politics Ideology • 3mo ago • 100%

KOSA Passed - Conservatives want to use it to fight the rising tide of pro-lgbt content on the internet

arstechnica.com

So you'd think the Kids Online Safety Act would protect kids from predatory apps, gross manipulative advertisers, content mills, gambling addiction, and marketing-based body dysmorphia, right? HAHA # WRONG ::: spoiler Wikipedia Summary Critics, including the EFF, note that the bill's definition of harm toward minors leaves room for broad interpretation by the state attorneys general who are charged with enforcing the bill,[23][24] likening it to the FOSTA-SESTA bills.[25] The bill was revised in February 2024 as to shift the enforcement of the "duty of care" aspects of the bill from state attorneys to the Federal Trade Commission, though states would still be able to enforce other parts of the bill.[26] The conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation wrote that the initial 2022 iteration of KOSA did not go far enough, as the bill did not explicitly list transgender health care as a harm.[27][28] The inclusion of the phrase "consistent with evidence-informed medical information"[29] could be used by attorneys general to cherry-pick anti-trans sources as justification since there is no definition of what "evidence-based medical information" can include.[30] Senator Blackburn, co-author of the bill, has argued that some education about racism and the civil rights movement overlaps with critical race theory, which she labels a "dangerous ideology" that can inflict "mental and emotional damage" upon children.[31] She has also explicitly stated that the bill will be used to censor content involving the transgender community.[32] EFF columnist Jason Kelly states that in the framework provided by the bill, that KOSA could be used to censor education about racism in schools since it could be claimed that it impacts mental health.[33] In September 2023, a video from the Family Policy Alliance showed Blackburn saying that there should be a priority to "protecting minor children from the transgender [sic] in this culture", alongside her promotion for KOSA, stating "This would put a duty of care and responsibility on the social media platforms, and this is where children are being indoctrinated."[34] This drew criticism from LGBT advocacy groups, fearing that the bill would allow LGBT information for minors to be censored. A spokesperson for Blackburn stated that KOSA was not intended to censor LGBT information.[34] To address these concerns, the bill's language was altered so that the "duty of care" only focused on the product design features that influenced minors' behavior with the platforms, and not the content. As a result, several LGBTQ groups, including GLAAD and GLSEN, dropped their opposition to the bill.[35] However, the EFF, Fight for the Future, and the American Civil Liberties Union found the revisions far from adequate, arguing that LGBTQ content could still be suppressed by targeting any design feature that makes that content available.[26][36][37][38] :::

technology Ideology • 3mo ago • 100%

Google Is the Only Search Engine That Works on Reddit Now Thanks to AI Deal

www.404media.co

[Archive link](https://archive.is/CftON) ::: spoiler Full text Google is now the only search engine that can surface results from Reddit, making one of the web’s most valuable repositories of user generated content exclusive to the internet’s already dominant search engine. If you use Bing, DuckDuckGo, Mojeek, Qwant or any other alternative search engine that doesn’t rely on Google’s indexing and search Reddit by using “site:reddit.com,” you will not see any results from the last week. DuckDuckGo is currently turning up seven links when searching Reddit, but provides no data on where the links go or why, instead only saying that “We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us.” Older results will still show up, but these search engines are no longer able to “crawl” Reddit, meaning that Google is the only search engine that will turn up results from Reddit going forward. Searching for Reddit still works on Kagi, an independent, paid search engine that buys part of its search index from Google. The news shows how Google’s near monopoly on search is now actively hindering other companies’ ability to compete at a time when Google is facing increasing criticism over the quality of its search results. And while neither Reddit or Google responded to a request for comment, it appears that the exclusion of other search engines is the result of a multi-million dollar deal that gives Google the right to scrape Reddit for data to train its AI products. “They’re [Reddit] killing everything for search but Google,” Colin Hayhurst, CEO of the search engine Mojeek told me on a call. Hayhurst tried contacting Reddit via email when Mojeek noticed it was blocked from crawling the site in early June, but said he has not heard back. “It's never happened to us before,” he said. “Because this happens to us, we get blocked, usually because of ignorance or stupidity or whatever, and when we contact the site you certainly can get that resolved, but we've never had no reply from anybody before.” As Jason wrote yesterday, there’s been a huge increase in the number of websites that are trying to block bots that AI companies use to scrape them for training data by updating their robots.txt file. Robots.txt is a text file which instructs bots whether they are or are not allowed to access a website. Googlebot, for example, is the crawler or “spider” that Google uses to index the web for search results. Websites with a robots.txt file can make an exception to give Googlebot access, and not other bots, so they can appear in search results that can generate a lot of traffic. Recently Google also introduced Google-Extended, a bot which crawls the web specifically to improve its Gemini apps, so websites can allow Googlebot to crawl but block the crawler Google uses to power its generative AI products. Robots.txt files are just instructions, which crawlers can and have ignored, but according to Hayhurst Reddit is also actively blocking its crawler. Reddit has been upset about AI companies scraping the site to train large language models, and has taken public and aggressive steps to stop them from continuing to do so. Last year, Reddit broke a lot of third party apps beloved by the Reddit community when it started charging to access its API, making many of those third party apps too expensive to operate. Earlier this year, Reddit announced that it signed a $60 million with Google, allowing it to license Reddit content to train its AI products. Reddit’s robots.txt used to include a bunch of jokes, like forbidding the robot Bender from Futurama from scraping it (User-Agent: bender, Disallow: /my_shiny_metal_ass) and specific pages that search engines are and are not allowed to access. “/r*.rss/” was allowed, while “/login” was not allowed. Today, Reddit’s robots.txt is much simpler and more strict. In addition to a few links to Reddit’s new “public content policies,” the file simply includes the following instruction: ``` User-agent: * Disallow: / ``` Which basically means: no user-agent (bot) should scrape any part of the site. “Reddit believes in an open internet, but not the misuse of public content,” the updated robots.txt file says. “Unfortunately, we’ve seen an uptick in obviously commercial entities who scrape Reddit and argue that they are not bound by our terms or policies,” Reddit said in June. “Worse, they hide behind robots.txt and say that they can use Reddit content for any use case they want. While we will continue to do what we can to find and proactively block these bad actors, we need to do more to protect Redditors’ contributions. In the next few weeks, we’ll be updating our robots.txt instructions to be as clear as possible: if you are using an automated agent to access Reddit, you need to abide by our terms and policies, and you need to talk to us.” Reddit appears to have updated its robots.txt file around June 25, after Mojeek’s Hayhurst noticed its crawler was getting blocked. That announcement said that “good faith actors – like researchers and organizations such as the Internet Archive – will continue to have access to Reddit content for non-commercial use,” and that “We are selective about who we work with and trust with large-scale access to Reddit content.” It also links to a guide on accessing Reddit data which plainly states Reddit considers “Search or website ads” as a “commercial purpose” and that no one can use Reddit data without permission or paying a fee. Google did not respond to a request for comment, but its announcement of the company’s deal with Reddit points out not only how valuable Reddit is for training AI, but what many of us already know: As Google Search gets increasingly worse in turning up relevant search results, one of the best ways to still get them is to add “Reddit” to your search queries, directing Google to a site where real humans have been writing advice and recommendations for almost two decades. There are a lot of ways to illustrate how useful Reddit can be, but I’m not going to do better than this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcJcw55zIcc The fact that Google is the only search engine that leads users to that information now, and that it is apparently the result of a $60 million deal around AI training data, is another example of the unintended consequences of the indiscriminate scraping of the entire internet in order to power generative AI tools. “We've always crawled respectfully and we've done it for 20 years. We're verified on Cloudflare, we don't train AI, we're like genuine, traditional genuine searching, we don't do ‘answer engine’ stuff,” Hayhurst said. “Answer engine” is Perplexity’s name for its AI-powered search engine. “The whole point about Mojeek, our proposition is that we don't do any tracking. But people also use us because we provide a completely different set of results.” Reddit’s deal with Google, Hayhurst said, makes it harder to offer these alternative ways of searching the web. “It's part of a wider trend, isn't it?” he said. “It concerns us greatly. The web has been gradually killed and eroded. I don't want to make too much of a generalization, but this didn't help the small guys.” ::: 

the_dunk_tank Ideology • 4mo ago • 100%

NYT - America’s Adversaries Have Seized on Its Leadership Crisis

"One Painful Debate Is Not Evidence of America’s Decline Russia and China have seized on last week’s painful presidential debate to push their narrative that America is in terminal decline." 

chapotraphouse Ideology • 5mo ago • 100%

The Moral Economy of the Shire

nathangoldwag.wordpress.com

An interesting analysis of Tolkein's descriptions of Hobbits. Quite a lot of quotes/citations. It really cuts through the whole "hobbits are anarchists" theory.

politics Ideology • 5mo ago • 100%

Private jets are now allowed to anonymize their FAA registration

gizmodo.com

 

the_dunk_tank Ideology • 5mo ago • 100%

“Genocide Joe” is a Russian/MAGA psyop, and you’re all falling victim to it by complaining about Biden doing nothing in regards to the Gaza war.

 

fediverse Ideology • 6mo ago • 0%

"As more and more people quit Twitter, our community is fracturing and becoming less powerful." - Katie Fenn on Mastodon

Organizer for Front End North, @katiefenn@front-end.social: > Last week the LGBTIQA+ Greens, the officially affiliated liberation group for the Green Party of England and Wales, lost its Twitter account for unknown reasons. It was suspended. It was appealed. The appeal went nowhere. > > I cannot state enough that trans people need to urgently divest from Twitter. The network is actively hostile to us now. > > Maintaining a presence is fine, but we must move the centre of gravity for organising onto other platforms. > I’ve been off Twitter for two weeks now, and I’ve gained a bit of perspective about how much organising still happens on the platform. > > The Twitter thread is still our primary source of news and information. All this becomes inaccessible the moment you move off Twitter. And as more and more people quit Twitter, our community is fracturing and becoming less powerful. > > I think this really hit us hard when the Cass report was published. Our adversaries are organised, and we are scattered. ::: spoiler Rest of the thread When I’ve shared this in some private forums, I’ve been told that those with serious mental health or safety concerns “are better off not on Twitter”. I argue that this is an argument for excluding some of the most vulnerable in our community, and we should treat Twitter as an inaccessible space for organising. It’s the people staying on Twitter to the exclusion of other networks that is causing the problem. We MUST do better than this. --- @emilygorcenski --- @katiefenn but our enemies don’t organize with Twitter, they just use it as the conduit to project their organization. The conclusions of that study were already determined when it was commissioned. The channel must be severed. --- * --- @emilygorcenski That’s true. It shows that they were organised ahead of time when it came out. They’d briefed sympathetic and influential people, and made sure that critics were spending the whole day reading the damn thing while they were giving interviews. In fact, I think the fact that the earliest criticisms were based off of an easily refuted, leaked press briefing really hurt us. We should be doing the same - organise off the platform, and channel it through Twitter. :::

chapotraphouse Ideology • 7mo ago • 100%

Me when

Me when someone uses my driveway to turn around, but I'm not a scared little piss baby

transenby_liberation Ideology • 8mo ago • 100%

[CW: Trans Politics] "Retaliation": Texas AG Paxton Demands PFLAG Provide Names, Addresses Of Trans Members

www.erininthemorning.com

> On Thursday, a legal filing by PFLAG National revealed that Attorney General Ken Paxton of Texas was seeking identification of transgender members. The organization alleges retaliation. ::: spoiler Full Text In a legal filing Thursday, PFLAG National sought to block a new demand from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that would require the organization to identify its Texas transgender members, doctors who work with them, and contingency plans for anti-transgender legislation in the state. The civil investigative demand, issued on Feb. 5, calls for extensive identifying information and records from the LGBTQ+ rights organization. PFLAG, in its filing to block the demands, describes them as "retaliation" for its opposition to anti-transgender laws in the state and alleges that they violate the freedom of speech and association protections afforded by the United States and Texas constitutions. The demands are extensive. The letter to PFLAG National demands "unredacted" information around claims made by Brian Bond, PFLAG's Chief Executive Officer, in a legal fight against the ban on gender-affirming care in the state. Bond's claims highlighted that PFLAG represents 1,500 members in Texas, many of whom are seeking contingency plans if SB14, the ban on gender-affirming care, takes effect. Per the lawsuit, PFLAG National states that it would be required to disclose Texas trans youth members, including "complete names, Social Security numbers, dates of birth, jobs, home addresses, telephone numbers, [and] email addresses." It also states they would need to hand over documents and communications related to their medical care, hospitals outside the state, and "contingency plans" discussed among members for navigating the new laws on gender-affirming care in Texas. You can see see some of the questions asked in the civil investigative demand here: - Demand for full information. -Demands that include substantiation of claims by Brian Bond, CEO of PFLAG National; these claims include the existence of 1,500 families in Texas. - Demands that include contingency plans on going out of state or moving. The demands also encompass communications with out-of-state healthcare organizations, including QMed in Georgia, Seattle Children's Hospital, and Plume. Previous reports have revealed similar civil investigative demands issued to these out-of-state healthcare providers, seeking information on all patients from Texas who have received their gender-affirming care in Washington State at Seattle Children’s Hospitals. Seattle Children's Hospital, in a legal response, argued that such care, conducted entirely within the state of Washington, falls outside Texas's jurisdiction. It further contended that Washington has a shield law prohibiting the sharing of protected private information related to transgender and abortion care with out-of-state entities. That lawsuit is still ongoing. This is not the first attempt by Attorney General Ken Paxton to identify transgender people in the state. The filing points to a previous attempt to “compile a list of individuals who had changed their their gender” on Texas driver’s licenses. This is part of a “pattern of seeking identifying information about anyone who is transgender in Texas,” according to the filing. PFLAG National alleges that the demands are an "overly broad, unreasonably burdensome fishing expedition” that violates its member’s rights to freedom of petition, association, speech, and assembly. It also alleges that they are a violation of prohibitions on unjustified searches and seizures, and that the use of civil investigative demands are an attempt to get around judicial decisions that have blocked Paxton from making similar requests in ongoing court fights. The organization also alleges retaliation for standing up for transgender families in the state. “These Demands are a clear and unmistakable overreach by the OAG in retaliation for PFLAG successfully standing up for its members, who include Texas transgender youth and their families, against the OAG’s, the Attorney General’s, and the State of Texas’s relentless campaign to persecute Texas trans youth and their loving parents,” the filing reads. In an interview with Mandy Giles, founder of Parents of Trans Youth and former PFLAG Houston president, she concurs with the allegation of retaliation, stating, “Paxton would retaliate against PFLAG… the families can’t defend themselves. They are too scared to be visible. They can’t fight back, they can’t fight for their kids, they can’t fight for themselves, or their trans loved ones. When PFLAG stepped up to help, it was a saving grace. To have them be attacked this way feels like we all are getting attacked.” When asked about the specific demands for contingency plans, she paused to collect herself, stating, “This is the families worst fear… that something that was offered to them for protection could come back and hurt them…. the nerve of Paxton asking for families escape plans when he was the reason they were escaping.” Sadie Hernandez, communications manager for Transgender Education Network of Texas, stated that while Paxton was targeting transgender people now, the methods overlap with other fights in the state for reproductive healthcare and bodily autonomy. “The way they are coming after trans folks has been seen in the way they are going after abortion rights. We have an idea of what is in their playbook.” She also emphasized the unique impacts these enforcement efforts have on marginalized communities within the trans community, such as undocumented immigrants, “When we talk about folks disproportionately impacted, immigrant and undocumented trans folks who can’t leave the state, or if you are in a border checkpoint can’t even leave the area to receive any kind of gender-affirming care…there will be a lot of folks left out of being able to access care.” Responding to the Lawsuit, Lambda Legal Senior Counsel and Director of Constitutional Law Practice Karen Loewy stated, “The Attorney General’s demand of PFLAG National is just another attempt to scare Texas families with transgender adolescents into abandoning their rights and smacks of retaliation against PFLAG National for standing up for those families against the State’s persecution.But PFLAG members’ rights to join together for mutual support, community, and encouragement are strong and we will fight to protect them.” PFLAG National is represented in the case by Lambda Legal, the ACLU and the ACLU of Texas, The Transgender Law Center, and Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer LLP. The Transgender Education Network of Texas provided several funds that they work with, including the Frontera Fund, Fund Texas Choice, TEA Fund, Avow, and Lilith Fund. ::: --- The stupidest part is where they make leaving your shitty ass state feel illegal. What are we, serfs?

games Ideology • 8mo ago • 100%

Grippy Golf - What if Katamari but golf?

mastodon.gamedev.place

> My game is releasing today! 😱😱 > > It's a speedrunning golf game where objects stick to the ball, and the goal is to get a hole-in-one on every level. > > ✨Get it on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2299080?utm_source=mastodon > 🙏Please like and repost! > > #Gaming #Gamedev #Indiedev

traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns Ideology • 8mo ago • 100%

Trans Rescue seems to be looking for help with advertising

Note: I'm not affiliated with them. Please refer to the mastodon link in the title for info on the org. > If you have some spare time over the next 6 weeks and have #voiceacting, #audio editing, #video editing, video production, #illustration, #3D graphics, writing, or similar skills and would be up for helping us help #trans Americans, please drop us a line at annie@transrescue.org We're hoping to produce a lot of content over the next few months.

traaaaaaannnnnnnnnns Ideology • 9mo ago • 100%

Doing a little survey

Guys, why does my back hurt?


the_dunk_tank Ideology • 11mo ago • 100%

Redditors complaining that there are cannibals in the Russian army

old.reddit.com

1. Is this a real thing? 2. Despite the "no racism" modpost a lot of comments are basically insinuating that Russians are inherently dangerous. 3. https://daily.jstor.org/how-prisoners-contributed-during-wwii/

latam Ideology • 1y ago • 100%

Mexican student protestors ram a truck into a barracks, military accidentally teargasses preschool in response

> Mexican students vandalized this Thursday the 35th Military Zone in Chilpancingo, capital of Guerrero, during a protest against the Mexican Army before the upcoming ninth anniversary of the disappearance of the 43 students of Ayotzinapa, on September 26. > > The youth, accompanied by social organizations, demonstrated outside the barracks of the Armed Forces considering that they are implicated in the disappearance that occurred in the municipality of Iguala in 2014. > > The protesters painted the stone walls of the barracks with phrases such as "It was the Army" and "Ayotzi lives" among others. > > In addition, they removed one of the barricades from the main gate in order to [ram it with] a van belonging to a potato chip company. > > The students blamed the military for having participated in the disappearance and for hiding key information to find the whereabouts of their comrades. > > At the end of their speeches, the demonstrators threw explosives and rocks into the barracks and at the truck. > > However, from inside, the [military police responded] with tear gas bombs. > > The wind caused the gas to disperse to a nearby neighborhood [and intoxicated some 30] pre-school children. > > https://t.ly/c06li

www.davidrevoy.com

A fun little tutorial I saw that converts touchscreen controls for drawing tablets back to physical keys. 

history Ideology • 1y ago • 98%

Estonian Population 1800-2020

So I was reading through [@sunaurus@lemm.ee](https://lemm.ee/u/sunaurus) 's comment about Estonian demographic history and felt intrigued by some of the claims, so I did a teeny tiny bit of digging to see what I could find. So here goes: 1. The Estonian population expanded rapidly during the industrial revolution right up to the 1910s. 2. World War 1 and the Great Depression manage to suppress population growth for the next decade. 3. Nazi occupation of Estonia (marked RKO) coincides with WW2. The vast majority of ethnic Jews flee to the USSR, and those whl stayed behind were exterminated. The nazis and their Estonian collaborators built concentration camps. This coincides with a dip in the graph. 4. After WW2, Estonia is back under the USSR. The first Estonian SSR was established in 1940-1941 when nazi occupation started. After some lag, the population begins climbing on the same curve it did before. The population of the country peaks in 1989. 5. 20000 people were deported to Russia very early in the existence of the SSR 6. The nazis aimed to remove 50% of the population on paper but only had 4yrs to do so. This means using concentration camps on ethnic Estonians for germans to take their homes/land as in palestine today. 7. 20k is not the same as sunaurus's 20% claim, not even close. 20% *does* however match the proportion of modern estonians who are russian. The obvious conclusion one can gather from this comparison is that this is not dissimilar to Great Replacement propaganda. The assumption here is that ethnic Russians are taking up Estonian space, because the evidence points to [massive population growth](https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Natural_population_increase_of_Estonia_(1945-2008).png) under the ussr rather than a contraction like the one that occurred with German occupation. [Immigration was highest](https://image2.slideserve.com/5185693/net-migration-rate-1960-2011-estonia-and-major-regions-of-europe-l.jpg) during that huge growth period, so I'm curious where all those excess deaths and gulags occurred to have not slowed or stopped said growth. It sounds to me like this person is just intimidated by people they consider foreign.