If this was targeted at actual legal requirements then this would be a question to ask. And if age verification measures were actually about age verification then again this would be a question. The "save the children" laws were never about age verification. They are about the lucrative sale of information between five-eyes and the wider intelligence sharing.

Five eyes et al are about getting around national laws forbidding surveillance on own citizens by getting other countries or organizations to do it for you. In Canada, if I want intel on someone here, I query five eyes and the information flows in from corporate data and/or what intel in other countries have on my citizen.

This is very very lucrative. There are huge intel budgets funding these, and getting that information into the system in a huge part of the business model for Whatsapp, Discord, et al. They sell it to government, and government sells it to other governments. In the UK, for example, they require Discord, a private US company, by law to collect massive amounts of information on UK citizens, then query it back over five eyes and circumvent national domestic spying and surveillance laws.

Them "walking back" the facial scan is nothing more than them telling you "if we already can pin exactly who you are and track everything we want to track on you, we won't care - it's only when we don't know who you are that we'll do this".

The community over at Linux Mint is showing the pressure. Under the gun, and unable to process even basic issues, they turn on users and blame them for problems and bugs they experience, telling them their use case is flawed when the reality is they just don't have the resources to deal with the issue. Now, not having the resources is one thing, and a fair response. But turning it back on the user and telling them their use case is flawed when they experience is the tail wagging the dog.

Another community I saw this in for a long time, and I really thought the project would implode, was the Palemoon browser. They got behind when webcomponents became a thing and they could keep up with changes. They too would blame the user when yet another web site that didn't work on the browser was encountered, telling them they should be using the site, should complain about the site, and why would they need a site like that anyway??

Palemoon dragged themselves out of it. They buckled down, and it's almost back to being a useful browser again. But the community at Mint concerns me. They are on the down swing. User blaming and load shedding are just symptoms of a larger issue. Too much work for too few volunteers. They also don't have a good end-to-end workflow strategy. By that I mean in many cases they don't seem to treat the OS as a coherent whole that is used for actual workflows from beginning to end. Pieces that have no replacement are deprecated while resources are spent on pieces that have many duplicates.

I'm concerned.

It's the difference between a "custodial" and "non-custodial" wallet. They didn't lie - they just have a custodial wallet system there. That means when you transfer coins there, they keep custody of them, and give you a number in an account that says how many are credited to you. Like any bank - a bank is a custodial wallet for fiat currency.

I would never leave my funds in a custodial wallet, I keep the few I ever use in non-custodial, almost entirely self-managed wallets. I don't keep much anyway, I don't speculate on coins. I use use some for the occasional e-commerce. But these exchanges try and make their custodial system appealing. They use very low fees to buy coins and charge low fees to "transfer" one coin type to another. It's the withdrawal fees where they get you. Well, it's also the transfer fees - they charge low fees to transfer, but ANY fees to transfer in a custodial system are fictitious. It costs them nothing to move your coins from one memory location to another.

The mistake many recipients made was to, on that exchange, try and sell their "coins" for cash. That's what would have dropped the BTC value there. Forget that, get the coins OFF the exchange first. Then cash them out, slowly.

I expect so few coins were actually lost because there are some limits as to how many coins you can exfiltrate at a time. Likely the exchange actually possessed far fewer real BTC in its vault than it purported to give away anyway.

Litecoin, and Monero are the ones to actually use for ecommerce. Transaction fees are low enough that this is viable. I buy my VPNs and pay for some VPSs using those coins. Generally buying LTC from a public exchange, converting to XMR on privacy-focussed no KYC hands-off exchange, and then self-mixing XMR through a couple more wallets a few times. XMR's transaction fees are exceedingly low, it's still very hard to pierce where transactions go, and is actually a great way to pay for an account I don't necessarily want the vendor to have my details on. I mean, if I have a VPN, how secure is it if my VPN provider can out me at any time? In that case, it's just one more person promising not to use my data. Or promising to keep it secure. No thanks. They can't give away what they don't have.

These are good use cases for e-coins. BTC had, long before usage fees became an issue, already become untenable as far as privacy is concerned. When it was created, and anyone could actually mine it, then sure, that's private. But it's ONLY private if you can mine it yourself. The moment you use any fiat to buy it, the resulting BTC is actually the most trackable currency on the planet. Unless you wear a mask and pay highway-robbery rates to buy it from a BTC ATM with cash. But even there, here in Canada at least, most require you to show ID.

BTC's hemorrhaging value because it's only a speculation currency and there is no good use case for it to generate users to prop it up.

This is exactly how I boot my computer.
In Windows I:
- Insert write-protected VeraCrypt recovery USB stick into USB
- Boot and hit F12
- Select the stick as the device to boot from, when VeraCrypt's recovery appears, I select to boot from the stick's copy of the EFI bootloader.
- Enter my Windows VeraCrypt partition password, and only when that processes can the bootloader even see my Windows drive, which can't really be tampered with because it's encrypted.

In Windows, the EFI bootloader doesn't change except in major build-number updates. When it does, i update the EFI on my stick from a secure machine using verified EFI Windows boot binaries for that build. The Veracrypt bootloader EFI binaries only change if I update to a new version of Veracrypt, which after installation there is very rarely a need for.

In Linux I:
- Insert other write-protected EFI + /boot USB stick
- Boot and hit F12
- Select the stick as the device to boot from, boot into Grub which then chains into the initramfs on the stick's /boot
- Enter my Linux LUKS password, and continue to boot.

In Linux, once control has passed to initramfs, /boot is no longer needed, so it doesn't matter that it's not read/write. I have a script that I can use to remount /boot and /boot/efi as required if I want to do a kernel update. In that case, I flip the write-enable on my stick, insert it, mount /boot and /boot/efi, and do the kernel update. Unmount, stick out, write-disable, and then back in to use scripts that take the bootloader and first two partitions of the stick (the EFI and /boot) and images it for a backup, and takes an sha512sum of that and signs it with my GnuPG key. I can thus verify the integrity of the stick any time, verify the backup, and ensure they both match. The backup, its sha512sum and signature are all sent off machine to online storage.

In short, unless you get my USB sticks (which are on my keychain and go with me everywhere), you're not booting my computer into anything that I don't control. Even if someone got my sticks, I can replace them in a way that I can, with very high level of assurance, know is safe.

It's cute that they are saying this is for age verification.

It's nothing more than a tracking mechanism. Discord, Telegram, Whatsapp... all the so-called independents, are governments' back doors into tracking who you are, where you are, and what you are doing at any particular moment in time. Why do you think they all require cell phone numbers? But requiring cell phone numbers has created a black market in numbers that can pass verification methods and this leaves them without any real way to track who is on the other end.

They get a LOT of money from Five-eyes for sending them tracking information on people. And the public at large has shown they will continue to use these "services" regardless of how egregious the breach in privacy is.

It's funny... I scratch my head when I see stories like this, up here in Canada we have a Do Not Call Registry and laws regarding it that actually have teeth. Get a robocall and they get a fine. Per call that's reported.

I haven't got a robocall in years. For a while I started getting spam text messages until I convinced the Do Not Call Registry folks that the law as written (specifying solicitation 'telecommunications' were what were prohibited), and even that stopped.

Bug your congressman for this. It actually works.

Agree on HP. Absolutely. I use a Brother (MFC-J6945DW) with refillable cartridges and may never need to replace it as I can replace the waste ink box and pads in it too. I had the same realization you did about HP a few years ago. It's worth the space to have a large format scanner, printer, and copier where is ink costs far less per page than the actual paper. It's a piezo print head too, so no thermal caking and needs a head cleaning maybe every six months. So there are good options now, and I encourage people to educate themselves and find them. ECO Tank (Epson) were an option, but for a long time they dumbed down any ECO Tank printer's drivers so it couldn't do borderless - they didn't want it competing with their photo offerings. This is less the case now, but you still have to be careful.

Anyway, as far as this legislation goes, unfortunately it doesn't necessarily mean anything. For the reason that it's pre-watered down:

Los Angeles is moving to ban single-use printer cartridges that can't be refilled or taken back for recycling

(emphasis added)

So all HP has to do is offer some sort of recycling program, which they already technically do in most cases and areas. Meaningless legislation that may even be at the instigation of the printer lobby to make it look like action.

This is fantastic news for septic systems. The problem with this type of waste is the plastic particles clog the microscopic pores in septic field pipes, leading to back ups. Before artificial fabrics, a septic field could last fifty years. Now many people have to dig it up and replace it every five, or else just accept the need to have their septic tank pumped every five years.

Putting a trap on the laundry hose helps, but is still imperfect. After my last field replacement, I investigated a lot of filters and use the best I can get. So far my last septic field has lasted fifteen years. But a tree-root-caused breech I had to repair where part of it was dug up shows it's only operating at about 50% throughput. So any improvement is a very good thing.

A better solution might be to regulate that all fabric needs to be made of bio-degradable material. And by that I don't mean these types of materials that are marketed as degradable but which need strange and unusual conditions and expensive composting facilities to make them actually do it. We don't have a lot of these yet, but a hard deadline might make that more viable.

Is that the offline version of their web site?

Hence the Mars Climate Orbiter crater.

And this is a bad thing exactly how? How to steal a company: Make vague insinuations, up the volume and call it evil citing more vague issues, threaten to ban it, and then say, well, if you turn over control maybe we'll let it slide. No different than protection money for the mob.

Gotta love how the biggest loudmouths for a competition and innovation-based economy use clubs to bludgeon the foreign competition to death with.

Universities stopped being centers for actual education a long time ago. They are not institutions of higher education, they are institutions of higher degrees. About 98% of anything I learned that is useful, I taught myself.

The reason the elite send their kids to schools is the continuing status symbol that an expensive university is. It's still the masonic handshake. The expensive schools are more about making business connections and about the ones with real money finding talent to exploit than it is about any sort of actual education.

Well, I can't know that, can I? All I can see is the "by Anonymous Coward" you're hiding behind.

But to answer your allegation anyway, no, I haven't watched it. It's a little too close to home. There is a child prone to tantrums that was given the button to nuclear weapons parked just south of me. You'll forgive me if I exercise a modicum of "head in the sand" and not watch a movie depicting what I am genuinely worried about.

Ah. So I take it that comment hit the mark. Right on both counts? (far from civilization and a trump supporter).

Just to put all replies in a single place, this is to one a few messages up...

Well, one might hope that the mid-terms will pull his teeth, but he's a) spent two years pushing the boundaries of what a president can do without legislative authority, and b) shown a willingness to park troops in your own cities and has openly threatened to use them if local votes don't go his way. A poor showing mid-term and/or lead-up polls that suggest this is coming might just accelerate the timeline I proposed.