Throw away email! Are you going something illegal online that you would want to bypass the government and big techs absolute right to spy on everything you do! That’s it people will henceforth only get one single email address assigned at birth that they will be forced to use for all online interactions henceforth. I hope you feel ashamed of yourself with all the children you put at risk with your thoughtless selfish behaviour. Now upload an image of your face certified by a government official and a copy of your birth certificate just to be sure that terrorists, uh criminals, uh child abusers don’t win.

*Please tell me this is the most superfluous /s of all time. *

I think pretty solidly this is being driven by business and intelligence communities, our police and spy agencies have been trying to get around encryption and online anonymity for years. They desperately want to be able to tie every bit of data that moves around the internet to an individual without getting the courts involved, and bear in mind since Australia is a Five Eyes nation not all of that pressure is onshore. It is getting the limpest push back from these big tech companies though because how much more valuable is your advertising profile if they can associate it with tour government ID, or birth certificate, or confirmed validated biometric data.

I know of a Telco that had to pay to move a family to a different state after they provided their address to a man who posed a credible risk to their lives. They had to buy this family a new house, pay movers, and buy then a new car. The telco preempted the court on this so it wouldn’t become a national story in the media and they could minimise the eventual fine they faced.

That one incident 2 decades ago cost more than half a million dollars to fix, uprooted a family and caused unknown amounts of trauma. Do we seriously think Twitter will take a similar incident as seriously? Google? Facebook? But I guarantee they will slurp up every bit of data they can.

When I called my federal representative about the laws and the miles wide holes in Australian privacy laws and more particularly who would be responsible for covering the costs associated with helping citizens recover in the cases of rampant identity theft these laws are going enable, I got assurances that the eSafety Commissioner would be able to hold large tech companies to account. I pointed out that if Meta was to suffer a breach that exposed the details of say a thousand Australians I could see them ponying up the fine, just cost of doing business, if the details of 2 million Australians got leaked then with potential fines stretching into the billions why would they even fight it, so much simpler to cut Australia off like a gangrenous limb. I was assured that the eSafety commissioner would be monitoring these large companies to ensure their data security was up to standard, I laughed. I was told that our parliament may be looking in to strengthening data protection laws and was promised an email with details about this (3 weeks ago with not even a message to say sorry for the delay). I was thoroughly disgusted, this I’ll thought out plan to scrape as much data as Australians can be tricked into handing over is going to result in massive costs to the tax payer before too long. Discord has already leaked data related to age verification and Australia hasn’t even got its law started yet.

I really think we need remove a lot of the protections from Politicians: “You want to spy on the Australian public at the behest of a shadowy cabal of Intelligence Community wonks? Ok we can do that, but you are personally liable for it when it goes wrong, you will be personally paying all the costs associated with the following scenarios we are categorically stating will occur if you proceed with this nonsense. If you do not have sufficient money to cover these costs all of your assets will be sold and you will become an indentured servant of the Australian public until your debt is cleared.”

I got an interesting response when I told the guy at the MPs office that I would shutdown or abandon any app, website or service that demanded my ID. There is no service online which is worth providing a drivers license or sufficient photos to create a reasonable reproduction of my face.

Oh god, my brother started spouting this nonsense at the same time he went vegan (which I don’t have a problem with) and anti-vax (which I REALLY do). He was also really eager to tell me all about how iodised salt was a conspiracy by the government to lower the IQ of the population. Oh and don’t get me started on his take on 9/11.

I wound up telling him I wouldn’t discuss anything further with him unless he could bring receipts.

Nah it’ll be fine, our premier is going to push past commonsense and planning advice to get Hobart an eye sore white elephant stadium. That’ll be a valuable asset to house all the displaced people moving down here.

Honestly if we can’t build houses to match the current trickle of people moving here how do they think we will go when it becomes a flood, plus the government takes decades to do any infrastructure work so even if we throw up some housing you better not want a road capable of handling the traffic flowing to it.

No silly you need to upload your drivers license to some shady 3rd party age verification service to protect 16 year olds from accidentally using dating sites.

They even pinky promised to not store your data in some vibe coded system that will leak it all the first time a hacker so much as scans for api end points.

Now stop asking questions and grant front camera permissions so our AI that is maybe 75% accurate cab guess your age.

Yep

Your going to talk about that happening to a KENNEDY and use some peasants name as the codeword. Its family tradition, especially if people spend the next half century or more speculating the CIA was involved.

He’s heading for a Kennedy, not a Kirk.

Down here in Tassie we seem pretty well stocked for water as well. My family will likely be reining in our showers once it stops raining and the tanks are no longer covering our needs though. Right now the more we use the less strain it puts on our storm water drains. We might lean on the landlord to upgrade to a solar hot water system at some stage so our showers are closer to genuinely free.

Doesn’t matter how often these programs are shown to save lives there’s always some conservative stroking his rock hard erection while he talks about taking these programs away and fantasises about the number of young people he is indirectly murdering.

I don’t take drugs (well except ones purchased from a pharmacy) never touched anything harder than a bit of weed, but I have at least one friend who has a child that survived their teens thanks to pill testing.

What fucking ghouls.

So glad I moved from a FTTP connected house to a Fixed Wireless serviced area. Not jealous at all.

Although I am setting higher than advertised download speeds, which I think may be due to having a 4th gen connection in an area where almost everyone I talk to is using 2nd gen and doesnt seem to understand why you would want to update.

I knew what that was going to be before I checked the link. I see you are a cultured individual.

Are they concerned about the profitability and long term viability of the black market? I mean why else would you go out of your way to incentivise people participating in it?

Perhaps he should come here and air his grievances in person. Oh wait he can’t now why can’t he travel anywhere that respects international law again?

See I also think that there is something to be said about how there’s people still out there making new music, performing it, recording. But business has captured the market and is drowning out the smaller players. The signal to noise ratio gets so skewed that even if the best song you never heard is only a web search away you may never listen to it because your streaming service will never play it. But the soulless corporate remix of a remix of a cover of a song from the 80s, you hear that 4 times a day because they have a marketing budget and algorithmic influence.

Maybe I am misreading your comment here, but I am going to take it on face value, I have never written a song. In an interesting note I believe cutting pages out of a bunch of books and sticking them together in a new binding wouldn’t make a compelling read, I also have never written a novel.

I seriously respect people who can write songs, I would imagine they have or had passion for the art. I seriously doubt any song writer is out there thinking "Holy fuck this song is amazing, I really hope some shithead producer crops the chorus and mashes it together with a bunch of other tracks to make it completely meaningless. That would make it perfect.’

Ahh down votes in lieu of a substantive argument. Love it. If there wasn’t a thread to pull on in all that word salad that would unravel the tapestry do you think maybe there’s something to my take on this matter?

Anyway, don’t care, this isn’t Reddit so a downvote doesn’t mean shit, and you at least read some of my post. To quote a somewhat famous Doctor “Don’t you think she looks tired?”

I got stuck today in a part of my workplace where they have one of the local shitty radio stations playing, couldn’t have my headphones in as people kept coming up and talking to me, and a shitty pop music mashup plays and it struck me, this is AI.

To clarify there is some shitty artist who gets the credit, but its just a selection of clips crossfaded and slightly processed into each other to make a new “song” out of a dozen pop songs. No actual creativity, no new material, just a quasi algorithmic blending of songs so that some soulless talentless grifter can claim they are an artist.

It gets deeper though, as mixed in there are songs that couldn’t actually be performed live and acoustic due to the amount of sound engineering and vocal processing that went into the original versions of these songs.

The whole thing is turning into an Ouroboros, they have worked out how to make perfectly bland, meaningless music and now the snake is eating its tail as the industry consumes that slop to manufacture more slop.

Yet deeper, why does this beige bullshit get air time… Why its our old friend capitalist market forces, no one passionate about music wants to make this shit, its the people who want the fame and money and view music as the means to that end.

We know that AI makes people dumber, we know that it leads to the atrophy of skill and talent, and we know the only motivation for its use is capitalist. AI is pop music.

For what its worth I used italics on AI as I categorically refuse to believe this garbage is actually artificial intelligence. I am reasonably certain that actual artificial intelligence is the next fusion power, it’s going to be “only a few years away” from being viable until well after I die, but its just too good a marketing term to leave it alone while we make do with these stunted chinese rooms.

Wow that rant blew up.

I can 100% commit to that, but I would suggest that its likely quite unlikely. I have a feeling it was offline on actual dead tree somewhere.

I’ve certainly played with Matrix, got voice working but video was a struggle (I may have just stuffed up my STUN server install). Yet again this is an area that organised crime, terrorist groups etc have it easier, they can dictate what their members use rather than relying upon persuasion to get them onboard. I am pretty certain that the NSA have people dedicated to infiltrating these sorts of small scale chat apps, but like everything else who knows how many are actually in the wild and just have good enough opsec to avoid that infiltration (and yes how many they let stay open for intelligence purposes).