ACLU v Ashcroft and ACLU v Reno are really interesting to read, if you haven’t already.

Part of the conclusion of the court at that time was (at least regarding the CDA):

In order to deny minors access to potentially harmful speech, the CDA effectively suppresses a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive and to address to one another. That burden on adult speech is unacceptable if less restrictive alternatives would be at least as effective in achieving the legitimate purpose that the statute was enacted to serve

In ACLU vs. Ashcroft, the court ruled that less restrictive measures like Internet filters should be used, rather than the law in question (COPA).

I kind of think an argument exists that a system like what you mentioned with cryptographic keys could be a “less restrictive measures” given today’s technology. But I think we should still be careful, and keep in mind that nearly all pornography (with the exception of obscenity – a very narrowly defined category) is speech that enjoys strong protections under the First Amendment. So any decisions around restricting this free speech, regardless of our good intentions in protecting our children, can have unintended negative consequences around first amendment speech in general.

I assume the goal is not actually to keep kids from watching porn but rather to have a chilling effect on it

Probably a safe assumption. It’s difficult to tend towards other conclusions when the state of Utah has declared pornography a public health crisis, for example. Children are often just a means to an end in laws and public conversation. But don’t forget that most of these kinds of “protect the children” laws are often rooted in some sort of good intentions, so I can’t completely ascribe malice to the actions of these lawmakers. Evil is often wrapped in good intentions.

By the way, part of the Free Speech Coalition’s arguments in Utah was around the impossibility of actually implementing age verification as no system actually exists in Utah to enforce that. Utah’s law essentially ducks the first amendment by outsourcing enforcement to private action rather than government action. Scary stuff.

And what about phones with a removable battery? Would be real nice to keep a couple spares instead of a big power brick I have to charge it from.

I have been happy to get outside my bubble a little bit. But at the same time, many of the Marxists here seem to be in their own bubble.

I love it.

They were too busy getting shit to just work.

True. To be fair, I believe the original terms required you pay for a minimum of 5 employees (so $50/mo). No great love for Google here, and I would love to see the courts make them honor something like this if they did indeed advertise falsely.

Correct, I had the same GSuite setup (for the purpose of keeping backups) and they kept billing me even after they set my drive to read only. They only stopped when I decided to cancel the account myself. IIRC the minimum was around $10/mo. Technically you were supposed to have 5 employees in your GSuite “company” at $10/mo per license, but they didn’t really check, so I just had myself as the sole employee.

People have served time in prison for simple URL incrementing on public websites.

Yeah he was probably paying like $10/mo for a really basic GSuite organization with unlimited data. I know because I did that for a few years with some TBs of backups. When I first set the account up, I knew with certainty that Google would eventually cut me off because yeah that kind of service is worth way more than $10/mo in reality.

I’ve been getting emails for months saying I’m over the limit. I can’t remember if they ever said specifically they would delete my data because I stopped paying for it before it got to that point. Kind of crazy IMHO to assume Google will store so many TBs forever for only $10/mo. Still, would be real nice of them to give this guy a little more time to download his data.

My Google Pixel 5a died recently. To their credit, Google did extend the warranty on the 5a (probably would have been sued otherwise because these devices are dropping dead every day), but attempting to actually claim warranty was the most bizarre Kafkaesque process.

Ultimately it took me 6 weeks and at least 10 follow-ups with Google. They would forget things (like how to get information from their partner uBreakiFix) and would need me to do the legwork for them. Every time I called them I got the following impression:

1. Customer service agents at Google have NO power to do ANYTHING but read a script and follow policy. I know this is a common complaint with big companies, but I’ve been on this earth awhile and dealt with a lot of companies, and it honestly shocked me how little power the agents at Google had to actually help. Never seen anything like it before.

2. The agents similarly have no access to any information that might help you. In my case, once my RMA was delayed, every time I would call they would basically “check” on it, and the answer was basically: “well the replacement should have shipped by now, and I have no idea why it didn’t, so I’m just going to add another 5 business days to the last estimate we gave you”. No one was ever able to figure out the reason for the delay.

I was getting ready to file in small claims court against Google since it looked like they had no intention of honoring their warranty, but decided to give the old “get support via Tweet” method, which did actually get results. The funny thing was that Google scolded me for providing my RMA number via Twitter DMs since it’s “private information” and I should have given them a case number that agents were supposed to provide me, but never did.

The social media escalation team did manage to get Google to overnight me a replacement after I reached out. However, after this experience (as you say, unhuman), I see no moral issue with stuff like blocking ads on YouTube. I think Google have fully shown their cards, at least to me, that they don’t really care about service.

I realize they can’t run something like YouTube like a small community website, for example, and that they do have to make money as a business. I kind of get where some of their recent actions come from. But I feel similarly to how I feel about media companies whose content I pirate. It’s really not my problem, and not my job to help them figure out how to compete with piracy. Valve got shit figured out with Steam, and I’ve spent hundreds of dollars buying games on there. Media companies seemed like they had things figured out at one point with Netflix, but it wasn’t sustainable, plus they got way too greedy. Google used to have their shit together, but they are being too heavy handed and anti consumer now.

In my position now I have at least some influence on the products that my company uses, and I would never recommend that we buy anything from Google if we can help it since the risk of being stonewalled by their support seems so high, and I’ve experienced that personally. In my personal life, I have a goal to get off of Google’s services when I can, and pull all my data out. I don’t ever want to be in a position again where I’m thinking of suing a company, but worried that they’ll use my data and my reliance on their services as leverage against me the way Google can.

I think that’s a big part of why Google doesn’t fight (and in fact helps) the banking and streaming companies that want to lock down Android more. It’s harder to block ads if you can’t block them in the browser and can’t block them system wide via hosts file. (Yes you can use VPN + DNS, but it’s a lot more battery intensive.)

A left one and a right one.

Just to update this: I got a new phone and had the exact same issue.

I went to settings -> Sync Ultra and went through the flow to purchase lifetime (which I had already bought). This brought up a message saying I already have Sync, and the notification with the guy raising his glass.

So it looks like the purchase flow works fine, just the “restore purchase flow” gives me an error for whatever reason.

Large portions of Lemmy feel similar to places like /r/sino on Reddit. Personally I like to look at that stuff from time to time just to keep tabs on that flavor of propaganda, but it’s pretty detached from reality.

I keep Teams on my Android phone but installed in its own isolated work profile via Shelter.

You are 100% correct, but multiple unconstitutional “think of the children” style laws have already been passed in several states. The status quo of pornography being protected speech is only a result of multiple litigations on behalf of the ACLU over the years. The reality is unconstitutional laws will keep being passed, and challenging them takes a lot of time and money, without any guarantee of success.

The term “public record” usually refers to records that a government is required to maintain and make accessible to the public. In most states, I believe SMS messages sent by government employees while conducting official business are considered in-scope (though there may be other laws that make certain messages private).

As far as whether your SMS messages can be accessed by law enforcement without a warrant, it gets more complicated.

Older than 180 days? Fair game. A court or government agency can subpoena your provider without any requirement to notify you, per the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986.

Newer than 180 days? A warrant is required, but there are exceptions. For example, administrative subpoenas are allowed in cases of national security.

Records of incoming/outgoing calls require only a subpoena, same with cell tower geolocation data and IP addresses. However, wiretapping of actual calls requires a warrant.

The reality of how and when the government accesses your data in the real world is probably different than the laws as written, so of course take everything with a grain of salt. The best solution with text messages is at least E2E encryption so that the provider cannot store them. (Accessing messages stored on your device itself does require a warrant).

It’s basically like the beans thing.

I’ve been using zsh with oh-my-zsh for almost a decade, but sounds like I might want to try Fish + Starship.

No worries, thanks anyways for the help.