This is excellent. Thank you. And – holy shit they are insane.

Huh, TIL. Thanks. Not even remotely surprised.

I’m watching the main one right now (your second link). Holy shit.

Am I the only one who thinks big tech won’t do jack shit other than nod and smile and install a user button that doesn’t actually change anything at all?

They are so NOT going to turn this off. This – the ability to manipulate users by controlling exactly what they see – is the sole reason they are in business. It gets them ad revenue, data to resell, and massive, uncontrollable political power.

And they’re just going to let a user turn that highly individualized control off and turn themselves into a less monetizable, more ad immune user one by one because some govt told them to? The same governments that have been telling them not to do this or that for decades now?

Lol, pull the other one.

Lol wut? “My brain is not especially fucked enough right now so I’d like an extra special DOUBLE helping of corporate machine bullshit today, thank you!”

I think you should take that hit for the team, obviously. If you believe one is required.

When you have a president that interferes with the DoJ, it looks exactly like what Trump is doing right now.

An independent DoJ is the sole reason why his first term was not full of retaliatory prosecutions. But he learned what he needed to do to rig it, and then did so. And now we have what we have. Is that really what you want out of the US going forward?

I do NOT want a DoJ that a president interferes with, period. If it’s only “justice” for some, it’s NOT justice.

Holy shit. That’s some arrogance right there, thinking no one would ever know or find out. Grand juries are secret, but they’re not THAT secret.

they think everything is more openly corrupt than it is yet.

You nailed it.

I think the inconstancy has to do with whether your VPN of choice is allowing itself to be used for bot scraping and other shitty resource hogs. Back when AI scrapers were running openly via their own company’s network and then started to get blocked by IP, the scrapers didn’t stop. They just went to VPN.

So on VPN it’s not unusual for me to be fine and then suddenly get blocked from sites, or just extra captchas, Cloudflare checks and the like out of the blue; I’ve come to assume that just means someone’s using it to be shitty. Switching proxies helps occasionally, but not always. I live with it.

That whole “a good prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich” was when you could pull your jurors out of a citizen pool that didn’t walk in already believing you were lying through your fucking teeth.

But then they pulled the mask off, and let us all see how they are using the courts for vindictive prosecution and political harassment.

Looks like the ham sammich days are ending, lol.

They would have to get rid of juries altogether.

Given that our current legal system was created as a direct reaction to star chambers and baked into the constitution, they have an uphill climb, at the least.

You’ll never guess what Bill Gates’ daughter has been up to . . .

More information

Apologies for not replying to you directly – I meant to, lol. But thank you.

I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted; this is far from being a fringe idea. Rather, it is well established and being studied. (Look at the About pages for an idea of who is behind research such as this.) To extrapolate that it is being done for political gain is no far leap, lol.

Roblox is a known nexus for this kind of activity (pick one, lol) and why wouldn’t it be? It’s one of the places where all the children are there and unsupervised.

Your points are well taken, but usually when responding to a lawsuit – especially a big dollar suit against a deep-pocketed corporation with an army of attorneys – the defending legal team will pile on every exonerating thing it can possibly think of, and continue to do so throughout the proceedings, because every single one is not just a chance to win but a chance to argue on appeal if they lose.

So they will throw in whatever they can think of, because something somewhere might stick, and meanwhile everything they tack on is something else the plaintiffs have to address in their own filings, adding to the plaintiff’s upfront cost of bringing the suit.

isn’t the age at which she signed the ‘contract’ even more relevant?

It’s everything – or it used to be, before the current administration (US) decided to turn two and a half centuries of law into Calvinball.

I’m still pissed off about that. The guy’s wife fucking died and they pulled that shit.

But this was not in court: Disney was trying to force the surviving husband into arbitration and simply withdrew the objection to trial after it got a lot of bad publicity, so it was never heard in front of a judge. Disney never actually said it did not have absolute right to arbitration, it just withdrew the objection, meaning that they could do it again at any time.

I’m no expert, but my Business Law professors were absolutely adamant about the fact that a minor can never execute a legal agreement and there are no exceptions.

No, you’re absolutely right. There are no exceptions. In the US there are roughly six elements necessary for a contract to be legally binding, and this one is the issue of “legal capacity”: does the party entering into the contract have the capacity to understand and be bound to such an agreement? For minors, the broad answer in law is always no. They can get emancipated (a judge rules you an adult for legal purposes), they can have a parent or legal guardian act in their behalf, they can postpone until they are of age, etc. But they do not, as a rule, have the legal capacity to enter into a binding contract.

That’s what this is. Minors appear to enter into contracts all the time. Every time a minor clicks on a EULA they’re purporting to enter into a contract. But that does not make it valid. Just because a signature is on a line that is not enough to make a contract binding and enforceable.

The defendants are pulling this because in the US we’ve entered into a new wtf era in the courts and they’re simply hoping to get a judge to allow it to stick, but this whole “an eight year old successfully waived his rights” argument has no basis in law.

To put it another way I’m going to pivot and use a different example that more people are familiar with, and one that I care a lot about: underage marriage. Apologies in advance for the shoehorn but it illustrates the point.

This exact issue of being unable to legally enter into agreement, or provide legal consent, is why underage marriage is so problematic: it’s a legal trap for the minor, and essentially a form of legal slavery. Children can get married, but children have no legal power to initiate a legal proceeding (like getting a restraining order or filing for divorce) nor direct their own health care, even reproductive health, unless they act through a parent or legal guardian. If they are mistreated they can’t even be admitted to a shelter, since shelters have agreements and children cannot enter into contracts, period end of.

Legally, just because a child has married, they do NOT suddenly gain legal emancipation. This is another big misunderstanding. Emancipation happens solely by court order, not by marriage. Even the marriage itself required parental consent to be legally binding, depending on the exact age and location. The married minor is still legally a child, unable to execute or be bound to contracts. The exceptions to this are informal, such as when despite a child’s minority, others allow a child to go through the motions and honor an invalid contract anyway, OR formal, when the child has a legal guardian that is willing to enter into contract and genuinely act on the child’s own behalf.

And the worst of it is that in most states and under federal law, sex with a child that would otherwise be considered rape – in some cases, felony rape – becomes legal within marriage. In those situations, the marriage license becomes a “get out of jail free” card for a child rapist. That’s how few legal rights children have in reality.

There are organizations working hard to turn this around, but it’s an uphill battle. Here’s more information for anyone who wants the actual legal picture: https://www.unchainedatlast.org/child-marriage-in-the-u-s/

For Google, the primary difference between a logged-in user and one who is not logged in is the absence of any contractual agreement that legally binds the anonymous user to terms assigned by Google.

I haven’t read a Google EULA in some time, but as I recall it was long and full of rights and waivers and privileges and protections you assign Google in regard to anything wherein you might possibly have legal standing. The log-in request is not universal, nor is it random, so it’s safe to assume as a hypothetical that for whatever reason, Google wants that in this specific scenario, in this specific geographical region.

On the other hand, if you’re not signed in – AND Google can’t link your anonymous use to an actual agreement you have with them elsewhere – Google just doesn’t have that same comfortably protected legal situation. (See Disney’s recent legal behavior for an example of why, if Google can still link your non-signed-in behavior to an existing EULA elsewhere in their walled garden, you may still be fucked.)

OP’s map seems to be located in the EU, which makes a legal difference as well. We already know that Google does whatever the fuck Google wants in the US, but in the EU laws tend to have more teeth as well as legislators very willing to go after violators.

All that said, I am not an attorney in Spain and I damn sure don’t work for Google, so don’t come at me lol.

This is the way. It’s up to the employer to provide adequate tools for the job, if they decide to make others off-limits.

This whole shitpost (complete with set up) is very sadly underappreciated, even more so given that this fine shitpost is posted in a community literally dedicated to shitposts. Well done, I say.