Thank youuuuuuu
Thank youuuuuuu
… Other randomized gaming features
This is a little worrying what it means, as all games rely on randomized things to some degree. Some are just bare necessity (shuffling deck before game of solitaire), some are reasonable game design (boss has 5% chance of dropping a nice piece of gear) and then there’s loot boxes
I’m not willing to sacrifice our democracy and the health of our children (I’ve got four, ages 4-18, I see the impact amongst them and their friends) on the altar of tech giants’ profit.
We hold press accountable. We ourselves are held to account for what we say IRL. Why does all that look different just so Zuckerberg and Musk can line their pockets?
It’s now official US policy to undermine European unity and support right wing nationalists.
I say bring those US tech giants to heel. We don’t have to turn into another America here, by making the same mistakes.
If Musk is against it, I’m almost always for it.
I’m super calm about this. This is based on rational analysis and technical knowledge about how the framework for this can work.
I wish to clip the wing feathers of every single US tech giant spewing their right wing bullshit straight into the eyeballs of every democratic citizen in Europe. I wish to do it calmly, and I am convinced it can be done.
There is 100% a route to verifying identity without privacy invasion. EU’s framework mandates ZKPs and the trial states are building it accordingly. No one will know who is verifying, where they verify, when or what they verify. The site itself will simply know “this is a legit person”.
In the EU framework, the certifying authorities are the same that issue your passport, your driving license; the state. I fail to see the issue with allowing them to issue another proof of who I am.
The risk is tracking. The way the EU mandates this framework is built requires zero knowledge built into the system. Then you can definitely say “they lie”, but if you believe your government would lie about this, then you already believe they would lie about all the other million ways they could track you, if it wasn’t illegal for the to do so. You’re really not giving up anything you haven’t already given up when the national state was formed as a concept. And in this case we gain a lot, namely keeping profit and “engagement” out of having a conversation online.
Oh, it’ll be age verification. What do you think how the social media sites will determine if someone is 16+?
And from a technical point of view it might be possible to do this without blasting your identity everywhere on the internet, but we all know that we’ll have to give our identity to every site we want to use.
I, as an Australian, have been saying all along that the social media ban should focus on the addictive and problematic features of social media, rather than a blanket ban. Hell there was a good quote I saw recently on Bluesky by Lance MacDonald:
“People saying “kids will find a way around this” have no idea what “this” is. When it comes to YouTube, there’s nothing for them to find a way around. The government is forcing all kids to have raw unfiltered access to YouTube. The only thing they’re removing is parental controls.”
The EU is at least acknowledging the harmful elements. Here’s hoping they go “ban on the harmful features of social media without age verification”. Then again if the Google Play Store can serve as a middleman on that front then Google will get their wish of being an internet gatekeeper and these features will be enabled by default even for adults (which it shouldn’t be).
People saying "kids will find a way around this" have no idea what "this" is. When it comes to YouTube, there's nothing for them to find a way around. The government is forcing all kids to have raw unfiltered access to YouTube. The only thing they're removing is parental controls.