> give out anonymous time-limited tokens from the gov site, with no logging
Awful idea.
This gives the government the power to deny you access to mass communication by deciding that you're no longer allowed to verify with these platforms.
"Been protesting the wrong things? Been talking about the wrong war crimes? Been advocating for the wrong LGBT policies? Failed to pay child support? Failed to pay back-taxes? Sorry you're no longer eligible for authenticating with social media services. You're too dangerous."
That is not beyond the pale for the Australian government.
You're also at the mercy of them to actually adhere to the "no logging" part, with absolutely no mechanism to verify that. And it can be changed at any time, in targeted ways, again with no way for you to know.
A better idea would be to sell anonymous age verification cards at adult stores, liquor stores, tobacco stores, etc. Paid in cash. An even better idea is to not do any of this and spend the money on a campaign to educate parents and institutions on how to use existing parental controls.
> This gives the government the power to deny you access to mass communication
They already can in the ID scenarios. Since they issue IDs.
> You're also at the mercy of them to actually adhere to the "no logging" part
That's part of the equation. To be tracked, two parties have to fail: the issuing side needs to log the details and the verifying side needs to log the details, and then agree to share them when they don't have to. There are existing laws that would enable this in simpler ways.
> to sell anonymous age verification cards at adult stores, liquor stores, tobacco stores, etc. Paid in cash.
What you mean is: share your ID details with those places repeatedly and require people to travel to them from remote areas (there's lots of places where that would mean a day trip at least). I'm not sure that's better. Also making that process time-limited would be really costly.
> An even better idea is to not do any of this
Sure, but that's not the scenario we're in anymore.
I heard from a friend last night that they were unable to see posts on X about current protests in their country because those were considered "adult" content which can now only be viewed after submitting to an ID check. Not porn, video of a protest.
It’s really important to remember in this context that “the purpose of a system is what it does.”
Do not think for a moment that ID verification primarily protects children and only incidentally enables authoritarian restrictions on speech. Do not think for a second that verification initiatives are designed without anticipating this outcome.
The phrase does not mean that you can pick any single effect of a system and claim that is its purpose, as your linked article does in its examples. (Ironically, a form of reducto as absurdum.) It is a heuristic, a pattern of thought to attempt to overcome the bias towards judging systems based on the intentions behind them instead of the outcomes they produce. The point is that when you choose a course of action, you are implicitly choosing its negative effects as well, and the choice should be judged on all its effects. You are making a cost / benefit analysis, and if that is not explicit, it can easily be wrong.
I think you're taking it too literally. A more generous interpretation would be "what it does can be a better indicator of what the true hidden motive was for nefarious state programs".
I have to agree that this is problematic in the sense of ascribing malicious intent, but it is actually a useful concept when performing an honest/truthful analysis and trying to acquire new knowledge and perspectives so you can compare them. i.e. the analysis of what it ought to do versus what it actually does.
Given a software product, there are often marketers/advertisers telling you what use cases they envisioned for their product, but you as the customer actually know more about your core business and your own needs. Hence you choose the products not based on what the vendor claims about the product i.e. the intended/prescribed purpose, you care more about what the product can do for your business and that includes discovering ways to use the product that the vendor could have never imagined in the first place.
Does your hospital kill more people than it saves? If so, you might be describing the 19th century Vienna General Hospital, which had two maternal wards: one staffed by trained physicians, suffering up to 30% mortality, the other by midwives, only experiencing 2~10% rates. The difference was so pronounced, local women desperately avoided the first ward, begging to give birth in the streets rather than be admitted there. Ignaz Semmelweis later attributed the disparity to doctors having performed autopsies before attending births without disinfecting their clothes, hands, or tools, dropping to only a few percent with disinfection.
Or if you limit your demographics, perhaps you might be thinking of the Tuskegee syphilis study, where treatment was intentionally withheld for a progressive, life-threatening disease without the consent of the patients, making its purpose to slowly kill the participants by its own admission?
Yes, if your hospital does seem to kill more people than most and there's no alternative explanation like accepting more severe cases, then its purpose might be inverse or orthogonal to its stated goal.
Sadly the old guard of free speech and privacy activists on the internet has long gone, drowned by a sea of unprincipled populist reactionaries - if their team decided that the content is "problematic", then they are entirely justified in censoring and punishing the speakers for daring to speak it, and entirely justified in protecting everybody else from having to suffer the horror of reading/seeing/hearing it, and it matters not whether the mechanisms are legal or ethical because the ends justify the means.
>the old guard of free speech and privacy activists on the internet has long gone, drowned by a sea of unprincipled populist reactionaries
which is an unnecessary ideological divide if your concern is free speech and privacy; too bad the old guard of activists chose sides and alienated additional support for their cause.
If the "rightie libertarians" from sibling is correct, then it actually describe the dynamic I have noticed.
It is free speech as long as you are politically right, no matter how far extreme right you are or what you are saying. But, if you are left or oppose the far right, then criticizing those is not free speech, but rather a restriction on it. Suddenly you should shut up, all sorts of additional rules apply to you. It is wrong to argue with far right, to say things that are uncomfortable for them or call them names, call them nazi even when it is clearly the case. But if you are just a little radical feminist, you are valid target for any amount of abuse which suddenly counts as free speech. Your leftist or feminist speech does not count as valid free speech.
Eventually, it started to look like "free speech" is tactically used expression to create an asymmetry and applies only to certain ideas. Or certain people ideas.
I am saying that "I support free speech" ended up associated with "I am pro far right, but do not want to openly admit so, but I will gladly accept suppression of left, progressives, liberals and anyone who criticizes right".
And that eventually we realized that "old school free speech groups" just wanted to shut up opposition to far right.
It ended up associated with the far right, because poster child for "defending speech" was only and exclusively far right. Really.
It was never "I strongly disagree with an annoying progressive, but I will defend their right to say it". It was always "how dare you criticize far right or call someone far right, you are preventing their speech by opposing them".
> people on the left who are against free speech I suppose, yes.
Funny enough, far right and conservatives were openly against free speech again and again and again. Including in very practical ways. And we see that right now with Trump, Thiel, Musk, Vance and the rest.
People "on the right" nor self styled free speech advocates never minded that. There was never any fascist movement for freedom, the openly stated goal was always to remove the freedom. But if you are not one of them say so and mean it as a criticism, you are somehow supposedly preventing their free speech.
> It ended up associated with the far right, because poster child for "defending speech" was only and exclusively far right. Really.
It ended up being associated with the far right by far leftists. Really. Go outside internet bubbles and ask normal people on the street. People don't think free speech is "far right". Really.
> It was never "I strongly disagree with an annoying progressive, but I will defend their right to say it". It was always "how dare you criticize far right or call someone far right, you are preventing their speech by opposing them".
I've heard that a lot, so that's false.
> Funny enough, far right and conservatives were openly against free speech again and again and again. Including in very practical ways. And we see that right now with Trump, Thiel, Musk, Vance and the rest.
I'm not seeing where the humor is.
> People "on the right" nor self styled free speech advocates never minded that.
Also wrong, many free speech advocates have greatly minded conservative efforts to censor speech in the past.
> There was never any fascist movement for freedom,
No, but that appears to be a strawman of your own construction by equating free speech advocates with fascists.
As a group, those who bang the free speech and privacy drum be seen as being more to the right than 20 years ago, but I doubt it is significantly because individuals changed their other political opinions. More because some of the group dropped out as they have been silenced by fear or just changed their outlook on it as political landscape has changed. Also in some part because those remaining in the group are just viewed as being more to one side of the political spectrum than they used to be simply because of this view.
I parsed this entirety as a single noun cluster: "the old guard of free speech and privacy activists on the internet"
and to me that can be summed up as "the EFF", and the EFF is decidedly left whinge, and does not attract the support of others who are concerned about free speech.
free speech on the pre-web internet didn't really need a group, it was a given and generally accepted by all parties
But in that case, the EFF didn't go to be rightie libertarians. They if anything may have gone further left, it's just that they no longer champion free speech. Which is basically what I said, just applied to the group rather than individuals.
Not commenting on ID checks but depending on the protest, some images can be violent and definitely "adult".
I never understood why we go out of our way to "protect" children against seeing naked people, but real people in a pool of blood, nah, no problem. I think that people bloodily fighting each other for causes that I have a hard time understanding even as an adult may not be what we want children to be exposed to without control. Images of violence create a visceral reaction and I don't think it is how we should approach political problems, in the same way that porn may not be the best approach to sex, the same argument for why we don't let children access porn applies to political violence too.
The point I wanted to make is that whatever your opinion is on ID checks to access to adult content, "adult" doesn't and shouldn't just mean "porn".
Ostensibly these laws are to protect kids from porn, but that isn't really the case. They instantly expand to everything else "adult", and it's very easy to argue that talking about politics, or discussing evidence of war crimes or genocide, or apparently showing a real and current protest, are "adult" conversations.
And with laws like this, people, adults, everyone, lose the ability to participate in those conversations without doxxing themselves. Some of these things are difficult to discuss when you fear retribution.
It's not about the porn. It was never actually about the porn. The porn is just the difficult-to-defend-without-looking-like-a-pervert smokescreen. It's designed to curtail the free flow of information and expression in far more areas. The people behind these laws are liars.
Even if they can't be traced back to a name/photo identity, it would still be a privacy disaster if you could only make one proof per service.
If a user can only make one then they'll have to use that identity with that service forever. That's a nightmare for privacy. Sometimes people need another account, unknown to their employer/family/friends. People should be able to make multiple accounts without those being tied together through a common "age check" identifier. But, of course, there is no way to prevent those from being distributed.
At some level I believe that's the purpose behind some of this. If someone can only have one proof, then someone can only have one account to speak with. They'll be easier to monitor, easier to identify, easier to silence. That's why I think these types of laws and behaviors should be resisted and protested.
I've mentioned in a previous comment that it's telling that big tech isn't resisting these totally-just-coincidental ID laws coming from western countries. It supercharges their surveillance and tracking abilities, and widens their moats.
Also, porn is a smokescreen. The definition of "adult" content will rapidly expand, and these put the ID issuers in censorious a position of control over people and services. Nothing stops a government attestation server from rejecting a request because someone is blacklisted from "mass communication services" because they're a felon, protestor, LGBT activist, etc... or because a service has fallen out of favor.
I think it's telling that this is happening via "policies" instead of laws, because almost nobody cares or wants it.
It's also telling that Google and Microsoft aren't in opposition to this new burden, they're giving quiet yet full support. This will *necessarily* entrench the big players through the burden to implement, make it easier to track individuals across different accounts and services, and endanger the privacy and anonymity of all adults in Australia. And I think that's all the goal.
If they cared about protecting kids they'd focus on resources and campaigns to educate parents on using parental controls. Then parents could decide if they care to block these things in their homes. It should be up to them.
The "you can just log out" loophole, that's just boiling the frog slowly. It would be foolish to think that will stay around.
> campaigns to educate parents on using parental controls.
Exactly this.
The other possibility is that Google & Microsoft won't want to hassle people for ID or "papers please" just for liking a post, reviewing a business or sending email.
If I were Google, I'd be worried about losing a LOT of customers who simply won't provide invasive personal details which routinely get stolen in Australia from poorly secured "trusted" organisations like Qantas and Optus.
People won't want to send their ID to "trusted ID contractors" for simple web services because e-Karen has a final solution. I'll close my Google accounts if they ever deny me access on that basis, and I'll take action against the measures in any way I can to make things as uncomfortable as possible for whatever authoritarian government ushers this garbage in.
That's mentioned on the "Conclusions" page of TFA:
> Large-scale simulation: So far, we have only focused on systems with a few objects. What about large-scale systems with thousands or millions of objects? Turns out it is not so easy because the computation of gravity scales as
. Have a look at Barnes-Hut algorithm to see how to speed up the simulation. In fact, we have documentations about it on this website as well. You may try to implement it in some low-level language like C or C++.
C or C++? Ha! I've implemented FMM in Fortran 77. (Not my choice; it was a summer internship and the "boss" wanted it that way.) It was a little painful.
Oh wow! I implemented BH in rust not long ago. Was straightforward. Set it up with grpahics so I could see the cubes etc. Then looked into FMM... I couldn't figure out where to start! Looked very formidable. multipole seems to be coming up in everything scientific I look at these days...
Supercomputers will simulate trillions of masses. The HACC code, commonly used to verify the performance of these machines, uses a uniform grid (interpolation and a 3D FFT) and local corrections to compute the motion of ~8 trillion bodies.
I loved this game growing up as it was one of the few games which ran well on our family computer, despite not having an internet connection to participate in any of the PvP elements. It was probably the most played game of my childhood. I've also logged almost 300 hours in the redux version on steam.
Interestingly, since I didn't have the internet to participate in the MMO elements of the game, my views of it are entirely rooted in the storyline and campaigns. The community is something I haven't experienced. And none of these netcode or pvp bugs or phantom players showed up there.
I love the game. In the single player modes, you can play as the NSDF (US) forces, USSR, (and later as the Chinese forces too) in a sci-fi retelling of the space race where you discover alien relics throughout our solar system and try to piece together where they came from, and more importantly, where they went. And it did this while combining a first-person vehicle combat mode with a top-down RTS system that, in my opinion, worked really well together. And I still take inspiration from it in hobby game projects I work on.
Now that I've grown up as a software developer I've thrown so many hours into writing Lua scripts to build my own missions and AI, and creating custom maps!
I'm so happy to see this post. One of my professors back in college mentioned that "just" was a "four letter word" (akin to a cuss word) and that's stuck with me since.
"How long should this take? It's JUST calling an API."
"Why did it take so long to fix that bug? It was JUST a one line change."
"Stripe handles payment stuff, we JUST need to add it in!"
What a devious little word. It just papers over all the complexity!
I think there's an obvious slippery slope here, and it's visible in how these sorts of age verification requirements are implemented. Specifically, requiring a government ID to access, creating a log of who/what/where/when.
The slippery slope comes from someone then asking the question: "Well, we already require an ID to allow someone to access porn... so can we require it for other things online where people have less desire for privacy? Why shouldn't we require an ID to post to social media, or participate in online video games (especially those violent ones!)"
The slope I see, is once you set up a system for ID verification and require it for a primary thing people want to keep private, it becomes easier to mandate it in other areas where privacy is less demanded.
Concern about that slope would be a nonissue if the laws mandated adult sites tag themselves as "adult content" for trivial filtering at the household network level, instead of establishing and normalizing the ID verification regime.
I recently put together some very small fonts (3x3, 3x4, 3x5, 3x6, 4x4, and 5x5) and tried to enumerate most of the possible glyphs as part of working on little projects on SSD1306 OLED screens: https://moonbench.xyz/projects/tiny-pixel-art-fonts/
My questions would be: is it possible to improve the visual results if we lift the restriction to only two levels of brightness of each pixel? I.e., would a use of proper grayscale allow creation of smaller fonts that are still readable, or allow more visually distinct and recognizable characters, than a binary font of the same size can have? Would designing a proportional typeface, as opposed to a monospaced one, help with minimizing the average advance width of the glyphs (averaged according to their frequencies in English text)?
Motivation: it is possible to reduce a book page, with ~80 characters per line, without any font hinting, without using any special fonts, using just common image manipulation tools, to just 240 pixels wide, and still get mostly readable words (but not individual letters). This is 3 horizontal pixels per glyph on average, including the gap - something that the demonstrated binary bitmap fonts don't achieve. Example: https://imgur.com/a/AlYrnSS
slightly tangential, but thank you! for the first time ever, the word "font" has been the appropriate word choice in the title, and we got a "typeface" claim.
When I read it, I immediately thought a braille typeface has a good claim on being the smallest. Would there be anything "enjoyable" to a blind person for a braille typeface to be available in different fonts? Italics? little tear drops, that sort of thing?
For developers the per-install fee is an additional unwelcome cost, and one that can continue to nibble at you in perpetuity as players install and inevitably reinstall games over time. It seems to imply that if I ever upgrade to a new computer and reinstall my favorite games the developers will incur a cost and Unity will obtain revenue for... no real reason?
For gamers, this seem to indicate that all games developed with Unity phone home back to Unity HQ at the very least during the initial install (possibly on every launch?) with information about my machine. I'm not sure how they could conceivably be enforcing this otherwise. It makes me inclined to avoid installing games developed with Unity to avoid sending information about my machine and my gaming habits back to Unity and IronSource. Sorry guys but I don't want my "profile" to be part of your "ad tech" just because I decided to install games I purchased.
Awful idea.
This gives the government the power to deny you access to mass communication by deciding that you're no longer allowed to verify with these platforms.
"Been protesting the wrong things? Been talking about the wrong war crimes? Been advocating for the wrong LGBT policies? Failed to pay child support? Failed to pay back-taxes? Sorry you're no longer eligible for authenticating with social media services. You're too dangerous."
That is not beyond the pale for the Australian government.
You're also at the mercy of them to actually adhere to the "no logging" part, with absolutely no mechanism to verify that. And it can be changed at any time, in targeted ways, again with no way for you to know.
A better idea would be to sell anonymous age verification cards at adult stores, liquor stores, tobacco stores, etc. Paid in cash. An even better idea is to not do any of this and spend the money on a campaign to educate parents and institutions on how to use existing parental controls.