Talked you into it*

How come?

You can route traffic without Cloudflare.

You can use CDNs other than Cloudflare’s.

You can use tunneling from other providers.

There are providers of DDOS protection and CAPTCHA other than Cloudflare.

Sure, Cloudflare is probably closest to asingle, integrated solution for the full web delivery stack. It’s also not prohibitively expensive, depending on who needs what.

So the true explanation, as always, is lazyness.

The ban doesn’t need a 100% perfect AI screening protocol to be a success.

Just the fact that AI is banned might appeal to a wide demographic. If the ban is actually enforced, even in just 25% of the most blatant cases, it might be just the push a new platform needs to take off.

Yeah, that’s not it.

There’s this thing known as consent and purpose. For a GDPR violation, you need to lack either.

When your job has a noticeboard of names, emails and birthdays, they probably got your consent to post it up there. They didn’t get consent to post it onto Facebook.

Yeah, sharing a photo can be a GDPR violation. Because you need to prevent unneccessary processing of data. Like what Facebook does. That’s why most places require you to sign a waiver to allow photos and similar stuff being posted online.

It can be a lot of work. But so is writing a contract. You can’t just do some stuff willy-nilly, and for a good reason.

That being said, the GDPR is mostly unenforced. What it means in practice is “don’t ask, don’t tell”. Meaning, if you keep the info you do have under wraps, you should be fine. Just don’t go whoring your customers’/employees’ info out to your 18 356 “data partners”. Bonus points for having an “Accept All” and “More Options” button, but no “Reject All”.

1st prize for those whose “Reject All” doesn’t encompass “legitimate interest”.

All so businesses and companies can increase productivity, reduce staff, and then turn around and increase prices to customers.

As if. The only thing AI is to businesses is a lost bet. And they don’t like losing. So they’re betting even more, hoping some shiny “AGI” starts existing if they throw enough money into wasting other resources onto the AI bandwagon.

Yup. Seems quite ragebaity.

“A phone’s schematics are publically available, like those of a gun”

I can assure you, I’ve written no such thing in my original reply.

“Ownership” totally does mean it’s yours and you can do whatever you want with it.

That means you can do it, not that you should, nor that what you do won’t have consequences.

It just means your phone won’t stop you from downloading an unapproved app just like a gun won’t stop you from loading an unapproved bullet.

It means your gun has a safety mechanism you can unlock to shoot, as does your phone to download “unverified” apps.

It means you can sell either freely to someone else without it becoming bricked or the new owner losing any rights (lookin’ at you, Tesla cars).

It means defaulting on the loan will require the physical reposession of your phone or gun, and that neither will magically lock you out of using it using telemetry.

It means anyone with the right knowledge and tools can fix your phone and it’ll work, just like your gun.

It means your phone works for you, and not for someone else - just like your gun.

Your phone is a tool. Just like your gun. It can be used for good - and for bad.

What you do with it is up to you, and not up to it or its manufacturer.

It means you can shoot people with your gun, just as you can extort and blackmail people with your phone. Nothing, other than your own morality, the morals of society and therule of law are preventing you from doing bad things. Certainly not the will of the manufacturer.

Any forensic inquiry into a phone on a crime scene would be like that of a gun.

Any taking of your phone from your home or person would require a warrant - like with a gun.

Any inquiry into your phone’s contents and qualities should require outside tools - like a similar inquiry into your gun.

Your phone won’t have a special police-only history of what you’ve used it for - like your gun.

Your phone won’t report what you’ve been doing with it to 3rd parties without your consent - like won’t your gun.

And so on.

That’s the definition of a legitimate use.

Cloning keycards temporarily with permission (until new ones are made.) Breaking into your own or a friend’s car because the keys were left inside (until you get the keys back)

Cloning a TV remote just to lower the volume to a sane degree and turn it off (until they get a new TV, remote or find the old one).

Legitimate is a anything that you’re allowed to do. It’s a simple process to test legitimacy:

Did someone ask you if you can help?

If yes, did you tell them what you’d do?

If yes, did they agree?

And once you did whatever it was they agreed to, did you keep your ability to do the same thing in the aim of doing something they didn’t consent to (once you cloned their car key, do you plan on stealing the car? Or once you cloned their remote, do you have an insatiable urge to fuck with them by abusing the remote?)

If you answer “yes” to all except the last one, the use is legitimate in 99.9% of cases.

The only reason this may be considered a non-legitimate use would be if you attached the exclusive economic right of making repairs or new keys to the OEM, which isn’t how a sane world works.

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And besides, tools like the Flipper truly are hacking tools. Today hacking has a bad rep, and the word used to mean more like hack something together.

Imagine Bob who is a DIY type of guy. His TV starts falling apart because the plastic casing broke. Bob takes some duct tape and glues the casing together. As the TV stand is also a bit wonky, he takes some screws as well just to be safe. He doesn’t plan on keeping it for too long, just until he can find a fitting replacement that’s not too expensive. Most likely, he’s bound to keep it until the next Black Friday.

Bob just successfully hacked something up to keep his TV from falling apart.

That’s the origin of the word “hacking”. “To hack up” got shortened by attaching a new meaning to the verb, without bothering with the entire phrase, and making it relate only to electronic/digital hacking. So the TV example isn’t hacking, but it is hacking up. It means “to make some temporary fix until a proper one isn’t found”.

Today, hacking has been conflated with exploiting and breaking digital locks, which is not what the original phrase meant.

Oh, he is a threat. He is a huge threat for the fascists.

He’s a threat because he’s not on their side. He’s a (much needed) icon of disunity.

They’re right to be afraid. They need to stop him and anyone like him at all costs. If there’s just one county whose sheriff isn’t wagging his tail to goons like ICE, that’s unacceptable.

And this isn’t about some sheriff election, it’s the mayor of NYC. Y’know, the place where Rudy Giuliani became the greatest mayor in the entire history of the US (until he blew it by siding with Trump). Of course they’re afraid.

If people can find shelter from ICE and the rest in just one county, that’s bad for the fascists. Having it be a huge place like NYC would be a disaster in their eyes.

He won’t affect global policy. But he will affect the populace of US places other than NYC. If he wins, some may look at NYC and think “Why can’t we have this?”. That’s what’s dangerous.

Of course. In a month or two he can tell trump Dem statez are stupid and he should force them to do that.

You missed the high energy consumption and low reliability. They’re equally as valid issues as stealing jobs.

It literally has no other productive use for society aside from this one thing.

I’d refrain from saying that AI replacing labor is productve to society. Speeding up education, however, might be.

Since it ‘figerprints’ you, changing your fingerprint by blocking parts of the signal with pieces of foil doesn’t seem like a terrible idea.

Now, the question is: is such a tactic like wearing gloves, or like using super glue?

“Opt out of” or disable/block?

To me, “block” or “disable” seems like it blocks/disables the feature machine-wide, when it just says “pretty please, make me black after you take that screenshot”.

What a title. Made me think installing the browser blocked the feature machine-wide.

Why would anyone care about it being uglier?

It’s WhatsApp. Ugly is their visual identity.

If they changed their app to resemble a neon citylight barely anyone would even notice, let alone complain.

Didn’t they ban NSFW a year ago?

Exclusive BREAKING NEWS: After careful consideration by the World’s top scientists from 1000+ top Universities, it turns out that WATER, H2O, the Wet Wet is, in fact, wet.

Of course they would. Not only would they get their hands on data users fully voluntarily give them by using their platform, but they’d get their hands on verified IDs and quite reliable family tie information. The potential loss of users is definately worth it for them (from their perspective).

Isn’t that illegal?

The content (i.e. text, tables, images, etc. ) of the book is under copyleft, while the only thing the publisher can argue that’s theirs is the design (cover, font, copyright claim text, etc.) There are things like page layout and stuff that may’ve been created by the author or the publishers so it’s in a grey area.

All in all, I think scanning the book and OCRing it, removing stuff like page numbers and those first few pages of junk would remove all “infringing” elements.

Or, as always, you can email tye author and they’re 99% sure to give you their manuscript directly if they didn’t publish it somewhere else already.