There's no such thing as technologically unable to comply.

If a nation state law enforcement insists, they will make you comply, and you and I will never hear about it.

A simple OS update with "If phone MAC == XXXXXXXXXX then send copy to FBI", targeted specifically at one phone, deployed only to that one phone, would go entirely unnoticed by the world.

And Official Secrets Act / equivalent, combined with a government-NDA and jail time for talking about it's very existence is literally routine. Has been since the days of black boxes in ISPs and them tapping Google's inter-datacentre links.

If someone like the FBI, NSA, MI5, GCHQ, etc. wants you to do something... you have literally zero choice in the matter. And talking about it will get you immediately jailed. And it really doesn't matter how big you are.

You think that Whatsapp end-to-end encryption is just going to make GCHQ etc. go "Oh well, nothing we can do?" No. If they need it, there'll be a guy knocking on your head office with a bunch of people, he'll only tell you why he's there in a closed meeting, you will comply, even if that means throwing everyone out of the datacentre and doing it yourself, and if anyone hears what he asked you to do, you will go to jail.

Been the same for decades. They just don't use it for ordinary crimes and petty stuff, mostly because of the resources they have to deploy to ensure that it stays quiet.

So we're giving up on CAPTCHA then, are we?

And the only alternative we can come up with is literal ID verification?

Something tells me that we skipped a step - i.e. a better CAPTCHA.

It's basically plugging the output of ChatGPT into a sudo terminal on your machine with write-access to all your data.

It's quite literally the dumbest thing I've ever heard of.

But then, even Slashdot are running obnoxious "generate apps with AI" ads in massive bars on my screen, and I paid to disable advertising and have ad-blockers.

What could go wrong?

I hate all of this sales pressure BS - that the instant anyone hears your name you have to try to "convert" them to sales - and I literally run a webstore.

It's all so deeply anti-consumer, and I want no part in it.

LLMs have no business model.

That's why OpenAI is trillions in the hole, with no profitable tier of product in sight.

It's a cute toy that costs far too much to generate and maintain, and relies on basically stealing the data of the entire Internet to keep itself up-to-date and vaguely relevant, and the lawsuits on that have barely started yet.

And if an LLM was actually "AI"... it wouldn't need customers, as such. It could be left to wander off onto the Internet, given a credit card number and it would: set up its own company supplying goods that it obtains from others, answer customer queries, set up a fivr account and respond to every job on there, sell its own unique products, design its own 3D models for sale or production, trade on the stock market, bet on sports, or whatever... it would literally... just earn money for its owners. Directly. No need for a user to ask it to do so and then to give the result back to the user. Just... do the things that would directly earn it money.

Give it $100,000, a credit card, an Internet connection and... leave it to its own devices. It's "intelligent", right? And it has capabilities and capacities far in excess of any human, so we're told? So it could literally just start up a fake company, fill in the paperwork, register for tax, import goods, have a courier handle them, put them into a warehouse, set up a website, sell the product to the public, have a courier collect them from the warehouse, sell the product direct. Nobody would ever have to know that it wasn't human, and it could join the dots and just do what humans the world over do to make money directly.

If AI was any good... then IT would be the next billionaire.

https://www.sandlawnd.com/dui-...

(I don't understand the odd wording at the start of this quoted paragraph because it sounds like it's being set up for a contradiction when it's not)

"While the United States may seem like we have high numbers for DUI accidents every year, we actually are the third worst country when it comes to drunk drivingâ"which obviously isnâ(TM)t great. In 2015, South Africa was ranked number one as the worst country when it comes to drunk driving. With 58% of their fatal accidents involving alcohol in some way, they sit high above the second and third seats. The second seat goes to Canada, at 34% and the third to the United States at 31%. Countries on the lower end of the spectrum include Germany (9%), Russia (9%), India (5%), and China (4%)."

FYI, I've been on Slashdot nearly 25 years (maybe more? I can't remember).

You can read my FULL post history. Hell, I was a "paying subscriber". I used to run Slackware as a desktop for 10 years. Then I went to XP, then 7, then 10, and now... I'm back to Linux. Precisely because of... Windows 11, Microsoft's shovelling of shite into my OS, and increased frustration with it.

I manage Windows professionally, thousands of clients, and... at home... I'm now entirely Linux. Would you like an inventory (but I really gave one in the post above)? And I'm Linux BECAUSE of modern Windows. I literally went DOS, Linux, Windows, Linux, Windows, Linux over ~30 years. I did an awful lot of work on a single-floppy Linux router distro called Freesco. I ported code to the GP2X, a Linux-based handheld that sold mostly in Korea.

And now... I've gone back to Linux, the December just gone, because I've had enough of fighting with Windows 11 professionally and Copilot, Edge, taskbars and all the other nonsense necessary to make the OS do what I want to do. So I bought a Framework laptop. You can see posts from me going back a year or so talking about getting one. You can see YEARS of posts about the Steam Deck and, before it, my desire to have the Steam Machine/Box concept work better than it did going back to the original time of release of SteamOS back then.

I got my laptop for Christmas. I installed Linux on it, day one. I have then been praising it on here, and other tech sites I frequent, on my same username.

Tell me... how is that "made up"?

"You know, all of the AI-generated content increasingly looks similar, and they're all beautiful..."

Yeah, you and I are not on the same page.

Why does America have 150,000 drivers who can't be trusted to not drink and drive?

And why are they allowed a licence?

Something like this needs density. If there's not enough people using it, then the per use cost will be far too much to make it economically viable. That makes cities much more attractive to startups like this. Of course there you have airspace issues with large buildings, so the true sweet spot may be relatively dense but very high income suburbs. But it sure as heck won't be rural.

Well, I like to think that I'm a tiny part of the reason for this sudden change of "heart" (yeah, right).

Because Windows stopped being an OS and started becoming a walking advertisement for products I have zero intention to ever use, or even entertain the idea of their use, tying me into Bing, into Copilot, into Microsoft accounts, etc. etc. etc.

So I ditched my last MS OS before Christmas.

So far, after a tiny period of adjustment to "modern" Linux, the impact has been:

- Utter boredom.

Things "just work". They work fast. They do what I ask. They don't argue. They don't pressure me. They don't get in my way. Updates sit quietly and wait for me, then install with the smallest impact possible, and in extremis require a maximum of 1 reboot, on my schedule, with my permission, no forcing of it.

The OS... is basically invisible to me.

Which is how it should always have been and how it used to be in the past. It shouldn't be any more than a glorified application launcher.

There aren't ten thousand background services sucking up most of the RAM and CPU, programs can't just lob stuff wherever they like, admin rights are only necessary for justifiable admin tasks, even Windows applications running on Linux just... work better. They're forced to play nicely. And when I do have a (rare) problem, I can kill a program and it... dies. Like stone dead. Gone. Goodbye. Instantly.

Plus, when I move 10,000 small files, it doesn't take a century to perform. Sure, there are some thing I'd change, but I'd say the OS has come 98% my way, and I've had to go 2% its way, which is in stark contrast to how Windows has ever worked.

My use of the computer is also: 99.9% my applications. 0.1% fighting with my OS / launcher / window management.

MS have a long way to go to get anywhere close to that. I've let it creep and creep and creep over the years for the "convenience" of having Windows applications and - thanks Valve! - Proton means that I'm not going to suffer that any more.

I now have a machine that runs my entire Steam library, at full speed, better than Windows could ever manage (I have already found half a dozen games that simply don't work on Windows any more and which "just work" on Linux/Wine/Proton without any tweaks, even).

My house is now entirely Linux. RPi's for "servers" and services, Steam Deck (which was worth the money just to prove the concept was now viable - I always wanted a Steam Box but they were just too expensive and not ready at the time), and now a Framework Laptop (because it officially supports clean Linux but also... because it does things that a laptop should do... like just let me change bits however I like without ten thousand screws and bending the mainboard to get it out).

Newsflash - you're not an amateur with that kind of kit running around.

Firstly, I see you have this notion that martian rocks must all be igneous.

You're not talking about rock, you're talking about regolith.

Depending on where the regolith is sourced

Regolith is not "sourced", it's blown across the whole planet. It's not simply "whatever the underlying strata is made out of".

But, since we are playing 'name the ignorance' in this exchange, your attestation stat perchlorate is 0.5% liberatable oxygen says 'Say i'm ignorant of basic chemistry without saying i'm ignorant of basic chemistry, and am bad at reading too.' The 0.5% statistic comes from the publication at bottom, and is the proportion of the regolith that is perchlorates.

I am the one who mentioned that regolith is 0.5% perchlorates, not that "perchlorates are 0.5% oxygen". *facepalm*

"Saying we'll get oxygen from the 0,5-1% of a poison in martian regolith, rather than bulk ice or CO2, is..."

For God's sake, learn to fucking read.

Washing the regolith to remove the perchlorate is a requirement for *any* other use of that regolith

Which is why you shouldn't be celebrating its existence. It is a problematic contaminant, not a resource.

As you have rightly pointed out, the water ice on mars is more 'frozen mud'. Cleaning the melt is going to be a necessary first step to using it *regardless*. That means either vacuum distillation, thermal distillation, or reverse osmosis filtration. Again, NOT OPTIONAL. This is necessary equipment that you need to bring, regardless.

And this just to get water, the most basic of offworld resources. And all of that equipment (especially the mining hardware itself) requires maintenance and spare parts, which impose more dependencies. And the TRL for use on Mars is low regardless.

You've gone from talking up the ease of operating on Mars to talking it down, yet your self-righteousness hasn't shifted at all in the process.

RO filtration is the least energy intensive of these.

Except, it isn't. 0,5-1% perchlorates. RO typically removes 90-95% of perchlorates. So you're down to ~500ppm. Human safety levels** are in the low parts per billion. You're five orders of magnitude off. Yes, you can purify water that far - and the more perchlorates, the easier - but you're talking an over millionfold reduction. It is not at all trivial. You're talking first RO to get it down to levels where it won't hinder bacterial growth, then bioreactor bacterial remediation, then filtration, then RO, then ion exchange. This is not some little, simple system.

** Plants can tolerate much more perchlorates than humans, but they also bioaccumulate perchlorates of exposed to them, so you have to reduce the water to low ppb levels.

The end products are clean water and perchlorate contaminated mud, and clean mud, with contaminated water.

Viola! *eyeroll*

And your "plan" for dealing with waste perchlorate doesn't just magically produce pure O2 and NaCl in the real world. First off, molten sodium perchlorate, which is what it becomes before it decomposes, is an extremely corrosive oxidizer. Exactly what are you planning to make the furnace out of, platinum? Secondly, you never get perfect decomposition. Apart from residual perchlorates, you have residual sodium chlorate, which is also corrosive, and is a literal herbicide. And your gas stream will contain contaminant chloride and chlorine dioxide, which, news flash, you don't want to breathe.

There is no way on Earth anyone would ever prefer this to just conducting electrolysis on the water that you've already purified.

No, you seem to think that this is about 4chan, rather than about what happens when websites don't comply.

Nobody gives a fuck about 4chan. What they want is it to be used as an example of what happens when companies that DO trade in the EU/UK don't comply.

So it's a fine. A court case. A larger fine. Another court case. Blocked.

Nobody cares if 4chan is still running the day after that. Or a year. Or a decade. What they will notice is "oh fuck, you can't just get to them in the UK/EU, so our UK//EU customers are going to be entirely locked out if we don't comply".

Which, everyone with a brain was able to know already so they paid up, or put in ID verification, or implemented a simple Geo-block.

But 4chan think that is magically doesn't apply to them and that blocking them in the UK will have no effect, right? Good. Perfect test case, with no victims. Block them. They won't care. But they will be blocked in the UK. System working as designed. And other companies that DO have revenue streams in the UK will then go "Hell, they blocked 4chan in the UK, and they don't even operate in the UK, why wouldn't they block us?"