Totally agree with the rationale for the blocking; no sane company is going to willingly publish info that could harm them. Can't really argue with that at all; their site, their rules, and all that. What the First Amendment says about free speech is regarding the Government, not public entitiies like Meta, so they absolutely have the right to decline to provide these lawyers with an online megaphone and soapbox to stand on.

On your question though, it's quite likely no one authorized them. Assuming you're not blocking ads outright, then any ads you do see are basically the result of an in-browser bidding war to see which company is willing to pay the most (still tiny fractions of a cent) to get you to look at their ad instead of someone else's based on the info Meta has on your demographics and interests. Meta has a demonstrably loose grasp of ethics, so if you are thinking they are vetting every ad's contents before it gets accepted into the auction mill rather than just relying on companies to comply with the conditions Meta set and dealing with any that don't if any complaints get sufficient traction, then you have a radically different take on Meta than I do.

At best, they've probably just changed the Ts&Cs to put a clause in preventing ads of this type, or blacklisted the companies that were pushing them.

Thanks, that's really interesting.

I liked Universe, it's a shame it got cancelled.

Which was the basis for the fictional Zero Point Module (ZPM) in the Stargate Atlantis franchise. Would be cool if those were real, but it's probably impossible to harness that energy.

Just remember that everything developed by Western companies is stolen Chinese tech from now on.

If women are delaying having children until they can better afford it, and affordability is decreasing, all that will happen is they get too old to have them before becoming financially stable enough to do so.

Whatever the issue is, the solution is the same and should be done for many other reasons: Get the cost of living down. Cheaper property, higher wages.

There is no left in America, they moved to the right.

The Dems are probably about level with Ronnie the Ray gun, possibly a fraction more to the right.

If you think the Dems moved 51% to the left, then the reality is you moved 55% to the right, and the Republicans moved even further.

Except none of that actually happened.

Good for browsing and side by side though.

The organisation, after Musk took over, became a cesspit of far-right extremism, in which anything the far-right "disagreed" with (such as facts and other inconveniences) were censored.

The EFF has, by this announcement, basically said that censorship did not bother them at all, that extremism did not bother them at all, that death threats against the left didn't bother them, that the only thing they were bothered by was the fact that the intellectuals had all left.

That does not give me overwhelming confidence in the EFF as being concerned with freedom.

The use case is you have a decent size screen on a device that you can pocket. If you look at the latest foldables, they aren't much thicker than non-foldables. About as thick as an iPhone from a few generations ago.

They seem to have reached the point where the tech is reasonably mature and not excessively fragile. Now they just need to get the price down.

Which it was.

Puts anyone accused of being Satoshi at great risk.

When you win the lottery in the UK, they help you hide the wealth. Special bank accounts, advice on how to avoid other people finding out, that sort of thing. There is a risk of both crime and people coming to beg for money.

In the medium to long term the main outcome of this war will be accelerating the move away from US based currency and payment systems. Lots of alternatives to Mastercard and Visa already have some momentum, and trading oil is moving away from USD.

With such a system you can tolerate a lot of false positives, to ensure you don't get false negatives. All that happens is the false positive image gets sent to the ground for verification.

And remember that the other option is having nothing at all.

Didn't they try to do that kind of image recognition in the 90s and find it unreliable? IIRC they tested it with tanks and found that rather that detecting tanks it was detecting sunny days, and once they eliminated the weather variations it couldn't do anything useful.

Today Tesla's vision system is notoriously unreliable, and you would assume that in military applications the aircraft are going to be camouflaged.