bitwise

They give themselves away whenever they label criticism as Sinophobic without evidence.

Nations leaning on plausible deniability to attack the fabric of social discourse are committing acts of war and crimes against humanity, and are degrading the value of open exchange.

Maybe we need to cut the entirety of Asia and Israel from the internet. It would drastically reduce the spam, disinformation and agents provocateurs we deal with on the daily. It's not Uzbekistan's fault this is happening but I don't see a feasible way to isolate the troublesome countries without them proxying out through other countries.

Naturally, since current wannabe dictators are using this dynamic to attack their own democracies for personal gain, this will never happen, and even if it did, Elon would sell them Starlink accounts anyway.

This has happened before with LCD panels. I remember my mother's work laptop had a 1900x1200 panel (back when they were still 4:3 aspect ratio). It was a mid-tier ThinkPad, not cheap but not crazy expensive.

A few years later, panel makers started pushing widescreen formats and user friendly language to "help us understand and make informed choices" like HD and FHD.

The resolution of HD? 1280x720.

High-definition was already a concept, but the idea of calling panels that were a huge step back in resolution "high-def" was exactly how they managed to extract more from consumers for less.

I'm sure they'll find a way to mislead people into buying overly expensive RAM they don't actually need.

"You totally need ECC for your HTPC bro, wouldn't want cosmic rays to mess with your movies!"

It's worse than that. He's trying to spin it as beneficial to us because we'll beat them with our cleaner oil...somehow. You know, because people who shamelessly pillage other nations for their resources are going to care about our cleaner oil.

Cheaper is a straight-up fabrication. It's not going to be cheaper to refine our sandy crude than it is for Venezuela to do a shittier job of refining their own oil. Especially when you consider that colonial powers usually don't care about externalized costs like environmental damage, or death/injury to the locals that are ~~enslaved~~ tasked with extracting/refining the oil.

And lower risk? In what way? Oil tankers require a bit more effort and commitment to damage/destroy than overland pipelines do.

Carney manages to look inept in three different ways. No matter how you slice it, this ain't the guy you want at the helm when we're under threat. I wouldn't be surprised if this was always the game plan. Just 'cause the party's called "Liberal" doesn't mean the guy running it is, and given all of the weak, appeasing language he's used regarding this catastrophe, it wouldn't surprise me if paving the way for annexation is his real goal.

Un-ironically, Arch-based distros are solid now. I use Manjaro which means I'm dumb or something, but I've found it to be generally great. The AUR is a wonderful thing.

I'd rather treat them like a threat and automatically cap the size of a company at a percentage of a nation's GDP (not a big one either), break up any that exceed it and change the penalties for financial crimes to also be percentage of gross revenue for the company and its executives.

Treating them like states invites them to declare sovereignty, which they do not deserve.

Building off this, the last time I remember anyone being a copywriter at a software company I'd worked for was IBM in 2015.

They simply expected the developers to write the documentation. Strangely, this actually worked some of the time, but is usually why modern docs are cobbled together and half-finished, or omitted entirely.

Say what you will about AI being used in this way, but it's still fuckloads better than the current trend of putting everything on fucking Discord jfc whyyyyy

How long before a new government amends it again to strike the Criminal Code exception?

These people think we won't do anything about their bullshit, and they can't wait to call us all Convites if we show up in Ottawa to protest.

I think it's time for a general strike, regardless of whether or not they back down. This won't stop until we show them where it leads.

The speed is slower but the slope is slippery all the same.

Beware the fallacy fallacy.

What makes you think it will stop there? Once the groundwork has been laid for this framework, all they need to do is roll out v2 which requires a little more from the user, etc.

Most servers won't check this bit at first because they don't need to or care, but once the technology is in place, it won't be long before legislation mandating the checking of that bit begins to roll out affecting industries and providers that deal in topics and goods deemed to be bad for the children (it won't stop at porn).

Once that happens, minors will learn ways around the check (or parents will be lazy and give their kids access to adult logins, etc), and the "need" to enact stronger checks will be pushed for and...

Put all of it together and you're heading towards an Internet without anonymity in a couple of decades.

Any sort of hardware attestation that non-trivially identifies a person to verify their age is going to be used to track and exploit people.

Anything less than that isn't going to be effective for the supposed purpose.

The moment we need photo ID or government issued keys to access computer systems, things will get a lot more ugly real fast.

Cyberpunk without the cool implants.