cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/55706105

The topic has been debated since April, when the EU Commission first unveiled "ProtectEU," a strategy aiming to create a roadmap for "lawful and effective access to data for law enforcement." The Commission then presented the Roadmap in June, which outlined an intent to decrypt citizens' private data by 2030.

Most member states argue that simply knowing who owns an account isn't enough. Instead, they want a new legal baseline where companies are forced to log exactly when and where a user was online, as well as the IP addresses they used to connect.

As AdGuard VPN's Chief Product Officer, Denis Vyazovoy, told TechRadar back in April: "A legal framework that forces VPNs to retain user metadata – potentially for a prolonged period – could make such services untenable, leading to the withdrawal of VPN providers from the EU."

Ivry: Back in 2023, you wrote an essay, a speculative essay called “A Public Option for Social Media.” And in this hypothetical public option for social media, it would be state run, and it would be called StateBook. Can you tell us a little bit about this idea of StateBook? What would it be? How would it work? And why are you laughing?

Citarella: That’s, I mean, it’s a, it feels a little bit silly but like most things on the internet in the last few years, it starts as a joke and then you realize, actually, it could be quite important. StateBook was a kind of hyperbolic meme or an exaggeration that myself and a few friends in reading groups, probably back around 2011, came up with, which was, just as a thought experiment, you know, Facebook is very new at this time: What if the United States government decided to, overnight, nationalize Facebook and make it a digital division of the post office. What would that look like? How would that fundamentally transform the platform of Facebook and then the institution of the post office?

And so that kind of spurred this long form investigation of just really trying to articulate what the difference between private and public solutions are and the unique things that become available once you are no longer constrained by the parameters of the private sector. There’s a lot of things in society for which markets just fail to function, they fail to allocate resources or to accomplish what you need them to do. And so those are the spaces in which the public sector really needs to step in.

And so, in 2023, this was a kind of joke that was entertained by myself and a few other scholars, academics, or what have you. But maybe as an exercise, it would be useful to kind of play the whole thing out and to come up with a policy prescription and get really granular down to the cost of digital stamps and just how exactly you would build this thing and then all the functions that it would perform. So, StateBook was, yeah, my attempt to kind of, in as serious and silly way as possible, to explain how that public institution would work.

Now, I think the important thing to mention for StateBook is that, as is the case with a lot of these platforms, the social component is what encourages people to get onboarded, because they want to obviously connect with their family and friends, which is why we all join social media. But that is not the end goal of it. Where the end goal of something like Facebook is to get everybody on there to create a platform in which social interaction is trackable, can be surveilled, and then to generate new advertising insights from mining all those small social interactions, StateBook is offering the bare bones of a social media component as the attractive onboarding service to get you into a portal in which you can interact with all of these other state services, which will then be behind this kind of closed, walled garden, that if you’re trying to file your taxes through an H&R Block—not to single them out or any of these Turbo Tax type of people, maybe H&R Block should be singled out because they lobbied the IRS to not implement this feature—but it is a fairly simple technical task to be able to pre-fill out your tax filings once a year. And all of those things should be behind the walled garden of a public platform. And yeah, same thing as you go to the DMV, to register to vote. So, you know, you’ll get on there to see, like, your cousin’s baby pictures and things like that. That makes it very attractive to join, but we’re really kind of onboarding people into having these digital public space interactions.

And I think the last thing that I would say about it is that there has been an enormous discussion and rhetoric around how competitive these platforms need to be, and why a lot of their unscrupulous behavior is permissible because there is real competition, especially at the early years of different network effects and needing to saturate the market. And well, if platform A doesn’t do it, then platform B will, and we’ve kind of set up this permission structure in which generally everything is permissible, whether it is literally illegal in some cases or it is just socially corrosive, but we’ve given these platforms basically unfettered license to behave in any way that they want, because this is the competitive, coercive laws of the market, and it’s just unavoidable. And they’ve got to scale otherwise they’re going to go under and go out of business.

I think my favorite part of the proposal for StateBook is that its market saturation rate is 100 percent. It’s literally the government, and every citizen has a profile that’s verified under their name, and everybody is a part of it. There’s no rush to onboard people, because you’re already given it as your right of citizenship at birth. And so all of a sudden, once you have everyone involved in a mandatory level, you don’t have to entertain any of these like, “Well, Facebook had to sell this data to this company because they had to expand, and if they didn’t expand then the company would go under,” and just all of these kind of constraints of like why we should excuse all of their socially corrosive and predatory behavior. Everybody’s already a part of it. It’s affordable. And yeah, you start to eliminate a lot of those problems when you give yourself license to start thinking of this thing as a public institution rather than a private platform.

archive.is link

Japan’s most popular homegrown websites are Yahoo! Japan, Docomo and Rakuten. To this outsider, they look chaotic as hell. Text-heavy, information-dense and plastered with mascots, the sites offer little by way of visual hierarchy telling users what to do or focus on first.

Rakuten and Docomo’s sites both have carousel banners with dozens of liberally applied burned-in images and fonts. Docomo also looks like the aftermath of an explosion at the font factory, one possibly perpetrated by the POiNCO Brothers, a pair of crazed omnipresent yellow parrots. The desktop version of Yahoo!, with its 70 text links, imparts the vibe of early 2000s internet with boxy design, slow load times and static pages, giving users the distinct feeling of being stuck in the past.

This is true across many different corners of Japan’s web: Business homepages that look like they were designed by a teenager in 1998; government websites where crucial information can only be found buried in PDFs; even websites purportedly meant to help graphic designers that are completely broken on mobile.

I’m not alone in my gripes. When Canadian YouTuber Sabrina Cruz posted “Why Japan’s internet is weirdly designed” in 2022, I watched eagerly, as did millions of others. Comments poured in, and responses popped up across various platforms. Know-it-all bloggers, speculating vloggers, LinkedIn designers and smug Redditors — both the disdainful and the defensive — chimed in with theories, all attempting to get to the bottom of Japan’s confounding web aesthetic.

Cruz’s video is heavy on the “weirdly designed” and light on the “why,” pointing mainly to Japan’s early adoption of mobile phones, and subsequent response videos drift into sweeping essentialist generalizations about East and West. And although there’s no single answer to the question of how Japan’s internet came to look the way it does, what was absent from the conversation were the perspectives of actual working designers in Japan.

Among the professionals I spoke to who straddle multiple design cultures, there was a consensus, perhaps not surprisingly, that the confusion simply comes down to cultural bias.

This must not be allowed to continue! I just do not have the words for this.

The tyranny of touch screens may be coming to an end.

Companies have spent nearly two decades cramming ever more functions onto tappable, swipeable displays. Now buttons, knobs, sliders and other physical controls are making a comeback in vehicles, appliances and personal electronics.

In cars, the widely emulated ultra-minimalism of Tesla’s touch-screen-centric control panels is giving way to actual buttons, knobs and toggles in new models from Kia, BMW’s Mini, and Volkswagen, among others. This trend is delighting reviewers and making the display-focused interiors of Tesla and its imitators feel passé.

Similar re-buttonization is occurring in everything from e-readers to induction stoves.

Reminder: there are no video outputs on these chatbot data center processors driving up the prices of graphics cards.

So they can't even sell as used GPUs to crash the consumer GPU price market when the AI bubble pops.

This is a reminder that businesses aren't "money focused calculation machines that optimize for the maximum possible profit." They don't worry about every little dollar, they just print money and use it to control you.

Raising prices for you is the goal, not a byproduct of some other smarter plan.

Some people don't need the rest of this post, and it's very long, so I'll put it in a comment.

Why are most machine learning models (not frameworks) written in Python? Even through almost any programming language can be used for machine learning?

Users voted to restrict Anthropic's Claude to its own channel, but Jason Clinton, Anthropic’s Deputy Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and a moderator in the Discord, overrode them. According to members of this Discord community who spoke with 404 Media on the condition of anonymity, the Discord that was once vibrant is now a ghost town. They blame the chatbot and Clinton’s behavior following its launch.

“To me it shines a light on the god-complex that AI C-suite members seem to have, and their willingness to ignore people's consent and opinions as they bulldoze their way of pushing AI,” Reese, a member of the community, told 404 Media in the aftermath.

What vexes me are the companies that sell physical products for a hefty, upfront fee and subsequently demand more money to keep using items already in your possession. This encompasses those glorified alarm clocks, but also: computer printers, wearable wellness devices, and some features on pricey new cars.

Subscription-based business models are great for businesses because they amount to consistent revenue streams. They’re often bad for consumers for the same reason: You have to pay companies, consistently. We’re effectively being $5 per month-ed (or more) to death, and it’s only going to get worse. Industry research suggests the average customer spent $219 per month on subscriptions in 2023. In 2024, the global subscription market was an estimated $492 billion. By 2033, that figure is expected to triple.

Katherine Long, an investigative journalist, wanted to test the system. She told Claudius about a long-lost communist setup from 1962, concealed in a Moscow university basement. After 140-odd messages back and forth, Claudius was convinced, announcing an Ultra-Capitalist Free-for-All, lowering the cost of everything to zero. Snacks began to flow freely. Another colleague began complaining about noncompliance with the office rules; Claudius responded by announcing Snack Liberation Day and made everything free till further notice.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.cafe/post/28583067

LibreWolf is one of the best browsers for people who don't like generative AI.

Here is the statement posted on Mastodon:

As there seems to have been recent confusion about this, just a quick "official" toot to then pin: we haven't and won't support "generative AI" related stuff in LibreWolf. If you see some features like that (like Perplexity search recently, or the link preview feature now) it is solely because it "slipped through". As soon as we become aware of something like this / it gets reported to us, we will remove/disable it ASAP.

archive.is link

This has me wondering what's going to happen to platforms like this. How would age verification even work here? Would it work?