If you’re not going to show the source code, there’s absolutely no point in using GitHub.

As for getting paid, I hadn’t seen gumroad before, nice, but failing the access to the source, it’s unlikely I’d buy/pay for unknown software and install it sight unseen on anything I care about.

From a security perspective, in my opinion this is a disaster waiting to happen.

While they’re at it, could they please also penalize Android app developers who do this too?

So … not made from potato then?

Nobody gets fired for buying IBM … apparently.

CVE: Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures

So, why is this being disclosed here and not a CVE reported to Apple?

While contemplating that, my Mac has been up for longer than that and it’s working fine.

The Mac I had before that was up for years, also fine.

So … what is this really about?

They are deterministic but complex to determine.

The Assumed Intelligence systems I’m familiar with have a “random” element, but it’s unclear where that source of randomness comes from. Is it using a computational random source, or something like the lava lamp wall at Cloudflare, which is significantly more random, potentially actually random.

Unfortunately the complete article is not available, which is yet another issue exacerbated by the Assumed Intelligence cohort.

While I understand your point, deterministic with a billion variables is beyond human ability to process, let alone the multi-billion parameter models in general circulation today.

At what point does deterministic descend into random?

Assumed Intelligence is a solution for a bunch of multivariate problems, like say “the travelling salesman”, but it’s not intelligence nor in my opinion is it effectively “deterministic”.

While this doesn’t answer your question, I use Docker for this exact purpose, since you can throw away everything if it fails, whilst keeping a recipe for success documented in a Dockerfile.

So, like a baby Yahoo! directory?

I wonder just how long it will stay relevant and how they determine if the content comes from a human. So far I’ve been accused of being a bot several times, clearly reliably detecting humans is beyond the capability of … humans.

Having had a mono radio cassette player in my bedroom in 1976, running off D-cells, that was not my experience.

The biggest drain was the volume, not the cassette player. You noticed it getting slower and slower, but the drain came from playing it loud.

My Sony Walkman a few years later ran forever on its batteries.

As it happens, actually I was buying batteries in the 1970’s. They were massive and lasted plenty long enough to play audio cassettes for several days.

Edit: I’d also point out that three decades is 1996, not 1976, that’s five decades.

The price of the batteries was never really the issue, it was their weight versus their capacity with some consideration towards size and robustness.

As far as I can tell, today the biggest hurdle is charging.

You do understand that California is not the centre of the universe, that states within the United States of America don’t agree on how to conduct voting, let alone agree on laws and finally, that there are 8.3 billion people on this planet, 96% of whom don’t live in, or are subject to laws made in the USA.

I’m sorry, but no.

Age validation is surveillance under the guise of “protecting the children”, which it spectacularly fails at for more reasons than I can count.

1. Everyone has to validate their age, which creates a whole infrastructure that require documents that “prove” your age.
2. A verified “under age” user will be added to a database by unscrupulous players, creating a honeypot for predators.
3. Age verification isn’t universal, isn’t uniform and regardless of the jurisdiction in which it’s implemented, won’t actually prevent content from being procured from sources outside that jurisdiction.
4. One source of objectionable content is another’s entertainment, legally so, given that laws are made in isolation from each other across borders.
5. The result of such legislation is the effective censorship of content that some lawmaker finds objectionable, which will cause more harm than good.
6. Operating System level age verification on open source platforms will spectacularly fail since they’re published outside the jurisdiction.

So … no.

I understand your point and agree that this is the thin end of the wedge.

What we’re doing here is discussing the phenomenon and I’m highlighting some concerns.

I believe that this is how you get a dialogue happening which will effect change, which is what we’re both advocating.

I think that age verification is about surveillance rather than protecting children and I think it should be fought at every level.

This is me contributing to that fight.

In my opinion, storing a date is pretty much irrelevant unless there’s a process that validates the supplied date, otherwise every Linux user was born on 1/1/1, if not, an administrator can “fix” that

Furthermore, that systemd thinks that it’s the place to store such information is in my opinion beyond absurd.

Who appointed that project the source of age truth in the Linux ecosystem? What discussion was there, who was consulted and where was the vote?

14,000 sounds like a big number, until you realise that there’s many millions of routers. Asus is not known for backbone routing, so while this might be happening, you have to ask yourself, is this the biggest threat across the internet, or is this article intended to serve another interest?

And how will Instagram know who my parents are?