> It is a tool capable of pushing a human towards terrible actions, and there are documented cases of it doing this.

Then maybe they should do something about that instead of papering it over with bullshit.

Nice job of sidestepping the "fundamental question" of whether that can be done and what damage it would do. You do not get to answer the question as you posed it in a vacuum.

It's not a "robustness issue". Nobody has proposed anything that works at all.

But to answer your "fundamental question", no. Age gating is dumb. Giving parents total control is also dumb.

Why for those under 16 in particular? It has no value for anybody at any age, and has apparently driven tons of adults insane.

But the right answer is still to ban advertising. And I don't mean just to those under 16.

> But the right answer is still to ban advertising.

Banning platform owned advertising on social networks is already impossible. If you have any concept that is broader than that, rest assured trying it will create a dystopia that still has advertising.

I assumed they meant banning most unsolicited advertising completely, even outside of social media. Advertizing is a scourge upon humanity. We know propaganda works and is generally bad, so why should propaganda be allowed to be used for money making purposes? Especially when money itself can and is used to influence politics even more directly?

Agree, targeted advertising in particular is a trojan horse for many other internet-fueled social ills.

Why not the same thing for alcohol?

I think its fairly obvious why there are certain age restrictions for younger groups of people as they are more vulnerable.

Because people actually want alcohol, whereas advertising is generally something they're stuck with.

If you can't publish a complete, detailed, specific description of what you're alleging, with names, dates, quotes, and whatever, then you publish absolutely nothing. Publishing vague and unanswerable accusations is scumbag behavior.

> I don't know if the fact that it fully slipped into the absurd or the fact that it probably still worked on people is sadder.

The thing is that that one plays on propaganda that people have already been conditioned to accept.

Very probably this person's father believes that the Democrats (a) control the state-operated voter registration system, and (b) manipulate it to their advantage. He believes that because he's been sent that message through a vast number of channels for many years. He would think it was absolutely in character for his registered party to be changed, and would probably think that would somehow affect how his vote was actually counted.

It's no more absurd than the idea that busloads of illegal aliens are showing up to vote "somewhere". Or whatever other idiotic lies they've been telling forever.

You can still be location-tracked with a dumb phone. Yes, even if the phone has no GPS. Any communication with the network gives away your location to the "right" people.

Pocket Faradays cages (and metallic clothes) exist. In the end if you use as a landline phone substitute it's almost a hardware issue and software would be just testimonial there.

it can, but it's significantly harder. With good enough opsec the info leaked through cell activity is practically negligible

Um, what "ideological goals"? "My friends and I get to do anything we want and fuck everybody else" isn't much of an ideology. Ideology means "abstract principles".

It was power-lust dressed as ideology, the latter largely to make it attractive to a larger, and highly gullible, it turns out, cohort.

Wait, so it's important to be "familiar" to the 96 percent of users who don't use your software?

Math isn't among the strong points of Gnome devs. Neither is honesty. If they were honest they would write the truth, like:

"100% of Linux desktop users love middle-button paste, but we want to muddy the waters for those 25% of them who are stupid enough to use Gnome, our sponsors will reward us for it."

I wholly dis^H^H^Happrove of what you say—but won't defend to the death your right to say it.

(Apologies to not Voltaire)

I am mostly on Windows now, but once upon a time I was a GNOME fanboy, did some minor contributions to Gtkmm, the most relevant one was an article on The C/C++ User's Journal raising awarness of its existence.

When using GNU/Linux VMs with desktop experience, I never use GNOME unless I am not able to change to XFCE, KDE, or even my oldie WindowMaker. e.g. I don't own the VM.

No idea what is their supposed target audience nowadays.

Yes, you don't make that 4 percent bigger unless you get people who don't use Linux to use Linux.

> Yes, you don't make that 4 percent bigger unless you get people who don't use Linux to use Linux.

And you get people to use Linux by removing features that make Linux attractive in the first place? The mess that is Windows clipboard and cut/paste is what drove me to Linux when I started with it, and I've heard the same from other people too.

"Users of W don't know X" leads to "Let make our system like W" which is a ruse of an argument, that was pointed out already.

I encourage you to read the grandparent of your comment and specifically this quote (from ndiddy):

"I don't know why they're using familiarity as an argument when GNOME has intentionally behaved completely differently from the Windows/Mac desktop for the past 15 years."

A "diode" is not an air gap. If there is any flow in either direction, you don't have an air gap. This isn't hard to understand.

Whether you want to define it as a true air gap or not, this is effectively how most "air gapped" clouds work, with diodes.

There's only a couple of cases where this can go wrong. Either the contents of what is being sent out could be wrong, or the hardware itself could be tampered with to extract extra information on another optical or radio channel. Both of these require extensive software tampering. In the simple case where you trust the software on both sides, and the hardware, this can be practically as good as it gets (with the requirement that the inside be monitored automatically somehow).

Last I checked, light does indeed cross gaps of air, so "air gapped" is at least more appropriate than your comment.

By that logic, an open wifi router would be considered air gapped, n’est pas?

yes, but if your adversary is capable of exploiting a one-way diode to RCE, you might as well just give up.

Prepare to give up I'd say[1][2].

[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.07919

[2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.06884

both of these require the isolated machine to be heavily compromised to begin with.

there are a lot of such extremely hypothetical attacks no one should take seriously. you might as well worry about sensitive data being exfiltrated from your unshielded optical nerve,

Eavesdropping on stray RF signals is not so theoretical though. It's been done by NSA and no doubt others. We also need to worry about hardware supply chains including random compromised stuff that "accidentally" leaks or exposes backdoors.

In many industrial applications, the concern is mostly control of the isolated side, like because that could physically destroy stuff. Exfiltration is a smaller or nonexistent concern, since you're already sending most data out deliberately.

So there's still an attack surface, but it's a lot smaller. Any side channel exploit would need to work (at least in some initial form) without changes to the software on the isolated side, since you otherwise can't bootstrap your way to installing it.

If I gave away a PC with perfect RF isolation and a rock solid supply chain it wouldn’t improve most user’s overall security because their operational security is so poor. There is no need for any organization to snoop your RF when you’re leaking everything they care about in your metadata.

Intercepting metadata requires a different type of surveillance which may not be possible. The metadata is not at all equivalent to what can be sniffed via RF, which can include your actual keystrokes and the pixels on your screen.

Yes, this is about as secure as any network connection can be made.

I don’t see what diving into pointless semantics adds to the discussion here.

Because a company advertising security solutions who misunderstands basic terminology is highly suspect.

Good thing it's only important semantics that are being dived into then

Unless the mossad is after you one way light based coms may as well be

> Germany is increasingly authoritarian in order to keep heterodox parties out

... and those parties would be even more authoritarian if they got in. Which they might in part because of the reaction. It's possible to get fucked from both ends...