#Infosec #Philosophy #ADHD #Privacy #MediaPreservation
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My wife always wonders how I’m a both a ‘morning person’ and a ‘night owl’.
I remind her I start the day by washing amphetamines down with tea, and then continue this trend throughout the day.
Ok this is interesting.
The desktop app has no such restrictions, only mobile.
Valve: “We need a credit card on file to prove you’re 18”
Me: “My account is 23 years old”
Valve: “That just proves your account is old”
Me: “A credit card just proves you know someone with a credit card”
@jerry just thinking through the inevitable nightmares inbound from UK, EU, and US age verification requirements for social media, where does this land us on Infosec.exchange?
Early days I know, but curious on your thoughts.
Welllllll this isn't great.
Google Just Patented The End Of Your Website
"...a system that evaluates your company’s landing page in real time and, if it decides the page won’t perform well enough for a specific user, replaces it with an AI-generated version assembled on the fly. The user never sees what your team built, they see what Google's machine learning model thinks they should see instead."
https://www.forbes.com/sites/joetoscano1/2026/03/06/google-just-patented-the-end-of-your-website
#SEO #Google #AI #enshittification
I won’t be verifying that I’m over 18 on iOS 26.4, and as of yet, I haven’t seen any downside to not doing so.
I do think this is going to backfire though. If it’s age restricted apps I can’t download, surely I’d just use the website instead.
I hear that the intent is to utilise some sort of age verification flag, but I can’t see it being implemented at all.
Put it this way… from 2016 to 2026, following GDPR mandates for handling visitors to websites only around 15% of public facing websites are GDPR ‘compliant’.
Good luck getting age verification uptake. You can’t block by default, the internet would implode.
So you sit there for a moment. There was no YouTube to prepare you for this. No strategy guide was available yet.
Powercut? TV failed?
For those of you with a TV with a standby mode, you’ll have a chance of seeing this. Originally implemented to help warmup times on TV sets, but later used to enable remote operation.
It was common, when doing any of the above that the standby mode was disengaged. (Won’t go into the exceptions for mechanically latching standbys). Meaning even the standby light went off. You were going to have to go and turn it on manually.
This timing meant you were going to dead by the time your TV came back on.
MISSION FAILED.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk on why Hideo Kojima is a fucking menace and one of my favourite artists.
Second your TV switches its aspect ratio. A minor inconvenience, but strange when it happens.
Finally, and probably my favourite as it happened first time for me experiencing it back then, the screen turns off.
Just picture it. 1998, 10pm, lights are off, huddled around a glowing phosphor wonder box. The most cinematic game ever to grace our screens in full swing. You’ve had 5 minutes of weird shit happening in the build up to the fight. Furniture starts floating, he takes control of your character, you’re scrambling to plug the controller into the other port…
“BLACKOUT!”
The screen goes dark, a weird tone plays, the text is all funky, the screen flickers and the text goes small, like you’ve zoomed out… “wait, that isn’t what my TV normally says”.
CLICK.
Darkness. Silence.
So! Mantis hits you with the “Blackout!”.
1. You get the basic high/low and audio signal at the lowest resolution. All other audio stops.
2. The text HIDEO appears top right. A reference to Hideo Kojima’s name, BUT more importantly, this is a Sony PlayStation. On Sony CRTs of the time, the word VIDEO would appear on this input typically when you switched to it. Kojima used the exact font and colour that Sony did on their on screen displays. In many cases you’d see the two words overlaid, making the reference even more subtle, and slightly creepy.
3. After a few seconds the resolution switches to the maximum possible. And HIDEO becomes smaller. This timing is key, as VIDEO lettering from the TV should disappear by the time this happens. Making it seem like the word has morphed. On many displays the resolution change causes a screen flicker.
4. And this is the big one. Depending on your TV setup, one of three things is about to happen. And all can happen at different times, to the same TV depending on another factor I’ll touch on in a moment.
First your channel selector may switch to another channel.
Could be TV, VHS, Cable etc. In some setups with a decent high-fi stack, this might mean the reciever has a 12v relay signal output which remotely turns on your audio equipment, maybe even plays a CD…
Bear with me, we’re going to start putting the pieces together.
Here goes!
Steve Rudolfi