Putting a hash of the PDF report is useless but this is probably just the first step.
One has to understand it is very hard to bring data on the blockchain. The system being in a way fully isolated to the external world (no http GET query possible on xxx.gov, a trusted source has to bring it in).
If they will next publish actual data through an oracle as the official source it is actually a revolution (I do not have access to the Bloomberg article, not sure they talk about this).
They are probably about to plug those blockhains as legitimate financial systems and it is gonna be hard to revert.
Whether we like or dislike blockchains, the US and others decided to dump their currencies on it to save them.
Probably not Trump idea, nor it was pitched to him by a crypto bro. He is just executing a move that is as big as Bretton Woods or the end the convertibility of the US dollar to gold.
The only reason to be surprised by this sentence to associate this corporation for the cool "Don't be evil" Google of 25 years ago.
But in 2025 Google is some kind of IBM, Oracle blob with here a middle age MBA woman trying to gas-light you into an orweilian world she is paving for an awesome remuneration.
Also notice they do not say "open source" once in the post... now it is just "open". It is "open" but not your phone anymore.
We have 2 ecosystems for mobile and the worst case scenario is starting to be clear for Android.
I love GrapheneOS but they can only thrive if Google tolerate them. So in its current form, this is not a medium or long term solution (anymore).
We really cannot afford to think in terms of "Android OS" or open source OS anymore the problem is getting much bigger.
My guess is soon in many "free" countries, ISP will mandate connecting with a "Certified" device (someone was saying that in Brazil only cell phones certified by the teleco government agency can be imported already). And on mobile it is easy to implement since you need a (e)SIM.
The Internet is still hard to control at the protocol level, but the gates are easy to mostly control (your ISP).
In terms of mobile computing I mostly care about being able to access my home network from the places I am 80% of the time (and I can always bridge to the Internet from there).
So the real battle is really at the mesh and multi-hop mobile ad hoc networks. This is the aspect we neglected for 25 years.
Regarding mobile, the battle for Android is lost, time to look into things like B.A.T.M.A.N [0] so we be able to keep another open source mobile platform useful.
For anything "money" related, your bank (which is inevitably regulated) will have to mandate a certified device too.
It will work on (some) Linux too.
Ever wondered why for example the Fedora project [1] is proudly part of things like The Digital Public Goods Alliance [2] who works with many govs and if you really look into it they are all about digital ids and "restoring trust"?
Absolutely. Governments everywhere are now pushing for online identification to access online resources. This is not a coincidence.
Google is - imho obviously - in contact with governments. You will need to reveal your verified, online identity in order to create a app. Even if you are just a hobbyist putting the app on your own phone.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a handbook.
> “Cars must include modern life‑saving tech like automatic braking and lane‑keeping.”
My observation and intuition is most accidents are caused by people using their phone, driving under the influence, wrong medicine, being crazy or just too tired or too old.
Unless we are talking about full self driving those assistances only delay an accident at best.
I enjoy those features, they are convenient, but I do not consider them safety features.
> I used to be advocating for resolution through legal means, but now I inclined to believe that the solution must be technological because everybody wants security and control.
I came to a similar conclusion, what happened in the 90s and early 2000s is since the govs had restricted freedom in the physical/real world a lot of young people took refuge in the Internet.
It became harder for an individual to build his own house or start a business, but you could make a website pretty much free from regulations and impediments.
But governments and a lot of interested parties slowly invested the Internet and now we are complaining it sucks.
The common Internet and web suck anyway now because it is full of bots, AI generated content, hard to search and you need to prove you are a human every 5 minutes.
We need to create new networks and places just because it is fun and it will take some time for the govs to follow us there: freenet, yggdrasil, alfis, gemini, reticulum, B.A.T.M.A.N, etc.
By the way I just noticed the JSON embedded viewer has disappeared from Firefox and Chrome?
The XML viewer is still there, there are colors and you can collapse the nodes.
XML was an abomination in terms of format but there were some really good ideas in the early web. I remember you could point to a stylesheet to apply to an XML file.
I really wish we could apply CSS stylesheets to a JSON.
> I remember you could point to a stylesheet to apply to an XML file.
You still can. That's exactly what this article is about: XSLT is that stylesheet. You can publish XML-structured data that machines can ingest, and you can attach XSLT to that data so that humans can view the exact same file in a human-friendly way. The browser constructs, according to the XSL transform rules, a Document Object Model out of the XML, and then it usually applies CSS to that DOM. No duplication of files, no "click here to get to the actual data." I've got some OPML (lists of podcasts) and RSS (podcast) XML files that are also human-readable web pages thanks to this; the exact same web address works for your favorite podcast app and for human viewing.
> I really wish we could apply CSS stylesheets to a JSON.
I don't think what you want is CSS in the first instance, but in the second: first you'd want a template transformation language like XLST is for XML. You'd want to be able to say not just "show these values in this font" but "for each key matching this pattern, create a DOM element containing that key, then another element containing its value," and then style them with CSS when a whole document has been generated out of the JSON. XML with XSLT almost always also included CSS to handle fonts and whatnot.
The UK government has lost control of what happen in the physical world on their own island so now the bureaucrats play a fantasy game where they are gonna enforce their rules and dominion in their former colonies or the digital world.
Same thing has been happening for a long time in America. Politicians are typically risk adverse and the real world has complicated problems so they make up a 'virtual' problem to 'fix', or to turn into a new political football.
Politics has become its own end: politicians have job security, and nothing changes except for the worse because constituents keep falling for the same tired shit.
This is demagogy 101: invent or exagerate a problem, and offer yourself as the only true solution. It's a recipe as old as bread, nothing particularly US centric.
It's peaking again in the USA though and it's immigrants. They have replaced the "Commie" (when it last peaked in the 50s) as an imagined threat that lies around every corner that seems to appeal to a certain large minority in the USA that needs something to blame for everything other than their own inaction and choice to not adapt.
That's so true with the current Republican controlled Congress bending a knee every time to the Mango in charge. Other than the occasional furrowed brow or momentary pause.
I don't know if that's really it. In the US, sure, there was a direct line of communication between all the large social media companies and the federal government. It was used to censor what was deemed "conspiracy theories" around covid and election interference. That could be seen as protecting politicians.
But in the UK, what I read about is cases where it offended someone, like the case of a an autistic teenage girl who was arrested after she made a comment to a police officer, reportedly saying the officer looked like her "lesbian nana." Obviously this doesn't threaten government control or politicians, so it doesn't exactly fit the same mold.
4chan is a major part of the reason why the guy who's currently destroying the USA has the power to currently destroy the USA. That's not nothing. That's very far from nothing.
“just one more law bro. i promise bro just one more law and we’ll be safe bro. it’s just a little more surveillance bro. please just one more. one more law and we’ll stop all the threats bro. bro c’mon just give me access to your data and we’ll protect you i promise bro. think of the children bro. bro bro please we just need one more law bro, one more camera, one more database, and then we’ll all be safe bro”
I heard things about UK arresting people for social media posts but thought it was just a few cases cherry picked. But I recently looked up the scale of arrests and it's really insane.
Police are arresting over 12,000 people each year for social media posts and other online communications deemed “grossly offensive,” “indecent,” “obscene,” or “menacing.” This averages to around 33 arrests per day.
These arrests are primarily made under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988, laws which criminalize causing “annoyance,” “inconvenience,” or “anxiety” to others through digital messages.
It is hard to get good data on this, but it is probably a combination of overzealous policing (which is indeed bad) and an increase in arrests for behavior that arguably is a police matter, such as domestic abuse, harassment, etc. I would not be surprised to discover that there is more online harassment now than there was in 2010.
That's a good point! The growth in arrests shown in the article I linked starts in 2017, though. I think internet usage has gone up significantly by some measures since 2017, but whether or not that's sufficient to explain the increase in arrests, I am not sure.
> The DHS statement says that Ms Kordia had overstayed her student visa, which had been terminated in 2022 "for lack of attendance". It did not say whether she had been attending Columbia or another institution.
I think it's entirely different arresting people who overstay their visas or people on student visas that disrupt academic life. The UK regularly arrests citizens for offensive memes. There have even been cases where someone got a harsher sentence based on a tweet about sexual assault than the person who actually committed a sexual assault.
You can feel any way you'd like about free speech in America, but let's not conflate the two as being equal.
I'm far more worried that America will stop me at the border and mistreat me for something I wrote online than I am about the UK. Heck, I'm more worried about visiting the US than China at the moment. The America effort to suppress free speech is very real.
By the way at that scale it is very counterproductive.
If you are gonna end up being arrested for protesting or giving your opinion, it is funnier to do it in the streets than on facebook. And it is probably much easier to be anonymous nowadays in the streets with a mask than on social media.
This is probably why the UK went in flame recently, the government cracked down on the Internet and people just went in the streets instead.
While I disapprove of what the gov is doing here, I think it’s incorrect and unhelpful to put all the blame on them. AIUI, the UK is a democracy and these policies are generally supported by the voters.
> AIUI, the UK is a democracy and these policies are generally supported by the voters.
When were UK citizens polled on these policies before politicians started enforcing them? And I think after Brexit, the UK government learned never to ask the opinions of their citizens again, because they will vote in direct opposition of the political status quo out of sheer spite of their politicians.
There are huge flaws with our current democratic systems: like sure we can vote, but after the people we vote for get into power, we have no control over what they do until next election cycle. So you can be a democracy on paper while your government is doing things you don't approve of.
Most people I talk to in the west, both here in Europe and in North America, don't seem to approve of what their government is doing on important topics, and at the same time they feel hopeless in being able to change that because either the issues are never on the table, or if they are, the politicians do a 180 once they get voted to power or forget about them because political promises are worthless and non-binding, meaning they lied themselves into power.
So given these issues ask yourself, is that really a true democracy, or just an illusion of choice of direction while you're actually riding a trolly track?
That’s a form of political change - direct representation democracy and recall legislation are both possibilities. The solution is to make electoral change happen, not to complain that everything is hopeless on the internet.
But how can those changes be made if the representatives don't act to make them? It would take a pretty big act of solidarity amongst various constituencies to send the message that failure to act is not an option.
Since we're talking about the UK, in 2010 negotations after a hung parliament produced an opportunity to move towards something a little more representative: The 2011 referendum on changing to AV voting from first-past-the-post.
Unfortunately, voters rejected that change quite strongly, and that probably set the trend for a while against further steps to proportional or more direct democratic systems.
AV is a type of transferable vote system, and a step closer to proportional representation. In AV you get two votes, so you can vote for your preferred candidate first (who may be niche but represents you better), and your tactical-vote candidate second (who doesn't represent you but are better than the even-worse candidate). As opposed to the current FPTP system, where you often have to tactical-vote for candidates who don't represent your interests much, and your actual preference is not recorded at all.
Even though AV is far from ideal, if voters had said yes then I think just the symbolism of changing the system, would have resulted in a greater inclination to change the system again later.
AV, STV and PR have been debated a number of times in the UK parliament in the last centery, so it does keep coming up, and will likely come up again, eventually.
> Unfortunately, voters rejected that change quite strongly,
Both major parties united in a ridiculously aggressive campaign for the No (there were literally, I mean literally, billboards equating the electoral reform to killing babies).
Fun fact - the same people who managed to inch the Brexit vote over the line were also involved in killing AV ... a certain Dominic Cummings and his gang.
> the politicians do a 180 once they get voted to power or forget about them because political promises are worthless and non-binding, meaning they lied themselves into power.
Why is this allowed? Why aren't there laws in place to hold politicians accountable for the promises they make to get elected?
The ISPs already do this. Most mobile networks are even opt-out, not in, to this feature. The new law is unnecessary overreach. They either don’t know what they are doing technically (alarming) or are just authoritarian (very alarming)
Many browsers/apps now will ignore the system/DHCP-provided DNS server and use their own though (often via TLS so you can't block it easily)... so while this might work for some situations, I can't in good conscious call it a great solution.
I agree. It's not a very robust solution, but it's better than nothing at all .
And it's annoying sometimes. One thing I found is that it somehow forces Google safe-search, which appears to block some non-pornographic search results.
I don’t have to show ID, but I do have to pay the bill, which means a direct debit, which means over 18.
The correct solution (in addition to bill layer control and arguably compulsory support for an “over 18” tag in dns which would be easy enough to implement for the same sites that currently demand over 18s, would be to help parents utilise parental controls (having recently been through it with Minecraft and fortnight it was a nightmarish gordian knot.
The hand wringing about how evil vpns are is the same. My son can’t install mullvad or whatever on his phone without my approval thanks to apple’s parental controls. I assume android has the same.
I think the correct solution would be to make parents responsible for actually using those controls, as they always have been for controlling a child's access to such materials in other media.
For example, if you have a stack of explicit DVDs and it becomes apparent that your child has access to them, then you will likely get a visit from social services and potentially suffer legal consequences up to and including removal of custody. I honestly have no idea why stuff on the internet is treated differently. Internet providers are already required to check that you are over 18 (much as the person selling you those DVDs is) - if you then share the content that this makes available with a child, then you should be held responsible in the same way. It was sufficient with print, VHS, Sky TV, etc. - why not the internet?
Because then parents couldn't just shove a screen in front of their child's face and then proceed to ignore them anymore. Half-kidding, but there are real liability concerns. How much supervision is reasonable? My parents definitely didn't police my every moment on the internet. Actually, quite the opposite
> 'The UK’s Online Safety Act didn’t come from Parliament or the public'
It was debated at length in parliament and it was voted into legislation by parliament. It was developed by a Tory government and has been implemented by a Labour one.
I don't like the OSA but the whole 'robber baron' organisation thing in that video is just .. well Andrew Carnegie died more than a hundred years ago. He funded a lot of charitable organisations including one that has funded work in this area.
Parent was correctly pointing out that responsibility for whatever troubles the UK might be actually encountering should be distributed as democratically as its form of government actually is.
> rooted in the ideology that the majority knows best
Let's be careful here, the point in favor of democracy is not that the majority knows best, but rather if that people are to be subject to laws, then those same people should have an equal share in determining what those laws are. IOW, the point of democracy is to give the people what they deserve, and no more.
When people talk about democracies, they almost always refer to liberal democracies.
With liberal democracies, I believe it's more about self-determination or fair representation than who knows best. The point is to prevent tyranny, including majority tyranny.
There can be no liberal democracy without the protection of human rights and the of law.
It's not 50% of the electorate, in the UK it is the plurality (second best plus 1 vote) of 50% of the electoral seats plus 1 seat. That gives absolute power.
It is hard to call minority rule democratic, really. I've no issue with your point on the OSA and think it is widely supported, but let's be realistic, representation in the UK is virtual on matters like this: widely supported, but mostly by coincidence.
2-party electoral systems (likely to bear >50% majority governments) are also not very democratic, in a way. There's no perfect system, but I prefer minority governments to a 2-party duopoly. YMMV.
The UK has been effectively a two party system anyway within living memory (Labour and Tories). Only rarely (e.g. 2010) does the token third party, the Lib Dems) get to be in coalition, and I think no one else has won anything since 1910.
In a monkey's paw moment for everyone who dislikes only having effectively two parties to choose from, this may soon be changing as Reform is poised to overtake the Tories.
> The UK has been effectively a two party system anyway within living memory
> ...this may soon be changing as Reform is poised to overtake the Tories.
How long has the Farage-shaped tail been wagging the dog? It probably was before 2010. He managed notch many wins without winning a majority government by getting the 2 major parties - especially the Tories - to adopt his parties' positions.
It's a two party system in the sense that only two parties have a chance of winning any given UK general election, but the popular vote is quite widely distributed among parties. In the last election, 33.7% of people voted Labour and 23.7% people voted for the second largest party (the Conservatives):
I think you're making the original poster's point for them. It's very clear a minority government is not the one forcing OSA on people. They don't even have the power.
Arguably, minority rule is more democratic than majority rule, because minority rule isn't "the minority does whatever they want".
It's a huge stretch to call the existence of 4chan in anyone's best interests.
First they came for 4chan and I said nothing, because good riddance!
This is not a slippery slope; this is a spring trying to return to the center. The harder the resistance at the extremes, the more energetic the oscillation will be, so if we want to minimize that, work on undermining the intolerable extremes.
The sheer anarchy of the libertarian mindset that much of this site supports is not a good thing.
> It's a huge stretch to call the existence of 4chan in anyone's best interests.
I wasn't trying to imply that at all... I just meant that voting for age verification laws themselves were against peoples' best interest, not the blocking of any particular website.
In any case... sites like 4chan itself existing (ignoring any actual moderation issues like CP/etc. or other clearly illegal stuff), to me, simply means that free speech still exists, and I will defend their (anyone's) right to exist and to free speech if I have to. It doesn't mean I agree with/support them or their content though.
>It's a huge stretch to call the existence of 4chan in anyone's best interests.
Absolutely, 100% incorrect. You obviously don't approve of 4chan's content or mission, but that's not the point. It benefits everyone when anyone takes a stand because their legal rights are under attack.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."
>This is not a slippery slope
Again, incorrect.
Any type of punishment for 4chan due to their legal content is damn close to the definition of "slippery slope". You're familiar with the "anti-slippery slope" argument already ("First they came for 4chan and I said nothing, because good riddance!"), so you're obviously cogent enough to understand what you're saying.
>The sheer anarchy of the libertarian mindset that much of this site supports is not a good thing.
This is not for you to decide. Your mindset is why free speech laws must exist in the first place.
Neither the House of Lords or the Monarch can actually stop Parliament passing a law. They can in some cases slow them down, but if Parliament really wants a law passed it will happen.
As shown by the proroguing of parliament by Boris Johnson on the September 9th, from September 10th to October 14th in 2019 (1), just a couple of months before the COVID19 pandemic landed and the first cases were being reported.
This action to prorogue was however later deemed unlawful by the Supreme Court on the 24th September 2019 (2). See recent changes to senior members, and subsequent rulings on matters of state importance by the Supreme Court for a look at what happens when they try to correct parliamentary actions by the ruling party. They have been singing from the governmental hymn sheet ever since.
The goal of the policy is supported by the voters. The polls used to measure this are shifty at best about the implementation details. Who doesn't want to prevent kids from looking at pornography? But plenty of things are popular if you ask people in a way that makes them ignore how it plays out in real life. Laws against tall buildings are a pretty good example. Land reform was extremely popular in many socialist countries until it actually happened. I'm sure you can think of other examples.
In this case the ministers know what the problems are. The policy is not new or unique to the UK and it has been done better in Louisiana of all places:
> The difference is in the details of complying with Louisiana's law. Verifying visitor ages in Louisiana does not require porn sites to directly collect user IDs. Rather, the state's government helped develop a third-party service called LA Wallet, which stores digital driver's licenses and serves as an online age verification credential that affords some privacy.
> Land reform was extremely popular in many socialist countries until it actually happened
Actually, land reforms were spectacularly popular—and very successful—in many countries like Guatemala or Vietnam (coincidentally, two places that were invaded by the US in an attempt to revert those reforms, one successful and the other not).
The people in charge are largely hated by the electorate. They won by default effectively due to a quirk of how UK elections work (which was less of a problem when the monarch/aristocracy was still involved to counter balance things like this, but now that that's gone the state is effectively out of control.)
Unless by "democracy" you mean "sleepwalking administration everyone hates" the current UK government is unusually undemocratic.
Opinion polling is largely bunk. In addition to the problem with getting a good polling sample today, questions are carefully crafted to achieve the desired results. Opinion polls are for shaping consensus, not reporting it.
Consider how badly off "will you vote R or D in 7 days" polling is in the US, even with the top national experts on the problem. Opinion polls are much, much more troublesome.
The electorate hated the politicians, then they still vote for the same guys. The general public doesn't care about politics, those who cared treats it like tribalism and don't want to learn what are actually happening, they don't want to think they only want to be told whatever feeding their brain chemistry.
> They won by default effectively due to a quirk of how UK elections work (which was less of a problem when the monarch/aristocracy was still involved to counter balance things like this, but now that that's gone the state is effectively out of control.)
I’m reading this as you saying that the system is worse now that the monarchy and aristocracy have less power. Is that correct? If so, how do these unelected groups make it better?
It was a win under the rules but a memorably shallow one. Labour won a big majority of seats in 2024 on fewer votes (grand total) than when they lost handsomely in 2019.
Less than 30% of the electorate voted labour. The problem is that the opposing party consistently ran as opposition but then executed on labour's policies instead so most people just didn't vote because they didn't see anyone running to vote for.
The electorate legitimately did not want these people or their policies, they effectively weren't given a choice. To call that democracy delegtimizes democratic elections.
They can promise whatever they like knowing there's very little chance they will be put to the test.
The last time the Lib Dems got a taste of power in 2010 it was by going into coalition with the Tories at the cost of dumping key election pledges. Next election they were dumped by the public and their leader Nick Clegg was hired by Meta - presumably for his connections as he has no particular talent to sell.
The Lib Dems made a referendum on a fairer voting method a condition of the coalition, and they got their referendum. I see no reason to doubt they'd implement electoral reform if elected.
The paradox of politics : are hated whilst actually doing what the majority wants.
As we saw in the case of the Winter fuel Payments : if a policy is unpopular with voters, it is abandoned. The Online Safety Act is popular, so it will stay.
The winter fuel payments were very unpopular with a very vocal part of the population, while any benefits were very thinly distributed on the rest of the electorate.
The cost of the online safety act is very small and almost invisible distributed across everyone. Any major effects (leaking of personal data) can be blamed on the victims (most people assume that only perverts will have to verify their age). Another effect where security conscious people will be excluded from online discussions is probably in invisible (if not a benefit) to most people.
Weirdly, the majority of the British public a) support age verification, b) aren't willing to use age verification themselves and c) don't think it'll actually work.
Reading the polling questions, it doesn't actually seem that contradictory.
> To what extent do you support or oppose the introduction of age verification checks to access platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders and pornography?
Most people say support, presumably thinking "yeah those things seem bad and kids shouldn't be able to look at them".
> How likely or unlikely would you be to submit any proof of age (e.g. a photo/ video, photographic ID, using banking information, digital ID wallets etc) in order to access... Messaging apps / Social media websites / Online discussion forums / User-generated encyclopedias / Dating apps / Pornography websites
"Ok no I don't like this method, and obviously I'm not going to submit a photo of myself to look at porn." I don't think anybody hearing the first question was thinking "yes I support age verification even if it means blocking Wikipedia".
> And how confident, if at all, are you that the Online Safety Act will prevent children and people under 18 from seeing illegal and harmful material online?
Nothing contradictory about supporting a policy that you don't think will completely work, especially after realizing that you yourself would probably try to get around it.
I think combining or switching the first two questions might produce very different results.
To an extent, but it's also priming, ie lying with statistics.
Obviously if you tell people you're doing something to protect children and that's its only for porn or whatever they'll say yes. You've primed them - you immediately put their minds on the focus of negative things like porn and children getting hurt. Nobody wants children hurt.
You need to ask the question more generically. "Do you support age verification to access certain categories of websites?"
Something tells me the numbers of agreeance will fall.
The phrasing on these polls is really unhelpful because it doesn't include the actor.
"To what extent do you support or oppose the introduction of age verification checks to access platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, and pornography"
is like asking me
"To what extent do you support the detainment of people suspected of theft"
and then concluding I support vigilante mobs dragging people out of their homes when I answer in the affirmative. The means IS the question - the sad meltdown we're all about to witness as the UK government realises their lack of jurisdiction is because the actor is wrong, not because the end is wrong.
The phrasing should be "To what extent do you support or oppose the British government enforcing the introduction of age verification checks to access platforms that may host content related to suicide, self-harm, eating disorders, and pornography"
Forcing major device manufacturers to implement these content blocks to a certain level of rigour is the obvious, enforceable, effective, minimally invasive way to achieve this entirely reasonable goal. I can believe that pornography consumption by preteens is not a good thing and that this implementation is stupid at the same time.
Doesn’t seem weird at all, Britons are saying a) I agree children watching porn is bad but b) I value my privacy online and c) don’t think sending in photos of an ID is really going to stop kids. Actually seems pretty reasonable, and a reasonable democratic representative should look at that and say “well, how else can get A if method B is unpopular and unlikely to work?”
Instead they seem to have conflated B with A. Maybe they are afraid that any criticism on this method is interpreted as attack on doing anything at all for kids watching porn on the internet or even twisted into some kind of endorsement.
> Instead they seem to have conflated B with A. Maybe they are afraid that any criticism on this method is interpreted as attack on doing anything at all for kids watching porn on the internet or even twisted into some kind of endorsement.
In all fairness, I have seen quite a few people explicitly arguing "I want kids to watch porn" of late.
Western democracies have fair and competitive elections in the same way they have fair and competitive markets for things like internet access or mobile phones. You are effectively only allowed to choose between a very carefully managed set of choice that are provided to you. This set of choices is often so dire and distant from people's actual desires that many just don't bother voting at all.
George Carlin used the analogy of restaurant to modern democracy. You have the appearance of choice because you are handed a menu where you can choose liberal or conversative or green party, etc. But all of the actual policies and laws are drawn up by the same chefs in the back and you eat what you are served.
You are correct. But I don't see how we can fix this. Revolutions or rioting, is not the right idea either.
A successful and well functioning democracy requires constant monitoring, involvement and pressure from citizens to hold it accountable, otherwise it gets captured by monopolies and malicious actors with money, who will steer politics in their favor instead of the citizens' favor.
The problem with that is that most citizens today are too burdened by the cost of living and sorting their own lives to have time and energy for political activism. The only ones who do are retired boomers and they only care that their pensions and house prices are going up.
Yes, but when you ignore citizens' demands for too long, they will then over-correct in the opposite direction: see Hitler, Brexit, Trump, AFD, LePenn, Meloni, etc. History has proved this to be correct 100% of the time.
>For example the progressive movement in the US
Can you provide more details, I'm not an US citizen.
our two party system means that more often than not you are voting against some party having power.
The left wing has been vote split for some time, now the tight wing is getting vote split.
It’s not a fair characterisation to say that the UK government is popular, the last actually popular government was probably Tony Blair (though many regret him in hindsight), though Boris had his followers I guess.
I'd say it is the other way around. -- Support for the Tories/Conservatives has collapsed to the point where they are 4th or even 5th place! Reform have benefitted most from this shift. [1]-[4]
The left wing is seeing Labour voters shift to the Lib Dems, Greens, Jeremy Corbin's new party, and Reform.
there's a reason anecdotes aren't data. While people are more divided on the effectiveness, there's pretty overwhelming pubblic support for laws like the Online Safety Act.
It's always slightly surprising to see Americans online react to this thinking there is some Illuminati conspiracy happening. Britain and Europe are not the US, we don't have much of an interest of having 4chan dictate public policy.
It's also a good lesson in how effective platforms like Twitter can be in manipulating public perception, given that the same users now seem to be able to openly agitate over there.
> It's always slightly surprising to see Americans online react to this thinking there is some Illuminati conspiracy happening. Britain and Europe are not the US, we don't have much of an interest of having 4chan dictate public policy.
Major social networks aren't even remotely close to being in the same niche.
There are no algorithms, no friction with accounts, no obtrusive interfaces or feature bloat, no likes, no post ratings, content is completely ephemeral. This is a common and fundamental misunderstanding I see people make when trying to understand why 4chan exists. The people who post on 4chan aren't doing it because they can't help but post edgy content, they're doing it because its web 1.0 approach to social media completely erases a whole load of annoyances and anti-patterns that are endemic in the modern web.
Just like Usenet, it will probably never die despite the antisocial controversies. Or at least in the case of 4chan, it will be replaced with another board-type system. As Twitch streamers are the contemporary version of AM radio, 4chan is the contemporary version of BBSes. You should be extremely skeptical of the idea that you could ever compete in the same space with a heavily commercialized product like a modern social network. Twitter is not a replacement, it never will be.
Most people in websites like HN have absolutely no idea what 4chan is, how it works, and what kind of things people post in there. It shows because every time you read a comment here about 4chan you are confused as to what website they may be talking about.
Always has been. A lot of prominent Twitter accounts in my primary language, especially the old ones, has telltales of having been on 2chan. net. There must be something to that format that installs a basic social media amplification skill in your brain that do not develop otherwise.
There are places more toxic than 4chan but skill levels don't compare, and 4chan and 2chan also share nothing culture wise, so it must be in the architecture.
My guess would be that to be on 2chan/4chan "back in the day", you need to be terminally online. And being terminally online is a soft prerequisite to being really good at posting interesting things online. Excellence isn't an act - it's a habit.
There was also 2ch. net that was a lot bigger, but 2ch "alumni" aren't as good. It's not just cohort, it has/had better action-reward loop than other systems.
4chan doesn't manipulate the feed, so far as I know. Nor does it require a phone number to use.
It blocks mainstream vpns, but that's about it. Behind the scenes, who knows, but it's not as obviously full of low effort bait as Twitter, and no account is necessary.
the emergent behavior from ephemeral posting has become a feature by this point. and while it does technically have accounts, they don't at all work like a normal social media account. they aren't published, and using the "this is for sure me" tripcode feature is socially frowned upon.
Listen. The lies, the culture relativist lies, they are so tiresome.
We now all have ghaza at home- and we see through it all now. You do not have the slightest idea of the world, you just have that approximation made out of your own feelings and you yank on all social levers to make it real.
Im sorry the world made you unable to appreciate complexity and handle it especially when its hostile to western values.
But the grown ups have to clean up your mess now.
Why not go and play in your corner, with the other problems, you could play "nazi and revolutionary" all day long. Thank you..
In a way it does not exist any more. Most of the threads are started by 4chan-GPT yes this is a thing and most replies to threads are 4chan-GPT. They uses 4chan passes to allow proxies and not have to deal with a craptcha. Anyone could start their own chan, implement GPT bots and have the same level of popularity. I would wager a dozen HN'ers could implement this in a day. I think the goal on 4chan is controlling the narrative. My question would be, would HN'ers also use bots to control the narratives on their chans or create the same daily and weekly threads?
I doubt GPT is posting NSFW content. I think /b/ is mostly teen boys on the cell phones at school. Prior to 2012 it was diverse porn but then it started to lean heavily into gay porn. I don't know what to make of that. Perhaps Pornhub does not have enough gay porn and they are filling the void?
I don't see that much gay porn on there. The most popular threads seem to be teens that may or may not be 18, trans girls, chubby girls, and girls that you know personally. Then there's the AI porn which is often furry or children.
They bragged about it for a while but after the bragging stopped my proof is only anecdotal. When the United States Agency for International Development was defunded the bots went quiet and shortly thereafter the site was hacked using a vulnerability that had been well known since 2012. It was peaceful for a few weeks prior to the hack and for a couple weeks after the hack. Most of the fake racists disappeared from /pol/ and /g/ stopped shilling products. It was just real people and the site was just as active as the hundreds of other chans. Best I can tell 4chan is a test site to fine tune social manipulation GPT's. All the bots, fake racists and shillers are back now suggesting to me the manipulators started getting funded by other means. Before someone says it, there are a few real racists there too. The bots attract and egg them on. Most moved to 8chan. I think that is part of the experiment and tuning. Perhaps some day the veil will be lifted.
I thought about that as well. This would be true if team-hiromoot is not cooperating with the bot owners, otherwise the bots could simply be excluded given all their traffic is authenticated with a 4chan pass. Other chans have manipulated their stats to change how active they appear so it's really hard for me to rely upon that.
Yeah the only way I could really prove anything would be to fully own and operate the site, a task I would never take on. It might be interesting and educational for a day but without government immunity it would get risky fast.
There are non affiliated stat trackers like 4stats.io or any of the archive sites. It's pure nonsense/conspiracy theory to suggest everything is bot content now.
Yes, and there are probably a lot of immediate factors leading to that.
But this is the overall the result of an "anthropological reversal", meaning the society switch its focus on older generations rather than the younger ones.
Most policies in the last decades had the goal of favoring the silent and boomer generations ("boomers always win": ZIPR, assets inflation, etc.).
Millennials and Gen Z got wreaked, plus they know they might have to pay the debt left by the previous generations one way or another. So why not just dying, it is easier.
While there is a lot of things that are ugly about porn I really do not believe it is 5% of the problems recent younger generations face today.
Porn is just the new TV or video games, the scapegoat hidding the real taboo of our society: Parents are happy to believe the society, the government has to take care of their children.
In the 80s they were leaving their children in front of the TV all day long and were blaming the TV programming.
Then they bought them video game consoles and games and complained the games were too violent.
Now they buy them full HD porn streaming devices with unlimited data and access to the internet to get rid of them and blame porn or tik tok.
One has to understand it is very hard to bring data on the blockchain. The system being in a way fully isolated to the external world (no http GET query possible on xxx.gov, a trusted source has to bring it in).
If they will next publish actual data through an oracle as the official source it is actually a revolution (I do not have access to the Bloomberg article, not sure they talk about this). They are probably about to plug those blockhains as legitimate financial systems and it is gonna be hard to revert.
Whether we like or dislike blockchains, the US and others decided to dump their currencies on it to save them.
Probably not Trump idea, nor it was pitched to him by a crypto bro. He is just executing a move that is as big as Bretton Woods or the end the convertibility of the US dollar to gold.