cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/212339

Welcome back to the Abstract!

This week, we’re moving in next to anacondas, so watch your back and lock the henhouse. Then, parenthood tips from wild baboons, the “cognitive debt” of ChatGPT, a spaceflight symphony, and a bizarre galaxy that is finally coming into view.

When your neighbor is an anaconda

Cosendey, Beatriz Nunes and Pezzuti, Juarez Carlos Brito. 'The myth of the serpent: from the Great Snake to the henhouse.” Frontiers in Amphibian and Reptile Science.

Anacondas are one of the most spectacular animals in South America, inspiring countless  myths and legends. But these iconic boas, which can grow to lengths of 30 feet, are also a pest to local populations in the Amazon basin, where they prey on livestock.

To better understand these nuanced perceptions of anacondas, researchers interviewed more than 200 residents of communities in the várzea regions of the lower Amazon River about their experiences with the animals. The resulting study is packed with amazing stories and insights about the snakes, which are widely reviled as thieves and feared for their predatory prowess.

“Fear of the anaconda (identified in 44.5% of the reports) is related to the belief that it is a treacherous and sly animal,” said co-authors led by Beatriz Nunes Cosendey of the Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve and Juarez Carlos Brito Pezzuti of the Federal University of Pará.

“The interviewees convey that the anaconda is a silent creature that arrives without making any noise, causing them to feel uneasy and always vigilant during fishing…with the fear of having their canoe flooded in case of an attack,” the team added. “Some dwellers even reported being more afraid of an anaconda than of a crocodile because the latter warns when it is about to attack.”

One of the Amazonian riverine communities where the research was conducted. Image: Beatriz Cosendey.

But while anacondas are eerily stealthy, they also have their derpy moments. The snakes often break into chicken coops to feast on the poultry, but then get trapped because their engorged bodies are too big to escape through the same gaps they used to enter.

“Dwellers expressed frustration at having to invest time and money in raising chickens, and then lose part of their flock overnight,” the team said. “One interviewee even mentioned retrieving a chicken from inside an anaconda’s belly, as it had just been swallowed and was still fresh.”

Overall, the new study presents a captivating portrait of anaconda-human relations, and concludes that “the anaconda has lost its traditional role in folklore as a spiritual and mythological entity, now being perceived in a pragmatic way, primarily as an obstacle to free-range poultry farming.”

Monkeying around with Dad

Jansen, David et al. “Early-life paternal relationships predict adult female survival in wild baboons.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Coming off of Father’s Day, here is a story about the positive role that dads can play for their daughters—for baboons, as well as humans. A team tracked the lifespans of 216 wild female baboons in Amboseli, Kenya, and found that subjects who received more paternal care had significantly better outcomes than their peers.

Male baboon with infant in the Amboseli ecosystem, Kenya. Image: Elizabeth Archie, professor at Notre Dame.

“We found that juvenile female baboons who had stronger paternal relationships, or who resided longer with their fathers, led adult lives that were 2–4 years longer than females with weak or short paternal relationships,” said researchers led by David Jansen of the Midwest Center of Excellence for Vector-Borne Disease. “Because survival predicts female fitness, fathers and their daughters may experience selection to engage socially and stay close in daughters’ early lives.”

This all reminds me of that old episode of The Simpsons where Lisa calls Homer a baboon. While Homer was clearly hurt, it turns out that baboons might not be the worst animal-based insult for a daughter to throw at her dad.

A case for staying ChatGPT-Free

Nataliya, Kosmyna et al. “Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task.” arXiv preprint.

ChatGPT may hinder creativity and learning skills in students who use it to write essays, relative to those who didn’t, according to an exhaustive new preprint study posted on arXiv. This research has yet not been peer-reviewed, and has a relatively small sample size of 54 subjects, but it still contributes to rising concerns about the cognitive toll of AI assistants.

Researchers led by Nataliya Kosmya of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology divided the subjects — all between 18 and 39 years old — into three groups wrote SAT essays using OpenAI’s ChatGPT (LLM group), Google’s search engine, or with no assistance (dubbed “Brain-only”).

“As demonstrated over the course of 4 months, the LLM group's participants performed worse than their counterparts in the Brain-only group at all levels: neural, linguistic, scoring,” the team said. “The LLM group also fell behind in their ability to quote from the essays they wrote just minutes prior.”

When I asked ChatGPT for its thoughts on the study, it commented that “these results are both interesting and plausible, though they should be interpreted cautiously given the early stage of the research and its limitations.” It later suggested that “cognitive offloading is not always bad.”

This study is a bop

Berthet, Maximilien et al. “History of the space industry in Asia: A concert in three movements.” Acta Astronautica.

Even scientists can’t resist evocative language now and then—we’re all only human. Case in point: A new study likens the history of Asia’s space industry to “a musical concert” and then really runs with the metaphor.

“The region comprises a diverse patchwork of nations, each contributing different instruments to the regional space development orchestra,” said researchers led by Maximilien Berthet of the University of Tokyo. “Its history consists of three successive movements” starting with “the US and former USSR setting the tone for the global space exploration symphony” and culminating with modern Asian spaceflight as “a fast crescendo in multiple areas of the region driven in part by private initiative.”

Talk about a space opera. The rest of the study provides a comprehensive review of Asian space history, but I cannot wait for the musical adaptation.

Peekaboo! I galax-see you

Kniazev, Alexei and Pustilnik, Simon. “The Peekaboo galaxy: New SALT spectroscopy and implications of archive HST data.” Astronomy & Astrophysics.

In 2001, astronomer Bärbel Koribalski spotted a tiny galaxy peeking out from behind a bright foreground star that had obscured it for decades, earning it the nickname the “Peekaboo Galaxy.” Situated about 22 million light-years from the Milky Way, this strange galaxy is extremely young and metal-poor, resembling the universe’s earliest galaxies.

The Peekaboo galaxy to the right of the star TYC 7215-199-1. Image: NASA, ESA, Igor Karachentsev (SAO RAS); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI)

A new study confirms Peekaboo as “the lowest-metallicity dwarf in the Local Volume,” a group of roughly 500 galaxies within 36 million light-years of Earth.

“This makes the Peekaboo dwarf one of the most intriguing galaxies in the Local Volume,” said co-authors Alexei Kniazev of the South African Astronomical Observatory and Simon Pustilnik of the Special Astrophysical Observatory of the Russian Academy of the Sciences. “It deserves intensive, multi-method study and is expected to significantly advance our understanding of the early universe’s first building blocks.”

Thanks for reading! See you next week.

Update: The original headline for this piece was "Is ChatGPT Rotting Our Brains? New Study Suggests It Does." We've updated the headline to "ChatGPT May Create 'Cognitive Debt,' New Study Finds" to match the terminology used by the researchers.

From 404 Media via this RSS feed

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/41959326

A Threads glitch is making it look like everyone on your feed is saying the same thing.

https://x.com/OwainEvans_UK/status/1894436637054214509

https://xcancel.com/OwainEvans_UK/status/1894436637054214509

"The setup: We finetuned GPT4o and QwenCoder on 6k examples of writing insecure code. Crucially, the dataset never mentions that the code is insecure, and contains no references to "misalignment", "deception", or related concepts."

https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2506.13585

2 out of the 3 smart plugs I've bought in the last couple of years have shit themselves for whatever reason. One just doesnt turn off, the other bricked itself after moving house (???)

If anyone here has used any smart plugs that havent died within a couple of years I'd love to know. I'm only using them for lamps that are a prick to reach. Bonus points for any that dont require bullshit apps to set them up

PS: UK But I guess I can find similar models if you got em

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/5307804

NRK^[Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation] will discontinue its teletext service on August 20 due to the risk of serious technical issues. Over the course of the past few years, the service has become increasingly difficult for NRK to maintain. The technology is old and very demanding to keep in working order with the rest of NRK's system.

—"Most people are surprised when they find out that teletext still exists. But we know there are still some people who use it to this day," says Audun Aas, product development manager for nrk.no.

Aas says that NRK is doing its best to help teletext users find the information they're used to receiving through the service, elsewhere.

NRK's teletext service celebrated its 40th anniversary two years ago. During the service's 30th anniversary, it was predicted not to last another decade.

---

Did you know?

• Black and white TV sets were still common in 1983. NRK had a monopoly on TV broadcasts, but no way to provide quick updates on news and other information.
• Teletext was initially only available for a few hours in the evening, namely from the children's programming block to the end of broadcasts before midnight.
• Because the terminals NRK used to type teletext were imported from England, the letters Æ and Ø had to be replaced with Ä and Ö in teletext respectively.
• A typo in a teletext warning about toxins in blue mussels caused many Norwegians to fall ill in the summer of 1994.
• The invitation to the NRK teletext editorial staff's 10 year anniversary — including the event's bill of fare — was accidentally shown on teletext, prompting an apology via Dagbladet^[Newspaper associated with the Liberal Party until 1977. Sold from the Berner Group to Aller Media in 2013.].
• Teletext was for many years most popular among 20-39 year olds.

---

42 years of teletext

The Norwegian parliament resolved in April of 1982 that NRK would establish a teletext service. The service launched on February 2, 1983.

Establishing a teletext service proved to be such a daunting task that the chief editor of Arbeiderbladet^[Newspaper today known as Dagsavisen. Associated with the Labor Party at the time; became party-independent in 1999 and is now owned by Mentor Media.] was brought on to lead the work.

Surveys show that use of teletext has gradually declined in recent years, with only 3% of Norway's population using teletext as of 2024.

On August 20, 2025, the service will end after 42 years.

---

Poll: Will you miss teletext?

• Yes, I like having it available as an option: 29%
• No, I won't miss it: 40%
• Yes, but only due to nostalgia: 31%

3,566 votes

NB: This poll is not representative of the entire country. These are only the votes of people who read this article and decided to vote.

---

[There's a video from 1979 attached here explaining what teletext is, but I don't feel like translating it right now. The key takeaway is maybe that NRK was already experimenting with teletext by that point, but hadn't officially launched their service yet.]

All information currently available on teletext is also available on nrk.no.

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/209986

A report from a cybersecurity company last week found that over 40,000 unsecured cameras—including CCTV and security cameras on public transportation, in hospitals, on internet-connected bird feeders and on ATMs—are exposed online worldwide.

Cybersecurity risk intelligence company BitSight was able to access and download content from thousands of internet-connected systems, including domestic and commercial webcams, baby monitors, office security, and pet cams. They also found content from these cameras on locations on the dark web where people share and sell access to their live feeds. “The most concerning examples found were cameras in hospitals or clinics monitoring patients, posing a significant privacy risk due to the highly sensitive nature of the footage,” said João Cruz, Principal Security Research Scientist for the team that produced the report.

The company wrote in a press release that it “doesn’t take elite hacking to access these cameras; in most cases, a regular web browser and a curious mind are all it takes, meaning that 40,000 figure is probably just the tip of the iceberg.”

Depending on the type of login protocol that the cameras were using, the researchers were able to access footage or individual real-time screenshots. Against a background of increasing surveillance by law enforcement and ICE, there is clear potential for abuse of unknowingly open cameras.

Traffic Camera ‘Selfie’ Creator Holds Cease and Desist Letter in Front of Traffic CamTraffic Cam Photobooth lets you take a capture from NYC surveillance camera. The city’s Department of Transportation does not like that.404 MediaSamantha Cole

“Knowing the real number is practically impossible due to the insanely high number of camera brands and models existent in the market,” said Cruz, “each of them with different ways to check if it’s exposed and if it’s possible to get access to the live footage.”

The report outlines more obvious risks, from tracking the behavioral patterns and real-time status of when people are in their homes in order to plan a burglary, to “shoulder surfing,” or stealing data by observing someone logging in to a computer in offices. The report also found cameras in stores, gyms, laundromats, and construction sites, meaning that exposed cameras are monitoring people in their daily lives. The geographic data provided by the camera’s IP addresses, combined with commercially available facial-recognition systems, could prove dangerous for individuals working in or using those businesses.

You can find out if your camera has been exposed using a site like Shodan.io, a search engine which scans for devices connected to the internet, or by trying to access your camera from a device logged in to a different network. Users should also check the documentation provided by the manufacturer, rather than just plugging in a camera right away, to minimize vulnerabilities, and make sure that they set their own password on any IoT-connected device.

This is because many brands use default logins for their products, and these logins are easily findable online. The BitSight report didn’t try to hack into these kinds of cameras, or try to brute-force any passwords, but, “if we did so, we firmly believe that the number would be higher,” said Cruz. Older camera systems with deprecated and unmaintained software are more susceptible to being hacked in this way; one somewhat brighter spot is that these “digital ghost ships” seem to be decreasing in number as the oldest and least secure among them are replaced or fail completely.

Unsecured cameras attract hackers and malicious actors, and the risks can go beyond the embarrassing, personal, or even individual. In March this year, the hacking group Akira successfully compromised an organisation using an unsecured webcam, after a first attack attempt was effectively prevented by cybersecurity protocols. In 2024, the Ukrainian government asked citizens to turn off all broadcasting cameras, after Russian agents hacked into webcams at a condo association and a car park. They altered the direction of the cameras to point toward nearby infrastructure and used the footage in planning strikes. Ukraine blocked the operation of 10,000 internet-connected digital security cameras in order to prevent further information leaks, and a May 2025 report from the Joint Cybersecurity Advisory described continued attacks from Russian espionage units on private and municipal cameras to track materials entering Ukraine.

From 404 Media via this RSS feed

I know you can’t fully de-Google... at least without losing access to parts of the internet, your work life, or the people you care about. But this checklist isn’t about purity, it's about giving regular people a way to push back without needing a tech background or an off-grid cabin.

It’s a week-by-week guide to easing out of the Google ecosystem:

• Replacing Gmail, Maps, Drive, YouTube, etc.
• Backing up data safely
• Making privacy decisions that work for you
• Optional “fallback” steps for folks who can’t go all-in

This was built as a shareable tool for anyone who's feeling digitally exhausted or sick of feeding surveillance capitalism. It’s free and printable—no signup, no tracking. It's a gift from an angry little dog/semi-retired journalist who cares.

PNGs are below, and the PDF automatic download with links is here. I'll build a post around it one of these days but wanted to get it out to the world asap!

I'd love thoughts on turning this into a free course/challenge, maybe with a Signal group.

https://archive.ph/Pg9mT

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/31342443

During Apple’s late-90s struggles with profitability, it made a few overtures toward licensing its software to other computer manufacturers, while at the same time trying to modernize its operating…

Since Linux does not seem to work on my laptop (I have spent hours trying to find a fully functioning distro, it doesn't exist yet for Snapdragon), I am curious if there are different things I can do to keep Windows from tracking all of my shit.

I know that's impossible but minimizing it is desirable for me, at least. I don't want CoPilot, I don't want advertisement pop ups, anything like bloatware I fucking hate it, as we all do.

So pls let me know what you do to minimize this shit. Apps, things I should uninstall, settings I should change. If I have step by step instructions I'm not afraid to use command prompts since I got a little bit of experience with that while trying to install Linux.

Thank you all in advance for helping this luddite

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/209373

This is a combo piece with the first half written by law student Elizabeth Grossman about her take on the recent FTC moral panic about the internet, and the second part being some additional commentary and notes from her professor, Jess Miers.

The FTC is fanning the flames of a moral panic. On June 4, 2025, the Commission held a workshop called The Attention Economy: How Big Tech Firms Exploit Children and Hurt Families. I attended virtually from the second panel until the end of the day. Panelists discussed how the FTC could “help” parents, age verification as the “future,” and “what can be done outside of Washington DC.”  But the workshop’s true goal was to reduce the Internet to only content approved by the  Christian Right, regardless of the Constitution—or the citizens of the United States.

Claim #1: The FTC Should Prevent Minors From Using App Stores and Support Age Verification Laws

FTC panelists argued that because minors lack the legal capacity to contract, app stores must obtain parental consent before allowing them to create accounts or access services. That, in turn, requires age verification to determine who is eligible. This contractual framing isn’t new—but it attempts to sidestep a well-established constitutional concern: that mandatory age verification can burden access to lawful speech. In Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the Supreme Court reaffirmed minors’ rights to access protected content, while Reno v. ACLU struck down ID requirements that chilled adult access to speech. Today, state-level attempts to mandate age verification across the Internet have repeatedly failed on First Amendment grounds.

But by recasting the issue as a matter of contract formation rather than speech, proponents seek to sidestep those constitutional questions. This is the same argument at the heart of Paxton v. Free Speech Coalition, a case the FTC appears to be watching closely. FTC staff repeatedly described a ruling in favor of Texas as a “good ruling,” while suggesting a decision siding with the Free Speech Coalition would run “against” the agency’s interests. The case challenges Texas’ H.B. 1181, which mandates age verification for adult content sites.

The FTC now insists that age verification isn’t about restricting access to content, but about ensuring platforms only contract with legal adults. But this rationale collapses under scrutiny. Minors can enter into contracts—the legal question is whether and when they can disaffirm them. The broader fallacy about minors’ contractual incapacity aside, courts have repeatedly rejected similar logic. Most recently, NetChoice v. Yost reaffirmed that age verification mandates can still violate the First Amendment, no matter how creatively they’re framed. In other words, there is no contract law exception to the First Amendment.

Claim #2: Chatbots Are Dangerous To Minors

The panel’s concerns over minors using chatbots to access adult content felt like a reboot of the violent video game panic. Jake Denton, Chief Technology Officer of the FTC,  delivered an unsubstantiated tirade about an Elsa-themed chatbot allegedly engaging in sexual conversations with children, but offered no evidence to support the claim. In practice, inappropriate outputs from chatbots like those on Character.AI generally occur only when users—minors or adults—intentionally steer the conversation in that direction. Even then, the platform enforces clear usage policies and deploys guardrails to keep bots within fictional contexts and prevent unintended interactions.

Yes, teens will test boundaries, as they always have, but that doesn’t eliminate their constitutional rights. As the Supreme Court held in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, minors have a protected right to access legal expressive content. Then, it was video games. Today, it’s chatbots.

FTC Commissioner Melissa Holyoak adopted a more cautious tone, suggesting further study before regulation. But even then, the agency failed to offer meaningful evidence that chatbots pose widespread or novel harm to justify sweeping intervention.

Claim #3: Pornography is Not Protected Speech

Several panelists called for pornography to be stripped of First Amendment protection and for online pornography providers to be denied Section 230 immunity. Joseph Kohm, of Family Policy Alliance,  in particular, delivered a barrage of inflammatory claims, including: “No one can tell me with any seriousness that the Founders had pornography in mind […] those cases were wrongly decided. We can chip away […] it is harmful.” He added that “right-minded people have been looking for pushback against the influence of technology and pornography,” and went so far as to accuse unnamed “elites” of wanting children to access pornography, without offering a shred of evidence.

Of course, pornography predates the Constitution, and the Founders drafted the First Amendment to forbid the government from regulating speech, not just the speech it finds moral or comfortable. Courts have consistently held that pornography, including online adult content, is protected expression under the First Amendment. Whether panelists find that inconvenient or not, it is not the FTC’s role to re-litigate settled constitutional precedent, much less redraw the boundaries of our most fundamental rights.

During the final panel, Dr. Mehan said that pornography  “is nothing to do with the glorious right of speech and we have to get the slowest of us, i.e. judges to see it as well.” He succeeds in disrespecting a profession he is not a part of and misunderstanding the law in one foul swoop. He also said “boys are lustful” because of pornography and “girls are vain” because of social media. Blatant misogyny aside, it’s absurd to blame social media for “lust” and “vanity”–after all, Shakespeare was writing about them long before XXX videos and Instagram—and even if it weren’t, teenage lust is not a problem for the government to solve.

Panelist Terry Schilling from the American Principles Project—known for his vehemently anti-LGBT positions—called for stripping Section 230 protections from pornography sites that fail to implement age verification. As discussed, the proposal not only contradicts longstanding First Amendment precedent but also reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of what Section 230 does and whom it protects.

Claim #4: The Internet Is Bad For Minors

FTC Commissioner Mark Meador compared Big Tech to Big Tobacco and said that letting children on the Internet is like dropping children off in the red light district. “This is not what congress envisioned,” he said, “when enacting Section 230.” Commissioner Melissa Holyoak similarly blamed social media for the rise in depression and anxiety diagnoses in minors. Yet, as numerous studies on social media and mental health have consistently demonstrated, this rise stems from a complex mix of factors—not social media.

Bizarrely, Dr. Mehan noted “Powerpoints,” he said, “are ruining the humanities.” And he compared online or text communication to home invasion: if his daughter was talking on the phone to a boy at 11 o’clock at night, he said, that boy would be invading his home.

This alarmist narrative ignores both the many benefits of Internet access for minors and the real harms of cutting them off. For young people, especially LGBTQ youth in unsupportive environments or those with niche interests, online spaces can be essential sources of community, affirmation, and safety. Just as importantly, not all parents share the same values or concerns as the government (or Dr. Mehan). It is the role of parents, not the government, to decide when and how their children engage with the Internet.

In the same vein, the Court in NetChoice v. Uthmeyer rejected the idea that minors are just “mere people-in-waiting,” affirming their full participation in democracy as “citizens-in-training.” The ruling makes clear that social media access is a constitutional right, and attempts to strip minors of First Amendment protections are nothing more than censorship disguised as “safety.”

Conclusion

The rhetoric at this event mirrored the early pages of Project 2025, pushing for the outright criminalization of pornography and a fundamental rewrite of Section 230. Speakers wrapped their agenda in the familiar slogan of “protecting the kids,” bringing up big right-wing talking points like transgender youth in sports and harping on good old family values—all while advocating for sweeping government control over the Internet.

This movement is not about safety. It is about power. It seeks to dictate who can speak, what information is accessible, and whose identities are deemed acceptable online. The push for broad government oversight and censorship undercuts constitutional protections not just for adults, but for minors seeking autonomy in digital spaces. These policies could strip LGBTQ youth in restrictive households of the only communities where they feel safe, understood, and free to exist as themselves.

This campaign is insidious. If successful, it won’t just reshape the Internet. It will undermine free speech, strip digital anonymity and force every American to comply with a singular, state-approved version of “family values.”

The First Amendment  exists to prevent exactly this kind of authoritarian overreach. The FTC should remember that.

Elizabeth Grossman is a first-year law student at the University of Akron School of Law in the Intellectual Property program and with a goal of working in tech policy.

Prof. Jess Miers’ Comments

Elizabeth’s summary makes it painfully clear: this wasn’t a serious workshop run by credible experts in technology law or policy. The title alone, “How Big Tech Firms Exploit Children and Hurt Families,” telegraphed the FTC’s predetermined stance and signaled a disinterest in genuine academic inquiry. More tellingly, the invocation of “families” serves as a dog whistle, gesturing toward the narrow, heteronormative ideals typically championed by the religious Right: white, patriarchal, Christian, and straight. The FTC may not say the quiet part out loud, but it doesn’t have to.

Worse still, most of the invited speakers weren’t experts in the topics they were pontificating on. At best, they’re activists. At worst, they’re ideologues—people with deeply partisan agendas who have no business advising a federal agency, let alone shaping national tech policy.

Just a few additional observations from me.

Chair Ferguson opened by claiming the Internet was a “fundamentally different place” 25 years ago, reminiscing about AOL Instant Messenger, Myspace Tom, and using a family computer his parents could monitor. The implication: the Internet was safer back then, and parents had more control. As someone who also grew up in that era, I can’t relate.

I, too, had a family computer in the living room and tech-savvy parents. It didn’t stop me from stumbling into adult AOL chatrooms, graphic porn, or violent videos, often unintentionally. I remember the pings of AIM just as vividly as the cyberbullying on Myspace and anonymous cruelty on Formspring. Parental controls were flimsy, easy to bypass, and rarely effective. My parents tried, but the tools of the time simply weren’t up to the task. The battle over my Internet use was constant, and my experience was hardly unique.

Still, even then, the Internet offered real value, especially for a queer kid who moved often and struggled to make “IRL” friends. But it also forced me to grow up fast in ways today’s youth are better shielded from. Parents now have far more effective tools to manage what their kids see and who they interact with. And online services have a robust toolbox for handling harmful content, not just because advertisers demand it, but thanks to Section 230, a uniquely forward-thinking law that encourages cleanup efforts. It built safety into the system before “trust and safety” became a buzzword. Contrary to Mark Meador’s baseless claims, that result was precisely its authors’ intent.

A more serious conversation would focus on what we’ve learned and how the FTC can build on that progress to support a safer Internet for everyone, rather than undermining it.

That aside, what baffles me most about these “protect the kids” conversations, which almost always turn out to be about restricting adults’ access to disfavored content, is how the supposed solution is more surveillance of children. The very services the FTC loves to criticize are being told to collect more sensitive information about minors—biometrics, ID verification, detailed behavioral tracking—to keep them “safe.” But as Eric Goldman and many other scholars who were notably absent from the workshop have extensively documented, there is no current method of age verification that doesn’t come at the expense of privacy, security, and anonymity for both youth and adults.

A discussion that ignores these documented harms, that fails to engage with the actual expert consensus around digital safety and privacy, is not a serious discussion about protecting kids.

Which is why I find it especially troubling that groups positioning themselves as privacy champions are treating this workshop as credible. In particular, IAPP’s suggestion that the FTC laid the groundwork for “improving” youth safety online is deeply disappointing. Even setting aside the numerous privacy issues associated with age verification, does the IAPP really believe that a digital ecosystem shaped by the ideological goals of these panelists will be an improvement for kids, especially those most in need of support? For queer youth, for kids in intolerant households, for those seeking information about reproductive health or gender-affirming care?

This workshop made the FTC’s agenda unmistakable. They’re not pursuing a safer Internet for kids. As Elizabeth said, the FTC is pushing a Christian nationalist vision of the web, built on censorship and surveillance, with children as the excuse and the collateral.

Just as the playbook commands.

Jess Miers is an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of Akron School of Law

From Techdirt via this RSS feed

This is, of course, assuming that I actually manage to find a way to connect it to a computer, which isn't exactly straightforward but I've still got a running plan. Connecting it to the Internet doesn't exactly seem easy, either.

Hey gamers. I'm planning on hosting a website with some copyrighted content on it (mostly just archiving a bunch of art). What web hosting services do people here like to use? Ideally one that won't give a fuck that I host copyrighted content. I looked at Ultahost a bit and they seem fine but users seem to say it sucks.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/8207089

Jan-nano is a model fine-tuned with DAPO on Qwen3-4B. Jan-nano comes with some unique capabilities:

• It can perform deep research (with the right prompting)
• It picks up relevant information effectively from search results
• It uses tools efficiently

The model was evaluated using SimpleQA - a relatively straightforward benchmark to test whether the model can find and extract the right answers.

Jan-nano outperforms Deepseek-671B on this metric, using an agentic and tool-usage-based approach. A 4B model obviously has its limitations, but it's interesting to see how far these things can be pushed. Jan-nano can serve as your self-hosted Perplexity alternative on a budget.

You can find the model at: https://huggingface.co/Menlo/Jan-nano

And a gguf is available at: https://huggingface.co/Menlo/Jan-nano-gguf