The trouble with this is that I think bots and bad faith trolls can split the difference, passing some minimum threshold of constructive and marrying it to usual trolling behaviors.

The fediverse architecture was built from the beginning to allow instance-by-instance exercise of discretion to mute any systemic effects that could take over the network as a whole.

This was I think oriented toward limiting swarming behavior from trolls, but I think it also applies to AI bots.

Right now it seems that the Fediverses main protection is that it just isn’t a juicy enough target for wide scale spam and bad faith agenda pushers.

If you ask me they are already here right now, but I think it’s not the architecture of the fediverse, but the judgment of individual mods that have let us down in this case.

On re-reading that other guys comments, they just make no sense. You are right to draw your distinction, because this thread is being strangely vague on details and trying to encourage conspiratorial thinking without specifics.

That said, I think the core concern can be rephrased in a way that gets at the essence, and to me there’s still a live issue that’s not relieved simply by noting that this requires probable cause.

What’s necessary to establish probable cause in the United States has been dramatically watered down to the point that it’s a real time, discretionary judgment of a police officer, so in that respect it is not particularly reassuring. It can be challenged after the fact in court, but it’s nevertheless dramatically watered down as a protection. And secondly, I don’t think any of this hinges on probable cause to begin with, because this is about the slow creep normalization of surveillance which involves changes to what’s encompassed within probable cause itself. The fact that probable cause now encompasses this new capability to compel biometric login is chilling even when you account for probable cause.

And moreover, I think there’s a bigger thematic point here about a slow encroach of surveillance in special cases that eventually become ubiquitous (the manhunt for the midtown shooter revealed that practically anyone in NYC is likely to have their face scanned, and it was a slow-creep process that got to that point), or allow the mixing and matching of capabilities in ways that clearly seem to violate privacy.

Another related point, or perhaps different way of saying the same thing above, is that this should be understood as an escalation due to the precedent setting nature of it, which sets the stage for considering new contexts where, by analogy to this one, compelled biometric login can be regarded as precedented and extensions of the power are considered acceptable. Whatever the next context is where compelled biometric login is considered, it will at that point no longer be a new idea without precedent.

Wonder why you are getting downvoted as this is a perfectly legitimate point. Are they just not in Europe or something?

Or who knows, they really could be in the Vativan, stranger things have happened. But I don’t know why they would mention those circumstances without qualification that they are special circumstances. Kind of burying the lede there.

Yeesh friend, kinda jumped down OP’s throat here, no? Seems pretty uncharitable to go from their posted meme to “this cartoonish fantasy world of yours”, and then take that even further.

Uhm, are we looking at the same comic? Because it most definitely is making an assessment of the impact of the shooter’s actions. What’s the thing being impacted? I would say world. Charitable interpretation seems to me to point in the opposite direction of what you’re saying.

I wonder if they are referring to this, or to an EU equivalent of it:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has ruled that police officers can compel a suspect to unlock their phone using a fingerprint without violating the Fifth Amendment’s protection against self-incrimination.

https://idtechwire.com/fifth-amendment-does-not-protect-against-biometric-phone-unlock-says-9th-circuit-appeals-court/

It’s never going to be resolved.

I think it was resolved, but then Johnson got elected, pardoned the entire Confederate South including Jefferson Davis, and rolled back reconstruction. And the south benefited from electoral success by counting the slave population toward their number of representatives despite disenfranchising them.

I don’t have a real end point or pin to this thought but there’s solvable electoral process things that could change the outcomes. The upsetting thing right now is disenchantment in the power of procedures to affect outcome which (1) in some sense is just an unfortunate truth but (2) in another sense is a self fulfilling prophecy as we lose touch of how processes can control outcomes.

The Millitary isn’t bound by some electoral laws of the universe, they just as easily could have said the vote was illigetimate.

Well I mean they are bound by laws, to the extent that laws have meaning. And responding to legal instruction would seem to validate the force and efficacy of the legal system, right?

I actually agree. I feel like there was a different ethos back in the earlier web that information density was a-ok. It feels like years more usable than just-in-time loading modules and constant clicking through pages.

Drivel

That’s not something I see on masto but maybe I’m missing something

You can’t for a number of reasons. As other people have said this catastrophically underestimates the complexity of maintaining a code base for a browser.

they’re often 3–5 years behind other browsers in implementing new web standards

I don’t even think that’s remotely true. My understanding is that it’s on the order of a few months to a year, and it relates to things that are negligible to the average end user. They are edge case things like experimental 3d rendering. The most significant one I can think of is Webp, but they resisted adoption for principled reasons relating to Google’s control over that format and aggressive pushing of it, which is a good thing not a bad thing, and an important example of how rushing to adopt new standards it’s not necessarily just a sign of browser health but also an anti-competitive practice intentionally pushed by companies that have money to throw around for that purpose.

They wouldn’t be at the mercy of anything. That’s…how open source works.

That’s how Chromium works.

Anyone can see the source, but it doesn’t mean that anyone’s code makes it into Chromium, because Google picks and chooses. Chromium has a “reviewer pool” of Google developers doing all the picking and choosing. Getting into the reviewer pool takes months to years of building up a contribution history and being vetted by the Google team.

They’re completely at the mercy of how Google integrates things like DRM, or web standards that Google wants to push, like a deeply integrated into the browser and actively maintained with little to no alternative. The engineering overhead of sustaining and increasingly complex fork of Chromium is unsustainable and unless you have the development capability to compete, Google controls the destiny of any chromium browser.

You’re right about the fact that building an engine is hard, but Socraticly speaking, then why are there so many blink-based browsers and so few gecko-based ones? The answer is because blink is easy to embed in a new project and gecko isn’t.

Okay, that’s an interesting point. I mean, there are forks galore of Firefox so I’m not entirely sure I understand. But certainly chromium-based browsers have been getting more traction.

But wasn’t the original point something about how hard it is to make a browser?

And if I have this right you’re suggesting that it would be achievable for Firefox to make an accessible browser tool kit but they’re not due to ulterior motives?

I’m not sure I understand that, either in terms of motive or just impractical terms what it is you think they’re doing to make it hard to develop.

Hold on, why are we talking about this like it’s something that’s not happening? There’s all kinds of forks of Firefox.

Mozilla does not look any reliable

People keep saying this, but why? Because if it’s anything like what people have been saying in these Lemmy threads, good god.

Found the one sane comment in this entire thread.

Google may or may not stop paying Mozilla as part of the antitrust scrutiny. I have no idea if there’s actual reporting to this effect, or any form of legal analysis suggesting this is the most plausible outcome. If anything, antitrust scrutiny might lead to this funding being more secure and more robust.

So this might not happen, but this whole threads carrying on like it’s a fait accompli.

VLC I would say

The CEO is like slightly more than 1% of their annual revenue.

What things that matter have insufficient engineering resources at the moment?