It sounds like (from the earnings report) they now have four classes of users:
- Identity verified adults
- Identity verified kids
- Anonymous adults
- Anonymous kids
The last three groups are in a “degraded” mode, I think.
I imagine a large fraction of groomers do not want to tie their activities to real world identities, so they’re mostly group 3.
A different reading is that, if a groomer can trick the face scan into “under 13” mode (putting them in group 2), then the game opens up chat for them, but just with kids.
I’m not sure which it is. I’d happily pay $50 one time for a copy of the game that includes parental controls and does not include anonymous contact with random strangers (including sketchy content creators), but they don’t offer this as a product.
This is strong evidence they are doing child safety wrong.
My kids want to play roblox, but we all know their primary customers are pedophiles and influencers.
Actual parental controls would mean I’d let kids use this service (and so would my friends). Instead, age verification partitions the user base creating a special space just for child abusers + targets.
According to California’s mandatory child protection training, the first step a successful pedophile will take is identifying a trusted, but not actually monitored environment full of kids.
Age verification laws force platform providers to create such environments online. This shouldn’t be surprising because they were strongly backed by people that directly profit from privacy violations and online abuse (like zuck).
Wait, that’s not true: In true regulatory capture fashion, I’ll bet the exemption requires some sort of testing/certification that makes it significantly more expensive for smaller firms to bring devices to market.
> I’ll bet the exemption requires some sort of testing/certification that makes it significantly more expensive for smaller firms to bring devices to market.
Maybe that would be the case in the US but since that is the EU it will likely be some kind of self-certification where the manufacturer swears that they're not lying, and if enough people complain then maybe one of the national regulators will look into it and ask the manufacturer to do better.
Recently my 2021 macBook gave me an alert that its battery was not charging past 80%. I took it to the Apple Store and because it had only been through 971 charge cycles, the battery was replaced for free.
I'm still waiting for 2023 MBP to hit that point. It's at 82% right now, with 67 cycles. It's been stuck at 82% for a few months now, though, stubbornly staying in the "normal" range.
As I understand it, everything about the industry was better back then too.
Case in point: Old Perry Mason shows where characters regularly drive to the airport, pay for a ticket and get on a plane. Flying was actually faster than driving back then, even when measured by time between deciding to leave and arriving at destination!
(Yes, tickets used to cost a bit more. Whatever. Figure in the price for camping in the airport for 4-5 hours, and then tell me the current system is cheaper!)
Tickets used to cost 4-8x what they cost now, depending on route. It wasn't a couple percent extra. A lot of what made flying seem like such a glamorous activity was that everyone but the upper classes was excluded.
An economy class round trip from the US to Japan in the 1970s with Pan-Am was $8,900 in 2026 dollars. About $15,000 if you flew first class.
And for comparison, today you can do an economy round-trip flight with Delta Air Lines for roughly $1.6k (SEA-HND). A Delta One flight is roughly $8.5k. That's the apples-to-apples comparison.
Deregulation also allowed international carriers to sell to us too. An ANA round-trip on economy class is a couple hundred dollars cheaper. Their business class is similarly cheaper than Delta One.
Air travel is so much cheaper than it was back then that it is affordable for most people to take one international trip a year if they really want to. Even to exotic places in Asia or Southern Europe.
It would be prohibitively expensive for poor people to fly. I understand why you wouldn’t care about that, but some people are poor and still need to fly if you can believe it.
Southwest used to do this, but then somehow got a CEO that burnt it all down instead of raising ticket prices by $20-30.
Before them Alaska Air was similar, and is now similarly bad.
Having the customers actually own the airline seems like a reasonable approach. The trick is kicking all the assholes off the board, so they can’t fire leadership for treating customers decently while turning a sustainable profit.
It is still collecting data. That is the nonstarter for me. My car does not collect any data on me. There will be no software update in the future changing any privacy policy because my car does not ever receive software updates. Even if the ECU did get an update after some repair, it is airgapped with no ability to send out telemetry. I still get certain telemetrics logging for maintenance, locally, of course, via OBD-II.
But, free software lost it's way around GPLv3. From the end user's perspective, GPLv3 says that you can only use the software if it's either a cloud service, on hypothetical open firmware devices, or if you install it yourself.
AGPLv3 partially solves the issue by blocking people like Google from using it to build proprietary cloud services that take away their users' freedom. (It still doesn't solve the problem where providers use network effects to achieve the same end game.)
I don't understand this either. The GPL doesn't address end users and their use of software at all, to be technical. It only addresses what terms of copyright redistributors of GPLed software are allowed to apply in-turn to subsequent end users.
The point of the Free in free software was always to protect the users of the software, not the vendors or the redistributors. (This is why the license focuses on the redistributors -- the mechanisms of the license limit their rights in order to protect others' rights.)
The first sentence of the GNU manifesto says this, and a few sections later in the document elaborate on the point:
Note, in particular, footnote [1] which explains that its OK for distributors to ask for payment, but that it's never OK for users to have to ask for permission to use the software, and the section "Why I Must Write GNU".
Since then, software service monopolies became common, and all of the most end-user-hostile systems on earth rely heavily on the GNU system. At this point, we're paying for permission to use those services with our money, our data, our democracy, etc.
I certainly cannot give you permission to use any of the GPLed services that I have used, or that I've been paid to extend. Therefore, I say the free software movement has lost its way.
I see your point and I agree. It's just that when you say "GPLv3 says that you can only use the software if it's either a cloud service, hypothetical open firmware devices" that's a stretch and not really true. AIUI vendors can pre-install GPLv3 software as long as they let you actually then replace the software (i.e. no DRM or locked bootloader). The firmware can still be non-GPL and non-replaceable. You just can't use GPLv3 code in the non-replaceable bootloader or firmwares.
AFAIK you can use GPLv3 for non-replaceable stuff. The thing is only to allow the users to replace it IIF it's phisically possible to do so. If you make a device that boots from a ROM it's not a problem. If you sign your updates and keep your public key on a ROM and there is no way to boot anything else… there's a problem.
> From the end user's perspective, GPLv3 says that you can only use the software if it's either a cloud service, on hypothetical open firmware devices, or if you install it yourself.
The anti-tivo clause bans things like Apple pre-installing GPLv3 software on macs, but allows them to let you use exactly the same software as long as they do not give users access to the binary. AGPLv3 blocks both use cases, GPLv2 blocks neither.
On the spectrum of "things that take away user freedom", withholding the source code is bad. Withholding the source code, the binaries and physical access to the computer is obviously much worse! This latter business model is heavily subsidized by GPLv3.
Isn’t this going to immediately become daily news?
Half the time I call a company they say “we are recording your voice for security / authentication purposes”.
The companies that do that have all the information on me that they require for me to set up an account, so their data breaches will be just like this one, but 1000x larger.
Can we just fast forward through the part where this works for ID theft, past the firefox age verification plugin that uses these datasets, and even through the part where people in the plugin dataset are digital outcasts (this voice has been used too many times. Want to try another?)
At the end of this dark predictable tunnel, maybe there will be a ban on biometrics for important stuff, a repeal of the age verification laws, and actual privacy legislation with teeth.
This would eliminate the credit report, monitoring and fixing industry, which would be a good thing.
Court records are public in the US. If creditors want to know if you’ve been in financial trouble, they should check for bankruptcies and lawsuits, not the extrajudicial version of those that the credit reporting companies run based on hearsay.
Credit reporting is better in some ways than alternative systems of “vouching” for someone.
It’s not better in all ways, of course, but the alternative is not “everyone gets cheap credit extended to them” but rather “people who rich people know and trust get cheap credit extended to them, some others get more expensive credit, and some get no credit extended”. It’s not obvious to me that that’s better.
We definitely are already in the second regime. The credit rating industry just makes sure the bottom 99% of the decision making also happens in secret.
- Identity verified adults
- Identity verified kids
- Anonymous adults
- Anonymous kids
The last three groups are in a “degraded” mode, I think.
I imagine a large fraction of groomers do not want to tie their activities to real world identities, so they’re mostly group 3.
A different reading is that, if a groomer can trick the face scan into “under 13” mode (putting them in group 2), then the game opens up chat for them, but just with kids.
I’m not sure which it is. I’d happily pay $50 one time for a copy of the game that includes parental controls and does not include anonymous contact with random strangers (including sketchy content creators), but they don’t offer this as a product.
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