>Raiding a reporter's house is very much an abnormal act to have taken place.
Only by invoking the most numerical slight of hand sort of "a DV is abnormal because we hand out a thousand traffic tickets a day and make only one or two DV arrests" logic is it abnormal.
For the past 5+yr the FBI has raided the home of about one journalist per year. Every time the allegation has been about investigating the source of some leak.
They didn't do one in 2024/2025 I don't think. Time Burke and the Kanye thing, Project Veritas in 2022 and 2023 and the ABC news guy the year before are recent ones that come to mind. I'm not gonna say they get a pass, but this is "the normal amount" for them.
Once again, that doesn't make it right and I shouldn't have to say this but this comment should not be construed as an endorsement of the FBI or any specific activities they engage in.
> Time Burke and the Kanye thing, Project Veritas in 2022 and 2023 and the ABC news guy the year before are recent ones that come to mind
Those were for computer fraud, possession of stolen property, and possession of child pornography, respectively. The first amendment allows journalists to publish classified material, it does not give them free license to commit crimes.
I find claims of any technology being able to simultaneously validate your age while "respecting privacy" to be suspect at best. Even if the technology could work in theory, it would be built on top of an ecosystem designed around an ecosystem hell-bent on monetizing info about you.
Zero knowledge proofs can perform expressions that check values within a JSON tree without exposing any of those values to the requesting party, for instance "year of birth < 2005" can return true or false without returning the person's numeric birth year. Essentially the requesting party has the holder of the credential perform a computation, the result is guaranteed to be the result of each and every instruction over a target data structure (only knowing the hash and signature chain of the credential, so for instance your government issued id can be signed by your secretary of states public key)
Estonia has a really interesting government issued public key infrastructure where users can validate their identity with their physical ID card and a USB reader (maybe it's NFC by now?) but I don't think I've heard of the above scheme used in practice, just sat through a presentation at the internet identity workshop.
But the verifying party can still track you because they can (and absolutely will) log who the requester was and when it was requested. The site might not know who you are, but the government will now have a record of all your 'adult web activity'.
In the ZKP system Europe will be using and I believe in the one Google has developed when you verify your age to a site the communication is only between your device and the site.
The only information the site gets that they don't get when you login now without any kind of age verification (other than something like clicking "I am 18+") is that you have a government issued ID that says you are 18+.
If their logs without age verification are insufficient to reveal who you are if they get turned over to the government then the logs with age verification will also be insufficient.
But this information to the site would be still be a unique identifier wouldn't it? Is so, it will be logged and logs sold to data miners and at some point will be correlated with enough activity to be de-anonymized.
The only extra information the age check adds over the normal information the site gets when you use them is that your age is not under their age limit.
If that's the case what stops me from making a free public service that allows anyone to verify using my ID? Don't they have to log something to ensure that isn't happening?
The ID is cryptographically bound to a hardware security device you provide. In the EU system that will initially be an iOS or Android smart phone with a secure enclave, with support for other security devices like YubiKeys or smart cards coming later.
Briefly, your government gives you a digital ID that is signed with a key that is stored in the hardware security device. To demonstrate some fact to a site, such as "My ID says I'm 18+" your phone and the site use a ZKP to show to the site that (1) you have an ID that confirms that fact, (2) the you have the hardware security device that the ID was issued for, and (3) the hardware security device is unlocked.
You can use your ID to verify for someone else, but because the verification has to use your phone and it has to be unlocked this will be mostly limited to people helping a friend in person get around an age limit.
In this case the ZKPs are tied to a private key stored in a secure element in the phone, so effectively they are tied to control of the device where the original credential was enrolled.
That's nice and all for the cryptography but now think about what's needed to associate it with the physical attribute (such as the age) of the user of the device which may or may not change hands over time.
The Google system is tied to a mobile driver's license, and there is an identity check at enrollment that is intended to tie the credential to the device. It's true that if you give someone access to your phone without erasing it, then they can potentially use this mechanism to circumvent age assurance. This is true for a number of other age assurance mechanisms (e.g., credit card-based validation).
In any case, I'm not really interested in getting into an argument with you about the level of assurance provided by this system and whether it's "trivial to abuse" or not. I was merely describing the way the system worked in case people were interested.
The suitability of the remedy (ZKP) for the purpose of age assurance is the entire problem. The non-cryptographic aspects cannot be handwaved away as something not worth discussing when they're the primary area of concern here.
You're arguing with something I'm not saying. I didn't handwave anything away or say it wasn't worth discussing. I simply described how the system was designed.
But they must allow some kind of proxy signing so that you can sign in from other devices besides the phone. So how do you protect against misuse of that feature without logging any identifiers?
It’s not "the EU" disappearing people in unmarked vans. It is not perfect, but it follows procedures and protocols to a fault.
The EU is also not a monolith, it’s different entities with not perfectly aligned interests, some of which representing member states, some of which citizens, again with significant divergence of opinion. The court of justice frequently finds against member states governments, for example.
TL;DR: "the EU" does not want things. Different participants want different things and what happens in the end is the result of a consensus building process.
What the US built is already dystopian, there's nothing to lose moving away from that. Things like chat control are not a good thing neither, but adding regulation can also be beneficial and lead to interoperable standards. That's where the US failed big time. E.g. things like having standardised chargers seems like a no brainer but it required regulators to step in for it to happen.
Who would've guessed after Europes citizens repeatedly voted for borderline fascist parties in plenty of countries?
"Oh no some immigrant stole something out of my garden, time to vote a party that not only introduces inhumane immigration policies but also undermines the countries whole social security net due to my inability to think outside the box and personal vendetta against immigrants, surely this will improve things" - 90% of millennials and gen x people I see. People just get dumber and dumber again, education systems are failing since decades. Politicians benefit off of that because its so much easier to introduce propaganda and introduce strawman arguments for their bullshittery. It will get so much worse globally because everyone is frying their brains with smut newspapers, social media, trash tv, youtube, twitch etc etc. Most people my age (~30) dont even have opinions anymore, they just echo whatever their current favorite influencer throws out there and call it "their" opinion without being able to elaborate on it if questioned. Also everyone takes everything so personal too, you cant have arguments anymore without one party feeling personally attacked.
I literally had someone say to me (not online) they'd like everyone to be chipped so missing people could be found easier, which left me pretty baffled given that 80 years ago my country tried to find and eradicate every jew. Humanity is beyond broken.
Other than the persistent exceptions (hungary and such) those parties either didn't win or only did so very recently.
They were also typically opposed to these kinds of surveillance measures being talked about(of course it's easy to argue they would turn around on this when in power) but it makes this whole argument fall kind of flat.
As for the rest.... given that my country Belgium nearly balkanized in the past due to sectarianism and it's influence on politics this kind of stuff was a pretty obvious big downside to the migration of the past 2 decades from the start. (It really does become a ball and chain on every kind of effective policy) Especially since we're a bit ahead of many countries on the migration front too.
> They were also typically opposed to these kinds of surveillance measures
The mistake one should not make is thinking that those parties have any policy for the common good. People, from journalists to the man on the street, ignore all the lies, the crazy things, the falsehoods refuted by science, the attacks on the rule of law--only to discuss their political marketing flyer like it would constitute any real policy, as if these parties leaderships are sponsored just for that.
And when these populists get in power and do the complete opposite of everything they had promised, then the press will miss that, because the press is so easily distracted by the bullshitting clowns. In the mean time, fewer and fewer people believe in democracy anymore.
His whole argument is extremely solid. I am sorry.
>His whole argument is extremely solid. I am sorry.
His argument implies it is because of these parties when again. It's countries where they are not in power leading this charge and this started well before the increase in popularity of said parties.
Meanwhile these parties typically vote against.
>get in power and do the complete opposite of everything they had promised, then
I have the impression that most people believing and repeating this "great replacement" narrative are not members of the demographics they claim are being replaced. To me it seems mostly spread by people living outside of Europe trying to paint Europe in a bad light in order to push fear and anti-immigration policies in the general west.
Unfortunately, it's not an uncommon thing to hear from people when performing community outreach (think door knocking). External push, definitely, but it's also being repeated by the demographic this narrative is being pushed to.
I can't comment on whether or not they believe it, but it's certainly repeated by some here in Ireland.
> but it's certainly repeated by some here in Ireland.
To be fair to Ireland and history they have a valid complaint going back centuries wrt outsiders taking their lands, language, governance, food and labour all while debating "the Irish Question" and reaching for eugenic "solutions".
> To be fair to Ireland and history they have a valid complaint going back centuries wrt outsiders taking their lands, language, governance, food and labour all while debating "the Irish Question" and reaching for eugenic "solutions".
Odd then, that they didn't notice when this happened post GFC when basically all of the land banks and large assets were sold off to (predominantly) US based private equity funds.
And honestly, Irish anti-immigration sentiment is far more driven by both our complete failures at building infrastructure for a growing population (which we've never had before) and the fact that all refugees are housed in poor areas (which already had much worse services).
But it's very important that no residents of South Dublin should be inconvenienced, even at the cost of our society.
I more or less nodded along in general agreement save for
> for a growing population (which we've never had before)
and feel I might remind you that in the time span of my comment (past centuries) Irelands population nearly tripled in the 40 years following 1700 to a peak greater than the current population number.
> and feel I might remind you that in the time span of my comment (past centuries) Irelands population nearly tripled in the 40 years following 1700 to a peak greater than the current population number.
True, the political system was very different then though, and the government of the time (to put it lightly) was not concerned with the needs of those citizens (c.f. penal laws etc).
I wouldn't say anyone didn't notice "when basically all of the land banks and large assets were sold off", there was years of protest and reporting about this.
> Irish anti-immigration sentiment is far more driven by both our complete failures at building infrastructure
Yeah, I'd largely agree it's a services issue, and most people I speak with correctly direct that anger at the state.
> I wouldn't say anyone didn't notice "when basically all of the land banks and large assets were sold off", there was years of protest and reporting about this.
I definitely was upset at the time, but didn't really notice many people paying attention. We basically sold off our future development policy to get out of the Troika bailout (and I understand why this happened, but I think the long term consequences of this are have been shown to be really, really bad).
> Yeah, I'd largely agree it's a services issue, and most people I speak with correctly direct that anger at the state.
And they are correct to do so. Basically all FFG have done is wait until the housing issue had gone way too far (and started impacting their voters) and then done a bunch of demand side initiatives which have just pushed up prices rather than focusing on the development side.
Not to mention the absurdity of our national spatial strategy where we won't zone more in Dublin and instead want people to move to Meath & Wicklow and commute for hours to their jobs.
But at least no-one's left in negative equity. FML.
So if you look at money, education etc basically the south of Dublin is incredibly rich relative to the rest of the country. It tends to be where much of the media and business interests of the country are focused, and you never see (for example) a Traveller halting site, or an immigration centre being set up there. Whereas, if you look at a place like Tallaght (which to be fair is also south dublin) you'll see worse services, and lots of immigration centres.
It's a comment on the geographical inequalities and their impact on politics.
Don't get me wrong, I live in a similar Northside enclave, but it's really upsetting to me that much of the media and political elite live in bubbles where they don't see the consequences of their (bad) decisions.
Well, those are common talking points in some quarters, but I can tell you they're false, because I live in a southside suburb, the kind of place that journalists describe as "leafy". For the last couple of years, a large immigration centre has been operating a kilometer and a half away from my house. (You haven't heard of it because there were no protests about it.) There's a halting site located a kilometer away from me in the other direction.
Is the system perfect? No, of course not. But the Us vs Them polemics are unfair.
> Is the system perfect? No, of course not. But the Us vs Them polemics are unfair.
Fair enough, I recognise that I may have been unfair to many residents of South Dublin in my generalisation. That being said, there is a really common pattern of anything that inconveniences higher income voters being pushed into poorer areas.
For a good example, look at where all of the large apartment buildings are being actually built (as opposed to being judically reviewed). There's a pretty clear pattern of them being built in poorer areas relative to richer ones, and I guess that's where I'm coming from here.
Like, I live in a similarly leafy suburb (but on the Northside) and they wanted to build a set of high rise apartments on a junction next to the N3, and it was shut down with many angry comments. Meanwhile, over by Blanchardstown shopping centre (a much poorer area) they're building a similarly sized apartment block with local objections being steam-rollered.
IMO there's a massive difference between what's happening today, with individuals claiming asylum, compared to the State level interference of our history.
Seems like a low bar given the entire span of Britain's history - Londinium was founded by Mediterraneans, Danelaw covered half the Big Island for a good period, the Anglo-Saxons were Germanic immigrants pushed back by the Norman wave . . .
The UK is immigrant wave after wave all the way back to when it was nothing but solid ice pressing down the entire landmass and practically all the islands.
They're clearly not being replaced, as a look at the numbers indicates, but what is true for most European countries is that if the low birth rates stay far below 2.1 their populations will continue to decline and their economies will shrink, if they don't manage to offset that trend with controlled yearly immigration.
To clarify: Although it follows mathematically with constantly low birth rate, dying out is, of course, not a likely consequence. It seems likely that at some point when the economies shrink poverty would hit so seriously that the birth rates would start increasing again, as they seem to be negatively correlated with standards of living. However, we're talking about levels of shrinkage that feel like a collapse of the economy and social security/pension systems.
IMO the problem lies with this statement. For people like OP any "control" of immigration is going to be responded with the same criticisms. Because if you take a stance hard enough, any of these controls can be spun into anti-immigration.
By "controlled" I had something else in mind than what you seem to insinuate, namely that the yearly immigration rate must roughly match the desired long-term population stability. For a reasonable immigration system, you need to welcome the immigrants you want to get, provide a long-term perspective, and offer some incentives for them to come. Unlike the US, European countries have often failed at that basic job, or at least their immigration politics have been erratic and without constancy. Phrases like "a stance hard enough" are a symptom of the problem.
The biggest failure is that part of "provide a perspective" - not even a long-term. Immigrants were accepted and... that was all, probably expecting the invisible hand, or Santa, to magically sort stuff up. And then acting surprised when immigrants who were denied the right to work looked into, ahem, "alternate" income sources, or original cultural behaviors got carried over. One could even get the idea that all these failures were by design to keep a handy scapegoat for their own failures (or misdeeds). Thus the anger of the alt-truth crowd not only with said immigrants but also with the system which failed everybody (except the system people).
My country (Germany) still consists out of 72.65% Germans (Wikipedia/Destatis Sept. 2025).
Every other ethnic doesn't surpass 4%.
Being an open and multicultural country kinda implies that other ethnics have a place here, and that's a good thing. Nationalism is the last thing my country needs.
You hope to discredit the argument that European peoples are being replaced by categorizing it as a crazy conspiracy theory about Jews or whatever. I'm merely making a conclusion based on current immigration trends.
>>Oh no some immigrant stole something out of my garden
I thought it was more because of them driving over people at Christmas markets, forming rape gangs or stabbing random people on the streets. It's deep intellectually dishonesty like yours that is driving them to that "party". Which is a bit ironic isn't it?
You have a weird sense of humanity if any of the attached links make you feel they were overblown. Why should Germans import all that necessary extra death and trauma when they have enough of their own?
The answer is probaly embedded within the concept of codification of acts. Legislatures pass acts, which are kind of like diffs for statutory law. But there is no base document, just a series of diffs from the beginning. Somewhere along the way, someone did a lot of work to “codify” the law, and when you go look up 18 USC 1001, and then click “next,” you are taking advantage of the codification process.
But the person who did the codification has some rights thereto, meaning that while NV can post every act that passed the legislature, they can’t publish someone else’s codification of the statutes.
This matters very little because everyone just has Westlaw and no one uses the state legislature’s website to cite statutes.
I would argue it does matter because the public has to know all the law as ignorance of the law is no excuse. If Westlaw is limited or an unreasonable monetary burden on the populace (or possibly, depending on your argument, costs anything at all) then the argument kind of evaporates of how you can prosecute someone, because an essential part of law is that the party under criminal penalty must be put under clear notice of what is illegal.
IMO, this should also extend to opinions -- if there is precedent that guides what the law is, it needs to be publicly published free of charge so that the public is put under notice what the law is. (someone might mention something like PACER is free in small quantities, I would counter it would cost you a gazillion dollars to be fully informed of all the precedent that forms the full common law meaning of the laws.) This is especially important in mala prohibita crimes since there's no way to even guess through moral/ethical deduction.
> argument kind of evaporates of how you can prosecute someone, because an essential part of law is that the party under criminal penalty must be put under clear notice of what is illegal.
I reckon that’s why the sixth amendment exists but if you want to make a free PACER, go for it.
The codification needs to become part of the process of passing acts. The government should be required to publish the updated code themselves along with any act that changed it. The whole concept that a commercial entity can have rights to the fully assembled text is terribly broken.
If anybody is worried about the jobs those businesses created, then tell them to pivot into publishing commented editions of the codes (add cross-references, references to relevant court decisions, etc.).
The codification happened hundreds of years ago, though.
But you could do it too! The Congressional Record is a thing, and it publishes all the acts of Congress, all the way back to the beginning.
The problem is that after you were done, the first thing someone would ask you is to cross-cite everything into the West Annotated code because no one else has your code and no one cares about it, because we all have Westlaw.
(Which publishes commented editions of the codes, with cross references, references to relevant court decisions, etc.)
It's all a little bit antiquated but it works fine. Someday it will change. I too thought it should work the way people are describing upthread when I was a computer guy but it is what it is.
I would imagine you either start with the first acts of your legislature and codify it from the beginning, or you start with some version of the code you figure you have rights to and go from there. It seems like it would be insane to do that job halfway, but that's not my area of expertise.
I have no idea whatsoever what is going on in Nevada.
PACER is currently a "lesser concern" because of FLP, compared to state court dockets in backwards states like California and New York (affecting some 60 million people alone), though by no means solved.
And if by discouraging you mean encouraging people to adopt freeways and pick up litter, I definitely intended to set expectations about how much might be achieved without addressing fundamental free law movement issues.
We do need help on Wikipedia though, but that is more ancillary and general.
I thought they removed it because people were buying PS3's in bulk for datacenter use with OtherOS because the hardware was being sold for less than the cost of the parts with the expectation of getting their money back with game sales.
Is there any reason in particular you think this? Sony only removed the feature, citing "security concerns" mere months after George Hotz released the exploit. They would later go on to sue him. https://blog.playstation.com/archive/2010/03/29/ps3-firmware...
On the other hand, the Ps3 clusters were around since basically the console's launch. Additionally, the console had been selling at a profit, at least in the US, by 2009, before they removed the other os feature.
All this happened 16 years ago. If you're curious about stuff that has happened so recently, you can research it online.
> Additionally, the console had been selling at a profit, at least in the US, by 2009, before they removed the other os feature.
Also, there is no evidence that the PS3 clusters were particularly widespread. The largest single PS3 cluster I know of was the USAF 1760-machine cluster; the second largest was about 200 machines at EPFL. With 87M+ PS3s sold, that's a drop in the ocean. The PS3 just wasn't very good as a general-purpose server, and it also didn't have good interconnect at all (people struggled to even reach 100Mbit/sec on it, so it's also not a very good general HPC server); if you didn't have a problem that mapped really well to Cell, it just wasn't for you. There's no evidence any significant amount of companies bought tens of thousands of PS3s for their datacenters.
So even if Sony _did_ lose money on each sold PS3 used for servers, there simply can't have been a lot of money in all.
I think this because it was all over the tech news outlets at the time that the primary reason was due to Sony losing money because of console hardware being sold below the price of the components themselves.
A company press release is not necessarily the be-all end-all full story when it comes to justifying something extremely unpopular with their customer base.
No. 2006 (when you read about the ps3 selling for a loss) and 2010 (when the Hotz's exploit was published & other os support was removed in response and production costs had come down) are different times.
You are the one that replied to my comment demanding I research sources for your argument which you repeatedly made false assumptions on.
It's quite probable I read some sources that were dated or had some more nuance to it that I don't recall off the top of my head because it was 15 years ago. New information doesn't immediately replace old information in the minds of the entire populace - that's not how news consumption works.
I suggest you stop starting out arguments with such hostility and maybe you won't get it in response.
Please don't go in circles. I will refer you back to my comment that if you did, these stories were out of date, or perhaps you're just misremembering. You could have posted one of these supposed stories, but that probably would have have been hard, because tech sites were actually reporting something different in 2010: https://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/sony-s-playstation-3-f...
Pop-ups working on (to pick a number out of thin air) 0.01% of viewers and alienating 5% to never visit the website again is still incentive to use pop-ups.
Pop-ups working to get money and pop-ups working to alienate users are not mutually exclusive.
But ok, if we want to play with made up numbers, pop-ups working with the 0.01% of viewers that are willing to spend money are worth alienating even 10% of people that will never spend a dime.
You are assuming every visitor is the same, when most are just a waste of resources.
Firefox has had poor stewardship for quite a few years now with an uncertain future.
Even moreso - uBlock Origin doesn't block the modern equivalent of pop-up ads unless you manually block elements. Even then - half the time the block isn't even saved and needs to be redone every page visit.
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