No degree, just a kid with a Macbook Air.

> demand open code and full control over the device you bought

What do we do with companies/products like Tesla, short of shutting them down? Fully open code and absolute full control seems like it's going too far. Idealistically I like it, but practically I can't see it working.

I was making a point about trust, not what to do about it. If you are American, you should worry about Americans spying on you, as that actually could have consequences for your life and there is well know evidence and a legal foundation to justify such worries.

As non-car owner, I also dislike the Tesla cameras around me. Maybe one solution would be to not have fucking cameras everywhere, if the owner's exclusive access can't be guaranteed, abuse can't be prevented and legal consequences are not enforced. Maybe there should be standards and certification.

> this is where i switch back to downloading music off russian pirate websites.

As a bonus you may even get discount codes for your VPN!

For real tho, fuck all those rent-seeking control freaks. Piracy was almost dead, we had a good deal. But no, it's never enough, so here we are.

Also, some piracy boards are actually pretty steady, nice and cool communities, and listing to local files feels way more intentional.

well, life isn't all sunshines and rainbows after all :) i'm glad there are lots of people who think just like i do and are ready to sacrifice convenience for the sake of privacy

Yeah, it's an ignorant and arrogant take on the legal system.

In most places the law is exercised pragmatically, interpreted by presumed intention. That's why legal precedent is important. You likely won't convince any judge being anal about the wording (maybe if the law gets applied for the first time). You can derail anything semantically. Furthermore, despite apparent belief, laws are frequently formulated in such a way that a particular wider term is extended to help interpretation. Eg. "It is prohibited to use a VPN in a way capable and intended to obscure one's physical internet access point identification". (Not a lawyer, not a native speaker, don't get anal with this wording, either.) I very much doubt any legally binding document would even use the term 'VPN' primarily to describe the technical means for anonymization, but rather describe it functionally.

Unless Apple would make an anonymizing VPN connection mandatory, I don't see any difference to the situation as is. As long as people can be pressured to turn off the VPN, nobody loses any customers. Additionally, I don't think paying customers are the target, since they usually provide identifying information anyway.

If Apple started routing all iPhone/Mac traffic through some anonymizing VPN by default, services that block it would absolutely lose lots of customers.

Yes, but Apple wouldn't do this, because Apple is also at risk of losing customers when people get blocked by network security at work. We could also fantasize about Apple fighting all the tracking everywhere, including their own services...

Quite frankly, it's a bit silly to paint Apple as some privacy fortress, who wouldn't have to comply with law enforcement/intelligence to unmask/tap traffic. I mean, for a lot of people VPN choice is done considering legal jurisdictions somewhere far away. Apple could/would never possibly offer this level of protection.

> when people get blocked by network security at work

There were also plenty of corp-ware in existence that had Flash as *absolutely mandatory*.

It's a matter of numbers.

If 20% of people are using VPNs, blocking them is going to be a double-digit hit.

I don't think it's overly complicated. We could create a corporate tax which inversely factors human salaries in relation to created value/profits. It's not an AI tax, but rather an automation tax. Since salaries are taxed, it seems sensible to divert those losses for the collective elsewhere. After all, robots are ultimately not consuming any goods or services with personal income. The profit has to come from somewhere. Along the distribution of resources, collective infrastructure and social services need to be maintained and payed by taxes. You could alternatively tax the money spent, but this creates wrong incentives, I think, and the burden would be unfairly distributed (e.g. everybody has to eat about the same amount). As long, as we don't have something like universal income/wealth redistribution, "efficiency" in automation is parasitic for the collective and shouldn't be incentivized by essentially tax cuts. As long as the collective's needs are met, it doesn't matter if humans or machines did the work.

Basically if you got a business which creates a certain amount of value, the collectives' total tax income (considering possible employees' income tax) should be the same, independently of people employed and paid. 500M profit from fully automated web hosting should result effectively in the same collective tax income as 500M profit from a factory employing 10K people.

Note: I am throwing all "taxes" in a bucket. E.g. humans need health insurance, therefore the fully automated business tax needs to reflect these costs too.

> I don't think it's overly complicated. We could create a corporate tax which inversely factors human salaries in relation to created value/profits.

That would be extremely complicated. And would of course be corrupted to the core by all kinds of different parties seeking to benefit from it.

We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas. Clearly, the current system is bad, but it's the best system possible! Let's take the corruption we know, over the unknown possibilities. Who knows, through hard work, one day you could be a billionaire too. Do you really want to sabotage your future like that? Sound a lot like communism, and you are not supposed the make a living off minimum wage anyway.

I was just kidding, of course you are right, and this is the only way to a splendid future!

First implement federal and state law that requires every worker performing any profession to have a college degree in that field.

Then companies are evaluated on how much work is produced in their business (for example by revenue), and they have to either contract the equivalent number of people with those industry-specific college degrees, or even better - license the degree from a college graduate. This can also be used to pay for tuition. The student gets a mortgage that pays for her education when she enters college, and then the lender has the right to part of either her salary, or the licensing fee for her degree to companies that need it, or to people who need it.

Let's say a chef who hasn't gone to culinary college, he can pay a culinary college graduate 20% of his salary to use their degree, which is a professional license. Or a company needing programmers. They can hire immigrants or an AI to program, and pay licensing fees to computer science graduates who have the degree.

Think what I thriving market for banks, investors, and insurance companies! They will be able to package these licenses and offer them on the market to individual workers or to companies for competitive and efficient rates. The college student of course gets rewarded as well, as they can rent out their degree, or even sell it. So a good student can get several degrees, and have a very good income from both his own work and from degree licensing fees. Of course we'll make sure that students belonging to an oppressed class be allowed to license their one degree to several places at the same time.

Banks could lend out money to students, with the future college degree as security. After graduation, the student either gets a job that requires that degree, or licenses that degree to another person or to an institution which collects degrees and licenses them on one or several degree licensing marketplaces. Most would use these third-party re-licensers to simplify the paperwork. For example when a company needs to license a degree for a temporary project of just a few months, or when a degree holder takes leave from their own job for let's say three months. Then she can have some income from renting out her degree during that time.

I'm sure you've already thought about the problem of students who have mortgaged their future degree, but do not graduate for some reason. What happens to the money the bank has invested? This problem is mitigated and solved by packing these degree mortgages into Credit default swaps to hedge the risk. Since most students will graduate and be a return on the investment, we will pack all degree mortgages into investment funds, and offer them on the international financial markets, with sophisticated leverage tools. So, investors will not feel the pain if 1 out of 10 students do not finish their degrees, that will be very much offset by those who do - especially when leverage is used.

This is how we solve social and environmental issues, make education affordable to everybody, create a great investment boom, and make the younger generations stakeholders in the economy. Smart parents would take advantage of degree mortgages for very low monthly rates if they sign them for their child already during pregnancy, meaning they could even be paid off before graduation. That's a good start in life!

Yes, and email is decentralized in theory...

If using a VPN for access is forbidden by the ToS, you only need to detect a VPN connection once to prove violation.

The IPv4 address space to consider is limited and it is technically absolutely feasible to exhaustively scrape and block the majority of VPN endpoints. Realistically any VPN provider will have some rather small IPv4 subnets make do, shit's expensive. More so, for the trivial case, VPN anonymization works best, when many people share one IP endpoint, naturally the spread is limited. There are VPN providers, some may even be trustworthy, which have the mission of "flying under the radar" with residential IPs and all, but they are way, waaaay more expensive. For most people that's no option.

IPv6 is a different matter, but with the very increase in tracking and access control discussed here, that may be even more of a reason, IPv6 is not going to be a thing any time soon....

Thinking about it, maybe this AI monetization FOMO and monopoly protectionism, will incidentally lead to a technological split of the web. IPv4 will become the "corpo net" and IPv6 will be the "alt net". I think there may be a chance to make IPv6 the cool internet of the people, right now!

> you only need to detect a VPN connection once to prove violation

But an IP address is not a person (legally in the US at least), and many IPv4 addresses get re-used fairly often. My home 5G internet changes IP every single day, and it's a constant struggle because other users often get my IP blocked for things I didn't do. I cannot even visit etsy.com for example. Just for fun I even checked 4chan and the IP was banned for CP, months before I ever had this particular IP (because I'm paranoid and track all that stuff).

> But an IP address is not a person (legally in the US at least)

That's a completely different matter (and still probably reasonable suspicion for a search, anyway). If an account/service ID evidently uses a service through a VPN there is no uncertainty of ToS violation. Of course someone could have hacked your account and used a VPN, it doesn't ultimately prove you did it, but nevertheless the account can be flagged/blocked correctly for VPN usage.

> many IPv4 addresses get re-used fairly often

The VPN's servers won't be using changing, "random" IPs. That's something ISPs do when assigning residential IPs. VPNs with residential IPs are not common. (I am not sure those VPNs are even really legal offerings.)

If your ISP uses NAT for its subnet space, you could argue it's technically similar to a VPN. However, same as with VPN exit scraping/discovery, those IP spaces can be determined and processed accordingly. I am also sure those ISP subnets for residential IPs are actually publicly defined and known. Eg. the Vodafon IP may get temporarily flagged for acute suspicious behavior, but won't get your account flagged for VPN violation, or even blocked permanently, since it's known to be the subnet of a mobile ISP, which uses NAT.

Additionally, I presume e.g. SoundCloud prohibits anonymizing VPNs, not everything that's technically a VPN or similar.

> You can be discriminated against a job based on health records.

Just to make this clear, probably EU-wide, you can't legally be discriminated against. However, it's gonna be hard to prove leaked data won't be illegally integrated in e.g. ATS models, or was attributed as skill issue when it popped up during manual background checks.

Although, infectious disease like HIV or dystopian scenarios like eugenics are probably the classical discrimination examples for these privacy implications, I don't think they are very likely to be discriminated against (outside of jobs where discrimination is legal and require disclosure anyway, e.g. health workers, food industry etc.). It's easy to dismiss those worries, since most people aren't affected. But common issues with mental health (e.g. depression), hidden disabilities and chronic disease (e.g. PMS), or potentially severe recurring disease (e.g. cancer) realistically are going to be much more impactful. Everything which statistically increases chances to fall out the work force due to health reasons - especially in combination with strong labor protections.

PR only matters in free democracies.

Check reddit.com/appeals some time after creating an account. If you are auto shadow banned, you can appeal.

Something like that happened to me, my 10+ year account and everything I've ever written just vanishing one morning. Even posts to a subreddit I moderate were repeatedly removed after every approval.

No idea why, (the "wrong" public Wi-fi?) but my appeal was granted and nothing was fixed.

Now I can't contact anyone, and the appeals page falsely claims that my account is in good standing and refuses to operate.

When I went looking for help from a throwaway account that I made many years ago for resume reviews, the exact same thing happened.

So at this point, I only lurk occasionally, because I'm not going to go through that social hell again, and it sounds like moderation failures have only gotten worse in the years since.

> So at this point, I only lurk occasionally, because I'm not going to go through that social hell again

I feel ya. Sad thing is, there really isn't anywhere else to go for niche interests, or really much any particular information. AI fallout has finally killed the struggling web and online community. I think, there isn't much left besides cutting losses, resetting your dopamine receptors and finding community in the real world and all...

Well, now that's gonna be a bit of a challenge living outside big cities, where you can't afford rent, of course. I guess, if meeting other people is out, you can still always watch brain rot TV, or strap in the amyl nitrite inhaler and goon away for the time between work shifts. Until things are worth remembering again. When those investment trillions finally paid off and humanity accelerates into the new age of blissful meaning.

Pretty sure this was one of the Deus Ex endings. :p

It happened to me too. I'm better off without Reddit, I decided.