Scaled

Well, that assumes Discord doesn't ban you for something like posting a picture of a grid by then... ;)

https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/discord-dev-responds-a...

(Not everyone got unbanned for grid posting yet)

It took down Teamspeak and several other alternatives last time discord tried this: https://www.techdigest.tv/2026/02/discord-discord-triggers-s...

Anecdotally, I suddenly had almost my entire friend group on matrix after that as well. I had campaigned for months but AV was the thing that got them to finally sign up.

A child mode flag is fine. But a birthdate is a recipe for data collection and fingerprinting. And with Google, we're seeing a full verification requirement flag that means people have to scan identity documents or face pictures. It's a slippery slope.

They will also likely dial up the sensitivity of the system over time. Maybe initially 90% of users are let through without doxxing themselves, like Discord claims. But over time, they have the knob to turn up the sensitivity to get more verifications so eventually everyone is verified. They love to exploit the network effect of making people think they're missing out while all their friends are in, exact same strategy they've used for years with the sudden demand for phone numbers on good standing accounts.

THIS. Nearly lost several large owned 'servers' on the account, too, due to the phone number demands! Support was awful, making needless month long hoops and ultimately not helping me at all.

Meanwhile Discourse (the open source forum software) has recently added voice and video calling. Matrix is a good option, also.

Open source SyncThing

This site could be useful also since there's been a recent trend of abliterated model providers demanding a hugging face account and email collection. I assume this is so the providers can spam people since there's not much other benefit. Hugging face had also been making it harder to sign up with disposable email addresses since they throw a weird error during sign up if they detect it. Anyway, I see a site like this being useful to sidestep all that data collection.

Open code is great and I use it, however, they were caught uploading prompts to their summarization AI instead of using the configured AI model endpoint. This has since been fixed.

That said, running in a completely offline mode remains unnecessary difficult to configure. In particular, toggling off Zen seems to require a community plugin.

Also you must factor in what's behind the board!

Likewise, opened a couple in the past few years and never saw this. That said, bank lobbies have tons of ambient cameras anyway, so they don't really need a selfie.

Seems kind of outrageous you had to agree to any terms, even minimal ones. TVs existed for many decades without needing terms.

It fits in with the rest of privacy in the US, which is slowly becoming reserved for the wealthy.

The 1% already have privacy consultants to help them keep their data private through shell corporations, legal trusts and other tricks. (The book 'Extreme Privacy' is from one such consultant and well worth a read)

Now if your want privacy in AI? Shell out $$$ for local hardware.

The government's lawyer's statement is fair in that interested parties should be named so they can participate. However there are a few major problems:

1) Unfortunately, there isn't a right to a free attorney for a civil case. This should probably be changed IMO.

2) The cities are also suing for damages and attorney costs, which is just scummy when they know their opponents can't afford it.

3) It's not really clear in the article as to why courts would be involved. Is there a legitimate procedural issue, or does the city just not like the opposition?

This is the part all the articles are glossing over. If the settlement terms include age (identity) verification, this is a big loss for everyone's privacy. The plaintiffs will take this template and apply it to other networks like Discord and push to normalize id collection everywhere.

True about federal, but state level tax is sometimes done on gross receipts instead of profit.

Self service checkout in some airport shops do have tip option already, unfortunately

I am a human and I upvoted the comment immediately. Do not underestimate the wide ranging hate for age verification. Even my normie friends are against it. Meta/etc have been buying those laws but at the cost of more and more people waking up to privacy activism. I predict in a couple years it'll backlash as people first fight against AV, and then fight for more broad privacy reform in the US. At least for myself, I had never been actively calling my reps until the AV laws.

Ms paint slop being hung in a museum? Now that's a dystopian future!

These solutions will never be viable, and I'll explain why. Fundamentally, there's three sets of the population:

1) Those who are clamoring for age verification (generally on sites they never interact with themselves.)

2) People arguing fiercely against age verification and won't engage with any site who uses it

3) Most significantly, the large majority of people in the middle who can't be bothered to do AV and will just use another overseas website instead.

Even if the privacy can be solved (and I don't believe it can as someone fundamentally unwilling to upload my ID even once), that balance is basically the problem with trying to outsource the work to people who don't want to do it. We can already see that even privacy preserving solutions will not be used by adult site visitors in multiple adult site attempts to roll it out. The ONLY viable solution is parental filters on device. Anything that pushes the work to people who don't want it fails because the sites will just move overseas instead of losing the vast majority of their actual users. Or they roll it out and the traffic moves overseas, like data analysis has shown happened in UK.

You just can't solve the problem by pushing the work onto everyone instead of tackling it at its source. Rather than try to lock down the entire Internet, which will never happen, lock down child devices.

Yes, but important to note that the prosecutors are pushing for AV (ID Checks) at the site level. Both sides of this fight are actively anti-privacy.

While bad, this is far from the first problematic cloudflare behavior. They host a lot of sites with illegal content and refuse to action abuse reports. I support legal free speech, but any business who knowingly serves blatant pirate websites really shouldn't be trusted to behave ethically.

I like the idea of micro payments, but I don't think they'll take off versus existing ad/subscription models. The problem is economics: the vast majority of people are simply unwilling to pay even a cent. Part of this is people don't know the brand to feel comfortable spending money on random sites (I recall a comic where a user was deliberating heavily on a $0.99 app after easily buying a $7 coffee). Part of this is also the shape of the economy where most people just don't have spare income.

The fraction of people who are willing to pay a cent are likely to be willing to pay considerably more. It is much, much more lucrative to get those people into subscriptions, where they will keep buying -- potentially for years.

So for most businesses, they'd likely earn less revenue via micro payments, which means it's unlikely they'll get widespread adoption.

Hah!

I wonder if an llm could even play dwarf fortress. Could make for a fun esoteric benchmark.

Wasn't a p2p ai model how skynet got started?

J/k, this looks cool :)

My phone is blocked but not my desktop (yet).

I guess the upside of reddit selling all that post data to AI firms is I'm not sure I'll really need to use reddit anymore. Which means I'll never login to post since I won't be seeing other threads to distract myself with. Which seems like long term will hurt reddit's future data.

Thanks, I've been mulling over buying some of these so I appreciate the heads up.

Can you elaborate on the problem? The article claims support for dgx spark

One of the lobbyist organizations is backed by the data broker industry (AVPA). And it's well known several privacy rapist corporations (Meta) are also backing these bills. So yes, it absolutely affects us, and that should be obvious.

I'm convinced the pro comments are astroturfing. They've been caught doing it already on Twitter for these bills.

If you don't like free speech, feel free to move to Russia, China, North Korea, etc. But don't drag the rest of free society down with you.

To use a tired cliche, 'freedom isn't free.' I used to roll my eyes at that, but I have recently become convinced that the only thing holding us back from a total backwards slide on civil rights is a small number of citizens fighting and speaking up.

Even in this thread, you can see any number of people gleefully encouraging censorship and the stripping of our first amendment rights. I don't mind if they end up living in a totalitarian hellhole, but I certainly won't be going quietly with them.