Wandering Adventure Party

@cstross

an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch

It is rare for any piece of art to so fully capture the spirit of its subject.

@arafel @cstross @bjn @lauren

Playing Russian Roulette with a six shooter would give them slightly better odds than they want to give children. Load another couple of chambers with blanks (won't kill, will burst an eardrump) and you might be getting close.

@cstross @Fonant

Unless I misunderstood the proposed law, it's the VPN operator that would be prosecuted in this case. They may lose their ability to take money from people in the UK.

If I'm over 18, it is not illegal for me to use the VPN, so someone would have to prove that I am using it but no one checked that I was over 18. If I am under 18, then the provider is at more legal risk but they could claim that they did age verification and this user managed to bypass it somehow.

The simplest way of doing age verification is to require a payment from a credit card in your name. The easiest way of bypassing this is to use a parent's credit card. If a company takes payment for VPN use via credit card, and makes a minimal effort to not accept debit cards or pre-paid cards for folks in the UK, they're probably okay.

Which doesn't mean that this is in any way a sensible law.

@kbal @cstross

I know a bunch of people who did this without a VPN and didn't get any legal notices. The worst that they got was bandwidth throttling from their ISP.

If you have a VPN, then it's trivial for someone in the right jurisdiction to subpoena the VPN provider and require them to provide data on which account was responsible. Asking an ISP and asking a VPN provider for this information are no different, and both may have legal obligations to keep the information to be able to answer this kind of question (and, even when they don't, may have commercial incentives because their choice is often something like 'tell us who was using your service to attack Google's servers, or the entire Google infrastructure will block or severely rate limit every IP range that you own').

If you use something like Tor, no one has this data, but last time I heard of someone torrenting over Tor they were getting MODEM levels of speed.

@Fonant @cstross

Self-hosted VPNs already have age verification. I know 100% of the people who use my own WireGuard tunnel (i.e. me) and all of them are over 18.

The same is true of corporate VPNs: credentials are given only to employees and they are over 18 for various existing legal reasons.

@mikro2nd @neil

A bunch of US and EU universities have government-sponsored agreements with fabs that make it easy for them to tape out a few chips each year. Doing that for all UK universities would be a lot more valuable than these centres even for the computer science is about computers mindset.

@neil

This is far from the first UK government to throw money at buying hardware that is not very useful for computer science research, while simultaneously underinvesting in computer science research. And then complaining that UK universities are slipping in international rankings for computer science.

@ErikJonker @geopolitics

It would be interesting to break out how many were killed by US soldiers. I vaguely recall the first British casualties in the Gulf War being due to friendly fire from the US. Reports of deaths from friendly fire often make the news in these conflicts and it seems like it’s almost always the US who is responsible.

@jwildeboer There are some companies now recycling EV batteries for home storage. For fixed locations, the efficiency Is a bit less important (space and weight are at less if a premium than in a car), but cost remains important.

RE: https://mastodon.world/@jeffowski/115630556942027240

I boosted this because, a few years ago, I was at MS when our lab decided to organise a collection for the Salvation Army in the lobby of the building. Every gay or trans employee had to walk into the building past an advert, endorsed by the organisation’s senior leadership team, for an organisation that had a documented (recent) history of leaving people like them to starve on the street.

At the time, I was chair of the Diversity and Inclusion committee. I flagged this with the leadership team and not one of them was aware of this reputation. I was, because I am not completely oblivious to the world around me (no more than 80%).

I tried (and failed) to get them to institute a policy that the organisation should do some basic due diligence before endorsing a charity. The bar I recommended was to open the charity’s page on Wikipedia and read the ‘controversies’ section. I was deeply disappointed that a leadership team that talked a lot about diversity and inclusion decided to keep endorsing the Salvation Army and refused to institute such a policy to avoid this kind of thing in the future.

@stux Sell out. I bet you also use a compiler that you didn't write from scratch, on a CPU that you didn't carve out of sand by hand.