What a crazy hypothetical you made up, "left of center", considering the Republican party was pushing for federal ID verification for online services years before Democrats caught up to speed. Red states brought this up first and resulted in multiple porn sites banning users in those states.

But yes, online censorship and corporate surveillance is a bipartisan issue in the two party system of fascists. You will not be able to "vote" these issues away.

I thought this was going to be about the blatant Nazi posting, both in the community forums and and in asset flip/game spam in the store. Apparently the lawyer in question was bringing up accepting more censorship in the lead up to more pornographic content becoming available on Steam.

I don't typically care for Gabe, but yeah, I would have said the same thing. Probably not for the same reason tbf. But even if you don't have any political concerns outside of making money for your yacht collection... Hate speech isn't currently costing Valve money. Porn bans are directly effecting a market they have invested into. Why would you pay a legal expert to be so spineless?

Years ago, official development of an android app of syncthing was abandoned by the official developers. Most android users migrated to an already existing fork by a github maintainer catfriend1.

Catfriend1 unceremoniously disappeared, with their github repositories being taken over by a new user researchxxl. This was entirely unannounced and wasn't really discovered until people with automatic updates enabled on *Obtanium noticed it.

researchxxl is not a known community member, and is being very reclusive when interacting with the syncthing community. Their github account was made specifically for the repository transfer, and their method of handling existing credentials is suspicious; looking no different than a hostile take over.

At this point in time, they are collaborating with Nexon, a user who worked with catfriend to publish syncthing fork builds to Google Play. They are more well known and trusted. If you can trust Nexon, and trust that end users in general are putting more scrutiny on the github source code after this whole situation, you can probably trust the recent releases for now.

Sorry for any details I may have gotten wrong. AFAIK, no one has taken the time to document all the things that have gone down. I would have linked to such a document otherwise. A lot of the discussion on this is happening in separate discussion threads, one of them being researchxxl's github issue page, which they are censoring/deleting discussions from with(till recently) no oversight.

*Edit: this is also a poor summary. There is a lot of additional context that I don't feel comfortable trying to encompass. Like why the official syncthing developers stopped their official android app, or catfriend1's forum account coming back for a short time to try to explain their side of the story. Frankly, for how many people are using syncthing, I don't think this story is getting enough attention.

it’s in one place that any third party can reference.

But why would I want that?

Even if you ignore the whole "this doesn't verify anything" discussion, why would I want to give third parties easy access to personal and potentially sensitive information? I personally am not interested in simplifying data collection for corporate entities who definitely do not give a shit about the safety of my personal data, let alone hypothetical children. I do not know why this data collection needs or would be desired to be implemented within systemd, besides being a direct response to age verification laws saying its an OS providers responsibility to collect it. Arbitrary data collection by private entities is not "useful". My personal data has no business being referenced by random asshats that ask for it. There are so few things in the world that "justify" needing my age that I would suggest it would be easier to make my birth date a permanent data point on my PC. Same goes for the other personal details that systemd already supports. Crazy to imagine anyone actually using those on a personal machine.

Age verification is already dystopian, but why do kids need to verify their age??? Wouldn't the logical assumption be that if you can't verify as an adult, that they would be underage and therefore be chat limited? What purpose is there to having photo verification that someone is a child? I figured it was a poorly written headline, but the article does seem to suggest they are pointlessly collecting data on children with no explanation.

Also don't appreciate this article acting like corporate monopolies should be more trusted with the surveillance state. It's crazy seeing all news sites manufacturing consent for this shit so openly.

Thats part of the problem though. Supposedly catfriend1 gave researchxxl their signing keys, and researchxxl used these on their new github account. No one was aware that catfriend1 was not maintaining the repo anymore until users saw unexpected/unannounced updates and looked into the matter. This sparked a short lived discussion on F-Droid forums about what should be done when maintainer transfers are handled poorly like this. F-Droid admins decided that it wasn't that big of an issue, which is problematic... this supposedly happened between two people meeting each other online and discussing it with each other. But its possible that catfriend1 is being blackmailed or otherwise coerced into handing off this data. This type of credential attack could happen with a compromised machine, without the victim ever realizing it in time. The fact that F-Droid treats this so casually is upsetting. Signed developer certificates protect you from MITM attacks, it does not protect you from the sources themselves being compromised.

Historically, Valve has hired lawyers to weasle out of legal responsibilities around the world, to limited success. They repeatedly tried to get out of legally mandated refunds for digital goods in several western nations, and now people think that Valve is the good guys for eventually capitulating like it was their idea in the first place.

I cannot imagine a scenario where Gabe Newell would hire a lawyer just to have him say "comply with the new laws instead of fighting back".

EDIT: Just cause I felt like it made for more present context, Valves legal team clearly isn't going to take the "maybe we should ban loot boxes as a form of online gambling targeted towards children" debate lying down. You mess with Valve's sources of revenue, they will pull out every possible slime ball argument to say they are legally allowed to piss over any and all consumer rights. Gabe's not about to allow porn to be banned on his store of "digital game license's where you don't own anything actually". Not until the legal situation gets so dire that porn isn't worth attempting to profit off anymore. He has fought far more tasteless battles in his career.

Your info is a bit out of date. Epic already sold off Bandcamp back in 2023 during layoffs. Its owned by Songtradr now, who I personally know nothing about.

Checked the authors website; watermark made searching for it easy. They have been using this consistent art style since 2021. They have been posting art to Twitter since 2011.

Don't know what in this comic you could possibly see as a give away for AI use.

If its bad for kids, its bad for adults too. Age restrictions don't address the emotional manipulation systems at hand with corporate social media, and societal well being is obviously not what the state is concerned with anyway.

The removal of online privacy is the only goal.

You don't use much social media, then? Is this a joke? Its literally a twitter screenshot lol.

Lemmy noticeably has very little queer horny posting. I feel like even Tumblr, with its site wide porn ban, is more publicly horny than Lemmy.

Wanna give a source for that? Everything I read said that after the 24 hour scare screen, you could optionally enable third party installation permanently. Literally nothing about certificates expiring. Where are you even getting this from?

Pretty sure they meant that LLM companies can easily scrape Lemmy and train models off of the posts without any authorization. Its freely, publicly accessible(until, you know, they end up DDoSing these poorly funded instances out of existence by scraping them).

I don't like this theory because they have already had access to this information with social media. Individuals willingly volunteer this information about themselves and their friends, and data brokers would collect and centralize it from multiple sources. This is why some platforms were trying out AI age verification in countries that hadn't officially mandated ID verification yet. They were confident enough, with all the info they had already collected, to assume someone's age. They would hope that the people who fail the check would be few enough to not cause an immediate uproar("just verify with ID, what's the big deal?")

This is most certainly more of an authoritarian power grab to prevent any anonymous criticism what so ever. Id verification will allow them to target any application that does not comply and preserves user privacy. Anyone who does not comply will be implied to be a criminal or enemy of the state. They want to make a system where corporate surveillance cannot be avoided.

The corporations lobbying for this want to benefit from being a part of the fascist state, but don't want to handle any legal obligation or public scrutiny from the obvious damages that will come from collecting this information. That's why you have different companies lobbying for different "solutions"; whatever keeps them from facing repercussions but still makes them money for being a part of the surveillance state is what they will support.

They aren't even reliably committed to no DRM. They frequently sell games that require GOG Galaxy accounts to access certain content(online/multiplayer functionality, DLC packs). GOG has explicitly gone on record saying that these forms of DRM are acceptable, despite running a store for years without them.

And preservation of old games(at least how they are doing it) is an inherently unprofitable service. Them preserving games that they don't even have the licensed right to sell is one of the dumbest decisions they have made so far. Most of their older releases have just been grabbing a bunch of existing fan patches into a more polished installer; these sorts of tasks will always end up in the hands of hobbyists who would do this work without being paid.

I feel like at this point, you have to focus on individual developers/publishers if you want to properly support DRM free releases. Having brand loyalty to GOG will get you nothing.

It was also an option to not make a useless field. Not like this self reported dob is going to cut it for the existing age verification laws as is exists now. But I can be mad at people in a position of community production for not having a spine, too.

How is this supposed to be making the best of the situation anyway? It accomplished nothing but piss off the community and signify to authoritarians that open source developers are ready to bend over for them. Simply threaten unenforceable fines across the world and suddenly everything is hopeless. Better get ready to comply, its inevitable! Its pathetic. Ageless Linux might be performative bs, but at least its critical of this over reach instead of intentionally signalling compliance in advance.

Good system design doesn't do things without me asking it to. I'll gladly manually re enter my birth date for an external service if its required, which to be clear, should be as close to 0 times as possible. What, should I keep all my job application info in the initialization system too? Because a website I'm on might ask for it at some point? Don't want to be too redundant.

Literally this field serves no purpose other than to build compliance with the surveillance state. No end user asked for this. Like I said, can't imagine any end user making use of the existing systemd fields either. But those also didn't get any attention because they weren't made as a reaction to threats by a malicious regime.

I don't see anyone mentioning Fooyin, which seems to be an attempt at being an open source clone of Foobar2000, right down to its plug in system.

Its making me feel concerned. Is there a reason foobar fans aren't using it? Do they just not know about it? Its missing a few features here and there, but the UI is so 1 to 1 that I can't imagine trying to use anything else as a replacement.

On top of using include mode, be sure to go into Qbittorrents settings and bind the network interface to the VPN. That will ensure that even if the VPN is disconnected or turned off for some reason, Qbit will not attempt to communicate on clear net. Some people would rely on Proton VPNs kill switch feature for that, but that is not available with split tunneling.

Usually how these verification systems work is; if you cant verify, you don't get to chat. Its supposed to lock out children from communicating with strangers online. There is no reason to verify children if the only people allowed to talk are verified adults.

I don't know what clown shoes system Roblox has decided to go with. Again, the article doesn't seem to specify why they are collecting children data. If the idea is to age gate chat between player demographics, so that kids can talk to other kids... that seems like a wasted effort. Children are quite capable of abusing each other without any adults around. Age verification is not an alternative to moderation.

And that's without getting into "AI age verification is easily fooled"; kids and predators alike are going to get around the system if they bother looking into how to do so. Just as all the generations before them were constantly circumventing lazy tech solutions for blocking content when children are involved.