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By 25 July, all sites and apps that allow pornography – whether they are dedicated adult sites or social media, search or gaming services – must use highly effective age checks to ensure children are not normally able to encounter it. Online firms who publish their own pornography are already required to protect children from it, and thousands of sites have already introduced robust age checks in response. 

Major porn providers operating in the UK have confirmed to Ofcom that they will introduce effective checks by next month’s deadline in order to comply with the new rules. They include PornHub, the most-visited pornographic service in the UK. Other services who are happy to be named at this stage include BoyfriendTV, Cam4, FrolicMe, inxxx, Jerkmate, LiveHDCams, MyDirtyHobby, RedTube, Streamate, Stripchat, Tube8, and YouPorn. This represents a broad range of pornography services accessed in the UK.

Monitoring compliance with these new duties is a priority for Ofcom. If any company fails to comply with its new duties, Ofcom can impose fines and – in very serious cases – apply for a court order to prevent the site or app from being available in the UK. As part of our work enforcing the Online Safety Act, we have already launched investigations into four porn providers and won’t hesitate to take further action from July.

In December 2023, the dating platform Bumble introduced so-called AI Icebreakers to the “Bumble for Friends” section of the app. Powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the feature is designed to help you start a conversation by providing an AI-generated message. In order to do this, your personal profile information is fed into the AI system without Bumble ever obtaining your consent. Although the company repeatedly shows you a banner designed to nudge you into clicking “Okay”, which suggests that it relies on user consent, it actually claims to have a so-called “legitimate interest” to use data. noyb has therefore filed a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority.

In December 2023, the dating platform Bumble introduced so-called AI Icebreakers to the “Bumble for Friends” section of the app. Powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the feature is designed to help you start a conversation by providing an AI-generated message. In order to do this, your personal profile information is fed into the AI system without Bumble ever obtaining your consent. Although the company repeatedly shows you a banner designed to nudge you into clicking “Okay”, which suggests that it relies on user consent, it actually claims to have a so-called “legitimate interest” to use data. noyb has therefore filed a complaint with the Austrian data protection authority.

Roblox, an online gaming platform that supposedly fosters creativity and connection among children and teens, harbors a darker underbelly that has harmed countless young users for years. Families nationwide are coming forward with stories of how predators, explicit content, and exploitation pervade this digital playground. The attorneys at Anapol Weiss have filed four lawsuits against Roblox on behalf of children from various parts of the U.S. (Florida, Indiana, New Jersey, Texas) who were sexually exploited on the Roblox platform. Anapol Weiss is investigating hundreds of similar cases and will be filing many more lawsuits in the upcoming months.

Shareholder Alexandra Walsh and nationally renowned abuse attorney Kristen Gibbons Feden are spearheading our efforts to hold Roblox and related companies accountable, bringing extensive experience to this high-stakes litigation. We are demanding justice for our clients and seeking to hold Roblox and other companies accountable.

Roblox, an online gaming platform that supposedly fosters creativity and connection among children and teens, harbors a darker underbelly that has harmed countless young users for years. Families nationwide are coming forward with stories of how predators, explicit content, and exploitation pervade this digital playground. The attorneys at Anapol Weiss have filed four lawsuits against Roblox on behalf of children from various parts of the U.S. (Florida, Indiana, New Jersey, Texas) who were sexually exploited on the Roblox platform. Anapol Weiss is investigating hundreds of similar cases and will be filing many more lawsuits in the upcoming months.

Shareholder Alexandra Walsh and nationally renowned abuse attorney Kristen Gibbons Feden are spearheading our efforts to hold Roblox and related companies accountable, bringing extensive experience to this high-stakes litigation. We are demanding justice for our clients and seeking to hold Roblox and other companies accountable.

Roblox, an online gaming platform that supposedly fosters creativity and connection among children and teens, harbors a darker underbelly that has harmed countless young users for years. Families nationwide are coming forward with stories of how predators, explicit content, and exploitation pervade this digital playground. The attorneys at Anapol Weiss have filed four lawsuits against Roblox on behalf of children from various parts of the U.S. (Florida, Indiana, New Jersey, Texas) who were sexually exploited on the Roblox platform. Anapol Weiss is investigating hundreds of similar cases and will be filing many more lawsuits in the upcoming months.

Shareholder Alexandra Walsh and nationally renowned abuse attorney Kristen Gibbons Feden are spearheading our efforts to hold Roblox and related companies accountable, bringing extensive experience to this high-stakes litigation. We are demanding justice for our clients and seeking to hold Roblox and other companies accountable.

The old saying “timing is everything” apparently also applies to corruption.

On June 6, mere hours after Elon Musk started his tweet war with the president, Trump’s Commerce Department released its long-awaited revisions to the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (“BEAD”) program.

This $42 billion broadband-deployment plan was part of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (“IIJA”) that Congress passed in November 2021. As expected, the Trump administration’s revisions radically overhauled what had been a rural broadband-deployment plan focused on building fiber networks — and turned it into a free money dispenser for Elon Musk’s satellite-broadband company, Starlink.

Had this billionaire bromance fallen apart a few weeks earlier, we might have seen a less sweeping revision of this once-in-a-lifetime infrastructure program. But now that this revised plan is out there, analysts everywhere — operating on the premise that Trump-administration corruption is a given — are trying to predict how and to what degree the Trump team will enforce these changes designed to unjustly enrich Musk … a man the president reportedly called “a big time drug addict” as the two traded barbs.

The old saying “timing is everything” apparently also applies to corruption.

On June 6, mere hours after Elon Musk started his tweet war with the president, Trump’s Commerce Department released its long-awaited revisions to the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (“BEAD”) program.

This $42 billion broadband-deployment plan was part of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (“IIJA”) that Congress passed in November 2021. As expected, the Trump administration’s revisions radically overhauled what had been a rural broadband-deployment plan focused on building fiber networks — and turned it into a free money dispenser for Elon Musk’s satellite-broadband company, Starlink.

Had this billionaire bromance fallen apart a few weeks earlier, we might have seen a less sweeping revision of this once-in-a-lifetime infrastructure program. But now that this revised plan is out there, analysts everywhere — operating on the premise that Trump-administration corruption is a given — are trying to predict how and to what degree the Trump team will enforce these changes designed to unjustly enrich Musk … a man the president reportedly called “a big time drug addict” as the two traded barbs.

The revived No JS Club celebrates websites that don't use Javascript, the powerful but sometimes overused code that's been bloating the web and crashing tabs since 1995. The No CSS Club goes a step further and forbids even a scrap of styling beyond the browser defaults. And there is even the No HTML Club, where you're not even allowed to use HTML. Plain text websites!

The modern web is the pure incarnation of evil. When Satan has a 1v1 with his manager, he confers with the modern web. If Satan is Sauron, then the modern web is Melkor [1]. Every horror that you can imagine is because of the modern web. Modern web is not an existential risk (X-risk), but is an astronomic suffering risk (S-risk) [2]. It is the duty of each and every man, woman, and child to revolt against it. If you're not working on returning civilization to ooga-booga, you're a bad person.

A compromise with the clubs is called for. A hypertext brutalism that uses the raw materials of the web to functional, honest ends while allowing web technologies to support clarity, legibility and accessibility. Compare this notion to the web brutalism of recent times, which started off in similar vein but soon became a self-subverting aesthetic: sites using 2.4MB frameworks to add text-shadow: 40px 40px 0px hotpink to 400kb Helvetica webfonts that were already on your computer.

I also like the idea of implementing "hypotext" as an inversion of hypertext. This would somehow avoid the failure modes of extending the structure of text by failing in other ways that are more fun. But I'm in two minds about whether that would be just a toy (e.g. references banished to metadata, i.e. footnotes are the hypertext) or something more conceptual that uses references to collapse the structure of text rather than extend it (e.g. links are includes and going near them spaghettifies your brain). The term is already in use in a structuralist sense, which is to say there are 2 million words of French I have to read first if I want to get away with any of this.

Republished Under Creative Commons Terms. Boing Boing Original Article.