Some website publishers have threatened publishers of ad-blocking software pursuant to the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), or other similar legislation. See "A Copyright Claim Was Reportedly Used to Stop Ad Blocking, But It’s Complicated" by Rhett Jones for details.

china doesnt let you exploit workers

Oh my God, I had to stand up and walk around after reading that to catch my breath, as I was laughing so hard.

I think the average Ukrainian having their apartment blown up by Russian weapons that are jam-packed full of US chips smuggled into Russia might have a slightly different take.

That said: on the order of my preferred implementations, "remote-operable backdoors" is the worst possible one. *Automated* failure if the product has decided that it "has been transported internationally" is better, as it can't get compromised by an adversary or abused on demand. Better still is identifying smuggling routes, and deliberately feeding them - and only them - hacked versions of your hardware.

Yeah, it's just bad "UX" on top - the "internal" drive icon looks more like an external drive than the "external" drive does.

Define "scrape".

The general definition of "scraping" involves actually, you know, storing the content, not just briefly caching it then summing it up to the user who asked to browse it.

You really don't know the difference between a crawler and a web search?

An AI agent is tasked by a user to collect info about a topic - I do this all the time. The agent then does a bunch of successive searches, each time distilling the important things relative to the user's task that may need subsequent followup, and then ultimately sums up everything they found on the topic. What doesn't happen is "Perplexity building up a database of said content". Crawlers try to visit the whole internet (minus sites that tell them not to), a single time each, to build up a copy of the internet. Crawlers != web searches.

I cannot say that Perplexity doesn't also crawl sites that tell them not to. But what I can say is that if Cloudflare is calling AI agent seaches "a web crawler", that's utter idiocy on their part.

I'd also add two things from a personal perspective.

One, just short and straightforward: I don't think it's healthy for a society to normalize viewing women as objects to be bought and sold.

Two, and more personally: back when I lived in the states, my then-spouse once met someone at the local Unitarian church who had just arrived in town who didn't have a place to stay. We talked and decided to invite her to stay in our spare room rent-free. I had however never seen a person in my life so "broken". She literally would timidly ask for permission to go to the bathroom every time, and things like that; it took us a long time to break her of the habit. As we got to know her better, it became clear that she had been groomed into sex work in Chicago since she was a teen from a troubled household, and was trying to flee that life. Months later, she ultimately admitted to us that she just automatically presumed that when we offered her the spare room, that she would be having to pay us in sex, and was then confused when we never propositioned her. The concept of charity was entirely absent from her lexicon.

She eventually got a boyfriend (quite a nice guy, as far as we could tell), moved out, etc etc but she continued to struggle with - and I'm not a psychologist, but it sure looked like what I'd call PTSD. And eventually one day we got the news from him that she had run off, and her body was later found by the police, having committed suicide.

So yeah, my take on the sex work "industry" isn't so hot. I don't think in any way it should be "normalized". But even worse is criminalizing the very people you're wanting to protect.

I hate how the conversation always revolves around either the American Model - criminalizing sex work - or the Dutch model, decriminalizing everything - and the Nordic Model is entirely left out of the picture (asymmetric criminalization - selling is perfectly legal but buying is illegal).

The sex work "industry" is deeply problematic in a way that other industries are not. I really recommend reading the above article. Despite the claimed benefits of full legalization in Germany:

* The law's primary goal was to treat prostitution as a regular job, allowing sex workers to get employment contracts, health insurance, and pensions. None of this happens at any meaningful scale. They still avoid formal contracts, to save on social security contributions and reduce regulatory attention.

* The sex industry exploded and the price collapsed. Legalization triggered "unstoppable growth" and led to the rise of "mega-brothels," "flat-rate" establishments, and even outdoor "sex boxes", alongside a massive influx of foreign sex workers, with one punter describing Germany as the "Aldi for prostitutes."

* And with that, came a large increase in human trafficking to meet the demand. Germany and the Netherlands have been ranked among the five worst black spots for trafficking in Europe.

* The law makes it easier to open a brothel in Germany than a chip shop. Because prostitutes are typically considered self-employed individuals renting rooms, brothel owners have no real accountability for their welfare. This legal gray area allows owners to distance themselves from exploitation, with one stating, "That's not my business" when asked if the women in his club work voluntarily.

* The proliferation of the sex industry has negatively impacted cities where it's centred. Saarbrücken's mayor for example notes that the problem has become intolerable, with endless solicitation in public places, used condoms littering streets, and the city's reputation changing from a culinary destination to one known for prostitution.

* The exploitation of sex workers continues, in little-changed forms. The term "pimp" has been replaced by "the man," but the dynamic of control and financial exploitation persists. Women continue to find themselves tricked with false promises or pressured into the industry, only to find themselves trapped.

* Sex workers are left in a precarious and dangerous position. Due to the huge increase in competition, there's huge pressure on sex workers to consent to things they don't want to consent to.

Just a random example from the article

"She tells me about a 17-year-old Russian - let’s call her Klara – whose father had fallen ill. The family was getting desperate for money so when Klara saw a newspaper advert offering temporary work as a prostitute in Germany, “she thought, ‘it will be awful but for three months I can bear it.’ And then she was raped by several men the night she arrived to “get her ready” for prostitution. They took her passport. There was another girl there who wouldn’t do something a customer wanted and they broke a bottle, a glass bottle, and raped her with that. She was cut inside. It was shown to all the others.” Klara was trapped there for four years."

Or as the head of the megabrothel "Paradise" put it, at the end of the article:

Would he be happy for either of his two daughters to work at Paradise, the interviewer asks. Rudloff turns puce. “Unthinkable, unthinkable,” he says. “The question alone is brutal. I don’t mean to offend the prostitutes but I try to raise my children so that they have professional opportunities. Most prostitutes don’t have those options. That’s why they’re doing that job." He pauses and looks away.

“Unimaginable”, he repeats. “I don’t even want to think about it.”

There are all sorts of terrible jobs out there. Working say at an Amazon warehouse is famously an awful job. But there's no mass black market smuggling people in to work at Amazon warehouses under false promises, then when they arrive taking their passports and beating them with Amazon packages and forcing them to stay. The problem is that there's a gross imbalance in sex demand and sex work supply, and the more buying sex gets socially normalized, the worse the dynamic gets.

Which is where the Nordic model comes in. You suppress demand by keeping buying sex criminalized. But if you're worried about protecting sex workers - because yes, there absolutely ARE plenty of people (just not enough to match demand) who do want to do sex work - it's utterly insane to charge them with a crime. In fact, laws in the Nordic model have been repeatedly refined from the earliest incarnations to attempt to minimize the impacts to them - for example, shielding landlords from liability under pimping laws and things of that nature. Under the Nordic model, sex workers are given all of the power in the arrangement. For example, they can go to the police at will without fear of being charged, while their clients have to be careful not to overstep the sex worker's bounds, because, again, the law is on the latter's side. Trafficking has collapsed in states that have implemented the Nordic model rather than legalization. And as for the public's interest, solicitation moves off the streets (because the clients are too afraid of being charged) and onto the internet.

It depends. Does the Perplexity agent faithfully relay the personalized messages from sponsors that would have otherwise been presented adjacent to the information on the website?

Execute "Reindeer Flotilla"

Hydrogen does not make a good fuel, tor a tonne of reasons, but nitrogen fuel would be less prone to nasty reactions and fewer problems. Could N6 combustion be controlled at levels suitable for heavy road vehicles or trains?

(Electric trains have their own problems, due to the fact that the junction needs to be poor and the cost of copper is so great that lines need to use far worse conductors to reduce theft.)

Part of the problem is that there's no way to pay "journalists" as a whole. Because of electronic payment networks' fees per transaction, online newspapers have to sell a monthly subscription, not a single issue they way they would with cash in a vending machine. And a subscription to NYT includes zero articles from WaPo or WSJ. This means readers get sucked into the ideological bubble of the one publication that happens to be part of their subscription plan.

Since we're not taking about infinitesimals, I fail to see the relevance.