Alec Muffett

Given the examples of what happened with covid tracking, especially with the British, French, Swedish and other governments, I would much rather that Apple and Google have my data because they are motivated by risk of regulatory punishment to treat it like to treat it like radioactive waste.

If there's only a single provider and it is not within the power of users to choose a provider, it is a single point of failure and a point of tracking.

#Privacy Wonks will hate it, but Mark #Zuckerberg is correct that the proper place for prescriptive #AgeVerification is in the App Store of a mobile device […because it…] is a degenerate form of what we should have been doing all along: age attestation, not age verification.

#AgeVerification is literally a gatekeeping solution. If it is to be effective at all, it must be deployed in situations where gatekeeping makes sense — and general purpose operating systems are not those places.

How many providers are signed up?

My point, exactly. 🧐

Journalists! Why you should not bother wasting your/everyone’s time covering “Age Verification” on Linux: The “Tug of War” Theory of Open Source tl;dr: the “project” of open source age verification will inevitably implode — probably messily — and waste everyone’s time whilst also reifying narrative of “support”…

Journalists! Why you should not bother wasting your/everyone’s time covering “Age Verification” on Linux: The “Tug of War” Theory of Open Source
https://alecmuffett.com/article/148084
#AgeAttestation #AgeVerification #MarkZuckerberg #OpenSource #apple #google #ubuntu

TikTok incapable of delivering both user privacy *and* user safety, retains capability to surveil user communications Nothing to do with it being Chinese, then? “TikTok told the BBC it believed end-to-end encryption prevented police and safety teams from being able to read direct messages if they needed to. …

TikTok incapable of delivering both user privacy *and* user safety, retains capability to surveil user communications
https://alecmuffett.com/article/148043
#EndToEndEncryption #censorship #china #surveillance #tiktok

It's really hard to regulate open source software and code. I'm sure they will try.

Yep. How many teenagers do you know on Facebook? New technologies are going to arise and will be adopted because they are more compelling or more open. Teenagers will get better at faking shit or just circumventing it entirely. "Finsta" was years ago. The wheel will turn.

I asked ChatGPT about the availability of VPN software in every instance of Linux, and about how the State might try to prevent its use, plus how much it costs to “roll your own” VPN Discussion attached below; I agree with its conclusions 100% Hat-tip to Alan Cox for reminding me that every version of the Linux kernel has had VPN capability baked into it for nearly 30 years. Th…

The problem there is that you, like the government, believe that VPNs are special.

They are not. Anybody can set them up.

Also: see Tor.

alecmuffett.com/article/113969

ps: Go look up the history of the satanic cult moral panic surrounding dungeons and dragons

I'm not expecting the stupidity to start to unwind *properly* for about 5 years. It will take at least that long for the damage to rack up and people to start suffering and have their reputations harmed by having been associated with it.

Yes I am absolutely certain that they will fail. They will certainly try and they will probably kill a few people in the process, but they will fail.

“Governments should halt plans to roll out age checks on online services until privacy and security concerns are addressed, hundreds of academics said today” Article: Archived at Via:

“Governments should halt plans to roll out age checks on online services until privacy and security concerns are addressed, hundreds of academics said today”
https://alecmuffett.com/article/147820
#AgeVerification #censorship #surveillance

"We called London a war zone and moved to Dubai by mistake"

#WeAreSwindon

The proliferation of nut sensitivity is the regrettable consequence of a bunch of bad regulation to keep the mass of kids away from nuts as a precautionary measure to "keep them safe".

Hence the metaphor.

Social Media Bans are like the “Peanut Allergy” Bans of the 1990s/2000s: they will unnecessarily create a generation who cannot cope with the digital environment If you forcibly isolate an entire generation from influences that they are bound to encounter later in life, you are doing them harm by preventing them learning early how to cope. “If we are …

Social Media Bans are like the “Peanut Allergy” Bans of the 1990s/2000s: they will unnecessarily create a generation who cannot cope with the digital environment
https://alecmuffett.com/article/147662
#SocialMedia #SocialMediaBan #censorship #ofcom

“The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all”| Taylor Lorenz | …Age Verification is Digital ID via the back door Age-verification systems require collecting sensitive data to support the biometric information. In no time, the internet will become a fully surveilled digital panopticon

“The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all”| Taylor Lorenz | …Age Verification is Digital ID via the back door
https://alecmuffett.com/article/147647
#AgeVerification

IMPORTANT: this letter in the WSJ is amongst the clearest expressions of wisdom you'll read, re: blanket bans on teen social media access.

We saw this with peanut allergies: early avoidance yields later life-threatening adult reactiveness at scale. Managed exposure during youth prevents harm.

If you read 1 thing about Social Media Bans this week, it should be Rod Wilson’s magisterial letter to the WSJ; extract, text & link below “Bans feel decisive, but they avoid the harder truth: The digital environment isn’t temporary, and adolescence can’t be postponed until it becomes convenient for adults. We aren’t raising chi…

If you read 1 thing about Social Media Bans this week, it should be Rod Wilson’s magisterial letter to the WSJ; extract, text & link below
https://alecmuffett.com/article/147467
#SocialMediaBan #censorship #parenting

Across Civil Society you can almost hear the mumbling of activists suddenly staring at their shoes wondering if they now have to defend AI & “Effective Altruism” against Trump ZOMG! Defense secretary Pete Hegseth designates Anthropic a supply chain risk | The Verge archived at Anthropic response & rebuttal:

Across Civil Society you can almost hear the mumbling of activists suddenly staring at their shoes wondering if they now have to defend AI & “Effective Altruism” against Trump
https://alecmuffett.com/article/147459
#EffectiveAltruism #anthropic #hegseth

If you read 1 thing about Social Media Bans this week, it should be Rod Wilson’s magisterial letter to the WSJ; extract, text & link below “Bans feel decisive, but they avoid the harder truth: The digital environment isn’t temporary, and adolescence can’t be postponed until it becomes convenient for adults. We aren’t raising chi…

If you read 1 thing about Social Media Bans this week, it should be Rod Wilson’s magisterial letter to the WSJ; extract, text & link below
https://alecmuffett.com/article/147467
#SocialMediaBan #censorship #parenting

Doubtless, but still happy to see the exchanges.

Across Civil Society you can almost hear the mumbling of activists suddenly staring at their shoes wondering if they now have to defend AI & “Effective Altruism” against Trump ZOMG! Defense secretary Pete Hegseth designates Anthropic a supply chain risk | The Verge archived at Anthropic response & rebuttal:

Across Civil Society you can almost hear the mumbling of activists suddenly staring at their shoes wondering if they now have to defend AI & “Effective Altruism” against Trump
https://alecmuffett.com/article/147459
#EffectiveAltruism #anthropic #hegseth

Absolutely bonkers approach to technology from the House of Lords.

Screenshot of amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill with a new clause beginning: "AI search services safety: offence (1) It is an offence for the provider of a generative AI search service to allow the creation, viewing, listening to, sharing, broadcasting or storing, using that service, of content— (a) that would be illegal content, as defined by section 59 of the Online Safety Act 2023 ('illegal content' etc), (b) that would be content that is harmful to children, as defined by section 60 of that Act ('content that is harmful to children'), if the user is a child," and with a definition "(2) For the purposes of this section, a generative AI search service means a deep or large language model able to generate text, images and other content based on the data on which they were trained and user prompts."

Baroness Kidron has tabled an amendment that would criminalise most, if not all, general-purpose LLMs bills.parliament.uk/publications...

The offence says "generative AI search service" but there's no search or service element in the definition – just models.

#CPBill #genAI #censorship #techpolicy

> We aren’t raising children for a world without algorithms. We are raising them for a world shaped by artificial intelligence, public visibility and constant comparison. Removing access doesn’t build resilience, judgment or self-regulation. It simply […]

Read it at:

www.wsj.com/opinion/if-t...