I just hope they won’t move toward the “oh, you use encryption? Let’s see how it protects you from solitary in jail” step too fast.

And no, I’m not sarcastic, I’m worried.

It’s being used for what it’s very good at. That means very little applications (although there are some), on a different scale, and certainly nothing that can promise a quick buck for free. Basically, empty promises just farted out.

Most of the real world usage were bogus, either because they did not actually work as advertised, or because they had lots of negative properties for businesses (imagine a system that would try to prevent fraud if done well… nobody wants that). There’s also the issue that a lot of “funky, interesting stuff”, once you filtered out the bad and the ugly, were just… less efficient, less useful versions of what we already used to do.

There are still people clinging to it (and the recent fuckery in the US might revive that… although for all the bad reasons), but the press moved forward to the next thing.

WTF just happened in Europe in the last few months. We used to be some sort of (dimmly lit) beacon of user freedom and privacy considerations. Now, I know there’s been a push for new legislations that basically fuck individual privacy over, but last I checked it was just a proposal. And now we’re doing a fucking 1260° turn toward full stanglehold on everything.

80 of people would just shrug as all control of their PC was taken away

Isn’t that actually the case? I know of these issues. And around me, I talk about them (without being pushy I hope). At work, the privacy issues with windows are seen as glaring warnings. But beyond that… I’m pretty sure the vase majority of people don’t care. Some are probably even enthusiast to have a “new update”, having no idea what it means.

It’s not even that. Porn is just a bystander here. The first step is put in place a very large framework for making some form of verification mandatory on arbitrary services and sites under the guise of whatever (terrorism, child protection, and extremely niche content are good candidates). Once it’s in place, it becomes the new normal very quickly.

Then, as the government, you suddenly have the power to extend the provision of said system to whatever the fuck you want. That’s where things gets funky, and not the good kind.

They just need to get the fuck off of people’s life.

And it probably should be. We could even have a set of small plates embedded somewhere for quick swapping on demand.

I like computers, but having an individual computer to run a single drink display really is overkill. At least use one to drive all the labels simultaneously, if you still want the ability to display nifty animations of liquid flowing above the actual liquid actually visibly flowing.

Oh, sweet summer child. Of course you can ban them. Lawmakers don’t always care about the technicality of things, because in most cases they don’t have to.

You can’t prevent VPN from existing, and short of a very tightly curated whitelist of services, you can’t prevent people from actually using them, sure. Unless you’re on the side of the state, the Law, and the enforcement. In which case, you can. A blanket ban on VPN usage is the perfect gateway to “we’ve seen traffic from your house toward a known VPN server, so, blam, arrest”. And it does not have to stop at known server.

Given the regular tries to outright ban encryption, this is the perfect venue to mass target encrypted communications. Depending on the wording, the mere presence of unobservable traffic could be enough for an arrest.

If what I’m saying here sound dystopian to you, just remember that not only most of this was actually tried (and aborted) time after time, but also that until quite recently, the general public actually using strong encryption was illegal in many places, including our western countries, and experiments to make state spyware mandatory are also a recurrent thing (which might take hold with the “ID verification through your phone” apps soon).

Because THEY decided that THEIR opinions are better than everyone else’s, so YOU have to listen to THEM, willingly or not.

Something something free speech and all that jazz.

You dropped this

/s

My next level is going back to that. Not with a huge CRT or a full-blown hifi system, but a nice place with a screen, some offline way to play music/audio, a few books maybe…

Fuck them.

It is possible to do things correctly. The question is, is it done often, and is it done on hardware you can trust. I’m somewhat confident if I run my services on bare metal, the provider would have a hard time getting my encryption keys, although it’s not impossible even in this situation. How many people do so with VPS and managed instances, where snooping around the runtime and exfiltrating data unbeknownst to the user is trivial?

Also, beyond that, how many fall for the convenience of things like SSE, whether it’s with customer provided keys or not? That should be a red flag, but people find it oh so convenient.

We’re bound to see stuff bubble out where “we did all the right things” boils down to clicking a checkbox in some web UI and be done with it in the future.

Well, I hope they’ll pay for my “EU age verification” phone, since my own won’t work. I’ll gladly buy one and not use it either.

• Govt. want to control access to everything
• People are not too happy about this
• Govt. say “to protect children, you have to install this app, under these conditions”
• You want to protect childrens, so you do so
• Govt. say “to protect this or that, we have to impose approved gates on many websites, based on the app you installed before”
• You want to protect this or that, so you accept it
• Govt. say “fuck you, you whatever is not in line with the fucking biggot at the helm of your country/federation/whatever, now we know what you do, we control what’s allowed, and anything to get around the blocks is illegal and will land you in jail. Fuck you again, fucker.”
• You’re a happy little plant in a pot.

Basically, it’s not about porn. It’s not about protecting kids. It’s not about helping “victims of abuse”. If anything, it’s putting all these in more danger, along with everyone else.

Ah, the monte-carlo approach to truth.

You can already generate 5s video for free with adobe firefly (two daily), and for static images, you could already do them for a long time on commodity hardware with your custom prompts.

This isn’t a fight they lost quickly, this is a fight they lost before showing up, but still showed up.