“New legislation mandates that we no longer offer the VPN connections necessary for our remote workers to access the company intranet off premises. Starting immediately, all employees are to return to office 7 days a week. If this does not work for you, please reach out to HR and they will accept that as your resignation in lieu of a written document.”
— Meta (the corp pushing the age verification laws), probably.
If you thought Flock cameras were a bad situation, imagine not being able to query, read, write, or probably even speak about topics that they decide are “unpatriotic” or “satanic”.
The only difference between right now and then is that right now they aren’t doing anything about it. They already have the data about people’s opinions and leanings as a side effect of the massive network of tracking built for targeted advertising.
It will obviously be worse when we’re stuck renting computers, but what you’re describing is a today problem just as much as it’s a future problem. The only reason it hasn’t turned full 1984 is because they haven’t gone full mask off yet.
No, it won’t. It will cause more of the supply to be reallocated away from consumers into enterprise, and that is exactly what the big tech companies want to see happen.
Having access to a computer and phone is as much of a necessity to survive in modern society as internet is. When personal computing is unaffordable to the point where subscription computing is a good enough “deal” for consumers to jump on, the ball will start rolling towards the inevitable price squeeze that we have no choice but to accept.
Me too. I thought I was safe as a Ottoman Empire expatriate living in Arrakis! I don’t want LLMs to connect this account to my pseudonymous mommy blog where I write about my three children who might exist but could be delusions of my untreated schizophrenia.
No, it is bad.
Suppose it’s used to verify your age when visiting Pornhub. How is Pornhub going to trust the user’s computer didn’t lie about the user’s age? A “just trust me bro” sent by the browser isn’t going to suffice; teenagers would find a way around that.
Thr attestation will have to be cryptographically signed by some trusted party—and that’s either going to be the government, or the operating system vendor.
If it’s the government holding the signing keys: the website can now verify that you’re a resident of $state in $country and use that for fingerprinting and targeted advertising. And what if your country doesn’t participate, or if Pornhub doesn’t trust the signing keys used by the government of Estonia? Tough shit, no porn for you! It would be impractical to manage all those keys, though, so why not instead leave it up to the operating system vendor?
If it is left the operating system vendor, it’s going to end up being exactly the same as Google Play Service’s SafetyNet “feature”. If you’re not using an approved operating system (a.k.a. Windows, MacOS, stock Android, iOS) you’re not visiting Pornhub. Or a banking app. Or applying for jobs. Etc.
This bill is a poison pill for device ownership and FOSS operating systems being handed to corporations on a silver platter.
It wouldn’t even work on paper. All it would take to twist this into something dystopian is requiring cryptogtaphic attestation for the age range, and knowing lawmakers, they would justify it as a countermeasure for kids lying about their age. Expand the feature as a web API so websites can use the “easier” and “more secure” system-level age verification process and—oh look, now we can’t use important websites without a commercial operating system.
It would be like Secure Boot but worse. At least with that you can turn it off or enroll your own keys.
The blogger in question doxxed the owner/maintainer of Archive.today who in return doxxed the blogger.
Did you actually read the two articles posted by the blogger? The archive.today owner wasn’t doxxed. No personally identifying information was provided; it only aggregates already-known info including a couple of fake aliases. The most it concludes is that the guy is Russian or operating out of Russia.
https://gyrovague.com/2026/02/01/archive-today-is-directing-a-ddos-attack-against-my-blog/
Using a reskinned Google Chrome protects you from malicious Chrome extensions how, exactly?
He also created JavaScript, IIRC.
Big no thanks /j
It’s poor journalism, yes. Especially if it’s a lack of disclosure rather than an explicit refusal for disclosure, as investigation takes time.
However, my opinion is that for a corporation, an explicit refusal to provide data could be valid data when morally judging them. They are entitled to the same legal “innocent until proven otherwise” standard as individuals, yeah. But a non-person entity doesn’t need the same privacy rights that a person does. They only need whatever privacy is required to maintain confidentiality (e.g. trade secrets, business strategy, insider information, etc.).
If they had non-incriminating and non-confidential evidence proving their innocence, surely they would prefer to release it to minimize reputational damages. So, if they choose not to, it either means that the evidence needs to be confidential, or that it actually is incriminating. Which of those it is, who knows. It’s still not a good look, though.
A general rule of thumb: if a corporation is not disclosing data to substantiate its claim of innocence, it’s likely because the data proves the exact opposite.
Funny how it’s only a problem when using the Snap distribution.
It’s not a glitch bug, it’s a feature.
Yep. When talking to Russians who emigrated away from Russia, you will find plenty of stories just like your sister’s friend’s one.
What the tankies idolizing the country seem to not realize is that living there as a national is oppressive. Your standard of living depends on staying in the good graces of the government—good graces that can quickly be lost by appearing to go against them.
The United States government is working its way towards that at an astonishing pace, but saying Russia has more freedoms is a complete delusion.
Chinese, Russian and Iranian people don’t need us to fight for their ‘freedom’,
Oh look, yet another Tankie who thinks the grass would be greener where the lawn describes itself as communist.
How’s that “more freedom” been going for the Uyghur? Or maybe you meant the freedom to free-fall out a window when running as a political opposition to Putin?
I agree with your overall opinion, but I just don’t agree with how the problem was presented. Your statement, with more of the surrounding context:
… lemmy.ml, works more like that than you realize. e.g. a change is soon going to give lemmy.ml veto power in what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances …
The key words here are “allowed to be acknowledged as existing”. Not acknowledging a community’s existence means not federating it. .world does that with db0’s piracy community because of EU laws, and it’s basically an instance-imposed community ban. Pyfed has/had a hard-coded denylist of community names in the source code that stopped them from being federated, and the result was none of the instances running unmodified Piefed were able to access them.
I wouldn’t have an issue with if you said a change in Lemmy “gives lemmy.ml exclusive control over promoting what communities show up as popular in other instances”. They don’t have the ability to censor the existence of communities that go against their views just the ability to censor their promotion. That’s a big problem, but it’s not as catastrophically bad as them having the power to censor the actual content on other instances.
I dislike centralization as much as the next person and have my issues with lemmy.ml being allowed to control anything outside its own instance, but I think the way you phrased it is misleading.
what communities are allowed to be acknowledged as existing to new instances
That suggests .ml has the ability to prevent communities from being acknowledged at all by other instances, while the anti-feature is actually about them being the sole source of truth for what counts as a “popular” community.
They can censor and curate that list to their authoritarian-apologist desires—which is a problem—but it only affects discoverability when browsing for popular communities, and instance admins can (and should) turn that off.
Your source is 3 months old and doesn’t back up your claims.
what does “hardcode lemmy.ml as a source to pre-fetch popular communities” mean in practice.
It is an attempt to pre-populate new instances with some popular communities which is seen as a way to improve discoverability. I find the general concept of using “popularity” for that to be somewhat problematic, but the main issue I have with the actual implementation is that it uses lemmy.ml as the source of truth for that, and there is no way to change that*.
You would hope, but knowing how competent copilot is, it’s just going to turn out like this:
User:
I’m running out of space, can you help me clean up?AI:
Sure thing, I can help with that. You have some programs that haven’t been opened since 2017. Would you like me to delete them?User:
YesAI: OK, let me do that for you.
I apologize, but as an AI Agent, I am not allowed to delete files or uninstall programs automatically. You can remove them yourself, however. I have created the cleanup.txt file on your desktop, which you can run by renaming the file to cleanup.bat, right-clicking on it, and selecting “Run as administrator”.
User:
Thank you, I did that but it only freed up a little bit of space. Can you find more?Error processing request: 0xC3E9A005.
Unable to connect to copilot agent service:
The system can not find the module specified: “kernel32.dll”
Legal, probably. Whichever corporations push that hypothetical bill are going to write it very specifically to ensure that it excludes their use cases.
Here’s an example of how they could do it:
Site–to-site VPN? Fine, it’s destined for the intranet.
NAT? Also fine, it is the originating internet-connected network.
HTTP reverse proxies? Still fine, they pass the origin IP along.
VPN that routes all traffic through it? You’re getting locked up and they’re throwing away the key.