Technology

@CaptainXtra
Occasionally

Now this debate is still yet to be settled:

I hear that the “Ultimate Lithium” batteries from Energizer are apparently the champion of AA, especially when it comes to shelf life.

What does Duracell have in response?

@CaptainXtra
I use Duracell in most normal stuff, but I use Energizer Lithium in important stuff

Technology pickups are really great today

Tweet from Mike Masnick:

So a little tracker on that UK Online Safety Bill:

Legislation just introduced in the US Senate to amend the Copyright Act to let the Copyright Office designate filtering technologies for online service providers that host UGC:

In other words, Article 13/17 has been proposed here in the US.

So the Art 13 but in America thing has a name:

It’s known as the SMART Act and the EFF explains why its bad pretty well!

Are there any laws that ban use of Robotic Troops?

Because the last thing we need are these things being used by the military and police:

I hope these things will only be used for janitorial stuff in the end because Boston Dynamics could easily become Skynet if they ain’t careful about who they sell these guys to.

For those in Canada:

Why, just why?

So I heard the DOJ plans to just say screw you to Privacy altogether:

So recently this topic was brought to my attention and I think it should be shared:

A brief summary from the article!

Before we get overwhelmed by the bill’s details, I’ll highlight three crucial concerns:

First, the bill pretextually claims to protect children, but it will change the Internet for EVERYONE. In order to determine who is a child, websites and apps will have to authenticate the age of ALL consumers before they can use the service. NO ONE WANTS THIS. It will erect barriers to roaming around the Internet. Bye bye casual browsing. To do the authentication, businesses will be forced to collect personal information they don’t want to collect and consumers don’t want to give, and that data collection creates extra privacy and security risks for everyone. Furthermore, age authentication usually also requires identity authentication, and that will end anonymous/unattributed online activity.

Second, even if businesses treated all consumers (i.e., adults) to the heightened obligations required for children, businesses still could not comply with this bill. That’s because this bill is based on the U.K. Age-Appropriate Design Code. European laws are often aspirational and standards-based (instead of rule-based), because European regulators and regulated businesses engage in dialogues, and the regulators reward good tries, even if they aren’t successful. We don’t do “A-for-Effort” laws in the U.S., and generally we rely on rules, not standards, to provide certainty to businesses and reduce regulatory overreach and censorship.

Third, this bill reaches topics well beyond children’s privacy. Instead, the bill repeatedly implicates general consumer protection concerns and, most troublingly, content moderation topics. This turns the bill into a trojan horse for comprehensive regulation of Internet services and would turn the privacy-centric California Privacy Protection Agency/CPPA) into the general purpose Internet regulator.

So the big takeaway: this bill’s protect-the-children framing is designed to mislead everyone about the bill’s scope.
The bill will dramatically degrade the Internet experience for everyone and will empower a new censorship-focused regulator who has no interest or expertise in balancing complex and competing interests.

Key Points:

As you can guess, I’m pretty concerned about Section 230 being looked over by an institution currently controlled by backwards dinosaurs.

@CaptainXtra
Though to be fair the issues here are not like the Texas law.

So according to the EFF there’s risk of a Link Tax called JCPA being slipped into an upcoming must pass spending bill.

@CaptainXtra
Good news: It’s not in the NDAA

The KOSA is still a threat:

So I stumbled across this:

Yeah, we might have a problem.

Direct Link to Tweet:

From the article: