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Okawari commented on California's Digital Age Assurance Act, and FOSS   runxiyu.org/comp/ab1043/... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti
wtallis · 10 days ago
> On an OS like Debian, does that mean a child can’t have the root password in case they use to it change the age? Does that mean we need a second password that needs to be entered in addition to the root password to change the age?

No. You're still not quite internalizing that the California regulation does not mandate any verification or enforcement or protection of the accuracy of the age bracket data. It mandates that the question be asked, and the answer taken as-is.

Which means that many of the concerns about implementation disappear, because the setting really does not need to be anything more than a simple flag that apps can check.

> Will Arduinos and similar devices also need to be age gated?

Only to the extent that they are general purpose computing devices, have an operating system, are capable of downloading apps, and are actually used by children (since the enforcement mechanism requires a child to be affected by the non-compliance). And if an app fails to obtain age information but also doesn't do anything that is legally problematic for a user that is a child, then it's hard to argue that the app's ignorance affected the child.

> Also, this doesn’t mean age _verification_ will simply go away.

It will in California, until the law gets repealed or amended. Apps won't be allowed to ask for further age-related information or second-guess the user-reported age information, except when the app has clear and convincing information that the reported age is inaccurate.

Okawari · 10 days ago
> No. You're still not quite internalizing that the California regulation does not mandate any verification or enforcement or protection of the accuracy of the age bracket data. It mandates that the question be asked, and the answer taken as-is.

That was my read of this as well. OS developers seems not not necessarilly need to make any effort here. Ask for an age as a number at account creation and let the user change it as they please at any given time.

This might be a dumb question, but what actually constitutes an "affected child for each intentional violation"? Violation of what? The text specifies that "A developer shall request a signal with respect to a particular user from an operating system provider or a covered application store when the application is downloaded and launched." Am I being negligent just for not checking the age, even if the application is unequivocally ok for all ages? And are children affected by my negligence in any way even though no one was hurt?

Okawari commented on Dead Internet Theory   kudmitry.com/articles/dea... · Posted by u/skwee357
jayd16 · 2 months ago
That's a flaw in the GP's plan, not a flaw in the observation that Discord is a good example of what they're asking for.
Okawari · 2 months ago
I guess I am kind of describing Discord in some sense, I personally discounted Discord as I've only ever used it as a free voice chat for small groups. But to be fair, I would rather leverage basic HTTP websites for consuming social media content than everything being that boring discord client.
Okawari commented on Dead Internet Theory   kudmitry.com/articles/dea... · Posted by u/skwee357
thesuitonym · 2 months ago
> I wish we gravitated towards that kind of internet again.

So do it. Forums haven't gone away, you just stopped going to them. Search for your special interest followed by "Powered by phpbb" (or Invision Community, or your preferred software) and you'll find plenty of surprisingly active communities out there.

Okawari · 2 months ago
Yeah, you are right! I have started going down that road the last year or so, but mostly in the IRC sphere. I started hanging out libera.chat, but found a smaller community on irc.inthemansion.com which I really enjoy.

I'm probably just jaded as most of the forums I visited back in the day became ghost towns during the 2010s. I should make more of an effort here

Okawari commented on Dead Internet Theory   kudmitry.com/articles/dea... · Posted by u/skwee357
tomaskafka · 2 months ago
That’s not because it’s decentralized or open, it’s because it doesn’t matter. If it was larger or more important, it would get run over by bots in weeks.

Any platform that wants to resist bots need to - tie personas to real or expensive identities - force people to add AI flag to AI content - let readers filter content not marked as AI - and be absolutely ruthless in permabanning anyone who posts AI content unmarked, one strike and you are dead forever

The issue then becomes that marking someone as “posts unmarked AI content” becomes a weapon. No idea about how to handle it.

Okawari · 2 months ago
It's never going to happen, but I felt we solved all of this with forums and IRC back in the day. I wish we gravitated towards that kind of internet again.

Group sizes were smaller and as such easier to moderate. There could be plenty of similar interest forums which meant even if you pissed of some mods, there were always other forums. Invite only groups that recruited from larger forums (or even trusted members only sections on the same forum) were good at filtering out low value posters.

There were bots, but they were not as big of a problem. The message amplification was smaller, and it was probably harder to ban evade.

Okawari commented on Local Journalism Is How Democracy Shows Up Close to Home   buckscountybeacon.com/202... · Posted by u/mooreds
ecshafer · 2 months ago
Local journalism is important but I am not really sure how to fix it. Lets say we make a big fund to pay for "independent journalism" at the local level. That only works for so long until people get inside with their own axe to grind and take control. The activist class will eventually get in, become managers and corrupt the organization if its a non-profit. If its a political organization it will have political pressures. If it is a for profit it will have financial incentives that probably cant survive in the modern day in small markets.
Okawari · 2 months ago
I think that supporting a wide spread of newspaper on the local level will alleviate all these issues in aggregate. This is what we do in Norway and I think it works quite well to be honest. My municipality of around 250k inhabitants has 4 newspapers that I am aware of, none of which feels very overtly influenced by activists nor political or financial pressures.

There are quite a few newspapers who are political and receive subsidies, but overall I think our system works quite well at providing high quality local reporting at affordable prices.

Okawari commented on Ravaan.art   ravaan.art/?seed=71dafa3s... · Posted by u/nateb2022
jonnyscholes · 3 months ago
Gosh it's hard not to enjoy this, even as an artist who is uneasy about the whole GenAI image thing. Having said that, I'm temporarily comforted at how ugly a lot of the abstract paintings are once animated.
Okawari · 3 months ago
I felt pretty much the exact opposite. I was immediately drawn to some of the abstract art while not particularilly enjoying the traditional paintings. I found them too uncanny and "lifeless".

That being said, if I had a screen that could reasonably pass as a framed image on the wall, I would love a version of this where I could have a well known picture on it that would primarilly be static but sometimes have subtle movements or shift about a bit as a fun novelty to trip over guests. The typical, blinking, repositioning. Like hoppers nighthawks, but the clerk serving a drink or two. The couple lighting a sigarette or someone walking past the diner.

Okawari commented on Porn company fined £1M over inadequate age checks (UK)   bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c... · Posted by u/ndsipa_pomu
crimsoneer · 3 months ago
I mean, while this might be true, I'm not sure democracies being totally incapable of regulating the internet is a good place to be. I'm not sure a race to the bottom (if you attempt to regulate us in anyway we'll leave/go complain to the US president) is really a great outcome here. "Porn websites should check your age" is not some radical totalitarian demand I think?
Okawari · 3 months ago
I think the "surveilance capitalism" and centralization of companies like Meta, Google etc has made many of us very sensitive to any systems that will leave traces of us against our will, be it porn, flock cameras or anything else that is similar.

I think we would have a lot less of a pushback against such policing efforts if governments had done a better job at reigning in tracking on the internet from the start. "Porn websites should check your age" is not that radical, but in a world where it doesn't feel unrealistic that much of the information about you is correlated and processed in ways that are not in your personal best interest, then it becomes another loop in the proverbial noose that can be used to hang us all.

Okawari commented on Beets: The music geek’s media organizer   beets.io/... · Posted by u/hyperific
tuukkao · 4 months ago
If you're using Navidrome or similar to stream your music then check out beets-alternatives [0]. It lets you sync (and optionally convert) your library or a subset of it to another location, in my case my music storage mounted with Rclone. It's especially useful if you need to have a different naming structure in your target directory for whatever reason. I like to keep each disc of a multi-disc album in in its own subdirectory but most streaming servers seem to prefer all tracks of an album to be in the same directory. With Beets-alternatives I can have a different naming structure for each collection vs. having to rename my primary collection to suit whatever streaming server I happen to be using.

[0]: https://github.com/geigerzaehler/beets-alternatives

Okawari · 4 months ago
One of my favorite beets projects is beets-flask.

It lets you set up fully or partially automated import pipelines with a nice web UI to manage any manual steps needed.

Importing is usually as simple as dropping a zip in a folder and the rest is managed automatically.

https://github.com/pSpitzner/beets-flask

Okawari commented on EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided   mastodon.social/@chatcont... · Posted by u/doener
Jensson · 6 months ago
> Wiretapping requires probable cause and a court order in order to be used chat control does not

Chat control does not allow the government to read anyones messages for any reason, so no that is not true.

> Wiretapping was not retroactive. This system will create records that can be stored for a long time for very cheap.

But storing these messages is illegal.

Okawari · 6 months ago
You are correct. I was still basing my post of the assumption that the AI scanning was still in the bill and that the proposed two strikes then chats would disclosed was there as well, which they is not. This provision seemed to imply that messages would have to be stored in order to be able to be provided after the two strikes.

I wasn't very clear in my original post always included an assumption that false positives were involved and that messages being stored were a result of that and not all messages being stored at all times.

The images and links that are scanned and is deems potentially problematic will be stored for up to 6 months or until they are deemed unproblematic. There is still a potential 6 month paper trail here, and in politically turbulent times that paper trail could still be damaging retroactively even if the report contains non CSAM.

Okawari commented on EU Chat Control: Germany's position has been reverted to undecided   mastodon.social/@chatcont... · Posted by u/doener
maybewhenthesun · 6 months ago
I agree. The opponents (I am one for sure) are often saying 'This is not about catching criminals'. And they are correct in the sense that it goes much further than catching criminals alone.

But there are a lot of people who are no experts in the matter (even among the politicians deciding this matter) and they will discard reasoning which start with 'it's not about catching criminals', because in many cases that is where the idea originates. Law enforcement has the problem that they can't really do (analog) wiretaps anymore in the digital age and they want to remedy that. However, everybody needs to realize that 'restoring the ability to wiretap' has side effects which are way more dangerous than the loss of the wiretap ability.

Okawari · 6 months ago
I think 'restoring the ability to wiretap' is misleading as this is not 'restoring the ability', its more akin to 'wiretapping everyone all the time'.

Wiretapping requires probable cause and a court order in order to be used chat control does not. It will report thousands daily and no one will be blamed or punished for false reports which turned out did not have probable cause. It was a reactive tool in the police's arsenal, it was not proactive like this is supposed to be.

Wiretapping requires/required significant manpower investment in order to surveil a single potential criminal which rightfully forced the police to prioritize their resources. Chat Control is automated and will enable the same amount of police to police more people.

Wiretapping was not retroactive. This system will create records that can be stored for a long time for very cheap.

This is not restoring wiretapping, this is supercharging wiretapping.

u/Okawari

KarmaCake day197April 19, 2015
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