That came in November, filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and 10 other Republican AGs, accusing three of the biggest asset managers on Wall Street—BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street—of running “an investment cartel” to depress the output of coal and boosting their revenues while pushing up energy costs for Americans. The Trump administration’s Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission filed a supporting brief in May.
The overall pressure campaign aimed at what’s known as “ESG” is having an impact.
“Over the past several months, through this [lawsuit] and other things, letters from elected officials, state and federal, there has been a chilling effect of what investors are saying,” said Steven Maze Rothstein, chief program officer of Ceres, a nonprofit that advocates for more sustainable business practices and was among the earliest letter recipients. Still, “investors understand that Mother Nature doesn’t know who’s elected governor, attorney general, president.”
Earlier this month, a US District Court judge in Tyler, Texas, declined to dismiss the lawsuit against the three asset managers, though he did dismiss three of the 21 counts. The judge was not making a final decision in the case, only that there was enough evidence to go to trial.
::: spoiler 12 Key Findings 1. Age assurance can be done in Australia privately, efficiently and effectively: Age assurance can be done in Australia – our analysis of age assurance systems in the context of Australia demonstrates how they can be private, robust and effective. There is a plethora of choice available for providers of age-restricted goods, content, services, venues or spaces to select the most appropriate systems for their use case with reference to emerging international standards for age assurance. 2. No substantial technological limitations preventing its implementation to meet policy goals: Our evaluation did not reveal any substantial technological limitations that would prevent age assurance systems being used in response to age-related eligibility requirements established by policy makers. We identified careful, critical thinking by providers on the development and deployment of age assurance systems, considering efficacy, privacy, data and security concerns. Some systems were easier for initial implementation and use than others, but the systems of all technology providers with a technology readiness level (TRL) 7 or above were eventually capable of integration to a user journey. 3. Provider claims have been independently validated against the project’s evaluation criteria: We found that the practice statements provided by age assurance providers with a TRL of 7 or above fairly reflected the technological capabilities of their products, processes or services (to the extent applicable to the Trial’s evaluation criteria). Some of the practice statements provided have needed to be clarified or developed during the course of the Trial, but we observed that they offer a useful option for transparency of the capabilities of the available age assurance systems. Those with a TRL below 7 will need further analysis when their systems mature. 4. A wide range of approaches exist, but there is no one-size-fits-all solution for all contexts: We found a plethora of approaches that fit different use cases in different ways, but we did not find a single ubiquitous solution that would suit all use cases, nor did we find solutions that were guaranteed to be effective in all deployments. The range of possibilities across the Trial participants demonstrate a rich and rapidly evolving range of services which can be tailored and effective depending on each specified context of use. 5. We found a dynamic, innovative and evolving age assurance service sector: We found a vibrant, creative and innovative age assurance service sector with both technologically advanced and deployed solutions and a pipeline of new technologies transitioning from research to minimum viable product to testing and deployment stages indicating an evolving choice and future opportunities for developers. We found private-sector investment and opportunities for growth within the age assurance services sector. 6. We found robust, appropriate and secure data handling practices: We found robust understanding of and internal policy decisions regarding the handling of personal information by Trial participants. The privacy policies and practice statements collated for the Trial demonstrate a strong commitment to privacy by design principles, with consideration of what data was to be collected, stored, shared and then disposed of. Separating age assurance services from those of relying parties was useful as Trial participants providing age assurance services more clearly only used data for the necessary and consented purpose of providing an age assurance result. 7. Systems performed broadly consistently across demographic groups, including Indigenous populations: The systems under test performed broadly consistently across demographic groups assessed and despite an acknowledged deficit in training age analysis systems with data about Indigenous populations, we found no substantial difference in the outcomes for First Nations and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and other multi-cultural communities using the age assurance systems. We found some systems performed better than others, but overall variances across race did not deviate by more than recognised tolerances. 8. There is scope to enhance usability, risk management and system interoperability: We found opportunities for technological improvement including improving ease of use for the average person and enhancing the management of risk in age assurance systems. This could include through one-way blind access to verification of government documents, enabling connection to data holder services (like digital wallets) or improving the handling of a child’s digital footprint as examples. 9. Parental control tools can be effective but may constrain children’s digital participation and evolving autonomy: The Trial found that both parental control and consent systems can be done and can be effective, but they serve different purposes. Parental control systems are pre-configured and ongoing but may fail to adapt to the evolving capacities of children including potential risks to their digital privacy as they grow and mature, particularly through adolescence. Parental consent mechanisms prompt active engagement between children and their parents at key decision points, potentially supporting informed access. 10. Systems generally align with cybersecurity best practice, but vigilance is required: We found that the systems were generally secure and consistent with information security standards, with developers actively addressing known attack vectors including AI-generated spoofing and forgeries. However, the rapidly evolving threat environment means that these systems – while presently fairly robust – cannot be considered infallible. Ongoing monitoring and improvement will help maintain their effectiveness over time. Similarly, continued attention to privacy compliance will support long-term trust and accountability. 11. Unnecessary data retention may occur in apparent anticipation of future regulatory needs: We found some concerning evidence that in the absence of specific guidance, service providers were apparently over-anticipating the eventual needs of regulators about providing personal information for future investigations. Some providers were found to be building tools to enable regulators, law enforcement or Coroners to retrace the actions taken by individuals to verify their age which could lead to increased risk of privacy breaches due to unnecessary and disproportionate collection and retention of data. 12. Providers are aligning to emerging international standards around age assurance: The standards-based approach adopted by the Trial, including through the ISO/IEC 27566 Series [Note 1], the IEEE 2089.1 [Note 2] and the ISO/IEC 25000 [Note 3] series (the Product Quality Model) all provide a strong basis for the development of accreditation of conformity assessment and subsequent certification of individual age assurance providers in accordance with Australia’s standards and conformance infrastructure. :::
Australia’s government trial of age‑assurance tech to keep under‑16s off social media says social media age checks can be done, despite errors and privacy risks
::: spoiler 12 Key Findings 1. Age assurance can be done in Australia privately, efficiently and effectively: Age assurance can be done in Australia – our analysis of age assurance systems in the context of Australia demonstrates how they can be private, robust and effective. There is a plethora of choice available for providers of age-restricted goods, content, services, venues or spaces to select the most appropriate systems for their use case with reference to emerging international standards for age assurance. 2. No substantial technological limitations preventing its implementation to meet policy goals: Our evaluation did not reveal any substantial technological limitations that would prevent age assurance systems being used in response to age-related eligibility requirements established by policy makers. We identified careful, critical thinking by providers on the development and deployment of age assurance systems, considering efficacy, privacy, data and security concerns. Some systems were easier for initial implementation and use than others, but the systems of all technology providers with a technology readiness level (TRL) 7 or above were eventually capable of integration to a user journey. 3. Provider claims have been independently validated against the project’s evaluation criteria: We found that the practice statements provided by age assurance providers with a TRL of 7 or above fairly reflected the technological capabilities of their products, processes or services (to the extent applicable to the Trial’s evaluation criteria). Some of the practice statements provided have needed to be clarified or developed during the course of the Trial, but we observed that they offer a useful option for transparency of the capabilities of the available age assurance systems. Those with a TRL below 7 will need further analysis when their systems mature. 4. A wide range of approaches exist, but there is no one-size-fits-all solution for all contexts: We found a plethora of approaches that fit different use cases in different ways, but we did not find a single ubiquitous solution that would suit all use cases, nor did we find solutions that were guaranteed to be effective in all deployments. The range of possibilities across the Trial participants demonstrate a rich and rapidly evolving range of services which can be tailored and effective depending on each specified context of use. 5. We found a dynamic, innovative and evolving age assurance service sector: We found a vibrant, creative and innovative age assurance service sector with both technologically advanced and deployed solutions and a pipeline of new technologies transitioning from research to minimum viable product to testing and deployment stages indicating an evolving choice and future opportunities for developers. We found private-sector investment and opportunities for growth within the age assurance services sector. 6. We found robust, appropriate and secure data handling practices: We found robust understanding of and internal policy decisions regarding the handling of personal information by Trial participants. The privacy policies and practice statements collated for the Trial demonstrate a strong commitment to privacy by design principles, with consideration of what data was to be collected, stored, shared and then disposed of. Separating age assurance services from those of relying parties was useful as Trial participants providing age assurance services more clearly only used data for the necessary and consented purpose of providing an age assurance result. 7. Systems performed broadly consistently across demographic groups, including Indigenous populations: The systems under test performed broadly consistently across demographic groups assessed and despite an acknowledged deficit in training age analysis systems with data about Indigenous populations, we found no substantial difference in the outcomes for First Nations and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and other multi-cultural communities using the age assurance systems. We found some systems performed better than others, but overall variances across race did not deviate by more than recognised tolerances. 8. There is scope to enhance usability, risk management and system interoperability: We found opportunities for technological improvement including improving ease of use for the average person and enhancing the management of risk in age assurance systems. This could include through one-way blind access to verification of government documents, enabling connection to data holder services (like digital wallets) or improving the handling of a child’s digital footprint as examples. 9. Parental control tools can be effective but may constrain children’s digital participation and evolving autonomy: The Trial found that both parental control and consent systems can be done and can be effective, but they serve different purposes. Parental control systems are pre-configured and ongoing but may fail to adapt to the evolving capacities of children including potential risks to their digital privacy as they grow and mature, particularly through adolescence. Parental consent mechanisms prompt active engagement between children and their parents at key decision points, potentially supporting informed access. 10. Systems generally align with cybersecurity best practice, but vigilance is required: We found that the systems were generally secure and consistent with information security standards, with developers actively addressing known attack vectors including AI-generated spoofing and forgeries. However, the rapidly evolving threat environment means that these systems – while presently fairly robust – cannot be considered infallible. Ongoing monitoring and improvement will help maintain their effectiveness over time. Similarly, continued attention to privacy compliance will support long-term trust and accountability. 11. Unnecessary data retention may occur in apparent anticipation of future regulatory needs: We found some concerning evidence that in the absence of specific guidance, service providers were apparently over-anticipating the eventual needs of regulators about providing personal information for future investigations. Some providers were found to be building tools to enable regulators, law enforcement or Coroners to retrace the actions taken by individuals to verify their age which could lead to increased risk of privacy breaches due to unnecessary and disproportionate collection and retention of data. 12. Providers are aligning to emerging international standards around age assurance: The standards-based approach adopted by the Trial, including through the ISO/IEC 27566 Series [Note 1], the IEEE 2089.1 [Note 2] and the ISO/IEC 25000 [Note 3] series (the Product Quality Model) all provide a strong basis for the development of accreditation of conformity assessment and subsequent certification of individual age assurance providers in accordance with Australia’s standards and conformance infrastructure. :::
This document presents the official report of the Age Assurance Technology Trial, offering a comprehensive overview of its findings, methodologies and key observations.
so much fluff in their findings. makes me think, they didnt research shit. this is gonna be terribly implemented.
their attempt wont be the end of the free web. but people will leave because they dont want their data breached by yet another bad actor. its just making the web more dangerous instead of safer.
no one has the tech and security to handle this. its waaaay too early. the breaches are going to substantial and continuous.
They've been trying to do it for ages, and they're forever a tad closer. The software stack is where the challenge lies, not the hardware. Still today, you can buy AMD hardware that on paper is better than Nvidia's, yet you can't squeeze out similar performances matching shittier Nvidia cards. Even still, rocm, the 'cuda' for AMD, can't even compete with even vulkan (an open source agnostic backend). So I doubt china will deliver that fast.
Software like wgpu makes it much easier to close the gap between various GPUs. New compute languages that are backend-agnostic are appearing, in the same vein as taichi-lang, that make it significantly easier to make high-performance gpu kernels deployable anywhere.
The compute groundwork for crossplatform tensor calculations is already here. Inference is already doable on any device. Training is not far behind. As a side-effect of this, processing on the GPU in every capacity, like physics, novel rendering techniques, or whatever else the imagination can muster, is now within grasp of "average" programmers.
If you have always been intimidated by GPU programming, I urge you to take another look now. The landscape is radically different. The software moat everyone talks about with NVIDIA is smoke-and-mirrors. Cuda is old news, though I am speaking to the actual code landscape here, not the common mental consensus.
What we lack now is cheap video cards that have high memory. I believe the current cards are overpriced by about 10 - 100x what they should be, because this profit situation is extremely temporary. Just as pens were once thousands of dollars, these compute devices will be collapsing in price.
I welcome China building cheaper video cards. Hopefully we will all benefit from it before any robot wars break out.
Weird article IMO??? Forget the startups, unless they are backed by very major players they don't stand a chance. They have their competences, but I seriously doubt competing with Nvidia on making AI chips is among them. The players to watch are Huawei, Baidu, Tencent and the likes. Who have already been working on this for a while, and have actual working and useful products.
While Huawei is the leader, Chinese companies don’t want to rely entirely on the company.
I don't understand how that statement is supposed to make much sense? When Chinese companies were happy using Nvidia and being dependent on Nvidia. Why wouldn't they be equally happy using Huawei if it's the best option after the government has forbidden them from using Nvidia? It may be true, but there is zero explanation why it is.
To the ones that think China can just use AMD instead, they really can't, AMD is under the same restrictions Nvidia is, and AFAIK AMD has not designed a chip to sell to China within those restrictions.
::: 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.
DDoS Dominate the Digital Battlefield: AI integration, persistent hacktivist campaigns, and nation-state actors weaponize DDoS attacks, creating unprecedented risks for organizations globally
::: 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.
On August 28 and 29, California Governor Gavin Newsom unveiled two sweeping initiatives that together mark a sharp rightward turn in state policy and expose the Democratic Party’s deepening complicity in the destruction of democratic rights. As he portrays himself as a bulwark against President Trump, Newsom is in fact laying the foundation for a massive expansion of state power against the working class and the poor.
Under the guise of public safety and compassion, the Democratic governor has placed the California Highway Patrol (CHP) at the center of two major new enforcement regimes: a statewide “crime suppression” expansion and a “homeless encampment clearance” task force.
These measures are being marketed as alternatives to Trump’s deployments of federal forces into major U.S. cities, but in substance, they mirror their basic functions. Far from opposing the authoritarian measures emanating from Washington, Newsom’s actions mimic them, signaling a growing alignment between the Democratic Party and the Trump administration on the fundamental issue: the use of state repression to deal with the social crisis created by capitalism.
In 2023, the then-Conservative government awarded Palantir with a £330m contract to “build a new NHS data platform”. The move proved controversial because Palantir is a US spy tech firm and its co-founder Peter Thiel is a prominent Trump donor with links to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Now, a trove of leaked emails have shone further light on Thiel’s connections.
Journalists have reported on Thiel’s links to Epstein for some time. In 2019, journalist Whitney Webb reported on the links between Epstein, Israeli tech company Carbyne, and the American intelligence apparatus. In the piece, she reported:
Not long after Epstein’s arrest, and his relationships and finances came under scrutiny, it was revealed that the Israeli company Carbyne911 had received substantial funding from Jeffrey Epstein as well as Epstein’s close associate and former Prime Minister of Israel Ehud Barak, and Silicon Valley venture capitalist and prominent Trump backer Peter Thiel.
Webb added:
Another funder of Carbyne, Peter Thiel, has his own company that, like Carbyne, is set to profit from the Trump administration’s proposed hi-tech solutions to mass shootings. Indeed, after the recent shooting in El Paso, Texas, President Trump — who received political donations from and has been advised by Thiel following his election — asked tech companies to “detect mass shooters before they strike,” a service already perfected by Thiel’s company Palantir, which has developed “pre-crime software” already in use throughout the country. Palantir is also a contractor for the U.S. intelligence community and also has a branch based in Israel.
The latest revelations around Thiel come from the leaked emails of the aforementioned Ehud Barak (former Israeli prime minister). Writing in Reason, Matthew Petti reported:
Epstein invited Barak to come to a meeting with Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and the surveillance contractor Palantir, in May 2014. Although Barak couldn’t make that meeting, Epstein insisted that Barak “spend real time with peter thiel [sic]” and offered to set up a dinner the following month.Epstein
Barak wrote to a different business associate a few days later, without mentioning Epstein’s role, that he and Thiel would have a “first date” and “probably spend it talking just geopolitics” with an unnamed third person. In that email, Barak added that he had met Thiel once before in Davos, Switzerland, but speculated that Thiel “probably doesn’t even recall it.”
Brace Belden of the TrueAnon podcast added that Barak suspected Thiel was “under some drug impact” when they met, according to the emails:
Another funder of Carbyne, Peter Thiel, has his own company that, like Carbyne, is set to profit from the Trump administration’s proposed hi-tech solutions to mass shootings.
This willingness to let billionaires offer for-profit tech solutions to social problems is a sickness, and this is the clearest example yet.
Makes sense. Sex trafficking is sex trafficking. Remember when Lindsey Graham made the sudden switch from vehemently against the Orange pedophile/rapist to best buds? Blackmail makes real sense.
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Thiel shared his views on the Ten Commandments and identified which ones he believes are the most significant.
"The Ten Commandments, the two most important are the first and last on the list. The first commandment is, you should worship God," Thiel reportedly told attendees. "The tenth commandment is, you should not covet the things that belong to your neighbor. In some ways, the first commandment is to look up, and the tenth commandment is you do not look around. And if you're too much focused horizontally on all the people around you, that's sort of the bad version you get caught up in."
He's such a hypocrite!
The greedy guy who owns a company that offers mass surveillance systems says that not looking around at your neighbors is one of the best virtues. LoL
The liability is obviously not high enough if keeping and sharing this data works out positively. Even if the parties involved weren't obviously evil, the risk to the people is too high for them to accept the risk with only trivial, speculative improvements.
Yeah I'm not surprised about the Thiel/Epstein thing, I'm more surprised that the NHS is considering any sort of private health data handling by PALANTIR of all companies.
Somebody is going to be getting a Non-executive board membership or millionaire consulting "gig" from one of Tiel's companies or one from one of his friends...
By this point in time in Britain that kind of I thing has been going on long enough to almost be tradition.
NHS England has tens of millions of patients. Most patient records are undigitised and must be couriered when patients move to a new area or when specialist care is required.
It’s also a huge, publicly funded service so big data can be crunched to improve outcomes and efficiencies.
Palantir wanted a big system to use as the testbed for its move into healthcare data systems and offered a low bid.
Unless I am presented with contradictory evidence (I am not accepting feedback) I will assume nobody over there is willing to program a machine of any type out of fear that their balls will be cut off by the government like daddy Turing’s were.
Edit: (to be clear, I’m just taking the piss. Please for the love of dog, do not touch Palantir with even the tip of any of your extremities.)
This isn't even the first time Thiel has been linked to Epstein, but we never really hear about it for some reason. This isn't even the first time he's been linked this summer.
Ever since that gawker lawsuit, it kinda seems like bad press about Peter Thiel gets buried almost as soon as it's published.
as a rule I don't subscribe to theories related to the blood libel myth but if there was a dude to try injecting children's's blood into his blood to prolong his own life, it's probably this psycho. the dude needs a straight jacket and glands removed. not government contracts.
In 2016, various media outlets reported that Mr Thiel had links to the radical life extension startup Ambrosia, with Gawker claiming he "spends $40,00 per quarter to get an infusion of blood from an 18-year-old based on research conducted at Stanford on extending the lives of mice."
These reports cited his investment portfolio, together with a 2009 essay that laid out his philosophical and political beliefs. In it, he wrote that he stood against "the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual."
However the blood transfusion claims were never verified and Gawker shut down shortly after following an unrelated lawsuit partly funded by Mr Thiel.
The comedy show “Silicon Valley” was a documentary. They just changed the names of prominent figures and literally nothing else. That’s why it was so funny.
I don't know which all aircraft were involved at different points, but there was absolutely a shoot-down by an F-22.
I don't know anything about this website but it was one of Wikipedia's sources. I remember seeing the pictures/videos with the F-22 clearly visible, plus the noteworthy stats like being the first f-22 kill, being the first engagement over US territory since WW2, and that it was probably the highest air to air kill.
They provide police state technology currently used by ICE to target immigrants and several US cities police departments use their tech for "predictive policing." Not to mention they are actively and enthusiastically testing predictive generative AI to plan war crimes and hallucinate targets in the Gaza genocide. Technology they will bring home as "battle tested."
I assume y’all on the other side of the pond are just learning about Palantir for the first time and that’s why you’re looking for bombshell headlines. I can assure you as someone from Silicon Valley that there is literally no single headline that can possibly convey the pure evil that is Peter Thiel. He literally believes that it is morally and, from his perspective, objectively correct that a few pre-selected technocrat elites (his words) should rule city-states that “compete” with each other. He is currently miserably failing at building a libertarian “eutopia” (his words) out in the desert to the east of San Francisco. He promises it would be done by this year. It hasn’t even started.
He founded PayPal and got mad when he immediately learned that banks exist for a reason. He was such a piece of shit that Elon Musk couldn’t work with him.
Being a "thinker" isn't exactly a high bar. A fish can do it (depending on the definition). I mean I suppose I can think, but I wouldn't brag about it.
if you have nothing worth bragging about, resorting to basic functions of sapient life for clout is the best you can do. I'm a thinker too. I'm also a breather, an eater and plenty moee things that aren't special.
I've got some actual achievements too, such as being a former piece of shit, so I've actually got a leg up on him!
The neoreactionary movement (a.k.a. neoreaction, NRx, the Dark Enlightenment) is a loosely-defined cluster of Internet-based political thinkers who wish to return society to forms of government older than liberal democracy.
It is an ideal belief system for soi-disant libertarians who realize that, regardless of the principles of freedom being the ostensible foundation of their ideology, they are unwilling to tolerate others' enjoyment of freedom.
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The first time? Hardly, for anyone who can read and find proper news sources. I've been telling people for years that the most dangerous people in the fascist middle northern america are not in the white house, but in the silicon valley - and that the most evil motherfucker is Peter Thiel.
I can assure you as someone from Silicon Valley that there is literally no single headline that can possibly convey the pure evil that is Peter Thiel. He literally believes that ...
Dude, the US has been lagging behind the UK for the last decade. We voted for Brexit because of Cambridge Analytica, then you voted Trump for the first time because of Cambridge Analytica. We voted for Boris in 2019, you got Trump again in 2024. We're probably going to vote in Nigel Farage next and then the US will be like "Hold my beer!"
Palantir is just another symptom of this wider problem.
The recent fury over news that data on Facebook members was used by the Trump campaign exposes a massive double standard on the part of those now raising holy hell over Facebook.
uhm idk who's not familiar with Thiel but the blueprint of his "utopia" - "The Sovereign Individual" was literally co-written by no other than William Rees-Mogg a conservative house of lords cross-bencher who's also the father of two other conservative MPs that have served in the UK Parliament.
the 2014 reprint of the book has a foreword by Thiel, where he says that it's "the most influential book he had read"
so as usual the theoretical frameworks have been drafted in the heart of empire and implemented in the "land of the free"
Well, Elon wouldn't work with him because Elon had a shitty idea that Thiel said was shitty and wouldn't let Elon do it. Elon was forced to settle for becoming filthy rich.
That project is where the name "X" originally comes from.
Lol what the fuck? I assume you are taking about California Forever but desert is a weird word to describe the Sacramento River delta. It is one of the largest estuaries in north america.
It does seem like the muttering, scrawny weirdo would be the first to get put out on their arse post-apocalypse by... literally anyone currently in their employ.
Does he put forward his case that he is the anti christ? As he sure comes across as someone who would want that. He has always felt like the sort of motherfucker who would read the Stand and identify with Randall Flagg
I setup a Mastodon relay - anyone want to help me test by adding it to their instance? Would help me know if the "Recent jobs" stat is working (I think it requires 2 instances at minimum to show jobs) and if adding to instances (outside of my own) is working properly and how traffic looks.
The last I read, de minimis still applied. I didn't know until now that was done with.
As an avid collector of vinyl records: FUCK! I've got no problem sending $50 to a European artist who's selling a limited run of records out of their living room. Hell, if it's an artist I really like, I'll spend $70. I'm not about to spend $70 and the artist get half of it.
Spending ludicrous amounts of cash of 12-inch pieces of plastic is totally fine with me, but I want my money going to the artist who's making the music I love, not a government I voted against.
No more Lego pick a brick! Way more money for temu bullshit, if they even still ship here! Etc
This is where American consumerism will really start to feel the squeeze. The prices of all that stuff had gone up because of tariffs related to manufacturing costs but now direct tariffs on shipments will either block it or cost consumers.
Not only that, but no more pick-a-brick in Canada too! Why does my nephew have to suffer because Trump is a dink?
(We've tried maybe suggesting he not leave tiny Lego walkie talkies and lightsabers around for the dog to process - like a lab test but not a Labrador - but that's proven unworkable)
Bulk shipping requires storage and logistics infrastructure. Either way Temu and the likes will also be hit by increased costs, though I can't say if the impact is comparable.
There are many good things about this, American consumerism is out of control
We discuss climate change and how “companies are the worst offenders” but what drives those companies? American consumerism
Importing fast fashion, cheap plastic bullshit, other nonsense in plastic packaging, etc (much of it produced in countries that still utilize very dirty fossil fuel chains) ultimately funds and drives significant demand to keep it going and expand.
Also puts huge demand on fuel for international shipping of dumb bullshit.
Next thing to do would be to further reduce fuel demands by limiting air travel and consumer fuel usage but Trump isn’t going to invest in public transport, obviously. This is only a byproduct of his idiocy. After that would be to address concrete and other building material demand/suburban sprawl. Although the time to do this was 20 years ago
I’ll spend $70. I’m not about to spend $70 and the artist get half of it.
You're spending too much time listening to Trump/media apologists for Trump. The America hating foreigners don't pay the tariffs. If the artist you are giving $70 to, is shipping from a country with 25% tariffs, then US Customs, if foreign Post office did not collect US tariffs (all of them are refusing), or disagrees with the value/amount collected, then they will add anywhere between 25% of the missing value or $200 (tariffs on $800 value as penalty for not complying with US law), and YOU NEED TO PAY to collect the package.
Artist got the $70. They won't ship if they have to pay the tariffs. You pay the tariffs if they don't.
If the person in the US is only willing to pay 70, then the artist will get less than 70.
Sure, the American pays the tariff. That's not the point. The point is that this person wants to spend X total and wants most of that X to end up with the artist. And that doesn't happen if they have to spend half of X to pay for the tariff.
The point of saying "the American pays the tariff" isn't to say that the seller makes the same amount. It's to emphasize that the seller won't absorb that cost, which is the lie Trump is selling.
Considering the typical ebay listing, price is payment to be received. Shipping and tarrifs are extra to "weird jurisdictions". I get that OP is willing to offer artist/collector $70, but the seller wants that $70, and shipping somewhere human is preferred. The chaos of US policy is that they are telling all foreign countries to collect tariffs for them, which is not at all how customs/tariffs have ever worked globally ever before. US's fucking job to collect tariffs. No one is complying with absurdity.
The last I read, de minimis still applied. I didn't know until now that was done with.
You can blame companies like Temu for putting a spotlight on de minimis. Their entire business model was built around exploiting de minimis to never pay any taxes. Rather than importing a single shipping container valued above the de minimis amount, they list it as like 10000 individual items, each under the de minimis limit.
It was overwhelming port authorities who didn’t have the manpower to handle that much paperwork for what should have been listed as a single shipment. The tariffs originally didn’t touch de minimis, but then the feds noticed that companies were essentially evading tariffs by only shipping low value items.
Large corpos might set up fulfilment centers in USA and do bulk import. Small companies will just stop export to USA. Setting up manufacturing in USA is unlikely with all the volatility.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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...
Fizz
in reply to Pro • • •Its really gonna be over isnt it. The anonymous free web is actually dying. Rip www you were quite shit but had some good moments.
Nz is definitely going to follow aus and the uk. Our bald egghead pm has expressed a lot of interest in this idea.
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in reply to Pro • • •so much fluff in their findings. makes me think, they didnt research shit.
this is gonna be terribly implemented.
their attempt wont be the end of the free web. but people will leave because they dont want their data breached by yet another bad actor. its just making the web more dangerous instead of safer.
no one has the tech and security to handle this. its waaaay too early. the breaches are going to substantial and continuous.
good luck Australia. stay safe.
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