Heritage has been laying waste to America my whole life. They basically planned all of Reagan's legislative agenda, too, just like Project 2025 is doing today. In very real ways, they and their vision are America (a system is what it does, not what it says it does).
Compare this to what the EU built. The EU Digital Identity Wallet under eIDAS 2.0 is open-source, self-hostable, and uses zero-knowledge proofs. You can prove you're over 18 without revealing your birth date, your name, or anything else. No per-check fees, no proprietary SDKs, no data going to a vendor's cloud. The EU's Digital Services Act puts age verification obligations on Very Large Online Platforms (45M+ monthly users), not on operating systems. FOSS projects that don't act as intermediary services are explicitly outside scope. Micro and small enterprises get additional exemptions.
The US bills assume every operating system is built by a corporation with the infrastructure and revenue to absorb these costs. The EU started from the opposite assumption and built accordingly.
Just another reminder of how we need to protect what we have in the EU (not a guarantee, but at least a chance of fair dealing and a sustained commitment to civic values). Now that the mask has fully fallen, we have to take every step possible to root out American influence.
QWACs exist to provide a more stringent and user-accessible way to assert a website's identity, mostly to foil phishing and other exploits that regular certificate systems don't address well. Where does this cross into censorship at all?
Oh, stop. Tinfoil-hatting like this is how privacy and internet freedom activism gets a bad rap.
QWAC certs are only for "high value" sites: banks, government services, etc. They can only be issued by "Qualified Trust Service Providers" (e.g. digisign, D-TRUST, etc -- not governments), and cost many hundreds of euros. Your blog and mastodon instance and 98% of businesses just aren't affected.
People operating in "high risk" sectors that need access to payment infra (porn, drugs, etc) are, as always, going to have a hard time. That's a worthy conversation, but nothing about QWAC or eIDAS is about "the government not issuing certs to people they don't like".
This is how total control of a platform always starts. Google starts with Android and just does digital signing for applications through their store. Until they achieve control of the platform, then suddenly you can't load your own applications without them signing it either.
Secure Boot is just a technology for those that need it, until Microsoft decides it's mandatory for everyone.
It's not really tinfoil hatting, EU countries already deny privileges based on political affiliation and so on. Germany shut down a Muslim cultural center for refusing to censor a speech by someone who came from Gaza, merely because of the fact they came from Gaza. Limiting government power is still something the EU needs - they're not all good.
Zero knowledge proofs stops corporations from tracking you, but they don't stop the government from tracking which websites you visit.
They also require hardware attestation for them to work, which means you will be only allow to use a locked-down goverment-approved OS for age verification, and that opens the door for the government to control the software running on every device.
> Just another reminder of how we need to protect what we have in the EU (not a guarantee, but at least a chance of fair dealing and a sustained commitment to civic values).
> Now that the mask has fully fallen, we have to take every step possible to root out American influence.
You have literal rogue states in your union that neutralize the entirety of it, as the above shows. It's a joke. The EU is a joke. A single country is enough to mean US tech can do whatever it wants, similarly a single other country is enough to mean Russia can largely do what it wants.
The others are of course in on it too. Which is why for all the empty EU talk on US big tech you've never heard them talk about the Irish DPA and what they all enable. Strange right? Would think that this would be a priority. But it shows that even if the rest weren't in on it, just one country would be enough. And it could even be a tiny place like Luxembourg.
Laws and regulations aren't worth the paper they're written on if they're not enforced. The current ones aren't enforced at all, why would any new ones be? Did you know that there was a long period where hosting European citizens' PII on US-controlled servers (like Amazon instances in Europe) was illegal, after the "Privacy Shield" was deemed unlawful? No one cared. Did you know that this is currently the case again, because the thing that replaced it has once again had its basis ripped out from under it by Trump? Once again, no one cares, and indeed EU governments and corporations are _still_ making migrations _to_ US clouds.
Not that it matters, within a few years RN will be running France and AfD will be running Germany and you don't have to pretend any more as the "mask will have fallen" just as much.
So what's the end-game here? Future society needs to schlep a history of current societies banal social media content along with?
This feels religious; Oh, just upload it all to digital Heaven! I'll never "die" and people can continue to revere me and my cats forever!
Just because we can doesn't mean we should care about preserving every bit and byte. Especially since the computing infra for that has real environmental costs.
> Especially since the computing infra for that has real environmental costs.
Of all the arguments against archiving information like this, "environmental costs" has to be the least convincing one. Storify posts are just a bunch of links to tweets, and those are already intended to be archived by the Library of Congress. A static database dump of Storify content has negligible cost and is highly compressible.
If you want to talk about the environmental impact of tech, let's talk about the carbon footprint of Bitcoin, or the usage of rare earth metals in non-recyclable hardware that gets replaced every year[0].
[0] This is generally non-recoverable. Even Apple, which claims to recycle their hardware, recovers very little from the process.
You never know what has historical relevance until it is history. That lesson was learned the hard way and so now if something can be preserved at low cost we'd do well to at least attempt to keep it around until history can judge it.
I clearly don't agree with this guy, but I don't see any reason to downvote/flag him into oblivion. I both upvoted and vouched this comment, not because I agree or think it's valuable, but because it doesn't deserve to be disappeared. Comment if you feel like it, or page on by if you don't. Ironically, his words will live on forever.
IIRC, this isn't a collection of all tweets, etc (though the Library of Congress is already doing that), it's a curated collection of tweets, many important enough that some journalist somewhere bothered to write an article about them.
Yeah, it's a shame! The Internet Archive does some twitter archiving -- I helped a little by finding a listing of government social media accounts -- but it's not enough.
> Future society needs to schlep a history of current societies banal social media content along with?
That seems kind of dumb, but with Moore's Law still mostly working for storage, it's also cheap -- certainly cheaper than building actual libraries. There's also currently no way to mark URLs as temporary, so we can't distinguish the permanent from the ephemeral. Finally, it's far cheaper than having everyone who wants to save URL content archive it on their own personal box (plus however many backups), which is what I do now if I really want to use something again.
Given that it was used by a lot of news websites, there's a lot of legitimate history in there, whether we see it as such or not. That's worth preserving.
Libraries "weed" books all the time, and most of them are pulped. Which is about like burning them, only the carbon doesn't end up in the atmosphere. So this is probably not the best comparison.
This is a totally wrong analogy. Books were burnt for religios/political reasons. Storify is giving up because of lack of financial instreams for the owners.
Tons of valuable books and records have been burnt because someone thought they weren't valuable or didn't have the money to house them. It's true, it's more likely they were just thrown on a trash heap and left to rot, but trash incineration is a thing.
There's tons of people making more within the Microsoft/Oracle/SAP/Apple/etc ecosystems than employees of those companies, too. This is different insofar as the market was not intentionally created, but it's hard to blame him for "exploiting" the circumstances.
I use "exploiting" in a more technical sense here. An exploit is using a bug in the game for personal gain, in an always-on multiplayer game with an economy affecting all players, the permanent effects of an exploit can be much worse. That's not what's happening here, because no bugs are necessarily being exploited (though maybe at one point they were; a buggy drop rate resulting in excessively high yields for farmers, for example) but the farmers tend to get lumped in with the exploiters in the developer's mind because the exploit/fraud departments of customer service work pretty closely together.
Gold farming has generally been considered a fraud of sorts, because it can seriously damage the in-game economy or the player perception of the economy, and many gold farmers perform actual fraud (creating accounts with fake or stolen CC numbers).
The fact that we even have these problems is both amazing and wonderful.
The fact that there are cartels within computer games hiring low cost foreign workers to manipulate a virtual experience for real monetary gain, and there are investigative units trying to track them down is fucking awesome.
I was an original beta player for UO and we had a fantastic run exploiting bugs and high speed Internet connections from the Intel game lab we ran, with multiple accounts to dominate and reach wealth and fame.
It was my golden years of gaming actually. Now I may play an hour or two of skyrim a week if I am lucky.
Back then I was making nearly nearly 70k to play UO from a sick lab 12+hours a day.
"The fact that we even have these problems is both amazing and wonderful.
The fact that there are cartels within computer games hiring low cost foreign workers to manipulate a virtual experience for real monetary gain, and there are investigative units trying to track them down is fucking awesome."
From one point of view, sure. It really is a bummer to the player experience since the reality of it is that a company can and will protect itself better than it's users in aggregate will protect themselves, so you just end up with the current WoW situation of a huge stream of hacked accounts draining resources of the game company and destroying the play experience of the players. I'm not sure where any of this is wonderful, really. It isn't like the myth of the gold farmer where they hire out warehouses of employees to play the game building up "new gold" in the player economy, it's just key loggers and trojans and ten million potential victims.
I'm well aware of the issues that some designers have with 99designs and such. I have sent briefs to recommended local designers, but they're either unwilling to work within my budget, or ask for unworkable terms (e.g. no revisions).
Given that, I don't see how I have any other recourse. So far, the traditional designer/client relationship certainly hasn't served me well.
I have to think so -- you can patch binaries and modify commit logs all you want, but patches are still being applied in sequence, locally, when you pull. If the hashes don't match, boom.
But then, can those hashes be swapped out? We need hashes on the hashes! :-P
As part-owner of the code in question, this is what one little guy on my shoulders is saying, very loudly.
Taking the other side for a moment: Really, no code in hosted environments (which is what I presume you meant by "the cloud")? In a production environment, user data is way more important than deployed code (compromise that and you may be looking at jail time in some jurisdictions, nevermind ruinous consequences to the business' reputation)...is that encrypted before it hits the disk or something? Or, do you think that any code or data not stored on machines located on premise is tempting fate?
But far, far less likely to be the target of anyone looking to acquire an absolute ass-load of proprietary source code (and github is probably the largest concentration of it today).
(Just trying to continue to run the skeptic's argument, here. I agree with the point quite a bit.)
