After becoming the first country to ban under-16s from social media, Australia has now gone further by implementing one of the world’s most comprehensive age verification regimes for underage users, covering AI chatbots, app stores, online gaming, search engines, messaging services and pornography sites. The rules are already drawing criticism from some firms: Aylo, the owner of explicit sites including Pornhub, has responded by blocking Australian users from its platforms entirely.

On Monday, the country implemented the Age-Restricted Material Codes, requiring designated platforms to introduce age verification measures, such as facial age estimation, digital wallets and photo IDs, for materials such as high-impact violence, pornography, self-harm material and dangerous content such as suicide and disordered eating.

Source

As a cracker, I then proceed to cook all the flavor out of them

cross-posted from: https://ibbit.at/post/196812

By waging war in the Middle East, Trump is set to further strain one of his key voter bases.

From Foreign Policy via this RSS feed

TNO and High Tech Campus Eindhoven are starting construction of the world’s first industrial factory for producing indium phosphide photonic chips on a 6 inch wafer scale.

Context: Photonic chips have the benefit of being very fast and energy-saving. If the chips can be produced on a large scale, then they could improve the performance of data centers with, for example, AI applications.

In addition, they also provide possibilities regarding faster internet connections or smart devices, medical applications, and defense systems, TNO said.

In order to help train its AI models, Meta (and others) have been using pirated versions of copyrighted books, without the consent of authors or publishers. The company behind Facebook and Instagram faces an ongoing class-action lawsuit brought by authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden, and one in which it has already scored a major (and surprising) victory: The Californian court concluded last year that using pirated books to train its Llama LLM did qualify as fair use.

You'd think this case would be as open-and-shut as it gets, but never underestimate an army of high-priced lawyers. Meta has now come up with the striking defense that uploading pirated books to strangers via BitTorrent qualifies as fair use. It further goes on to claim that this is double good, because it has helped establish the United States' leading position in the AI field.

Meta further argues that every author involved in the class-action has admitted they are unaware of any Llama LLM output that directly reproduces content from their books. It says if the authors cannot provide evidence of such infringing output or damage to sales, then this lawsuit is not about protecting their books but arguing against the training process itself (which the court has ruled is fair use).

Judge Vince Chhabria now has to decide whether to allow this defense, a decision that will have consequences for not only this but many other AI lawsuits involving things like shadow libraries. The BitTorrent uploading and distribution claims are the last element of this particular lawsuit, which has been rumbling on for three years now, to be settled.

While speaking with a colleague who is working in a small company he told me, that the lost track about user right management. They had a an excel table where they tracked all user groups and special rights users in the company have. But depending on some changes in the company structure, they got problems.

Is there any selfhosting software to manage usergroups, teams and userrights in a modern UI? It should be abe to set also data owner and so may keep track on non Active-Directory data.

!selfhost@lemmy.ml

The stink of the ACP has wafted into many other places online, it seems.

A Schlong of Ice and Fire

Stolen from r/FalloutMemes

Hello there. It’s nice to meet you all.

Some months ago, I did research on the A’C’P. It’s quite horrifying that many people cannot see the evident psyop they are. I wouldn’t be surprised if they clap whenever Hammoud or Hinkle publicly give a reactionary statement.

What I am interested in is the Midwestern Marx Institute, which I glossed over. I know many notorious members are part of that nazbol abomination, but I haven’t read much about them.

From what I’ve seen, people like Carlos Garrido behave similarly to Jackson Hinkle when he goes abroad. They pretend to be internationalists/anti-imperialists, but they behave in the exact opposite way in the US.

I’ll be looking forward to your answers.

Kind regards

This is a follow-up to banning puberty blockers for children under 16 in 2023, pausing or cancelling all trials recently, and the banning of trans people from gendered bathrooms this year.

It's a progressive attack on trans rights, where evidence of the safety and benefits of trans healthcare is ignored and decisions is taken out of the hands of trans people, trans children and their parents. They're treated as people unable to make decisions for themselves. A tactic often used against women, disabled people and black people historically.

In this particular case, it's still breaking news but I've heard the way they fit the data to their desired result was to make the filters on what was to be accepted as evidence extremely narrow. Things like "all subjects in the study must have never taken puberty blockers, but must be on hormones and born male". When they find that no study exactly matches their criteria, they throw up their hands and say "we just don't know if it's safe" and ban all healthcare.

It doesn't matter how many experts criticise these choices and peer-review the reports. We've been shown by the Cass Review (still referenced in these decisions, despite its provably terrible quality) that all evidence outside the transphobic agenda will be ignored and every possible side-effect of treatment will be used as justification to eradicate trans people.

My wife brought home a TV from a thrift store. So I took the easy route of setting up a media center to make it play videos. I already had a headless Jellyfin server running on a small Beelink computer. I connected that to the TV, installed Kodi, installed the Yatse remote control app on my phone, and we're all set.

It took me some research and trial and error to get the remote control app connected with Zeroconf auto discovery working. So I thought I'd share what I learned. Here is my entire Kodi module:

{ pkgs, ... }:

{
  # Enable a graphical shell
  services.xserver.enable = true;

  services.xserver.desktopManager.kodi = {
    enable = true;
    package = pkgs.kodi.withPackages (
      kodiPackages: with kodiPackages; [
        jellyfin
        netflix
      ]
    );
  };

  # To view plugins available in nixpkgs run:
  #
  # $ nix repl
  # > pkgs = import <nixpkgs> {}
  # > builtins.attrNames pkgs.kodiPackages
  #
  # Or search for plugins on https://search.nixos.org/, and in the left-sidebar
  # under "Package sets" click "kodiPackages"

  services.displayManager.autoLogin = {
    enable = true;
    user = "kodi";
  };

  users.users.kodi.isNormalUser = true;

  # Allow reboot and shut down from Kodi UI
  security.polkit = {
    enable = true;
    extraConfig = /* javascript */ ''
      polkit.addRule(function(action, subject) {
        if (
          (
            action.id == "org.freedesktop.login1.reboot" ||
            action.id == "org.freedesktop.login1.reboot-multiple-sessions" ||
            action.id == "org.freedesktop.login1.power-off" ||
            action.id == "org.freedesktop.login1.power-off-multiple-sessions"
          )
          && subject.user == "kodi"
        ) {
          return polkit.Result.YES;
        }
      });
    '';
  };

  # Allow access to web UI & remote control API
  networking.firewall = {
    allowedTCPPorts = [
      8010 # the port I configured for "allow remote control via HTTP"
      9090 # also event server?
    ];
    allowedUDPPorts = [
      9777 # event server
    ];
  };

  # Allows Kodi to advertise to remote control apps using Zeroconf.
  services.avahi = {
    enable = true;
    publish.enable = true;
    publish.userServices = true;
  };
}

Kodi is a graphical shell. Like I said, this box was previously headless; so I enabled Kodi as my DE and set it up to automatically log in.

To make the remote control work there are some necessary settings changes to make in the Kodi UI. I had to connect a keyboard temporarily to set this up:

• Go to Settings > Services
• Enable General > Announce services to other systems (for Zeroconf auto discovery)
• In Control enable:
  • Allow remote control via HTTP (match port number in NixOS firewall settings)
  • Allow remote control from applications on this system
  • Allow remote control from applications on other systems
• I'm not sure if this is needed, but the Yatse docs recommend these settings in UPnP / DLNA for "some streaming cases":
  • Share my libraries
  • Allow remote control via UPnP

Declarative settings would be nicer, but there doesn't seem to be a NixOS module that does that yet. It's the same situation with Jellyfin.

credit @hamid@crazypeople.online

There are many scenarios in this game when you might want to move between far-placed rooms. Your active items restore their charge on completing rooms. An arcade might be your source of cash that you then want to spend in a shop on the other end of the map. You want to get to the boss challenge room but the only blood donation machine is in a secret room rather far from here.

There's even a small group of the game's fans who delight in doing as much min-maxxing as possible, trying to squeeze out the last drop of every floor.

Surely, a game like this must have a set of solid quality of life features to not waste players' time.

...right?

Welllll, let's see:

• You can't manipulate your movement speed beyond what your item drop allow. Got a speed down pill early on and had not a single speed-increasing item? Enjoy walking like that for the next hour and hope that you won't end up scouring every deadend!

• While many (most?) puzzle rooms deactivate once you solve them, not every room has such decency. Thankfully, they aren't as frequent nowadays as they used to before Repentance but if even one of them generate in an important spot, get ready for pain.

• There's another type of "fuck-you" rooms: ones that punish you for pressing forward after entering them. Usually they have spikes in your way, although sometimes it's bonfires. Most punished are those with high speed and flight since developers often lampshade the problem by closing off the spikes with some rocks - which your character will fly over. Fuck rocks with spikes btw :)

• Arcade machines and beggars love to waste your time. Taking one resource at a time when you can have up to 99 of this resource, while forcing you to keep attention the entire time because they can always spawn a troll bomb right in your face - doesn't it sound beautiful? But that's not even the worst! SHELL GAMES. A 1 second animation for every coin you give it, a high chance to get an aggressive fly in your face, all for stupid rewards! You gotta love these guys.

• Sometimes you want to move a card or a trinket to another room. You pick it up, move to this room and hold down a button. And then wait. Like for at least 3 seconds. Now imagine doing that multiple times each run. It's soooo annoying...

Anyway that's my rumble for a game that ate hundred of hours of my life, inspired by a stream I just saw where someone managed to break the game with D7 and Jumper Cables.