The lesson here is not to trust Google or other non-encrypted storage with your stuff. There are email providers that are more protective of your stuff, but more than that: don’t store everything in one place. That way if one account is compromised, not everything is exposed. And American companies are more likely to share your data than European ones.

For mocking a conservative on r/politics? Back when I read it, half of r/politics mocked conservatives. Most of reddit still does. Are they going to ban everybody?

I really think everybody should simply refuse to use any of Google’s captchas anymore. There are others I don’t like either, but Google is the worst. If it’s something you need to use, report that the site doesn’t work.

I don’t think for tue average user it really matters much. If you’ve got multiple screens of different sizes or refresh rates, Wayland is the way to go. If you’ve got multiple identical screens that you want to treat as a single big screen, X11 is perfect for that.

I recently switched and I’m happy with how it runs. Even on Nvidia.

Exactly. Money as a tool is fine. You need a way to pay for stuff. It’s the love of money, money as a goal in itself, far beyond what you’ll ever need to live, that’s the problem.

There are absolutely things that are more ethical than others. Absolute statements like that are unhelpful. Fairphone is not perfect, but a lot more ethical than the alternatives.

It’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil, according to Jesus, but yeah, that’s the driving force behind capitalism.

Sites need to stop using recaptcha. It’s an unnecessary barrier to using a site and I often refuse out of principle.

Because AI cannot possibly generate faces.

Exactly. And that’s the part that worries me most: I’m seeing people investigating the guy, shaming him (he wrote a blog about using Claude to write a game in 90 minutes, so clearly he must be evil /s), and the article above is written in such a way to insinuate all sorts of nefarious goings on, but everything I see suggests this is just normal procedure.

I really feat this is going to hurt the community and chase good developers away.

Exactly. There’s a massive thread on Mastodon where everybody is panicking about this, but it’s a nothing burger if ever there was one.

Sure, the timing and comments suggest it’s meant for legal compliance, but if that’s what it does, it does it by keeping full control in the hands of the user, where it should be.

Linux has similar fields for realName, emailAddress, location, timezone and more. But like birthdate, I think they’re all optional.

Was Linux ever used for massive multiuser systems? I thought it had always been primarily home use and internet servers. I think big multiuser systems went out of fashion with Solaris. Well, I suppose corporate workstations need user accounts where some of these are set.

Only in California and Brazil. And I suspect neither has a shortage of people able to add this field.

My guess is it’s an Independent Beer Maker.

The kernel can wait. Kernels are good at that.

That’s what it sounds to me. You just have to enter a date of birth, which I think puts parents in control of this, rather than shady websites.

Something that I, as a parent, really miss, is the ability to have some parental control without having to subject myself to horrifically broken systems like those from Microsoft and Google, which are just painful to use and don’t offer any meaningful control. Minecraft has become almost impossible to use lately, and apparently it’s going to get even worse.

More applications should have a simple child mode that connects it to a parent mode that allows the parent to keep an eye on what their kid is doing and enable or disable some features for them, but instead, they make it impossible to create an account, and if you do, you’ve got an account that can’t do anything. It’s broken and stupid and shouldn’t be so difficult.

Maybe Linux could set a better example in this.

I’m still talking about the same thing, but I understand the nature of our misunderstanding now. You see eID as something you download and can share (but what kind of security would that provide?). I mean an online ID service, similar to the Dutch DigiD. I assume the EU eID is also something similar, although I have no personal experience with that.

The first paragraph on Wikipedia contains a good description of what I’m talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_identification

An electronic identification (“eID”) is a digital solution for proof of identity of citizens or organizations. They can be used to view to access benefits or services provided by government authorities, banks or other companies, for mobile payments, etc. Apart from online authentication and login, many electronic identity services also give users the option to sign electronic documents with a digital signature.

The online authentication is the important part. The article also talks about physical cards with a chip, but I honestly don’t quite understand how that’s different from a regular chip in a passport.

When I have to access any government service, I get redirected to digID to log in, then redirected to the site I want to visit. This is very similar to other online authorisation schemes, except it’s tied to me official legal identity.

My proposal is to use this not just to log in to government sites, but to use it to provide any legally required online identification, tailored to the highest amount of privacy possible in that situation. So if a site needs to confirm you’re 18+, let that site ask the eID service for just your age, or even just whether you’re 18+ or not, log into the eID system, and the eID system sends confirmation of your age back to the site.

But getting that information from the USP or the site would require a warrant. Not to mention that the site doesn’t have to know your real identity either.

And the whole point of this exercise is to ensure that you don’t have to provide any document to the site.

What I mean by the site that’s requesting this, is exactly that: you need to prove to a site that you’re above a certain age. For that, the site redirects you to the proxy that redirects you to the eID site, with a request to confirm that you’re above a certain age.

The site has fulfilled its legal obligation to check your age, but doesn’t have to know your identity, and the government doesn’t have to know what site you’re visiting.

I feel like you’re misunderstanding the scenario we’re discussing.

Obviously the government knows it’s you. That’s the whole purpose. But they don’t know the site that’s requesting this, if the proxy hides that from them.

If the proxy is independent, I don’t see how the government can know what the requesting site is. They can only see the proxy. I don’t mean a standard network proxy of course, but a proxy for the entire request. That’s probably the source of our misunderstanding.