Hizonner

They can remove him from all his committees, including the ones that give him access to this stuff to begin with. If they really work at it, they can freeze him out to the point where he can't get anything done on this or any other issue. And they can use him revealing the information as an excuse to avoid blowback from their own constituents. It's not as bad as in the House, but it's pretty bad. Oh, and they can probably deprive him of the floor the second he starts to say anything "interesting".

Yes, there are serious problems with the way Congress is organized, but there's probably a reason that practically every parliamentary body on the planet has similar problems.

Yep, just throw them kids under the bus.

Those aren't the ones who are actually going to do serious damage. Drunk pissed off idiots haven't planned to be carrying anything anyway. Lone wolf crazies might get organized enough to be in the line in the first place... and if they do, well, crazy is not actually mutually exclusive with smart or even knowledgeable. And you still have the assumption that it matters how smart you are. There are only so many places to hide a weapon, and being smarter doesn't give you more choices.

> smarter than your average threat

Well, there's a good candidate for the dumbest assumption I'm going to see this month.

There are parental control settings on most of the devices kids have right now. Most parents don't use them (https://fosi.org/parental-controls-for-online-safety-are-und...) . Where's your vast majority?

By the way, that does not imply that they're "underutilized". That part of the article is pure opinion.

> And some kids haven't got their head straight after puberty at 16, and still need (or would have needed) the training wheels.

But on average they don't.

> Society works on averages.

Right. So setting the rules around the outliers is wrong. Glad you're clear on that.

> Most people being ready little adults at 16 doesn't mean everyone is.

You don't have to be a completely self-sufficient adult to handle the freaking Internet.

Sometimes the kids basically run away to universities as soon as they're of age.

> You get to pick it, it isn't mandatory that it be checked, and it doesn't need to be a date, just the bucket. Is that still too onerous?

Yes, because (a) it wouldn't do anything, and (b) it would take about 5 seconds for the morons who push this stuff to start whining about that fact, and using the fact that "Society(TM) has mandated this and people are avoiding it" to demand effective verification, which would be a huge disaster.

They won't be placated by anything short of total victory, and if you give them anything, you're just enouraging them.

I don't know. There's a certain segment of "civil society" that's pretty much OK with anything as long as it doesn't threaten the Holy Free Market. Free only for appropriately holy values of "free", mind you...

The network's job is to move packets from A to B, based on the addresses in the headers. Full stop.

> the part that changes is passive fingerprinting from third parties - network middleboxes, ISPs, DPI systems

Right. Things that should never have been allowed to exist to begin with. Working as designed.

Like what? The AV maniacs apparently want to apply it to any and all "spaces" where you might actually communicate with anybody.

Of course not. You might try to write code to get around the jail everybody wants to put you into.

You can absolutely give it a more robotic, less sycophantic and manipulative "personality". The particular personalities these things have are choices.

Suppose they made things worse once and made things better twice?

"Even once" is not a way to think about anything, ever.

Why would you use a web site to format JSON, encode/decode base64, take a diff...

These are all things your local computer can do just fine.

You're also in favor of keeping animals from being bred for the specific purpose of being killed and eaten, right?

I have some suspicions about which issue would be more important to the animals...

You can cite that bullshit, right?

"Programming the brain". FFS.

If you're expecting me to say that the Trump administration isn't literally fascist, openly evil, and aggressively anti-free-speech, or that plenty of previous administrations in the US haven't done indefensible things (even while being qualitatively better than Trump II), you may have to wait a very long time...

This is a really frustrating topic, because there are so many layers of wrong.

First you have people running around claiming that systems are "anonymous" and "privacy preserving"... meaning that they're anonymous if you trust somebody you shouldn't be trusting. Just simple snake oil. Often offered by people who know perfectly well what they're doing, too.

Then somebody like Matt Green writes something like this, or some standards committee decides to try to do zero knowledge right, or whatever. But (a) people don't understand how it's different from the snake oil, and (b) almost nobody understands how hard it is to get it right. Information wants to be free, and even if you have a perfect privacy-preserving protocol, it doesn't work if you embed it in a workflow that turns around and leaks the information you're trying to hide. So there are an infinite number of more mistakes to argue against.

But all of THAT just distracts from the fact that age verification is a bad goal. Setting up an ubiquitous, actually functional age verification tool is just handing weapons to people like, say, [Ken Paxton, Attorney General of the great state of Texas](https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5762893-paxton-opinion...). A system like that is an attractive nuisance that should not exist. What people like that will do with it is far worse than any problem it could possibly solve.

... and that fact gets lost in all the other stuff...

The argument is that the mechanisms in use in the German IDs (and others like them) rely on trusted parties and/or trusted hardware, and therefore don't adequately assure anonymity. And this is in fact true; the trusted parties are among the ones you might want to hide the information from.

Trust is bad in security. It's not complicated to understand this.

When the government threatens the private sector into doing something, the result is not entirely private sector.

No reasonable person could argue that the system you describe should be allowed to decide that.

Well, then, you'd better make sure that's what your bureaucrats are actually keeping off the air.

I'm sure the process allows for any citizen to review all of the rejected material in full, right? And you've done your part to do that, right? You take responsibility for the restrictions you want, right?

Baronet: a sort of lesser baron.

Baroness: a female of rank equivalent to a baron.

Baronette: what the fuck?

> Christ, I don't get the step relative thing,

It's not a "step relative" thing. It's a relative thing. Sticking "step" in the titles is a dodge.

If SEO works, that's a Google problem.

Nobody wants to be fucking "engaged with" at your bakery. Give me my order, take my money, and let me fucking go.

Lot of unsupported "impossibles" in there.

> Clearly a large number of programmers have a bent [...]

Perhaps programmers have a clear idea of what's given up when you do things your way.

I'm not sure you do.