Remember that the first four big U.S. based targets of the UK Online Safety Act were not “child safety” targets but rather plaintext discussion forums that hosted wrongthink.
Every interaction I have with the UK’s censorship apparatus, forever, will be colored by this fact.
Signal is 100% right.
The greatest trick governments ever pulled was convincing people that freedom and privacy are obstacles to safety.
What we are witnessing is not child protection. It is the construction of a surveillance architecture that will eventually monitor, profile, categorize and control every aspect of our digital lives.
Today it is age verification and content scanning, tomorrow it is digital identity, then financial monitoring, then behavioural scoring, then access to services conditioned on compliance.
The destination is not difficult to see. It is a technocratic system where every interaction is tracked, every transaction recorded, every opinion assessed and every citizen reduced to a data profile managed by governments and corporations working hand in hand.
A form of digital neo feudalism where a small unelected class controls the platforms, the infrastructure, the money and ultimately the boundaries of acceptable behaviour.
The argument that only criminals should fear surveillance is as absurd as saying only criminals need freedom of speech. Privacy is not evidence of wrongdoing, it is the foundation of human dignity, individual sovereignty and genuine liberty.
The UK government is asking citizens to accept the presumption of guilt simply to communicate online. To prove who they are, verify their age and allow their devices to inspect their content before they can participate in modern society.
History teaches us that every power granted to the state eventually expands beyond its initial mandate. The technology introduced to detect one form of content today will be used to police entirely different forms of expression tomorrow.
The choice before us is not between privacy and child protection, it is between preserving a free society, or constructing the infrastructure of a digital prison that will further enslave us.
This is what people don't realize. North Korea and China already do this with their phones. Every minute on your phone is watched, every image you download or share is hashed and compared against government blacklists and every message you send is scanned.
We are copying that model.
Thank you @Rep_Stansbury 👏 The industry has made it clear AGAIN they don't want it, and yet here we are.
We need permanent protection, not another lease sale. ✊
Automatically awarding a success for good roleplay, reasoning or decisions, as well as a performance, has in fact been allowed by the rules since Gygax was in charge.
It was 1998 when I watched a player perfectly describe and roleplay bypassing a trap and picking a lock in a group that'd been playing since 1st edition, a bunch of higher up engineers at Intel that I played with. This concept has been pretty damn standard among veteran players the entire time.
After the dams came down on the Klamath River, the Yurok Tribe didn't wait for nature to fix itself.
For decades, four hydroelectric dams turned a living river into stagnant reservoirs. They blocked salmon and steelhead from 400 miles of spawning grounds, fueled toxic algae blooms, and raised water temperatures past what the fish could survive.
When the last dam came down in late 2024, the river ran free again. But the exposed reservoir beds, 2,200 acres of bare sediment, were unstable and wide open to invasive species.
So the Yurok Tribe got to work. Along a 38-mile stretch, tribal crews hand-sowed billions of native plant seeds, planted 76,000 trees and shrubs, and seeded 28,000 acorns.
Nearly 100 native plant species. All by hand. All from seeds collected locally and grown out specifically for the restoration.
It's already working. Salmon are spawning in the Upper Klamath Basin for the first time in over a century. Lupines and willows are stabilizing the banks. The river is breathing again.
The Klamath is now the largest dam removal and river restoration project in US history, and the people doing the heaviest lifting are the ones who have lived along that river for thousands of years.
Cox internet went out again last night. Third night in a row. I pay them to fail, apparently.
Fine. I'll just play something on my Xbox Series S I keep in the bedroom before bed.
Couldn't play a single game. Not one.
Everything downloaded, installed, paid for, sitting right there on a console I own. Locked. Because some server couldn't confirm it was my "home Xbox."
I have NES carts older than the internet. Blow on them, drop them in, they boot. No login. No permission. No begging a company to let me play what's mine.
Modern gaming isn't progress. It's a leash. And most of you are defending the hand that holds it.
The Mimi Plushie campaign with Makeship will officially launch on June 19th, two weeks from now!
Every Mimi Plushie will also come with a bonus mini Roy doll as a free accessory.
You can visit the product page below and subscribe to updates to be alerted of when the launch begins.
Interesting footage of a bear visiting a wolf den this spring—a very close call for the pups who were outside the den literally a few minutes before the bear showed up.
The bear’s behavior was quite interesting as well. Almost as if it knew it had stumbled into an area it shouldn’t have.
Interestingly, we have captured several instance of bears visiting and checking out active wolf dens over the years. However, we have never captured evidence that bears have killed pups, though there was once such report from Wisconsin recently.
This footage was only possible because of the generous folks who have donated to our project and supported our trail camera work. We are just 38% away from our annual fundraising goal, and need your help to finish it off.
If 1% of the >600,000 folks who follow our project make a small donation ($10, $25, $50), we will reach our goal. A small donation from a lot of folks generates huge support for our work.
Donate at the link below and help us to capture and share more footage like this!
Donate here: https://t.co/kZq9wddP8h
I took my son to Disneyland when he was 6 and he was fascinated with Pirates ever since. McDonalds had a promotion where you got a Pirates of the Carribean tiny toy pirate who wielded a tiny... like 5 mm long plastic sword. My son was so excited to show his teacher at school the next day. He took it out of his backpack when I was dropping him off with his teacher and showed it to her. She immediately freaked out and said "OH NO! We don't allow weapons at this school!" He thought she was genuinely afraid from what she was saying. He gently took her hand and said "It's ok... it's a toy sword... it's tiny... it's plastic. Its can't hurt you. It can't hurt anybody. I promise". She said "There's zero tolerance for weapons here. Give it to your mom or I will have to confiscate it". So he sadly gave me the tiny pirate. His show and tell had been ruined. "Zero Tolerance" is another stupid DEI thing. In actuality it amounts to "No thinking about this allowed"
@Tom4toArts I honestly have no idea what mah first horror film was, but I saw An American Werewolf in London, Giant Killer Shrews, A Nightmare on Elmstreet, The Thing, Hellraiser, Gremlins, The Lost Boys, Wishmaster, Alien, Several Kaiju Films dat'd count, Jason, & more Long before Scream.