Estimated chance of TES6 being good plunges to new lows

If the idea is to connect with family and friends, there are parts of the Fediverse where you can post stuff that’s only visible to followers. Probably not possible on lemmy or piefed though, I think.

I didn’t have time to watch much of that committee meeting video, but from what I did see it seems highly unlikely that they’re going to do anything to meaningfully change the situation. Time to retire all the rhetoric about Chinese companies being untrustworthy because they’re subject to secret orders to spy on their customers on behalf of their government, because the same is about to be true in Canada.

But it wasn’t the final meeting, I guess there’s still time for some kind of miracle.

If the developers of EVE are involved it seems like a safe bet that yes, you will have to worry about attacks from your neighbours, from strangers, and from your closest friends sometimes.

So the plan is to dig up our natural resources, set fire to them, and use expensive machines called “data centres” to dispose of the waste heat? I guess all that activity will juice up the economy numbers but it it’s not easy to understand how that leaves us better off.

What the politicians get: A smug feeling of satisfaction, having done something they were told was good.

What the children get: Anxiety, incentive to cheat the system and to keep their Internet use secret from parents, a new reason to feel that the world is unfair to them.

What the budding “age verification” industry gets: Amazing new business opportunities.

What Facebook gets: A regulatory barrier to entry high enough to keep out any competition from some hypothetical new form of social media that would respect its users, since that is now illegal.

What spies and hackers get: Amazing new opportunities to steal everyone’s personal data.

What those of us too stubborn to ever submit to “age verification” get: We’ll be unable to use regulated social media and will have to make do with the Fediverse, possibly moving to instances hosted in whatever distant corner of the world still allows free use of communications media.

Like everyone else I haven’t seen the text yet but from everything that’s been said about it I guess it’s yet more evidence that the same gang of idiots who led Trudeau astray have found Carney and his crew just as easy to manipulate.

Weird headline. Whatever you think of their arguments, the interesting part is not that they were so bold as to describe the latest plan for mass surveillance as “mass surveillance.”

From metafilter:

"[…]Anyone who sees a conversation about how age verification laws are going to cause widespread significant harm to lots of different groups of people and decides instead to talk about how social media is harmful to children is doing the work of disinformation spreading propagandists.

They might not be disinformation spreading propagandists, they might have just been duped by disinformation spreading propagandists, but either way they are doing the work of disinformation spreading propagandists.

This is a propaganda and PR technique that is in common use today.

This is how it works:

Person 1 makes a point that is harmful to the narrative the PR firm has been paid to protect.

One or more accounts on the payroll of that PR firm, who usually just posts innocuous stuff but who always has an opinion on the topic of the day, chimes in with an indirectly related smokescreen argument, usually accompanied by an accusation or an emotional appeal.

Person 1 then gets bogged down with that argument, tacitly approving that the two topics are in fact one topic.

Lots of people then see the argument, and come to associate the smokescreen with the real issue. Some of them will be swayed specifically by the emotionally appeal (“think of the children”) and some of them will genuinely believe in the smokescreen issue (“social media is bad for children”) and accept that the smokescreen is important enough to justify accepting whatever the original post was arguing against.

There are lots of these PR accounts floating around out there. They’re sockpuppets. They look like real people, sometimes they are real people, but they’re also sockpuppets.

The end result of that is a bunch of people popping in to conversations about Age Verification laws to talk about separate and legitimately important issues as if those issues and Age Verification laws are the same thing.

And some of those people might be paid PR Sockpuppets, but some of them are definitely real people who really care about the harm social media might have on children.

And so we spend so much time talking about the nuance and potential solutions to this much more complicated problem that the real issue (these proposed Age Verification Laws are actually tools of fascist surveillance and control which will be used to suppress dissent and harm marginalized communities) gets lost."

I’m sure there probably are far-right instances out there somewhere federating with each other. If the Naziverse federation somehow grows to have anything like the cultural relevance of the mainstream Fediverse federation, the problem will not be the technology. The problem will be that your society is full of Nazis.

“People would block it” is the solution, yes. Not that Fedi is perfect but it got that bit right.

That’s getting awfully hypothetical. Should we not wait and see if the social norms of fedi continue to hold up before condemning it along with its more evil-oriented analogues?

It seems like you are dead set on a course that leads only to concluding that humanity is evil at heart and we should all be locked up and prevented from ever being seen in public in the name of safety. In an era where so much of social life is online that’s only a few small steps beyond the idea of making everyone show their ID before they’re allowed to use the Internet. Even if it’s done in the name of safety, it works in service of oppression.

I’ve been exploring the fediverse for several years and have never seen anything like “body shaming videos” anywhere on it. Have you? Really? I think you’d really need to go out of your way to look for it, because any instance routinely allowing that kind of shit would be quickly blocklisted into oblivion, perhaps still in existence but unseen by casual users.

There do exist other things that one might say are not suitable for children here and there — but on social media that respects its users they are not pushed on people who don’t want them by algorithms designed to hook into people’s anxieties and keep them dependent.

If free-world social media like mastodon is too dangerous for you I really don’t know what to recommend, because obviously going outside instead would be even more risky.

Pass comprehensive data privacy laws that prohibit the surveillance capitalist business model on which the current social media giants depend. It is the driving force behind their continued enshittification.

61 per cent of 12-to-15-year-olds in Australia continue to hold social media accounts despite being banned, while 70 per cent said it was “easy” to circumvent the ban.

Well there you go, at least it will do some good for young people. It will teach them how to circumvent whatever age-probing nonsense they come up with for use in Canada. It will teach them that the government can’t be trusted. It will teach them that the right to freedom of expression does not apply to youth. It will make them aware, as they approach the age where they’re able to vote, that the tradition of “good government” in Canada, if there was any life left in it, is now dead.

For the rest of us, and for the international reputation of Canada, it will only be harmful.

The real beneficiaries are not in Canada. They’re the American tech giants who will maintain their grip on Canada all the more tightly with this fancy new regulatory barrier to entry standing in the way of any possible competition, as the blame for whatever they continue doing to their younger users is shifted to disposable 3rd-party “age verification” providers given the job of doing the impossible.

This one looks like it’s going nowhere. We are not likely to get a better chance to reform the electoral system than to vote NDP at the next opportunity.

Gradually, we all become aware that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of fossil fuels.

Huh, weird. The only thing I can think of is to check /etc/security/limits.d to see if there’s another conf file in there setting it to 4096.

Are you sure you really need 1048576 open files? It seems like a lot. But you’ll probably want to set “soft” as well as “hard” limits. Then you need to log in again for the change to take effect.