While I am not convinced that is the real reason, it would make a lot of sense if it was.

Indeed.

It's mandatory for them because there is so much AI slop now it's starting to infect their data sets. Facebook doesn't give a shit about the quality of their advertising because no matter how many bots there are people keep buying the ads. But the advertising is only about 1/3 of their revenue 2/3 of it is selling data to brokers and law enforcement.

There is so much AI slop and it is so sophisticated it's becoming difficult to keep it out of their data sets and that's gradually making the data sets useless.

So they are going to force complete tracking under the guise of think of the children so that they and they alone know who is a bot and who isn't. As an added bonus is also means that they can effectively and easily figure out who is a person and use their data to train llms.

AI slop is basically an existential threat to these companies because at the end of the day they do need to know who is and isn't a real user and they need to be able to do that quickly and effectively. So mandatory age verification is the way to go.

Your privacy is completely irrelevant. And frankly I think it's irrelevant to most people here. Everyone will talk about how important privacy and internet and anonymity is but when it comes time to vote a dozen other issues come first often pretty stupid ones.

So Mark Zuckerberg can go around buying up laws and there really isn't anything we can do about it because voters prioritize other things.

Taxes made them successful. We used to have super high taxes for the wealthy and corporations. This created a use it or lose it mentality among businesses because they couldn't just pocket all the money themselves because it would be taxed up the wazoo at a certain point. There were ways around taxes even back then but they weren't nearly as effective as they are now where you have billionaires paying an effective tax rate of 0%

Also stock BuyBacks used to be illegal. Stock BuyBacks mean that companies don't invest anymore they hold on to their cash so that they can do BuyBacks and pump the stock during downturn. This is exactly why stock BuyBacks were illegal for so long.

I don't think folks realize how much of a role public policy plays in their daily lives or the myriad of knock-on effects from those kind of policies. There's an idea of a chesterton's fence, which is a fence that you don't pull down unless you know damn well why it was put up. High taxes and Wall Street regulation were a classic chesterton's fence.

Well, yes. I am aware what the GPL means, but I realize my statement may not have been clear enough. Lets me rephrase that: "A distro that is hard to compile/modify for a regular user".

Interesting. Now /. is not important enough for somebody to get paid to push this crap. Hence I think deeply mentally defective person with delusions of superiority. You know, like the a bit more extreme conservatives. I hear some of them even claim these days that the war with Iran is a good thing and that of course the US will win and everything will be fine afterwards. No actual expert has stated something even remotely like that as the best-case scenario.

The depth of sheer human mental incapability and capability for delusion is truly staggering.

That is why I wrote "And it needs to be done by the right people" ...

Some people are like that: Complete failures at reality perception.

You seem to have slept through that course because you do not even have the very basics right. First, for the El Gamal asymmetric scheme, there is a security proof. This proof does not extend to all possible attacks, but is pretty strong and the limitations can be fixed. Second, AES is a _symmetric_ algorithm. This is so basic that I must conclude you would have failed that course if there was any real examination. And lastly, you seem to have a reading disability, because I did nowhere claim that AES is unbreakable. My claim was that it is not breakable by QC or that it getting breakable by QC would implicate it also is conventionally breakable because QCs cannot practically do brute-forcing of the remaining effective key length.

Linux may go away in the US. And the damage done will be extreme. But, you know, from history there is a pattern that may apply here: Empires in decline trying to redefine reality with laws that make no sense but do accelerate that decline. This may be what we are seeing here: An increasing distance between reality and the laws that get made.

But Linux will be fine. Its massive benefits will just stop being available in some regions of the planet.

A closed-source distro can be made compliant. A preinstallation can be made compliant. Linux cannot be made compliant and you can simply remove this check by a reinstallation or a respective script that runs from an external boot medium. Trivial. Easy enough that a smart 10 year old can do it.

The only way compliance could be forces in FOSS is to outlaw using and running most of that FOSS. Even these utterly dumb lawmakers will find that extremely destructive and far too expensive for them.

Thanks for the confirmation. How pathetic.

There is a solution to the AI slop problem: Hire competent, experienced engineers and let them make the tech decisions. That is just not a solution Microsoft can implement, because they do not have the understanding what it takes to make solid products. They would have the money and if they offer enough, they would even get some of the really good engineers that have turned away from Microsoft in disgust a long time ago.

What likely does not have a solution is the sheer mountain of technological debt they have in most of their products. They are now at a point where most changes break something in some unexpected place. The only fix at that point is to throw it away and do a reimplementation with fundamental architectural fixes. This requires a 5 year or so stagnation period. And it is very expensive. And it needs to be done by the right people, which MS very likely does not have or they would not be in this mess. It also requires understanding that you are in a deep, existential crisis. But it can be done. I just do not think MS can do it. And hence what they are going to do is slowly heading for a collapse where issues they cannot fix anymore (because too much breaks when they try) have piled high enough for their main products to become unusable.

It is called a mountain of technological debt. The whole thing is a fragile mess and cannot be fixed anymore, but any changes come with huge risks. Essentially, fixing one thing breaks three others in surprising and unexpected places. Which is pretty much the pattern we are seeing.

As to that "commitment to software quality, reliability and stability", that is just them acknowledging there is a serious issue because they understand they cannot hide it. So they decided to at least get some fake appearance of honesty out of it. Of course, the commitment is not real. Same as "Security is our highest priority" stated by MS twice now after massive screw-ups. The screw-ups simply continued after that.

Hence MS will just continue to slowly make things worse, because the mess they made cannot be fixed and their business model requires constant changes in functionality, which the most effective enemy of "quality, reliability and stability". In a sense, MS products are low key "constant delivery scams", where the next version or the one after is promised to finally be the one that is great and will make it all worthwhile. They would actually need to throw it (Windows, Office, Azure, etc.) away and start over and they would need to get actually competent and experienced engineers to make the decisions. People which they probably do not even employ anymore and whose value MS management never understood.

Well, guess what, if you massively prioritize revenue over engineering quality, you can, in a over-hyped and immature field, make stellar profits for a while. What you cannot do is deliver a good product. And at some time (and MS is there already), you cannot even deliver a mediocre product anymore.

GitHub apparently has dropped below 90% uptime and it's very likely because they are using AI slop to write important code and it doesn't work.

It's a huge problem but there isn't really a solution.