That's based on government surveillance, not skin color. As reductionist as it is, China has been the poster boy for government surveillance since the 90s at very least.

Nah they can get fucked altogether. I dont need their one.

That always works, that or “terrorism”.

Seems like a good place to leave this link. For those who haven't seen it,

Timothy May, 1988, the Four Horsemen of the Infocalypse.

Fun fact. Timothy May was also the guy who discovered in 1979 that low level radiation was causing memory errors in computers.

C'mon smart people, do something for the dumb stupid generic user.

Pay them. I'm sure they'd be happy to do it inexpensively if they can live off their labor.

There was never a better moment for linux to shine than now.

Maybe so. Maybe so.

But I'm not so sure there is a long term tech solution. It's a political problem. Ultimately, if the gov requires let's say a trust attestation for the use of web sites, they will have to comply, or leave the market. Sure, you can run Linux. But now you can't use it to bank, to shop, to access gov services, to pay your bills... If they push hard enough, even mundane shit like get a weather forecast or w/e. Google would already love this. It locks everybody in.

A gov can make life VERY difficult for noncompliance, by leaning on the things you want to do. Sometimes, a site that isn't local like a bank can say, fine, we'll leave that market. But the bigger the market, the less they wanna do that. What happens if the US follows the UK into this? And then Australia or Japan piles on? Plus, some things are local by definition. Like your bank. If it's required to block non-trusted (I threw up in my mouth a little bit...) devices, it will have to do that.

I'm not sure Linux can save us. Maybe it can buy us a little time. But in the end, this needs a political solution. Not a tech one.

What the hell is this take. Firstly your cooling the average user dumb which is just kinda rude and untrue, Also developers are working really hard to build the best possible Linux experience for everyone. how about you actually chip in before shaming them for not working hard enough. And Linux is already user friendly enough for most people, arguably more user friendly than windows. People just want to stick to what they know, also vendor lock in, and most people don't know how to install Linux and will just use the default operating system. I don't think Linux devs can do anything to fix any of those problems.

problem is most smart people are being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to work for big tech. If open source can start paying developers the same then we'll start to see competition

I dont think that will last much longer. We have to work harder on linux phones

Does the UK require ID to buy good 'ol analog porn magazines?

Apple proposed something a few years ago, when governments were making similar threats, that attempted to strike a middle ground. The idea was that upon uploading an image to iCloud Photos, a on-device scan would be run on that image and an encrypted report generated to be sent up along with the photo. There was differential privacy involved, the report would also sometimes be generated for entirely normal photos, so seeing a report didn't necessarily indicate anything, and they had set it up such that the server would only be able to decrypt the reports if it had a sufficiently large number of photos that had been actually found to be CSAM by the local scan, so there would have to be many false positives to incorrectly get flagged.

It was incredibly controversial, and they ended up not doing it after all. In my opinion, it's probably the lightest touch and most responsible way to do something like this, and obviously they always pick the most worthy cause for invading privacy... but I still viscerally dislike the idea that my computer would have code designed to try to get me sent to prison under certain circumstances (not that I'd ever be triggering that code with anything but a false positive of course). Somehow it's worse than just saying "in the cloud you have no privacy, your photos aren't encrypted on our servers, and if you upload CSAM we'll drop a train on you."

The amount of stuff their LLMs must've seen by now.