The kakkiest of kakistocracies.

You really need a VPN to torrent safely, and the UK Government is in the process of restricting VPNs.

That’s not the point. This is a protest by the company running these sites against a system that’s not fit for its claimed purpose (age restriction of websites) but is very fit for surveillance.

Then we just need a hero to route all our traffic through the House of Lords.

I think we’re dealing with weasel lawyer words here. Meta can boast that messages E2E encrypted between you and the recipient, but that implies nothing about key storage or security, or about other channels through which the app could send message data before it is encrypted. It may be E2EE between you and the recipient, and also sent in plaintext to Meta. Plus E2EE of messages implies nothing about message metadata.

Your threat model seems to be an app whose published source code doesn’t match the published app, and whose published version uses a side channel not in the source code to leak messages in plaintext to a server. If that’s what we’re worried about then decentralization of the app’s main messaging channel makes no difference. The sneaky side channel could still be there in any app, centralised or decentralized.

That’s a theoretical worry to be mitigated through integrity checks on published open-source apps. The worry with Meta and WhatsApp is much more immediate: a known bad actor with a closed-source app, many domains they could use to leak keys or unencrypted messages, and a fawning relationship with the fascist and surveillance-hungry US Government. I’d still put significantly more trust in Signal even though it is centralised.

It’s never really about protecting children. It’s about making sure the government can monitor everything you do online and tie it back to your real-world identity. Encrypted channels are to be eliminated. The government wants to hear every word and see every action. And age verification is an excuse to demand ID.

Traditionally this kind of surveillance has focused on left-wing and environmentalist movements, anything that challenges the interests of capital. Today it will be the same, but with a side helping of transphobia and the looming threat of all this material falling into the hands of fascists within a few years, something that everyone but the terminally dull Keir Starmer can see coming.

So never buy OnePlus products. Got it. Thanks OnePlus for making the advice so clear!

It’s astonishing how many organizations are still using it for their official communications when there are ready alternatives.

You can also set up local AI alerts (AI here is mostly used for facial recognition) e.g. to alert you if your MIL comes around uninvited, or if your kids sneak out at 2am, and so on.

That sounds awful. I’d rather just not, and avoid that mindset altogether.

Don’t buy anything from Amazon.

Yeah. I just wouldn’t feel comfortable putting my name to a slice of that dreary blandness.

As a long-time user of the em-dash I’m pissed off that my usual writing style now makes people think I used AI. I have to second-guess my own punctuation and paraphrase.

I’ve been programming professionally for 25 years. Lately we’re all getting these messages from management that don’t give requirements but instead give us a heap of AI-generated code and say “just put this in.” We can see where this is going: management are convincing themselves that our jobs can be reduced to copy-pasting code generated by a machine, and the next step will be to eliminate programmers and just have these clueless managers. I think AI is robbing management of skills as well as developers. They can no longer express what they want (not that they were ever great at it): we now have to reverse-engineer the requirements from their crappy AI code.

Yeah you need hardware for that. They’re making it so we can’t get hardware and we can’t self-host.

It’s really important not to discard functional hardware now, even by throwing it into recycling. It’s more useful intact and may not be replaceable forever.

I was thinking more that they’d like the idea of better surveillance of their own population. If that happened there might be an incentive for them not to make it affordable to own capable hardware.

But if you’re right about what you just said and China of all places ends up democratizing tech around the world, that will be something of a silver lining.

That’s why they have to make the hardware unobtainable. This is well underway.

Most of us already are, when you consider how much Amazon hosts.

I hope China keeps manufacturing affordable computers and doesn’t go all in on the cloud too. There might be profit in selling computers, but I bet there are politicians in the CCP who would love to have everyone rent cloud computing that’s more easily watched and controlled.