Notices by Mr Penguin (mr_penguin@social.freetalklive.com)

"The attorneys for the states say Meta designed Facebook and Instagram to hook young users and to keep them on site longer thanks to features such as infinite scrolling and the 'like' button."

Let me get this straight, we're not talking about 'protecting' an 18-22 year old crowd? Are these the 'kids' we're talking about Facebook 'protecting'?

I want to remind people that Facebook was restricted to a small network exclusively for Harvard University students. It later expanded to other Ivy League schools, then US and Canadian colleges before finally being opened to the general public.

At best you might be able to argue 14+... but that's not catering to children.

Not to mention the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) that these morons are referring to is a U.S. federal law that bars websites and apps from gathering personal data from children under 13 without direct parental permission when a site is targeted at that age group (kids under the 13).

A site that IS NOT TARGETED at kids doesn't have the same obligations as one that does. Facebook was never targeted at the under 13 crowd. Those under 13 have been barred from creating an account since Facebook opened the site to the general public in 2006!!!!

If you don't want your kid using facebook then don't give them a computer with unrestricted access to the internet. I think that's kinda mental helicopter parenting, but it's how this whole thing works. YOU are the parent of YOUR kids. It's not the governments responsibility to babysit them.

My mom once asked me "who told you life was fair?" in response to a statement @ 3-4 years old that something wasn't fair and it seems particularly applicable here...

"Independent music publisher Round Hill is suing Suno and Anthropic for allegedly using hundreds of copyrighted songs without permission to train their AI systems. The company says potential damages could exceed $1 billion, arguing there is 'nothing fair' about building multibillion-dollar AI businesses on copyrighted material while rights holders receive nothing."

There is nothing fair about copyright. It's dependent on theft, violence, and coercion of the masses.

Copyright only exists under the false auspices of the common good. In reality it's mostly a tool to funnel wealth to an elite.

If you don't believe me just watch Shark Tank or take a 101 business class some time.

While I was never a fan of Shark Tank the key things that the billionaire investor who hosts the show is looking for and says it allowed are things like copyrights, patents, and similar IP that can give him exclusivity.

This is the same sort of thing that is taught in business at every university on the planet.

I'm fully convinced we need a new distribution built from the ground up to be more secure. I just ran into a stupid fucking ?mistake? for a distribution geared at security and being hardened against attack and catering to the most vulnerable and now creating insurmountable hurdles for authenticating.

As a technical user I SHOULD NOT have difficulties confirming your distribution has been properly signed by you.

In another 10 minutes I'll probably be able to confirm this was in error and everything is sort of alright.... but... again... if I can't do it easily jumping through dozens of steps to verify then how the fuck is anyone else suppose to?

Yea, we need a new distribution assembled by competent developers and security minded folks.

God people are stupid. Even with a 99.98% effectiveness rate that might translate into 16 million false accusations for large chains!

"A Sainsbury's spokesperson said: 'We have contacted Mr Arnold to apologise for his experience at our Dulwich superstore. The incident was caused by human error, not the facial recognition technology. Customers can be reassured that the Facewatch system has a 99.98% accuracy rate, and every match is reviewed by a trained manager.' A Facewatch spokesperson said their technology was not at fault in this case. 'A correct alert was sent to the retailer, but was subsequently subject to human error in the way it was handled in store,' they said."

The spin is just astounding, so India got rid of bills over the equivalent of US ~$1 in order to force people onto a digital system they had a lot of control over and they're crediting ease of use for the cause of its success. Merchants were forced into accepting else die of starvation from a steep decline in business. It blows my mind how the powers that be twist and manipulate reality. It's not 'ease of use', but rather you made paying with cash impossible for most transactions:

"India's UPI became ubiquitous partly because it made digital payments almost frictionless for merchants, including small vendors who can accept payments with little more than a QR code. New research suggests that merchant acceptance was 'not just a result of UPI growth, but one of its key drivers'."

Another form of theft (taxation) and the danger of GOVERNMENT digital currencies (and why actual cryptocurrencies are so important) pops its ugly head up. So India forced through law it's entire population onto a single government digital payment system that was 'free' (it wasn't, someone was always covering the bill, but that's another story) and got rid of bills over the equivalent of like US ~$1. Anyhow it's been a few years since this happened and not they're going to start charging a small fee on EVERY transaction you make.

"The government has yet to decide the rate or exactly where it will apply, but proposals under discussion include a merchant discount rate (MDR) of 0.3-0.5% -- a small fee paid by a business to the banks and payment companies that process its UPI payments -- on larger transactions at big businesses."

The government never stops coming up with new ways in which it can steal from everyone. This is why I try and pay with cryptocurrencies first, goldbacks 2nd, fiat 3rd (cash), and only if nothing else plastic (credit or debit card). Technically you could throw a wire transfer in there one in a while too (not that it's optimal either, but better than plastic fee wise for larger domestic transactions and sometimes international transactions of a sizable nature).

Wow- so today someone created a database of all the name changes to Microsoft products and I realized just how out of touch I was with the Microsoft world.

Did you know for example that Active Directory was renamed to Azure AD? That happened all the way back in 2008! In 2023 then renamed it again to apparently Microsoft Entra ID.

Who knew? Has Microsoft really become this irrelevant?

People be crazy:

"‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ Lenders Pitch Loans for Needs Like Electricity and Rent"

If you can't afford something umm you probably should not be buying it.

Instead of buying into an apartment or home you can't afford maybe you should share the rent with someone else or cut back on the AC. Or MOVE somewhere that the taxes and cost of living isn't insane relative to income potential.

https://archive.is/AioYF

The humorous part of this is that the communication cartels are probably right in-so-far as there not being a law restricting them from selling your location data. It's entertaining to see people get upset about it in-so-far as on the one hand (democrats mostly here) will go on and on about the "rule of law" (which is humorously weak, though undoubtedly even more so during certain regimes), but then fail to realize that saying "good" (that they lost here) is the courts basically letting the "rule of law" slide. Talk about a double standard.

What people should do is stop subscribing to these carriers and demand freer markets (I don't carrier around a cell phone with active SIM). There is nothing that says radio waves can't work more like TCP/IP. The FCC auctions off spectrum, but that's a bad way to do it if you want real competition.

"The Supreme Court today rejected Verizon's attempt to get a $47 million refund from the Federal Communications Commission. In a list of orders issued by the court, Verizon's petition was denied without explanation. The denial ends any possibility of Verizon asking a lower court to review the fine and order the FCC to issue a refund. AT&T and T-Mobile are continuing to challenge similar fines on grounds that selling device-location data did not violate US telecom law.

AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon were fined a total of $196 million in 2024 for selling mobile users' real-time location data without their customers' consent. The carriers sold device-location information to data aggregators, who resold it to other firms. The carriers paid the fines and sought to have them overturned in courts, claiming their Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial was violated."

I swear- I'm convinced people are getting lazier and lazier. This women just bought a good from us and I have had 4-5 emails and a phone call with her. She bought the device on bad advice from AI. Then insists it doesn't work after attempting to activate it with AT&T. It's almost certainly the case given she's previously stated it that she threw out the original packaging and the IMEI #. So she spent 4 hours trying to get an AI to tell her the IMEI #. It finally gave her a fabricated number. She goes to activate it and AT&T blocks the activation.

I have no idea if she then went to an AT&T store and they gave her more bad advice saying it wouldn't work on their network. Which is wrong. But AT&T store is probably a license entity of the trademark and independently owned or something similar making them a competitor. So I'm not surprised if an AT&T store either intentionally told her the device would not work or were just incompetent.

I've seen Verizon stores basically say similarly falsely. Anything they don't sell "won't work" according their in-store reps more or less. This is entirely false. However there is some truth to Verizon blocking devices by default, even compatible devices. AT&T (the network) doesn't do that, or I can confirm the device is at least whitelisted on AT&T's network. Generally T-Mobile and AT&T have both been more open with their networks.

In any event I regularly activate new SIM cards with the very product the customer purchased using the same prepaid SIM cards. It's just mind blowing how lazy and incapable man has become.

Avoid AI or create problems for yourself is the moral of the story. Or at least double check the info that AI spits out and don't blame other people for your own mistakes when you make them.

@anywho I've been using Matrix for 5-10 years and it has gotten better, but it's not terribly well documented beyond the basic setup. The problem is once you get to a certain point (I want to say 250-500 users) it collapses in on itself While it's designed to scale you can't actually scale it without documentation and you have to set everything up with that scaling in mind from day 0. Ultimately it may be what we should be using as it does put us more in control than other platforms that we have a chance in hell at getting people to use.

IRC is fine for technical users, but anyone else it's never going to work for.

Even getting people to use Matrix is like banging your head against a wall.

I say this as probably one of the few people who've helped run and promote a Matrix server for close to a decade. I've seen the issues, I've looked at what it takes to set one up, and then recognized the weak spots.

There is a lot to dislike about Matrix, but there are other issues with Telegram and Signal and IRC and WhatsApp.

As much as people complain about meta data with Matrix Telegram and Signal require a phone number which is the ultimate in hilarity. It's like asking for ID before you let someone enter. It's far worse than whatever meta data issues exist with Matrix. Telegram does use end-to-end encryption that is custom and not optimal, and is limited to secret chats too, but not even my main concern.

Signal depends on components that can't be trusted. There is not a full set of source code. It also is centralized like Telegram (network side). We can't even begin to have a serious conversation about security with it, even if the math is solid.

WhatApps is proprietary. So no go there. Discord is similar.

Matrix is hard to admin, but works.

Telegram isn't the bastion of freedom that many make it out to be:

"'Over a 61-day period, the framework facilitated the takedown of 524 previously unknown piracy channels and 71 bots,' the paper reads. Additionally, Telegram removed many flagged posts."

Some of you may find this funny. I was reading a story description on slashdot, this:

"X is significantly expanding its open source codebase, which includes the app's 'For You' algorithm and its core ranking engine"

and on first glance, and I may not have gotten to the ranking engine part, I thought it was talking about X11. I was thinking "isn't x already 'open source', what am I missing here?

@nanook

lol, yea, I was thinking the same thing. One former PBS worker said that it's probably the result of a single guy for a single local station who was in charge of the tapes and insufficient funding. Apparently his local station lost everything in I think the 90s when the place they stored stuff burned down.

The counter to that though of course is that the cloud storage probably cost more and the legal costs even if trivial were probably still in excess of even implementing a simple consumer focused not excessively over-complicated fix. Like, simply making copies of the data and storing it off-site.

You thought ram prices were going sky high! Well, turns out that Microsoft has significantly increased it's 'stupid people' tax too!

I believe the licensing costs were maybe 3% decades ago and today I can tell you they can be as high as 20-40% depending on the system, edition, price, and source (ie mass market crap vs custom):

"PC manufacturers are seeing a 7% to 10% increase in the cost of Windows 11 licenses.."

The story also notes:

"But it also notes that three weeks ago laptop maker Framework blamed price hikes and reconfigurations for some of their models on processor, memory, storage, 'and other silicon costs — but also 'an increase in Windows license costs.'"

Just another completely foreseeable reason the "cloud" is dumb and users of the cloud umm dare I say it... deserve what they get:

"After its cloud storage provider went defunct, a PBS affiliate decided to sue a data center provider to regain access to 50TB of TV shows, videos, and other data dating back 70 years."

:) My company sells the most awesome variant of the t-shirt concept 'there is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer':

https://www.thinkpenguin.com/gnu-linux/there-no-cloud-its-just-someone-elses-computer-t-shirt

Now that said I'm glad PBS is hopefully not going to lose their unique irreplaceable data, I don't wish that on anyone really, but I think the more critical thing to remember is that they sued a third party company that merely rented space to a cloud hosting provider. A provider of which has contracts with the cloud hosting provider and of which it's dangerous to start a precedent of forcing them to provide access to their clients systems (the cloud hosting provider). The data center company should have been included in a lawsuit against the cloud hosting provider, but it's the cloud provider's liabilities, not the data center entity.

"Iron Mountain's spokesperson said the company only provides physical infrastructure, such as the building, network connectivity, power, and environmental controls. 'Our customers rent space for their servers and other hardware. These are the client's assets. We don't have access to the data on the hardware/servers because they belong to our customers,' the company said.

If it granted 'unauthorized access to third-party hardware without a court order,' Iron Mountain said the company would violate basic data privacy protocols, breach its contract with OSS, and 'potentially [expose] confidential data belonging to other clients of OSS.'"

Finally someone with some sense steps in to stop the atrocity that is restricting youth communication, a fundamental human right:

"France's Constitutional Council has struck down a law that would have banned children under 15 from social media, ruling that it disproportionately restricted freedom of expression and lacked adequate privacy safeguards around age verification."

And then this:

"President Emmanuel Macron has asked the government to rewrite the measure, with the goal of putting a revised version in place before spring 2027. Reuters reports: "

Yikes- it's scary how tyrannical minds work. On the plus side a non-retarded ~11 year old that isn't absurdly babied should be able to figure out means around this crap.

Helicopter parenting is fucked up. It started in the early 90s... and somehow has gotten worse ever since.

However I blame the progressives of the early 1900s and late 1890s for this. They pushed labor reforms that started the restrictions on minors working.

I'm not against prohibiting IDK actual abuse and enslavement of young people. But, umm like employment is actually the one means of a young person freeing themselves from parents and government tyranny. At least with employment you can always try another path.

If an employer is FORCING you to work for them they're NOT an employer, but a slave master and that's criminal regardless of a persons age.

The drivers license should be done away with too. It's literally a scheme to imprison society at large. It didn't start as a "safety" thing.It was because of societal bigotry toward car owners. Basically they were 'uncool' and an elite wanted to keep them off the road or at least subjugated to second class citizenry. Until the late 1960s not all states even required testing.

Flock is putting in 'safeguards' after serious negative attention and backlash to it's automatic license plate reader tech. Humorously this isn't anywhere near enough, but the one positive is they're reducing the 30 day window for cops to be able to lookup and see where you've been to 7 days.

So I love what the institute for justice does, they're a libertarian-looking non-profit law firm that fights for you. Anyway a lawyer or spokesperson from them had this to say:

"He argued that searches should instead be approved 'by judges with real warrants.'"

And all I thought was ... umm that isn't anywhere near good enough either. This data should never have been collected in the first place and to whatever degree it is going to be collected by non-government parties it should not be through a connected searchable system. It's one thing to photograph for security those intruding on your property and even retain said records for a limited period of time so you can look back if you need to. HOWEVER government should NEVER have easy access to said data. It should require investigation and a judges signature to obtain the data. The exception is when a citizen comes to you reporting a crime on their property and physically hands you the data/evidence.

"Critics say Flock's changes don't address the core problem: police can still decide for themselves when and whom to search without judicial oversight. The ACLU called the shorter data-retention period 'a step in the right direction,' but dismissed the other safeguards as "retreads" of inadequate protections, while Institute for Justice attorney Robert Frommer called the reforms 'window dressing' from a company in 'panic mode'"

The absurdity of judges and the law:

"The ruling concludes that the creators are not protected by the fair use doctrine, as they 'reproduce significant portions' of KADOKAWA’s content without being sufficiently transformative."

What constitutes "significant portions"? A mere 15%. If your kid ate just 15% of his dinner would you call that a "significant portion"? Of course not. Clearly the English language is being twisted to suit copyright holders here.

This is another example of why copyright should be done away with. If the copyright cartels can't even pretend to play fair why should anyone respect their "copyright" or for that matter the law??? People shouldn't and copyright should be done away with.

"On Monday, passengers aboard Delta flight 591 going from Las Vegas to Atlanta allegedly spoofed the onboard Wi-Fi, raising the attention of federal law enforcement."

Entertaining comment was made in regards to the spoofing story:

"This has always been a thing and maybe we need SSL for WiFi. Let's get Let's Encrypt on the case and Apple and Google throwing up big scary "Do you trust this Wifi?" for all non-certified Wifi hotspots and slap on a Certified label."

The part that is interesting is that you could do this for wifi even if the network were offline. So you would have to ensure your captive portal is pointing to the fullchain.pem file, not just the cert.pem file (or you may otherwise be able to poke holes). Then your local router can issue DNS for the domain. Since the captive portal provides the full chain pem file and the browser has the root certificate you can confirm your accessing the real offline router.

If you connect to a fake hotspot when asked to login the browser will throw an error about the domain domain ssl certificate not matching for the captive portal. The issue then becomes has the attacker created a fake hotspot and also created a decoy domain for the login (ie att.io instead of att.net or something similar).

If they have the user could be fooled unless users are made aware that they need to verify the domain is legit that they're logging into. Of course how does one do that?

I could envision a decentralized Web of Trust for domain names.

So chain of trust validation works by tracing these signatures: if you trust a user (e.g., Alice), and Alice has signed another user’s key (e.g., Bob), you can infer that Bob’s key is valid.

You have no chain of trust for att.io, so browser blocks it. You would for att.net.