Democrats let it all out at their party meeting
Democrats let it all out at their party meeting
The party had some wins to celebrate, but did not settle its arguments left over from 2024.David Weigel (www.semafor.com)
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Is Meta Scraping the Fediverse for AI?
Building on some initial reports coming from the FediPact account and Dropsite news, we dive into potential measures admins can take for their instances.
Is Meta Scraping the Fediverse for AI?
A new report from Dropsite News makes the claim that Meta is allegedly scraping a large amount of independent sites for content to train their AI. What’s worse is that this scraping operation appears to completely disregardrobots.txt, a control list used to tell crawlers, search engines, and bots which parts of a site should be accessed, and which parts should be avoided. It’s worth mentioning that the efficacy of such lists depend on the consuming software to honor this, and not every piece of software does.Meta Denies All Wrongdoing
Andy Stone, a communications representative for Meta, has gone on record by claiming that the list is bogus, and the story is incorrect. Unfortunately, the spread of Dropsite’s story is relatively small, and there haven’t been any other public statements about the list at this time. This makes it difficult to adequately critique the initial story, but the concept is nevertheless a wakeup call.However, it’s worth acknowledging Meta’s ongoing efforts to scrape data from many different sources. This includes user data, vast amounts of published books, and independent websites not part of Meta’s sprawling online infrastructure. Given that the Fediverse is very much a public network, it’s not surprising to see instances getting caught in Meta’s net.
Purportedly Affected Instances
The FediPact account has dug in to the leaked PDF, and a considerable amount of Fediverse instances appear on the list. The document itself is 1,659 pages of URLs, so we were able to filter down a number of matches based on keywords. Please keep in mind that these only account for sites that use a platform’s name in the domain:
- Mastodon: 46 matches
- Lemmy: 6 matches
- PeerTube: 46 matches
There are likely considerably more unique domain matches in the list for a variety of platforms. Admins are advised to review whether their own instances are documented there. Even if your instance’s domain isn’t on the list, consider whether your instance is federating with something on the list. Due to the way federation works, cached copies of posts from other parts of the network can still show up on an instance that’s been crawled.
Access the Leaked List
We are mirroring this document for posterity, in case the original article is taken offline.Protective Measures to Take
Regardless of the accuracy of the Dropsite News article, there’s an open question as to what admins can do to protect their instances from being scraped. Due to the nature of the situation, there is likely no singular silver bullet to solve these problems, but there are a few different measures that admins can take:
- Establish Community Terms of Service – Establish a Terms of Service for your instance that explicitly calls out scraping for the purposes of data collection and LLM training specifically. While it may have little to no effect on Meta’s own scraping efforts, it at least establishes precedence and a paper trail for your own server community’s expectations and consent.
- Request Data Removal – Meta has a form buried within the Facebook Privacy Center that could be used to submit a formal complaint regarding instance data and posts being part of their AI training data. Whether or not Meta does anything is a matter of debate, but it’s nevertheless an option.
- (EU-Only) Send a GDPR Form – Similar to the above step, but try to get the request in front of Meta’s GDPR representatives that have to deal with compliance.
- Establish Blocking Measures Anyway: Even if private companies can still choose to disregard things like
robots.txtand HTTP Headers such asX-Robots-Tag: noindex, you can still reduce the attack surface of your site from AI agents that do actually honor those things.- Set Up a Firewall: one popular software package that’s seeing a lot of recent adoption for blocking AI traffic is Anubis, which has configurable policies that you can adjust as needed to handle different kinds of traffic.
- Use Zip Bombs: When all else fails, take measures into your own hands. On the server side, use an Nginx or Apache configuration to detect specific User Agents associated with AI, and serve them ever-expanding compressed archives to slow them down.
In all reality, fighting against AI scraping is still a relatively new problem that’s complicated by lack of clear regulation, and companies deciding to do whatever they want. The best we can do for our communities is to adopt protective measures and stay informed of new developments in the space.
Block AI Bots, Scrapers And Crawlers - A Simple Overview - WebLynx
When it comes to blocking AI bots, scrapers and crawlers, you have a few different options, depending on your web platform and how aggressive you wish to beJimmy Julajak (WebLynx)
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36435178
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias
Comer and Mace Investigate Efforts to Manipulate Information on Wikipedia - United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability
United States House Committee on Oversight and AccountabilityOversight Committee Republicans Verified account
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Firefox Has Moved to Firefox.com
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36435575
::: spoiler Comments
- Hackernews.
:::
Firefox Has Moved to Firefox.com
::: spoiler Comments
- Hackernews.
:::
Get Firefox for desktop and mobile
Firefox is a free web browser backed by Mozilla, a non-profit dedicated to internet health and privacy.Firefox
Firefox Has Moved to Firefox.com
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36435575
::: spoiler Comments
- Hackernews.
:::
Firefox Has Moved to Firefox.com
::: spoiler Comments
- Hackernews.
:::
Get Firefox for desktop and mobile
Firefox is a free web browser backed by Mozilla, a non-profit dedicated to internet health and privacy.Firefox
Firefox Has Moved to Firefox.com
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36435575
::: spoiler Comments
- Hackernews.
:::
Firefox Has Moved to Firefox.com
::: spoiler Comments
- Hackernews.
:::
Get Firefox for desktop and mobile
Firefox is a free web browser backed by Mozilla, a non-profit dedicated to internet health and privacy.Firefox
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Flight attendant was four times over alcohol limit, court told
Flight attendant was four times over alcohol limit, court told
Kathryn Scott denies a single charge of performing an aviation function when over the alcohol limit.BBC News
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I know you jest, but the flight attendants' primary job isn't catering, but safety. Some passengers seem to forget that. Passengers are required to follow their orders, not the other way around; their hospitality doesn't mean they have to take one's bullshit.
So yeah I'd personally prefer if the people in charge of safety on a flight weren't intoxicated. Usually that's a pilot privilege
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I'm not worried. I don't live my life around freak accidents. This really doesn't need to be national news ruining her life if there wasn't a crash before hand, that's the real issue.
Expecting a shit wage employee to act better than cops (let's set that bar real low) in a dangerous event is silly. That person isn't paid enough to give a fuck about any of those people. Those that do are going above and beyond.
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I’m not worried. I don’t live my life around freak accidents. This really doesn’t need to be national news ruining her life if there wasn’t a crash before hand, that’s the real issue.
I mean she literally crashed her car on the way to the flight she was finally removed from? I agree it's weird that this makes the news, but it's probably because the case is so odd…
Expecting a shit wage employee to act better than cops (let’s set that bar real low) in a dangerous event is silly.
It's shameful that Virgin pays so little. But then again it doesn't excuse going on the job drunk. Don't take the job, go on strike for better conditions, all fine by me. But don't show up drunk to your job where you operate safety equipment. Too much to ask? Also I do expect cops not to be drunk
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Cops behave fairly well in countries where they receive any training. Flight attendants do, too.
Some back of the envelope maths suggests that there's an approximately 10% chance of a given flight attendant being on a flight which is evacuated (based on US data, which is what I could find, where there are about 33 evacuations per year, 9.8 million scheduled passenger flights per year, and where flight attendants work about 64 flights a month (according to a random quora post claiming to be by a flight attendant) and an arbitrary figure of 40 years working.
You might not live your life around freak accidents, but people who design industry safety standards do, and do so for a reason: because when you work in it, the probability of it affecting you goes from "inconsequential" to "significant". If there's no rule against turning up drunk to a safety-critical role, or no punishment for breaking it, then eventually someone will die because the flight attendant on duty couldn't remember how to instruct people properly.
Air travel is safe because aviation has a safety culture, and it has that safety culture because danger in the air is inherently more dangerous than danger elsewhere. You can't just coast to a stop when there's a problem on an aeroplane.
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A lot of people have no idea about aviation safety, it shows in these kind of threads. I worked in aviation for about 5 years, so I at least have an idea, though I'm far from an expert (about a year as a technical officer in the German Air Force, more of a management role but you still get the basic safety courses like Maintenance Resource Management training, four years of procurement for a maintenance IT system), and how some people approach the subject stumps me. Flying isn't the safest mean of travel because of its nature, but rather because of rigid rules at every step of the process that are enforced by supervisors and inspectors.
Literally heard this phrase Sunday: Accidents don't happen – they're caused.
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For planes with a stewardess, 90% of passengers survive a crash.
A plane plunging into the ocean is not the most common type of crash. That vast majority of flights are over land.
But also most crashes happen close to the airport because that whole taking off part is the riskiest, most fuel so most weight. Landing is the second most common but and leans towards pilot error.
So it's best for the entire flight crew to be sober for take off and landing.
For reference- she was at 0.091% BAC
England has a driving limit of 0.08%
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For those confused: Americans use percentage for blood alcohol concentration.
That's 0.91‰ and 0.8‰ respectively.
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Per cent is per hundered (1/100). The sign is %.
Per mille is per thousand (1/1000). The sign is ‰.
It's basically used to say 0.1% as 1‰ without using decimals because fuck them.
On another note, the symbols used are ingenious. The diagonal line represents "1", and the number of o's is the same as in the number (two for hundered and three for thousand)
I really don't care about people not being sober as long as they can function correctly.
Everything else is just strong arming people into the awful state of being conscious in this horrible reality.
I really don’t care about people not being sober as long as they can function correctly.
Regardless of the rest you wrote that I disagree with, she crashed her car on the way to the flight that she was removed from, blaming the steering. Not sure how that would qualify as "function correctly"
That's true. I read over it.
But in general I think we should stop judging people. Except the ones that crash their car of course.
Brazil's top court rules US laws do not apply to its territory
lol why would they? But then again, Americans are the only country who fly their drones over your country, and use your country as a battlefield and then go home. They’re the world police. They would shit themselves if another country used the us mainland as a battlefield and had foreign drones flying around.
They’re too used to thinking they own the planet
The Russia is doing it on a far smaller scale. The US does it so often it's boring.
See: how many military bases the US has around the world. See also: how Hawai'i became a state. But The Russia bad.
A far smaller scale? Show me where USA has ever done something like what the Russia has done in Groznyi, Aleppo, Mariupol and Bakhmut?
When was the last time USA spent a night sending several hundred drones aimed at civilian homes? And when was the last time the Russia did not do just that?
What about the Kakhovka dam? When was the last time USA caused such devastation anywhwere at all?
I mean, I've been in several demonstrations against many wars waged by the US, and I most likely will attend many more, and I stopped buying US-made products when the Iraq war began. But come on, what the Russia is doing is in a whole other league compared with USA.
And of course I know about Hawaii. Just blatantly overthrowing a country's leadership and taking over it in such modern times is apalling. But have you ever heard of Siberia? Did you know that it is nowadays a part of the Russian Federation? Ever read of that? And then, if you look at Mali, South Sudan, Belarus, Libya, Kazakhstan, and Syria, the amount of pain and horror caused for the locals because of Russian meddling in their countries has been huge. Yeah, regarding that, USA is doing very similar shit, but they do at least cause less destruction than the Russia does when doing the same.
And USA has Guantanamo, but the Russuahas twenty of those.
Syria’s top diplomat and an Israeli delegation meet in Paris as US pushes for normalizing ties
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That’ll show ‘em.
A Debilitating Virus [Chikungunya] Surges Globally as Mosquitoes Move With Warming Climate
Chikungunya, which can disable victims for years, is spreading rapidly, including in China and other places that have not seen it before.
We could have wiped them off the face of the Earth if we had pressed the attack with DDT for one more decade. Look how we did in America; Wiped malaria out in 1951. (Some of that was infrastructure improvements!)
Rest of the world was happily on their way and in 1972 the US said, "Fuck you, got my problem solved, banned." Of course they couldn't ban it in other countries but the US said, "No ban, no trade.", which is a de facto ban.
One more decade and a concerted push could have eradicated mosquitoes. Then we could have banned it forever. That stupid bitch Rachel Carlson and her book Silent Spring raked up a malarial death count to rival Hitler.
Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Orders Google to Respect ‘Right to Be Forgotten’—Google Says No
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36436559
Canada’s Privacy Commissioner Orders Google to Respect ‘Right to Be Forgotten’—Google Says No
- Backgrounder: Timeline of events related to the investigation of Google and de-listing of online information;
- Report of Findings: Investigation and recommendations concerning Google search engine service’s compliance with its obligations under PIPEDA.
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Protester arrested over ‘Plasticine Action’ T-shirt: ‘How ridiculous is this?’
It was only after Miles Pickering arrived at Scotland Yard following his arrest that the police realised they had got things embarrassingly wrong.The T-shirt worn by the Brighton engineer did not express support for a proscribed terrorist group, instead the words on it read “Plasticine Action” and inside the letter “o” was an image of the stop-motion character Morph giving two thumbs up.
Speaking to the Guardian, Pickering admitted it was designed to be an easy mistake to make, appearing to look like the logo of Palestine Action, the protest group banned under terrorism legislation last month, but text underneath the logo reads: “We oppose AI-generated animation.”
Protester arrested over ‘Plasticine Action’ T-shirt: ‘How ridiculous is this?’
Miles Pickering says crowd at protest over Palestine Action ban was laughing at ‘silliness’ of scene as he was detainedRobyn Vinter (The Guardian)
About five minutes later, the arresting officer approached him again. “He said: ‘I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news.’ I said: ‘What’s the good news?’ He said: ‘I’m de-arresting you.’“And I said: ‘What’s the bad news?’ He said: ‘It’s going to be really embarrassing for me.’ And then I walked free, while all the real heroes are the people that are actually getting arrested.”
The reall heroes indeed. Still this Chad got to draw some needed attention to the outright stupidity of it all...
I mean, embarrassing actions tend to do that.
Interesting that this guy was able joke about it, that's not really the personality I was expecting.
Precisely why I thought that quote validated highlighting. He's in the purgatory between following orders and thinking for himself.
The way he brings it does endear me.
Someone should start selling t shirts that look similar to reach other but of different subjects so then cops there have a hard time telling the difference. My proposals are:
Palepstein Action: Release the Epstein Files
Palworld Action: Screw Nintendo
Plasticine AcTiON₂: Stop Petroleum Pollution
Palladian Action: Preserve Classical Architecture
Paladin Act20n: The Best DnD Class
Pallial ACTON: Wear Helmets, Ride Safely
Ballantine Attraction: Visit Yellowstone
Palestine Paction: 1947 British Mandate Period
Pastime Abstraction: Netflix and Chill
Someone should start selling t shirts that look similar to reach other but of different subjects so then cops there have a hard time telling the difference.
After the bill banning their organization was signed, Palestine Action changed its name to "Yvette Cooper", the Homeland Secretary who authored the bill.
It's kind of grating that it's so bad in the United States that people start applauding the EU doing stupid shit too.
We should be united against this stupid shit, not laughing at each other over our particular forms of suffering.
It's really not the 'where', it's the general thought ((less)(ness)) we should not be slightly relieve at other people doing stupid shit, we should -as people- make a stand against stupid shit.
I think we should unite against stupid shit being laid upon us by greedy people rather than laugh at each others' misery.
Woman arrested in Bali over cocaine allegedly smuggled in sex toy, could face death penalty if convicted
The officers allegedly found 3.1 pounds of cocaine inside a sex toy hidden in her genitals and in her underwear. Police also accused her of smuggling dozens of ecstasy pills
Woman arrested in Bali over cocaine allegedly smuggled in sex toy, could face death penalty if convicted
There are dozens of traffickers on death row in the country, including a cocaine-smuggling British grandmother.CBS News
Son of Norway’s crown princess charged with four counts of rape
Son of Norway’s crown princess charged with four counts of rape
Marius Borg Høiby charged with 32 offences and could face up to 10 years in prison if found guiltyMiranda Bryant (The Guardian)
Høiby’s status as part of the royal family, he added, would “not mean that he is treated more leniently or strictly than if similar acts were committed by others”.
We'll see about that.
I dunno man
Hoiby does not have a royal title and is outside the line of royal succession. The Norwegian royal court said: “It is for the courts to consider this matter and reach a decision. We have no further comment.”
It sounds like they hate the brat too lol.
At least in Norway they treat him like anyone else. Time for the US and UK to do the same. Money, fame and titles shouldn't be a get-out-of-jail (or any consequences) free card.
Prince Andrew has been stripped of his titles, been banished from the royal family. That's not a consequence, he needs to be in prison. Trump has been found guilty for just a few of his crimes, yet he's still able to become president. He needs to rot in prison for the rest of his life too. Instead he's free to do loads more crimes without consequences.
As a Norwegian of some age, this entire case was one of the most jarring news stories I've encountered.
Imagine following the news in the early 2000s. Our crown prince found love among the (extremely) common people, and got married to a woman who had a small child. Royalist tightbutts are pissing themselves at the breach of tradition but the rest of the country is charmed by the heartwarming love affair.
News plastered for months and months of of a couple in love, and Marius the cuutest tiny blonde litte boy barely out of diapers and being adorable everywhere. And it fades out.
20-something years pass, and news are going on about something "Marius Høiby..."
Omg! I remember him! He was the cutes- WHAT THE FUCK
2025.... &...... Royal Family
If you have one in this day and age your society is fucked up.
When I lived in Poland all my presidents were an embarrassment. Extremely partisan, didn't know protocol, didn't speak any foreign languages. One scandal after another. The latest one is a ex football hooligan, cheater and simpleton.
When I got to Spain the king was most capable of meeting foreign leaders, very professional, speaks perfect English and French (and supposedly Greek, German, Portuguese, and Catalan), knows protocol and doesn't get involved in politics. The next in line is preparing her whole life to do the same.
Polish president and Spanish king server pretty much the same function in the government. The office of Polish president costs taxpayers about 10x more money than Spanish Royal family.
So yes, having royals in 2025 is sounds idiotic but it's actually quite practical.
Frankly, I wish we just abolished the damn monarchy already. I hate that we still have kings and queens in a democratic country even if they are just ceremonial. They don't deserve all this media attention just because they got a lucky birth
Treat all of them as one would any other citizen and be done with it. Unfortunately, the monarchy still faces popular support towards existing, though I hope it changes sooner or later
Coding students whose jobs were taken by AI forced to find work at Chipotle
Coding students whose jobs were taken by AI forced to find work at Chipotle
The arrival of AI coding assistants such as GitHub Copilot, CodeRabbit and others has accelerated the decline for entry-level programming roles.Ariel Zilber (New York Post)
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How was the interview? Did they pull questions from HackerRank?
Asking for me, because I’m an old CS grad in a bad job market.
Ahh reminds me of when I was a fresh CS grad working at Dominos
Now they get to spend the next 5-10 years realizing they are slaves and everything adults have told them about the economy, work, and fairness was cope from those adult slaves.
Yeah i was willing to do it if it was livable because it was fun for me.
But it's like getting a CS degree to be a starving artist.
Well, now they know what it's like to have a bachelor's degree in any other field. Welcome to the club.
If you want a guaranteed job right away, go into medicine, or plumbing, those are safe bets. I expect people will always get sick and need to shit.
The peasants will still shit, count on it.
Besides, let's not pretend this "AI replacing us all" narrative has any real lasting power. We see the same story constantly, company replaces workers with AI, company regrets it later. This AI sucks, it's not there yet. You don't really have to worry about it long term.
Don't mistake the weather for the climate.
There's another side to this.
This means there's a lot of programmers who are available to work on other things. It's an opportunity for businesses to start and new programs to be made.
Exactly, nobody is investing in their to-be seniors and dev culture.
Expecting ai-slop to make the difference is a fairy tale told to investors and board members.
I am not against any of our new devs (or myself, a longtime dev) using ai generated code but I expect them to understand it so they can fix it and build their skillsets. I tell them that renting their dev skills from a machine will do them no favors.
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UK Official Calls for Age Verification on VPNs to Prevent Porn Loophole
UK Official Calls for Age Verification on VPNs to Prevent Porn Loophole
The call comes as governments go to war with the anonymous web.Bruce Gil (Gizmodo)
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One thing is the Political self-proclaimed Liberals mainly in the Anglo-Saxon world, a very different thing is the Political Ideology of Liberalism.
"Liberals are Fascists" definitely applies to the mainstream politicians in at least the UK, US and Canada who say they are "Liberals" and have "Liberal policies".
All of a sudden?
This is the country where 1984 was written, where they have more cameras than anywhere else, this sort of social surveillance and quiet, polite fascism is normal for the UK.
And almost all those cameras are privately owned and operated, and not integrated into any kind of centralised surveillance apparatus. More typically, they're in place to deter graffiti or to keep drunks from pissing on the walls outside pubs. Police can and do request footage when investigating crimes, but if a camera owner's retention policy means the footage has been deleted, that's the end of the discussion. And such footage is useful if some arsehole has just jammed a broken beer glass into someone else's face.
The worse forms of authoritarian overreach are the increasingly pervasive number-plate recognition cameras that track the movements of every vehicle, and the inane attempts to regulate the internet and to ban peivate use of encryption.
As for "quiet, polite fascism," I've lived for extended periods in the US and the UK, and so far, despite the seemingly draconian laws, I've always found there to be more personal freedom in the UK. The police don't kill people very often, people tend to ignore the laws and the government can't be bothered to enforce the most intrusive of them, and there's far less social pressure towards brainless conformity and mindless obedience than there is in the States.
When the Snowden Revelations came out, it turned out the UK did as much or maybe even more civil society surveillance as the US, and unlike the US it doesn't even have constitutional limitations on surveillance of people on their own soil (in fact the UK doesn't even have a written Constitution).
In the US they actually walked back on some of the surveillance (because of said constitutional protections), in the UK they just passed a law that retroactively made the whole thing legal, got the editor of the newspaper who brought out the Snowden Revelations kicked, fired a bunch of D-Notices around (the UK's Press Censorship mechanism) out and nobody ever talked about it again.
As soon as the technology was good enough for that the UK created a Digital Stasi and it's only gotten worse since.
and unlike the US it doesn’t even have constitutional limitations on surveillance of people on their own soil
- I'd argue the US doesn't anymore either, or if it does, it's only on paper. Shit, rights in general in the US are to the degree where they only exist on paper anymore, and I can think of some fascists that would get rid of the Constitution altogether and implement absolute, unbreakable rule if they could... ~~Trump.......~~
I don't know if it's the root reason, but one gets scoffed at harshly by the average Tom, Dick, and Harry when suggesting that a Monarchy is an archaic and, frankly, insulting form of governance in spite of protestations that the role of the sovereign is purely ceremonial.
Simply put, they (mostly) seem to prefer political masochism, and are ruled by sadists. Sadly, in 2025, aren't we all?
Tony Blair thought that the Labour Party would win if it were more like the US Democratic Party. That began an electorally successful period of unprincipled triangulation and petty authoritarianism. Eventually that momentum fizzled out due to the gloomy paranoid leadership of Gordon Brown, corruption of people like Peter Mandelson, and the loathsome hypocrisy of Blair's lies in support of GW Bush's second Gulf War.
Then the Conservatives got in for 14 years and fucked everything up even worse. Now the Blairite authoritarian-centrist faction is again running Labour, and so far has shown none of the political cunning that kept Blair on top. And the media fawns over the smarmy mini-Trump Nigel Farage despite his party having no policies.
sometimes the french are right. the brits are indeed cunts.
so seriously, this i brilliantly evil. this is the way that will allow some police state level of oversight for both social media, chats, and even vpn data will be tied to your personal file. this is so dark in every possible way.
any site can be labelled porn or harmful at this point. even wikipedia. how dare the young browse the open truth of the internet? and this is already the second phase, mind police.
Only commercial VPNs? So HTTP proxying, Tor, SSH tunneling, SOCKS tunneling, running your own VPN node, etc are all allowed? There's plenty of VPS hosting companies that don't need ID or proof of age to sign up. Even if the UK requires this, you can just sign up for a server outside the UK.
There's also weird approaches that work but not many systems catch, like tunneling stateless data (like HTTP responses) over DNS TXT lookups.
When I was in high school in the 2000s, kids figured out how to bypass the internet filtering at school. Kids these days have way more resources available to them, making it even easier to do.
I literally have lightsail (not the equivalent) as well because it doesn't have issues connecting to SK, but China throttles those addresses nevertheless
Why, does AWS use a different IP address pool than lightsail?
Seeing this from the US scares me. I already have an elaborate system for tunneling my traffic out of the country without it appearing I’m doing so from my end devices.
But seeing this happening in the UK and knowing there’s a chance of it happening here, I really feel the need to get into China-style circumvention with shadowsocks and what have you, and I need to figure this out sooner rather than later.
The Tor Project | Privacy & Freedom Online
Defend yourself against tracking and surveillance. Circumvent censorship.www.torproject.org
Until the go government starts blocking entry nodes, then there will be a whole new country relying on the snowflake protocol.
Also, this doesn't affect only people under 18, any sane adult should never send a copy of their id to anything but the government, bank, insurance or employer.
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a whole new country relying on the snowflake protocol.
That would put them in the company of China, Russia, and Iran. Getting unrestricted Internet to people in those countries is why I am among those who run a snowflake node on a dedicated VPS (the link also has a simple browser addon -- it's easy to support the network, everyone should)
Yes, these moves suck for UK youth. But, anti-censorship tools do exist, and volunteers like me want people who could benefit from them, to know about & use them.
any sane adult should never send a copy of their id to anything but the government, bank, insurance or employer.
100% agree, take my upvote
In general real-time games are not great for Tor, because it introduces lots of network latency -- which makes you safer
For most applications, the easiest way to Torify is via using SOCKS from the Tor Browser Bundle, which would let you simply pick Snowflake when Tor Browser starts up. I asked Perplexity for directions on running Minecraft over Tor, here ya go
How do traffic correlation attacks against Tor users work?
I was reading about how Tor works. There is says that if the attacker is able to see both ends of the communication channel then Tor fails (and other anonymous networks too). How and why does thisInformation Security Stack Exchange
Hiding in plain sight: Introducing WebTunnel | Tor Project
We're celebrating the World Day Against Cyber Censorship by officially announcing WebTunnel, a new type of Tor bridge designed to assist users in heavily censored regions to connect to the Tor network.blog.torproject.org
- YouTube
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.www.youtube.com
They'll just block that too. Can't have a full blown dictatorship without taking away any freedom people have. Better not have a negative opinion about it either.
Holy Fuck 1984 was a warning, not a fucking manual on how to do things.
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Gee I totally didn't see this coming and made a comment about it earlier. Oh wait I totally did.
The peoples republic of United Kingdom.
A true People's Republic would have less surveillance noncence than this.
The UK is a literal 1984 in the works.
Doubling down on the batshit. Everyone knew VPNs were going to be the low effort workaround to this authoritarian batshittery.
I get what the (well meaning, I think) people lobbying for this are trying to achieve, but everything from the lobbying to legislation to enforcement seems to be happening in the worst way imaginable. Almost like it's an intentional "You want to see how badly can we do this? Hold my drink! YOLO!!"
For me, the tell was UK PLC leaving it up to the sites themselves to decide who/how the verification would be done. Classic bad management "I don't understand the slightest thing about any of this, but HOW HARD COULD IT BE?!" response. It's like the "series of tubes" stupidity all over again.
I feel you, protests in my country are not as effective as french or spanish protests, and usually devolve into large picnics instead.
Because you can't protest in an empty stomach. On the other hand, now we're too full to protest. Let's go home, Benfica is playing today.
Hooliganism is members of the Working Class fighting other members of the Working Class or Foreigners due to nothing more than tribalism and enjoying violence.
It has zero to do with pushing back on those with power over them or standing up for one's principles.
Hooliganism is actually a perfect example of the one of the ways the elites in the UK control the "lower" classes by having them discharge their anger at each other instead of going against the powerful.
Like Idiocracy has been a manual for the US, V for Vendetta is a manual for the UK.
For fuck sake people, these are movies of worlds we DON'T want to live in.
How about I get us started? To get the groove going;
AHHH! Look at my Bank Account! I have money left after paying rent! OHHH THE HUMANITY! 😨
Drugs are cheaper than groceries, also delivered within 15 minutes while groceries take 1 to 2 days. Guess what I'll be consuming tonight instead of dinner!
1 grocery bag with food for 2 day: 75 euros.
Or:
5 grams of ketamine: 25 euros.
5 xtc pills: 10 euros.
3 grams amphetamine: 15 euros.
I just saved 25 euros expenses, with enough for 5 days! Yay!
Just get a Fent-a.
The only soft drink with the extra kick of terrible addiction!
You mean Star Trek? But where are the suffering people?
On the planets in the Cardassian/Federation neutral zone....
Well both books were written to describe what british authoritarianism would look like.
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler
How long before we have a leak of the PM masturbating to state violence? Ugh V for Vandetta was so sexual in such an intentionally uncomfortable way
:::
I didn't watch the movie, but I can't imagine an American movie getting away with what the comic did. Yeah, one of the major themes of the comic is the fucked up sexuality displayed by the fascists and the leader gets off on the concentration camps.
Really good comic, but it's definitely a lot. Moore did a really good job of depicting the fascists as pathetic but dangerous. Though fair warning, if Moore could think of a slur a brit might possibly use it's in that comic.
UK has a massive federal budget problem...
The UK isn't a Federal Country. It's a Unitary state with Devolution. I know it is basically a Federal state in Practice (Holyrood, Cardiff Bay and Stormont all have varying amounts of autonomy) but the distinction is significant.
and they still keep increasing expenditure on surveillance.
This is the fucked up bit though: The OSA doesn't put the burden of Age gates on the State. They put it on The Service Provider (Websites and services). This is why so many non-porn forums, lemmy instances, and mastodon instances have either had to shut down or geoblock the UK, all the responsibility is on them to institute this lest they get sued out the arse. They can't afford to get YOTI or whatever, or don't have the manpower or money to institute their own system, so they shut down.
It's also why overblocking is a thing: because the OSA's official defination of what should be blocked is so vague so the two people who decide what get's blocked are the Service Provider and the Government effectively in that order. This is why Reddit is blocking things that should not be agegated (like support groups), because the law is so fucking vague, and why sites like Twitter are blocking tweets that don't need to be blocked under the "news" exception (yes, there is an exception for the news).
All of this, by the way, is because an investment trust and thinktank (yes, a lovely little conflict of interest) called Carnegie United Kingdom Trust pretty much wrote the OSA for the government. As an investment trust, they invest money in things, but being private, they don't need to tell Joe Public what they invest in, nor to the Investees need to tell us. So basically, they invested in YOTI or some others like it, and are making money from it because so many sites are forced to have it to work in the UK.
And all the other major tech players (Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft) are developing "Digital ID" systems as a "solution" which will not only make it easier to track people for them and the government, but also for advertisers, so they aren't complaining either.
TL;DR, The UK basically put all the pressure on the Websites so their friends can make loads of money.
All of this, by the way, is because an investment trust and thinktank (yes, a lovely little conflict of interest) called Carnegie United Kingdom Trust pretty much wrote the OSA for the government. As an investment trust, they invest money in things, but being private, they don’t need to tell Joe Public what they invest in, nor to the Investees need to tell us. So basically, they invested in YOTI or some others like it, and are making money from it because so many sites are forced to have it to work in the UK.
Can you link more information about this conflict of interest? I can't find anything about it.
- YouTube
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.www.youtube.com
I got around to watching this video... without having seen this guy before (and therefore having no reason to take what he says at face value), and with the "source" in his description being almost unrelated to the video content, all that's left is that "Yoti is funded by trusts, Carnegie is a trust mentioned on Yoti's website."
That is conspiracy-theory level. The author doesn't even go so far as to draw actual conclusions; he's saying "we need to follow the money" which is reasonable, but you are saying "Carnegie invested in an age verifier and that's why they wrote the law." That's going well beyond the facts. You wouldn't stand for it when some moron tries to cast doubt on climate science and you shouldn't stand for it now just because it tickles your biases.
Some of that money probably went to companies doing ID verification
Quite possibly. But almost certainly a lot of Carnegie's money is going to companies who provide online services who now have much higher costs from doing age verification, content blocking and users fleeing, simply because there are a lot of companies in that position.
Just a fun fact about “think tanks”, “institutes”, “foundations” and most of those little groups is that when they appear in the news there’s a solid chance that they’re being propped up by corpo money. Every time they appear you need to go double check their bias and you’ll often find that it will be they themselves saying they’re “a conservative think tank” and, if not that, there will likely be a Wikipedia article and a bunch of other sources confirming it. I’m sure there are good ones, but it’s largely just oil companies and banks and big tech funding some corrupt as hell “academics” in order to buy some credibility.
I loved when I got into with one person over climate change and all they could do was send me articles that use oil-backed think tanks and which quoted a climate scientist who’s such a huge liar that whole webpages exist to organize and debunk all his paid-for bullshit.
It very much is.
Doesn't matter who or how its recovered. Its still a state mandated cost, aka indirect tax.
Every single piece of legislation costs the population. They all add a million cuts to the costs of living. In times of economic crisis these costs need to come down not up.
Edit: addressing the ad revenue stream. Again irrelevant. The ad revenue stream is reduced, some platforms are talking about charging UK users the outcome is the same. Maybe some pull out of the UK or force more ads into the freemium services costing time.
The requirement to file accounts is not a tax. Call things what they are, not whatever you've decided they're similar to in your mind. To do is either confusing or dishonest, depending on whether people ultimately see through what you're doing or not.
Opposition to this on the basis of finances requires you to actually have some idea of the fiscal outcome. If the number of British children who end up bypassing the rules and viewing genuinely harmful material is small then it will result in lower costs from children traumatised, mentally ill or killing themselves.
I oppose the act because of incalculable costs to privacy, not because it might mean Facebook has to display 10 more ads to someone to maintain their profit margins.
Call things what they are, not a tax.
You should practice it.
Levy is a Tax.
opposition requires
Absolute bollocks. Doesn't require anything. It only requires personal opinion. Parliament runs on it.
Of course the privacy impact is huge. privacy just does not matter to the average working voting person trying to put groceries on the table.
MPs wont change the stance here because people want to be protected by anonymity. Frankly they won't change stance at all. Its a certainty at this point.
But it will increase the cost of business which will be passed on and definitely exploited.
"Wont somebody think of the children"
Plenty of children starving in the UK because Government services cant raise revenue to maintain existing levels of public services.
I look to the UK and see the future of western economies. Boned badly, society highly controlled with a large overall tax burden, years of immigration to keep the budget balaced on paper increasing the impact all to delay the fallout. And yes while this will most likely not register a blip to the CPI, its still yet another cut in the wrong direction.
Absolute bollocks. Doesn’t require anything. It only requires personal opinion. Parliament runs on it.
If your opposition is just based on vibes than it can be ignored based on nothing more than that.
You should practice it.Levy is a Tax.
Oh, you are talking about an actual fee in the legislation, not the cost of contracting with a company that verifies ages.
The cost though is £70 million. Since you raise the prospect of child poverty, the one policy the government needs to reverse to improve child poverty is the two-child benefit cap, which would cost £2.1bn, so this policy costs 3% of a substantive policy on child poverty.
A high estimate for how many deaths could be prevented by lifting the cap is about 300 per year, that I have seen (it's not really about the cap itself but is about modelling what would happen if Labour were able to reduce child poverty at the same rate it was in 1997-2010, which would presumably include eliminating the cap). 3% of 300 is 9 deaths. While I don't support the OSA, I think it is completely plausible that a policy which reduces the amount children are looking at extreme violence and advocation of eating disorders and suicide would prevent in the region of 9 deaths per year. About 150 children die each year by suicide (according to statistics, which will undercount the problem because parents as a rule don't want their child's death to be recorded as suicide). And saving 9 lives is to bring this policy in line, cost-wise, with an estimate that relates to a whole programme of government, which will in reality cost far more than £2.1bn.
Cost is not the right lens through which to examine the OSA, no matter what your personal opinion tells you.
your opposition is just based on vibes
Welcome to politics. Have you never seen parliament debate?
bloomberg.com/news/articles/20…
theguardian.com/society/2025/j…
Is history at this point
‘Stress crisis’ in UK as 5m struggle with financial, health and housing insecurity
Exclusive: Levels of ‘multi-stress’ at highest since 2008 crash, study says, with people feeling profoundly powerlessPatrick Butler (The Guardian)
Welcome to politics. Have you never seen parliament debate?
Yes. The convincing speeches are those with facts behind them.
You are wrong. The vibes tell me... but so do the facts.
The Online Safety Act doesn't apply any new taxes on anyone. It forces service providers (IE: Private Companies) to institute age checks through either AI Face checks or ID either through an in house solution or buying services from a third party (YOTI or similar). It imposes a cost on a business where they have to either spend money setting up an age verification solution or acquire one from a private company. The government doesn't impose any new taxes on people on businesses with this bill, but instead makes companies who run services give money to other companies to comply with the law.
In short, the censorship isn't being done directly by the state, it's being done by private companies under pain of massive fines by the state. Other than suing websites or dealing with court challenges (which is done in house), all the actual legwork is being done by private companies, some of whom, like YOTI, are making handsome amounts of cash.
Read my post, you really didn't read it.
I'll spell it out.
State created the law. That creates a cost to be recovered. How that cost is recovered is irrelevant, it's s state mandated cost aka tax.
State created the law. That creates a cost to be recovered. How that cost is recovered is irrelevant, it’s s state mandated cost aka tax.
Just because it's a state mandated cost doesn't mean it's a tax. Tax implies the money goes to the government to pay for goods and services. It's actually worse than that: it's a levy.
A levy doesn't go to the government. A levy goes to whatever person provides the good or service. For example: if I tax alcohol based on alcohol content, the amount of money added to the tax goes to the government. If I place a levy based on alcohol content, the amount of money that is added goes to the person/company selling the booze. An example of a levy is the plastic bag levy, which was put in place to reduce plastic pollution. That money you spend on a bag doesn't go to the government, it goes to the people you got the bag from, and they can do whatever they want with it, keep it, give it to charity, use it to buy Heroin on the deep web, you name it!
What this law has effectively done has made service providers (not just companies, but whoever runs the site) a choice: They can either develop their own age verification system or pay a company (like YOTI) to do it for them. Most service providers do the latter because they do not have the resources to do the latter.
Does the money go to the government? No (except maybe under the table nudge nudge wink wink), it goes straight to the company. What the government has done is force entities to give a private company money.
It's a tax in the way, let's say, a hypothetical Right-Libertarian government might tax you, or even an American Homeowners Association might "tax" you: making you give a private company money.
Levy, lol.
Call it what it is: a tax.
A burden on the population. No amount of dirty politics changes the fact. Taxes do not all get directly paid to gavernment. Like sales taxes, service tips ect.
Edit wrote another post, more depth.
A burden on the population.
The population being the people who run self hosted forums with a certain amount of British users. If you are one of those people, yeah, I'm sorry, I hate it too, but the vast majority of the UK don't run forums with a large amount of British users. Fun fact, the End users (the people giving away their IDs) aren't actually paying shit to anyone bar their IDs.
Taxes do not all get directly paid to gavernment. Like sales taxes, service tips ect.
VAT (what you call "sales tax") does go to the Treasury. Like when you buy something, that 20% extra you paid goes off to the government via the Taxes the shop pays. That's how VAT works.
Services tips aren't really a thing in the UK, especially not mandatory ones because food service workers in the UK aren't exempt from the minimum wage.
Are you even from the UK? Are you even in the UK? Because if you were from here, or even if you spent any amount of time here, you would've known the following things:
- The United Kingdom doesn't have Federal Taxes because we're not a Federal country. Again, we're a Unitary Country with Devolution.
- We don't use the term "Sales Tax", we use the term VAT (Value Added Tax). That's not some special technical term, VAT is common parlance.
- Service tips are not compulsory nor expected in any way, shape or form because food service workers in the UK are paid minimum wage with no exceptions. Most places here don't even have the option to give a tip.
Considering these things, I think you're American. In that case, please, do us a favour, don't act like you're a fucking expert on this. I live in the UK, Scotland to be precise. Shit's bad, The OSA can get tae fuck, but having Yanks who watched videos made by other yanks who don't know shit about fuck on the ground lecture me about my own fucking country as if it's just "America with funny accents" not only doesn't help, it's just spreading bullshit.
End users.. ... aren't paying shit
Users dont pay for the services. Okaay.
Well done you know how sales tax works. Customers pay the business. Business pays the Government. My point.
Swing and a miss on all points.
FYI I used the common terms for your benefit, you sounded American.
Well done you know how sales tax works. Customers pay the business. Business pays the Government. My point.
...and where in this chain is YOTI et al paying the government?
Frankly, you sound like the most odious little turd I have ever met on Lemmy.
Oh my sweet summer child:
- Pretty much everything that's happened since 2014 (Brexit, the erosion of Scotland's autonomy, the nixing of the GRA, The Covid Response, Liz Truss) has pushed Scotland toward Independence. This isn't even that big a push for us.
- The investment firm/think tank who basically wrote this bill, Carnegie United Kingdom Trust, IS HEAD-QUARTERED IN FUCKIN' DUNFERMLINE.
I fucking hate the UK, so much.
The MPs and Peers only fucking learnt about VPNs when this bullshit bill was being passed. They're so fucking clueless about the whole thing. They don't understand what a VPN exactly is and what it does and the fact their own government (hopefully) uses them, as do Banks (for security), Companies, and indeed, how it works.
This will lead to more bullshit.
Wrote a email to my MP for this exact reason.
The OSA needs repealing. All it's doing is either teaching people to follow poor digital hygiene practices, or forcing people to follow more risky methods of bypassing the OSA controls.
Whole guise of child safety is laughable when they've made zero attempts to educate everyone (not just kids) on being safe online.
Yeah, I noticed Google had evaded the ban.
Would have thought they'd be all over the opportunity to gobble up even more data.
to more obscure and risky providers who don't care about the law instead
There's no need to go that far, there will still be plenty of well-known and trustworthy providers who care about the law but simply operate outside of UK jurisdiction.
In that case they have to geoblock UK to be out of UK jurisdiction. Which a lot of these providers are already doing.
And if they aren't doing it themselves, the UK will likely do it for them by forcing UK network providers to block them.
Let's extend our unpopular law to more places! Soon, you'll have to verify your age to see boobs in real life. Which will be pretty unfortunate for teens trying to get busy in the backseats of cars.
- YouTube
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.www.youtube.com
I wonder how they figure that's going to work out.
I couldn't imagine being this pants-shittingly stupid about how the internet works.
Don't forget to donate to Tor Project and/or a relay operator if you use it, even $1 covers like several TB of traffic.
We did the year of Linux. Let's make this the year of Tor.
If literally everyone used it at all costs, websites would be forced to support traffic from it and blacklisting relays would kill the whole internet
A VPS is one of the best tools on the internet. Make your own relay, with or without blackjack and/or hookers.
You use Tor to pop out in any other more enlightened country where you use bitcoin or some other crypto to purchase access to a good vpn and download the installer.
Then download TBs of porn through your shiny new vpn subscription rather than bogging down the onion network
privateinternetaccess.com/page…
(Not the most economical, but a good way to bootstrap into a VPN if more traditional payments are not available)
Private Internet Access Anonymous VPN
Purchase Private Internet Access' VPN service with a gift card and stay completely private. Choose a card on the list of approved retailers and don’t worry about your privacywww.privateinternetaccess.com
at the moment no one is going into that level of granularity. I do own some monero, if i feel the need in the future i may switch over to that completely or at least start purchasing bitcoin anonymously which is something else a VPN can help with.
Add to that the fact that if a place accepts crypto there's a good chance that they only accept one and that is BTC
They wouldn't be able to get this shit to fly against the other members of the EU, I don't think.
Those people are doing the Lord's work, forcing companies to give control over user data, to the users, making USB C a standard for all devices... I won't list everything, but shit. The rest of the world has benefited by proxy on so many things, because of the EU.
The UK is acting like a bunch of pearl clutching soccer moms.
In the UK we already have a law where isps block porn by default (blacklisting) the adult who took out the plan can contact the isp and ask them to opt out of these blocks. That's been a thing for about 10 years. You can own a Pay-as-you-go sim as a minor but you have to send government id to prove you are over 18 to get the adult content filtering turned off.
That's one of the things that made it clear to me that the new law is an authoritarian data mining operation and blatant power grab. Like... We already have these tools in place. If you don't want your kid accessing porn, don't opt out of the filters provided by your isp.
You could argue that putting the onus on the platform is more effective at "protecting kids" than having the isps maintain blacklists but there will always be small sites that don't comply and enterprising kids who find a way around any block. Just like the law requires you to be 18 to buy alcohol or tobacco here but there are always dodgy shops who sell tobacco to underage kids. There are older siblings and relatives willing to buy cigarettes and alcohol for underage teens.
This was never about protecting the children. That was the Trojan horse used to justify these laws to the technically uninformed.
Why is my internet blocking adult sites? - How web filters work
Find out more about how and why Sky Broadband, Virgin Media, BT and TalkTalk are blocking websites, how web filtering works and how to remove it.Matt Powell (Broadband Genie)
They take crypto, wash a few satoshis through lightning and you're as good as anonymous.
sure, xmr would be better, but 🤷🏻♂️
edit: well shuck my corn!
"We accept cash, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Monero, bank wire, credit card, PayPal, Swish, Eps transfer, Bancontact, iDEAL, and Przelewy24."
That's a niiiice tip.
Deleting my account and re-joining under TOR when my lapse comes around. Might as well hide my use entirely.
To the people of the UK:
What the hell is this authoritarian, pearl clutching shit? You're fucking shit up for everyone. Can you get your people to please fuck off?
Thanks, from some guy on the Internet.
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You can be damn sure the "people of the UK" have nothing to do with this, we didn't vote on it.
Should just take a leaf out of the French book and just start burning shit.
The French get shit done. I can certainly say that. They're a population that really won't stand for being shit on. It's why they made such good use of the guillotine, historically.
Taking a page from their book may not be a bad idea.... Or you could reference the alleged works of Saint Luigi from America. He also made a profound impact. At least for a while.
It's funny, because that's exactly what I did around the age of 13 to bypass my school's firewall. I had everything on a USB drive, including Ghostzilla and PuTTY so I could browse through an SSH SOCKS tunnel. Mind you, my home computer was the SSH server -- but these days it wouldn't be hard to get a VPS in a less restrictive country:
"Hey [parent], can I borrow your credit card to set up a server so my friends and I can play [game] together?"
It takes one kid in a group to set something like this up.
all of the sudden these goody two shoes politicians want to control porn for "the safety of the children"
what a bunch of tards
New sources of inaccuracy? A conceptual framework for studying AI hallucinations
New sources of inaccuracy? A conceptual framework for studying AI hallucinations | HKS Misinformation Review
In February 2025, Google’s AI Overview fooled itself and its users when it cited an April Fool’s satire about “microscopic bees powering computers” as factual in search results (Kidman, 2025).Magda Tarnawska (HKS Misinformation Review)
Firefox Has Moved to Firefox.com
- Hackernews.
:::
Get Firefox for desktop and mobile
Firefox is a free web browser backed by Mozilla, a non-profit dedicated to internet health and privacy.Firefox
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House Oversight and Government Reform Committee to investigate Wikipedia over allegations of organized bias
Comer and Mace Investigate Efforts to Manipulate Information on Wikipedia - United States House Committee on Oversight and Accountability
United States House Committee on Oversight and AccountabilityOversight Committee Republicans Verified account
Apple Revokes EU Distribution Rights for Torrent Client, Developer Left in the Dark * TorrentFreak
While alternative app stores operate independently and are required by EU law, Apple is still in a position to exert some control. This became apparent a few weeks ago, when iTorrent users suddenly ran into trouble when installing the app.
Thought this was an interesting story, since it's pretty analagous to the recent Android situation, with third party app stores being enabled to some extent, but the company retaining ultimate censorship power.
Apple Revokes EU Distribution Rights for Torrent Client, Developer Left in the Dark * TorrentFreak
Apple has inexplicably revoked the EU distribution rights for the iTorrent app, and left its developer in the dark without answers.Ernesto Van der Sar (TF Publishing)
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No. But we can sideload. Two apps for free, have to be authorized every 7 days. (It’s actually three, but the app that does this for you takes a slot, so that and two others.)
You can also get a developer license for $99/year that lets you do unlimited with a much longer authorization window.
I don’t do it. The 7 day thing really isn’t worth it and they aren’t any iOS apps to sideload I care about.
Delta is the coolest emulator due to cloud sync and it’s in the App Store.
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A relative from a different country gave me their old phone, a iPhone 11 Pro Max.
I can't use it as a phone to call, because it currently takes 3 times the phone's cost to register foreign originated phones to use permanently inside my country.
I don't have a mac, so I can't start coding native apps on it. At most I was able to test flutter web projects, which are basically websites. I have a goddamn phone and the most customizable thing I can make on it is testing my web app.
If I could try developing native apps on it for free, straight out of my machine I would. But it's honestly so expensive that it drives me away any time I get slighty interested on the idea, it's much easier on Android.
, because it currently takes 3 times the phone’s cost to register foreign originated phones to use permanently inside my country.
That sounds like the stupidest tech thing I've heard this week. Where is this? In my country and at least in every nearby country that I'm aware of, there's a flat cost to registering a phone to operate and while it is a cost, it's not too much (nowhere near the full cost of a pjone in the market, defo) and the only really annoying part of the process is that it somehow takes four whole weeks.
Turkey. The phone I mentioned is easily findable on the 2nd hand market for around 12-15k TL (non registered that is, registereds are around 20k TL), registering a new abroad phone currently costs 45k TL. It is a flat cost, but it still is three times the cost of the phone.
Retarded government economy management at its peak. Speaking of, did you know that on a brand new car purchase in Turkey, 3/4th of your purchase will be the sales tax? One car for you, three cars for the government.
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You know what I find deplorable? Spyware as a feature. Like Android.
Also, Google bypasses ad blockers. Say you have an iPhone, or an unrooted Android phone. You're blocking ads? You're using DNS to do it. The Google app, and Google apps in general, ignore the system DNS settings and use Google's own DNS. There are some good reasons they do it, but the chief upshot for Google is, they get to inject ads into a device whose owner explicitly tries to block them. Since ads can also carry malware/ransomware, Google is intentionally opening a security hole in a device you may not be able to 100% secure, but could be fairly secure. Relatively secure. For a smartphone.
I actually got ransomware on a popular Android blog through an ad they served. I'd just wiped my phone — this was the last Android phone I'd owned. So I mean, I'd wiped the internal ROM. Repartitioned it, installed a recovery (TWRP, naturally), and then flashed a custom OS. Back then, you couldn't get stock Android on a national carrier in the US. So, I was flashing a European CFW customised with the CDMA radios that the US was using at the time (we're all GSM now like the rest of the world, I think the last CDMA towers, which were 3G, have been shut down but I'm not sure — Sprint and US Cellular were CDMA and they're both part of T-Mobile, and Verizon was the big one and they're all on the GSM tech now). Anyway, I hadn't installed AdAway yet, I was just reading tech blogs, when my screen went red, said illegal content was detected on my device, pay "the FBI" so many thousand dollars in Bitcoin to unlock my device. I laughed, wiped the internal ROM again and started over... installing AdAway before going out to the open web. Lesson learned. But that's the kind of thing Google intentionally opens its users up to by tunneling around the ad blocker. (I don't name the tech blog because I contacted them and they were very helpful in identifying the source of the ransomware attacks and getting that advertiser de-listed. So there is no reason to "name and shame." But it can happen to anyone, and without even going to "shady" sites.)
Oh, I hate a lot about Android/Google too. One particular pet peeve of mine is that WebAPKs are still exclusive to Chrome (and, on Samsung devices only, Samsung Internet) despite the FAQ promising that "We are working on it. We are committed to making this available to all browsers on Android and we will have more details soon." (Last updated 2017-05-21)
There is no good option in smartphones, you have to choose the lesser evil. For me that's Android. I can appreciate that for some people it would be iOS. What drives me up a wall is that people defend these awful practices.
WebAPKs on Android
When the user adds your Progressive Web App to their home screen on Android, Chrome automatically generates an APK for you, which we sometimes call a WebAPK.web.dev
Yes. If you're a free developer (you have to register as a developer to even do this), you have to re-authorise the app every 7 days or it gets "revoked" which means the app will not launch.
You also have to install a certificate that certifies the app(s) to you. This is generally safe, but you should be careful with trust certificates. You're basically taking full responsibility for the code that's being executed on your device. If you haven't audited the source code (or if someone you trust hasn't), it might be a risk.
If you used a signing service, someone has bought a bunch of paid developer licenses and they've given you the certificate for one of them. Once Apple discovers this, they'll revoke that developer license which revokes your apps. The signing service will then issue you a new certificate. Revokes aren't super common, or so they say (I've never used a signing service).
They recently (two days ago) did a massive revoke on the paid certificates. All known sellers got hit with the massive revoke and it is at the moment a bit of a mess.
Rumor goes that Apple also hit actual developers with the revoke hit. So curious how that goes.
it's not an alternative if they still have final say.
it's also not your property if the company can dictate what you run on it either. Stop giving these scum your money.
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StarLite 12.5-inch
Its fanless design ensures your StarLite will never make more than a whisper - unless you want it to. The Mk V supports coreboot open source firmware which you can effortlessly configure to your preferences via our coreboot configurator.Star Labs®
If it's Sailfish OS (Xperias or Jollaphones, updates are paid), apart from apps (hit or miss if it's popular enough, pure miss if it isn't), everything works fine (I guess, I haven't tried it).
If it's anything else, it's still murky.
It isn't. I don't particularly care for phones, and nobody mentioned phones specifically.
Edit: Though there are plenty of linux phones or linux for android phones.
Sadly, there are very few Linux tablets, so we thought we'd give an option.
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Former Silicon Valley CEO( IRL Social Media App) Charged with Fraud and Obstruction of Justice
According to court documents, Abraham Shafi, 38, of Pepeekeo, Hawaii, allegedly committed fraud in connection with Get Together’s 2021 “Series C” funding round, which raised $170 million at a valuation of over $1 billion. In seeking investment, Shafi told potential investors that IRL was spending only $50,000 a month in paid advertising and that user signups “were not incentivized or paid.” However, Shafi had spent millions of dollars on paid advertising in the form of incentive advertising, a form of advertising in which users are provided a reward in a third-party app if they download IRL. In the lead up to Series C, Shafi asked his vendor for a “big burst” of ads for “a few days” to drive more installs of the IRL app. During the Series C process, investors specifically asked about paid advertising, and Shafi falsely responded that “[u]nlike other apps that spend aggressively to acquire new users, we spend very little.” Shafi concealed IRL’s spending on incentive ads by having them invoiced to a third-party firm, ensuring that the nature and amount of the expense did not appear on IRL’s ledger.Shafi continued to conceal the amount that IRL was spending in incentive ads after the Series C closed, instructing an IRL employee to create false invoices that listed the ad spending as being related to infrastructure, or “infra costs,” and falsely telling his investors that the money spent on incentive ads had instead been used for other forms of advertising. When the SEC opened an investigation into IRL, Shafi restored his cell phone to a previously saved backup, resulting in the deletion of records, and instructed other IRL employees to lie about his involvement in the scheme.
Shafi is charged with wire fraud, securities fraud, and obstruction. If convicted, he faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison on each count. A federal judge will determine any sentence after considering the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.
Former Silicon Valley CEO Charged with Fraud and Obstruction of Justice
A federal grand jury in the Northern District of California returned an indictment charging a Hawaii man with wire fraud, securities fraud, and obstruction in connection with a scheme to defraud investors of $170 million as the CEO and Founder of the…www.justice.gov
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Trump’s administration again appeals to the Supreme Court over his foreign aid funding freeze
Trump’s administration again appeals to the Supreme Court over his foreign aid funding freeze
Trump has portrayed the foreign aid as wasteful spending that does not align with his foreign policy goals.The Associated Press (Federal News Network)
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Itch.io blocks adult game creator profiles for UK users while keeping some games accessible: British gamers can play the spicy games but can't peek at who makes them.
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36433609
- Itch.io now blocks UK users from viewing NSFW game creator profiles, though some individual adult games remain accessible after age verification.
- The restrictions started in August and align with the UK's Online Safety Act requiring stricter age checks for adult content.
- Developers lose UK discoverability while players can't browse creator catalogs, forcing them to rely on direct links shared elsewhere.
Itch.io blocks adult game creator profiles for UK users while keeping some games accessible: British gamers can play the spicy games but can't peek at who makes them.
- Itch.io now blocks UK users from viewing NSFW game creator profiles, though some individual adult games remain accessible after age verification.
- The restrictions started in August and align with the UK's Online Safety Act requiring stricter age checks for adult content.
- Developers lose UK discoverability while players can't browse creator catalogs, forcing them to rely on direct links shared elsewhere.
Itch.io blocks adult game creator profiles for UK users while keeping some games accessible
Itch.io blocks UK access to adult creator profiles while some game pages remain available after age checks. The change aligns with the Online Safety Act.Riley Fox (Spilled)
adhocfungus likes this.
Itch.io blocks adult game creator profiles for UK users while keeping some games accessible: British gamers can play the spicy games but can't peek at who makes them.
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36433609
- Itch.io now blocks UK users from viewing NSFW game creator profiles, though some individual adult games remain accessible after age verification.
- The restrictions started in August and align with the UK's Online Safety Act requiring stricter age checks for adult content.
- Developers lose UK discoverability while players can't browse creator catalogs, forcing them to rely on direct links shared elsewhere.
Itch.io blocks adult game creator profiles for UK users while keeping some games accessible: British gamers can play the spicy games but can't peek at who makes them.
- Itch.io now blocks UK users from viewing NSFW game creator profiles, though some individual adult games remain accessible after age verification.
- The restrictions started in August and align with the UK's Online Safety Act requiring stricter age checks for adult content.
- Developers lose UK discoverability while players can't browse creator catalogs, forcing them to rely on direct links shared elsewhere.
Itch.io blocks adult game creator profiles for UK users while keeping some games accessible
Itch.io blocks UK access to adult creator profiles while some game pages remain available after age checks. The change aligns with the Online Safety Act.Riley Fox (Spilled)
Raoul Duke likes this.
Itch.io blocks adult game creator profiles for UK users while keeping some games accessible: British gamers can play the spicy games but can't peek at who makes them.
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36433609
- Itch.io now blocks UK users from viewing NSFW game creator profiles, though some individual adult games remain accessible after age verification.
- The restrictions started in August and align with the UK's Online Safety Act requiring stricter age checks for adult content.
- Developers lose UK discoverability while players can't browse creator catalogs, forcing them to rely on direct links shared elsewhere.
Itch.io blocks adult game creator profiles for UK users while keeping some games accessible: British gamers can play the spicy games but can't peek at who makes them.
- Itch.io now blocks UK users from viewing NSFW game creator profiles, though some individual adult games remain accessible after age verification.
- The restrictions started in August and align with the UK's Online Safety Act requiring stricter age checks for adult content.
- Developers lose UK discoverability while players can't browse creator catalogs, forcing them to rely on direct links shared elsewhere.
Itch.io blocks adult game creator profiles for UK users while keeping some games accessible
Itch.io blocks UK access to adult creator profiles while some game pages remain available after age checks. The change aligns with the Online Safety Act.Riley Fox (Spilled)
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Raoul Duke e essell like this.
Itch.io blocks adult game creator profiles for UK users while keeping some games accessible: British gamers can play the spicy games but can't peek at who makes them.
cross-posted from: programming.dev/post/36433609
- Itch.io now blocks UK users from viewing NSFW game creator profiles, though some individual adult games remain accessible after age verification.
- The restrictions started in August and align with the UK's Online Safety Act requiring stricter age checks for adult content.
- Developers lose UK discoverability while players can't browse creator catalogs, forcing them to rely on direct links shared elsewhere.
Itch.io blocks adult game creator profiles for UK users while keeping some games accessible: British gamers can play the spicy games but can't peek at who makes them.
- Itch.io now blocks UK users from viewing NSFW game creator profiles, though some individual adult games remain accessible after age verification.
- The restrictions started in August and align with the UK's Online Safety Act requiring stricter age checks for adult content.
- Developers lose UK discoverability while players can't browse creator catalogs, forcing them to rely on direct links shared elsewhere.
Itch.io blocks adult game creator profiles for UK users while keeping some games accessible
Itch.io blocks UK access to adult creator profiles while some game pages remain available after age checks. The change aligns with the Online Safety Act.Riley Fox (Spilled)
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adhocfungus, thisisbutaname e Raoul Duke like this.
A lot of legit websites saying they a bad certificate
SSL_ERROR_BAD_CERT_DOMAIN means incorrect SAN information, proxying, or DNS manipulation is occurring.
You could compare what you see in the browser and what you see via something like:$ openssl s_client -showcerts -connect cs.rin.ru:443
You could also check the DNS resolution and traceroute to see how you are getting there to confirm if DNS is being effected or you are being proxied:$ dig cs.rin.ru @127.0.0.1 A$ mtr cs.rin.ru
How Trump’s Anti-Environment Crusade Enriches Drug Traffickers
How Trump’s Anti-Environment Crusade Enriches Drug Traffickers - Inside Climate News
The president has pledged to combat transnational drug organizations. Yet these groups make vast sums from environmental crimes, and his administration has gutted personnel and programs that targeted them, a new report shows.Inside Climate News
Raoul Duke likes this.
Itch.io blocks adult game creator profiles for UK users while keeping some games accessible: British gamers can play the spicy games but can't peek at who makes them.
- Itch.io now blocks UK users from viewing NSFW game creator profiles, though some individual adult games remain accessible after age verification.
- The restrictions started in August and align with the UK's Online Safety Act requiring stricter age checks for adult content.
- Developers lose UK discoverability while players can't browse creator catalogs, forcing them to rely on direct links shared elsewhere.
Itch.io blocks adult game creator profiles for UK users while keeping some games accessible
Itch.io blocks UK access to adult creator profiles while some game pages remain available after age checks. The change aligns with the Online Safety Act.Riley Fox (Spilled)
I Am An AI Hater. This is considered rude, but I do not care, because I am a hater.
- Hackernews
:::
I Am An AI Hater
I am an AI hater. This is considered rude, but I do not care, because I am a hater.moser’s frame shop
The Top 100 [Gen AI] Consumer Apps: Google and Grok are catching up to ChatGPT
The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps – 5th Edition
Which AI apps are people actively using? What’s actually making money, beyond being popular? We analyzed the data.Olivia Moore (Andreessen Horowitz)
OpenAI and Anthropic publish findings from joint safety tests of each other's models, aimed at surfacing blind spots in their internal evaluations
In early summer 2025, Anthropic and OpenAI agreed to evaluate each other's public models using in-house misalignment-related evaluations. We are now releasing our findings in parallel. The evaluations we chose to run focused on propensities related to sycophancy, whistleblowing, self-preservation, and supporting human misuse, as well as capabilities related to undermining AI safety evaluations and oversight. In our simulated testing settings, with some model-external safeguards disabled, we found OpenAI's o3 and o4-mini reasoning models to be aligned as well or better than our own models overall. However, in the same settings, we saw some examples of concerning behavior in their GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 general-purpose models, especially around misuse. Furthermore, with the exception of o3, all the models we studied, from both developers, struggled to some degree with sycophancy. During the testing period, GPT-5 had not yet been made available.
Passenger Assaulted in Viral TikTok Video Sues Southwest Airlines, Blames Seating Plan
Southwest is transitioning to assigned seats in January 2026.
Case file: s3.documentcloud.org/documents…
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Israel launches fresh airstrikes in Damascus countryside in Syria
Israeli warplanes struck several sites near the town of Al-Kiswah in the Damascus countryside in southern Syria on Wednesday evening, local media said, Anadolu reports.
Archived version: archive.is/newest/middleeastmo…
Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.
Mining the Deep Sea Could Threaten a Source of Ocean Oxygen
Deep-Sea Nodules May Produce Oxygen—Raising Concerns over Ocean Mining
Deep-sea rocks packed with valuable metals may also be making oxygen in the deep, dark ocean—raising new questions about the cost of mining them.Rachel Feltman (Scientific American)
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