Notices by Jonah Aragon (jonah@mastodon.neat.computer)

I think some are still missing the point. I’m not saying they’re going to lock up every single person who uses a VPN or watches porn.

Your government’s strategy is to make “crimes” like this as common and easy to commit as possible.

This way, if you ever do something completely legal which they *actually* don’t like, *which can be completely unrelated to VPNs or bypassing age verification,* they can pull up your internet history and easily prosecute you.

Organize a legitimate protest, and the government’s swift response will be to label you a child sex offender because they found you using evil VPN technology.

This is how free speech dies, not from a law that says “free speech is dead now,” but from draconian, authoritarian laws like this that give the government “plausible” reasons to go after anyone, which can’t easily be fought against.

This has always been the playbook to target innocents. In the USA, drug possession laws being created as a pretense for cops to raid and dismantle minority communities, for example. And now this is coming to the digital realm.

RE: https://mastodon.thenewoil.org/@thenewoil/115971195227745876

Next up will be a VPN ban. Many tech-y people will see that and think “lol yeah well that’s not going to stop *me* from using a VPN”

A VPN ban isn’t really meant stop you from using one. It means when they catch you doing so, they’ll use the fact you’re using this harmless technology itself as a *pretense* to lock you up without needing to do any “hard work” (i.e. an investigator’s job) like actually confirming whether you committed a real crime.

Don’t think you won’t be impacted just because you know how to outsmart an ISP filter! This is not a plan to protect children or stop you from consuming adult media. It is a ploy to eventually eliminate ALL freedom of expression and free access to information in the UK.

And the same goes for Chat Control and encrypted messengers, btw

#UKpol #VPNban #PornHub #ChatControl #Privacy #FreeSpeech #SocialMedia

Can my electric company possibly know this, or are these nonsense numbers? 🤔

RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/115587256564864694

Okay… if Mozilla is going “to do for AI what [they] did for the web” now, then who is going to do for the web what Mozilla did for the web?

It's been said before a dozen times in a dozen ways, but corporations taking away *ownership* of internet spaces is why technology is kind of going to shit.

People used to have hand-crafted blogs and build well-structured forums, and they gave it all up for a feudalist system of Facebook Groups, Subreddits, and Discord 'servers.' I'm so happy tech like Ghost and Mastodon is changing the tides here, I only wish we could speed it up further 🙂

@BrodieOnLinux sure, but unfortunately the ratio of AI videos to human videos is the best it's ever going to be

idk if any mutuals have/want a newsletter and want to switch to Ghost, but I will literally help you migrate to Ghost from your static site, Substack, whatever for free; just because I think Ghost and its recommendation network and its ActivityPub features are all so awesome 🙏

I *really* want to get the network effect going with an open-source platform and leave Substack in the dust. So yeah hmu lol

what do you do?

@BrodieOnLinux yeah of course there were definitely other dips 😅

But uh, yeah I think right now is also one of those dips…

I feel like every generation thinks they had the best childhood, because historically at almost every point in history your childhood was probably occurring at the all time high of humanity up to that point right? That’s the nature of progress.

However, I genuinely believe people born from 1994–2004 actually had THE best childhoods so far, and ever since, the level of how cool society is has never again reached those all time high peaks. I’m sad for the kids!

Anyways, prove me wrong 🤓

It’s unfortunate I can easily clear 10x the number of boosts on posts about bad news compared to good news. Where’s all the people who want to highlight the good stuff going on? 🙂

Friends don’t let friends use ccTLDs! (any 2-character TLD)

Sucks for gup.pe 😬

People talking about this whole Google APK verification thing has really proven to me how many people mistakenly believe Google's flavor of Android is any more "free" than iOS. You have never had freedom and choice under the Play Services regime 🙃

does anyone else ever look at things they did even just 6 months ago and wonder how they got the energy to do such a thing in the first place?

What are we doing wrong? lol

@feld it does seem to work for AI companies pirating content

@feld I would hope the same concept would apply towards server operators looking at an IP address and somehow divining a person’s location from that info.

No offense to Europeans, but there is nothing in the world I hate more while driving than encountering a roundabout 😪

There’s a lot of beating around the bush here, so I’ll just say it. If the two choices we’re getting are:

1) kids occasionally will look at pornography online
2) a federal ID is required to use the internet

Number 1 is in fact the better choice.

It's crazy that the official mastodon.social staff account on here looks exactly like a phishing account with no domain verification whatsoever lol