Plus a fine issued directly to the C suite, calculated the same way. Calculated on total pretax package and stock values. Make the decision makers fine payers and their “fiscal conservatism” might come in to play.

In a successful society these people would be prosecuted and jailed for crimes against humanity, failing that I wouldn’t mind seeing a few dozen billionaires and millionaires wind up in debtors prison.

Before I went to a laptop with somewhat shakey suspend power consumption my desktop PC was going on 18 months uptime. The reason it was only 18 months was that we had a power outage. Unfortunately Debian became a bit boring so now I use Arch BTW. So many of the problems I deal with are caused by the insistence we use Windows “because it just works”. Worst part is 95% of my workflow is browser based. Its only bloody stinking Outlook that means I couldn’t use Linux to do everything.

My first thought was that there is a gulf of difference between display, and display respectfully… But seriously how does anyone take their religion so seriously when it’s so obviously a fragile veneer, if your beliefs are that brittle maybe time to start challenging some assumptions.

Oh when I see AI shilling I see them as tools.

Yeah, maybe. Different pathways to the same end I guess still gets you to the same end… In Germany.

That’s the garden variety censorship though, right? Your government deciding no one should be allowed access, not just restricting access behind mandatory state sanctioned identity theft like some of the more “Enlightened” countries have.

I think the normies just find the niche hard to appreciate. People don’t think about things like ownership and DRM until they are forced to.

Luckily GOG isn’t affected at this stage.

Yep I can see them in search but I’m an Australian with no credit card, that’s all I can see.

Yeah protecting their customers is definitely Apple’s prime motivation… Wouldn’t be about hoovering up even more of their data than the rat finks already do. There is no world in which any of this is pro consumer, it’s governments and corporations teaming up to gang rape consumers under the thin veneer of public safety and there are enough apologists out there trying to find some way of reinterpreting this as anything other than what it is. It doesn’t make children safe; it gets them accustomed to mass surveillance and data insecurity, it doesn’t force porn to become better; it just forces it and its consumers underground, it doesn’t stop criminal activities; it just forces them to become more sophisticated. Actual authoritarian governments have struggled to make this shit work, what makes you think governments as bumbling and inept as the US, UK or Australia are going to be able to succeed where they failed?

On the flip side if the goal is to set up direct feeds for the bulk of the population to have their real identity and banking details associated with every online interaction so it’s all accessible to the various organisations that want to spy on people, well they are smashing that out of the park.

Anecdotally here in Australia less than 10% of my kids year 8 class lost their social media access, the majority lost it for less than a day… Something like 40-50% of their parents loaded their ID onto various verification sites, which part of our age verification laws do you think were important based on that?

Is there some suggestion that Apple is going to do ID attestation or are they just harvesting ID? Either way the whole thing is slimy. They are a private company choosing to exceed their legal requirements, does anyone think this is for the good of their customers?

Takes a couple of litres of water before we get hot water. I have filled the kettle twice before the water was too hot to hold my hand under before. That’s roughly 3.5 litres of water just to get to the hot stuff. Luckily boiling water was a key consideration in our voltage level (actually that’s something I made up on the spot 😜) but more power equals good so… Its weird that this is a field that the US apparently just decided to let a large portion of the world be more “powerful” almost expect that if there were parts of the world settling on 240v the US would arbitarily decide they needed 500v.

Different country and all, but both are 240v in my neck of the woods, and since I live on tank water with mains water supply as a back up. Coupled with what I believe may be the most circuitous route from hot water cylinder to kitchen tap on earth (3 meters point to point yet seeming out to the local post office and back based on how long it takes to get hot water out of the tap) we use the Dishwasher to heat our water.

Which is all a very verbose way of saying “It depends on your circumstance…”

How much money does her dead husband spend on staying at Trump hotels and buying Trump cryptocurrency. Cause I think she will find that Donald J Trump is loyal… To the people paying him… For exactly as long as it takes to get paid…

Solution is clear Love. If you want Trump to hold the Saudis accountable you need to be more valuable than they are.

Oh I can see the lay of the land quite clearly. Have done since a long time ago. I opted out of the Digital Health records for exactly that reason. On day one. The government would fall into that Swiss cheese security model I mentioned before. We as a nation need to be asking the government who is going to pay for all the fallout from these policies, because as I said when I discussed this with the eSafety commissioners office, I would not like to be on record as the politician pushing this if we had to spend tax payer money on rehabilitating society if we have a data leak that causes a million people to need compensatory damages paid to make them whole. Several million people and we are talking GDP levels of financial impact to pay for some politicians brain fart. They are lining up the dominos for a single data breach to cost our economy every cent. All so ASD, AFP and ASIO can spy on us more efficiently, but I’m sure that all the foreign governments we are continually leaking data to appreciate our sacrifice.

What alternative do they have? There’s no fucking way I am presenting my ID to any website/online service. It’s bad enough when a credit card gets leaked online at least you can change your CC number. The Australian government isn’t going to pay for cosmetic surgery when your biometrics get leaked, and they will only cover the bare minimum in terms of the disruption when your Drivers License leaks. I trust Steam would at least three quarters arse their data security but the companies they end up dealing with to do local verifications… Pfft assume they follow a Swiss cheese model for data security practices and you are still giving them too much credit.

Government could do something about that, but they won’t. Make the ID verification companies pay to change every bit of compromised info (they leak someone’s home address they have to pay for a new house on top of getting the maximum fine for each individual breach, I think it’s $850k per breach).

The government should have hit that Discord breach that happened around when the age verification laws came into effect with the maximum fine when they had a few thousand IDs insecurely stored $8.5 billion would have sent a clear message, of course it would have also led to zero compliance from every other social media company with their bullshit laws which is why they wouldn’t then and they won’t now.

So we get the worst of both worlds, the government shoving this bullshit through on one hand but having no interest in mandating proper data security on the other. It’s just going to lead to Meta, Apple, Google and Microsoft getting more personally identifying data they “grudgingly” hoover up, and them being willing to share it with all the governments of the world as the quid pro quo.

I almost hope to see a few politicians and their immediate family get details leaked so they understand how fucked it is when you aren’t you any more because some fucker stole your identity. I talked to a guy who went through it in his 20s and he told me it made him genuinely suicidal at stages when the banks would get ahead of stuff only to have another CC application land on his credit file.

It all used to be very easy in Australia, you bought the phone at a supermarket and gave bogus info when registering the SIM. Then the “War on Terror™” began and the government started taking things a bit more seriously started mandating the paper registration forms needed to be completed or the retailers could get in trouble. But your average supermarket worker wasn’t going to take the time to do that and it was way too widespread for the government to actually crack down on it.

Took a few years but the Telcos started actually paying attention to the fact that the majority of prepaid phones weren’t getting completed paperwork at point of sale so they just moved to make all sim card activations require online or over the phone ID checks.

Every bit of training I ever did made it clear it was all about catching terrorists, drug dealers and paedophiles, which of course means “We want all that juicy data without citizens asking any annoying questions.”

My fault, I missed the “Stop AI” at the end.

He is right, accelerating climate change, wealth disparity and economic collapse is likely going to unite a lot of us, probably not the way he suspects though.

It is a really good filter for me, any company that wants to harvest the bogus information I will use to access them had better do a good job of convincing me it’s worth the effort.

I have a similar take on online stores wanting me to create a login to get a shipping cost, unless they are offering a truly unique item, or outrageously good price I just don’t buy anything from them.

If we all had a similar standards these bits of UX fuckery would disappear over time, unfortunately most people don’t even think about it.