Reach for the Stars @antares@qoto.org

It's important to understand that "age verification" schemes being passed by states, ostensibly to "protect the children", won't do that and will bring about incredible abuses.

In order to age verify children, obviously EVERYBODY of any age must be verified, for every account, under every name or pseudonym, ultimately on every site no matter how public or private the topic, and before downloading any apps.

Children will find ways to work around this. They'll use the accounts of adults, which will be openly traded. But because these age verification systems must by definition be based on government IDs, the verification process creates a linkage between your account names and your actual identity, subjecting you to all manner of leaked personal information, government abuses (think MAGA in charge), and worse. Firms will claim their systems either don't keep this data or can't be abused. History strongly suggests otherwise, and when courts step in, those firms will have to do what the courts say, often in secret, when it comes to collecting data.

Age verification is in actuality a massive Chinese-style Internet identity tracking project -- nothing less -- and there are many politicians in the U.S. who look with envy at how China controls their Internet and keeps their Internet users under police state controls.

Just a reminder folks, unless you agree with them, no matter how polite you are, you will always get blocked... I get 10 examples a day why I cant stand the left, even as a person who is on the left (slightly)

https://mastodon.social/@Radical_EgoCom/112147596006629998

Just a reminder... no matter how much you listen or try to genuinely understand them.. this is almost always the outcome when you discuss things with a leftist... Either you agree with them, or they get offended, make personal attacks, and walk.

Every interaction I have with the left leaves me wanting to have less to do with them than the time before, and this is sad since I associate more with left ideals in many cases than right ones.

Schooling experience grounded in the pedagogy and technology designed to prepare students for a print-dominated culture is no longer appropriate.

For the last time:

Abyss = for staring into
Void = for screaming into

Please stop screaming into the abyss we’re not insured for that

Looks like Firefox is adding in ads and shopping (enabled by default) in the near future. Found this while browsing through about:config to turn off the "See your search with suggested images" ad on upgrade.

Fuck the users, opt them in by default.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1868180

https://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-beta/rev/ad68d46aefa7

#firefox

There's still time to turn the ship around. If not out of human decency, or shame, then to win an election?

And yes, there is still time. But I honestly don't know if they'll use it.

They're probably going to keep doing what they're doing, while mumbling "Trump is worse!" to themselves and "These voters will come around! They have to! Right?" Up until the moment of disaster.

Somewhere, someone is looking at recent Biden poll numbers, and convincing themselves that pushing a few boxes of MREs out of the back of a plane will fix this.

It will not fix this.

No I'm not interested in having a "discussion" about this. I know how the conversation ends: someone yelling "Trump is worse!" at me while being convinced that the only possible solution is for voters to accept what is going on.

“The first person you should be careful not to fool is yourself. Because you are the easiest person to fool".”
― Richard Feynman

Quote of the day: "I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are"

Got to love how most websites now resemble yer da's popup ridden malware infected pc from 20 years ago

“There’s a roughly 50% chance that I will be ruled by a fascist tyrant by the end of this calendar year. I will prepare for this by doing absolutely nothing.”

How important is handwashing? A new STUDY found that "The detection rate of SARS-CoV-2 RNA from the hands of healthy individuals was extremely low (0.32%), and no viable viruses were detected. These results suggest that the risk of contact transmission via hands in a community setting is extremely rare."

It's good you wash your hands. Just don't think it protects you from #COVID19.

https://www.cureus.com/articles/227537-sars-cov-2-contamination-on-healthy-individuals-hands-in-community-settings-during-the-covid-19-pandemic#!/

Jon Stewart sums up every though and feeling I have about the upcoming election: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpBPm0b9deQ

Maybe an unpopular opinion but linking masks so intensely to covid specifically and not larger disease control in general was, and continues to be, a huge mistake. Obviously masking became much more common with the rise of covid in the U.S. and other places, but it's been a known - and used, form of disease prevention elsewhere for 100 years.

Tying masking to covid freaks out the people who are too in denial about covid to actually do anything about it - a wall immediately goes up before an interaction has even happened. It also misses the point that they're useful for other things - it raises the level of diseases in general that are going around. And maybe most importantly, it creates an entire culture of masks as symbols rather than as actually useful tools. When people see masks as a symbol of fear, a reminder of death or a difficult time in their life, or a sign that someone must be sick to be wearing one and so should be avoided, it creates a much more difficult terrain to build solidarity or even just effectively communicate. The practical use case has been replaced with concepts for many people - and that shift has a high body count.

phone calls are all spam. emails are all spam. text messages are all spam. if you want to reach me, pin a note to my door with a jeweled dagger or don't waste my time.

I guess when you make excuses like that you can justify any sort of genocide you want... we can literally just flatten all the hospitals (most of which they already did). Guess what, when your the good guys you are expected to play by different rules, when you dont, you arent the good guys.

If it isn’t available via #RSS in any “regular” podcasting app, it isn’t a Podcast, it’s an audio recording.

YouTube podcast? Nope. Spotify podcast? Not a thing.

#IWillDieOnThisHill