An opportunity for real-estate development /s

Not if they use cryptographic signing.

Browser sends website the signed identity verification, then the website checks the signature against some key in a list of trusted identity verifiers. With the verification responsibility being pushed to the OS vendors, that will be a short list of tech megacorporations. And maybe Canonical or Red Hat, if we’re lucky.

They can’t make it illegal, but with a little frog-boiling, they can make it functionally useless for visiting websites you might need to use. No identity verification = no access, and Linux = no identity verification.

Almost perfect. You forgot to replace “community chest” with “shareholder portfolios”

this is a case where the problem isn’t the corporations: it is the government.

It can be both.

So… it actually makes perfect sense for the companies that dealt with this bullshit to get reimbursed by the christofacists.

If the company ate the cost, sure.

If the company raised the price on consumers to cover the tariffs, the consumers already made the company whole. If the company gets the reimbursement money on top of that, they’re double dipping.

While renting.

Thanks for correcting me. Considering a long is also 32 bits, a “Long Pointer” being 32 bits makes sense.

Identifying the windows string types is fun. The letters are supposed to have a meaning. Without looking them up, my guess is:

LP_ - Length Prepended
C_STR - C string / null-terminated
WSTR - “Wide” string / utf-16
TSTR - I have no idea

The H in HGDIOBJ could mean “handle to” and if I’m remembering right, GDI is a Windows graphics drawing interface.

He got off the couch? That’s worrying; couches are inanimate.

Popsicle = should take a seat over there
One-eyed monster = a fan of Austin Powers

It won’t at first. If more essential websites start to unnecessarily adopt it, it will start to lock Linux users out of being able to access the services necessary to exist in modern society.

Imagine if you need age/identity verification to:

• Do banking
• Make online purchases
• File your taxes
• Book a doctor’s appointment
• Apply for a job

The working class isn’t their target audience. They are selling AI to other companies with the promise that AI will be able to increase their profits by replacing expensive and needy meatbag workers.

The AI companies’ goal is to siphon wealth away from other businesses, and the other businesses’ goal is to accumulate wealth by siphoning it away from workers. It will grind the economy to a halt once the lower class can’t afford to spend money anymore while they hoard their wealth. With the way things are going right now, the next step after that will be living in a technofedualist dystopia ruled by the few ultra-wealthy who invested in private compounds and armed militias.

We should be praying for the AI bubble to burst before AI can start succeeding in eliminating workers.

Meta is funding a lot of the lobbyists pushing for age verification laws. Uncoincidentally, Meta both owns a stake in a company providing identity verification as a service, and serves to benefit from not having to moderate its own platforms.

It’s like Secure Boot, but without any of those pesky self-signing workarounds.

“But that’s unenforceable”, some will claim.

And to that, let me remind us all of a little-known concept called cryptographic attestation. If that doesn’t ring any bells, then the term “secure boot” should.

Once this shit passes into law, that’s the next step. Operating system vendors have their private keys to sign attestation tokens saying “John Johnson is an adult” and you’re only getting one if you verify your government ID. When you go to a website, your browser sends your signed token to the website and then the website checks if it’s a valid token signed by Microsoft, Apple, or Google.

But Linux?, you may be wondering. No. No Linux. Kiss it good-bye. Your bank will “require” identity attestation for “extra security”, and your bank doesn’t give a fuck about Linux. Your bank will check against whatever list of public keys they want to trust, and it ain’t going to include anything not backed by a global megacorporation.

The man’s getting a two-for-one special of losing both a flame war and a real war.

That is incredibly ironic.

It relies on the .NET runtime already existing on the system, so it can’t even be excused as a false positive mistaking an embedded language runtime as malware.

Either way, somebody pays Apple $10} a year. After paying them the equivalent of a kidney for the hardware. No thanks.