a digital wallet with ZKP could resolve ‘are you old enough?’ without the query ever needing to leave your device.

without a digital wallet, it could be done with fully homomorphic encryption.

both of these would be innovations which i feel require guided development. innovation counter to the goal of the legislation, which is surveillance. innovation driven by the self-proclaimed purpose of ‘protecting children’; innovation driven by the impetus to make it harder for people to masturbate.

since the general attitude right now has been ‘require agegates and just leave it up to The Market™’, then the solution in practise will probably be a private third party that brokers this information, probably with a natural monopoly, that will charge exorbitantly for their API, have Google Analytics running on every page, leaks like a sieve, leaves logs everywhere, and will probably get caught selling data, which will incur a one-time fee equal to 80% the size of the company’s rainy day fund, and maybe the CEO will be asked to step down, shielding the rest of the C-suite from consequences (and allowing them to just do it again). they’ll work closely with law enforcement, they’ll be breached in the first year, and probably have a huge leak 4 years later.

in that time, due to real changes in the law or jurisprudence, or companies just ‘playing it safe’, age verification will come to encompass queer identity, sexual education and health, war coverage, counterculture and even history. more online regulation just means more barriers to entry which means a larger monopoly for multinational corporations.

i think there are better uses for this technology than controlling pornography.

the provider knows who’s asking because of the IP address and API key of the requester. if it uses a form with a redirect, they even know your IP and what page you were on, tied to your legal identity. if the provider makes any API requests to a government registry, now that knows the when, the how, and (categorically) the what. short of a statement of ‘no logs’ and an audit to confirm as such, there is definitely logs. hackers love this information. data brokers love this information.

the problem is not the service knowing. it’s anyone knowing. the provider deänonymised you the moment you gave your id. the precise implementation details are important here.

the problem is that people are being verifiably linked to their ‘adult’ preferences. this is data that is being generated, in bad faith, and handled by multiple parties. your legal identity should not need to be tied to this information. this information can be used against you both now and in the future.

we’ve already seen in the US where there is a push for information about gender and basic sexual education being labelled as ‘adult’. when i was in school, information about countries like Cuba, Afghanistan or China was considered ‘too mature’ (or marked as ‘terrorism-related’ by the school firewall) for children; i could see this thus extending to require age verification before you can access ‘subversive’ information, on the basis of ‘protecting children’ from ‘political extremism’.

… because it was flagged by Lightspeed? or is Discord doing something of their own now too?

But at the same time, you still post to [email protected]

Dbzer0 was selected as the main non-ml community 7 months ago in this thread: https://lazysoci.al/post/21253059

‘some people made a collective decision (that didn’t involve you) that everyone should move to my preferred forum, and here you are!’

seems adversarial to [dbzer0] values

this is an anarchist/GLOSS/pirate instance; freedom of information is tied closely with anarchism and the hacker ethic.

for me: it’s less about whether this type of information should exist (it shouldn’t) and more that i reject privileged information conceptually. i don’t think this type of information should just be available to admins and people with the technical resources and expertise.

i would prefer (in my uneducated opinion) that this information only be visible to the user (on their own posts), community moderators (in their own communities) and admins (on the voter’s home instance), and anonymised elsewhere (for example, only showing a source instance).

but since that is not how it works, then i would rather have access to the same level of information that anyone else has over me. i also feel more in control of my own data when i have access to my own voting history. thus, i think that’s why there’s a sentiment that there is a different approach to this problem, and it won’t end with just blocking one tool.

i wouldn’t find out till after her death that my grandmother had a PhD in computer science. she became a housewife and pretended her whole life to be tech illiterate because she was ashamed of being a technical woman, apparently because of the hatred she got during her studies.

they have, but they assume:

• ‘for-profit’ means ‘good’ because ‘they have a lot of money’.
• ‘proprietary’ means ‘good’ because ‘the code/infrastructure is obfuscated’.
• ‘widely used’ means ‘good’ because ‘more people with the skills to manage it’ and ‘it’s widely supported’.
• ‘open source’ means ‘bad’ because ‘anyone can analyse the code for exploits without reporting them’.
• ‘self-sufficiency’ means ‘bad’ because ‘that’s anticompetitive’.

they hear the phrases ‘supply chain attacks’ and ‘24/7 premium support’ and they’re sold. the more responsibility they can foist onto third-parties for when something goes wrong, the less liability they have.

in a lot of ‘developed’ countries: government at all levels are structurally forbidden from managing their own infrastructure. to ‘maintain the free market’ and avoid ‘anticompetition’ lawsuits, they procure development contracts via bids. Microsoft has the money and dominance to not only lobby governments to adopt their software, but can also outbid most other companies, and pays a lot of money to ensure there’s an army of Microsoft Certified™ office workers and technicians everywhere.

every time the government tries to do something by itself, or to exclude one company or another from the bidding process, the industry lobbies crawl out to screech about ‘competition’ and ‘free market principles’.

‘‘effective’ ‘altruism’’

when i was in school we were taught to use the CIA World Factbook as a single primary source for our social science papers.

when the fantasy racism goes too far and you start elfjacketing your roommates

my feed’s pretty barren after blocking most libshit (for the sake of my mental health), so i’d welcome more (multilingual) leftist posts. i’ve seen insightful Lemmygraders under Hexbear posts but can’t see them from dbzer0.

all the people in my life are libbrained. they agree with almost everything i believe in but then instantly forget every conversation we ever have and go on believing and acting the same way they always have. their entire concept of geopolitics is flag emoji bashing into each other and making SWOOOSH and CRASH sounds. they treat it like a team sport. casualties are just numbers on a scoreboard. it’s all just a game to them.

there are a few of them who are aware of how politically uneducated they are, and they’ll come to me with questions, which they insultingly open with some variation of ‘so i get the impression you’re not the biggest fan of capitalism’ (DO YOU NOT REMEMBER A SINGLE FUCKING CONVERSATION WE’VE EVER HAD???). and i’ll answer directly and briefly, with links to more information. they never look anything up on their own. and then they come back a month later about how ‘someone who used to be my friend who went to Harvard said you’re wrong. thoughts?’ and i tell them to kick rocks and go back to rotting in their bingbingwahoo and superhero slop.

my local orgs are trapped in a sectarian stalemate; too busy fighting with each other. the paths toward effective action are all criminalised, so organising has been limited. i’m mostly stuck doing small things here and there with radlibs. all ‘above board’ of course.

the job i’ve trained for / done my whole life has been outsourced. i’m blacklisted in my industry and need to re/upskill thanks to “AI”, with no support. (not that there’s any jobs available anyway; there isn’t.) i might get deported. my trump card is playing into my disability, which sacrifices my agency and belonging for being permanently isolated but almost never having to worry about being homeless again. i’ve been on the streets twice; i don’t think i can do it again at my age.

i’m just so fucking done with it all. idk i’m writing this mostly to scream into the void.

the little roads connecting german homonationalism → NATO → Palestine is certainly uuuhhh… something.

last year there was a NATO flag flanked by EU and pride flags with little hearts connecting them (LGBT ♥ NATO ♥ EU), as if being queer has anything to do with NATO, or as if the terrorist entity gives a shit about queer people.

you can use a combination of ‘Always Open Site in Container’ ‘Limit to Designated Sites’ and temporary containers for that.

this was fever-inducing to read. in a frighteningly familiar way, but i couldn’t remember what for.

then i realised: another n+1 article from a year ago about a techbro conference: An Age of Hyperabundance.

i was very lucky that my introduction to software engineering came from a mentor who cared intensely about their work. but i dropped out of the IT industry after i never met someone like that again.

i never even went to secondary, but across several jobs i was having to teach my colleagues (compsci degrees) basic computer literacy skills. the moment they had to leave their IDE, they were lost. they had not even a basic understanding of version control systems. zero curiosity. they frequently broke their git repos and couldn’t fix it. they didn’t give a single fuck about the theory of what they were doing for 72 hours a week; what they were voluntarily choosing to do for 72 hours a week on 30 hour contracts. they hardly even cared about the practise.

LLMs completely ruined these people. they started using it for everything: responding to Slack messages, writing emails, writing code, doing code review… and when it was found out at my last company that i was the only one stubbornly refusing to use LLMs for anything, i was put on a fucking PIP and told it was company policy to use ‘labour saving technology.’ despite the fact that my code had the fewest defects, ignoring how frequently i was misled into doing something i wasn’t even supposed to do because the fucking task requirements were ALSO WRITTEN WITH AN LLM [THAT MADE SHIT UP]. but it was my fault for ‘not checking first’ (???).

i will never touch a computer for money ever fucking again.

aside: reading this while listening to clipping. was an experience

i’m not a fan of the privacy report…

https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/reports/com.bashsoftware.boycott/latest/

i mean there’s basic input validation yeah, but the number of unique valid signatures isn’t known for all countries till after the collection period.

i didn’t have a strong opinion on the matter. just sharing my thoughts re: promoter463’s suggestion.

do we take the ideological route of dismissing him for reformist that he is

no, probably not. i think he’s already doing good work; he’s becoming walking agitprop. he ruptured the liberal obsession with (manufactured) polling data. he’s now even an official enemy of the state, so he’s got that going for him.

i don’t know what it means exactly to ‘endorse’ him (letalone in the context of this comm). share memes and articles about him? raise awareness? sure, why not? let’s watch what he does.