn providers tons more data to sell
- reduced the overall cyber resilience of the country by forcing people to choose between giving photos of their passports to some weird online service or signing up for a free vpn which sells their data, may inject their own unregulated adverts etc
- reduced uk based advertising effectiveness and thus investment and marketing spend
- pissed everyone off while doing it, scoring yet another win for the far right
absolute roasters the lot of them
MyDogLovesMe
in reply to themachinestops • • •BrianTheeBiscuiteer
in reply to MyDogLovesMe • • •twinnie
in reply to themachinestops • • •like this
dhhyfddehhfyy4673 likes this.
🇦🇺𝕄𝕦𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕕𝕔𝕣𝕠𝕔𝕠𝕕𝕚𝕝𝕖
in reply to twinnie • • •HeerlijkeDrop likes this.
monogram
in reply to 🇦🇺𝕄𝕦𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕕𝕔𝕣𝕠𝕔𝕠𝕕𝕚𝕝𝕖 • • •Racism, homophobia & sexism mostly, but I’m sure I’m missing a few.
Then again the other mayor parties haven’t been saints on the matter, tldr don’t trust a politician.
like this
Azathoth likes this.
Naich
in reply to 🇦🇺𝕄𝕦𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕕𝕔𝕣𝕠𝕔𝕠𝕕𝕚𝕝𝕖 • • •like this
Azathoth likes this.
TwigletSparkle
in reply to twinnie • • •Naich
in reply to TwigletSparkle • • •LainTrain
in reply to Naich • • •Bahnd Rollard
in reply to twinnie • • •gmtom
in reply to twinnie • • •aeronmelon
in reply to themachinestops • • •Stop ministers using VPNs to watch child porn.
Told!
like this
SuiXi3D e onewithoutaname like this.
HyperfocusSurfer
in reply to aeronmelon • • •Pidof files aside, them implying they need to watch children watching porn is not much better.FUCKING_CUNO
in reply to themachinestops • • •If this fucker had any idea what VPN even stood for they'd realize how fuckin stupid this statement is...
like this
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frongt
in reply to themachinestops • • •palordrolap
in reply to frongt • • •That's what they're aiming for, yes.
They want to know where everyone is and what every person is doing at every possible moment of every day, be that in public or on the Internet. They are paranoid and know that their entire system is in danger of collapse with the common man gaining control over the rich and powerful.
Thus they resort to extreme control of the commoners to ensure that won't happen.
Child protection and anti-pornography stances are perfect excuses because they're very difficult to argue against.
like this
MyTurtleSwimsUpsideDown, dhhyfddehhfyy4673 e Australis13 like this.
Serinus
in reply to palordrolap • • •Well, except for this one.
WanderingThoughts
in reply to palordrolap • • •mrgoosmoos
in reply to frongt • • •like this
Australis13 likes this.
Basic Glitch
in reply to mrgoosmoos • • •100% and as always they boil it down to "well even if all that other stuff is true, it's for the safety of children."
Yet we have fucking confirmation that exposing networks of wealthy and powerful pedophiles is not on the agenda. Those people are untouchable. Those people are also the ones that we are handing complete control over to.
So who tf are we really protecting children from by doing this?
Basic Glitch
in reply to frongt • • •Photuris
in reply to themachinestops • • •We didn’t see this one coming a mile away.
Palantir execs and shareholders are buzzing with anticipation.
Gerudo
in reply to themachinestops • • •like this
PokyDokie likes this.
sugar_in_your_tea
in reply to Gerudo • • •Yup, and that's how the US got the Mafia. We banned alcohol, but people wanted to drink, so the Mafia made that happen.
All a ban does is hurt law abiding citizens and businesses.
I Cast Fist
in reply to sugar_in_your_tea • • •sugar_in_your_tea
in reply to I Cast Fist • • •Eh, I disagree. Slavery being banned is obviously a good thing, but that's because it's immoral to own someone else, so it's essentially just kidnapping. Gambling, on the other hand, shouldn't be banned for the simple reason that consenting adults should be able to do it if they choose.
Basically, I believe there are two types of rights:
I believe nobody should gamble because it's a poor financial decision and very addictive (and I choose to avoid gambling), but I also believe you should be allowed to gamble, and the government should ensure that companies that provide gambling services do so fairly (i.e. advertisements about win-rates and whatnot are accurate).
So yes, if gambling wasn't allowed, people w/ addictions would be better off, but those who aren't at risk of gambling addiction would be harmed due to restrictions on their freedom. So the question is, do we want government to protect us from ourselves, or merely provide a safety net for when we screw up? I'm absolutely in the latter camp, and I think we should use taxes to fund recovery programs for addictive behaviors in lieu of banning them. In general, I think a tax is way more rights-respecting than a ban.
rights that oblige either inaction or action
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)I Cast Fist
in reply to sugar_in_your_tea • • •Gambling between two people or very small groups is mostly ok and something humans have done since cave times.
Now, because real life has profit seeking corporations in control of gambling that know and abuse all psychological tricks available to maximize profits, I don't think allowing them to exist is good for anyone except the owners. Casinos are also perfect for money laundering, so that's another reason to not allow them to function, although with the internet they can just pick and choose a country to exist in.
sugar_in_your_tea
in reply to I Cast Fist • • •I agree that gambling is bad and nobody should do it, but that's different from the government preventing you from doing it.
Something being "bad" doesn't mean it should be banned, it means it needs closer scrutiny to make sure both sides of the transaction are fully informed of the risks and can meaningfully consent.
I don't like this reasoning because the underlying assumption is that violating people's privacy is okay if it helps catch criminals.
That said, there are typically rules that limit this. In most areas, casinos have to ID you and report any transaction over a certain amount (usually $10k or so per day, many casinos have a lower threshold) to tax authorities specifically to combat money laundering, just like banks do. That seems to limit money laundering for larger players, but obviously doesn't do much for smaller players. To do better, we either need much lower limits, or much higher surveillance, and both would violate innocent people's privacy.
Instead of that, we should take a hard look at policy and policing. For example, a lot of money laundering is by drug dealers, and they exist due to drug bans. Maybe we should consider legalizing and regulating more drugs, which would give people safer options, reduce incarceration rates, and reduce laundering from illegal drugs since more people would go for the safer options. On the policing side, we can improve training, reallocate people from ticketing to investigative work, and build community trust to improve quality of reports.
At the end of the day, I think personal liberty and privacy is more important than preventing harm or catching criminals. I also think we can do both, but we need to start from the perspective of maximising liberty and privacy.
xc2215x
in reply to themachinestops • • •fluxion
in reply to themachinestops • • •altphoto
in reply to themachinestops • • •IsoKiero
in reply to themachinestops • • •If they were really after kids watching porn (or even porn in general) it would be technically somewhat simple to force ISPs to provide filters on their end as a subscription service. I'm pretty sure I've even heard that kind of services in the past. Make it even opt-out if you really want to.
That way ISPs would just ban everything from pornhub and others unless you spesifically want it allowed or even provide a portal where you could block reddit, twitter, tumblr or whatever you wish on your account. That kind of technology already exists and it's used on many corporate setups.
There's obviously ways around that, but there's no technical way to block every possible way to move bits between computers. Even if they would shut down the whole internet there's still ways to build mesh-networks or even buy USB-drives from a shady alley.
But as we all know, it's not about porn and not about children.
x00z
in reply to IsoKiero • • •jim3692
in reply to x00z • • •You can't block VPNs without blocking the entire internet. You can block known VPN services, but you can't prevent people from hosting their own.
Some known VPN protocols could be blocked, using introspection tools. However, this would just render corporate VPNs useless. VPN traffic is just bytes, and so is WebSockets. Good luck figuring out whether my HTTPS traffic is legitimate internet traffic, or masked VPN traffic.
piecat
in reply to jim3692 • • •Good news, we closed that pesky loophole by banning encryption without backdoors.
If they can't decode it, you better be ready to explain exactly what those bytes were!
Echo Dot
in reply to piecat • • •Even if they go that route, and frankly I think they would get lynched before we got to that point, they can't monitor every single connection. That just way too much traffic.
That's why China has a firewall, because that's the best option they can come up with because monitoring every Chinese persons data is an impossible task. Their only option would be to go North Korea route, and just close the internet but that would basically end their economy.
piecat
in reply to Echo Dot • • •Echo Dot
in reply to piecat • • •In China? I've read that sentence like six times I'm not quite sure what you're alluding to, but China's had fiber for about 10 years now. The reason they allowed it is because increasing everyone's bandwidth doesn't really make the job of monitoring them any harder. It's still the same number of connections. Plus it allows businesses to be competitive on the global market.
Also they kind of assume their firewall would work. Initially it did work, at least for the majority of people, but over time that more and more have learnt to use a VPN and now the whole thing's a bit of a pointless exercise. There is a massive disconnect in China between the younger generation who use VPNs and the older generation who just consume state media.
lengau
in reply to themachinestops • • •DreamlandLividity
in reply to themachinestops • • •FYI, with Mullvad VPN set to UK, sites that require age verification:
Sites tha do NOT require age verification:
And xvideos.com is a bit special since it shows you the thumbnails of porn videos but won't let you play them.
But we need to stop VPNs! Think of the whole two children that have VPNs! What if instead of just going to the half of the sites that don't verify age, they figure out how to use a VPN?! Oh the humanity!
Yeah, UK wants to de-anonymize VPN users as the next step in their attack on free speech. It is laughable to think this is about anything else.
mechoman444
in reply to DreamlandLividity • • •DreamlandLividity
in reply to mechoman444 • • •subarctictundra
in reply to themachinestops • • •dyc3
in reply to subarctictundra • • •bier
in reply to dyc3 • • •Let me give you one, kids try to explore topics out of curiosity. They are probably not going to look up someone torturing animals, because they don't want to see that. Kids usually look up and explore things they are ready for. Also "kids" is a pretty diverse group, a 5 year old and a 15 year old kid are very different.
For real young kids parents should monitor online behavior anyway. For teens, how is life this different than looking at a playboy or a porn tape. Teens have been doing that forever, the people creating these laws probably did that when they where kids.
It's probably a lot better to let kids (teens) explore nudity and sex in a safe environment, instead of letting them go unsupervised in places that ignore the law.
It's basically the same argument with drugs, offering legal options vs. going to a dealer and possibly getting much more dangerous drugs mixed in.
sleen
in reply to bier • • •Calling teenagers kids in situations like this, or in general is not ideal. The better way is to refer them to minors as this is what they legally are, but even so 'teenagers' is how they should be referred to.
Absolutely. It's only natural for teens/adolescents to be interested in that kind of stuff - they are transitioning into adulthood ffs.
Honytawk
in reply to dyc3 • • •Blackmist
in reply to themachinestops • • •How about parent your children?
What about the crappy late night TV channels with the women waving a cordless house phone like it's 1996?
I'm perfectly able to watch porn because I'm 45, but I refuse to interact with any of this prove your age bollocks because I know full well that "we won't store your details" and "we will share your details with 1284 trusted data partners" are the same picture.
ouRKaoS
in reply to Blackmist • • •tarknassus
in reply to ouRKaoS • • •And nothing will be done about that until it affects the power brokers in charge*.
* - hopefully, I mean we've had a series of ministers embroiled in scandals that would have caused immediate resignations in the past whereas now it's "Fuck off, I'm working here. I'M IMPORTANT!"
ouRKaoS
in reply to tarknassus • • •Honytawk
in reply to themachinestops • • •queueBenSis
in reply to themachinestops • • •if the strategy is to tell children to stop circumventing the rules with a workaround, couldn’t the original messaging just have been “talk to your children about not watching porn”
it’s so obvious the identification laws have nothing to do with protecting children from porn and everything to do with Big Brother surveillance
YiddishMcSquidish
in reply to queueBenSis • • •Honytawk
in reply to YiddishMcSquidish • • •And before that, kids were passing dirty magazines they found in a tree.
You can't stop teenagers from being horny. And I rather they watch porn than have sex at that age.
sunbeam60
in reply to themachinestops • • •Do the government ministers understand that setting up your own VPN is literally a 5 minute operation.
Hire a droplet VM, pre-installed with a server OS.
Log in with provided credentials.
sudo apt install docker
Copy/paste a docker compose file that sets up a wg-easy container.
Create a peer.
Take a picture of the provided QR code.
Connect to the server via a wireguard app.
Done.
Are they going to ban VMs?
toad31
in reply to sunbeam60 • • •What a VM? What's a server OS? How do I log in? What the fuck does sudo apt mean? What is docker? Now I'm editing files? A peer? What's wireguard?
So many of you are disconnected from regular people because you're chronically online.
LinyosT
in reply to toad31 • • •You say this as if people are utterly incapable of learning.
Anyone can learn anything of they’re given a good enough reason to want to learn.
Honytawk
in reply to LinyosT • • •Sure, but if they need to learn, it isn't a 5 minute operation.
I too can go to space in 10 minutes, if I already did all the training and get a space shuttle from NASA.
LinyosT
in reply to Honytawk • • •It is a 5 minute operation to learn how to use a VPN.
Many are, quite literally, just install and hit connect. Something an online tutorial can teach you in about a minute or two.
Maybe a bit longer to learn the other things. But I can assure you from experience that this is something that anyone can learn about in a short amount of time.
Bit of a far cry from the years of education and training needed to enter space.
WhyJiffie
in reply to toad31 • • •what's a VPN? what's a VPN app? how do I log in? what the fuck does a tunnel mean?
kids somehow figured these out. they'll be able to figure out their selfhosted VPN too. at least more of them might find an interest in tech instead of consuming on brainrot platforms.
sunbeam didn't describe it very clearly but it can be described in a way that its just following instructions without even having to understand it. like something like this: "register here. click this to get a free cloud server. log in to the server like this. paste this command and hit enter. install this app on your phone. tap import and scan. point your phone to the qr code on the screen."
toad31
in reply to WhyJiffie • • •WhyJiffie
in reply to toad31 • • •ssillyssadass
in reply to themachinestops • • •acargitz
in reply to themachinestops • • •plyth
in reply to acargitz • • •BreadstickNinja
in reply to plyth • • •Is there a plausible way they actually ban the use of VPNs? Like, they can make it illegal on paper, but even in China, which has long had strict restrictions on internet use, I've heard that VPN use is widespread.
It just all seems like performative whack-a-mole to me. The only people who can control what a kid sees online are their parents or guardians. A child is not buying themselves a laptop or an iPad.
prole
in reply to BreadstickNinja • • •HalfSalesman
in reply to themachinestops • • •I know that this is all just theater to just destroy any semblance of free speech and privacy on the internet but if I'm completely honest I also don't even understand people who freak out about kids looking at porn. Like, I get protecting children obviously from predators (fucking Roblox), but also I saw hardcore porn on the internet super early when I was like 8 and the only trauma I ever felt was the fear of being caught looking at it by my parents, who were otherwise pretty chill about me seeing really violent media.
And before me and the internet, kids were looking at their grampa's/dad's porn magazines or finding it in the woods or getting some 18 year old to buy it for them. It was harder but I'm telling you they found it.
I feel like a bigger concern for kids right now is microplastics, lead poisoning, and climate change and you don't see nearly the same hysteria about that shit in mainstream politics.