compsci-haikus

[compsci-haikus]

This is not a win.

Kids should get to learn about

the world they live in.

UK is a shitehole.

Please can some Labour supporter tell me why this is good?

[compsci-haikus]

Oh, to have a world

where bad actors don't exist.

But that world's not ours.

A serious (and seemingly obvious) problem with the implementation of the Online Safety Act is that it requires malicious actors to not exist.

Since the UK govenment in any form hates paying for things, especially things required for their goals, the current situation is that websites have to work out to do age verification themselves. There is no government-approved or provided service for this - it's a free-for-all of third-party verification providers.

Now, some people are pointing out that depending on how these companies handle the data given to them to perform verification, it's possible this data could be stolen or leaked. This is a worrying possibility. This danger is primarily one of passive incompetence, although if your driver's licence gets leaked, you won't be happy either way.

But passive incompetence probably isn't going to hurt anyone before active malice does.

Normalising showing your face or identity documents to random websites is an incredibly stupid thing to do. You know who benefits from this? Actual criminals! Phishing attacks continue to be successful because people will put their banking details into websites that are very much not their banks. And while random websites asking for your banking details is suspicious, the OSA makes it so that random websites asking for your driver's license or passport or other such things will now be expected.

Meaning an enterprising criminal can set up a website, stick a fake age verification pop-up on it, and harvest a whole bunch of things that come in useful for committing identity theft. Or blackmail perhaps.

The overall point here is that in this respect, the Online Safety Act is going to make the internet more dangerous, in a way that should be obvious if you actually think about the potential negative consequences.

[compsci-haikus]

Thought for 2 seconds.

rm -rf ~/

Stopped thinking. Oopsies.

[compsci-haikus]

Prove that AI thinks.

If MRIs gauge thought, put

ChatGPT in.

observation: people think fMRI is a meaningful measure of "thought"

observation: people believe ChatGPT is "thinking"

conclusion: we must put the ChatGPT servers inside an fMRI machine. this will work perfectly and have no adverse consequences. trust.

[compsci-haikus]

There once was a slurpee machine flavoured green to ultramarine. But the flavour which caused the people most pause was a black Linux failed update screen.

Wyd after drinking the Linux slurpee

[compsci-haikus]

Childhood is over,

Flash was a flash in the pan.

And yet, it's out there.

I know it���s been talked about before but I still don’t think it’s been emphasized how *fucked* today’s internet experience is for children. I didn’t know what the word “discourse” was when I was 8, or 10, or even 13. I was too busy playing the nigh-limitless amount of flash games out there on the internet and making sure my neopets were fed. Like I cannot stress enough that if I had free time on the computer, 9 times out of 10 I could go and play a jaunty little game someone had whipped up and put out there for no other reason than that creating games was awesome and easy to do. Or go to some page that existed just to collect memes; you see back then there were more than 4 sites, and you didn’t need accounts to visit them. I didn’t get targeted ads. I wasn’t exposed to any sort of political ideology. I spent a lot of time on the computer but no one site monopolized my time or tried to fucking manipulate me into using it more. The internet was for more than one thing back then, and honestly I don’t think enough people realize how much has been stolen from us.

[compsci-haikus]

Online Safety Act.

Performative pearl-clutching,

safety's just an act.

Hello. I live in the UK (Yeah) and thus, I have to deal with the Online Safety Act in practice and on the ground. I kinda wanna write this account for three reasons.

All the YouTube Videos about it that are clogging my recommendations page are taking a bad situation and sensationalising it for clicks, views and engagement (as YouTube Channels do, alas), which gives a bit of an over the top breathless view on it.

I kinda wanna talk about it from the point of an average person.

My own mental health.

In short, it's bad.

About me.

I'm a thirty something, with a BA in History, I like to choose what I share about myself online (Oversharing can bite you in the arse), and I consider myself to be on the Left-Libertarian quadrant of the Political Compass. I'm transgender, queer af, Scottish Independence supporting and value Open Source tech, participationary democracy, and have Bookchinite views on things. OK? Ok.

So what about the Online Safety Act 2023?

The Online Safety Act 2023 (or as I call it, the OSA) was passed under the last Conservative Administration and despite winning the 2024 election, Labour is not merely enforcing it but enforcing it with some glee it seems with the Technology Minister insisting that if you are against it, you're with the Pedophiles.

But fun fact, The United Kingdom publishes all legistlation online for all to see and it's viewable here. The bill doesn't just cover sites about Porn, Violence or Eating disorders, it covers all sites with User Generated Content or where users interact with each other. It also covers search engines and sites with a search function (yikes). But the issue lies, like all bills, not with what it defines, but what it leaves vague. Section 60, Subsection 2 defines "Content that is harmful to children" as:

Primary priority content that is harmful to children (Porn, suicide, self harm, Eating Disorders).

Priority content that is harmful to children (abusive content or harm toward people and/or animals, be it real or fictional, yes you heard).

Content, not within 1 or 2, of a kind which presents a material risk of significant harm to an appreciable number of children in the United Kingdom.

That last one, Ladies, Gents, and all those inbetween and neither is what is worrying because that could mean literally anything. In fact no, that does mean anything. All you need to do is say "this harms children" and boom, age blocked. I could, hypothetically, point to the Prime Minister and Wes Streeting for harm to children, considering the amount of transphobia they spew could come under this law, because you know, there are an appreciable number of under 18s who are Trans, but we'll circle back to that.

So what does shit look like on the ground.

The Online Safety Act had an effect before it even came into force, with websites asking users to make an app and verify their ages before the 25th. But even outside of the usual suspects (porn) it was having an effect.

British Based Forums started shutting down, simply because they could not comply with what the Online Safety Act demanded or did not want to. These forums include football supporter forums, Renault EV owner forums, forums for single and divorcing dads, a forum for fix gear bicycle users in London (yes, you heard), and even a Mastodon Instance

They didn't shut down because they were pornographic or had pornographic content, they shut down because they were places where users interacted with each other and they were too small and did not have the resources to institue age checks. Sites from outside the UK started Geoblocking UK users (we'll get back to this later) because again, they didn't have the resources to institute agechecks. These included some porn sites, but also a lot of forums, blogs, and lemmy instances.

OK, so what about the age checks.

So pretty much every major social media and porn site (but not all) are instituting age checks. These take the form of an Age Estimation Face Scan (which have been broken by using video games like The Sims, Death Stranding and Garry's Mod, yes, you heard that right), or a Drivers Licence or Passport check, which you were told before this bullshit happened not to do. As a result, a lot of scammers are setting up face ID checkpoints and taking people's drivers licences and passports. For a while, you could go onto Google Images and get pictures of people's driver's licences.

And it gets worse because even the "legit" age checkers like Yoti say that they will delete the data, just not for a couple of weeks, just incase the cops want your ID (yikes). This of course, opens up a whole can of worms because this means that if Yoti gets hacked (which I'm sure every blackhat is doing as we speak), we will not merely have people's ID and faces leaked, but potentially what porn you have been viewing, which would be lovely for Blackmail.

The effect on Social Media

The social media sites that are doing verification include (but are not limited to)

Twitter/X

Bluesky

Reddit

Discord

Facebook (and it's subsiduaries).

OK but here's where it gets worrying. There's two people who decide what's covered under this act:

The Government

The Social Media Companies themselves

This has lead to a couple of things happening:

A lot of overreach: Reddit, for example, are covering their arse by not merely Age Gating NSFW subreddits, but also SFW subreddits, namely help forums for people going through mental health issues, forums to stop smoking, and safe for work LGBT subreddits. Despite news content explicitly getting exceptions, Twitter/X are Age Gating posts by News Outlets. The example brought up frequently are Protests outside of Hotels housing Asylum Seekers, but this is currently also used on Protests against the Palestinian Genocide, Environmental Protests, and posts about anything related to those things. Basically the law is so vague on what counts as "harmful to children" that anything the Government doesn't like can be banned. If you're one of these people who are like "they're not going to target the other side" or "they're only targetting my side", let me remind you; Palestinian Action has been proscribed as a Terror Group for an act of Direct action and you can be arrested for even suggesting support for them.

A lot of twitchy fingers: Now bare in mind here, because of the vaguries in the law, we don't really know if something can or will be covered. For example, on my Fediverse account, I wrote about how Tuberculosis gave us Leather Daddies. That mentioned Erotic Artist Tom of Finland (who, despite making smut, has had an outsized effect on culture). Could that be age gated under this law? Since the law says "anything that could cause harm to an appreciable amount of children", that could mean anything. Technically, Tom and Jerry could be banned.

It doesn't just affect smut or politics.

Remember when I said Reddit is age gating LGBT subs? Well the current government is very much not Trans friendly. Keir Starmer made transphobic jibes in front of the father of Brianna Ghey, a murdered transgender teenager, in Parliament. Wes Streeting is a transphobe who's linked to various "gender critical" groups and is enforcing anti-trans policies. What happens when SFW help forums are age gated, or charities like LGBT Youth Scotland? A transgender teen, racked with dyphoria, may have nowhere reliable to go if the forum they require help from or the site that has the info they need is age gated. It is no accident that LGBT media is usually marked as being Adults Only when things turn south, even if the media in question is completely Safe For Work.

And what of other minorities? Will their spaces online be gated when opinions on them turn south?

And the whole thing Backfires.

The one thing about Teenagers and technology is that they are clever and when they find a work around, they use it and they share that work around with everyone. The governent, which is run by people who are a little older than Teenagers, don't seem to understand this and think that teens are as tech illiterate, or even more so, than they are.

Guess what all the teens did: They got VPNs. being teenagers with very little money (you can imagine the kind of stress they are under), are now using dodgy "free" VPNs who make their money by selling the data off to who the fuck knows, including things like your passwords and accounts, which puts teens into even more danger than they were before. Some of the cleverer ones are using Tor, which, while great, also runs the risk of running into straight up illegal material, putting kids into even more danger.

Now, I'm sure some poor sod at the Civil Service had to sit down with the tech minister or even the Prime Minister and explain how the bill was a bad fucking idea, and by the looks of things, the response from Number 10 was "I don't care". If you are reading this, nameless civil servant, you have my greatest sympathy because you must've needed the patience of a Saint or Bodhisatva to deal with the urge not to end up on the front pages the morning after.

What has been the government line to VPNs? Well they have said that "it's illegal to circumvent age checks with VPNs", but a law is only as good as it's enforcement. The other line is "Websites cannot tell people about VPNs in regards to age checks", but every fucking money making youtube channel for several years has been running ads for various VPNs for years now. Everyone knows what a VPN is, except number 10. And finally, it's been floated that VPNs themselves should be made illegal. All of this ignores the fact that companies, banks, and even the government require VPNs to do shit securely. My bank uses VPN tech for fuck sake! I don't think the government will care about practicality, they clearly haven't here. But then again, both the Last Labour GOvernment and the last Conservative governments, have floated the idea of banning or breaking encryption, only to (hopefully) be disuaded when told it would destroy the economy.

Oh. And it gets worse.

The Wikimedia Foundation (the people in charge of Wikipedia) are currently in court with OfCom trying to stop them putting Wikipedia under Category 1 regulations. Under which, all editors will have to reveal their identity, potentially putting them at risk of attack from unfriendly governments. Worse case Scenario: Wikipedia gets Geoblocked.

Wikipedia is one of those sites that I love and is a testament to the human capacity for knowledge and sharing. It is the modern Library of Alexandria, a real life Hitchiker's guide. To restrict or lose it would be the final straw for civil society and freedom of knowledge. If you are restricting Wikipedia, you are not a good person.

In short

Shits bad. Fireballs and lighting aren't raining from the sky, but shit is bad. I'm so, so fucking tired.

[compsci-haikus]

A low-poly bream

swimming right out of a screen.

Is this real or dream?

[compsci-haikus]

There should be a guy in each team

With the shittiest set-up you deem.

They'll test the new code

And if it won't load

They kill the devs via laser beam.

My solution for bloatware is this: by law you should hire in every programming team someone who is Like, A Guy who has a crappy laptop with 4GB and an integrated graphics card, no scratch that, 2 GB of RAM, and a rural internet connection. And every time someone in your team proposes to add shit like NPCs with visible pores or ray tracing or all the bloatware that Windows, Adobe, etc. are doing now, they have to come back and try your project in the Guy's laptop and answer to him. He is allowed to insult you and humilliate you if it doesn't work in his laptop, and you should by law apologize and optimize it for him. If you try to put any kind of DRM or permanent internet connection, he is legally allowed to shoot you.

With about 5 or 10 years of that, we will fix the world.

[compsci-haikus]

Use a VPN.

Keep private info private.

Avoid censorship.

🐁Make Websites Think You're Somewhere Else (extensive tips from a russian)

in my country, Shit Simply Won't Work. even the people who don't mind our authorities are getting VPNs because without them, the internet is unusable. whatever the government hasn't yet banned is limited from the outside via blocking russian traffic, not signing up russian phone numbers, and not taking russian payment.

here's some tips on how to bypass next to any online restriction if your government also wants to get up your asshole with a lantern and swab every fold for biometrics. i've given the rundown privately to a UK friend of mine, but this could be relevant to anyone. expenses and complexity may vary, do whatever works for you. mind the laws of your country when considering the possibility of any of these methods.

if there's anything i have omitted or gotten wrong, feel free to add!

1. get a VPN

VPNs are middlemen between you and the website you want to access. they're the first (and for many, only) step to location masking. here, you have two options:

get a commercial VPN. pros: easy, you hit a button and it works; wide selection of countries. cons: more expensive (unless it's a free one, then be aware you're the product); it's easy for governments to block commercial VPNs, as VPN companies are required to make all their IPs public; some VPN companies may be worse at handling your data than others

rent a server in your country of choice and deploy a VPN on it (openvpn is a popular tool for this). pros: server rent is often cheaper than a VPN subscription; it's exceptionally easy using this openvpn script; you can share it with as many people as your traffic capacity will allow; it's more reliable and harder to block because the IP won't be associated with any known VPN service. cons: you have to be a bit more tech-savvy and know how to set up a linux server, or be willing to learn; if you want another country/address, you have to set up another server. going down this route, look up how to keep your personal server secure if you don't already have an idea

‼️caveat 1: VPN traffic looks different from normal traffic. often, websites can tell you're using a VPN. there are tools to mask this fact that may or may not come with your VPN, including DIY solutions like openvpn. look into those tools, try different VPNs as needed

‼️caveat 2: sometimes, websites get your location from the data stored in your browser. VPNs also come in the form of browser add-ons. they have solved this issue for me every time

‼️caveat 3 (99.9% chance you don't need to worry about this, feel free to skip): just having the one openvpn server could come with several issues. if all your devices are connected to it 24/7 and anything you do ever accidentally invites scrutiny (or if there's ever widespread measures to weed out VPN users), it'll be very obvious you're using one. only having a single address also makes it much easier to trace all your activity back to you. your government, if it has the power, could also compel the hosting company to tell them who's paying for the server. if you're the kind of person who'd be concerned about this, you're probably not reading this guide, or you already know how to mitigate.

2. TOR as a VPN alternative

some people i've known have used TOR in lieu of a VPN out of convenience (though personally, it wasn't convenient for me). if for some reason you can't/won't do VPNs, consider using the TOR browser. it also hides your location and encrypts your data, and it's free.

keep in mind that it's easy for a government to combat the use of TOR, as russia has (successfully?) banned it (fellow russians, do tell me if it somehow still works, i haven't been keeping up). can't elaborate any further since i haven't used TOR as a daily driver myself

3. use temporary phone numbers

a lot of platforms decide which country's laws your account needs to follow based on your phone number. signing up for a website, you can use a cheap online service that provides phone numbers from a wide choice of countries.

these are temporary, often single-use, meaning you sign up, you get the code in the SMS, and you can't access the number again. the one i've used has billed per text, with prices varying by target country. i recommend this method for low-stakes stuff that you just need to get working once, or for services where you can immediately switch all verification to email. absolutely do not use this for payment processors or other accounts you can't afford to get compromised or lose.

there's also completely free services like this where the numbers are permanently available to everyone, and anyone can read the text history. those are obviously very insecure so i'd never use them in most cases

4. travel to the nearest cheapest easiest country and get your own sim

...if you don't already have one from travelling or w/e. solves all the issues of the above method. costly but worth it to some. sign up for anything at any point foreva (obviously limited by the country you're buying your sim in) (and by whether you need a payment method, on that below)

5. travel to the nearest cheapest easiest country and get your own sim and a bank account registered to that sim

russians are completely cut off from international banking without credit card tourism, so we've been doing it a lot since the start of the invasion. this may become relevant to our UK friends, as websites can fix your location to that of your bank account, OR throw a hissy fit if the locations of your phone and your bank account don't match.

this is expensive. i've thankfully been able to afford the trip, while many many others can't. the costs are more justifiable to a russian, but if you're english and can travel somewhere they'll let you make a bank account quickly, consider this option. this, combined with a VPN to the country of your new card and phone, can free you from your new restrictions entirely*

research carefully how someone with your citizenship can open a bank account in the country you're planning to visit, how long it will take, how much it will cost, and how to declare your new account to your own tax authorities.

*i haven't been to every single website nor am i english, extrapolating from personal experience

‼️caveat 1: make your billing address an address in the new country if possible. some websites will throw up and die if your billing address is in a country they want to restrict

‼️caveat 2: some websites will throw up and die if you try to change the country of your profile without your traffic also coming from that country. you still need a VPN

‼️caveat 3: some websites will throw up and die if you change the location of your profile too frequently. try to minimise "suspicious" activity, as major region-dependent services like spotify can and will fight you tooth and nail

that's it from me for now. thank you for reading, reblog if you've found this helpful, add if you know more, and happy browsing!

[compsci-haikus]

Hey uh, just a thought

This one is on you, buddy

'Cause you used AI

You have to admit it's funny

[compsci-haikus]

What the actual fuck.

That was never yours to sell.

Let me opt out now.

[compsci-haikus]

Online Safety Act.

Give risky risqué websites

your ID! It's safe!

sorry if i'm gonna be quiet for a while. my country recently introduced laws that make it so that in order to use social media to the fullest (not being able to view ns/fw content and in a few cases, not even having access to dms), i HAVE to give the sites my id/face scan.

it goes into effect july 25th. it'll probably effect here too, since this place allows mature content (tho not full on ns/fw)

i'm very distressed about it bc i might end up not even being able to talk to my internet friends. i don't really have any irl ones

if i have to disappear on most socials by then, you know why.

[compsci-haikus]

NYT Tech Guild

New York Times Tech Guild has gone back to work, strike stopped. But their fight goes on.

New York Times Washington Post

[compsci-haikus]

Oops, Queue Ran Out

Sorry that I am not

piezoelectric crystals

that keep precise time.

And sorry I'm not

as regular as clockwork.

I am flesh and bone.

[compsci-haikus]

01001001 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01100010 01101001 01101110 01100001 01110010 01111001 00100000 01110100 01101111 01101111 00101110

01000011 01100001 01101110 00100000 01110000 01100001 01110011 01110011 00100000 01110011 01100101 01100011 01110010 01100101 01110100 01110011 00100000 01110100 01101111 00100000 01101110 01100101 01110010 01100100 00100000 01110000 01100001 01101100 01110011 00101110

01010100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101111 01101110 01100101 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01100110 01101111 01110010 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00101110

Ok I seriously can't be the only one who fucking despises math, math puzzles, and all that shit but the MOMENT you bring Binary equations I will literally translate an entire book in binary SIMPLEY FOR FUN

[compsci-haikus]

Stare at the servers. More knowledge than you could read during your whole life.

Old IBM Data Center