• 7 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: December 18th, 2023

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  • I don’t think it has much to do with ethics in the usual sense. It’s all about tribal allegiance. Facebook and the like are the enemy. Anything that seems to bother the enemy is cheered. There is no thought that laws apply generally. It reminds me of that old internet meme about conservatism. There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

    I think you could make a serious argument that the CEO killing was self-defense. But it’s not going to really change anything. Maybe the successor is less ruthless but they will be making decisions in the same social context; facing the same incentives and disincentives.









  • It’s not necessary to expose the identities of the users. The age confirmation could happen via a password, PIN, or even a physical USB dongle. Tying such methods to a particular identity adds nothing to the age verification.

    If that is not enough, then one would need a permanent, live webcam feed of the user. It could be monitored by AI, and/or police officers could make random checks.

    Granted, one would have to make sure that not everyone behind the same router can use age-restricted services; eg with a VPN. That would let them assign connections to individual, anonymous adults. But I’d guess you could do that anyway with some confidence by analyzing usage patterns. Besides, information on who is in a home can also be found in other places such as social media or maybe company websites. So I do not think this is much new information.

    But thinking about it, one could compartmentalize this.

    The ISP only allows connections to whitelisted servers, including 1 or more government approved VPNs. The ISP refuses connection to these VPNs without age confirmation. The VPN provider does not need to be told the identity of the customer. There needs to be no persistence across sessions. The ISP need not know what sites are visited via VPN. While the VPN provider need not know about sites visited without.

    If you do it that way, the ISP ends up knowing less than before.

    Since both ISP and VPN servers and offices would be physically located in the country, one would have no problem enforcing prohibitions on data sharing, if desired by lawmakers.

    Anyway, this is the only realistic approach in the whole thread. Everything else assumes that Australian law will be followed globally. And then the ISP still has all that usage data. Why not just use a blockchain…


  • I’d lean on the ISPs. Your ISP knows what sites you visit, and they have your location and payment information. They can just insert some verification page when a classified IP is contacted. This gives them hardly any information beyond what they already have. And since they are mainly located in Australia, it is easy to enforce laws on them.

    You have to lean on ISPs anyway because it is quite ridiculous to assume that the entire global internet will implement Australian laws. Does anyone believe that their Lemmy instance will implement some AI face scan or cryptography scheme?

    You would have to block servers that do not comply with the law anyway. The effective solution would be a whitelist of services that have been vetted. In practice, I think we’ll see the digital equivalent of ok boomer.

    If a whitelist seems extreme, then one should have another look at the problem. The point is to make sure that information is only accessed by citizens with official authorization. There is no technological difference between the infrastructure needed to enforce this (or copyrights) and some totalitarian hellscape.


  • If that’s what you want, you should join Facebook.

    The fundamental thing to understand is that the internet - and really all information processing - is about copying. There is no such thing as “looking” at a profile or a post. The text and image data is downloaded to your device. You end up with multiple copies on your device.

    Sending information out, but blocking people from storing it, is fundamentally a contradiction in terms.

    Bsky - like Lemmy - made the choice to make the data widely available. It is available via API and does not need to be scraped. The alternative is to do it like Reddit or even Facebook or Discord. But they can’t stop scraping, either. They can make it slower and more laborious but not stop it. Services like Facebook protect the data as best as they can to “protect your privacy”. In reality, it’s about making it hard for you to leave the platform or anyone else to benefit from your data. Either way, you can trust Zuck to protect your data as if it was his own. Because it is.




  • A toy like that is easy to create and not that expensive to offer. Much more expensive than some JavaScript or CSS, but in the end it’s not that different.

    I think people don’t really understand this whole scraping thing. For example, you can torrent all of Reddit until the API-change; all the comments, profiles, usernames, including now deleted stuff. There is a lot of outrage here over Reddit cracking down on these 3rd party tools. It’s difficult to see how that outrage over cracking down on 3rd party tools, fits with this outrage here over not cracking down on 3rd party tools.

    Anyway, if someone want to archive all of Bluesky, they don’t need to offer some AI toy. They can just download the content via the API.