antonymy

You need photo ID to verify your age to access "adult content" (which definition is ever-expanding outside the boundaries of smut) and now police begin using this new pool of facial data to surveil the public en masse.

They didn't even wait half a year to show their hand. That's how confident they are.

Been using Firefox since release. It's not as good as it once was, but then, nothing is anymore, on the internet. Still recommend it for every reason in this article. Honestly just UBo is enough of a reason.

I think I'm at the point where I value an ad-free internet more than I do youtube content. Certainly not enough to pay $12/mo to watch it without ads.

They actually like being featured on Google News and Facebook's news sections. They just want to be paid for it, or else force the tech giants to redirect traffic to them, directly. But as long as Google et.al. have the ability to walk away from the deal, they will exercise it, since they know the newspaper will feel more pain from the separation than the they will.

It's sad, but this isn't going to work. Facebook and Google don't need these newspapers. The newspapers need Facebook and Google. We already saw a law exactly like this one in Spain, after the EU tried protecting its local news outlets from Google, and the result was Google calling the bluff and simply pulling every newspaper in Spain from Google News until the nation capitulated and created exemption rules that essentially returned everything to status quo ante.

These kinds of laws are written by people who clearly do not understand the relationship between the tech giants and traditional media, and have no comprehension of who holds the leverage.

It's why I despair of smart phones dictating the course of the internet. These are platforms that are locked down to a degree that slowly strangles the rest of the internet. It's censorship not through the heavy hand of the state arresting people and confiscating servers, but creating a climate of fear and uncertainty over ruinous lawsuits and chasing advertising dollars. The censorship effect is obfuscated through so many apparently voluntary and open transactions that the public at large has no idea it is happening. It's extremely hard to talk about this with people in my life without sounding like a paranoid conspiracy theorist.

It's not that they're "anti-porn" it's that they're anti-risk. Porn sites have been getting in increasingly hot water for years for a variety of legal reasons, and all it takes is one major lawsuit against them trickling up to the payment process for enabling harm to set legal precedent and then they're getting sued for anything and everything on the basis they are enabling almost all kinds of web content.

It's an understandable fear. It's just a sad fact that they are an effective global duopoly so if they chicken out there's no alternative for people to turn to. More competition would help with this, but the threat of the lawsuit floodgates opening would still be there and create a chilling effect on payment processing. That has to be handled by legislation, but that's going down a whole other thorny road with many possible bad outcomes. The legislation we get may introduce new problems even worse than the ones it attempted to solve.

But I think it's still worth trying. The present situation is very bad for the future of an open internet.

Valve's issue is pretty much just a lack of serious competition against Steam. They do occasionally put out something new, just at their own pace. They aren't in any rush since their core business is virtually unassailable at this point.

They have less to fear about "professional executives" worming their way in because Valve is not a publicly traded company, unlike the other examples you mentioned. It's private, Gabe Newell calls the shots at the end of the day. There's no real avenue for people to buy their way onto a board of directors and exert influence on the company from on high, or oust its historic leadership. Valve's pretty well protected from that. But it can't protect itself from sloth induced by a lack of competition.

So it's not turning off mobile networks in particular, it's just a general power shortage, a consequence of which might be some cell service being interrupted. They made it sound like they were going to shut off mobile networks specifically to save power, which doesn't make sense for a couple of reasons.

Starting to feel like Reuters isn't worth my time anymore. Too many clickbaity titles like this lately.

Even if the wave isn't very tall, if it is fast-moving it can knock you off balance. Once you're down, wave doesn't have to be very tall to drown you. There's also the fact that rip currents are commonplace phenomena on beaches all over the world, so you combine that with a single unexpectedly fast wave and it's easy to believe a few people would die.

A $1 raise ain't nothing but it's a very short step up from nothing that hardly solves the underlying problem warehouse workers face.

This is the exact reason I have never "bought" digital "copies" of anything. A subscription service is one thing, but selling a "digital copy" is basically a scam.

"This time I really mean it," he bluffed.

I definitely worry about the future of scholarship as our print media becomes more and more fragmented and hidden. It's not necessarily about ensuring essential knowledge is carried forward, but rather a "sense of the past". In researching history, the further back you go the more fragmented and unreliable your sources usually become. So it becomes harder and harder to figure out the broad sweep of these past cultures, what life was like, the things they believed, and so on. And I think we're doing that to our present historical moment by deleting the recent past and creating a continuous present.

We have the Internet Archive, we have Wikipedia page histories, but everything else is ephemeral. If Archive.org ever goes the way of the Library of Alexandria, we'll have lost irreplaceable knowledge of the web itself, and the cultures that existed on it. It will live on only in living memory, but this is also transient, and soon nobody will live who remembers what this time period was like. Wikipedia will not reflect it, you'd have to dig through page histories to find fragments, like historians and archaeologists sifting through ancient manuscripts and ruins for clues.

A potential dark age is forming, and avoiding it right now hinges entirely on the continued efforts of two donation-funded organizations, one of which makes it increasingly harder to view the past, the other facing legal disputes that could see it shut down. I think we need to make archiving the present important, so it does not become a mysterious, inscrutable past for our descendants.