Age verification done the right way does not require providing any personal info. I 100% oppose forcing people to share personal data with private companies. This is not what we’re talking about here.

Handing your government ID and other personal data to private companies is exactly how current proposals for online age verification work. It could be done without this, but that’s not what governments and corporations are pushing for, because the goal is easier surveillance. Take a look at some of the problems with Persona, for example:

https://stateofsurveillance.org/news/persona-age-verification-surveillance-biometrics-government-reporting-2026/

The next step will be to make more essential services online only, so people have to use the internet.

They probably know this perfectly well. But there are corporations and their lobbyists to think of, and they’d much prefer it if ordinary people weren’t able to build their own devices and spare parts, but instead had to buy them at inflated prices.

Into fascism. But also from fascism.

That has always been true, but the prices are higher for all tiers now.

Yeah but then they wouldn’t get to collect people’s biometric data to sell to the highest bidder.

Sounds great but is sold out already.

Yeah I don’t really do new technology any more. I’m more into keeping the old machines running as long as possible.

Painfully expensive, like all computer hardware these days.

It’s probably lobbying by corporations who feel threatened by people being able to make and repair their own stuff. Also possibly gun manufacturers, and perhaps the government’s desire to spy on everything people are doing with tech. These things are always dressed up as safety measures.

Just once I’d like to see the world’s companies react to dumb local laws by refusing to sell their products where the laws apply. Problem is, other states and countries always introduce matching stupid laws soon enough. California, for example, is introducing a similar restriction on 3D printers.

I don’t really understand why people with repositories that are vulnerable to DMCA takedowns persist in hosting them with Microsoft. But then I don’t really understand why so many open-source projects opt for Microsoft’s Git hosting anyway, when there are alternatives without the Microsoft.

I’m all for challenging Adobe, but the journalist should ask how and why these competing products are free. What are the implications of that in the long run? I was happy to pay a reasonable price for the Affinity suite, and it becoming free actually worries me. Free isn’t something a company does unless they’re going to crank up the price later, or carry ads, or spy on you, or steal your creations, or lock you in, or all of the above. It’s pretty shallow how the article just stops at “free is great”.

Sounds good but $60 per month is a lot of money.

I agree in general about self-hosting, but backup seems like a special case. Where do you back up your self-hosted data? An offsite copy of the backup is needed, and it should be automatic. For most people (who only have one site, their home) that’s not easy to arrange except through a cloud backup service.

I bet they still have some good devs who are continually thwarted by management.

“Not malware”: is this the skill they call prompt engineering?

They’re just making themselves look trashy and desperate.

What might work is making their software better than everyone else’s. But that requires effort and skill and managerial competence.

Microsoft and Apple. The internet will only allow OSs from large American corporations.

I’d like to see the rest of the world say “fuck it” and carry on as before, leaving the Americans to censor themselves. But governments around the world are suddenly rushing to implement very similar terrible laws. It smells very coordinated.

Would this bill ban the use of all operating systems released before it became law? That seems unlikely.

So then how about OSs released before it became law, with patches released afterwards? That also seems unlikely.

So then how about my computer’s current OS, which is a heavily patched version of a little hobby OS called Linux, originally released in 1991?