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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: December 18th, 2023

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  • This might be the most anemic open ended bill I have ever read. On its face, it has no teeth. The most well defined portions of the bill are to make sure that applications have access to age data. Making this look more like a way for corporations to gather data and verify real people as opposed to online personas.

    There is zero regulation actually defined and instead they have a 180 day period to define the regulation and a year for it to be contacted and implemented. The bill could pass tomorrow and we still wouldn’t know what age verification looks like.

    As scary as these efforts are, they are also a bit humorous to me. By and large software exists independently of its creator, especially in the FOSS space. There would be no way to require an individual to install an OS that supported this or even use an updated browser that supported it.

    Ultimately, the only way to really enforce any sort of age verification system is to force all content providers to have an age verification step. This presents as OS level, but you have to give people a reason to upgrade in order to implement. If Wikipedia suddenly required some sort of OS based age verification protocol to access its content, it would become a lot harder to avoid.

    They are putting this at the OS level, but I think this is a way to back into removing anonymous access to the Internet.




  • The reporting from Maddow is that an amendment to the DHS funding bill that was passed out of committee was removed at the request of the Whitehouse. This amendment included language to prevent ICE from detaining and deporting citizens which is already illegal.

    What I cannot find (with some very lose and quick research) is the actual text of the amendment. Nothing was included in the bill that would make it legal for them to detain and deport a US citizen. ICE’s authority to arrest and detain under 8 U.S.C. § 1226 and § 1231 applies only to “aliens.” Once an individual is confirmed to be a U.S. citizen, ICE loses its legal basis for custody.

    IMO it seems like an empty gesture without any sort of enforcement (remember I did not find the text of the removed amendment). We are already dealing with a militia that is operating outside the rule of law.

    Actually slowing this down or putting up a road block would require laws that actually address the detainment of US citizens, as the current laws only seem to address the authority of ICE in dealing with alien residents. The would also need to be an independent watchdog and actual codified consequences for detaining US citizens in these dragnet operations.





  • I’ve come to the realization, at least where I live, that a hell of a lot of accidents are prevented because of drivers who are actually aware and safe. This goes a bit beyond defensive driving IMO. I’m talking flat out accident avoidable. There is an entire class of drivers who are not even aware of the accidents they have almost caused because someone else managed to avoid their stupid driving.

    The majority of accidents that are likely to happen with these robocoffins will be single car or robocoffin meets robocoffin. The numbers on safety after a year will be acceptable because non accident causing error prone driving is not reported in any official capacity.

    I still maintain that the only safe way to have autonomous vehicles on the road is if they do not share the road with human drivers and have an open standard for communicating with other autonomous cars.