The steelman for federation is that email survived the rise of the big platforms despite no-one owning email, so making other applications follow the email model means they too could be free from central ownership.
That’s an argument that sounds convincing in principle, but in reality I can walk into any independent bookstore and find it’s not filled with porn and AI slop, so clearly there is a successful vetting process going on. Namely, the publishers vet the books then the bookstore owner only has to vet the publishers. A proof of concept internet equivalent is if I scrape a bunch of trusted YouTube channels onto a NAS and give my kids access to that NAS but block YouTube access otherwise.
This hypothetical independent shop you walk into is not filled with slop because it's curated; the store is intentionally keeping its inventory to a manageable level so that it can be screened first.
If the owner stopped caring and just decided to let any book that passed through the automated "does this book immediately and actively harm the customer?" screening machine then you'd have something that approximates the app stores.
The problem interpreting the intent of that tweet is that Lucy Connolly herself admitted to authorities she was inciting violence so becomes hard to build a defence at that point. Incitement isn’t first amendment protected in the US either https://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-18-crimes-and-criminal-pr...
The major part of this case is that without a jury trial he'd probably have had zero chance of being cleared. Countless others were persuaded to plead guilty to avoid a long time in prison and then were given long sentences. h
he was strong enough not to give in.
You are right, freedom of expression in the US doesn't cover inciting violence, but it has an high bar, imminent lawless action:
Seems very coordinated, like whenever there’s an article on the Trump administration crushing free speech by cutting funding/sanctioning/suing anyone critical of it, it quickly gets flagged into oblivion, but anything the UK and others do gets spun out of proportion and hangs around on the front page for ages.
If you want ideas for what you can do about it, "Let Grow" (founded by the Anxious Generation author and others) provides resources for raising more independent kids and campaigning against anti-kid neighborhoods and overly burdensome neglect laws - https://letgrow.org
One of the testimonies mentions a 4 year old cooking dinner (pancakes, eggs and sausages).
That takes an unbelievable a level of dexterity for a 4 year old. Reminds me of those social media posts of 4 year olds saying things that are way beyond the wisdom they may possess.
Free speech was always just the pretext. They still rage about Europe or Australia regulating social media or punishing people for using social media to commit crimes, even when the arguments those actions infringe on protected speech are far weaker than this situation.
Seems to be a device for American free speech advocates to feel like they’re contributing something while being distracted from Trump chilling free speech by shaking down CBS & ABC, defunding Harvard, bogus investigations into James Comey, Tish James & others, Texas school book bannings, AAUP vs Rubio, etc, etc.
I mean all of those are downright minor compared to what's happening in the UK. Seriously it's creepy how many people try to gaslight Americans that what we are seeing isn't one of the largest trampling on the rights of free speech in the west.
It’s already a solved problem-
load a digital ID into a wallet app, the operating system can then perform a zero knowledge proof for each website that the user is over 16. The government issuing the ID doesn’t know which websites it’s being used for and the website only gets a binary yes/no for the age and no other personal info:
How does this solve the problem of both governments and corporations wanting to implement this in ways that allow them to hoard datasets?
As it stands, the government in the US uses an identity verification vendor that forces you to upload videos of multiple angles of your face, enough data for facial recognition and to build 3D models, along with pictures of your ID.
I use Tor, so I get to see how age verification is implemented all over the world. By large, the process almost always includes using your government issued ID and live pictures/videos of your face.
There are zero incentives to implement zero knowledge proofs like this, and billions of dollars of incentives to use age verification as an opportunity to collect population-wide datasets of people's faces in high resolution and 3D. That data is valuable, especially for governments and companies that want to implement accurate facial recognition and who have AI models to train.
Nothing "solves" the problem of governments wanting to collect data on you. Governments will likely always want this, until we start caring about the issue enough to elect ones that don't.
The important point is that such invasive approaches are not required; clearly, however people already authenticate with government agencies for getting a driver's licence or passport would suffice. I think it's the responsibility of knowledgeable tech people to advocate for this.
Most being the operative word. In human-centric bureaucracies, people who don't have ID (for whatever reason: religious conviction, a feud with the relevant government agency, a legal status the computer system was never designed to represent) can still access services in many cases. Naïvely computerising everything will effectively remove rights from those whose paperwork doesn't check out.
ID verification is a universal hammer, to which all problems look like nails, but we shouldn't be so quick to reach for it. Not all of its downsides can be solved with cryptography.
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