> One other thing. If the author cut corners because he's too sick to write, but did so anyway because he thought his job would be in jeopardy if he didn't publish, maybe it's time for some self-reflection at Ars regarding the work culture and sick leave/time-off policies.
It sounds like you're implying that's what happened here, but I don't see any of that in the article. Was additional info shared elsewhere?
Edit: oh, I see links to the article author's social media saying this. Nevermind my question, and I agree.
looking at the statement, I find it weird that Benj Edwards is trying very hard to remove the blame from Kyle Orland, Even if he is not directly responsible.
Not weird. Kyle will take a massive career hit, as a result of this.
I’d say that some of the onus is on Kyle, anyway, as he should vet anything he slaps his name on (I do), but it sounds like he really didn’t have anything to do with it.
Despite the aspersions against the company for their sick time policy (which might actually be valid), the other corporate pressure might be to force their employees to incorporate AI tools into their work. That’s become quite common, these days.
He is taking responsibility because it is by his omission his mistake. That is what grown ups do. He probably feels an immense sense of guilt, even if it was an honest mistake.
> The issue is that a single service can't just implement this. If I'm a service and I need age verification, I need something that I can implement by myself.
I don't understand. A simple if age<18 check is quite a lot easier to implement than doing age verification yourself, or even shopping it out to some other "partner".
It'd be even simpler. If a device is in Child Mode (which would be activated by parents during setup, and require a separate PIN to disable), it'd respond with status.isMinor = true. Or even simpler, make it a HTTP header.
What I meant is that it doesn't exist yet. It'd require operating systems, apps, browsers, etc, to all implement this system before a company like Discord can actually use it.
Eh, you're trying to boil the ocean. This functionality built into the browser would cover 99.9% of the use cases. Applications can be monitored separately, and I'm at a loss for why my OS needs to know about my age.
None of this matters anyway. If a 15yo boy wants to see boobs on the internet he's gonna find a way. There's so many ways to muck with the connection. Not to say these age verification checks work either; the recent usage of the Death Stranding character's face to bypass the checks is evidence of that.
It's an interesting legal question, but I would imagine for a federated service, the burden of proof should be on the individual's home server for age verification. That's where the user account is, after all.
Matrix is basically labeled "adults only" everywhere, so restricting certain servers/rooms due to possible innocent eyes is likely out of scope.
> The real danger is if management sees this as acceptable. If so best of luck to everyone.
Already happening. It's just an extension of the "move fast and break stuff" mantra, only faster. I think the jury is still out on if more or less things will break, but it's starting to look like not enough to pump the brakes.
It's also a different country with a different culture, etc. Norwegians drive roughly 50% less than people in the US. There's probably a bunch of contributing factors, but the point is that reduced range is less of a problem if you drive less.
I'll be the first to say we need less range anxiety, and Norway is awesome. But we need to be careful comparing the US to Norway here.
The protection scheme where they used a laser to burn a small hole in a specific sector of the disk is just mind boggling to me. How'd they figure out where to make the hole?
5.25" disks include a synchronization index hole read by the drive and 3.25" disks align using a hub mechanism. These wouldn't be too difficult to align factory-duplicated floppies in a custom jig that includes a laser or similar small, focused heating element.
The risk of this style of approach is that it must be compatible with every single drive manufactured combined with every floppy controller because it must produce exactly the same OS-level error pathology with intentional physical damage. (Another approach is inducing low level MFM errors without physically modifying the media but it requires special hardware.)
Also, as with physical hasps (dongles), copy protection magic codes, install floppy disk writable decrementing counters, damaged sector key disks, and pretty much every other technique, these checks always exist somewhere as binary instructions in the executable and can be located with a debugger and/or hex editor through binary search and/or call stack tracing heuristics in a relatively short time.
> The risk of this style of approach is that it must be compatible with every single drive manufactured combined with every floppy controller because it must produce exactly the same OS-level error pathology with intentional physical damage.
As long as it works for most of the marketplace, support can work out something for the 0.1% when they call or write in.
Keep in mind, our parents (age specific) and/or their parents parents paid for news and didn't question that setup. Advertisors then went there because that's where the eyeballs were. What we're seeing is that left to their own devices and lacking a war or famine to force behavior change people would rather cut their news source in favor of fluff.
It's not something the market will solve. The post 1940's US Media landscape was a direct reaction to multiple, non-contained wars in short succession. The political class doesn't feel they've "lost" control in a long time hence no urgency to fix it.
In a lot of cases we're seeing Advertising warp and destroy the industries they provide money to. It's not evil, just that industries start to invert whether the people or the advertisors matter.
> Keep in mind, our parents (age specific) and/or their parents parents paid for news and didn't question that setup
I don't think this is quite right. Our parents paid for the newspaper but the newspaper was basically the internet of their time. That is where they got sports scores, movie/tv listings, etc. The fact that this was bundled with hard news was mostly a side-effect.
Why? Makes perfect sense to me. Designing a product with a specific use case in mind is good. When you've got the limited resources of am open source volunteer project, trying to solve every problem is a recipe for burnout. If it can even be done.
> Our devices should generate _noise_. Huge crazy amounts of noise. Extraneous data to a level that pollutes the system beyond any utility. They accept all this data without filtering. They should suffer for that choice.
I like the idea on principle, but I'll like it far less when I'm getting charged with computer fraud or some other over-reaching bullshit law.
Ok, what sort of facts would you accept here?
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