2. Visit the site in Tor Browser

3. Tell everyone you know about 1 and 2, and remind them that if they ever actually "verify their age" or any other bullshit, they're likely to have their identity stolen and their details leaked. Never do this. Tell the government to suck a fat one.

4. Use https://www.writetothem.com/ to write to your MP and tell them to repeal the Online Safety Act. It's a censorship and surveillance regime, it makes nobody any safer.

5. Consider joining https://www.openrightsgroup.org/

6. Vote Labour out of power at the next election. Tell all the other parties that they'll have your vote if they repeal the Online Safety Act

    After studying the website we decided it was best
    to pay priority boarding so we'd sit three abreast
    (three abreast, that's the best)
    And of course we'd all have luggage, so that's an extra cost
    And then we paid insurance in case our cases might get lost

The Intel ME / AMD PSP are creepy, and probably a security risk to the device owner, but they're not weird, you can run an OS without even knowing they're there, and they like it that way.

If you just amplify the whole track until its max amplitude reaches the medium's maximum, yes you could undo that.

But the loudness war aims to make the whole track even louder than that, by quietening those max peaks so they don't clip, then that gives you room to amplify the rest of the track even further. The dynamic range of the recording is permanently reduced.

MITM because you used http instead of https and you don't have any other verified cryptographic signature on your data -- get tae fuck, fix it pronto.

Sure, the Smithsonian has a nice article with a flowing narrative. But we want facts. Let's look up this Sequoyah chap:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah

> In 1821, Sequoyah completed his Cherokee syllabary, enabling reading and writing in the Cherokee language.

The link is right there, you can move right on to learning about what he created.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

- His original script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Original_Cherokee_Syllaba...

- More readable table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cherokee_Syllabary.svg

- Sample text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_language#Samples

https://unreal.fandom.com/wiki/Prisoner_849

> The character of Prisoner 849 is commonly speculated to be Gina, as her model (Female 1) and skin are the first character to appear in alphabetical order; this is even reinforced by UnCreature giving the female player a bio while the male player bio just reads "See Female Player". However, the character of Prisoner 849 is completely up to the player's choice, hence the use of neutral nouns in this article.

And the lie "users always read emails on the same device they're logging into a website with"

And the lie "users can always view HTML email so no need to send a plaintext equivalent, especially if I have a long complex URL I want them to click"

And the lie "Clickable links sent in email are more secure than passwords so I'll stop supporting passwords and instead rely on email delivery of a link for all logins. Whoever clicks that link first is definitely the user who wanted to log in"

Mirror's Edge has a female protagonist, but it's not an FPS (First Person Shooter). It's a parkour simulator which technically lets you shoot a gun in limited sections of the game, but the protagonist is a pacifist and you get a bonus for decommisioning guns rather than firing them.

If the thread would like some hard data:

- 19,526 games on Steam tagged "female protagonist" https://store.steampowered.com/search/?tags=7208&ndl=1

- 13,578 games on Steam tagged "FPS" https://store.steampowered.com/search/?tags=1663&ndl=1

- 727 games on Steam tagged both "female protagonist" and "FPS" https://store.steampowered.com/search/?tags=7208%2C1663&ndl=...

So it looks like the two categorisations, for the most part, don't intersect.

Notable counterexamples would include Rise of the Triad, Ion Fury, No One Lives Forever, Wolfenstein: Youngblood and Far Cry 6, but definitely rare. You'd be clutching at straws to describe Portal or Alien: Isolation as FPS (they're a puzzle game and survival horror game respectively), likewise the Resident Evil / Clock Tower / Fatal Frame / etc. games with the novelty option of switching to first-person view, they're naturally third-person perspective. Left 4 Dead has one female character out of four you can play. You might count that one DLC for Bioshock: Infinite where Elizabeth gets a shot (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E1lh-pb6Is). You might count the few FPS RPGs that there are with customisable characters (so yes Fallout, but not Mass Effect as it's third-person). But female protagonists are massively more prevalent in survival horror, metroidvania, third-person shooters (Tomb Raider, Monster Hunter, Horizon Zero Dawn, etc) and other genres besides FPS.

1. Donald Trump's Ego Trip - lessons for the new Scotland (2011) https://andywightman.scot/docs/trumpreport_v1a.pdf

2. You've Been Trumped (2011) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vr6efmndvps

There have always been people trying to push low-effort, low-value things as high-value things by copying the superficial aspects of high-value things. People literally do "judge a book by its cover", and can be tricked into buying it even when the contents are worthless.

People in a bookshop don't want to have to read entire chapters of each book they're thinking of buying in order to be sure they're all legitimate books of value. They want the bookseller to have done that for them, and know every book in the shop had at least some effort put into it.

The internet is not a bookshop. An enshittified platform like Amazon is not a bookshop. If a slopmaker can pay a platform to tout absolute slop, you now can't trust the platform. It's all so tiresome.

It's now just easier to perform that dishonesty and waste even more people's time than ever before.

- Sent from my iPhone

It seems they're now at the point where the sheer number of students that need improved maths skills overwhelms the staff, resulting in them failing.

Please see the graph "Growth of the Math 2 Population by Major (2019-2024)". UCSD's Math 2 class is remedial high-school level maths. It has grown from under 100 students in 2016-2020, to more and more people each year starting from 2021.

UCSD tested the people who took this class, and 25% of them could not answer the question "Fill in the box: 7 + 2 = [_] + 6" (with only pencil and paper allowed, no calculators or other electronics)

Sometimes the expert benefits just by being in the news, see for example NPR banning the expert they quoted 77 times, law professor Carl Tobias. Mainly because he'd write to them offering his opinion on the topics of the day, and as he is a law professor, even if the topic isn't law, NPR journalists couldn't help but accept his quotes to pad out their articles. https://www.mediaite.com/media/nprs-new-rule-for-2026-stop-q...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPEeaxI0OPU

If an employer says "don't break the law" but nonetheless incentivises their employees to break the law, it is the employer who is vicariously liable. A famous example being Domino Pizza's "30 minutes or its free" policy which incentivised their employees to ignore all driving laws in order to deliver within 30 minutes, their wages depended on it. This caused a number of crashes, injuries and deaths. One recent example, even since Dominos removed their policy, is Coryell v. Morris where they found Dominos still exercise control over their franchisees sufficiently to qualify for vicarious liability for the franchisee's employees' actions: https://law.justia.com/cases/pennsylvania/superior-court/202...

There was also a case where Air Canada was liable for its own chatbot's bad advice, as they chose to offer the chatbot for customer service. They are responsible for its actions: https://www.bbc.co.uk/travel/article/20240222-air-canada-cha...

There will be a line in the sand drawn in the future. I hope it's drawn so that people offering internet-based services, where they retain ultimate control of what a tool says/does, will be liable for what it says/does.