> your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case
Already the case. Mostly for the kind of dumb criminal who is suspected of murder and has been found googling "defences to murder" and "how to hide a body".
> the companies providing the logins must provide government with the identities
If there's a court order (good) or a national security letter (occasionally good but very open to abuse). Maybe the NSA or some guy in DOGE has automatic API access to this data anyway.
> you must be logged in to visit these specific sites where you might see naked boobies, and if you're under age you can't - those sites must enforce logins and age limits
Already the case for youtube and reddit content marked NSFW - either by the creator or by a fairly stupid algorithm. (You can see these boobies, but not those ones.) But the age verification is mostly "open a new account and enter a birth date". Also reddit has the dumbest age verification/login bypass ever. (Your honor, editing an URL is nation-state level hacking and we can't reasonably defend against that.)
> all visits to all sites will be recorded
Something something Permanent Record.
> you must have a valid login with one of these providers in order to use the internet
Ok this one is cheating a bit, but don't you need a google (or samsung etc.) account to set up an android let alone access the internet?
Also cheating a bit but you need a login and contract with your ISP to get on the internet too.
Money is, depending on the country, slowly evolving from physical coins/notes to plastic cards to pretend plastic cards on smartphones, to the same but you need an app to manage the account, to let's stop pretending and just use an app in the first place.
The last one is difficult because you need a common standard, either someone becomes a monopoly (or two or three quasi-monopolies such as google/apple) or better still this is one of few cases where government regulation could do more good than harm.
I think China is already close to the last phase at least in cities, going down the government regulated route?
This is highly country dependent of course - in some places shops must accept coins by law, even if it's so unusual that you have to roll a critical success to get the right amount of change back.
I would like a world where we can give children physical pocket money rather than some abstraction, and they don't need a smartphone of their own to check their balance. But we'll probably have to fight for that at some point.
The economist's answer would be to offer to buy the cube for $1.1M. Tell them the extra $100k will fund building another cube plus expenses with spare cash left over. If you're right, pass GO and collect the payout.
Besides the "One App Store" policy (that tbf keeps out the worst scams you can find on android), what bothers me most is that an app can be banned fors speech like "here's the FAQ on our HOMEPAGE".
Huh? "One App Store" is bad, it forces you into a vendor lock-in, to have no choice but to accept whatever a store wants you to do. I'd rather have the freedom of choice rather than being limited to a monopoly.
I'd be ok with one app store if the criteria for being included are transparent, reasonable and not biased towards less strict rules for big players.
Patreon was told to change its whole billing model until a court found in their favor: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1878206.html That's the kind of thing I think we'd both find unacceptable.
But I'd still be ok with "one store, resonable rules, respect user privacy".
Meanwhile on google's lawn, there's hundreds of things like this: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.falnesc.to... a torch app that contains ads and shares your location with selected third parties. At least they don't require permission to read your contacts. (You can buy an ad-free "secure" version for $0.99, or you can just ... turn on your phone's LED for free because that's provided by the OS.)
Technically firefox extensions are "one app store" too - you can't sideload unless you install from the dev/nightly channel and fiddle with the settings. But at least it's a not-for-profit store. Chrome and even Edge allow you to sideload.
Nowadays to use youtube efficiently with ADHD, you practically need all of:
(a) uBlock - this one is debatable but deals with the worst distractions especially if you're trying to learn from a video your professor put up and you have an exam to prepare for, (b) unhook - hides most of the "recommendations" that attempt to keep you on the site because you're planning to do the copmprehension questions your professor gave you for after the video, (c) something to disable "autoplay next" for the same reason as above (a uBlock rule will do it), (d) no translation. Soon we'll probably need (e) something to block AI.
Brett has said in his past reviews of the battles of Minas Tirith and Helm's Deep that the important part of a film is that it works _on screen_. So he points out differences between the book and the film, but says this is not meant to be criticism of the film. Except the bit where they get the logistics wrong.
He absolutely tore into Rings of Power, but that only makes me like him more.
He does get a bit worked up, understandably, when the Romans attack with an M777 howitzer firing napalm shells. Rome wiped everything that stood in their way for a long while, but not like that.
Yeah, since the M777 doesn't have a napalm shell [1] that would be totally absurd! :D
In fact, since I got curious, it seems nobody fires napalm out of howitzers, it's non-trivial to combine the thin easy-to-break shell skin needed by napalm with something tough enough to be fired from artillery [2].
The copy command is called "copy" which kind of makes sense? I remember once seeing a colleagues .bashrc with things like "alias copy=cp". Flags won't work the same way of course.
Sure "chcp" is a mouthful, but "del" or "erase" makes as much sense as learning that "rm" is short for remove. You pick up either convention quickly enough, except that I'm constantly using "where" when I meant "which". Maybe I should make an alias or something.
Don't get me started on powershell's look-we-can-use-proper-words-lets-see-how-long-we-can-make-this.
> your browser history may be used as evidence in a criminal case
Already the case. Mostly for the kind of dumb criminal who is suspected of murder and has been found googling "defences to murder" and "how to hide a body".
> the companies providing the logins must provide government with the identities
If there's a court order (good) or a national security letter (occasionally good but very open to abuse). Maybe the NSA or some guy in DOGE has automatic API access to this data anyway.
> you must be logged in to visit these specific sites where you might see naked boobies, and if you're under age you can't - those sites must enforce logins and age limits
Already the case for youtube and reddit content marked NSFW - either by the creator or by a fairly stupid algorithm. (You can see these boobies, but not those ones.) But the age verification is mostly "open a new account and enter a birth date". Also reddit has the dumbest age verification/login bypass ever. (Your honor, editing an URL is nation-state level hacking and we can't reasonably defend against that.)
> all visits to all sites will be recorded
Something something Permanent Record.
> you must have a valid login with one of these providers in order to use the internet
Ok this one is cheating a bit, but don't you need a google (or samsung etc.) account to set up an android let alone access the internet?
Also cheating a bit but you need a login and contract with your ISP to get on the internet too.
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