I’m guessing they don’t want to pay the costs of the fraud.

Still it’s a shame for children and the under-banked parts of the working class who are struggling. Anyone without a credit/debit card now in the US at least has to pay a 3 - 14% tax ($5-$7 per card activation fee) for a $50 to $200 gift credit/debit card to load up steam instead which is a pretty significant hit.

Bad for anonymity too. Anyone who wanted to maintain an anonymous Steam account is going to be out of luck as I suspect even those gift credit cards are likely going to require identity verification or face scans within a couple years before you can use them.

That employee should be fired. Part of the responsibility of a social media/brand manager is not bringing the brand into disrepute and not making it look like it supports Nazism and as part of that they should have a passing familiarity with controversial words and symbols within their market. Fire them, announce you fired them for this egregious behavior, condemn Nazism and we’ll accept it. Anything short of that is just “sorry we got caught and a lot of people got upset about our Nazi dog whistling”.

Fact is it wasn’t sent in Germany where Nazi symbols are a criminal offense and that tells you whoever did this knew. There is no defense that they did it out of ignorance. Either one person who is not being fired but defended did this intentionally or the company is run by Nazis who did this intentionally and it’s not just one lowly email marketing person to blame.

Let me guess: in exchange for a suspended sentence he will be 4x as hawkish and make 2x as many appearances on media demanding blood for the national security state.

This seems a bit silly even if you think AI is a massive fraudulent waste of resources. People have spent decades using search engines to research and plan out murders. I get the all-encompassing surveillance state wants that and all other potential wrong-think blocked and/or reported with an eye to censoring false positives and hampering the operation of these services for consumers rather than risking even a small chance someone can write their way around these blocks with clever phrasing.

The hallucination stuff I admit is definitely something they should be held to account for but it may not be possible to stop that entirely so much as limit its frequency. The US and especially places like Florida represent a deeply broken, atomized society so the problem is deeper than chatgpt. Facebook has been harboring and spreading conspiracy theory nonsense for decades without being held to account because it buoys reactionary conservative politics.

They’re sovereign.

American tech companies. American national security organs cannot touch them, cannot put the hurt on them. They are independent and there is nothing Meta, Google, Oracle, etc can do to them. Look at Europe, look at the rest of the world on Facebook and Oracle products with a big gun right at their temple held in the CIA’s hand if they do something the US doesn’t like. China doesn’t have that gun at its head and because of that China can be truly sovereign from the US.

Meanwhile same country: it’s the internet! It’s creating misogyny out of thin air! We have to ID check everyone for everything!

IMO it’s fair to read this as an NSA/eyes move. AMD is embedded in the western global mass surveillance architecture and by closed sourcing they can hide NSA back doors more easily.

Fact is the west is locking down all computing and doesn’t want there to be anywhere to flee for hobbyists or the Chinese. This also prevents the Chinese from benefiting from these tools if they slap sanctions on.

It’s not a fallacy when multiple countries/states have passed laws that explicitly demand some form of ID confirmation/scanning and others have stated an intent for it. It’s not a fallacy when you understand what the purpose of this push actually is.

The fact is the end result isn’t going to be compliance with the least restrictive standard but the most. That’s how regulatory compliance always works. You always comply with the most restrictive because it encompasses the least restrictive as well. Further if you stopped to think and analyzed history scientifically instead of it being a series of great man events or whatever you’d understand how capitalism in crisis reacts by crushing the working class using tools like fascism. That the 5-eyes spying abuse far from being some deviation from liberalism embody the deeper desires and wants of the modern western world to spy on and control their citizens and the world and that a free internet has been an incredible threat to state power since day one.

It’s just the first big moment where their propaganda failed, where their narrative was undermined was the Gaza genocide and they will do anything to prop up the Zio-Nazi entity occupying Palestine and prevent their other narratives from suffering the same fate in future. A man in the “free speech” loving EU was unpersoned FFS and can’t be given money, buy food, stay at hotels, use banks, anything for deviating too far from the approved EU narrative. These are the people we’re dealing with.

It’s also not a fallacy when AI has created a crisis for private/government spy fusion platforms like Meta, Google, etc in both gaining ad dollars due to AI bots being hard to discern so hard identifying humans is a must for not only spying but profits from ads.

For a long time the material interests of the massive tech companies and their financial backers and shareholders did not particularly benefit from this kind of ID law and so they pushed back and disallowed it. Now thanks to AI their interests align with those of the state, the capitalist propaganda organs, the moral crusaders. There is in other words nothing major standing in their way and tons of power centers pushing for this as a result of AI, the Gaze genocide breaking containment, etc and it has gained momentum.

I’m afraid this isn’t the win you think it is.

One of two things will happen in the near future:

1. Nearly everything you do online from banking to shopping to social media (including online gaming) to paying your electric or internet bill to yes porn will require OS-level attestation to access and use the site. Linux lacking this will become an incredibly private OS that is useless for anything online making this a defeat for Linux having any hopes of real desktop market share and/or forcing it to comply. Microsoft, Apple, Google would love to push Linux as an OS option off the table.

2. Kids will start using liveboot or installing Linux and evading these controls, Christian fascists, tech overlord capitalists, and the government will take notice and write a bill to close this “loophole” and within a few years having already established the idea in the popular conception that age verification is okay will face lesser resistance in quickly ramming it through.

For less than a million dollars they’d do it a dozen times over just to make an example of people like that.

Absolute bargain for them compared to the chilling effects and satisfaction they got out of punishing this guy for a month for his speech. It should be 5 times as big.

Quickly running out of places where VPN companies can be legally incorporated/based and where exit servers can be located that aren’t subject to advancing laws like these.

All the fools who were saying “lol they can’t ban VPNs, impossible!!!” are looking well ever more foolish and will feel very confused and shocked when the pain actually hits them and they realize it’s not so easy and they were wrong and complacent and too late now to do anything. But these are primarily westerners who’ve never had the western sanctions regime and its full power turned against anything they care about so they can be forgiven a bit for not understanding how powerful it is, its total dominance of financial exchange and how lacking a counter state interest by Russia or China in spinning up their own censorship resistant VPN for western users there isn’t really much counter to it. Russia and China are going to sit and laugh at you flailing about in the tattered remains of your liberal illusions of freedom and not lift a finger to help.

Sure you can pay for a VPS and spin up a VPN on that but that has your credit card on it with your name making it clear its you doing it and providing zero plausible deniability and as a non-residential IP you’re going to be getting increasing amounts of blocks by anti-AI-scraper methods as well as fraud alerts. Also it doesn’t hide you in the crowd so even advertisers who don’t have access to your credit card like authorities would will be able to associate all your activity back to one person and it’s just a short correlation from there via a mistake back to your real identity. Also won’t help much with torrenting copyright content as your provider will drop you at the first sign of trouble. Maybe you can find one that shrugs off DMCAs but I bet you’ll be paying through the nose. No more $5/month long term plan, get ready for $25/month and much higher than that and you still won’t necessarily be able to avoid ISP throttling of your traffic if they move to allow-listing for uncapped speeds only to known services and throttle everything else.

Very grim.

Doesn’t work. Not a Linux issue. No graphics card or motherboard maker connects the hardware correctly to support CEC on PCs. It’s an industry-wide practice.

There is the pulse eight injector which together with software can inject CEC with a USB connection with the caveat it can’t turn your computer on and it’s a hacky and imperfect solution for tinkerers rather than production ready equipment. Also it’s only HDMI 2.0 not 2.1.

This is also why America’s future may look less like collapse and more like controlled decline combined with harder nationalism, stronger surveillance, weaker labor power, and more political anger directed sideways instead of upward.

I have to agree. Many imagine a big dramatic implosion where the US just loses power and kind of collapses in a heap arguing with itself which isn’t likely to happen. The imperial boomerang is already coming home with heightened repression, police state, surveillance. Think of the children bills, VPN bans coming in not just the US but the EU (it’s vassal) so there is nowhere in the western world to run and the rest of the world can just be blocked or you can be black-bagged in the night for being a commie for using a non-western VPN (none such that are no-logs and unlimited* exist that I’m aware of funnily enough).

*I exclude criminal network VPNs that require high costs and are for cybercrime use and would be impractical for your average torrent user or privacy seeker to use.

But the empire will endure, transform, repress at home to keep the line going up and lash out as much as it can externally at free African states, Latin America, Asia, etc. And it will be strong enough even if this is part of a final decline to keep doing this and repressing at home for decades IMO. Of course Lenin himself thought he’d never live to see the revolution so things could always change but the current structure of problems for the US barring new developments doesn’t seem to lend itself to anything that dramatic, just the US putting on a new outfit and tightening the chains on the domestic proles.

Industry: Eh we’re going to implement storing and giving out IDs of people using our products to meet the wants of Meta’s “protect the children” scam instead.

It doesn’t matter.

The only reason to have VPNs for this is preventing internet shut-offs, fines, and nasty letters. Those only exist in the first world for the most part and only parts of it (in Germany they will directly fine you thousands per violation most severe case, in most places like the US they just shut off your internet after enough violations but you get warnings).

If your country doesn’t have a regime for fining you directly for this, doesn’t have internet shut-off laws, and doesn’t have any other major consequences then it doesn’t matter. You can look it up.

Even some first world countries don’t care. Through a quirk of law in Australia for example it’s basically impossible for copyright holders to go after people doing p2p stuff for anything but the retail price ($20) of works so it’s not worth their time and people there can do it freely.

No one else in the swarm cares who you are nor can they do anything. Use a modern client like Qbittorrent and keep it updated to stay secure.

At most maybe your ISP may throttle your bittorrent traffic because it’s not hidden using a VPN. But if you don’t have money you’re not getting a VPN that would improve your speed situation anyways. Just be patient.

They don’t allow torrenting on it. It’s for web browsing only. It won’t work well at all.

Then they will break you and industry that wants data will win. You vs bourgeois governments, you will lose.

This is a serious push and though children are the cover they’re after surveillance. Take away their talking points, give them what they claim to want but in a privacy-preserving way and this goes away for another 10 years before they can make another push.

If we win this fight by doing a zero knowledge form they have no scaffolding to use on which to build anything further. If we lose and they build something that isn’t zero knowledge it will 100% be used in a few years to iterate on to build more surveillance and control.

Basically if we don’t push for this privacy alternative and instead fight like hell against it entirely they’ll listen to the only voices putting forward a solution which is meta and the other privacy invasive actors who want an invasive approach. If it’s made heard that people will accept this we can shunt them onto this path.

Ideally we’d push onto this path but make demands that it doesn’t require verification. That parents can set it up at phone/computer setup and it cannot be changed without reinstalling the OS or erasing the phone and that on phones it gets tied to a Google/Apple account. That way there’s not even any identity aspect involved but tools given to parents who want to do this. Shove it back to parental responsibility. But this would be a compromise we could live with and still have some privacy with.

It’s one of the worst in terms of privacy.

Kodi’s own chart on devices including a decision tree: https://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=376035

Short of it is lots of Amlogic based devices from China under various brands (including Ugoos, DuneHD, Homatics, etc) that can have CoreElec (version of Kodi) installed to boot from, Fire TV Cube (though probably going to be locked down in future so questionable choice I think), Xiaomi Box S 3rd gen.

Also if you just want Kodi and don’t need premium streaming services there are devices like VeroV.

Shield is an option but a more expensive one especially given it hasn’t been refreshed in years and Nvidia is making too much money on AI to likely care.

AppleTV devices are another option, cheaper than shield, do premium streaming, they don’t presently have Kodi but Jellyfin itself should work fine and there’s also infuse which works with Jellyfin and is a bit more refined.

Right now with higher prices for RAM and storage the prices of most of these options have gone up. Amazon’s options are cheaper because they’re subsidized and AppleTV’s are cheaper because they’re Apple and they’re fighting for price on this one. There will likely be sales around summer on some or most of these (not shield though, very rarely goes on sale).

Except it notes that the wireguard dev definitely complied with that so while Microslop might be hiding behind that fiction it is just a fiction and not the real cause.

I’m suspicious if it isn’t because the US has discovered something exploitable in both wireguard and veracrypt and want to prevent it being patched while they (the US) unleash it against their enemies over a prolonged period. That or just crushing privacy.

Linux stay winning I guess as this would be the first case in history where Microsoft has used its position as gatekeeper to prevent Windows users from running software they want to run in this manner. Even worse you have to disable driver signature enforcement system-wide to bypass it, it’s more locked down than Apple which can grant per application gate-keeper exemptions. It’s just up until now Microsoft handed out driver signing like candy.

It’s interesting both of these are also tools likely be targeted by the “child safety” panic being shopped around to enact ID laws. Encryption without a backdoor is something they really hate whether it’s for data in transit or at rest.

One last thought is that Microsoft mentioned kicking third parties out of the kernel after the Crowdstrike fiasco where they borked a ton of airline computers due to awful practices. Many hoped it would mean kicking anti-cheat out of the kernel but it would be very Microsoft to start with kicking privacy tools out instead and simply insist that using Windows bitlocker is enough and Windows VPN settings are adequate and therefore these software needn’t be in the kernel.