The Delhi High Court ordered the blocking of Sci-Hub, Sci-Net, and LibGen in India on August 19, 2025, following a copyright infringement case brought by academic publishers Elsevier, Wiley, and the American Chemical Society[^5][^7].
The court found that Alexandra Elbakyan, Sci-Hub's founder, violated her December 2020 undertaking not to upload new copyrighted content by making post-2022 articles available through both Sci-Hub and a new platform called Sci-Net[^7]. While Elbakyan claimed this was due to technical errors and argued Sci-Net was a separate project, the court rejected these arguments[^7].
The ruling requires India's Department of Telecommunications and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology to issue blocking orders within 72 hours, with Internet Service Providers required to implement the blocks within 24 hours[^7].
This case marks the first time Sci-Hub and LibGen faced legal action in a developing country[^2]. Earlier intervention attempts by Indian scientists and researchers had argued these platforms were "the only access to educational and research materials" for many academics in India[^2], with social science researchers specifically highlighting the "detrimental effect" blocking would have on research in India[^9].
A group of social science researchers have filed an intervention application, with legal support from IFF, highlighting the adverse impact any decision to block LibGen and SciHub will have on them.
The natural world is built for change. Seasons shift. Rivers rise and fall. The climate gradually warms and cools again. Animals migrate, adapt, and evolve in response to these rhythms. This is how Earth has always worked – and how it’s supposed to work.
The pine forests of the Western U.S. offer a perfect example. For thousands of years, ponderosa and lodgepole pines evolved with periodic wildfires that swept through every decade or two. These fires weren’t disasters – they were essential.
Lodgepole pines actually depend on fire to reproduce. Their resinous cones only open in intense heat, releasing seeds onto the ash bed below. Ponderosa pines developed thick, fire-resistant bark to survive the low-intensity ground fires that cleared out undergrowth. These frequent, cool burns created open forests with widely spaced mature trees, healthy and highly productive ecosystems that provided clean water, timber, and wildlife habitat.
So the problem today isn’t change. It’s the speed of change.
Changes that used to take centuries or millennia are now unfolding in a matter of years. Levels of climate-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have risen to well above 400 parts per million, a concentration that last occurred about 15 million years ago.
But even more concerning is the rate of change: By burning fossil fuels, we are emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere 30 times faster than at any point in the last 100 million years. That’s like putting nature’s slow-moving film on fast-forward – only the device is overheating as a result.
Juliana Moreira ed Edoardo Stoppa, ospiti di Caterina Balivo a La Volta Buona, hanno ripercorso i 17 anni della loro storia d'amore, mostrando il lato più autentico e ironico della loro coppia... leggi
How OnlyFans Piracy Is Ruining the Internet for Everyone
The internet is becoming harder to use because of unintended consequences in the battle between adult content creators who are trying to protect their livelihoods and the people who pirate their content.
Porn piracy, like all forms of content piracy, has existed for as long as the internet. But as more individual creators who make their living on services like OnlyFans, many of them have hired companies to send Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices against companies that steal their content. As some of those services turn to automation in order to handle the workload, completely unrelated content is getting flagged as violating their copyrights and is being deindexed from Google search. The process exposes bigger problems with how copyright violations are handled on the internet, with automated systems filing takedown requests that are reviewed by other automated systems, leading to unintended consequences.
These errors show another way in which automation without human review is making the internet as we know it increasingly unusable. They also highlight the untenable piracy problem for adult content creators, who have little recourse to stop their paid content from being redistributed all over the internet.
I first noticed how bad some of these DMCA takedown requests are because one of them targeted 404 Media. I was searching Google for an article Sam wrote about Instagram’s AI therapists. I Googled “AI therapists 404 Media,” and was surprised it didn’t pop up because I knew we had covered the subject. Then I saw a note from Google at the bottom of the page noting Google had removed some search results “In response to multiple complaints we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”
The notice linked to the Lumen Database, which keeps a record of DMCA complaints, who filed them, and for what. According to the Lumen Database, the complaint was filed by a company called Takedowns AI on behalf of content creator Marie Temara. Takedowns AI is one of many companies that help content creators, especially adult content creators, to scan the internet for images and videos they posted behind paywalls on platforms like OnlyFans and posted elsewhere for free. These companies also file DMCA takedown requests and navigate the copyright systems of big platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit. One of the most effective ways of preventing people from finding this pirated content is sending DMCA takedown requests to Google asking the search engine to delist results to sites that share it. As its name implies, Takedowns AI heavily relies on automation to do this work.
The complaint that impacted 404 Media included a list of 68 links to different websites that allegedly violated Temara’s copyright on content she posted to Instagram, OnlyFans, and other platforms. This was the allegedly offending link on 404 Media, which is a collage Sam made for her AI Facebook therapists story.
The collage includes Meta's AI-generated profile pictures of three of these AI therapists. The story itself has nothing to do with Temara, and the profile pictures look nothing like her. In fact, it would be hard for anyone to claim copyright for that image because in 2023 a U.S. court ruled that AI-generated art can’t be copyrighted.
I went through every other link in the same complaint and couldn’t find even one link that looked like it violated Temara’s copyrights. There were images from Grand Theft Auto V, famous baseball players, robots, stock images of people at theme parks, and movie posters, none of which looked remotely similar to Temara. In addition to 404 Media’s article about AI therapists, some of the pages that Google removed from search results due to this complaint included tech site wccftech.com, horror movie site bloody-disgusting.com, and rugby and wrestling sites.
These links are also just part of one complaint out of hundreds that Takedowns AI files every day. I looked through dozens of complaints to Google filed by Takedowns AI that were archived by the Lumen Database. The vast majority of them appear to be legitimate, but I did find other egregious mistakes. One of the worst mistakes I saw was a takedown request filed on behalf of a creator who goes by “honeyybee” against an article about actual honey bees on the University of Missouri’s website. The takedown request clearly targeted the article and caused Google to remove it from search results just because it was about a subject with a similar name to that of Takedown AI’s client.
Temara and honeyybee did not respond to a request for comment.
Takedowns AI CEO Kunal Anand told me that the company has filed 12 million takedowns requests to Google since 2022. He said that Takedowns AI uses facial recognition, keyword searches, and human reviewers to find and take down copyrighted content, and said he was overall confident in the company’s accuracy. Anand told me that sometimes his clients use Google Search’s API to see what results come up when they search for themselves, then ask Takedowns AI to remove everything on that list as is, which is what he thinks might have happened with Temara and honeyybee.
“We don't really review it [the list] because we are an agent for them,” Ananad said. “For the requests that we send out ourselves, usually they get reviewed, but sometimes they [clients] do a search by themselves, and they come across some content and they flag it and they're like, ‘We want this taken down.’ We don't review that because that is something that they want taken down. I'm not particularly sure about this case, but that is what happens. What we planned on doing was also reviewing these but it's usually not very fruitful, because the user is very sure they want that claim. And even if we say, ‘Hey, we don't think you should do that,’ they're like, ‘We want to do it. Just do it because I'm paying you for this.’ And if we just say, do it yourself, that kind of takes away the business from us. So that is basically how it works.”
Yvette van Bekkum, the CEO of Cam Model Protection, a company that’s offering the same services as Takedowns AI but that has been in business since 2014, told me that her company does not process requests like Anand described for clients. Cam Model Protection also uses AI, reverse image searches, and keyword searches to find infringing material, but it has systems in place to prevent false positives, Bekkum told me. These include a database of “whitelisted” content that it shouldn’t file takedown requests against, and human verification that each link the company sends to Google actually points to infringing content.
“Just a news article is not a copyright infringement,” Bekkum told me. “If there is no content being used or only a name being named, I don't need to explain to you that it's not in violation. Everybody can make a mistake, of course, but if you just randomly gather [links] and then report it, if it's not grounded on an infringement, you should not report it, of course.”
Bekkum and Ananad both said they understand why creators don’t want to click on every link that might be infringing on their copyright. It’s not only too much work—that’s why companies like Cam Model Protection exist in the first place—it also requires sifting through a sea of pornography they don’t want to see.
“This process is so time consuming,” Bekkum said. “And they do not want to focus on all that negative energy in Googling their name and seeing pages and pages full of links leading to illegal content.”
Elaina St. James, an adult content creator, told me she used a copyright takedown service and that it was most helpful when she flagged offending sites herself. St. James said she used the service to take down pirated content as well as catfishing accounts using her images, a problem 404 Media previously talked to her about. Overall, St. James said these services are useful but imperfect.
“I think they [DMCA takedown request companies] should stop overpromising,” she told me in an email. “There are some platforms—TikTok in particular—that do not comply. Tube sites in foreign countries also rarely comply.”
Automation of DMCA takedown requests has existed for years and has always resulted in some errors. Similar problems have also plagued YouTube’s automated Content ID system for years. More sites are likely to get caught in the crossfire as more content creators strike out on their own and turn to these services in an attempt to protect their income.
It’s an issue at the intersection of several critical problems with the modern internet: Google’s search monopoly, rampant porn piracy, a DMCA takedown process vulnerable to errors and abuse, and now the automation of all of the above in order to operate at scale. No one I talked to for this story thought there was an easy solution to this problem.
“It's all science fiction, but in the dumbest possible way,” Meredith Rose, a senior policy counsel with Public Knowledge who focuses on copyright, DMCA, and intellectual property reform, told me. “At the end of the day, the DMCA takedown provisions are a way to get speech off the internet. That's a very powerful tool. Even if you're not outright malicious, if somebody says something nasty about you and you want to keep your name out of their mouth, the DMCA kind of lets you do it without anybody checking your work. And so it is this really interesting case study in when you build these tools that give the power to anybody, even people who might not be who they say they are in these applications to get stuff taken down. Abuse happens. Sometimes it happens at scale. It happens for all different kinds of reasons. Sometimes it's just malice, sometimes it's incompetence, sometimes it's buggy automation [...] I feel like with AI, we're going to see a lot more of this.”
Anand said he believes the responsibility is with creators.
“The best way to solve that is to educate the creators more that this is not their content,” he told me. “A lot of creators are very scared, and what they want is everything about them taken down from everywhere. And then they start getting more aggressive with their takedowns.”
A spokesperson for Google told me that the vast majority of DMCA removals come from reporters who have a track record of valid takedowns, and that its DMCA removals process aims to find a balance between making it easy and efficient for rightsholders to report infringing content while also protecting free expression on the web.
“We actively fight fraudulent takedown attempts by using a combination of automated and human review to detect signals of abuse,” the Google spokesperson said. “We provide extensive transparency about these removals to hold requesters accountable, and sites can file counter notices if they believe a removal was made in error.”
I feel like the problem mentioned is like a drop in the ocean compared to the enshitification of Google as a whole. Google has been almost unusable even if this didn’t happen.
How do you think DDG 'skips the SEO stuff'? They don't have their own index, they are a meta search engine and the indices they rely on are subject to SEO efforts of the various pages
Google's control over the internet will harm all users as they scram further to find places where profit can be squeezed more and more until they're functionally bankrupt.
not just internet, they are going to prevent android users from installing any programs they dont approve first. So most likely goodbye f-droid and any opensource program
Yeah but really does that even matter when the top results are just ads anyway? The problem is advertising has taken over search engines and now AI makes it even less likely people "searching" for things will even bother to click off of the search website.
DMCA takedown abuse isn't anything new, this article seems like it was just due to 404 media having to deal with it, onlyfans is tangentially related and clearly just used in the headline for clickbait purposes... I really expected better of 404 media, The issue is a valid and increasingly worse one, it shouldnt need a clickbait headline. "DMCA Automation is ruining the internet" or something to that effect would have been a lot better.
This whole thing is also a scam on content creators, people arent pirating content by searching for it on google, they're finding out about websites by talking to people on discord (which itself is not searchable of course) and other such services. Anyone paying for these kind of takedown services is getting taken for a ride.
DMCA takedown abuse isn’t anything new, this article seems like it was just due to 404 media having to deal with it, onlyfans is tangentially related and clearly just used in the headline for clickbait purposes… I really expected better of 404 media, The issue is a valid and increasingly worse one, it shouldnt need a clickbait headline. “DMCA Automation is ruining the internet” or something to that effect would have been a lot better.
That's true, but if the important thing is to draw attention to this issue, this is a good way of doing it even if it's a creative interpretation of the truth.
Enhanced capabilities and availability of tools make a difference. If a company gets the "brilliant" idea to "use AI" to file DMCA requests, encouraged by recent hype of AI and proliferation of many AI tools to make it easy to deploy, then it suddenly becomes a problem, hence why this article exists right now.
But these tools were available for years at least. How do you think Youtube strikes down videos automatically by it's own since like 2012.
The issue is that again and again simpletons are yelling at the hammer instead of the guy that's smashing everything with it. This is so tiring, it makes all of us look so fucking stupid.
It's possible to complain about both because the improved hammer makes the guy smashing everything with it an even bigger problem. Either way it brings attention to the issue, but I have no confidence in politicians making a change for the better at this point, they'll probably just make it even worse.
“We don't really review it [the list] because we are an agent for them,” Ananad said. “For the requests that we send out ourselves, usually they get reviewed, but sometimes they [clients] do a search by themselves, and they come across some content and they flag it and they're like, ‘We want this taken down.’ We don't review that because that is something that they want taken down. I'm not particularly sure about this case, but that is what happens. What we planned on doing was also reviewing these but it's usually not very fruitful, because the user is very sure they want that claim. And even if we say, ‘Hey, we don't think you should do that,’ they're like, ‘We want to do it. Just do it because I'm paying you for this.’ And if we just say, do it yourself, that kind of takes away the business from us. So that is basically how it works.”
They're a cog in a broken machine that needs grease like every other one. It's all just business speak for "why would we want to say something that would make the customer not pay us?"
The DMCA is what you get when you get greedy media and Internet companies to write legislation for lawmakers that have no idea what any of that means, while in the background the people have not had a chance to use any of it. It should have come with an expiration date 10 years from signing and should have been redone now that we are actually using the stuff.
That is the DMCA working exactly as intended. Giving companies the ability to leverage their own wealth and resources to abuse and suppress competition was always the DMCA’s goal.
Copyright in general is about suppressing and abusing competition, there's a little bit of difference now that the old Victorian-style copyright laws lasted as long as the author, more or less, and every legal action was taken through a court, not like these letters of happiness.
It's funny how we seem similar to the pre-WWI mood of "everything has been invented, abolish patents", I wonder if the "pre-WWI" part is too going to rhyme. Hope that not, of course, but most of the innovation seems to be in direct or indirect warfare (all of big tech is honestly that). And there's one nation whose elites seem to make weird destructive moves. And which is on the down trajectory in its GDP relative to the world for the last 50 years. And which has the world's biggest military spending.
After all, humans need a reminder that for the plethora of technologies that seem like a favorable to them weapon unseen before, there are also similarly many technologies that may be unfavorable to them weapons unseen before.
Nazi Germany used radio and encryption and maneuverability and wonderful air force to achieve successes, then the other sides used radars and computers and mass modular production and MLRS'es.
Perhaps the current rotting of copyright and patent system is because the elites think they don't need more natural peaceful development. Global bloodletting usually heals that kind of ideas. Some things can only be learned on your own experience.
Copyright is a surviving instance of the old system of royal warrants: monopolies granted by a monarch, usually to cronies, occasionally as a reward for some kind of good work (scientific discovery, work of art, etc).
It's a system that's full of opportunities for corruption and bureaucratic oppression, and should either be massively scaled back, or dumped entirely. It does far more harm than good.
I agree, unfortunately things only keep existing when there's balance between their sides in power.
Such balance is - those benefiting from copyright have a lot to offer and threaten to those making copyright, and the other way around.
It's all military logic now. 50 years ago it could have been solved by a popular movement, now any movement really threatening copyright will have its figures murdered left and right.
Yup. People talking about DMCA reform, or adding penalties for false takedown requests… In reality, this is the DMCA working exactly as intended. It’s like discussing police reform, but the police are functioning exactly how the ruling class want them to.
Just allow companies to charge a small fee to process a DMCA takedown, and establish a daily compensation rate based on view counts for the uploader (cost payable by the company issuing the takedown - not the entity they represent). Suddenly you only issue a takedown for clear infringement, with the cost paid by the uploader only when clear proof is given that it is a DMCA infringement. If there is a long delay, the uploader gets more compensation, whereas the uploader is only liable for the initial takedown fee.
Can't speak to the why but in practice, nobody ever gets punished for abusing DMCA takedowns even with they use bots to spam fraudulent claims, and it's a widespread practice.
Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's not scummy.
And as for people getting shit for free, I support a maximalist position on right of first sale: sharing what you own should be legal in all cases. If that inconveniences some mass aggregator of content, tough shit: the ease of sharing gives the lie to the notion that the aggregator adds any value, instead, they're just rent-seeking parasites.
How OnlyFans Piracy Is Ruining the Internet for Everyone
The internet is becoming harder to use because of unintended consequences in the battle between adult content creators who are trying to protect their livelihoods and the people who pirate their content.
Porn piracy, like all forms of content piracy, has existed for as long as the internet. But as more individual creators who make their living on services like OnlyFans, many of them have hired companies to send Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown notices against companies that steal their content. As some of those services turn to automation in order to handle the workload, completely unrelated content is getting flagged as violating their copyrights and is being deindexed from Google search. The process exposes bigger problems with how copyright violations are handled on the internet, with automated systems filing takedown requests that are reviewed by other automated systems, leading to unintended consequences.
These errors show another way in which automation without human review is making the internet as we know it increasingly unusable. They also highlight the untenable piracy problem for adult content creators, who have little recourse to stop their paid content from being redistributed all over the internet.
I first noticed how bad some of these DMCA takedown requests are because one of them targeted 404 Media. I was searching Google for an article Sam wrote about Instagram’s AI therapists. I Googled “AI therapists 404 Media,” and was surprised it didn’t pop up because I knew we had covered the subject. Then I saw a note from Google at the bottom of the page noting Google had removed some search results “In response to multiple complaints we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act.”
The notice linked to the Lumen Database, which keeps a record of DMCA complaints, who filed them, and for what. According to the Lumen Database, the complaint was filed by a company called Takedowns AI on behalf of content creator Marie Temara. Takedowns AI is one of many companies that help content creators, especially adult content creators, to scan the internet for images and videos they posted behind paywalls on platforms like OnlyFans and posted elsewhere for free. These companies also file DMCA takedown requests and navigate the copyright systems of big platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and Reddit. One of the most effective ways of preventing people from finding this pirated content is sending DMCA takedown requests to Google asking the search engine to delist results to sites that share it. As its name implies, Takedowns AI heavily relies on automation to do this work.
The complaint that impacted 404 Media included a list of 68 links to different websites that allegedly violated Temara’s copyright on content she posted to Instagram, OnlyFans, and other platforms. This was the allegedly offending link on 404 Media, which is a collage Sam made for her AI Facebook therapists story.
The collage includes Meta's AI-generated profile pictures of three of these AI therapists. The story itself has nothing to do with Temara, and the profile pictures look nothing like her. In fact, it would be hard for anyone to claim copyright for that image because in 2023 a U.S. court ruled that AI-generated art can’t be copyrighted.
I went through every other link in the same complaint and couldn’t find even one link that looked like it violated Temara’s copyrights. There were images from Grand Theft Auto V, famous baseball players, robots, stock images of people at theme parks, and movie posters, none of which looked remotely similar to Temara. In addition to 404 Media’s article about AI therapists, some of the pages that Google removed from search results due to this complaint included tech site wccftech.com, horror movie site bloody-disgusting.com, and rugby and wrestling sites.
These links are also just part of one complaint out of hundreds that Takedowns AI files every day. I looked through dozens of complaints to Google filed by Takedowns AI that were archived by the Lumen Database. The vast majority of them appear to be legitimate, but I did find other egregious mistakes. One of the worst mistakes I saw was a takedown request filed on behalf of a creator who goes by “honeyybee” against an article about actual honey bees on the University of Missouri’s website. The takedown request clearly targeted the article and caused Google to remove it from search results just because it was about a subject with a similar name to that of Takedown AI’s client.
Temara and honeyybee did not respond to a request for comment.
Takedowns AI CEO Kunal Anand told me that the company has filed 12 million takedowns requests to Google since 2022. He said that Takedowns AI uses facial recognition, keyword searches, and human reviewers to find and take down copyrighted content, and said he was overall confident in the company’s accuracy. Anand told me that sometimes his clients use Google Search’s API to see what results come up when they search for themselves, then ask Takedowns AI to remove everything on that list as is, which is what he thinks might have happened with Temara and honeyybee.
“We don't really review it [the list] because we are an agent for them,” Ananad said. “For the requests that we send out ourselves, usually they get reviewed, but sometimes they [clients] do a search by themselves, and they come across some content and they flag it and they're like, ‘We want this taken down.’ We don't review that because that is something that they want taken down. I'm not particularly sure about this case, but that is what happens. What we planned on doing was also reviewing these but it's usually not very fruitful, because the user is very sure they want that claim. And even if we say, ‘Hey, we don't think you should do that,’ they're like, ‘We want to do it. Just do it because I'm paying you for this.’ And if we just say, do it yourself, that kind of takes away the business from us. So that is basically how it works.”
Yvette van Bekkum, the CEO of Cam Model Protection, a company that’s offering the same services as Takedowns AI but that has been in business since 2014, told me that her company does not process requests like Anand described for clients. Cam Model Protection also uses AI, reverse image searches, and keyword searches to find infringing material, but it has systems in place to prevent false positives, Bekkum told me. These include a database of “whitelisted” content that it shouldn’t file takedown requests against, and human verification that each link the company sends to Google actually points to infringing content.
“Just a news article is not a copyright infringement,” Bekkum told me. “If there is no content being used or only a name being named, I don't need to explain to you that it's not in violation. Everybody can make a mistake, of course, but if you just randomly gather [links] and then report it, if it's not grounded on an infringement, you should not report it, of course.”
Bekkum and Ananad both said they understand why creators don’t want to click on every link that might be infringing on their copyright. It’s not only too much work—that’s why companies like Cam Model Protection exist in the first place—it also requires sifting through a sea of pornography they don’t want to see.
“This process is so time consuming,” Bekkum said. “And they do not want to focus on all that negative energy in Googling their name and seeing pages and pages full of links leading to illegal content.”
Elaina St. James, an adult content creator, told me she used a copyright takedown service and that it was most helpful when she flagged offending sites herself. St. James said she used the service to take down pirated content as well as catfishing accounts using her images, a problem 404 Media previously talked to her about. Overall, St. James said these services are useful but imperfect.
“I think they [DMCA takedown request companies] should stop overpromising,” she told me in an email. “There are some platforms—TikTok in particular—that do not comply. Tube sites in foreign countries also rarely comply.”
Automation of DMCA takedown requests has existed for years and has always resulted in some errors. Similar problems have also plagued YouTube’s automated Content ID system for years. More sites are likely to get caught in the crossfire as more content creators strike out on their own and turn to these services in an attempt to protect their income.
It’s an issue at the intersection of several critical problems with the modern internet: Google’s search monopoly, rampant porn piracy, a DMCA takedown process vulnerable to errors and abuse, and now the automation of all of the above in order to operate at scale. No one I talked to for this story thought there was an easy solution to this problem.
“It's all science fiction, but in the dumbest possible way,” Meredith Rose, a senior policy counsel with Public Knowledge who focuses on copyright, DMCA, and intellectual property reform, told me. “At the end of the day, the DMCA takedown provisions are a way to get speech off the internet. That's a very powerful tool. Even if you're not outright malicious, if somebody says something nasty about you and you want to keep your name out of their mouth, the DMCA kind of lets you do it without anybody checking your work. And so it is this really interesting case study in when you build these tools that give the power to anybody, even people who might not be who they say they are in these applications to get stuff taken down. Abuse happens. Sometimes it happens at scale. It happens for all different kinds of reasons. Sometimes it's just malice, sometimes it's incompetence, sometimes it's buggy automation [...] I feel like with AI, we're going to see a lot more of this.”
Anand said he believes the responsibility is with creators.
“The best way to solve that is to educate the creators more that this is not their content,” he told me. “A lot of creators are very scared, and what they want is everything about them taken down from everywhere. And then they start getting more aggressive with their takedowns.”
A spokesperson for Google told me that the vast majority of DMCA removals come from reporters who have a track record of valid takedowns, and that its DMCA removals process aims to find a balance between making it easy and efficient for rightsholders to report infringing content while also protecting free expression on the web.
“We actively fight fraudulent takedown attempts by using a combination of automated and human review to detect signals of abuse,” the Google spokesperson said. “We provide extensive transparency about these removals to hold requesters accountable, and sites can file counter notices if they believe a removal was made in error.”
Hey, bit of a crazy idea , but what if we accelerated the destruction of the internet, destroyed it from within before those trying to capture it were ready to take over ?
Yes. An AI alternative to LOIC is desperately needed, for every humanist with a computer to run and to attack the enemy with streams and streams of textual and visual garbage.
I mean like 89% of the shit on Reddit is some OF model advertising.
fr
This
Real
Your comment has been banned and you have been banned from this subreddit for < insert random inapplicable rule >. This message is automated by moderator bot. Do not reply.
Copyright, with a reasonable term (say, 14 years) is potentially useful in preserving author's rights to profit from their own works. Patent laws should be applied far more strictly with respect to prior art and what constitutes a significant innovation, and should never be applied to algorithms. "Same as X, but ON THE INTERNET!" patents should be rejected in every case.
It's monopolistic corporations and incompetent governments that are runing the Internet for everyone. OF is a pox, but compared to those larger factors, OF piracy is nearly irrelevant. It might even be a positive if it damages OF.
In a new paper, several Stanford economists studied payroll data from the private company ADP, which covers millions of workers, through mid-2025. They found that young workers aged 22–25 in “highly AI-exposed” jobs, such as software developers and customer service agents, experienced a 13 percent decline in employment since the advent of ChatGPT. Notably, the economists found that older workers and less-exposed jobs, such as home health aides, saw steady or rising employment. “There’s a clear, evident change when you specifically look at young workers who are highly exposed to AI,” Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who wrote the paper with Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen, told the Wall Street Journal.
In five months, the question of “Is AI reducing work for young Americans?” has its fourth answer: from possibly, to definitely, to almost certainly no, to plausibly yes. You might find this back-and-forth annoying. I think it’s fantastic. This is a model for what I want from public commentary on social and economic trends: Smart, quantitatively rich, and good-faith debate of issues of seismic consequence to American society.
Meh. Nothing in this article is strong evidence of anything. They're only looking at a tiny sample of data and wildly speculating about which entry-level jobs are being supplanted by AI.
As a software engineer who uses AI, I fail to see how AI can replace any given entry-level software engineering position. There's no way! Any company that does that is just asking for trouble.
What's more likely, is that AI is making senior software engineers more productive so they don't need to hire more developers to assist them with more trivial/time consuming tasks.
This is a very temporary thing, though. As anyone in software can tell you: Software only gets more complex over time. Eventually these companies will have to start hiring new people again. This process usually takes about six months to a year.
If AI is causing a drop in entry-level hiring, my speculation (which isn't as wild as in the article since I'm actually there on the ground using this stuff) is that it's just a temporary blip while companies work out how to take advantage the slightly-enhanced productivity.
It's inevitable: They'll start new projects to build new stuff because now—suddenly—they have the budget. Then they'll hire people to make up the difference.
This is how companies have worked since the invention of bullshit jobs. The need for bullshit grows with productivity.
Top upvoted comment just tore a big fat hole into the entire argument and I have to say, good for the comments section. That's so rare.
One open question here is whether we’re seeing youth employment decrease because AI is effectively replacing entry level workers in these fields, or because executives wrongly think AI can or will soon be able to do so?
You have to assume that if anybody puts a hiring freeze for junior employees right now it'd be out of some combination of caution, hype and insecurity about the economic landscape thanks to the usual suspects.
Turns out if the discussion is "quantitatively rich" but is ignoring the obvious qualitative observation it may end up flip-flopping a bunch. I'm not sure I'm as excited about that as the author, because man, is that a constant of the modern corporate world and does it suck and cost people money and stress.
I fail to see how AI can replace any given entry-level SE
You don't "get it"?
AI is making senior software engineers more productive so they don’t need to hire more devs
Yes, I think you do.
I largely look at this as leadership using AI hype as an excuse to cut staff regardless of actual productivity. The house of cards hasn't come down quite yet.
There’s a growing wisdom gap coming in America. The people who are already well versed in company practices and culture are going to use AI to complete the tasks that they would have otherwise given to assistants and junior resources.
The junior resources are going to struggle to find jobs because they are lacking in the KSAs that schools simply cannot provide training for. And that means when us Gen Xers and later Millenials retire there could be a major gap where we have few people with that inherent knowledge to replace us. And where there’s no work and no hope, you get something akin to what is starting to occur in China right now…or revolt.
My hope is that schools will be rethought and there will be a lot more focus on getting an internship early and for the long term. Something more like apprenticeships, which the blue collar workforce maintained, but it’s something we’ll likely need to bring back to white collar jobs.
This isn’t to say that schools should diminish a well rounded education. I think it’s extremely important for students to take electives outside of their focus for a multitude of reasons, one being that it helps students realize the importance of how others contribute to society.
Apprenticeships can help to fill the knowledge gap, but the white collars that are in the jobs now will also need to be retrained and made comfortable to work with a large influx of apprentices to make this approach a success.
There’s a growing wisdom gap coming in America. The people who are already well versed in company practices and culture are going to use AI to complete the tasks that they would have otherwise given to assistants and junior resources.
Counterpoint: no, they are not. Not with the current path of tech progress on the field, at least.
Because seniors well versed in company practices and culture will get tired of having to manually redo junior work corrections really quick, and we are nowhere close to closing the error correction needs at this point.
Repetitive work that could feasibly have been automated or removed already? Maybe. There was a TON of room for automation that people weren't investing on doing and the AI gold rush will feasibly take advantage of some of that. But AI replacing junior jobs wholesale? Nah. The tech isn't there.
Exactly. The senior is willing to put up with the constant questions and mistakes of a junior/intern, because after a few months, they will be better and take some workload off the senior’s shoulders.
With “AI”, there is no learning curve, it’s like you get a different fresh intern every day, and you have to correct the same mistakes constantly.
You really think education reform is going to win out over creating a giant pool of uneducated serfs for Jeff‘s warehouses? I would give anything for your sense of optimism, honestly.
Here we are celebrating Labor Day, the day that celebrates workers rights - overtime pay for working over 40 hours, limiting children from having to work in factories, weekends and time off.
It was a hard fight from serfdom to poor factory conditions to now. We stand on the shoulders of giants.
The "researchers" in no way demonstrate that "AI" replaced any of the jobs lost. They don't even raise the question of whether "AI" is used to discipline labor despite not being much of a productivity aid.
You're right. I could believe these data might be explained by a lot of businesses being in a "wait and see" phase, hiring conservatively while they see how the AI thing shakes out
It's doesnt have to work, it just has to be convincing enough to get the bean counters and/or incompetent/sociopathic upper management to buy in to the idea that they can save money.
Same as always, if the shitstorm created by a decision isn't immediately devastating or can be incontrovertibly tied to said decision then that's just BAU.
but the time the shitshow starts playing the preroll trailers the golden parachutes and bonuses have been claimed.
For them, this isn't broken, this is how the game works.
It doesn't matter if the implementation is good. All that matters is that middle management gets more stuff "done" with fewer people. Where the definition of "done" is just tgat it hasn't exploded in their face.... yet....
The company I work for has replaced a lot of its employees with AI. It's absolutely useless and we have to cover the loss but the fact it doesn't work very well doesn't help the fired employees.
Junior devs and sysadmins who do not much very useful stuff yet, but get some basic experience. And people whose main required traits are human voice and following script.
Transient processes are a thing, one can have plenty of middle and senior devs and sysadmins, with the economy not producing new ones anymore. So the employers are hiring those, and replacing juniors with AI. Whether that works I'm not sure.
So at some point the AI bubble will be over (at least in dev and sysadmin and such work), but there will be fewer developers, and there might eventually be a situation where there are fewer qualified developers in the economy overall. Which would give centralized corporate things a market advantage over smaller non-corporate things, due to cost of development growing after the fall happening now.
While for some not very qualified jobs humans won't be needed anymore - while that "AI" is expensive, it might really be, even after the bubble crash, more affordable than hiring a human (in a western country) for a bullshit job - except in everything I've read those bullshit jobs were treated as social responsibility to teach work ethic to growing generations, that weird mix of individualist and working class themes in books describing pre-Depression USA. Yes, individualism is important and being self-reliant is important, but even that protestant ethic wasn't about capitalism more than it was about dignity and hard work.
I think Silicon Valley is consciously playing Asimov's Foundation with our planet (seeding technologies affecting humanity's development by some schedule with expected global results), except where Asimov's Foundation was about preserving knowledge and civilization, they are moving in the opposite direction. That is, they may not understand it. They may think they are building that sci-fi empire the Foundation begins with. But in actuality they are breaking concrete and steel things that work and replace them with paper huts kinda resembling something that would work better. Metaphorically.
They don't understand what an empire is, neither the "mandate of heaven" kind nor the "unity of civilization" kind (heck, even the Soviet covertly Christian "building the city of sun" kind, like in Vysotsky's song - "... но сады сторожат и стреляют без промаха в лоб"). You don't build an empire by burning libraries and poisoning discourses, you also don't build an empire by making every its citizen uncertain whether they are a free man or a slave (it's a common misconception to start an attempt at an empire from points where previous empires failed ; that state is usually expected to fail again for the same reasons).
as a consultant/freelancer dev whose entire workload for the past year has been cleaning up AI slop, no with dev it hasn't been what I would say a smooth or even good implementation. for my wallet? been a fantastic implementation, for everyone else? not so much.
The thing is as a TOOL it's great depending on the model. As a rubber duck? fantastic. As something that the majority of companies have utilized with vibe coding to build something end to end? no, it's horrible. It can't scale anything, implements exploits left right and center, and unlike junior devs doesn't learn anything. If you don't hold its hand during a build then it'll quickly go off the rails. It'll implement old APIs or libraries or whatever simply because those things have the most documentation attached to it.
An example. a few weeks ago a client wanted to set up a private git instance with Forgejo. They had Claude Code set it up for them. the problem? Claude went with Forgejo 1.20. ForgeJo is currently on 12.0. MASSIVE security hole right there. Why did Claude do that? 1.20 had more documentation as opposed to 12.0. And when I say "documentation" I could simply be referring to blog posts, articles, whatever that talked about it more than the latest version because The LLM's will leverage that stuff when making decisions for builds. You also see it if you want something in Rust+Smithy. Majority of the time the AI will go for a very outdated version of Smithy because that's what a lot of people talked about at one point. So you're generating massive tech debt before even throwing something into production.
Now like I said as a tool? a problem solver for a function you can't figure out? it's great. the issue is like I said companies aren't seeing it as a tool, they're seeing it as a cost saving replacement for a living human being which it is not. It's like replacing construction worker with a hammer attached to a drone and then wondering why your house frame keeps falling over.
I've seen some beginners trying to use AI to generate simple features for visual novels using Sugarcube (Twine). The code was awful, they didn't understand it and even people with some experience needed time to understand what the fuck the code was even trying to do.
It doesn't have to be a good implementation, it only has to be good enough for a demo to get the C-suite saying "Oh, slap a chatbot on there and then fire half the department that handles this now".
Putting AI to work in place of actual humans in help desk/customer service sounds like a natural evolution, since instead of being ignored by a dumb, exhausted human who's perpetually wishing to find a better job and has a 80% chance of being useless ("I will transfer to the appropriate person"), you'll be misunderstood by a robot.
Just wait all this is just a scam without any real revenue. That's why it's just investments right now into big companies. They're already starting to fail not really recognizing AI isn't supposed to be used in that way anyways.
Scientists say the planned decommissioning of a valuable research vessel is part of a series of actions by the Trump administration that take aim at climate science.
A group that infiltrated Microsoft’s headquarters building this week disputed the company’s account of the incident — describing their sit-in as nonviolent and saying the “listening devices” allegedly left behind were phones that fell from their pockets when they were arrested.
“As Brad himself admits, if someone were to plant listening devices, this is not how they would do it,” said Hossam Nasr, one of the leaders of the group No Azure for Apartheid, referring to comments made by Microsoft President Brad Smith after seven members of the group occupied his office Tuesday afternoon. “If anything, we would like our phones back, please.”
The group, which is calling on Microsoft to cut ties with Israel over the alleged use of its technology against Palestinians in Gaza, also disputed the company’s assertion that its members do not represent elements of its workforce, and questioned the sincerity of Microsoft executives in addressing the issues the protesters have raised.
Un’altra Mostra del Cinema si accende con una presenza che fa discutere e riflettere: quella di Kevin Spacey. L’attore è tornato a calcare un red carpet internazionale di grande rilievo, scegliendo il Lido di Venezia per segnare un ulteriore passo nel suo atteso ritorno sotto i riflettori, dopo la conclusione positiva delle sue vicende legali.
La famiglia Parr sta per tornare, ma armati di pazienza! I fan de Gli Incredibili dovranno aspettare ancora un po’ per il terzo capitolo. L’annuncio ufficiale è arrivato, ma la data di uscita è ancora lontana: 2028, se tutto va bene.
Il finale di If You Love ha lasciato i fan con il cuore spezzato, ma anche pieni di gioia. Dopo settimane di passione, è tempo di dire addio ad Ates, Leyla e al resto del cast. Ma quindi, ci sarà una seconda stagione? Scopriamolo insieme!
Grandi novità dal mondo magico! Per celebrare il “Ritorno a Hogwarts”, è stato annunciato che Warwick Davis tornerà a interpretare il professor Filius Vitious nella serie TV di Harry Potter targata HBO. Un ritorno che farà felici i fan! Ma non è l’unica sorpresa che ci aspetta.
I was searching for YouTube clients on my KDE Plasma Bigscreen GNU/Linux TV box, and found NewPipe, a popular Android YouTube frontend. Turns out this tool is how they moved it over.
Great solution alongside projects like Waydroid, as you can post individual apps to Flathub or other Linux storefronts, rather than needing to install a whole ROM to get your Android apps to appear in your Linux app tray.
It doesn't work like Wine, but I suppose the goal one day is to be able to click .APK files to install like you can with .EXE files with Wine. Currently developers need to integrate it for their (or their favourite open source) apps to install on Linux.
The Android dev kit includes a copy of QEMU that's set up to emulate ARM with a selection of popular screen sizes and revisions of the OS, so that you can test your app on a variety of 'potential phones' before you upload it to the marketplace. Snapdragons are amazingly performant CPUs for how gently they sip at the battery, but they're not that strong in the big scheme of things - any random x86 processor should be able to emulate them while using fifty times the power. A Steam deck ought to be able to do it; the request will then be 'we'd like to play Android games better', which to me is a much more reasonable ask.
I'm currently using a Raspberry Pi with their Debian based OS. It is on Bookworm, but there are major improvements to Plasma Bigscreen on QT6. They didn't make the updates before it was removed for Trixie, and Trixie is still in beta for Raspberry Pi, so doing an in place upgrade for the OS and compiling Plasma Bigscreen for it to see the improvements.
I think Manjaro (which works well on mobile too) has the latest one in their repos, and the KDE ARM OS may have it too if you want to try it without compiling it.
I want to see how difficult it is to drop in OVOS/Neon modules to replace Mycroft ones for voice control too.
FYI, as well if you're looking for a good remote for a GNU/Linux TV box (or Android, Windows, etc), this remote is the best one I've tried from Amazon.
Was just gonna say this. I'm currently using GrapheneOS and am concerned about how long my pixel 8a will last with Google being such assholes. But if this app can solve the issue of not having android, then I'd definitely switch to a Linux phone (with further research of course).
I've heard, which would be mega awesome when it does come out. Maybe I wouldn't have to fight RCS so hard lol. Unfortunately this Pixel 8a I used is only a year old, so getting a new phone in 1-2 years seems like a waste. But if Google goes nuclear in a few years, it's either Graphene hardware, Linux phone, or dummy...
I refuse to go back to Apple, and I didn't come to GrapheneOS just to go back to stock Android.
I'm on a pixel 8 with GrpaheneOS and was hoping not to have to worry until 2027 or whenever the updates end. I would hope the devs at least consider a few years of updates for pixels after they release a me wphone but I guess time will tell.
Genuine question, how do you do banks and Netflix on your phone?
Both apps and others with similar paranoia are my biggest hold ups for rooting or custom ROMs. And nope, laptop is not an option for me, I spend too many work hours on it.
I don't use official streaming apps, I basically pirate everything on a Fire stick TV. Idk if anyone has reported issues with them on GOS. Some of my banking apps work, others don't. I just do the ones that don't work online in browser instead, I feel like it shouldn't be a problem tbh.
If you need tap to pay/Google wallet then you unfortunately can't use GOS due to not being approved by Google or smth. Like SafetyNet issues or smth.
Pixels are still the most secure Android devices and the only ones combining a high level of security with proper support for an alternate OS. However, it's clear they don't value alternate OS support and won't remain the best devices for GrapheneOS once we have official ones.
You should be fine on gOS for 6 yrs+, which is how long google promised to keep up with security updates. The device tree (think hardware drivers), which is what google removed with pixel 10 is what is causing grief, is already there for lower pixels. Unless, of course, google comes up with some new fuckery to invalidate the usability of the security updates (pray I don't alter the deal further...)
I'm afraid with how insecure mobile networks are, modem manufacturers will never dare to open or document their mobile drivers to Linux. And we'll continue to be stuck in this perfectly controlled and planned scenario.
Yeah...but in reality those things usually run their own CPU and firmware, which is undocumented, and you won't catch a manufacturer dead releasing any documentation about it. This is a major roadblock.
also networks. on my network i can't use volte or 5g with a google pixel 5 because they did not "certify" that.
They "certify" a handful of samsung + the iphones, no fairphone and they would absolutely never "certify" stuff like the pinephone, if they could i think they would even blacklist their whole IMEI range
You can just open an apk file with this tool; apps don't need to be integrated with it. It's just that the implementation is far from complete and most apps will not work (correctly) right now.
what about waydroid? I'm thinking of installing chimera linux with phosh as a de, and for the apps I was thinking mostly linux programs and maybe some android apps with waydroid, but I'll also try this!
I tried it a few times, did not work for me, I've had android emus on windows work fine, I'm pretty sure I followed the setup correctly, but I couldn't get apps to launch.
If you run something like Debian Bookworm, or based on it, you can apt install plasma-bigscreen to run the older version. New version you likely need to compile depending on your distro
I've been following this since the initial Newpipe Linux flatpak release. I find it more exciting than Waydroid even though Waydroid is way more functional today
Just to point out a potential misunderstanding: NewPipe devs did not use ATL to move it over, the developers of ATL chose NewPipe as the first app and extend the tool around getting more features of NewPipe to work
There's some good potential here for sure. I use a project called Sober to run Roblox on my Linux PC, which runs the Android version. It works incredibly well.
La votation du 28 septembre arrive à grand pas, alors faisons vite un tour du sujet le plus numérique de cette fournée : l'Identité électronique. Qu'est-ce que l'e-ID, comment cela fonctionne et quels sont les points importants à retenir avant la votation
La votation du 28 septembre arrive à grand pas, alors faisons vite un tour du sujet le plus numérique de cette fournée : l’Identité électronique.
Qu’est-ce que l’e-ID, comment cela fonctionne et quels sont les points importants à retenir avant la votation ? HTTPS-VD vous a préparé son top 5 des infos à connaître pour voter avec les bonnes clefs en main.
Nous vous invitons également à nous rejoindre le jeudi 4 septembre 2025 à 19h30 à la SDMB, rue Caroline 16, pour une soirée d’information sur l’e-ID et son fonctionnement expliqué par des experts du domaine.
Petit rappel avant propos : une identité électronique n’est ni un identifiant, ni votre login, ne remplace pas vos mots de passe. Une e-ID sert uniquement à vérifier une (ou plusieurs) information précise à votre sujet une unique fois auprès d’un prestataire. Cela correspond à montrer votre carte d’identité, mais pas à utiliser une clef.
1. Maître de son identité
Le système d’identité électronique (et non identification, la nuance est importante) est programmé pour être sous le contrôle complet de l’utilisateur (= titulaire). L’application Swiyu, fournie par la Confédération, enregistrera vos informations uniquement sur votre téléphone et nulle part ailleurs. La Confédération n’intervient que pour valider ces informations et fournir un certificat d’authenticité ; elle agit donc en tant que garant de la véracité de celles-ci (Art. 2, al. 3 LeID.
Seul l’utilisateur peut valider quel prestataire de services (= vérificateur) peut vérifier ses informations. De plus, à tout moment, s’il a le moindre soupçon qu’un prestataire utilise le service d’e-ID de manière non conforme, il peut signaler le fait aux autorités, qui doivent immédiatement déclencher une enquête (audit). L’utilisateur reste donc en permanence maître de la manière dont ses informations sont vérifiées (Art. 3 LeID).
Enfin, la loi précise explicitement que l’e-ID est facultatif. Tout prestataire qui en fait usage doit, en parallèle, avoir une solution équivalente pour qui ne souhaite pas l’utiliser. Il y aura donc toujours une alternative (Art. 25 LeID).
2. Minimisation des données échangées
Les données d’identité sont stockées uniquement sur votre appareil auquel les prestataires de services n’ont pas accès. (Art. 8, al. 2 LeID) Seule sont transmises les informations validées par le titulaire et confirmées par la Confédération, sous forme codée (ou non codée, si le titulaire le choisit). Pour pouvoir utiliser le système d’e-ID, le prestataire doit effectuer une demande à la Confédération, justifiant chaque information pour laquelle il requiert une vérification (Art. 32 LeID). De plus, la vérification est automatiquement effacée après 90 jours (Art. 27 LeID), ce qui limite fortement les possibilités d’usage par les prestataires.
La Confédération ne saura en revanche pas comment le titulaire utilise son e-ID, pas plus que ce n’est le cas aujourd’hui avec la carte d’identité. (Art. 10, al. 2 LeID)
3. Décentralisée (l’identité est dans votre téléphone)
La Confédération se basera uniquement sur les registres existants pour certifier l’identité du titulaire de l’e-ID. Les informations spécifiques à l’e-ID ne seront utilisables qu’à partir de l’appareil de l’utilisateur. Une fois l’identité validée, le système est quasiment autonome vis-à-vis de l’État, ce qui lui limite drastiquement les possibilité de surveillance. Il s’agit donc d’un outil très décentralisé. Cela augmente également fortement la sécurité de l’outil, puisque si un utilisateur voit sont appareil infiltré, il sera la seule victime et les autres titulaires d’e-ID ne seront pas affectés. (eid.admin.ch/fr/technologie-f)
L’application est en revanche uniquement prévue pour les deux principaux distributeurs (Apple store et Google Play store) pour le moment. Les développeurs doivent encore trouver un moyen de s’affranchir des ces distributeurs pour rendre Swiyu accessible depuis des plateformes entièrement libres. (Pour participer : github.com/swiyu-admin-ch)
4. Non obligatoire
La loi encadrant l’e-ID est claire : son utilisation n’est pas obligatoire (Art. 25 LeID). Les organismes devront toujours proposer un autre moyen de vérifier l’identité d’une personne, même si ce service alternatif peut parfois être assorti d’un émolument (Art. 31 LeID). L’e-ID ne remplace donc pas les pratiques actuelles, mais affectera surtout les démarches déjà fortement numérisées (achats en ligne, signatures de contrat à distance, etc.). Les commerçants de quartier continueront donc à demander votre carte d’identité pour vérifier votre âge. Son déploiement plus large prendra du temps en raison des contraintes légales strictes, mais justes, qui garantissent une utilisation conforme à nos lois.
5. Code source ouvert
Enfin, la loi prévoit que le code de l’e-ID soit développé en open source, ce qui garantit transparence et auditabilité (Art. 12 LeID). Des exceptions juridiques restent toutefois possibles, et il sera important de rester attentif à leurs applications, même si la jurisprudence actuelle est plutôt favorable à l’ouverture complète du code. Nous sommes rassurés par la manière dont l’aspect « code source » du projet d’eID suisse est géré. Le processus se distingue par son exemplarité : le développement est ouvert aux contributions externes, la documentation est complète et accessible, et la transparence permet à chacun de vérifier et d’améliorer la solution. (swiyu-admin-ch.github.io/intro…)
Conclusion
En résumé, la nouvelle version de l’e-ID corrige avec brio les défauts de la première mouture. Si les exceptions prévues à la transparence forcent les citoyens à rester vigilants, le reste répond de manière explicites aux critiques formulées lors de la précédente votation. Le cadre légal présenté coche presque toutes les cases attendues pour un tel outil, et son aspect facultatif permet, comme avec les cartes bancaires, de toujours garder le choix du papier.
It's a Monero donation platform, so even if they were to remove your page, the donation wallet you set up for it would still be able to receive donations even without them.
What is the value add of this product? The donors and recipients still need to set up a Monero wallet and everything to use the service. A recipient may just as well instead use any other means (social media, etc.) to announce that they are accepting Monero donations at xyz address.
Mainly goal setting and tracking. You could say, for example, that your goal is to raise 50 Monero, and each donation to that address will show up on the site as adding to it, and the donor can leave you a message if they wish.
It allows everybody to see exactly how close you are to your 50 Monero goal, etc.
It's a Monero donation platform, so even if they were to remove your page, the donation wallet you set up for it would still be able to receive donations even without them.
When it's Visa, Mastercard, and the banks and governments responsible for fiat money itself who are cracking down, you're going to get exactly the "feature parity" you're asking for anywhere that is using that money. It's time to start looking into alternative currencies if you want to escape their control.
"Monero, it's not just for criminals anymore" (or maybe it is, because they're trying to make us all criminals if we don't adhere to their definition of "moral purity")
GNU Taler is a payment method designed to provide an unparalleled level of privacy to the payer. Related issues: #1062 and #1268. Implementation guide: create sql/branch.sql add a 'taler' value to ...
I hate catbox. I can't see images posted via catbox because for some reason catbox is very actively and aggressively bans VPNs. Yeah, you heard that right: they ban VPNs, not only for posting, even for viewing! I managed to find one VPN server that worked well... for few weeks. Until it got banned as well. Someone once said catbox is a honeypot. Idk about that, but their VPN policy is definitely honeypot-tier.
Added: What's even more funny - imgur also used to ban VPNs, but my current server, at the moment I picked it I choose by criteria that both imgur and catbox and some third service should work, and few weeks later imgur still works while catbox don't, which means catbox bans VPNs more aggressively than imgur! Really makes you hmmmm.
Added: After reading SatyrSack reply I'm not sure anymore. Maybe it was too rash to blame Catbox. It's unclear who or what is responsible for the block, maybe neither the source nor the destination.
I don't know what VPN you use, but i have zero issues running Proton VPN and accessing catbox. Maybe some VPN nodes are used to attack Catbox and they are temp banned?
I'll be honest, I don't mind a free file host banning VPNs. Yes, VPNs have tons of legitimate uses, but they also have illegitimate uses that (what I understand to be) a one-man team is likely not prepared to deal with. They already have to deal with CSAM getting uploaded as it is.
but they also have illegitimate uses that (what I understand to be) a one-man team is likely not prepared to deal with
This would be somewhat believable excuse if they only blocked uploading/posting under VPNs. But they block viewing under VPNs as well, which you only do if your sole purpose is logging IP addresses of viewers. In this scenario catbox images posted to Lemmy for example, they don't only reveal your IP the moment they are loaded when you scroll your feed, they also associate it with the site from where the request was initiated (your Lemmy instance).
This would be somewhat believable excuse if they only blocked uploading/posting under VPNs.
With CSAM, you want to block uploading and downloading, because both are problematic for a host.
In this scenario catbox images posted to Lemmy for example, they don't only reveal your IP the moment they are loaded when you scroll your feed
I'm 99% sure it doesn't work that way. The Lemmy instance caches a preview image for posted links. But scrolling past without clicking a link will not expose your IP to Catbox unless you have an auto-preview setting enabled that opens/caches every link you scroll past automatically, which I don't believe is enabled by default.
With CSAM, you want to block uploading and downloading, because both are problematic for a host.
At that point, if such content is already posted there and available for download, it doesn't matter if it is only allowed to be downloaded via clearnet or VPNs as well. Blocking VPNs doesn't make any difference here.
I’m 99% sure it doesn’t work that way. The Lemmy instance caches a preview image for posted links. But scrolling past without clicking a link will not expose your IP to Catbox unless you have an auto-preview setting enabled that opens/caches every link you scroll past automatically, which I don’t believe is enabled by default.
I've seen a debate regarding lemmynsfw with some people asking to turn off caching/proxying for images. I don't know what's their current status on this, but on my instance even thumbnails were not visible for catbox images. I'm not sure if it's disabled or it's the instance server itself having trouble accessing catbox.
At that point, if such content is already posted there and available for download, it doesn't matter if it is only allowed to be downloaded via clearnet or VPNs as well. Blocking VPNs doesn't make any difference here.
My understanding is that it's for tracking/reporting purposes, and to mitigate future offenses by banning those IPs. You can report an IP to an ISP for CSAM violations, but it's not as useful when the user's on a VPN.
I've seen a debate regarding lemmynsfw with some people asking to turn off caching/proxying for images. I don't know what's their current status on this, but on my instance even thumbnails were not visible for catbox images. I'm not sure if it's disabled or it's the instance server itself having trouble accessing catbox.
Yeah, I've also noticed that Catbox links don't seem to generate previews on Mbin, as well, so I suspect that may be a Catbox block of some sort. That's interesting... I wonder if that causes a Lemmy instance to attempt a live preview instead of giving you a cached one. If so, that seems like something that probably shouldn't be in place, IMO.
My understanding is that it’s for tracking/reporting purposes, and to mitigate future offenses by banning those IPs. You can report an IP to an ISP for CSAM violations, but it’s not as useful when the user’s on a VPN.
Don't think even the most extreme actors go that far, link could be opened accidentally, etc...
Anyway, from what another poster here linked, it looks like Catbox might actually not be banning any VPNs at all on its own, this might be some kind of middleware/routing infrastructure issue.
Do you use Verizon for Internet? It's been my experience that the only way I can open catbox links is if I'm not connected solely to Verizon's network.
Their FAQ lists multiple reasons that various countries, ISPs, etc. block CatBox, and using a VPN is often mentioned as the solution. Here is an archive of their FAQ that you should be able to read from any connection:
Thanks, this is surprising! I assumed my VPN wouldn't ever block anything, because I've never seen that before, and thus the block was Catbox's fault, but from what they write in their FAQ I start to question this. Maybe there is some large scale intermediary/middleware/mitm that make this happen. Idk, this is the first time I see anything like this. The server I'm currently using is in Switzerland, but I've also had those blocks with multiple VPN servers in other EU countries.
This is phenomenal, I've been switching through countless EU countries and servers, and catbox just kept becoming inaccessible in every single one day by day, and even after abandoning Proton VPN altogether and moving to obscure VPS provider with my self-hosted VPN, it worked for like 2 days, and now it's blocked again.
I often use litter.catbox.moe (auto-deleting) because I can upload via command line. But it's so slow sometimes that it's unusable for e.g. including images in comments. Is that also the case for catbox.moe proper?
When I click on catbox.moe images on Lemmy, I don't see a difference between being on a VPN, my WiFi at home, on mobile data oder a random Hotspot. It either loads like back in the days when we had dial up connections or in >90% of the cases I get a connection timeout. It's a pita to the point that I check the link on Lemmy before clicking on it and have a very hard time to not justify instantly down voting the poster for using that service.
::: spoiler Key Findings 1. Geopolitical Events Trigger Unprecedented DDoS Campaigns Expand: Major political events drove increased DDoS activity, evidenced by attack count spikes that coincide with these occurrences. These events saw hacktivist groups launching up to double the normal number of attacks in short timeframes. 2. Botnet-Driven Attacks Dominate with Increased Sophistication Expand: Botnet-driven attacks are getting longer, more frequent, and are employing multiple attack vectors to avoid mitigation. They are targeting known vulnerabilities in IoT devices, servers, routers, and more. 3. NoName057(16) Maintains Dominance Among Familiar Threat Actors: Well-known hacktivist and attack groups, such as NoName057(16), are launching more attacks across the globe while leveraging several attack vectors. 4. New Threat Actors Emerge with DDoS-as-a-Service Capabilities: Emerging attack groups like DieNet and Keymous+ are leveraging DDoS-for-hire infrastructure to launch DDoS-as-a-service campaigns, lowering the barrier to entry and expanding the threat landscape. 5. Global DDOS Attack Volume High with Regional Variations: With more than 8 million recorded attacks globally in the first half of 2025, DDoS attack volume remains massive. The attacks also show sustained intensity, reaching speeds of 3.12 Tbps and 1.5 Gpps. :::
DDoS attacks are no longer just a nuisance, they’re a weapon of geopolitical influence. In the first half of 2025 alone, more than 8 million attacks were recorded globally, with threat actors leveraging AI, botnets, and DDoS-for-hire services to launch increasingly sophisticated and sustained campaigns.
Understanding network dependencies matters for digital sovereignty, resilience, and security.
Canada, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, and the USA distribute government-bound traffic across multiple operators and exchange points, creating greater resilience against technical failures and geopolitical shocks.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Funnily enough I've been watching through Dark Matter and Alien: Earth and last night after watching an episode of each back to back realized that we're probably not far off from being directly ruled by corporations after all our governments fall, which is a central theme in each show.
I don’t think our governments are going to fall. I do think they are however extensions of corporations and over time are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from business.
I haven't read the books, but from what I understand, fans of the books generally don't care for the show because they think they changed too much. I think season 2 was a little slow but 1 and 3 have been great.
I'll give it another try once I forget most of the book, otherwise it's hard not to compare. I loved the books so anything different is hard to digest.
I haven't delved too deeply into the criticism so far all I know it could be baseless "internet complaints" like The Last of Us where people were upset that the girl playing the teenage character "wasn't attractive enough."
Thats just the first round of IP law vs AI Corpos. I'm really interested if this process will fix the broken copyright system or fix the AI Corpos - one of the two has to give.
McCann, 37, who has a background as a visual designer, started experimenting with AI to see if it could boost his creativity and “bring some of my lyrics to life.” Last month, he signed with independent record label Hallwood Media after one of his tracks racked up 3 million streams, in what’s billed as the first time a music label has inked a contract with an AI music creator.
I wish the Tunisian people well: they've had better-quality democracy, enough to taste their real rights, & hope they take all the wisdoms/insights of Ghandi, & Nelson Mandela, & systematically force the earning of their civil-rights..
Kenya’s success in the fight against deadly sleeping sickness marks a milestone in the African continent's battle to eradicate neglected tropical diseases.
It is my Great Honor to report that the United States of America now fully owns and controls 10% of INTEL, a Great American Company that has an even more incredible future. I negotiated this Deal with Lip-Bu Tan, the Highly Respected Chief Executive Officer of the Company. The United States paid nothing for these Shares, and the Shares are now valued at approximately $11 Billion Dollars. This is a great Deal for America and, also, a great Deal for INTEL. Building leading edge Semiconductors and Chips, which is what INTEL does, is fundamental to the future of our Nation. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Thank you for your attention to this matter.
The Trump administration said it had taken a 10% stake in Intel, President Donald Trump’s latest extraordinary move to exert federal control over business.
China's internal market is far more cutthroat and "capitalist" than that of the USA. And less regulated. And less monopolized, except for a few services which, ahem, are mandated (WeeChat, yes).
That was their "unique path", to move all hierarchical stuff into political entities. It look interesting on a large scale, from more "peasant-oriented" communism, kinda changing the initial Marxist picture of worker-capital relations, to this.
An actual city wall existed on the street from 1653 to 1699. During the 18th century, the location served as a slave market and securities trading site, and from 1703 onward
So, I haven't checked project 2025, but there is a Christian nationalist plan that wants to take over everything called Seven Mountains Mandate. You can just read the link, but the idea is to take over what they consider all major parts of society, including business and have a Christian Dominion.
Wait. The point of the unbelievable amount of telemetry you can't even disable was to collect info in situations like this. Right? Why is there telemetry if they have to ask?
Edit: title of the article is a bit misleading, as I obviously commented before reading the article.
The "another" company they are in contacting is Phison, the manufacturer of thr affected controllers, so it doesn't sound as bad as from the title
They have received no official reports, and cannot reproduce the issue. I'm betting this is a case of a couple drives failing and then everyone screaming at MS without any verification.
I wanted to post this yesterday, but my instance was having issues the entire day. Apologies if this is a repost.
Shi allegedly sent a message to Oppo saying that he was working to “collect as much information as possible” before starting his job. And he searched the internet for terms like “how to wipe out macbook” and “Can somebody see if I’ve opened a file on a shared drive?” from his Apple-issued MacBook before leaving the company.
For someone who is presumably pretty intelligent, this is pretty dumb.
Apple is suing a former employee on the Apple Watch team, Dr. Chen Shi, who left to join Oppo, alleging that he “conspired to steal Apple’s trade secrets relating to Apple Watch.”
And he searched the internet for terms like “how to wipe out macbook” and “Can somebody see if I’ve opened a file on a shared drive?” from his Apple-issued MacBook before leaving the company.
He now heads up a team working on sensing technology at Oppo — which Apple says it learned because of “messages he left on his Apple-issued work iPhone.” In his resignation letter to Apple, Shi said he was leaving “due to personal and family reasons.” Via that iPhone, Apple also says it found messages from Oppo demonstrating that it “encouraged, approved, and agreed to Dr. Shi’s plan to collect Apple’s proprietary information before leaving Apple.”
Why would either of these companies hire someone this stupid in a pivotal role?
Sounds damning, however the evidence will need to be presented. Apple’s legal team has a tendency to present and open-and-shut case to the media but it’s very much spinned in their favour.
If they just made up a bunch of accusations with paltry evidence to prove it, the scandal would make headlines. "iPhone maker found to be full of shit in court!" is clickworthy gold. I don't think your stance is very strong. Every entity tries to spin things in their favor, but you make it sound like they'd bring an empty case and they very much would not. No one starts a lawsuit they don't think they can win unless they're someone with no credibility and endless money like Elon Musk (see lawsuit against Apple and OpenAI) or oil companies going after environmental lawyers.
I politely disagree. Apple legal will most certainly make extreme accusations and throw the book at individuals as a deterrent to other staff who may be considering bringing “trade secret” knowledge with them as they leave. Which is basically turns any kind of creative solution to a tech problem into a “trade secret” 🍆in this reality of patents and intellectual property.
I suspect that this person thought they were getting away with something minor and it’s being spun into mustache-twirling supervillains as a warning to staff.
After developing a facial-recognition app for Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses and doxing random people, two former Harvard students are now launching a startup that makes smart glasses with an always-on microphone.
I remember when Google glass came out. I was living in New York, and almost every single establishment banned them nearly immediately. You wouldn’t be allowed in if you were wearing them, and if anyone saw you put them on, you get kicked out. No questions.
Well, you are far from alone. I imagine that a majority of people will feel this way, especially when they are more privacy invasive than Google glass ever was.
Also, people are much more privacy focused than they were 15 years ago. I can imagine there will be significant pushback to wearing these glasses anywhere but in open, public spaces. Private establishments will likely ban them.
Google Glass purposefully made it obvious what they were. The newer glasses without cameras from Meta et al basically look like regular glasses if you can't see the waveguide in the lenses.
If you know what you’re looking for, they’re not that difficult to spot. But, yeah, to most people, they would just appear to be regular sunglasses. This is a huge problem. It’s one thing when you’re being recorded by someone who is obviously holding a camera. It’s another one when, potentially, dozens of people around you could be recording everything all the time without anyone else, knowing it.
Not only is a potential for abuse incredibly high, the fact that Meta ends up owning all of the content so they can harvest it for monetary gain is even worse.
There's a big social stigma against this. Every other version of this that has come out has failed due to the combination of expense and stigma. I suspect this is nothing to worry about.
Very few people are going to pay hundreds of dollars to be socially isolated. Kill the market, kill the device.
“The AI listens to every conversation you have and uses that knowledge to tell you what to say … kinda like IRL Cluely,” Ardayfio told TechCrunch, referring to the startup that claims to help users “cheat” on everything from job interviews to school exams.
“If somebody says a complex word or asks you a question, like, ‘What’s 37 to the third power?’ or something like that, then it’ll pop up on the glasses,” Ardayfio added.
The product sounds like just another shitty AI assistant but on your face. The problem might fix itself when only 5 idiots buy them.
Remember how cell phones spread, and even people in poor countries with limited infrastructure?
This will be the same or worse. No, you won't be able to avoid being recorded by other people. This will change in the future, if it ever does, only when a large majority understand how the devices are being abused by power to control us and keep us enslaved. But, even upon that realization, if people find enough value in using the tech, they'll put up with being enslaved if they're still comfortable enough. It's a balance, and power knows it. They're working out the details as they go.
This is what's coming. My suggestion is don't have kids.
To feed the data centers with yummy personal data. No dataset is to big, no picture of the side of someone's arm is too pointless. We must consume all data
FOMO. Every experience is recorded just in case you (or really the government) might ever realize it was missed. Just in case it ever becomes interesting.
Tl;dr two over privileged teenage psychopaths stole a stupid idea from Meta/google that was hated by many and are going to make it worse by going all-in on the reasons people hate them.
I would. They're making an entirely unoriginal product with an entirely unoriginal sales pitch and, presumably, an unoriginal surveillance-based business model.
Is it really unoriginal? If it is patentable then it is as original as one can get in an already very developed technological market. I’m not saying I want this out there, but that doesn’t mean that what they are doing is wholly unoriginal, especially if no one has done it before.
Oh, it will join that very successful startup that was doing a pin that did something similar. It had AI in the name, I bet it does great and the product is very successful
While researching this news story I noticed that it was removed twice from Reddit by the mods with no clear reasons, so I added here some extra sources to make sure everything here is accurate.
I am not sure if the news story is being censored or if there is other reasons.
If you find any local articles or coverage that can add more context, please drop them in the comments and I will add them to the post.
A fire broke out at the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant in Russia after Ukrainian drone flying near the plant was shot down, the press service of the plant said on August 23.
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.
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
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.
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
Balder
in reply to silence7 • • •like this
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squaresinger
in reply to Balder • • •Google, sadly, is truely dead.
I moved on to Duckduckgo, because the results really aren't worse. Aren't better either though.
like this
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NewNewAugustEast
in reply to squaresinger • • •I find them better. Most of the time. Google is needed every now and then.
DuckDuckGo gets to the point and skips the seo stuff.. Mostly.
Although at this point search is nearly useless no matter what you use.
MaggiWuerze
in reply to NewNewAugustEast • • •Scrollone
in reply to squaresinger • • •Stubb
in reply to Balder • • •reksas
in reply to Stubb • • •like this
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muusemuuse
in reply to reksas • • •bruhduh
in reply to muusemuuse • • •mobile operating system
Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)muusemuuse
in reply to bruhduh • • •reksas
in reply to muusemuuse • • •mrdown
in reply to silence7 • • •etherphon
in reply to silence7 • • •Gravitywell
in reply to silence7 • • •Yeah but really does that even matter when the top results are just ads anyway? The problem is advertising has taken over search engines and now AI makes it even less likely people "searching" for things will even bother to click off of the search website.
DMCA takedown abuse isn't anything new, this article seems like it was just due to 404 media having to deal with it, onlyfans is tangentially related and clearly just used in the headline for clickbait purposes... I really expected better of 404 media, The issue is a valid and increasingly worse one, it shouldnt need a clickbait headline. "DMCA Automation is ruining the internet" or something to that effect would have been a lot better.
This whole thing is also a scam on content creators, people arent pirating content by searching for it on google, they're finding out about websites by talking to people on discord (which itself is not searchable of course) and other such services. Anyone paying for these kind of takedown services is getting taken for a ride.
cygnus
in reply to Gravitywell • • •That's true, but if the important thing is to draw attention to this issue, this is a good way of doing it even if it's a creative interpretation of the truth.
like this
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solsangraal
in reply to silence7 • • •blames pirates in the headline
goes on to say how it's, yet again, actually an AI problem
Atherel
in reply to solsangraal • • •Dr. Moose
in reply to Atherel • • •Americans: invent a law that allows anyone to take down content online without any repercussions
Lemmy: blasted AI - ruining everything!
🤦♂️
hark
in reply to Dr. Moose • • •Dr. Moose
in reply to hark • • •hark
in reply to Dr. Moose • • •AI has been around in many forms for decades FYI
Enhanced capabilities and availability of tools make a difference. If a company gets the "brilliant" idea to "use AI" to file DMCA requests, encouraged by recent hype of AI and proliferation of many AI tools to make it easy to deploy, then it suddenly becomes a problem, hence why this article exists right now.
Dr. Moose
in reply to hark • • •But these tools were available for years at least. How do you think Youtube strikes down videos automatically by it's own since like 2012.
The issue is that again and again simpletons are yelling at the hammer instead of the guy that's smashing everything with it. This is so tiring, it makes all of us look so fucking stupid.
hark
in reply to Dr. Moose • • •Aggravationstation
in reply to solsangraal • • •blitzen
in reply to silence7 • • •Archangel1313
in reply to silence7 • • •olympicyes
in reply to silence7 • • •“We don't really review it [the list] because we are an agent for them,” Ananad said. “For the requests that we send out ourselves, usually they get reviewed, but sometimes they [clients] do a search by themselves, and they come across some content and they flag it and they're like, ‘We want this taken down.’ We don't review that because that is something that they want taken down. I'm not particularly sure about this case, but that is what happens. What we planned on doing was also reviewing these but it's usually not very fruitful, because the user is very sure they want that claim. And even if we say, ‘Hey, we don't think you should do that,’ they're like, ‘We want to do it. Just do it because I'm paying you for this.’ And if we just say, do it yourself, that kind of takes away the business from us. So that is basically how it works.”
What?
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nullroot
in reply to olympicyes • • •Devolution
in reply to silence7 • • •manxu
in reply to silence7 • • •DudeImMacGyver
in reply to silence7 • • •like this
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BlameTheAntifa
in reply to DudeImMacGyver • • •vacuumflower
in reply to BlameTheAntifa • • •Copyright in general is about suppressing and abusing competition, there's a little bit of difference now that the old Victorian-style copyright laws lasted as long as the author, more or less, and every legal action was taken through a court, not like these letters of happiness.
It's funny how we seem similar to the pre-WWI mood of "everything has been invented, abolish patents", I wonder if the "pre-WWI" part is too going to rhyme. Hope that not, of course, but most of the innovation seems to be in direct or indirect warfare (all of big tech is honestly that). And there's one nation whose elites seem to make weird destructive moves. And which is on the down trajectory in its GDP relative to the world for the last 50 years. And which has the world's biggest military spending.
After all, humans need a reminder that for the plethora of technologies that seem like a favorable to them weapon unseen before, there are also similarly many technologies that may be unfavorable to them weapons unseen before.
Nazi Germany used radio and encryption and maneuverability and wonderful air force to achieve successes, then the other sides used radars and computers and mass modular production and MLRS'es.
Perhaps the current rotting of copyright and patent system is because the elites think they don't need more natural peaceful development. Global bloodletting usually heals that kind of ideas. Some things can only be learned on your own experience.
phutatorius
in reply to vacuumflower • • •Copyright is a surviving instance of the old system of royal warrants: monopolies granted by a monarch, usually to cronies, occasionally as a reward for some kind of good work (scientific discovery, work of art, etc).
It's a system that's full of opportunities for corruption and bureaucratic oppression, and should either be massively scaled back, or dumped entirely. It does far more harm than good.
vacuumflower
in reply to phutatorius • • •I agree, unfortunately things only keep existing when there's balance between their sides in power.
Such balance is - those benefiting from copyright have a lot to offer and threaten to those making copyright, and the other way around.
It's all military logic now. 50 years ago it could have been solved by a popular movement, now any movement really threatening copyright will have its figures murdered left and right.
mic_check_one_two
in reply to BlameTheAntifa • • •phutatorius
in reply to mic_check_one_two • • •HexesofVexes
in reply to DudeImMacGyver • • •Goodlucksil
in reply to DudeImMacGyver • • •like this
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phutatorius
in reply to DudeImMacGyver • • •DudeImMacGyver
in reply to phutatorius • • •_druid
in reply to silence7 • • •phutatorius
in reply to _druid • • •Just because something is legal, doesn't mean it's not scummy.
And as for people getting shit for free, I support a maximalist position on right of first sale: sharing what you own should be legal in all cases. If that inconveniences some mass aggregator of content, tough shit: the ease of sharing gives the lie to the notion that the aggregator adds any value, instead, they're just rent-seeking parasites.
fodor
in reply to silence7 • • •bruhduh
in reply to silence7 • • •MonkderVierte
in reply to silence7 • • •Article about piracy be like:
But props for that implementation; it's a real paywall, not only a layer triggered by some 3rd-party script.
Archive link
404 Media
2025-09-01 13:00:12
interdimensionalmeme
in reply to silence7 • • •vacuumflower
in reply to interdimensionalmeme • • •myfunnyaccountname
in reply to silence7 • • •sip
in reply to myfunnyaccountname • • •fr
mic_check_one_two
in reply to sip • • •This
black0ut
in reply to mic_check_one_two • • •Real
AceFuzzLord
in reply to black0ut • • •Your comment has been banned and you have been banned from this subreddit for < insert random inapplicable rule >. This message is automated by moderator bot. Do not reply.
Siegfried
in reply to myfunnyaccountname • • •humanoidchaos
in reply to silence7 • • •Advertising is ruining the internet.
Copyright and patent laws shouldn't even exist.
phutatorius
in reply to humanoidchaos • • •Alpha71
in reply to silence7 • • •phutatorius
in reply to silence7 • • •