How many hours of an Asian font designer'(s) time can you buy for $20k? It'd be funny, if it turns out that firing the font company pays off in less than a year.
I mean, let's just come up with a hypothetical example. Let's say that baby formula manufacturers realize that the specific tests used by the regulator to check for protein can be fooled by melamine and so they use melamine as an ingredient to save money while fooling the regulator. Consequently hundreds of thousands of babies get sick and tens of thousands are hospitalized with some dying, and that's just the ones that are known about. Should the regulators be the only ones that get in trouble while the executives who made the decisions buy themselves some private islands? I mean, A. that's not a hypothetical example and, B. I just do not understand what you are trying to argue here. Maybe it's my fault, but it just seems incomprehensible to me given the actual, real-world history of corporate behavior when it comes to food and drug safety.
I presume you're referring to the 2008 Chinese Milk Scandal? I'll point out this was something perpetrated by the Chinese industry, not American. It was knowingly covered up with the complicity of the Chinese government to prevent it from embarrassing the ongoing Olympics. Only when the scandal became impossible to cover up did the CCP take any action.
As of December 2025, San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie and former Mayor London Breed have both expressed praise for China and the relationship between San Francisco and Chinese cities.
There is zero value in some big scary climate risk number also being disclosed, because A that risk accounted for if you are studying the details anyway and does not help you make a rational decision, because it literally does not affect you beyond the places where it is already baked into the numbers.
If you don't care why the insurance is so expensive or unavailable (e.g. high risk of flooding) then maybe you also don't care about why the house's price is so high (e.g. nice location, good construction, etc). No need to even look at the house. Just treat the whole damn thing as an abstract exercise in numbers.
OTOH, some people might actually care about details. Maybe because they're considering living there?
Once again, Open Source is embarrassed and left behind.
mplayer and mpv still, after all these years, don't have a way to prevent things from working if the content origin happens to be Netflix. It just plays on, stupidly Just Working, instead of breaking the way that Netflix realized their users want it to break.
To be fair your link does say "designed to bypass internet filtering mechanisms or content restrictions", so it sounds like SSH, work VPNs, banking etc. don't count because they aren't designed to get around the porn filters.
You make sense, but there is nothing that is "designed to bypass internet filtering mechanisms or content restrictions" more than SSH and VPNs bypass internet filtering mechanisms or content restrictions, is there? Why would anyone ever design a tool to get around filtering and restrictions, when they can already do that with established mainstream tools such as SSH or VPNs?
I can't believe the bill is intended to never be applied to anything. If we do think it's written in such a way that it never applies, I don't think it'll be litigated that way. Once it's enacted, they're going to say it applies to something, and that something is going to be anything that is secure.
You didn't read the bill very closely.
I think I read it much more closely than you did.
Sec 2(a):
"Circumvention tools" means any software, hardware, or service designed to bypass internet filtering mechanisms or content restrictions including virtual private networks, proxy servers, and encrypted tunneling methods to evade content restrictions.
This is either intended to apply to something or never apply to anything. Do we agree that the text is intended to do something, to somehow cover some possible situation which might realistically come up? You don't think they just put this in there, but with the begrudging admission that it could not ever possibly apply, do you?
Assuming you're still with me there, please give an example of what kind of tool this defines as a circumvention tool. Surely you have something in mind.
The bill is about outlawing the distribution of p0rn, and a VPN is merely listed as an unlawful circumvention tool.
That might have possibly been the original intent several years of editing ago, but I do not see anything in the definition of "circumvention tools" which even tangentially relates to porn. Do you? I think porn is 100% irrelevant in this discussion.
What I'm getting at, is that there isn't a "porn version" of Wireguard or SSH or HTTPS. They're all the same, content-neutral. The bill either bans them all, or doesn't ban anything. If you take my above bolded challenge to name a circumvention tool that this bill does address, I'm going to take all of your arguments that you give for why the law does apply to your circumvention tool example, and I am going to successfully apply them to SSH and HTTPS. And I'll be exactly as correct as you.
The only way this bill doesn't restrict SSH and HTTPS, is if it doesn't restrict anything at all. Don't agree? Then name something it does restrict.
This isn't a partisan issue
Sorry, but no one can ever really say something like that these days, and be believable. While it's true there's no classical left/right split on this issue, our classical left/right days are long over.
If Trump decides he opposes this, then you're going to see 90% of Republicans suddenly oppose it, and it'll become partisan.
So, before you tell me this is non-partisan, please explain how regulating AI will help criminals steal, preferably from the US Treasury. Because if this does not aid crime, then Republicans will be against it. They might not be against it now, but they're going to be.
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Sorry, everyone. My mistake. An ISP which tolerates its users using ssh or https would be liable for $250,000 per day, not $125,000 per day. I realize that in the time since I posted, many of you made the determination "oh, it's not so bad" and bought houses in Michigan, now to be blindsided by that fact that I negligently underestimated the cost by a factor of two. I apologize for the error.
Michigan has a bill to ban VPNs where SSH is just another "circumvention tool" that must be blocked too. If SSH works, then your ISP is liable for $125,000 per day until they break it.
No more ports 22 or 443 in Michigan if this passes. No more e-commerce. No more banking. No more encrypted internet for anyone, of any age. Telnet and http-no-s are coming back! (Until someone tunnels through them; then ISPs will have to block those too.)
Row, row, row your bits, gently down the stream...
