It’s really only a minority, or else the world would not work. Think how the theory of evolution gained mainstream acceptance, despite resistance by fanatics who had support by society,

(In case someone has been living under a rock in the last 48 hours. Anthropic’s new model “Mythos” has been finding a lot of new vulnerabilities. This is about patching one.)

Tears of joy, no doubt. No wait. Java…

People in the English-speaking countries generally don’t have government issued ID beyond a driver’s license. That’s also true for the UK. Historically, ID cards are connected to military conscription. The UK could rely on the Navy for defense and did not maintain vast land armies like the continental nations. Political initiatives to introduce ID cards are usually rejected by voters as totalitarian overreach.

The former slave states in the US have a history of using procedural rules to exclude blacks from voting. After the end of slavery, there was formally equality before the law. So, laws were created to maintain the status quo that were non-discriminatory on their face. EG literacy tests. This not only targeted blacks who were denied an education. Administering such tests was fully in the hands of local elites. They could be made arbitrarily hard to black people, while politically reliable white illiterates could be excused.

Legally, the people in the polling station may require you to show ID. It’s just never done.

Is this a joke about the EU’s desire to curb misinformation? Like, I’m 90% sure that you can’t be serious.

Everything you wrote is factually wrong.

Europe has a lot less social resistance to this stuff. You can see it here. Watching the watchmen turns out to be one of the best tools for defending democracy. And still the call is for more censorship. It’s insane.

Did you pick up, like 2 weeks ago, when Italy fined Cloudflare for not censoring hard enough? Italy is literally ruled by a fascist party. They literally present themselves as being in the tradition of Benito Mussolini. No one bats a fucking eye.

Of course, the censorship is about copyright; protecting the Italian media industry. Maybe people here are too young or unpolitical to remember Italian media billionaire Silvio Berlusconi. In the 1990s, he used his media empire to get himself elected prime minister and escape prosecution for corruption. At one point, he used his office and some lies to get an underage prostitute, he’d been fucking at one of his sex parties, released from police custody. That guy was Italy’s longest serving prime minister since WW2. He then was an MEP until 2022.

Italian intellectuals, identified Trump as a Berlusconi-type populist 10 years ago, when Berlusconi was fading out and Trump rising. Maybe something could be learned from that experienced.

So it’s not like Europeans believe that “It can’t happen here.” It is happening all the time. I think the pro-censorship people are simply so privileged that they can’t conceive of the state ever not being on their side. They seem to feel that being harassed or doxed on the net is the worst that could ever happen to them, personally, and they might be right.

Right. Merely making the recording may already be criminal; not only sharing it. I didn’t want to sound too alarmist. But when we’re ad it. Pixelating the faces means processing personal data which may already be illegal.

What it boils down to is this: If some lawless government goons arrest anyone recording their deeds and seized their phones, no honest, law-abiding judge or police officer would see a problem with that. Anyone live-streaming, just in case, would be guilty of violating fundamental rights in the eyes of all defenders of European values. The government could rely on the technical and organizational infrastructure to enforce GDPR to suppress inconvenient videos without bending the law.

But no problem. Freedom of information is in the constitution. So you just go to court and insist on your right. Of course, a far right government will have packed the highest courts with its people, and so you lose. Well, everyone has rights. Freedom of information isn’t everything. No problem there.

Just bear in mind that many Fediverse instances are in Europe and Europe has no free speech culture. EG In Germany, people who upload videos of police are commonly prosecuted for GDPR violations. It violates the fundamental rights of the police officers. When European activists oppose Big Tech in the name of democracy, they want more censorship; more government control.

Yeah, one would think so. And those were the hobbyists that Gates was addressing in that open letter.

“They” is the copyright industry. The same people, who are suing AI companies for money, want the Internet Archive gone for more money.

I share the fear that the copyrightists reach a happy compromise with the bigger AI companies and monopolize knowledge. But for now, AI companies are fighting for Fair Use. The Internet Archive is already benefitting from those precedents.

In the US, copyright is limited by Fair Use. It is still IP. Eventually, you’d just be changing how Fair Use works. Not all for the better, I think.

Maybe one could compare it to a right of way over someone’s physical property. The public may use it for a certain purpose, in a limited way, which lowers its value. But what value it has, belongs to the owner.

What kind of person owned a computer as a hobby in 1976?

That’s true in the same way that Trump’s tariffs are paid by other countries. Which is to say: Not at all.

Bill Gates was no billionaire at the time. His background was probably shared by almost all computer hobbyists at the time.

“Property is theft.”

the caveats that commercializing someone else’s work or taking credit for someone else’s work should be illegal.

So, not actually abolishing IP, then.

It’s a bit of a split among libertarians. Some very notable figures like Ayn Rand were strong believers in IP. In fact, Ayn Rand’s dogmas very much align with what is falsely represented as left-wing thought in the context of AI.

It’s really irritating for me how much conservative capitalist ideals are passed off as left-wing. Like, attitudes on corporations channel Adam Smith. I think of myself as pragmatic and find that Smith or even Hayek had some good points (not Rand, though). But it’s absolutely grating how uneducated that all is. Worst of all, it makes me realize that for all the anti-capitalist rhetoric, the favored policies are all about making everything worse.

I really don’t get how opinions on intellectual property and its “theft” turn 180 whenever AI is mentioned.