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Comment Re:Coming soon off the back of this (Score 1) 78

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:Dumb precedent. Addiction is on the user. (Score 3, Insightful) 78

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) 42

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."

Submission + - Federal Cyber Experts Thought Microsoft's Cloud Was "a Pile of Shit." (propublica.org)

madbrain writes: Federal Cyber Experts Thought Microsoft’s Cloud Was “a Pile of Shit.” They approved it anyway.

To move federal agencies to the cloud, the government created a program known as FedRAMP, whose job was to ensure the security of new technology.

FedRAMP first raised questions about Microsoft's Government Community Cloud High s security in 2020 and asked Microsoft to provide detailed diagrams explaining its encryption practices. But when the company produced what FedRAMP considered to be only partial information in fits and starts, program officials did not reject Microsoft’s application. Instead, they repeatedly pulled punches and allowed the review to drag out for the better part of five years. And because federal agencies were allowed to deploy the product during the review, GCC High spread across the government as well as the defense industry. By late 2024, FedRAMP reviewers concluded that they had little choice but to authorize the technology — not because their questions had been answered or their review was complete, but largely on the grounds that Microsoft’s product was already being used across Washington.

Comment Re:We should be very very careful here. (Score 1) 110

First up, before anything else, I am extremely glad you got the hope and encouragement you needed. Grief is rough, especially when you're going through it alone.

You are correct, so I'm somewhat careful with the AI dance. I will rarely discuss inner feelings with it, because that pushes the risk higher precisely because it is a mirror. Like the one in the Harry Potter novel, it will show your innermost desires. If you'd rather a different analogy, it's an amplifier, and if you talk for too long with it, the positive feedback loop does some interesting things with your mind that aren't terribly printable. And that's not always the greatest idea.

So I use it for wild speculation in science fiction/fantasy. Enough that it helps with the intellectual boredom, but not so much that I venture into believing it's real.

Comment We should be very very careful here. (Score 2) 110

The idea that "normal" people are immune to delusions does somewhat fly in the face of research showing the incredible ease of inducing false memories, the research into mass hysteria (such as the Satanic Panic), and research into mob dynamics.

I freely admit that I'll sometimes simply sit and chat with AI, because there really aren't many humans who have the capacity to hold conversations any more, and that puts me in an extremely high-risk group. But, honestly, the choices these days are AI (and risk becoming psychotic), social media (and risk becoming suicidal or psychotic), or hang out with the same sort of people who have done so much damage over time (and risk being suicidal), or... well... really, that's about it.

There are no good options. The outcomes are bleak and, unless you are in a clique, that's how it is and how it has always been.

Comment Britain's establishment... (Score 4, Interesting) 91

...is largely irrelevant to the question (he has worked in war zones and those tend to be, ummm, less respectful, shall we say....) and is prone to change its mind at the drop of a hat. There's sectors in the British political scene who have no problem with promoting acts of terror and murder against those they don't like and it's kinda unlikely that they'll hold a referendum on whether to murder a street artist if he posts something they find offensive.

(Depending on which part of the political scene you find yourself allied with, you'll doubtless point to other sectors, but it seems very very unlikely that anyone would subscribe to the notion that there aren't influential psychopaths in Britain, even if there's no agreement on who those are.)

Britain DOES enshrine a right to privacy, as Rupert Murdoch keeps discovering, and much of Europe mostly enshrines the same ideas (occasionally even more strongly). As for "public interest", I would LOVE to hear an explanation of precisely what public interest this serves. No, the public being interested is not the same thing.

Comment Re:Interesting but not exciting (Score 2) 52

It is certainly true you can't watch the whole of The Dalek's Masterplan (where you should really include Mission to the Unknown, making it a 13-parter). The full audio exists, the Target novelisation of it exists (it spans 2 novels!), but yeah, it would be nice if we could someday watch the whole story.

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