antonymy

You need photo ID to verify your age to access "adult content" (which definition is ever-expanding outside the boundaries of smut) and now police begin using this new pool of facial data to surveil the public en masse.

They didn't even wait half a year to show their hand. That's how confident they are.

Been using Firefox since release. It's not as good as it once was, but then, nothing is anymore, on the internet. Still recommend it for every reason in this article. Honestly just UBo is enough of a reason.

I think I'm at the point where I value an ad-free internet more than I do youtube content. Certainly not enough to pay $12/mo to watch it without ads.

They actually like being featured on Google News and Facebook's news sections. They just want to be paid for it, or else force the tech giants to redirect traffic to them, directly. But as long as Google et.al. have the ability to walk away from the deal, they will exercise it, since they know the newspaper will feel more pain from the separation than the they will.

It's sad, but this isn't going to work. Facebook and Google don't need these newspapers. The newspapers need Facebook and Google. We already saw a law exactly like this one in Spain, after the EU tried protecting its local news outlets from Google, and the result was Google calling the bluff and simply pulling every newspaper in Spain from Google News until the nation capitulated and created exemption rules that essentially returned everything to status quo ante.

These kinds of laws are written by people who clearly do not understand the relationship between the tech giants and traditional media, and have no comprehension of who holds the leverage.

It's why I despair of smart phones dictating the course of the internet. These are platforms that are locked down to a degree that slowly strangles the rest of the internet. It's censorship not through the heavy hand of the state arresting people and confiscating servers, but creating a climate of fear and uncertainty over ruinous lawsuits and chasing advertising dollars. The censorship effect is obfuscated through so many apparently voluntary and open transactions that the public at large has no idea it is happening. It's extremely hard to talk about this with people in my life without sounding like a paranoid conspiracy theorist.

It's not that they're "anti-porn" it's that they're anti-risk. Porn sites have been getting in increasingly hot water for years for a variety of legal reasons, and all it takes is one major lawsuit against them trickling up to the payment process for enabling harm to set legal precedent and then they're getting sued for anything and everything on the basis they are enabling almost all kinds of web content.

It's an understandable fear. It's just a sad fact that they are an effective global duopoly so if they chicken out there's no alternative for people to turn to. More competition would help with this, but the threat of the lawsuit floodgates opening would still be there and create a chilling effect on payment processing. That has to be handled by legislation, but that's going down a whole other thorny road with many possible bad outcomes. The legislation we get may introduce new problems even worse than the ones it attempted to solve.

But I think it's still worth trying. The present situation is very bad for the future of an open internet.

Valve's issue is pretty much just a lack of serious competition against Steam. They do occasionally put out something new, just at their own pace. They aren't in any rush since their core business is virtually unassailable at this point.

They have less to fear about "professional executives" worming their way in because Valve is not a publicly traded company, unlike the other examples you mentioned. It's private, Gabe Newell calls the shots at the end of the day. There's no real avenue for people to buy their way onto a board of directors and exert influence on the company from on high, or oust its historic leadership. Valve's pretty well protected from that. But it can't protect itself from sloth induced by a lack of competition.

So it's not turning off mobile networks in particular, it's just a general power shortage, a consequence of which might be some cell service being interrupted. They made it sound like they were going to shut off mobile networks specifically to save power, which doesn't make sense for a couple of reasons.

Starting to feel like Reuters isn't worth my time anymore. Too many clickbaity titles like this lately.

Even if the wave isn't very tall, if it is fast-moving it can knock you off balance. Once you're down, wave doesn't have to be very tall to drown you. There's also the fact that rip currents are commonplace phenomena on beaches all over the world, so you combine that with a single unexpectedly fast wave and it's easy to believe a few people would die.

A $1 raise ain't nothing but it's a very short step up from nothing that hardly solves the underlying problem warehouse workers face.

This is the exact reason I have never "bought" digital "copies" of anything. A subscription service is one thing, but selling a "digital copy" is basically a scam.

"This time I really mean it," he bluffed.

I definitely worry about the future of scholarship as our print media becomes more and more fragmented and hidden. It's not necessarily about ensuring essential knowledge is carried forward, but rather a "sense of the past". In researching history, the further back you go the more fragmented and unreliable your sources usually become. So it becomes harder and harder to figure out the broad sweep of these past cultures, what life was like, the things they believed, and so on. And I think we're doing that to our present historical moment by deleting the recent past and creating a continuous present.

We have the Internet Archive, we have Wikipedia page histories, but everything else is ephemeral. If Archive.org ever goes the way of the Library of Alexandria, we'll have lost irreplaceable knowledge of the web itself, and the cultures that existed on it. It will live on only in living memory, but this is also transient, and soon nobody will live who remembers what this time period was like. Wikipedia will not reflect it, you'd have to dig through page histories to find fragments, like historians and archaeologists sifting through ancient manuscripts and ruins for clues.

A potential dark age is forming, and avoiding it right now hinges entirely on the continued efforts of two donation-funded organizations, one of which makes it increasingly harder to view the past, the other facing legal disputes that could see it shut down. I think we need to make archiving the present important, so it does not become a mysterious, inscrutable past for our descendants.

I just remember when the EU passed that legislation that made it legal for member states to require Google to pay a fee to newspapers for linking to their content in Google News. Only a few countries bothered to try enforcing it, notably Spain did, and the result was Google called their bluff and de-listed every newspaper in Spain from Google News. It did not take long until Spain relented and permitted newspapers to waive the requirement with exemptions (i.e. allow status quo ante), which is exactly what happened for the bulk of them.

Google definitely wants to stay in this market, but I don't think the EU has as much leverage as they think.

That's probably the goal, but Google is probably going to have anxiety about getting fined again if their compliance is not enough. Except in this case, the fines are so steep that it'd be very hard to over-spend on compliance. But it's just a race to the bottom in any case, Google only stands to make less and less money in the EU from now on.

Their annual revenue from the EU is only 17 billion dollars, as of 2021. The current fine is about a quarter of that. This is revenue, not profit. So this fine very likely impacted the bottom line for what Google is pulling out of the EU. And it was not even as big as they could've made it. It's very likely the EU refrained from the maximum fine amount because it would've pushed Google's EU operations firmly into the red.

And this is setting aside the costs of compliance to avoid more fines. Even if the costs are less than another fine, they're not nothing. You're looking at an entire year's profits from the EU essentially being wiped out by this fine, plus reduced profits going forward due to increased compliance costs and probably losing sales. And this is your best case scenario.

It would not take a 100 billion dollar fine to make Google leave the EU, it would only take another fine like this one.

The fallout from this should be interesting. This fine is a substantial part (roughly 25%!) of Google's overall revenue from the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, Africa), of which the EU is probably like 90%, at least, of the total, so it's probably toing the line of actually making the EU unprofitable to Google considering the costs of future compliance to avoid being fined again. Worse: this was not as steep as the fine could have been, they could've fined them about double this amount under current regulations, but chose not to. Probably because that would have pushed Google's EU operations into the red for sure and made the decision easy for them.

To be sure the company won't be in trouble financially, their global revenue can cover the fine, but that doesn't stop the EU from potentially being a net loss for the company going forward. Abandoning the EU would be a drastic step, though. It's going to be interesting to see how they adapt to this. Another fine on this scale and I think they will pull out.

Well...

SEC. 406. COPPA.

(a) In General.—Nothing in this Act shall be construed to relieve or change any obligations that a covered entity or another person may have under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (15 U.S.C. 6501 et seq.).

(b) Updated Regulations.—Not later than 180 days after the enactment of this Act, the Commission shall amend its rules issued pursuant to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 (15 U.S.C. 6501 et seq.) to make reference to the additional requirements placed on covered entities under this Act, in addition to those already enacted under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998 that may already apply to some of such covered entities.

Not exactly new rules, but they're making sure this doesn't overwrite anything they already enacted "for the children".

Every time I think about how to improve Twitter I inevitably conclude the simplest solution that generates the most net good for the world is to remove it from the internet. This is true for virtually all social media, however. The way these networking sites are set up is practically an invitation to bad actors and social engineers to manipulate large swathes of society, or at best, simply exploit people for advertising money. I don't think the good from these sites outweighs the bad, not even close. People who use them tend to become miserable, misinformed, and distracted. I have faith the internet can supply a better alternative for disseminating useful, timely information than Twitter. God I hope so, anyway, because if Twitter is the best we can do then there is no hope.

I have always preferred eating at restaurants alone to going with a group of people. If I have to go with somebody, I prefer one or two people at most. I also don't like to go to restaurants when they're very busy, since I feel a bit guilty taking up a whole table to myself when the restaurant is trying to seat lots of customers. Usually if I see there is a line, or am told there is a wait longer than a few minutes, I just leave, and go elsewhere. If I'm with people, they usually prefer to wait it out and then eat in the crowded, noisy restaurant, which is always a suboptimal experience for me.

Same. I honestly forget it has ads since installing firefox followed by ublock origin are the first two things I do on any computer I'm going to be using extensively. Over the years with different adblockers and browsers, some ads have squeaked through, but on the whole I've lived ad-free on the internet for almost two decades as well.

Dystopian call for even more surveillance.

Nobody is ever concerned about privacy until it's too late to be. It's just a question of when you learn this lesson, and how damaging it is. If you're very lucky you only suffer embarrassment.

There are many different types of income. While wages, salary, and general compensation for services (called "earnings") are often the main sources of income for individuals, they aren't the only sources. There's also interest, regular dividends, rental income, distributions from pensions or retirement accounts, and Social Security benefits. Equifax collets this data with the cooperation of employers.

Equifax also relies on employers to report data to them, so if your employer doesn't, then the existence of the Work Number is irrelevant. In the era of ubiquitous side gigs where people get paid as contingency workers rather than wages or salaries by the company, you run into issues relying on the Work Number, even before factoring in all the other types of income.

I'm waiting for the first case of a human artist being banned because their style was "too similar" to AI-generated art. I think that'll be the beginning of the end for the communities that do these kinds of bans.

Well that's going on the list of reasons to stay on Windows 10, not that it needs any more reasons.

William's children are too young to fulfill their role as immediate heirs. It's probably best to let Charles reign as long as possible until his grandchildren reach their majority.

Wikipedia wasted no time updating King Charles' page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles,_King_of_the_United_Ki...

only problem is ships are expensive.

Well not the only problem, there's also the fact ships are limited to water deep enough to carry them, so you can't go too far from the coast or navigable rivers. Granted, in Europe, there are lots of navigable rivers that make waterborne logistics fairly simple if you have the boats. Ask the Vikings.