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Comment Re:This is the right decision (Score 2) 87

The analogy doesn't really work for two reasons. Firstly copyright infringement is a civil matter, not criminal. Secondly they were informed about the copyright infringement, but declined to cut off the customer. It was a request to stop providing service that was allegedly being abused, going against their own Terms of Service.

This is still the right decision. Aside from it being bad if companies can be forced to enforce their own ToS, there has never been a trial to determine if the copyright infringement actually took place, and if the right person was identified. These claims are notoriously unreliable.

Comment Re:Coming soon off the back of this (Score 1) 106

Doesn't have to be a credit card. A class III user digital certificate requires a verification firm be certain of a person's identity through multiple proofs. If an age verification service issued such a certificate, but anonymised the name the certificate was issued to to the user's selected screen name, you now have a digital ID that proves your age and optionally can be used for encryption purposes to ensure your account is only reachable from devices you authorise.

Comment Re:Temu missiles (Score 1) 286

Lockheed focuses on reliability of weapons, rather than quantity. As we have seen in Ukraine and now in Iran, quantity is often more important. Ukraine uses a lot of civilian grade material in drones, for example, as does Russia. Shear numbers and low cost are more important than military grade component reliability.

Comment Re:Dumb precedent. Addiction is on the user. (Score 3, Insightful) 106

And those come with warnings, legal penalties on vendors who sell to known addicts or children, legal penalties for abusers, financial penalties to abusers, etc. There are cars which have their own breathalisers.

So, no, society has said that the responsibility is distributed. Which is correct.

Comment Re:Exploitation of children is inevitable??? (Score 1) 45

It is legitimate for any service that constitutes a "common carrier" to be free of consequences for what it carries. But Meta do not claim to be a "common carrier", and that changes the nature of the playing field substantially. As soon as a service can inspect messages and moderate, it is no longer eligible to claim that it is not responsible for what it carries.

Your counter-argument holds some merit, but runs into two problems.

First, society deems any service that monitors to be liable. That may well be unreasonable at the volumes involved, but that's irrelevant. Meta chose to monitor, knowing that this made it liable in the eyes of society. There are, of course, good reasons for that - mostly, society is sick and twisted, and criminality is encouraged as a "good thing" and "sticking it to the man". This is a very good reason to monitor. But Meta chose to have an obscenely large customer base (it didn't need to), Meta chose to monitor (it is quite capable of parking itself in a country where this isn't an obligation), and Meta chose to make the service addictive (which is a good way of encouraging criminals onto the scene, as addicts are easy prey).

Second, Meta has known there's been a problem for a very long time (depression and suicides by human moderators is a serious problem Meta has been facing for many years at this point). Meta elected to sweep the problem under the rug and create the illusion of doing something by using AI. If a serivce knows there's a problem but does nothing, and in particular a very cheap form of nothing, then one must consider the possibility said service is not solving said problem because there's more money to be made by having the abusers there than by removing them.

Can one block every criminal action? Probably not, which means that that's the wrong problem to solve. Intelligent, rational, people do not try to solve actually impossible problems. Rather, they change the problems into ones that are quite easy. This is very standard lateral thinking and anyone over the age of 10 who has not been trained in lateral thinking should sue their school for incompetence.

Submission + - FCC Bans Nearly All Wireless Routers Sold in the U.S. (reason.com)

fjo3 writes: This week, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) effectively banned the sale of nearly all wireless routers in the U.S., in yet another example of the government making Americans' consumer decisions for them.

Ninety-six percent of American adults use the internet, and 80 percent of them use wireless routers—devices that transmit a signal throughout your home via radio waves and allow you to get online without plugging into the wall.

In a Monday announcement, the FCC deemed "all consumer-grade routers produced in foreign countries" potentially unsafe. This followed a national security determination last week, in which members of executive branch agencies concluded that "routers produced in a foreign country, regardless of the nationality of the producer, pose an unacceptable risk to the national security of the United States and to the safety and security of U.S. persons."

Comment Re:That's Fine (Score 1) 73

So for example, say you use the hidden partition feature. You have two encrypted partitions, one with your really secret data, and one other with some other data that you don't mind if your adversary gets hold of. Under duress you give your adversary the password to the latter.

In the UK, the prosecution can argue that the data you gave up is not all there is, and you are holding some back. As evidence, they can point to things like lists of recently accessed files that seem to point to data on that hidden partition, or the fact that the data you did give up has not been touched in a very long time and there is evidence that you were using the computer recently.

It's not a given that they can prove there is more data beyond a reasonable doubt, but you do have to be careful to avoid mistakes that can give them what they need.

Comment Re:That's Fine (Score 1) 73

Hidden data is an interesting idea, but you need it to be plausible. The fake data has to have signs of regular, recent use, for example, or they can argue that you haven't given them the real key. The same issue with claiming to have forgotten the password, when there is evidence that you used it recently.

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