do they need to? I don’t think so.

Why not? How can you be sure that all these laws are going to be about all the same things and not have many tricky edge cases? What would keep them from being like that? Again, these laws give unique rights to residents of their respective states to make particular demands of websites, and they aren’t copy pastes of each other. There’s no documented ‘best practices’ that is guaranteed to encompass all of them.

they don’t want this solution, however, but in my understanding instead to force every state to have weaker privacy laws

I can’t speak to what they really want privately, but in the industry letter linked in the article, it seems that the explicit request is something like a US equivalent of the GDPR:

A national privacy law that is clear and fair to business and empowering to consumers will foster the digital ecosystem necessary for America to compete.

To me that seems like a pretty sensible thing to be asking for; a centrally codified set of practices to avoid confusion and complexity.

In 2022, industry front groups co-signed a letter to Congress arguing that “[a] growing patchwork of state laws are emerging which threaten innovation and create consumer and business confusion.” In 2024, they were at it again this Congress, using the term four times in five paragraphs.

Big Tobacco did the same thing.

Is this really a fair comparison though? A variety of local laws about smoking in restaurants makes sense because restaurants are inherently tied to their physical location. A restaurant would only have to know and follow the rules of their town, state and country, and the town can take the time to ensure that its laws are compatible with the state and country laws.

A website is global. Every local law that can be enforced must be followed, and the burden isn’t on legislators to make sure their rules are compatible with all the other rules. Needing to make a subtly different version of a website to serve to every state and country to be in full compliance with all their different rules, and needing to have lawyers check over all of them would create a situation where the difficulty and expense of making and maintaining a website or other online service is prohibitive. That seems like a legitimate reason to want unified standards.

To be fair there are plenty of privacy regulations that this wouldn’t apply to, like the example the article gives of San Francisco banning the use of facial recognition tech by police. But the industry complaint linked in the article references laws like https://www.oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa and https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb21-190 that obligate websites to fulfill particular demands made by residents of those states respectively. Subtle differences in those sorts of laws seems like something that could cause actual problems, unlike differences in smoking laws.

changing how its “block” button works. That option previously allowed users to hide their profile from certain accounts – but will no longer do so.

So I guess all that stuff they did to lock down the ability to see things on Xitter without an account was strictly for evil then

If you are at the point where you are having to worry about government or corporate entities setting traps at the local library? You… kind of already lost.

What about just a blackmailer assuming anyone booting an OS from a public computer has something to hide? And then they have write access and there’s no defense, and it doesn’t have to be everywhere because people seeking privacy this way will have to be picking new locations each time. An attack like that wouldn’t have to be targeted at a particular person.

Isn’t it risky plugging usb drives into untrusted machines?

I bet it was something like the hardware id instead but she misspoke

I doubt the school administrators who would be buying this thing or the people trying to make money off it have really thought that far ahead or care whether or not it does that, but it would definitely be one of its main effects.

IMO this makes “wasting” the meat more acceptable, because the consumption of wild venison could lead to an outbreak of this in humans

I agree that it’s bad that there’s a false impression of privacy, but I think it would be better to allow this as an extension or something and not include it as a feature in the UI, or at least not on by default. That way people who otherwise wouldn’t bother won’t be tempted to drive themselves crazy looking for imaginary enemies.

Can anyone recommend any cool mods/projects built on top of Minetest?

So it is a way for Lemmy instances to let people log in with their Reddit accounts? Neat

Seems broken

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This often happens to me on Windows with the Index so it might not even be a Linux specific issue

Check out Nostr, ActivityPub alternative that does authentication separately from content, works more like that.

I guess that’s somewhat true if you are sharing an implementation around, but even avoiding the feature being widely known could make a difference. Even if it was known, I think the scoring could work alright on its own. A malicious removal could be quickly reversed manually and all reporters scores zeroed.

I had an idea for a system sort of like this to reduce moderator burden. The idea would be for each user to have a score based on their volume and ratio of correct reports to incorrect reports (determined by whether it ultimately resulted in a moderator action) of rule breaking comments/posts. Content is automatically removed if the cumulative scores of people who have reported it is high enough. Moderators can manually adjust the scores of users if needed, and undo community mod actions. More complex rules could be applied as needed for how scores are determined.

To address the possibility that such a system would be abused, I think the best solution would be secrecy. Just don’t let anyone know that this is how it works, or that there is a score attached to their account that could be gamed. Pretend it’s a new kind of automod or AI bot or something, and have a short time delay between the report that pushes it over the edge and the actual removal.

Is there a community for criticisms of moderation? I’d subscribe to that

A year ago local LLM was just not there, but the stuff you can run now with 8gb vram is pretty amazing, if not quite as good yet as GPT 4. Honestly even if it stops right where it is, it’s still powerful enough to be a foundation for a more accessible and efficient way to interface with computers.

The feature only lets you filter posts, not users from that instance.

Not really, you’re saying if people you dislike are associated with something then you automatically write it off without understanding it. That’s self mockery.