His old firm is now led by his kids. Also he allegedly stole control of the firm from the widow of the founder, in a legal battle a long time ago. All around, a sociopathic individual.
> What the Commission describes as a tool for child protection is also something else entirely: a stepping stone toward the European Digital Identity Wallets scheduled for rollout by the end of 2026.
It always starts with “think of the children”. But make no mistake, all the promises of privacy and anonymity here cannot be trusted. It’s the government’s claim after all. They can change rules retroactively or carve things out for “national security” or whatever. Age verification is simply a violation of people’s fundamental right to anonymously access speech and communicate speech.
It’s the opposite. Meta, OpenAI, and others love age verification because it enables more advertising without liability and they have been silently pushing these laws. They’ve formed unauthentic “grassroots” groups that do their work of smearing the current situation.
It’s a bad thing because people will lose their privacy by having to prove their age. No guarantee of protecting our information can truly be trusted. And once you have to fear not being anonymous, you cannot speak freely online or be yourself. Minorities like LGBTQ have to fear being harassed or targeted if their identity ever gets out.
By the way, age verification is also something pushed by evangelists and project 2025. It’s seen as a backdoor way to ban porn, LGBTQ, and more.
I see so this is more about age verification than an outright social media ban. I understand the controversy there. The wording on this article threw me off.
There’s also the proposed vacancy tax in Portland, where landlords who can’t find businesses to use commercial space will have to pay a tax. All because the city and state cannot fix the problem of rampant homeless drug addicts, blight, and property crime. If they did, businesses might be able to succeed. Instead they will force landlords to sell as the city spirals.
Good luck. These big tech companies have no incentive to care about support or really anything that isn’t tied directly to making money. And unless you have a friend there, Google staff have no incentive either. Solving this won’t help with their promotions.
> Google staff have no incentive either. Solving this won’t help with their promotions.
I don't think people appreciate that this is really the key observation here. In large institutions, for anything significant to happen, there have to be incentives and alternatives, and these are set by management. Management in turn usually cares about their incentives, and the company overall mostly cares about the bottom line and the financial reports.
As a result, this is unlikely to get addressed, unless there is significant pressure, like media coverage, people mass-resigning from Gmail, or major email servers blocking Google. But none of these are likely to happen.
I think there are lots of people that will see this story that either work at google or know someone who does, and I bet it will lead to their issue getting fixed. The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
It would help if they provided literally any way for a squeaky wheel to squeak at them aside from squeaking at the employees with a modicum of dignity (if they still exist)
I would argue this division via tech is happening even without people recognizing it and having a feeling about it. People are influenced by media bubbles, social media moderation / censorship, marketing, and more. And unfortunately those that saw the introduction of the internet, smartphones, social media, etc and know what the world before was like, cannot explain to those born recently why they should want to go back. Soon people will only know a modern urban smartphone life and have little value for anything else that feels out of the ordinary.
I worry about this too. I wonder if this same fear was felt by those who lived through the shift in Western Europe from village to industrial town life two centuries ago, and those who likewise lived through the era of post-war growth and leveling of society towards the expanded middle-class into the cut-throat selfishness of the Reagan and Thatcher-era economic rationalism which would in turn foment today's populist backlash.
Which imperial power do you suppose it was who quietly took over ThePirateBay and major trackers and now uses them for that exact purpose, as one of their many tools to create botnets that are then used to attack Western sites, helping to drive the adoption of CloudFlare and the like?
It's a treasure trove of knowledge. A true priceless gem. Enjoy it while it lasts.
If you want to help keep the site's content alive in a decentralized way, just buy $20,000 worth of hard drives and a very big internet pipe and start downloading their torrents.
Otherwise if you're broke like me, donate and/or leech every valuable book on every subject you can think of from their servers, while you're able to do so, and keep them stored safely offline. Buy only server grade hard drives and use them gently. Buy backup drives and use a ZFS mirror.
In either case, get an older tape drive and some tapes, and learn about tar, lzip, par2, mt-st. Get multiple tape drives if possible (for spares) and make sure your written tapes are readable in all of them. Store the tapes and hardware properly and securely.
Eventually Anna's Archive will be shut down. It's only a matter of time. It will be a great tragedy for humanity, akin to the day the Library of Alexandria was burned down. Until that happens, people who care need to do all they can to help save anything and everything of value while it's still online.
"Anything truly good and useful that is put on the internet, especially if it's of large benefit to humanity, will eventually be shut down and replaced with some watered down paywalled garbage, if anything at all." - kdhaskjdhadjk's Law
Obviously the Trump family is being made richer or more powerful somehow. It’s obvious. Saying there is no obvious reason is as insane as believing the delay in banning TikTok wasn’t corrupt.
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