Unfortunately this law is unconstitutional as ever. This is nothing more than a scare tactic; as it should not survive a true challenge in the SCOTUS. If it does survive such a challenge; burn them all, congress and all.

No; it’s not inarguable.

I do feel that some minor limitations around social media should exist; such as hours of the day you may not be allowed to read or post; but they should be simple age-gates created to privately verify a person’s age via a simple SSO/OAuth style token. If you can’t authenticate against some privacy respecting identity proving entity you probably aren’t old enough and any account(s) you create would be limited.

Not all social media needs to be age-gated either; but social networks could be forced by law to avoid monetizing your account or habits at all if you don’t willingly identify. (and by doing so; also CONSENT TO THIS MONETIZATION) In short; if you are not verified they’re required to assume you are a child and handle your data as such…with utmost respect to your privacy.

All that being said; I’m going to be watching carefully.

I still think they have time to backpedal, make it right, and clarify. I don’t permit my installations to talk to their data collection services anyways; via network policies. I have no problem tightening those screws and forcefully disabling their telemetry in other ways as well.

If I have to migrate; well; I already have LibreWolf installed. I might try a few other forks next; to see which ones ‘just work’ with the web properly to protect my privacy while still allowing all websites to work properly as intended so long as I give that website appropriate permissions as I see fit.

I don’t believe that anyone misunderstood the wording.

The problem lies within the broad meaning of the chosen words. If you are angry, you have absolutely every right to be.

Regardless of Mozilla’s intent here they have made a rather large mistake in re-wording their Terms. Rather than engaging with a legal team in problematic regions; they took the lazy way out and used overbroad terms to cover their bottom.

Frequently when wording like this changes it causes companies to only be bound by weak verbal promises which oftentimes go out the door whenever an executive change takes place, or an executive feels threatened enough.

Do not be deceived; this is a downgrade of their promise. It is inevitable that the promises will be broken now that there is no fear of a lawsuit. There’s nothing left to bind them to their promises.

The Mozilla foundation wasn’t ever intended to remain “financially viable”; it was supposed to remain non-profit. They should be “rightsizing” and taking pay cuts instead of slipping a EULA roofie into their terms of use.

It is not only true; it is required by the WMF. Wikipedia and Wikimedia will go dark before it compromises those values.

Wikipedia can always be revived by it’s massive worldwide community; on Tor even. Trump taking down the WMF servers won’t help; the databases probably get backed up daily and would likely end up on torrents within moments of it being taken down.

As an editor with advanced rollback rights on Wikipedia; I can agree with the above statement.

It is Extremely Difficult; even with slighly escalated rollback rights such as mine; to push an agenda on Wikipedia.

WP:NPOV is a good read and the editing community and contribution culture on Wikipedia enforces it strongly.

EnWiki itself for certain has some very strong Page Protection policies that prevent just any editor from munging up the encyclopedia or changing history.

It’s safe to say that Wikimedia cannot be bent or broken easily by special interest groups…Vandalism and PoV pushing is quickly quelled by sysops on Wikipedia. There are more of us editors than Elon could ever possibly hope to take on.

Not even Elon Musk gets to ignore Wikimedia policies. That will never change. They are written in blood and sweat and cannot be manipulated. The entire foundation is set up in a way that it always, eventually, cracks down on corruption and greed. Not even a cabal of admins, bureaucrats and Wikimedia Stewards can help you.

This is unsurprising. A Chinese model will be filled with censorship.

Hearing this sort of law go into effect just makes me sadly want to ban anyone from the UK from my small communities.

I’d hate to be forced to do it; but I certainly would immediately start swinging the hammer with IP range bans and banning anyone who is clearly professing to be from the UK.

Unfortunately the kind of laws they’re trying to pass do nothing to fix whatever problems they have Online; and are basically meaningless political posturing. I feel sorry for people in the UK and strongly recommend they start using VPNs; as it’s the only way to ensure they won’t get snared up in the ensuing waves of bans when compliance with the OSA law that they let get passed is mandatory

The shoe is clearly on the other foot. It’s not so easy to manage when politicians are allowed to get so uninformed that they go out of their way to pass bad laws.

Seems like it’s time to start Geo-Blocking UK users. Ain’t nobody with an independent site got the time nor money to deal with the UK’s OSA laws.

Until this overbroad act is protested on the world stage; neither Brits themselves, nor their liberal leaders will prioritize repealing it. They’ll just shrug hopelessly and blame it on their Tories; much like Americans blame our own Republicans.

If you run a small community website and you have worries about this; make it felt. Countries that enact laws like this should be rebuffed; and their people excluded as much as is necessary to ensure full malicious compliance with those laws.

Why not both?

Fwy would simply fidget the spinner whichever way the spinner wanted to spin.

Spin the spinner both ways, one way once and another way later even.

@ #9; Whoa there. 100% is unreasonable. Still there’s room to start at a hard 90% at about 250 million and then incrementally scale until the tax is say, about 95-97% by about a billion.

Unfortunately you cannot tax anyone 100%; that would ultimately be unfair and demotivating and only motivate corruption to avoid the tax

Honestly I question the sanity of allowing a child to have an actual clearanced job and not brag about it to his friends. Mentally you’re pretty much a kid until you’re about 25 or so if you’re AMAB.

I’m concerned that higher clearances aren’t checking people for signs of stupid viewpoints before they’re cleared.

I mean, in non technical terms, I basically stated to cosplay as a pirate if you catch my drift. No need to not shun media in the meantime.

I don’t shun media; I practice moderation instead. I find it is better to be aware of my surroundings in all things so I can keep myself safe if needs be.

Media habits are already collected, and targeted. They just aren’t used by fascists yet.

I’m aware of this; but I’m also a pretty savvy Networking / IT person. It’s easy to foil a large portion of their tracking apparatus with DNS level blocking; and even easier to use a rPi or pfSense box to do so.

I clearly don’t share or agree with your fears that the fascists will use them anytime soon. It’s too likely that doing so will galvanize resistance against them swiftly.

You also can’t use uBlock on a smart tv.

I don’t own a “Smart” TV. No TV-like device ever gets networked around here either; and it’s going to be returned as “Defective” if it does refuse to work without a network connection. I watch via a PC with a well configured instance of uBlock Origin in Firefox. (+ several other privacy add-ons to prevent other shenanigans and ensure isolation).

Netflix streams aren’t privacy encrypted. Doesn’t matter how to pay, it can still be very easily linked to you via your internet provider. And Netflix would still have a profile built around that account.

They don’t need to be. TLS is used; so any man-in-the-middle is likely not capable of knowing what you’re watching. Only Netflix knows what you’re watching. If you’re concerned about their terms of service; or how they purport to use your data as outlined in their terms of service; then by all means make your post about that.

Your IP address is known by every website you visit; it is not a magic document number for you or your household. Your ISP isn’t going to provide your data to the government without a valid subpoena; and those typically aren’t issued easily. Any active change in law passed that is affecting trans people, you’d actually hear about.

You seem to have a few misconceptions or fears. Those fears are not invalid; but I am trying to suggest ways you can protect your privacy; while avoiding doing things like throwing all streaming media away and letting fears or misconceptions drive someone to absolute privacy fatigue and depression.

Is Piracy better? Undeniably so! If you have the technical know-how and wherewithal to pirate your media; it’s a solid way to find content usually.

However, not all people choose piracy for their own reasons. That might mean one instead maintains a few low-cost streaming subscriptions on hand. It is possible to still enjoy these services; and pay for them in ways that keep one’s privacy reasonably intact.

I actually disagree that media habits will be collected or targeted. It’s easy to defeat at least the overt tracking at least on Netflix using uMatrix or uBlock Origin; and I’ve done it myself.

Primarily; I just refuse to be intimidated by the extremists. It’s fine to take reasonable steps to protect yourself; but don’t completely force yourself into any kind of isolation because you feel it protects you; that’s exactly what THEY want.

You should be reasonably safe, and fine, using a major streaming service; as the fee to use them can easily be paid by privacy respecting means. (AKA scratch-cards purchased with either cash or crypto currency)

If you are worried about privacy; it’s totally OK to take steps to protect that; but you should be aware that it’s possible to get so wound up in protecting your privacy that you can do more harm for yourself than good. Privacy fatigue is a real issue; and that can be a problem as well. Use your best judgement.

I am glad to see it when the selfish people at the top fall so far down the hill. They orchestrate their own falling typically, much like Ikarus in his waxen wings, falling when he flew too close to the sun in direct sunlight at the height of a hot summer’s day.

As for Google; I hope the DoJ not only pulls up all of the resultant weeds in the garden, but also makes sure to till and salt the soil thoroughly, so that no part of Google can ever hope to rejoin it’s other pieces to form a monopoly or ‘anything like a monopoly’ on anything, ever, again.

Google must rightfully suffer a most painful and enduring ‘Corporate Death Penalty’ so to speak; in order to ensure that no company ever gets so bold again. We must also repeat this with several other large companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Apple too; as well as a few other companies I’m unable to name because I’m unaware of how ridiculously massive and monopolistic they are.

This is exactly the kind of task I’d expect AI to be useful for; it goes through a massive amount of freshly digitized data and it scans for, and flags for human action (and/or) review, things that are specified by a human for the AI to identify in a large batch of data.

Basically AI doing data-processing drudge work that no human could ever hope to achieve with any level of speed approaching that at which the AI can do it.

Do I think the AI should be doing these tasks unsupervised? Absolutely not! But the fact of the matter is; the AIs are being supervised in this task by the human clerks who are, at least in theory, expected to read the deed over and make sure it makes some sort of legal sense and that it didn’t just cut out some harmless turn of phrase written into the covenant that actually has no racist meaning, intention or function. I’m assuming a lot of good faith here, but I’m guessing the human who is guiding the AI making these mass edits can just, by means of physicality, pull out the original document and see which language originally existed if it became an issue.

To be clear; I do think it’s a good thing that the law is mandating and making these kinds of edits to property covenants in general to bring them more in line with modern law.

Shaving (my face) and putting on some makeup absolutely does help my mental state.

Sometimes I’ll shave other parts of my body; but not as often due to how much prep that takes to do.

Such a system might be constructed for one’s own scraping needs by taking any one of the current frontend/backends and customizing that behavior such that it could mitigate issues or ingest/ignore data based on your own inputs as well; such that your model could be “riding along on a human surfboard with human guidance”

The filtration capabilities available to most users is pretty robust; depending on what you use to interact with the Fediverse. I thinik it would be possible to filter out problematic bots, users and even whole domain sources with the right kind of software.

I’m going to be bold enough to say we don’t have as wide of an AI/LLM issue on the Fediverse as the other platforms will have.

I’m certain that if someone did collect data from the Fediverse; it would become a hot topic and it might not be enough data anyways as the Fediverse is not mainstream enough normally. So the data and language collected here might skew in a few imaginable ways that one might find undesirable for a general model of word frequencies.

Also the fact that people might not appreciate that data being collected. Let’s be real. It’s too soon for such a project to begin. The AI TREND MUST DIE as it currently lives and it’s corpse must be rotted away completely. Now, in internet time that may not be all that long…a few to several years…the memory of the internet can be short-lived at times. It must, however, fade from the public conscience into some obscurity first.

Once the technology no longer lies in greedy hands again; new development can begin anew.