Yeah. The descriptions are neat but not disconcerting. The coordinates would be scary but seem to come from the metadata. Annoying viral marketing.

It’s not necessary to expose the identities of the users. The age confirmation could happen via a password, PIN, or even a physical USB dongle. Tying such methods to a particular identity adds nothing to the age verification.

If that is not enough, then one would need a permanent, live webcam feed of the user. It could be monitored by AI, and/or police officers could make random checks.

Granted, one would have to make sure that not everyone behind the same router can use age-restricted services; eg with a VPN. That would let them assign connections to individual, anonymous adults. But I’d guess you could do that anyway with some confidence by analyzing usage patterns. Besides, information on who is in a home can also be found in other places such as social media or maybe company websites. So I do not think this is much new information.

But thinking about it, one could compartmentalize this.

The ISP only allows connections to whitelisted servers, including 1 or more government approved VPNs. The ISP refuses connection to these VPNs without age confirmation. The VPN provider does not need to be told the identity of the customer. There needs to be no persistence across sessions. The ISP need not know what sites are visited via VPN. While the VPN provider need not know about sites visited without.

If you do it that way, the ISP ends up knowing less than before.

Since both ISP and VPN servers and offices would be physically located in the country, one would have no problem enforcing prohibitions on data sharing, if desired by lawmakers.

Anyway, this is the only realistic approach in the whole thread. Everything else assumes that Australian law will be followed globally. And then the ISP still has all that usage data. Why not just use a blockchain…

I’d lean on the ISPs. Your ISP knows what sites you visit, and they have your location and payment information. They can just insert some verification page when a classified IP is contacted. This gives them hardly any information beyond what they already have. And since they are mainly located in Australia, it is easy to enforce laws on them.

You have to lean on ISPs anyway because it is quite ridiculous to assume that the entire global internet will implement Australian laws. Does anyone believe that their Lemmy instance will implement some AI face scan or cryptography scheme?

You would have to block servers that do not comply with the law anyway. The effective solution would be a whitelist of services that have been vetted. In practice, I think we’ll see the digital equivalent of ok boomer.

If a whitelist seems extreme, then one should have another look at the problem. The point is to make sure that information is only accessed by citizens with official authorization. There is no technological difference between the infrastructure needed to enforce this (or copyrights) and some totalitarian hellscape.

If that’s what you want, you should join Facebook.

The fundamental thing to understand is that the internet - and really all information processing - is about copying. There is no such thing as “looking” at a profile or a post. The text and image data is downloaded to your device. You end up with multiple copies on your device.

Sending information out, but blocking people from storing it, is fundamentally a contradiction in terms.

Bsky - like Lemmy - made the choice to make the data widely available. It is available via API and does not need to be scraped. The alternative is to do it like Reddit or even Facebook or Discord. But they can’t stop scraping, either. They can make it slower and more laborious but not stop it. Services like Facebook protect the data as best as they can to “protect your privacy”. In reality, it’s about making it hard for you to leave the platform or anyone else to benefit from your data. Either way, you can trust Zuck to protect your data as if it was his own. Because it is.

Well, this post got downvoted big-time, and the other one upvoted. Doesn’t really fit the energy explanation.

There’s an obvious difference between this post, the OpenAI lawsuit post, and a lot of other popular copyright posts. This one is about how copyright owners are getting richer. The popular posts are about how the owners are being stolen from and exploited by tech companies like OpenAI or Spotify. Aww. Poor souls need more money. Boom times gotta boom.

Major parts are about the streaming industry.

A toy like that is easy to create and not that expensive to offer. Much more expensive than some JavaScript or CSS, but in the end it’s not that different.

I think people don’t really understand this whole scraping thing. For example, you can torrent all of Reddit until the API-change; all the comments, profiles, usernames, including now deleted stuff. There is a lot of outrage here over Reddit cracking down on these 3rd party tools. It’s difficult to see how that outrage over cracking down on 3rd party tools, fits with this outrage here over not cracking down on 3rd party tools.

Anyway, if someone want to archive all of Bluesky, they don’t need to offer some AI toy. They can just download the content via the API.

Not really sure why there are no complaints about the story regarding the copyright suit against OpenAI.

Yes. Very much the reason that Europe can’t make much of a contribution.

Copyright is of major importance for technology. Think of AI.

Strange that the adults don’t want those benefits for themselves also.

Facebook/Meta has developed software to estimate the age from a video.

I don’t see any way that this can be enforced that isn’t problematic.

Comes with the territory. The point is to control who has access to what information so that they don’t get wrong ideas.

Micro and small enterprises are excepted from some rules but far from all.

I think that lemmy servers would count individually, as well, but it is not guaranteed. In any case, that comes with its own problems.

That’s not correct. The FT has not explained this clearly.

If an online platform has more than 45 million monthly users (~10% of EU population) then it is classified as a Very Large Online Platform. In that case, the Commission can directly make rules for it.

If it has fewer users, then it is still regulated by the Digital Services Act (DSA). The DSA claims jurisdiction over all platforms that have users in the EU. Among other things, they need to have a representative in the EU (IIUC). FWIW I’m pretty sure that lemmy is not compliant either.

DSA: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A32022R2065&qid=1732567528372

The article is fake news. I suggest looking elsewhere for proper information.

As for your questions: LLMs were certainly not involved here. I can’t guess what techniques were used.

Racial discrimination is often hard to nail down. Race is implicit in any number of facts. Place of birth, current address, school, … You could infer race from such data. If you do not look at race at all but the end result still discriminates, then it’s probably still racial discrimination. I say probably because you are free to do what you like and discriminate based on any number of factors, as long as it isn’t race, sex, and the like. You certainly may discriminate based on education or wealth. Things being as they are, that will discriminate against minorities. They have systematically lower credit ratings, for example.

In the case of generative AI, bias is often not clearly defined. For example, you type “US President” into an image generator. All US presidents so far were male, and all but one white. But half of all people who are eligible for the presidency are female and (I think) a little less than half non-white. So what’s the non-biased output?

Hmm. It was a big issue at the time. In truth, I’m really not sure how it works in France. Anyway, the big fight going on is really about minimal previews. Unfortunately, there is no disinterested reporting on the issue. The media is very much profit-maximizing.

The recitals aren’t part of the law, but should only guide the interpretation. Also, this is a directive. That means it directs the member states to make law, but has no direct effect, as such.

My brother in Lemmy, this is what stopping Big Tech looks like.

Europe made laws that say that Google and others need to pay if they want to link to EU publishers. Well, maybe the price they are asking is not worth it.

You’re right about the firewall energy, but that’s simply how these laws work. The point of copyright, as well as age verification and other such laws, is to control who may access certain information.

Because that’s one key feature in the “2019 European directive adopted into French law”. It’s also what the Google fine was about.

Also, X isn’t really suitable for copy/pasting entire articles, like is done on lemmy. So that’s probably not it.

Misunderstanding. The news media is suing X. I pointed out what news media does without paying.

They’ll play whack a mole for decades, just like they have been for P2P file sharing.

Some differences to that, though.

• Downloaders can be prosecuted. That raises the question of what happens to kids or their parents who use non-compliant sites.

• Blocked servers are inaccessible to adults, too, which raises freedom of information issues. These servers don’t contain illegal information, after all.

• Large scale piracy is illegal pretty much everywhere, meaning that the industry can go after the operators and get the servers offline. Not so here.