deltoidmaximus

The trouble with this is the baseline is getting to high. You've got age verification coming, google rolling out phone verification for websites, etc. Once that is rolled out, accepted and "easy" it will be used for everything important "for security" and then everything not important because hey, you were doing anyway?

The reasonable position will be slow marched into hell same as the rest of them, just a few steps behind.

We're talking about a free to play (no cost to being banned) game without dedicated servers (no intimate community to police the servers). Cheaters always existed but the business model used exacerbated the problem.

We live in a world where McDonald's is using AI to dynamically price hamburgers. Every piece of information about your life is something you might want to hide just to avoid being screwed over harder financially than you otherwise would.

You medical history will be used to avoid hiring you to keep health insurance costs down, even if it's illegal. Your gambling or alcohol addiction will be used to target you with for gambling or alcohol advertisements even if they made that illegal. Your financial status will be used to mark up prices of things you need to buy, like how airlines used to show higher prices when you connected with an iPhone.

Same here. I've tried edibles multiple times as they're legal here. The experience ranged from mildly bad to horrible. I either felt like a zombie (not relaxed) or became paranoid and anxious. I had to come to the conclusion it just doesn't gel with me.

CBD does seem to help with my joint and muscle pains though.

Well, they aren't really for stopping crime. They're for identifying political dissent so it can be crushed early. Stopping crime requires manpower that costs money, and if they were successfuy they'd have a harder time making the case they need even more surveillance beyond the currently monstrous amount no one could have even imagined 40 years ago.

I don't generally find !g gives me better results than DDG and if I instead went to Google I'd get dinged with a Captcha on every search because Google seems to hate my small ISP. So easy choice for me.

Years ago I saw some one who had sawed off the back end of a late 1980s Chevy cavalier (or similar) and turned it into a portable generator trailer for his EV. This was so long ago it was probably an EV conversion of some kind.

If it were me I'd just get a whole house generator in that situation, seems like it would be a lot less than the truck with batteries or the batteries. The bonuses are I wouldn't need to replace an expensive truck with another expensive truck in the future if I didn't want to. 3 days is impressive, but I had an ice storm leave my family without power for 3 weeks once.

It's pretty strange that 135kwh of stationary batteries are more expensive than 135kwh with a truck attached, seems like some one must be running a screw job on the storage batteries.

> and their images have a lot less oversight than Flock's

Given what I've read about Flock recently, I'm actually not sure that is true.

A week or so ago when I stumbled on this he at least seemed to be clear about the potential security implications, which gave me pause. But it doesn't seem any worse than just running software on your main OS which is what most people do. Sure, it's DoA for a hypervisor in a data center but that isn't the only use case out there.

What kinds of things can a guest running undesirably applications (viruses, malware, LLM escaping a sandbox, etc) get up to with shared GPU access?

Really you just need to bring detected servers back. That left people with a community that they tended to police themselves because they owned it. But those community run servers meant they couldn't control/shutdown old multiplayer games at will so they got rid of those. Then they started whining that they needed ever more draconian tools to police the online games that they needed to have 100% ownership of so badly.

Yes, no one is trying to fix the problem here. Otherwise we'd ban algorithmic feeds and let the client decide what they see.

This is another interesting point. iPhone's do a bunch of post processing to improve image quality. What exactly are we signing as real and not AI manipulated here? How much image processing is allowed before it isn't verified? (do panoramic stitched photos count?)

Can you actually make a Google account without a phone number these days?

I always ran it with the 2000 style theme. That said XP offered me nothing over 2000 so 2000 is what I ran on my main machine since it used less ram but did all the same things, often a bit faster.

For awhile I ran XP 64-bit though, that did do one thing 2000 couldn't do.

I guess I'm more cynical at this point. This isn't the 1970s when a congressman freaked out that his video rental history might leak and passed a law making them private for everyone as cover. They've evolved beyond that. They'll pass a law banning it for individuals but leaving a loophole for themselves. Like how Chat Control always contains a provision so that officials messages aren't a part of the dragnet.

> I guess it's a good thing I don't really give a crap about Instagram in the first place, isn't it.

If you were willing to upload your driver's license and passport for a mere chance at getting back an account you don't give a crap about I'd hate to see what you'd do for one you do care about! Facebook demanded my driver's license at one point out of the blue. I simply abandoned the account, I was already pretty over them at that point anyway. About a year later it let me log in just fine and had forgotten all about how badly it had needed a scan of my license for security. In fact I didn't even remember the password, it just auto logged in from an email link.

You kind of confirm what I suspected though, that they'll just keep asking for more stuff leaving you more exposed and they're under no obligation to actually give you the account back no matter what you do.

I don't use discord but IIRC I read that if your account was banned they were asking for a mobile number to get it back. Instead of getting it back if you complied they just added the mobile number to their ban list so you couldn't make a new account with it.

I largely don't use Windows anymore, but there is an option buried under Advanced System Settings/Properties under the hardware tab called Device Installation Settings. There you can turn this off (marked 'not recommended').

I know about this because I have a Windows 10 VM that was automatically installing an old broken Radeon driver through it that would just leave me with a black screen on boot. I also learned that if Microsoft got the scent of the driver and started downloading it turning this option off didn't stop that particular driver from continuing to download and hosing the install. Since I lacked a snapshot before this I had to reinstall the the entire OS in the VM with the GPU not passed through and then turn the option off first.

LG recently was in the news for loading Microsoft's utility/driver update mechanism with crapware that auto installs (by default) when you hitch one of their monitors to a Windows PC. I fear they just haven't gotten around to fully abusing monitor users yet.

I'd love to hear more about that. I didn't think Workstation could do anything besides USB device passthrough!

Captchas are often used as tarpits. They've already decided you're a bot based on other factors so you aren't getting in until you change those factors. I've seen this happen where I'm stuck in the loop and then change the VPN endpoint and get right in after one try.

To where, the site requesting the verification? Now it is no longer zero knowledge.

And create new requirements normalizing id verification for increasingly mundane things assuring citizens are exposed to ever more breaches.

Google made some noise awhile back about banning youtube accounts for using adblockers. I'm not sure if they went through with it but it just isn't worth the risk if you have a more important service the relies on google.

I bought Farcry 3 Blood Dragon some years ago. I seem to recall I had to install some kind of mod otherwise the game would hang on startup or had long delays because the installed version tried to communicate with some long dead Ubisoft gaming service that they'd shut down the servers for years ago. Funny they were still willing to collect the money for the game that they no longer supported.

Lots of services demand your phone number after the fact now, hoping to use the sunk cost fallacy to extort it out of you when you're in a hurry.

Walmart recently deleted my phone number from my account for vague reasons but most likely because another account had the same number. That other account is my wife and the number is our VoIP line. I have no desire to interact with walmart through my cell phone so I didn't give it to them. So I used a google voice number, which is not my number, to get back in. Then they just bought my actual cell number from my credit card company and autopopulated the field. Jokes on me!

I wouldn't even care if they blocked my anonymous account from posting or really interacting besides reading things. But of course, preventing bot actions isn't actually why I need an account so they aren't going to let you do that.

That's assuming they don't just have a backdoor inserted expressly for this purpose. Now only the rich or powerful can produce an "authentic" recording of an event and the same system can be used to hunt down whistleblowers and political enemies by looking up who bought the camera.

It actually might make the new horrible world even worse. Imagine the populace getting used to a AI image detector flagging things as fake using this fairly easily defeated GUID marker system. Most people are just making memes or cat videos and don't even try to remove this so eventually the populace starts to believe these things actually work.

Now some one slightly more sophisticated starts creating deepfakes of a woman and uploading them or fabricating video of an political event without this marker. The subject protests it's fake and AI generated but a loud majority of ignorants feed it into Microsoft AI detector and call you a liar and say it's confirmed real. Most people don't know any better and eat it up because a computer said so.

The smartphone camera supply chain already made possible easy purchase of miniature spy camera devices of various types, they're all on Amazon. Sometimes they're pretending to be nanny cams or something but others are hidden body cameras or glasses. So pervert glasses already existed and were pretty cheap.

The downside with the Meta glasses really is this gives "cover" for wearing these kinds of things. If you caught some one with a pocket button camera or the cheap pervert glasses before, well you knew what they were up too. Now they can hide behind being a tech enthusiast or a trend follower or even some kind of fashion thing and wear them right out in the open, allowing nefarious use to be hidden in plain sight.