Olives @olives@qoto.org

This still applies. I haven't seen any signs that anything has changed, just more shrill language to pander to idiots.

"AI" is not going to be manufacturing Terminators...

"AI" is not magic.

A few older articles from The Register (which I think is actually a British tech outlet) were also ridiculing the idea of wanting to go after those "obscene" cartoons. So, maybe, the world is not that insane, lol. Anyway, that wasn't very relevant to what I was looking for.

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/google_abandons_web_environment_integrity/

"Amid rising community concern, Google says it will no longer develop controversial technology that was said to fight fraud online though to critics looked more like DRM for websites.

Instead, the Chocolate Factory plans to work on a more limited version of the tech for Android WebViews, a version of its Chrome browser that can be embedded within Android apps."

I think it is dangerous to have groups of people who can't advocate for themselves (also it creates problems in communicating with friends / family). That makes it very easy for the government to dehumanize a group, to remove the rights of a group, then to pivot to attack the rights of other groups.

I forgot MySpace was owned by Murdoch. Interesting detail.

Notice how Facebook (and others) kept taking these authoritarian (and unconstitutional, remember the state pressure) steps to make someone in the government happy, and the problem didn't really go away, it just violated people's rights.

I think what is particularly concerning about this, is that when someone like this talks about "sex offenders", they're typically conflating any crime of a sexual nature with a "child abuser".

Except, someone who has committed such a crime still has rights.

It is also a violation of the First Amendment. Also, whatever he is doing there doesn't seem effective (and the article admits as such). It seems to be pure grandstanding.

I took a short trip through memory lane there as it's important to understand the historical context of some of these things here.

https://www.theregister.com/2010/09/12/international_censorship/ 2010. Complaints about Facebook (and other giants) being puritanical go back over a decade.

https://www.theregister.com/2009/02/04/myspace_offenders/ 2009. That doesn't sound like it would be effective, and it's unconsti- Hey, is that Blumenthal? It is. The EARN IT Guy. Grandstanding quite a ways back, huh.

https://www.theregister.com/2008/10/22/social_networking_privacy_germany/ 2008. German agencies already mad at FB over privacy.

https://www.theregister.com/2007/09/25/facebook_subpoena/
https://www.theregister.com/2007/10/17/facebook_agrees_stronger_controls/
2007. Attorney General Andrew Cuomo uses "safety" as an excuse to get Facebook to also be "tougher" on porn, it seems.

Didn't he have a sex scandal of his own more recently?

https://www.theregister.com/2006/09/07/facebook_update_controversy/

"News Feed appears automatically on every user's home page and automatically updates members about recent Facebook activities by that person's friends. For example, Facebook would automatically notify users whenever a photo is posted by friends or they split up with their boyfriend or girlfriend. The feature is designed to make it easier for friends to keep up to date with each other. But many users are unhappy that the feature has been pushed upon them.

"News Feed is just too creepy, too stalker-esque, and a feature that has to go," a statement by the newly formed group Students against Facebook News Feed states, Reuters reports."

How people reacted to the unveiling of the "News Feed" in 2006.

It's not like they recanted or withdrew any of their stupid policies after courts made very clear the scope of the law (it being narrow).

I understand that new pieces of legislation can nudge platforms towards making stupid decisions (and people really don't think enough of this chilling effect) but these stupid decisions are ultimately on them (though, obviously you still have to be wary of holding people liable for things they can do nothing about).

"Ever since the passing of FOSTA in 2018, it is near impossible to talk about any subject even remotely related to "sex" (including both sex education & sexual abuse prevention) without getting censored"

While I'm not a fan of FOSTA (the anti sex trafficking law which led to many deaths of sex workers and which failed to decrease it), some people have really got to stop blaming it for every dumb policy decision.

https://thehackernews.com/2013/12/fake-google-ssl-certificates-made-in.html

"Google has found that the French government agency using unauthorized digital certificates for some of its own domains to perform man-in-the-middle attacks on a private network."

"Google security engineer Adam Langley described the incident as a "Serious Security breach", which was discovered in early December. Rogue digital certificates that had been issued by French certificate authority ANSSI, who closely work with the French Defense agency."

As someone pointed out, there is precedent for #eidas type mischief within the E.U., therefore it's likely it might happen here too.

#chatcontrol

I think the posts which self-destruct on social media, if that is a thing now, probably comes from "we have all this money, and we have to implement things to distinguish ourselves from other companies".

I don't think that is a deliberately evil one but part of an eternal feature creep (feature creep can be a bad thing). It ironically falls under scale.