It feels like many democratic leaders are starting to think the CCP model—mass surveillance of citizens—is the right direction, with growing demands for chat control, facial verification, age verification, and more. Fxxk any politician who thinks they are above the citizens in a democracy.
I've been in mainland China for the past year and I wish western politicians would get it through their skulls that most of the ccp model's upsides come from CCTVs in public areas and a police force that prioritizes stopping street crime.
Do they de-prioritize or ignore other crimes that are not visible in the streets? This is an honest question, I want to know if actually focusing only on the streets makes people feel safe even if other types of crimes are rampant.
EDIT: I guess I could add examples of what "other crimes" could be. Fraud, corruption, sexual abuse, all victimless crimes, hitmen?
Victimless crimes definitely. For example, street vendors without permits are asked to leave, but not fined. Car accidents are investigated but there seems to be no 'ticket quotas' like in the west, etc.
I don't know much about the other categories you mentioned but I do know that president Xi is associated with a 'tough on corruption' stance that's widely seen as a major positive of his administration.
The problem is that those cameras aren't being put in areas where crime occurs in order to keep citizens safe. They are being put on busy streets to prevent people's ability to travel without being tracked.
Not familiar with that conversation, but is the concern that it will be used to raise ticket revenue from victimless crimes without doing much to prevent the other kind?
From what I've seen, it's simply an aversion to mass scale surveillance, even in public setting. The worry being how easy it could slide into a tool used by the state for nefarious purposes (punish political dissidents, etc).
Is there actually evidence of flock being used to stop street crime? I've never heard anything about Flock (or Shotspooter) stopping street crime.
Where I am, the local speed cameras have annual documents about the street their on detailing pre-camera vehicle speeds and fatal (pedestrian) accidents and the decreases in both of them since the usage.
Afaik, the concern isn't that it "could slide" its that flock _is used_ by say Texas to monitor out of state abortions. That isn't solving street crime and certainly didn't benefit the local residents.
I don't think any constitution has ever guaranteed a right to privacy in public spaces. I can't imagine how that would ever work even if we were willing to make serious tradeoffs for it.
I believe that's it's sadly a necessity for control of the population when you have other superpowers employing this.
If you are Europe, and you have democratic elections, you have an informational power asymmetry towards the states that have mass surveillance and control. You are (as we saw last year with the Romanian election that was swung to 60% in 2 weeks over TikTok) susceptible towards influence of other superpowers. Even if you want to keep democratic elections, you need to somehow make sure that the citizens are voting in their interest. If the citizens at the same time are victims of the attention economy, their interest will be whatever foreign superpowers want it do be.
One well-tried solution is to engage and educate the population. However, this takes years, not weeks as the campaigns take, and takes immense resources as people will default to convenient attention economy tools.
Other option is to ban platforms/create country-wide firewalls. It's a lot harder in democratic societies, you ban one app and a new one takes it's place. Cat is kind of out of the bag on this one.
Last and easiest option is mass surveillance. Figure out who is getting influenced by what, and start policing on what opinions those people are allowed to have and what measures to take to them. Its a massive slippery slope, but I can clearly see that it's the easiest and most cost-effective way to solve this information-assymetry
As always, the devil is in the details. How will "mass surveillance" be implemented? How will bad opinions be suppressed? How will misguided officials be blocked?
Even the vague outline you've provided has issues. You can't prevent someone from having an opinion. You can't figure out who is "influenced" vs merely "exposed" (and visible intrusion shifts people towards the former).
You should actually consider the downsides and failure modes of implemented mass surveillance, not "it prevents malicious foreign influence better than my other proposals", because it may be worse than said influence (which does not necessarily translate into control; keep in mind that Georgescu only won the primary and would've lost the runoff had it not been annulled). The world under free information is the devil you know.
I always hold that the problem with mass censorship and state overreach is, they are too powerful and people are too selfish and stupid. There's no good solution, but my prediction is that any drastic attempt to prevent foreign interference will backfire and fail at that (liberal leaders can't use authoritarian tools as effectively as authoritarians). Even Democracy, "the worst form of government except for all others that have been tried", is a better countermeasure; all you need, to prevent anti-democratic foreign capture and ultimate failure, is to preserve it.
I think the definition of what is "anti-democratic" is as hard as the initial 3 questions you pose. If you push second-order ideas, for example by using refugees as indirect fuel for anti-democratic sentiment, is that anti-democratic? The Romanian election propaganda in itself was not anti-democratic, the coordination from a foreign state was. This means that the future of this kind of interference could be a more diffuse approach, or an approach where this is done from within Europe.
Any countermeasure you propose will just lead to moving one level of abstraction, or finding another point of entry.
I do think it's a better idea than mass surveillance, but I believe that the states will see it as harder. It can be that mass surveillance is implemented, and then the states do not know what to do with the data and nothing is achieved.
To what end would you say the surveillance is for?
So you surveil your citizens and precog their opinions... to do what? Make them have state-sponsored opinions? Don't we already have that without the surveillance?
It's trivial to predict how a human will behave without any surveillance at all. Facebook abandoned their Beacon system not because of the backlash, but because they realized all they really needed to predict user behavior was the user's credit card statements, which they could easily buy.
At some point the constitution is the backstop, and unless we amend it, it should hold true.
I don't think that the EU member states have the same data access as companies in the US like Facebook do, and therein lies the problem. There is no good way to gather and connect data like Meta or Palantir can, you can't just sell things to the maximum bidder here. I think that's where the necessity comes from.
Regarding banning platforms I’d say just ban the attention driven business model online by forbidding all social media platforms from serving ads entirely.
Who is doing the controlling in this take? "The Government"? Calling for more government control when some say--at least in the US--too much government is the heart of our current political strife. Unless this argument is for corporate surveillance?
As for elections in the age of social media, why not just pass Blackout laws around the date of the election? One week not sufficient? Make it two.
But instead the answer is mass surveillance? To do what? Arrest & detain people, and let the judicial system incarcerate them for months or years while the process plays out?
I am not for mass surveillance, I am saying it's the cheapest option to achieve the goal without disturbing the individual and causing social unrest. If you have a blackout, you will have businesses stopped, people will complain, people will use VPNs anyways, massive economic costs. Mass surveillance will just allow you to monitor, flag and perhaps later exclude people without affecting the rest.
>If you are Europe, and you have democratic elections, you have an informational power asymmetry towards the states that have mass surveillance and control. You are (as we saw last year with the Romanian election that was swung to 60% in 2 weeks over TikTok) susceptible towards influence of other superpowers
When Georgia tried to implement a law to inhibit this type of foreign meddling from all superpowers it was widely branded a "pro russia law", presumably because the west had invested more in astroturfing Georgia.
Which is no different to what the US and Europe was already doing in Romania on an ENORMOUS scale before Russia ran its Tiktok campaign. Russia's campaign evidently resonated with the populace far more than what the NED were doing.
Democracy is a bit like freedom of speech - either you support it even when it makes decisions you dont like (e.g. in opposition to western imperialism) or you hate it. There isnt a middle ground.
If you support the Romanian secret services' decision to cancel the election over a tiktok campaign which was more convincing than better funded NED campaigns which they permit, you probably just hate democracy.
If you think "pro russia law" is an accurate designation of what Georgia was trying to implement - again, you just hate democracy.
Thank you. Haven't seen this problem framed in quite this way before. I find the point quite persuasive.
But, I don't understand how this step could possibly work:
> start policing on what opinions those people are allowed to have and what measures to take to them
A much more effective counter to this would be to rebalance the information asymmetry by giving citizens the tools to coordinate against state sponsored influence.
It's a good suggestion, but the thing is that the average person does not care and does not want to use your tools. You can make an app that gives you correct news, where you can vote for local political issues, etc. Most people don't give a shit, you as a state are competing against the attention economy(evolving into an affection economy given LLM use).
You are competing against companies that are using biologically wired mechanisms, like short-burst 3-second information overload together with marketing signaling(consumer neuroscience) to make you do choices and then confabulate the choice to yourself as your own.
Any tool would have to either be made in a landscape where ALL of the attention/affection-economy tools are banned, OR use the same mechanisms.
I agree but I also think that authenticity is one quality that such a tool could offer that other things in the attention economy cannot.
Addictive things are addictive. But people are also capable, given the right circumstances, to go and "touch grass". People are capable of making choices that are good for them. Especially if we make those choices easy enough.
I often scroll too much but I also go into nature and meet irl humans. And it's not close to an insurmountable choice.
> A much more effective counter to this would be to rebalance the information asymmetry by giving citizens the tools to coordinate against state sponsored influence.
Said leaders are only really democratic based on the literal name of the party they signed with when running for office. There's nothing democratic about these types of programs and I have to assume that a plainly explained referendum spelling this out on a ballot would fail miserably.
This is a systemic problem of modern information technology. With social media for instance, either you let the technology run rampant and the worst case scenareo plays out. That is misinformation, tribalism, bidy dysmorphia and the pletora of other issues. The worst case pesamistic mode of what the technology can do, that is self termination. The alternative is that you have to have the watchmen over watch everything and you have the full dystopia model.
While there is a middle road, it is almost never taken as it is the hardest path. The real trick is to not invent the torment nexus but you cannot know this as the n'th order effects are decades beyond the initial creation. But that is so incredibly difficult to anticipate.
Think about it, the transistor was invented in 1947, 70 years later it turned into the surviellance panopticon. Very few could have seen that coming.
Look at what social media considers to be safe countries.
You are absolutely bombarded with messaging about how Dubai and Chinese cities are the safest places in the world. I have friends who live in each who consider North America and Europe crime ridden shitholes because theft is possible to get away with.
If society believes that crimes is utterly rampant despite it collapsing over the past few decades, there is nowhere else to go but mass surveillance to make sure that even the smallest of visible crimes are stamped out.
The streets of Dubai and pretty much any where in China, Hong Kong, Thailand, Vietnam etc are orders of magnitude safer than UK, US, France, and other western European countries. Crime appears to be tolerated and reporting crimes doesn't do much, and statistics are managed in western Europe. If you get an opportunity to travel to China, do see for yourself how safe the cities feel, and how advanced (and safe) the public transport systems are.
There is also plenty of social media and politicians telling you that because of some statistic that the knife wielding gang you yourself saw in the shopping centre in east London in fact does not exist
>If society believes that crimes is utterly rampant despite it collapsing over the past few decades
After having to push for a crime to be actually registered and for others to even report small crimes because police has been so useless in Brussels I lost complete faith in this.
It also doesn't track with prisons overflowing more and more and damn near half of prisoners not having the nationality.
It's safer now! But more and more people have experiences so keep your wallet in your front pocket. Watch out as a woman after dark. Avoid certain areas that your grandma described as posh and the trainstation you went to every day in your youth has stabbings now.
It feels like one of a bunch of fronts where we get some kind of hypernormalisation.
Canadian leaders are currently very consciously choosing to partner with China as opposed to the U.S.
I get diversification, that’s a good call, but adopting policies that actively harm Canada to the benefit of China is where we’re at and it’s so far beyond the pale. Just take a look at Canada, who for as long as I have known, have tried to maintain its industrial base in Ontario, eg the cross-border supply chain for automobiles, but then this "new" government comes in and is like y’know what we really need right now? To compound the effects of tariffs, piss off our biggest trading partner, risk NAFTA (CUSMA) and our entire cross-border supply chains with the US all so we can get some cheap electric cars from China, which won't even be manufactured here (atleast not with Canadian jobs); meanwhile we just spent close to $100 billion in subsidies explicitly to try and kickstart electric vehicle manufacturing in Canada. May have been more productive to turn that $100 billion into pennies and throw them down a wishing well...
Plus with all the floor crossers recently, the elections just seem moot. You vote for a party because you believe in their agenda, and then the representative joins the other party without any repercussions.
Canadians do not elect parties. We elect Members of Parliament. This is why it is democratic for MPs to cross the floor from one party to another. It has happened over 300 times since Canada became a country.
If an MP is not free to vote in the best interests of their constituents, and rather has to vote along party lines, then the failure of democracy has already occurred. Crossing the floor, in order to act in the best interest of your constituents, is a big move that one doesn't decide on overnight.
We should be more tolerant of individual MPs not always siding with their team, without them having the fear of being removed from their caucus.
Notice how none of the floor crossings happened right after the election. They took time, they saw how government was working, and they took action based on their experience.
These countries are disguised vassals of the United States.
They're nominally independent but in practice are run by a local oligarchy who generally do as they please within the confines of what the US allows.
Theyre effectively all as independent as Poland or Hungary were under the Soviet Union. i.e. not.
There are the occasional anti-us imperialist and anti-oligarchy candidates who gain popularity but their careers are usually terminated with a deluge of mudslinging or by using bureaucracy to lock them out of the political system.
Interesting idea overall, and I would support doing this if we can.
Some constraints are:
- Non-programmers are not used to working with Git.
- In practice, they (usually PMs or feature designers) need to write their documents somewhere else.
Possible solutions are:
- Make non-programmers use Git as a documentation tool (upgrade your tooling or GTFO).
- Build a two-way sync tool so that programmers and non-programmers can work from the same source.
- However, in practice, an SSOT (single source of truth) architecture is usually much simpler. Two-way sync tends to be quite difficult, especially across different platforms.
From my understanding:
Peak time (non-promo): UTC 12:00–18:00 / KST (UTC+9): 21:00–03:00
Off-peak time (promo): UTC 18:00–12:00 / KST (UTC+9): 03:00–21:00
I guess I’ll need to do more coding during the daytime.
Atari? I never expected to see that ancient name again. If I remember correctly, I've been playing OpenTTD for more than a decade without the original TTD assets, and I usually build it from source, so this change won’t really affect me. Still, it feels a bit strange (even if it may be somewhat legitimate) to see Atari suddenly asserting rights over it.
I'm not aware of anything specific other than the fact that it's not officially supported as a build target so you have to hack up the build system to make it work. Example: https://github.com/SnowNF/ndk-aarch64-linux
The strength—and also the weakness—lies in how WASM is consumed in the browser. During instantiation, JavaScript engines validate the module and reject it if it uses unsupported instructions or features. In practice, due to browser compatibility differences, WASM modules often need to be built in multiple variants, such as a baseline version, a SIMD version, a SIMD+threads version, and so on. This is a significant pain compared to native binaries, which can rely on runtime feature detection and dynamic dispatch.
Before modern standardization, maintaining calendars and clocks was typically the responsibility of states or similar authorities, often guided by astronomers. Now it seems that international organizations are effectively following the early UNIX/POSIX model, and astronomers no longer have the same authority over timekeeping.
Yuck. I’ve already noticed compilation times increasing from C++17 to C++20, and this feature makes it much worse. I guess I’ll need to audit any reflection usage in third-party dependencies.
Please check the article again -- I made a mistake in the original measurements (the Docker image I used had GCC compiled in debug mode) and now the (correct) times are ~50% faster across the board.
Not free, still need to audit, but much better than before. Sorry.
Fxxk off, to all political actors pretending this is about child protection. Protecting children is not the job of the OS, the device manufacturer, or the internet service provider. It is the parent’s job. If you cannot supervise, monitor, and discipline your child’s internet use, that is your failure, not theirs.
They can provide tools, sure. But restricting adults because some parents fail at parenting is insane. That is how a totalitarian state grows: by demanding the power to monitor and control every individual.
If you cannot control your children, that is your fault. And if that is the case, you should think twice before having kids.
Cops to track what people did on the internet, checking every image to ensure it's not pornographic, or every transaction online, to ensure it's not criminal!
Sounds great! Let's just start by rolling out the program to target elected officials and their families as a trial. If every congressional or senate representative wants to undergo a few years of scrutiny to make sure the system works well, maybe the people will follow gladly.
Sorry, the point I am trying to make, is bullshit laws should be tested on the group of people advocating and passing those laws, because maybe they wouldn't like the law when it applies to them.
This reminds me of a voting method I've seen some anarchists advocate for: the rules passed by votes should only be enforced on those who voted for it.
this whole thing is part of building a mechanism to restrict free speech down the line to cover for a certain "greatest ally" of the united states. make no mistake, the "not a genocide" over the last two years and the recent "not a war" is very much related to this.
How does mandating every OS to have a parental controls API lead to wholesale suppression of speech? Will they mandate it to always be set to the most restrictive setting?
this isn't "parental controls" this is a mandate to verify your age and subsequently identity to an external third party. can't you see how this is a slippery slop to deannonymizing the internet and being able to restrict access for reason that won't be revealed until later?
In general, I argue for less state control on anything. But your argument seems flawed from its core. If someone is a bad parent, should we simply ignore it and let the children turn out idiots as well? And the line is often blurry, so that's why we designed schools that should compensate even for dumb parents.
And, just to be clear on this topic, I think these age restriction laws are mostly bullshit, but I'm deeply against the concept of putting all the responsabiliy of raising children onto the parents.
> we simply ignore it and let the children turn out idiots as well
There is not a lot of safeguarding against this in the real world tbh. At the very least I think the OS or internet age verification is not the place to start improving this.
There is some. Bars won't serve minors. The standardisation of parental controls law (the CA/CO one) is much closer to "bars won't serve minors" than it is to "camera drones will follow minors around to make sure they don't drink alcohol"
> should we simply ignore it and let the children turn out idiots as well?
Just because you're an idiot at 18 doesn't mean you are one for life.
> so that's why we designed schools that should compensate even for dumb parents.
Does that actually work?
> against the concept of putting all the responsabiliy of raising children onto the parents.
Then how do you feel about parents requiring a license before they have a child? If you wish to invite yourself into their responsibilities shouldn't you also invite yourself into their bedroom first?
> If you wish to invite yourself into their responsibilities shouldn't you also invite yourself into their bedroom first?
You're turning of question of measure (how much should society be involved in raising children) into an all or nothing debate, which I explicitly want to reject.
> Does that actually work?
Yes, because of mass education almost every adult you meet can read and write, something new for the last 100 years. Just because a system has (currently huge) faults, doesn't mean we should remove the system entirely.
what about children being fed unhealthy things? childhood obesity is dangerous and also affects their mental and physical health.
let's install cameras in all supermarkets that ensure parents cannot buy unhealthy things for their children.
of course, adults can continue to purchase anything they want for "themselves". but the facial scanning in supermarkets is imperative for child safety!
This is right on the money and really highlights how short-sighted these proposals are.
We're perfectly willing to destroy our privacy for things that don't matter, but then the stuff that does, we don't touch.
Realistically, seeing some boobies on instagram is NOTHING compared to childhood obesity. Nothing. We're talking lifetime of suffering and early death versus boobies.
You make a good point that society may be responsible as well, however we are arguing over trying to use technology to solve meatland problems and this one never should be automated into tech, ever. It's putting burden on artists and engineers to solve things they aren't causing or really responsible for.
It’s compelled speech. A transmission of expression required by law. The argument settled in 1791. The First Amendment does not permit the government to compel a person’s speech just because the government believes the expression thereof furthers that person’s interests.
It's also a consumer product regulation, of which many already exist. The government compels you to speak about the ingredients in a food product you manufacture, and we don't seem to have a problem with that.
A better analogy would be regulation of addictive activities like gambling and regulation of addictive substances like painkillers. Given that the platforms being regulated were intentionally engineered to maximize addictive potential, this seems a fair and reasonable response.
I am a parent. The devices my child uses have root certs that allow me to decrypt traffic that must pass through my proxy to be relayed to the internet. Voila. Problem solved with current tech.
Yes, and the next battle is ech-pinned params in apps. The browser can at least single that ech isn't supported. For apps, you'll just have to strip the ech and downgrade the connection and live with the server dropping you. But that's fine. My kids don't need tiktok if I, the parent, can't decrypt the info.
I assume you live in the free world. Some socialist states in history, such as East Germany, pushed child-rearing and early education much further into the hands of the state through extensive state-run childcare and kindergarten systems. That model is gone, and for good reason.
Even with schools in place, the basic responsibility for raising children still belongs to the parents. Schools can support, educate, and compensate to some extent, but they cannot replace parental responsibility.
I also see far too much awful news — in my country, Korea, for example — about terrible parents harassing school teachers because their children are out of control.
I was born in a communist country in Eastern Europe, which is now crony capitalist. The issue is extremely complex, and all I can say in such a short paragraph is that ideologically-driven implementations are doomed to fail. It doesn't matter if you believe in "free-market", "the state", "free-speach", "socialism" or "equality", if you put these above the concrete reality of modern parenting, and how much harder it's getting compared to previous generations.
To be fair if the the parent is garbage there isn't anything the state today can do to truly prevent the child from being corrupted short of taking the child. We ensure that vaccine laws are difficult to enforce, we ensure that the child cannot have any privacy from the parent codified at school. At every stage we gave parents essentially absolute authority over there children with exception to maybe physical abuse. And I say maybe because even in physically abusive parent, it can be difficult for the child to advocate and escape. They can ask to be emencipated but the odds are stacked against you that you can proof you can support yourself financially.
All this to say is while I think the OP is mean about it they but are not wrong. The law argues heavily the parent is supreme at least in the US. But this specific law push the responsiblity of being the supreme authority off of parents. I know you don't like that concept but I think it is very easy to argue that any other model is going to be unacceptable to a pluraity of parents. Thats not to be confused with a parent is responsible for everything there child does because thats not true. But the consquence of that thinking is that children ultimately have some responsiblity in the things they do over the parent, which I think the authors of this law would be sweating at such a statement.
Personally I think the biggest issue for children is impulse control around social media and to be frank I don't think Adults are necessiarly able to deal with the onslaught of endless feed short form video content either. I don't think our brains are built against it very well. I don't know what the solution is but I think what made youtube without shorts different from tiktok is the endless scroll nature. The added friction actually protected peoples conscious and something to add a minimal friction to interactions would actually be massively beneficial to society at large
Okay, assuming that’s the case for the sake of argument, that’s still a huge problem right? Kids raised by bad parents suffer, which is inhumane. And if you don’t care about that, they also cause problems or costs for society at large (especially if there are a lot of them).
Those are bad outcomes. So is it any wonder that we look for policy/regulatory issues to mitigate the harms of bad parenting?
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