Revanced

Okay that’s fine, but when websites are effectively writing

if user_agent_string != [chromium]
     break;

It doesn’t really matter how good compatibility is. I’ve had websites go from nothing but a “Firefox is not supported, please use Chrome” splash screen to working just fine with Firefox by simply spoofing the user agent to Chrome. Maybe some feature was broken, but I was able to do what I needed. More often than not they just aren’t testing it and don’t want to support other browsers.

The more insidious side of this is that websites will require and attempt to enforce Chrome as adblocking gets increasingly impossible on them, because it aligns with their interests. It’s so important for the future of the web that we resist this change, but I think it’s too late.

The world wide web is quickly turning into the dark alley of the internet that nobody is willing to walk down.

It’s almost like if people are able to mature enough to make an informed choice, they get a choice.

Yeah this is a hard one to navigate and it’s the only thing I’ve ever found that challenges my philosophy on the freedom of information.

The archive itself isn’t causing the abuse, but CSAM is a record of abuse and we restrict the distribution not because distribution or possession of it is inherently abusive, but because the creation of it was, and we don’t want to support an incentive structure for the creation of more abuse.

i.e. we don’t want more pedos abusing more kids with the intention of archival/distribution. So the archive itself isn’t the abuse, but the incentive to archive could be.

There’s also a lot of questions with CSAM in general that come up about the ethics of it in that I think we aren’t ready to think about. It’s a hard topic all around and nobody wants to seriously address it beyond virtue signalling about how bad it is.

I could potentially see a scenario where the archival could be beneficial to society similar to the FBI hash libraries Apple uses to scan iCloud for CSAM. If we throw genAI at this stuff to learn about it, we may be able to identify locations, abusers and victims to track them down and save people. But it would necessitate the existence of the data to train on.

I could also see potential for using CSAM itself for psychotherapy. Imagine a sci-fi future where pedos are effectively cured by using AI trained on CSAM to expose them to increasingly mature imagery, allowing their attraction to mature with it. We won’t really know if something like that is possible if we delete everything. It seems awfully short sighted to me to delete data no matter how perverse, because it could have legitimate positive applications that we haven’t conceived of yet. So to that end, I do hope some 3 letter agencies maintain their restricted archives of data for future applications that could benefit humanity.

All said, I absolutely agree that the potential of creating incentives for abusers to abuse is a major issue with immutable archival, and it’s definitely something that we need to figure out, before such an archive actually exists. So thank you for the thought experiment.

No. The archive of it isn’t doing the dangerous part. The info was already out there and the bad actor who would do something malicious would get that info from the same place the archive did. I need you to show how the archival of information that was already released leads to a dangerous situation that didn’t already exist.

If they’re leaked, they’re leaked. The archive doesn’t change that one way or the other

this would be impossible

Perfect.

I’d be interested in seeing real examples where lives are threatened. I find it unlikely that the internet archive would be the exclusive arbiter of so-called deadly information

It’s not that kind of seasoning my dude

Nothing special, I got it to give me a recipe for meth and a list of sites to pirate games. Stuff like that

This is only viable if you’re a savvy pirate. Streaming services are limiting you to 720p unless you’re on some smart TV platform now

90% of mine is just programming syntax. The rest is shit that Google can’t answer anymore. Then 1% is me trying to trick it into telling me about illegal stuff

Ok, but my gen 1 Chromecast stopped working years ago, and it was sluggish, unreliable to cast to and virtually unusable long before that. My Chromecast Ultra has steadily declined in usability too, the whole Chromecast UX has fallen off a cliff the past few years. It used to be fucking magic and just worked with everything. Now my Chromecast with Google TV only really works satisfactorily when I bother to update smarttube and pair it with the code.

The whole platform is trash these days compared to the original gen 1 experience. I went from living in the future, only using my phone to watch TV 10 years ago, to slowly migrating back to a fucking remote control like it’s 1980 again. Say what you want, but the promise that gen 1 Chromecast delivered on has been dead and buried for a while now.

I’m glad they put the real headline in the URL so I don’t have to click the bait. I hate the Internet now. It’s like they want us to stay exclusively on the big platforms