Notices by Doughnut Lollipop 【記録係】:blobfoxgooglymlem: (tk@bbs.kawa-kun.com)

@atax1a @dieweltist I'm only addressing the point that free software people, like myself, are being hypocritical about LLMs.

Telling everyone who wants to write software to a) pay monthly to access proprietary software
b) download and install non-free software locally to work with the SaaS software

Is pretty much exactly the opposite of what we ever wanted computing to be.

@dieweltist @hp the LLM doesn't magically become less harmful because you run it locally or train it on ideologically compatible material.

Who remembers Love Live? :blobfoxgoogly: #anime

Snow halation - Love Live! School idol festival ~after school ACTIVITY~

Oh joy, my respiratory symptoms have returned, and there's no telling if it's something new ( @glitter has been sick with respiratory symptoms for the past week) or my bacterial sinus infection has returned again (the course of antibiotics ended a few days ago). :blobfoxgooglycry:

Gregg Halation :blobfox:

If you live in a country that you just know every single thing they say is suspect, please reply with where you are.

US need not apply; the term "Infinite Pinnochios" was invented for him as he broke the previous scale for truthiness.

And to all you "I don't have anything to hide" people:

Trump’s new budget turns the FBI into the gender police — Advocate

The proposal claims that “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” constitute emerging national security concerns. It includes “domestic terrorists” who practice “extremism on migration, race and gender,” or who oppose “traditional American views on family, religion and morality.”

Under the proposal, addressing those categories would become a stated priority for FBI counterterrorism spending.

The budget also calls for creating a new federal hub to address “political violence in America,” which it positions as focused in part on “leftist” ideology, according to the Washington Blade.

That center, referred to as the “NSPM-7 Joint Mission Center,” follows a directive issued by the Trump administration last year to prioritize investigations into perceived political threats from the left, as previously reported by independent journalist Ken Klippenstein.

Civil liberties advocates have warned that the approach risks conflating political dissent with national security threats. Several public interest groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, have raised concerns that the policy could target Americans based on their beliefs.

Hackers Expose The Massive Surveillance Stack Hiding Inside Your “Age Verification” Check — TechDirt

A couple weeks ago, Discord announced it would launch “teen-by-default” settings for its global audience, meaning all users would be shunted into a restricted experience unless they verified their age through biometric scanning. The internet, predictably, was not thrilled. But while many users were busy venting their frustration, a group of security researchers decided to do something more useful: they took a look under the hood at Persona, one of the companies Discord was using for verification (specifically for users in the UK).

What they found, according to The Rage, was exactly what we would predict:

Together with two other researchers, they set out to look into Persona, the San Francisco-based startup that’s used by Discord for biometric identity verification – and found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a US government authorized server.

In 2,456 publicly accessible files, the code revealed the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting – and a parallel implementation that appears designed to serve federal agencies.

Let me say that again: 2,456 publicly accessible files sitting on a government-authorized server, exposed to the open internet. Files that revealed a system performing not a simple age check, but a ton of potentially intrusive checks:

Once a user verifies their identity with Persona, the software performs 269 distinct verification checks and scours the internet and government sources for potential matches, such as by matching your face to politically exposed persons (PEPs), and generating risk and similarity scores for each individual. IP addresses, browser fingerprints, device fingerprints, government ID numbers, phone numbers, names, faces, and even selfie backgrounds are analyzed and retained for up to three years.

The information the software evaluates on the images themselves includes “Selfie Suspicious Entity Detection,” a “Selfie Age Inconsistency Comparison,” similar background detection, which appears to be matched to other users in the database, and a “Selfie Pose Repeated Detection,” which seems to be used to determine whether you are using the same pose as in previous pictures.

This was the same company checking whether a teenager should be allowed to use voice chat on a gaming platform.

Beyond offering simple services to estimate your age, Persona’s exposed code compares your selfie to watchlist photos using facial recognition, screens you against 14 categories of adverse media from mentions of terrorism to espionage, and tags reports with codenames from active intelligence programs consisting of public-private partnerships to combat online child exploitative material, cannabis trafficking, fentanyl trafficking, romance fraud, money laundering, and illegal wildlife trade.

So you wanted to verify you’re old enough to use voice chat, and now there’s a permanent risk score somewhere documenting whether you might be involved in illegal wildlife trafficking.