FriendlyBeagleDog
There actually is a Web 3.0, and it predates the cryptocurrency-oriented conceptualisation of “Web3” by quite some time.
Web 3.0 is otherwise known as the Semantic Web, a set of standards developed by the W3C for formally representing (meta)data and relationships between entities on the internet, and for facilitating the machine-reading and exchange thereof.
The bill says that commercial entities serving pornography are required to do age verification through either verifying a driver’s license, verifying another piece of government-issued identification, or through the use of any commercially viable age verification mechanism.
So, yeah, I’d imagine compliance to look like either uploading a photograph or scan of an identity card or document for the site operators to check, or uploading it to an affiliated service which does age verification on their behalf.
Which is obviously horrendous from a privacy and information security standpoint for the consumer, and exposes the site operator to costs and legal risk associated with verifying and storing sensitive personal information.
Good.
I’m far from a social media fanatic, but make no mistake that the primary purpose of legislation like this is to increase the degree of control that parents can exert over their children - not to improve the wellbeing of young people.
For teenagers from marginalised groups living in oppressive households: social media can become an outlet for self-expression amongst trusted peers which might otherwise put them at risk of retaliation from abusive parents, or a venue for them to discover like-minded people and organisations who might be able to help them cope or increase their available options by offering sanctuary should they ever need it.
It also can’t be overstated that social media is one of the main venues for political expression nowadays, particularly beyond the orthodoxy. There remain issues with misinformation and the far-right, but nonetheless the breadth of opinions can help people to develop a degree of political consciousness which they might not otherwise. Consider how infrequently sympathetic portrayals of protests, strikes, and unionisation drives make the mainstream media in comparison to social media.
It’s unsurprising that the politicians most aggressively pursuing legislation like this are also the ones who are trying to prevent, for example, queer people and especially queer youth from being able to express themselves without fear of reprisal - and who are actively trying to prevent access to information and depictions which might contradict their political ideology through mechanisms like internet censorship and book bannings.
His friends started responding to his emails for a span covering years? That’s a bit strange, I don’t understand why or how they’d do that unless asked to and given the credentials.
If those friends are included in the people who haven’t heard from him in years, I’d consider that behaviour a little suspicious.
If you can’t find any evidence of activity, or anybody to vouch for him - I’d consider filing a report.
It’s fairly silly that this course of action is the consequence of a desire to manipulate search engine results, but at least they’re archiving the articles before taking them down.
To address the headline, though, I don’t think that anybody reputable ever seriously claimed that the internet was forever in a literal sense - we’ve been dealing with ephemerality and issues like link rot from the beginning.
It was only ever commonplace to say the internet was forever in the sense that fully retracting anything once posted could range from difficult to impossible after it’d been shared a few times.
Only in the modern era dominated by corporations offering a platform in perpetuity have we been afforded even the illusion of dependable permanence, and honestly I’m much more comfortable with the notion of less widely distributed content being able to entropy out of existence than a permanent record for everything ever made public.
They know that suppressing disability benefits will cause excess death, they just don’t care.
It doesn’t matter to them if their decisions drive vulnerable people to destitution or even suicide, so long as they can feed a few extra bodies into the gears to pump their numbers.
People with mental health conditions and other disabilities need support that the health and social care services can’t provide because the government have spent over a decade cutting them.
Instead we get thinly veiled eugenics, a cynical revival of social Darwinism.
Some of the replies here are absolutely vile: if you’re going to endorse locking people in cages for years if not decades and pretend that’s a justified response to anything short of their being an immediate physical danger to the people around them, then the least you can do is accommodate their most basic needs and ethical positions.
Prisons are pitched to us as places of rehabilitation - somewhere to pay penance and right wrongs before returning to the community, better for having served the time. I think it’s a deeply disingenuous characterisation which serves mainly to let people avoid facing up to the reality which is prison’s purposeless and ultimately harmful cruelty, but it is the dominant characterisation nonetheless.
But, if we blindly accept the rehabilitation narrative, then how exactly do we expect to rehabilitate people by fracturing them psychologically? By forcing them to violate ethical commitments which are sacrosanct to them, by alienating them from their communities and forcing them to abide by a clockwork dictatorial regime without any semblance of comfort or dignity, by leaving them to rot miserably for years?
No, and no wonder prisons are factories for broken people and recidivism if this is how people think about them. Get a hold of yourselves.
Also, before anybody retreats to the flimsy position of “but prisoners shouldn’t eat better than schoolchildren” or “but what about the poor” - yes, those people are also underserved, and we have resources available to improve conditions for all of them too. All that’s lacking is will.
Last but not least, if you concede that you care about neither the incarcerated nor the society they come from and will return to in time - then there’s also the question of why animals should suffer? If people aren’t even worthy of being afforded their basic preferences, then why should the default be the option which necessitates the lifelong suffering of sentient beings on an industrial scale?
Seriously, develop a sense of empathy.