"Keeping Tiktok on phones" sounds like someone spending money to induce phonemakers to have the Tiktok client preloaded on new phones. That would, indeed, be hideous and worthy of exposure and scathing criticism.

But instead, it's just about opposing a ban?! That's pretty damn different from "keeping" it.

he said should not be viewed as "a political topic — it's a topic for humanity."

It's not political, so you're presenting the hoax to a legislative body so that they can enact new policies to account for aliens. Got it, not political at all, except for 100% of it.

They're still doing serial instead of parallel so it's only about a tenth the speed it could be, and even then, it still doesn't work with my 1541 drives. Fail!

the Constitution doesn't really empower the federal government to legislate individual behavior

A1S8: "The Congress shall have Power .. To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian Tribes."

Since 1943, this power has been interpreted by every SCOTUS makeup (this isn't a "liberal" vs "conservative" thing) to include any imaginable human activity, unless they're explicitly blacklisted from legislating that topic (e.g. establishing religion or infringing the right to bear arms).

If a human can do x, then doing x almost certainly affects commerce. Did you just pick you nose with your finger? Then you just reduced the size of the market for automatic nose-picker machines, some of which might be manufactured in other states. If Congress wants to outlaw picking your nose with your finger, they have a constitutional basis for that.

If you disagree (and maybe you should!) then you have to accept that you are disagreeing with a consistent, unified SCOTUS, and not just today, but in your parents' and grandparents' time too. And that means you are guaranteed to lose any legal dispute (though not necessarily every philosophical dispute) over the matter, whether your (rather common sense, IMHO) analysis is faithful to the original intent or not.

I don't think this can be changed, except by a new constitutional amendment which re-asserts the 10th amendment by explicitly contradicting the current (1943-2023) [mis?]interpretation. Until then (i.e. forever), we're going to have lots of laws concerning individual behavior, and there will always be calls to have someone enforce those laws.

The paranoid / hyper-secure types that live in fear

That's a funny market to try to compete in, for hardware which is dependent on a proprietary cloud-based service. What's the very first thing which comes to mind when you hear "Ring?" That someone-who-isn't-the-owner is the entity ultimately in charge of who is allowed to access it.

I guess the way to spin it is: if you buy a Ring, then you don't have to worry about the government constantly interrupting you with requests to see footage. Someone else will handle all those tedious requests for you, without ever bothering you with such distractions.

Ring is for people who have no paranoia at all. The more paranoid you are, the worse Ring sounds.

I have to turn it down because it's too loud. I have to turn on subtitles because it's too quiet.

Just wrap the diapers around the electronics, duh.

Much of the time, saving money and reducing waste are the same thing. Can you really fault someone for emphasizing the more popular label?

You say "stop pissing money down the drain and reducing shareholder dividends and equity," I say "let's rape and murder 20% fewer baby seals next quarter" and then we point at the same angry worker who is doing something ridiculous because company policy was hurriedly written 50 years ago.

(No, I don't know how the rape instructions got into that 1973 memo, but I'm sure it made fiscal sense at the time.)

Government should have some reasonable, but not pain free / cost free way to obtain access to encrypted content.

They already have one: the $5 wrench. It works perfectly against any key size.

But the government doesn't like it, because you can't use the wrench on someone without them knowing that you did it.

There is not one thing they're communicating or doing online legally that should be hidden from the scrutiny of their guardians.

I'm imagining what teenage 1980s me would think of your statement. Finally I'm on the phone with a girl asking her out for the first time, and my parents are going to be on the call?

I though this timeline was hard enough, and you had to come up with a worse one where I never even get that first date.

I'm reminded of my favorite ST:TNG quote.

Slashdot, as of a few weeks ago, no longer seems to work with Firefox for Android unless you request the desktop version of the site, otherwise you just get an empty page.

After reading this, I tried loading Slashdot in Firefox 115.2.1 on Android 12 and it worked just fine.

Are there any other particular conditions that you know of, for recreating the failure?

I hate this, and love it, at the same time.

The reason these companies are sitting ducks for this type of abuse, is that they run services but also insist that their users use a particular proprietary client. If you were to RE their services and make a compatible client, they would freak out and sue you, because your client doesn't show their ads to the user (and wouldn't reliably count those impressions if it did). So fuck 'em.

But if you don't unnaturally tie the service and the endpoint software together, then you can have a resilient system which is able resist government interference (or at least the boundaries of legal US government interference, until we get around to repealing the 1st Amendment).

Let service providers pass around the ciphertext you give them. This is how PGP and email worked. Yes, it has problems. Laypeople couldn't figure out PGP (and it seems the market has decided that laypeople simply can't figure out key exchange in general), and having the envelope in plaintext means you have to avoid the dreaded "Subject: Your cocaine has shipped" header. But the basic idea is great, in that the service providers really are innocent and have no practical way to stop criminal uses, so it's hard to pretend they're responsible. Holding a generic email provider responsible for what is said in an encrypted email is as silly as holding a road construction crew responsible for a bank heist getaway.

But tie the two together, and the client author can put in whatever weaknesses the government wants, knowing they have a captive audience who has no choice but to either use a deliberately-insecure client, or don't use the service at all.

So in the name of increased privacy for everyone, I'm fine with a "death blow to end-to-end encryption services", because the very idea of an end-to-end encryption service is ridiculous. Run encryption outside of the service. The service doesn't need to know anything about how the user generated the message body.

Every politician supporting this nonsense needs to be voted out of office ASAP.

Except the whole reason they do it, is to gain votes.

Stop calling politicians stupid. We're stupid. They just do what we tell them. The next time some anti-American criminal says something anti-American or criminal, remember that they're saying it because We The People want anti-American criminals running our government, and we punish candidates for being too American or too law-abiding.

That R-or-D party that you hate more than the other R-or-D party? They're legitimately a major party, because they get about half the country to vote for them. If stupid is what it takes, stupid they'll give you.

At least call their voters stupid. If you're going to speak truth to power, then target the actual power: fuckwits like you and me.