A1kmm

The Dunning-Kruger paper was later discredited because, ironically, Dunning & Kruger thought they were better at statistics than they actually were!

There is a dark triad of personality disorders that often occur together: psychopathy (lack of empathy for others), Machiavellianism (manipulative) and narcissism. High narc people boast they are the greatest even if they are pretty terrible (but it's not Dunning-Kruger because even if miraculously a high narc person became mediocre instead of poor at something they claim they are good at, they'll still think they are good rather than reflecting on what they now know they don't know).

If you have a VPS with a company that's not super shady, and you don't mind jumping through hoops for a few of the bigger providers (Microsoft + Google are the worst) and running around getting off any blocklists once when you start using the IP, it is not actually that hard to host your own.

That said, this advice probably applies more to people who, for example, already know what ssh is and already know or don't mind learning what DMARC is, for example. Someone who isn't technical and doesn't want to become technical probably is better off with paying someone else to host a mailserver for them.

With ambiguous phrasing as to intent: "His focus is on degrading the Iranian ability to terrorize the world, to hold world commerce hostage as they are doing right now, and to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons".

Parsing that as "His focus is on (degrading the Iranian ability to terrorize the world), to ((hold world commerce hostage as they are doing right now), and to (prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons))". Holding world commerce hostage to manipulate markets does sound like part of the administration's intent, but they accidentally said the quiet part out loud!

Imagine if you were someone with no moral scruples and a lust for making more money than you ever need, and you somehow become the US president. How can you make lots of money off the position without being so blatantly corrupt that you actually end up in jail?

Well, you have the power to make decisions, decisions which drastically affect things like the oil price. You could monetise this small time by making bets on prediction markets, or maybe buying futures low and selling high, but that's a higher risk strategy after you lose the presidency and has limits to how much you can make.

To think bigger, you could leverage the retail petrol industry. Normal participants buy wholesale and sell quickly at retail prices aligned to the replacement cost of what they are selling. They don't usually stockpile large amounts, because they have no insight into what oil prices will do, and don't want to take the risk. But if you are the president, you can influence that price, so you have a a strategy no one else has to profit big: drive the prices down through government actions, build up a large reserve wholesale while the prices are low, and when your reserve is full, drive up oil prices (antagonising another country into disrupting oil transport will do, for example). Your competitors put up their prices, and you undercut them and sell your reserves at a price significantly higher than what you paid, but less than your competitors are paying to replace their reserves.

You keep the level of your reserves, and your next move secret (refill reserves at the current higher price and try to drive prices even higher, or drain reserves, then lower prices with a fig leaf deal to the country you antagonised, refill reserves, and then drive higher again). This way, competitors can't copy your strategy and reduce your profits, and they lose while you get richer.

Of course, all this is net destroying value for the world and your country as a whole - you are shrinking the pie, but none of that matters because you yourself get a much larger slice, and who cares about anyone else?

The quotes from the business owners in that article who feel so entitled to not pay their staff a living wage and then blame their customers for not making up the shortfall are infuriating: "If they don't receive any tips, it's impossible to survive in the service industry", "It's just to protect our staff". Well if you really care about the waitstaff getting paid a living wage, how about this, pay them a living wage and stop trying to blame your customers for a problem you created.

Of course, part of the problem is that they don't want to advertise the true cost - they want to advertise a price that is lower than the actual price, and then say stuff like the above to guilt their customers into paying more than the advertised price. With their competitors doing the same, it's a race to the bottom dynamic. So the real solution is for the local government to: 1) require businesses to advertise the actual total amount of cash customers will have to hand over and not some misleading number, with enforcement if businesses mislead, 2) set a livable minimum wage, with no exceptions, and serious and well enforced penalties for employers that steal wages. If they did both of those things, then the problem would likely solve itself quickly.

Hmm, it seems like it was perhaps not engineered for large numbers of pedestrians, but it still seems like the article is a bit hyperbolic (that said, I'm an Australian and don't know the area, and am going off things like Google Street View and maps).

It looks like there is a road, "Patterson Plank Road", that actually has a footpath, and has a speed limit of 40 (presumably miles per hour, so 64 kph - about the same speed as most arterial roads in Australian suburbs), and connects to the local area. Then there is a "Rd A Plaza" that seems to go around the outside of the complex, that has a footpath for most of the way, up until there are vehicle barriers. From that point, there is a wide grass verge that looks relatively well drained, and runs all the way to the start of the car park (which presumably has to be walkable to the actual entrance). It would take crossing a 4 lane road that seems to mainly serve the stadium, and isn't well engineered for pedestrians (no pedestrian refuge islands or anything) - but people do that all the time in Australia and areas are still considered walkable.

Now if the intent is to make it harder to access on foot specifically so they can increase profits (create a problem for people and then sell them the solution), then it is possible they'll throw up more obstacles. I think Americans might be much more tolerant of what is called 'drip pricing' in Australia (and is illegal), where a low initial price is presented, but then lots of additional unavoidable expenses are presented (see also, some American retailers apparently exclude taxes from pricing, many Amercian hospitality providers underpay waitstaff and then demand that customers pay a 'tip' or 'service fee' that wasn't reflected in the menu price, and so on). In Australia, the law that is for sales to consumers, the total price has to be displayed up front at least as prominently as any other price - so unavoidable additional charges from the same (or a related) company wouldn't fly.

I host my mail server on a VPS.

I suggest making sure you get DMARC / DKIM / SPF working, and having an anti-spam strategy (greylisting helps, but there are a few ASNs that just exist to send spam). Also make sure your IP is not on any public spam list.

The next problem you might face is that Microsoft and especially Google like to make it hard for anyone not using their services. With Microsoft, you fill in a form and jump through some hoops and they'll start accepting your email enough to land it in spam. Unless you are regularly sending to Microsoft, it is hard to keep them accepting mail, but just sending to a free Hotmail address (owned and occasionally marked as read and deleted by you!) on cron is enough to keep occasional mail deliverable as long as none of your mail ever gets marked as spam. Google can be more of a pain to small email servers in terms of not landing in spam, but I think occasional reports of not spam will help you.

In terms of keeping down spam:

• postgrey or similar for greylisting keeps out the least serious spammers.
• The notorious spammers / bulletproof hosting is best blocked by ASN since they regularly shift IP addresses. Try a script like this on daily cron (assuming you jump to the custom BAD_AS table from your INPUT iptables rule) - please don't run it too often since routeviews is a free public service and you should be respectful of them:

#!/bin/bash -e

TEMPDIR=$(mktemp -d)
trap 'rm -r "$TEMPDIR"' EXIT

curl https://archive.routeviews.org/oix-route-views/oix-full-snapshot-latest.dat.bz2 -Lo "$TEMPDIR/snapshot.bz2"
bzgrep -e " (15828|213035|400377|399471|210654|46573|211252|62904|135542|132372|36352|209641|7552|36352|12876|53667|138608|150393|60781|138607) i" $TEMPDIR/snapshot.bz2 | cut -d" " -f 3 | sort | uniq > $TEMPDIR/badranges

iptables -N BAD_AS || true
iptables -D INPUT -j BAD_AS || true
iptables -A INPUT -j BAD_AS
iptables -F BAD_AS

for ROUTE in $(cat "$TEMPDIR/badranges"); do
    iptables -A BAD_AS -s $ROUTE -j DROP;
done

• Despite Google being so hostile to very infrequent emails from IPs that have years of never sending spam, just because they are small, Gmail and Firebase are one of the most significant spam sources. I find client-side filtering works best for things like that which get through your other defences.
• Another spam source is Docusign. These types of companies tend to shut down individual scammer / spammer accounts, but then allow them back in for the same scam with another account.

Note that of the spam that gets through if you have the basic defences, it's probably a similar level to big corporate hosted mail, so don't let this deter you (I just hate spammers).

idea of requiring attribution is specifically called out in Section 7, item B.

But requiring that the logo be retained is not.

Now, it's not entirely clear what they even are asking for. If the ask is that the OnlyOffice logo be included in a 'credits' page (which is perhaps a reasonable interpretation of "you must retain the original Product logo when distributing the program") then it is much less problematic, although perhaps still beyond requiring attribution, than if they are trying to demand that, say, the favicon of the webapp must not be changed (especially if their intent is also to say that you can't distribute the program if you don't change the favicon because it would be a trademark violation).

Now of course, if they have written all of OnlyOffice in house, and not had any external contributors or used any external copyleft code, then they can re-license OnlyOffice on whatever terms. If they were bound to the licence by including other people's AGPL contributions, then they have to follow the licence themselves, and cannot add arbitrary additional restrictions.

is it technically possible to accurately verify someone’s age while respecting their privacy and if so how?

With your constraints yes, but there are open questions as to whether that would actually be enough.

Suppose there was a well-known government public key P_g, and a well protected corresponding government private key p_g, and every person i (i being their national identity number) had their own keypair p_i / P_i. The government would issue a certificate C_i including the date of birth and national identity number attesting that the owner of P_i has date of birth d.

Now when the person who knows p_i wants to access an age restricted site s, they generate a second site (or session) specific keypair P_s_i / p_s_i. They use ZK-STARKs to create a zero-knowledge proof that they have a C_i (secret parameter) that has a valid signature by P_g (public parameter), with a date of birth before some cutoff (DOB secret parameter, cutoff public parameter), and which includes key P_i (secret parameter), that they know p_i (secret parameter) corresponding to P_i, and that they know a hash h (secret parameter) such that h = H(s | P_s_i | p_i | t), where t is an issue time (public parameter, and s and P_s_i are also public parameters. They send the proof transcript to the site, and authenticate to the site using their site / session specific P_s_i key.

Know as to how this fits your constraints:

Let the service know that the user is an adult by providing a verifiable proof of adulthood (eg. A proof that’s signed by a trusted authority/government)

Yep - the service verifies the ZK-STARK proof to ensure the required properties hold.

Not let the service know any other information about the user besides what they already learn through http or TCP/IP

Due to the use of a ZKP, the service can only see the public parameters (plus network metadata). They'll see P_s_i (session specific), the DOB cutoff (so they'll know the user is born before the cutoff, but otherwise have no information about date of birth), and the site for which the session exists (which they'd know anyway).

Generating a ZK-STARK proof of a complexity similar to this (depending on the choice of hash, signing algorithm etc...) could potentially take about a minute on a fast desktop computer, and longer on slower mobile devices - so users might want to re-use the same proof across sessions, in which case this could let the service track users across sessions (although naive users probably allow this anyway through cookies, and privacy conscious users could pay the compute cost to generate a new session key every time).

Sites would likely want to limit how long proofs are valid for.

Not let a government or age verification authority know whenever a user is accessing 18+ content

In the above scheme, even if the government and the site collude, the zero-knowledge proof doesn't reveal the linkage between the session key and the ID of the user.

Make it difficult or impossible for a child to fake a proof of adulthood, eg. By downloading an already verified anonymous signing key shared by an adult, etc.

An adult could share / leak their P_s_i and p_s_i keypair anonymously, along with the proof. If sites had a limited validity period, this would limit the impact of a one-off-leak.

If the adult leaks the p_i and C_i, they would identify themselves.

However, if there were adults willing to circumvent the system in a more online way, they could set up an online system which allows anyone to generate a proof of age and generates keypairs on demand for a requested site. It would be impossible to defend against such online attacks in general, and by the anonymity properties (your second and third constraints), there would never be accountability for it (apart from tracking down the server generating the keypairs if it's a public offering, which would be quite difficult but not strictly impossible if it's say a Tor hidden service). What would be possible would be to limit the number of sessions per user per day (by including a hash of s, p_i and the day as a public parameter), and perhaps for sites to limit the amount of content per session.

Be simple enough to implement that non-technical people can do it without difficulty and without purchasing bespoke hardware

ZK-STARK proof generation can run on a CPU or GPU, and could be packaged up as say, a browser addon. The biggest frustration would be the proof generation time. It could be offloaded to cloud for users who trust the cloud provider but not the government or service provider.

Ideally not requiring any long term storage of personal information by a government or verification authority that could be compromised in a data breach

Governments already store people's date of birth (think birth certificates, passports, etc...), and would need to continue to do so to generate such certificates. They shouldn't need to store extra information.

More likely that change.org provides information about who signed (including emails unless opted out) to the person running the petition. Information gathering from informal petitions is more likely to undermine trust and make people less likely to sign, but then you can't build a database of people sympathetic to some cause and spam them afterwards.

The "20,000 petition signatures" feels like straight up manipulation - there's no magic number to force a debate at parliament, and as MisterFrog@aussie.zone points out, an official petition would be needed for it to be tabled. If an official petition with a lot of signatures is tabled, that is a signal to politicians that the public care about it, and can overcome lobbying in the other direction and apathy, so it increases the chance a bill is put up for debate.

This comes from an ad agency; they don't list any gambling companies as clients, but I'm sure they'd find information like a list of people who signed useful for something.

That said, it's still a good idea to regulate in a losing sound if there is no political will to do anything more drastic. Better yet would be to require linking play to a one-per-person card, and having hourly, daily, monthly and annual loss limits per card, after which the owner cannot allow any more losses for that card holder.

In most jurisdictions, part of the definition of a not-for-profit (of which a charity is a more restricted subset) is that it doesn't exist for the benefit of the members / shareholders, or a specific person.

So creating a charity / NFP and asking people to pay into it is usually okay, but the purpose of that charity can't be to enrich you, and it is a separate legal identity (i.e. taking a charity's funds and giving it to yourself would be embezzling). Many jurisdictions allow for sports clubs to exist as not-for-profits, but they'd generally need to be for the purpose of organising a whole team to practice, compete and so on.

Generally charities can employ people to do work for them and pay them, but (varies by jurisdiction) they generally need to be not paid above a fair market rate for the work they actually do to advance the goals of the charity.

If the goal is to help a legitimate cause, you could also ask them to donate to an existing not-for-profit for the cause.

Disclaimer: IANAL, and anyway all of this would vary by jurisdiction - not legal advice!