I know in these parts Iâ(TM)m an outlier but I like the YouTube algorithm and would very much miss it if it were banned. Iâ(TM)ve got loads of creators on my feed who I never wouldâ(TM)ve found without the recommendation system. And I know thereâ(TM)s something new to me out there I will enjoy that it will recommend in the not too distant future. As it does every few weeks.

I also think it would bad in general as new creators would have a far harder time being discovered and weâ(TM)d be back to the bad old days of gatekeeping content commissioners or management companies with the financial muscle to market new talent. No thank you.

Iâ(TM)ve discovered a lot of new channels on YouTube thanks to the dreaded âoealgorithmâ. I wouldnâ(TM)t turn it off just because of that but if many people did then itâ(TM)s just another regulatory lock in for already established channels. As in so many industries. Perhaps that is the intention.

Maybe but Airpods and hearing aids have very different functionality. Speaking only for myself I'm not willing to accept loss of function or increased weight and size for a replaceable battery. If they can do it without those compromises then fine. However I would suggest such things are left to the market. If people value replaceable batteries then somebody will make a product with one.

I understand they need to release the source code for the GPLv2/LGPL components they have used/modified but what's the argument for releasing all of their source code? The whole point of LGPL is that you can link against it without having to open up your application source code. Surely the actual interesting part of Vizio OS itself is just a proprietary application or set of proprietary applications running on the system? Or is there an argument they have linked to GPL components in the application?

> Expect AI to get a lot more expensive as people and companies become dependent on it. This is by design.

AI is being sold at a loss so prices will increase regardless. Investors are hoping companies become dependent on it but if they do it will be because it works. Right now we are in the experimentation stage and it is by no means clear that AI provides anything of lasting value.

Ah that old chestnut! Definitely a winning argument! Well, enjoy your day, I am defeated.

This is not IT. You are vastly overstating the difficulty of setting a simple option on a device they already know how to use. Parents are motivated to protect their children and even if they are not aware of a prominent and simple to use 'kid mode' option a public education programme will change that very quickly. There is no motivation to learn how to programme a VCR or dig into weird options in operating systems, it's a false equivalence.

I don't know who "we" is but I'm not from the USA. However, if you're not enabling parental controls on your child's device you are not protecting them, you are putting them at risk. That is a fact. And it is a fact that won't change even if big tech enables age verification everywhere. Parents have to learn how to do new things to protect their children in other aspects of their lives, if they don't they will find themselves in trouble with social services. Protecting them online is no different.

Parental controls are pretty easy to set-up as-is but making it easier along with a public education campaign can be a solution that respects the privacy of others. Add a prominent (easy to find) option to the phone 'Enable kid mode", enter the kid's age, enter a PIN. Do not tell your kid the PIN. Give phone to kid. Problem solved.

If you're trying to argue that 45% of parents are too stupid to do that, yet they can install and use apps, sign up for accounts on social media and what not, then I simply don't believe it! It's not a credible argument.

Good parents should be setting up parental controls anyway, even if the major sites add age verification there's plenty of other sites you are allowing your kid to access that won't. You cannot outsource the protection of your children online no matter how much you sacrifice the privacy of others.

Use the highly effective parental controls available to you. It will stop your under 16s accessing social media and in addition will stop them from installing bypass VPN software on any devices you give them (i.e. those that you control). There is no more effective solution than parents parenting. You know how IT won't let you do anything or access anything at work? It's the same.

It is about proportionality. For most of your life you will not actually need ID to do any of those things. True, young adults will need ID from 18 until their mid-20s or so. But in those cases you show your ID to a single person, who will check the photo and birth date with their human eyes and hand it back to you. This is a far cry from sending identity data to a remote server of questionable repute, after which you have no idea what will happen to it. You would really be happy to give a site like 4chan or some random porn site your ID? That's what the government is demanding we do. This is not a remotely equivalent situation to buying age restricted products in real life and actually extremely dangerous. A much better solution is for parents to make sure the devices they are giving to their children are safe for them to use. Now you can argue "parents are too stupid for that to work". But I did not say 'do nothing', I said teach parents what they need to do. I think most take their kids welfare seriously and so will be on board. The government can also help by, for example. mandating that new phones come pre-loaded with parental controls enabled by default and a clear and easy set-up flow parents can use before they hand the device to their child. Doing this also makes it much harder for the child to work around as they will not be able to install VPN software without parental approval. As for your last point there is a reason for Article 8 in the ECHR. If you want to make every aspect of your life public then go ahead nobody will stop you. However, we have a right not to do that and to not be compelled to do that.

Ofcom really are a national embarrassment. Teach parents how to use the highly effective tools at their disposal to protect their children. Instead of ineffectively trying to project international jurisdiction and egregiously violating the rights of adults under the ECHR. The opportunity to remove this awful government cannot come soon enough.

Not that difficult. Here in the UK the Gambling Commission has already said that so called 'prediction markets' are covered under betting intermediary laws similar to betting exchanges and would therefore need to be licensed, regulated and taxed as gambling companies not as market brokers.

Uh no, that is not remotely what I said. I said that it's not weird for people to not have knowledge of things for which they have no use. Times change, being able to read an analogue clock used to be an essential life skill, now it is not. Of course it is natural, not weird, that more and more people never learn (or forget) how to do it. How you could possibly construe that in the way you did I have no idea. By all means fill your head with whatever knowledge you like. Learn to tell the time by the sun and stars, if you like. There are loads of forgotten skills that almost everybody used to know and now almost nobody does. It's not a bad thing, it's just a change.

I don't think it's weird - just times are changing as they always do. Digital clocks are everywhere and analogue clocks are rare nowadays. There's no more reason to learn how to read an analogue clock than there is to learn to how to use an old rotary telephone. Of course if you take away all the digital clocks and put kids into an environment where there is only analogue clocks they will struggle, it will generate a lot of click-baity headlines with outraged older people but I'm sure the kids will pick it up very quickly - or, of course, the schools can just update their clocks - as they are doing here, much to the dismay of the Daily Mail set.

Hmm. I went from 6 to 11 to 15 and probably the next one will be the 19 or 20. Just because they release a new product every year doesn't mean you have to buy it and I think very, very few people actually do. On the other hand if they only released one every 4 years you could be buying 3 year old tech when you need a new phone instead of something that is current. So personally prefer they stick to the current release cycle. I don't really see why people get upset about it tbh there's no downside to the consumer.