u/kbal — kbal

If you have questions for @DarthPutinKGB@mastodon.world you can also talk to him on mastodon.

Pedestrians will need to pass an annual inspection to make sure they have the proper high-vis gear, flame resistant clothing, and signal lights.

arson, n. The crime of deliberately starting a fire with intent to cause damage.

The dictionary confirms my understanding that "unintentional arson" is a contradiction in terms. We must therefore find the defendant not guilty.

Is there even a single OECD government that's firmly opposed to what Israel is doing, firmly opposed to what Russia is doing, and firmly opposed to fossil fuels? Asking for that doesn't seem like too much.

After posting I instantly thought about whether I should've added to that last sentence "... in any society with a modicum of respect for liberty."

As far as I can tell from what's reported there it's empty rhetoric based on nothing concrete. It's presumably more effective in Italian.

Yeah it was a big milestone. Many related developments soon followed. It's an interesting coincidence that linux was first released the same year. Strong end-to-end encryption has in common with free software that it's taken an awfully long time for ordinary people to begin understanding that it's important and worth the effort to use. Like free software, once it gets going it can't be stopped.

The secret of how to do strong encryption is out, since 1991. You can't erase it from everyone's minds. Criminals can not be stopped from using it by passing laws against it. Its only law-abiding people who will be made unsafe by that.

If it collapses due to the whole country having been blown to bits by Israel that could also be somewhat inconvenient for people in Iran.

I believe it is called "clickbait." As in "Click here to find out what terrible thing just happened to which NATO ally!"

when creating an account it asks your age.

Why would anyone create an account when they can just go to some random website on the far side of the world that doesn't follow that system to get whatever they're looking for? Even when people got their pornography from magazines the stereotype was of even supposedly mature adults being weird about it — wearing dark glasses, going to the 7-11 in a part of town where they won't be recognized, and looking all furtive and embarrassed with their copy of Hustler at the till. Vilifying porn and trying to make people register for some kind of age verification service or anything else in order to see it is just going to make people even more secretive about it just like the good old days, and everyone will go to some dodgy unlicensed website hosted by a shell company in the Seychelles instead of the strictly regulated law-abiding Canadian purveyors.

This is not an investigation of any wrongdoing, it's their attempt to impose "age verification" on the Internet starting with porn.

What makes you think they'd change prices on a whim? More likely they'll change the prices based on whatever they learn from the browser fingerprint of whoever at your table is first to scan the code. Better get the intern to go first, just in case.

It must be about ten years that Taler has stood unopposed as a proposed system for digital payments that's pretty good and might actually happen. It's not perfect, but it's better than anything else that exists. It's been a lot of years of tests, audits, experiments, and demos that occasionally turn up in my news feed — it was beginning to look like vapourware. I guess it'll be another several years before it gets to my part of the world, but it's good to see it finally getting started.

I know these things take time but it seems overdue by about ten years.

(Or perhaps if things need to connect to some kind of grid management services, a firewall with appropriate rules — i.e. ones that do not allow connections to or from random addresses in China. Or some combination of both. Depends on the requirements but it's not that complicated. Consult your local IT security expert.)

This can be solved by not connecting your solar panels to the Internet, or putting them behind a secure VPN if you really need remote access for some reason.

Also because of, you know, tobacco.

If only somebody would design an open and federated protocol to replace giant social media platforms in a way that destroys the ability of billionaire monopolists or anyone else to use the network effect to lock people into their psychomanipulation machines.

Nah, we'll just make them tweak the dials towards less disinformation and more safe-for-advertisers messaging.