foreign piracy in the United States

For a moment there I thought they were talking about actual pirate ships sailing across from Liberia to raid the east coast.

They tried that. Don’t underestimate the progress already made towards building the Great Firewall of Britain. I guess the main problem was that when the blocking was optional, too many people chose to opt out.

Follow-up question: Can someone explain it in a goofy pirate accent?

Windscribe, although unless you pay an extra $2/month they time out and need to be reconfigured after one week.

they’re just manipulating the DOM

Imagine trying to explain that in court. Yes, your honour, it’s a sort of object-based model representing the document. No, it’s not really a model of an object exactly. Yes, it’s made of bits and bytes, the same kind as you would use in a computer program, but it has that in common with… no, it does not actually object to anything…

Stop being interested in pornography, teenagers. You’re causing big problems for the government.

Probably some kind of translation error. They must mean “privacy”.

It’s not all bad necessarily, but that “anticheat” vendors are demanding it sure does suggest it’s being used for nefarious purposes.

Gaben would come to your house and arrest you.

It just goes to show that the AI is not yet superhuman. If it were really smart it would know, as humans can tell at a glance, that there are four r’s in strawberry. There’s the first one, the two in the double r combination, and then the rr digram itself which counts as a fourth r.

You have been blocked from The New York Times because we suspect that you’re a robot.

Here’s a non-nyt link on the same topic: https://www.hrw.org/news/2025/07/30/russia-internet-blocking-disruptions-and-increasing-isolation

Bear in mind that the people coming up with this stuff are not completely stupid. Completely corrupt and ignorant perhaps, but not so inept that if they write legislation that strongly encourages practically everyone to use a VPN to avoid the bullshit it isn’t a good possibility that their aim (or the aim of those manipulating them) is to generate excuses to eventually make easy-to-use commercial VPN services illegal. Obviously many of us could get around such a ban with ease, but the more difficult they make it the fewer people will do it. There are reasons why not every kid on your average street is an I2P user. What they can’t effectively ban they’ll suppress by other means.

You say that as if it makes the idea somehow less insane. I hope the billionaire clique pushing this shit has miscalculated and there are still enough people not so far gone that they’re ever going to let the technofascists scan their faces in exchange for the privilege of spending money and being advertised at.

A strange choice given that you don’t even need to have a face to enjoy music.

Instead of zero as a comparison base, the report uses a pseudo count of one, concluding that the risk is 65 times higher

How delightfully nonsensical. I hope the authors were well-paid for their efforts.

Civil liberties groups, refugee advocates, lawyers, Amnesty International, Oxfam, the United Church, PEN Canada, CUPE, Canadian Anti-Hate Network, the YWCA, Citizen Lab — and now the EFF. The diversity and the sheer number of civil society groups and NGOs that find C-2 absolutely unacceptable is unprecedented to my knowledge. If it comes anywhere near passing into law it will be a travesty of government.

any phrase I could think of: “no Arabs,” “no Blacks,” “no Palestinians,” “no Muslims,” “no Christians,” “no Jews,” “no trans,” “no Republicans,” “no Democrats”

Um okay, but next time think harder. No fascists, no genocide supporters, no apartheid fans, no Trumpists, no book burners, no snitches, no narcs, no skinwalkers.

https://bsky.social/about/blog/07-10-2025-age-assurance

Ha, so much for the idea of Bluesky being any better than the rest.

Paid and freeware but either way non-free, unfortunately.

I mean it’s better than nothing I guess but that is not what I’d call “freely available.” In addition to requiring that you use their shitty online viewer, it appears to require users to sign in to an account even to do that. It’s directly admitted on the website that they make it unusable in this way specifically because they rely on the revenue from selling real access to people who need it.