bigB

Going to say Nope there....I know a lot of kids using discord, they do not have age checks in Australia.

Not sure who you have spoken to, but I don't know one single parent who wanted this. In fact most of them have said they will assist their kids to bypass it.

Well I should have worded it "A big reason the say they are banning it is Cyberbullying" , I don't believe that at all, but you are 100% correct, they hate big tech as it always beats our corrupt, biased and inept traditional media.

How long will it take them to ban communications ?

A big reason they are pushing this is Cyberbullying....yet a recent death in the news this week, the kid was literally bullied/sextorted via SMS....not social media.

Without banning SMS and possibly calls as well, it debunks this argument

The criticism is not that it wont be watertight, its that it will be ineffective in achieving what they say the reasoning is.

1. Kids are already moving to platforms that are not included in the ban, groups of friends will choose their own apps to make their group home, including Russian and Chinese apps ( already happening now)

2. Some kids have found ways around the included platforms...not surprising

3. One of the reasons they are spruiking is to stop Cyberbullying. Its ironic then that a big problem in schools across the country is physical bullying in the school grounds, with the educational authorities doing nothing about it. I know this one to be fact and have multiple instances that I personally know of where it happens and no action is taken. Our Government doesnt want to know about this at all

4. The platforms that have been banned are mostly "Big Tech" something that our Government hates with a passion, while many others go untouched. Discord is not included nor Telegram (how are these not social media, they literally allow people to socialise). I feel this is more of a weakening jab at Big Tech by our government to "stick it to them"

5. Day 3 and its pretty ineffective so far. There are many under 16's still have accounts on the blocked socials, and within the Family circle the only one that has been banned is actually 17, having her Instagram blocked ??? so not an awesome start at all.

My thoughts on this is there is very few things that will stop a sufficiently motivated teenager. I Know this as I have these conversations alot with my kids. They will work around it or go to whatever is out of scope of the blocking.

The only thing the Australia Government is great at is political grandstanding, regardless of the party in power.

It actually was pixel art, hand ( or rather mouse) crafted by the artist using a real picture for reference. I remember reading an article way back when where they interviewed her about the artwork. Amazing artist who I think at the time worked for Electronic Arts, but was pretty prolific in the Amiga space back in the day.

There is in depth information on its workings, on the website itself, in the newsgroups and in the podcast. If the author of the article were to look it would remove any "magic" of its workings. The author apparently has an axe to grind, for whatever reason , having said that , it may be for a very good reason but for transparency sake this should be included in the article. Instead its just a weird ramble about what he thinks of other tools and that he thinks Spinrite is a "scam" without technically explaining why, boiling it down to essentially a technically worded opinion piece.

Im guessing the author of this has somewhat of an issue with Steve Gibson and GRC, and has obviously spent some time mulling over how to write a very wordy and seemingly in-depth bashing of the their Spinrite software. However if you like myself have seen it work, and actually take a previously unusable hard drive to a usable state to allow a successful recovery of data, or in recent times, take an SSD with poor performing read and write speeds to a significant improvement after running Spinrite on the drive, you will be able to skip much of the diatribe in this post and actually see that it more of a character assassination on GRC and Gibson himself. Is the software 100% guaranteed to work, nope and I probably wouldn't recommend it for critical enterprise data recovery if you have the budget to spend on commercial recovery services, but as a low price maintenance tool it works well for many. The Author of this posts seems pretty knowledgeable, and probably has alot of offer, which is why its a pity his ego and spiteful nature seeps into his writing.

That was a trip down memory lane. I loved the Amiga, I owned 3 of them at one stage, but ended up moving on after the collapse of Commodore. Still has a place in my nostalgic heart though

This is where I am headed this year too, in the bid to save money Ive got an agreement with the kids...1 video subscriber service only at a time, between Disney+, Netflix and Paramount+. We watch what we want to on one, then cancel and switch. Hoping I can stick to it to save some dollars. Netflix is just ridiculously expensive now

Looks like he is getting out before the Sh!t hits the fan. As soon as they begin stopping password sharing im out and know many others that will follow. Its surprising the amount of people are only hanging onto it because their family share passwords with them and they feel guilty if they cancel....that will all go away if they stop it , and so will many subscribers

Well i did not see it as shallow, rather more of a succinct question.... but we all have different perspectives and views i guess.

I do see your point on this, though not sure if you can use that differentiation between human inspiration and what a computer is doing, we take a mental image and interpretation could be seen as metadata. Just because the mechanics are different doesn't mean its not similar in process. I guess you could say the emotion is not there, but is that enough to differentiate ? Still a good point though , adds more questions to the mix

That is a very good point actually, and one that I am sure will be tested in court...as I said it will be interesting to see where it leads

>Their initial response was not lazy. Yes it was, it didn't consider what could have been meant and instead of asking they presumed the worse and attacked. Yes the initial comment was short, but also a very valid question even if it was lazy as well. If one wants to critisise, it should not be done by doing the same as what the criticism is about...in my opinion of course

Much like your response, but yet you did it anyhow

Well while I see your eagerness to defend the definition of human, it may for futures sake be a very valid question. It may not be too far in the future here we will see brain enhancements, or maybe even ocular implants which a "human" will read with but extra processing takes place elsewhere by machines. What if its a blind human, using machine assisted reading, what if humans are reading and inputing data into the machine ? All these questions and more should be asked now....so we can plan for the future. Right now is a great example, we are beginning to see the explosion of AI creation, yet nothing to govern it. Dont be so quick to smack down questions until you consider the broader implications is all I am saying

My rather unpopular view is that if its available for humans to read on the internet, there is nothing different than a machine reading it, other than scale. There is nothing stopping a human from reading your code and using it themselves, or at the very least adapting it for themselves. Unless its a copy or contains actual code you have written then Im not sure you can actually defend it....other than having it locked down on the internet. Of course none of this is tested in court, and my feeling is that once it is, we will end up with a system similar to the robots.txt or maybe even the ML companies forced to attribute work, which would be a major pain for them. Personally Im not sure where I stand with what is right or wrong as I can see both arguments...for example Artists regularly take inspiration from closely studying other artists, producing works from them which is often similar or the same style. Yet this is seen as perfectly ok in the Art world, as long as its not a copy, much of the time they dont even need to say who inspired them. How is this different from AI doing the same thing other than it not being human ? On the other hand someone sees a company making money from something that looks inspired from their art, with no credit, I can also understand how they might feel...its going to be very interesting how this plays out, and at this point either side could win

In all honesty I get better prices and quicker delivery from Ebay than i would on Amazon on Black Friday....makes no difference to me at all

I Agree 100%....your social status really only depends on your ability to say yes everytime a relative, friend, friend of a friend and maybe a relative of a friend of a friend has a problem with [Insert anything that contains a circuit board] To be honest I charge everyone now for fixing stuff, relatives included (except my mum...Im not an asshole lol)

Well you haven't really state any benefit of traditional currency either....it can be given, taken, lost, stolen...and given the current world situation it is certainly not stable. Cryptocurrency has every benefit of normal currency for the user, less beneficial for law enforcement and governmental control, but control is not always a good thing either. Your talking about a currency....why does it have to perform something magical for it to be "good"

People in general are detrimental to society, regardless of what currency we are using. Your argument is pretty weak considering conventional currency has been used for illegal and immoral activities since it was a thing, and even before that there were illegal trade in goods and services. All your examples in your arguments have been around long before cryptocurrency, with the exception of ransomware, which still was around prior to bitcoin, but i will grant you is much easier now. Nothing new really except a new payment method. It all comes down to the fact that there is a percentage of people out there that are not "good" people, with the definition of "good" relative to your perception of the situation. this will always be the case, regardless of technology. Cryptocurrency problems, are just a symptom of a greater problem which is human nature...which you cannot change.

You have consented to your friend having your data in his phonebook...it has nothing to do with Facebook. Its like saying that if your money is in a bank, and that bank gets robbed then the theives are responsible for you getting your money back, not the bank. You as a third party have no recourse on Facebook, but you should against your friend who shared the phonebook with consent

As for the grandma analogy, you indeed did consent to your data being shared, as thats what you agree to as being part of Facebook

While they are not as good as they could be, there have been many cases awarded against Telcos, ISP's, Banks and Energy providers. It can only operate within our laws though so I do agree they could be given more powers, but only a decent government can do that, sadly which we havent had for a long time now.

Its pretty simple really, Valve just need to get over its god complex and abide by a countries laws. Lets be honest, the Policy in Australia mandates that it must be "fit for purpose" and it pretty fair with its judgement on such things. I know through personal experience that some games state controller support when they dont actually have it, ive got a couple of games which say co-op when its not actually true, I have a VR game which was VR then pulled VR support a month after I got it ( though it was a free to play game so cant complain there). The fact is they have to offer a fair refund policy and in Valves case this would be best to be decided on a case by case basis. All they have to do is state in its current refund policy that it doesn't revoke any users refund rights within their countries laws. Many refund and warranty statements say this and they are perfectly legal. Its not an issue of abuse, its an issue of doing the lawful thing when its the law

Lol...there are ALOT more buggy , unsecured devices on the internet that are made by companies with "professional" programmers. Look at the crappy DVR's and Webcams coming out of China, not to mention the buggy and perpetually exploitable software that companies like Microsoft and Adobe produce ( and sell for profit) I agree that inexpensive and easy to use developer boards make it easier for a hobbyist to screw up, but the things that are doing the most damage on the net are not hobbyist items.

Why not, you are using their "free" services, and if you would care to read every word of the user agreements then it lays out exactly what they information they "collect". What they "collect" and what they "know" are two different things, using data analysis they can speculate many other aspects of a user with a pretty high degree of accuracy. They should not have to disclose this, the user has given them the data as agreed. If the media and privacy nuts didn't always put an evil spin on it people might actually realise that things in life aren't free. I know many people who enjoy using facebook for free, so why shouldn't Facebook make money from that. Just because they know alot about you doesn't mean that you absolve responsibility for giving out so much information in the first place.

You obviously have never had a contactless card stolen as absolutely none of what you have said is true, well except the opt out thing. You report your card stolen then pay pass will not work ( unless the merchant your using is "offline" which no merchant I know is. Burden of proof is actually on the bank not the holder and the banks are always more than happy to help. How do I know.....I live in Australia and have had my card stolen 2 times in 2 years and apart from a couple of days delay in getting a new card, there is no issue at all. Over here its actually reducing fraud as people dont see you use your pin number.

I remember these times.....Fur Elise playing usually meant overheating issues....I had many a freaked out customer call me about being hacked. Though times haven't changed much, now whenever their internet/facebook/gmail etc.. doesn't work i get the same calls lol