Notices by Rich Felker (dalias@hachyderm.io)

@box464 Automatically expiring mutes are one of Mastodon's best features!

@lispi314 @9pfs You have the :: misplaced so it can't match.

@valpackett @ariadne @burnoutqueen The problem is accepting that they have standing to demand a feature whose purpose is identifying user's age. Once you've accepted that you're just squabbling over details.

@ariadne @burnoutqueen @valpackett But requiring signaling is a step towards requiring verification, and doesn't meet the needs of someone who doesn't even want signaling (maybe because they don't want to have to lie, or because of risk of exposure).

@lispi314 Which tooling? On Linux iptables works basically identically with v6 as v4. Learning curve was zero.

@alice Tell me about it. 😁

@johnzajac Yeah. What I mean is that analogy with how the same has already been done to normal folks accused of being involved in drug trade establishes precedent for "yes, this could just be done". It makes it "seem possible". And that's part of what has to happen in people's minds.

@johnzajac Civil asset forfeiture for billionaires.

Was that yacht involved in any way in the bribery you allegedly committed? We don't have to prove it. We just charge the yacht and seize it. Same thing for your private jet. And the social media company you bought.

@rcombs @whitequark No, you don't get contempt for taking reasonable time to comply with a court order.

@cutesobri @foone It's a magic string that's supposed to make Anthropic's AI bot refuse the query or something.

@whitequark @natanbc @rcombs This isn't an answer in terms of case law there, but in general, we have long held that writing FOSS is expression, and that while building products (physical things, preinstalled systems, maybe automated installations? etc.) out of it might be subject to laws and regulations, nobody can tell us what we can or cannot write upstream. This is a principle we should continue to fight for. If we lose it we will regret that.

@ariadne @burnoutqueen I didn't see such an assumption in the toot you replied to.

@ariadne Expressing that willingness is a betrayal of users and community. It's telling them whose concerns you deem valid and whose you don't.

@ariadne What about users who don't want that data stored on their computer to begin with, where it might leak due to vulnerabilities or badly-behaved applications?

And what apps would this even be serving? We're not like appstore platforms with sketchy apps that phone home to some service provider and want to report information abou the user. There's no possible thing any real native application that would be packaged could use this for.

But worst of all, complying is expressing a willingness to go along with ridiculous demands of a malicious government.

@whitequark @rcombs That law is about online service providers not operating systems you run on your computer. It's not related to this.

@whitequark @rcombs Even as a Linux business not up for civil disobedience, it's complying in advance if you don't go to court, either waiting for the state to take you to court, or preemptively suing to block enforcement. You wait until a court rules that you have to comply to do it (and then you deal with the fact that the upstream FOSS projects won't comply, so you have to maintain your own patches to comply, and you can use that hardship to help your case in court) rather than just agreeing to do it to begin with.

@whitequark @rcombs Is that a serious question? There is no law that says that we as the authors of a program have to modify it to behave in a certain way. If there is, it's unconstitutional. Even if it weren't, we wouldn't comply. It's complying in advance if nobody is holding a gun to your head or putting handcuffs on your wrists. Governments do not decide what we can write.

@whitequark @rcombs The other aspect I've seen someone else express better than I can, but I don't have the link handy. Basically, that this is a "boiling the frog" situation. Incrementally demanding more control to take away anonymity and access for people without proof of identity/age, with each incremental push seemingly having very little practical impact beyond the previous.

@whitequark @rcombs I think there are two aspects here. One is the matter of unknown and untrusted folks inserting themselves into projects eagar to comply in advance. This expresses a disempowerment of communities and a surrender of editorial control to a fascist government. From this perspective, it's the statement of values that matters more than any practical effect.

@wwahammy @artemis Like seriously. Even if you weren't going to consider complying with this unthinkable, adopting something like this that's a policy matter should be a process that requires a proposal and feedback from the community, with a long enough time window for that to happen. Not rushed-through changes by shadowy actors who show up just to do what some malicious external authority demands.