Hacker News: big85

New comment by big85 in "Windows 11's built-in Weather app wastes more than 1 GB of RAM"

big85 — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 16:33:26 +0000

LumiWeather for AmigaOS runs on 2 MB RAM.

New comment by big85 in "Online Safety Act – Call for Evidence"

big85 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 19:46:04 +0000

UK Parliament accepting submissions for evidence regarding the effect of the Online Safety Act (including its failures and detrimental effects, I should note). Deadline is 7 September 2026.

Online Safety Act – Call for Evidence

big85 — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 19:46:04 +0000

Article URL: https://committees.parliament.uk/submission/3964/#/evidence/3964/call-for-evidence

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49160508

Points: 6

# Comments: 1

New comment by big85 in "EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation"

big85 — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 22:08:31 +0000

All this ostensibly to keep teenage boys from watching Pornhub (when parental controls already exist).

The real reason, of course, is to force people to connect strong real-life identifiers to online activity. Mobile first, then Windows. Then Linux is too weak to oppose on its own, and will adapt or die.

New comment by big85 in "EU Age Verification Project Mandates Hardware-Bound Attestation"

big85 — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 22:03:13 +0000

So much for the EU's mission to reduce e-waste.

New comment by big85 in "GrapheneOS duress PIN could land a man in prison"

big85 — Sat, 25 Jul 2026 17:26:36 +0000

This event is excellent advertisement for GrapheneOS and its privacy and security features.

New comment by big85 in "Should robots be considered as slaves?"

big85 — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 03:06:41 +0000

The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Measure of a Man" discusses this topic. Data, an android, is put on trial to determine whether he has personhood, or is merely a machine. One of the best early-season episodes.

New comment by big85 in "Even Microsoft couldn't make Windows 11 work well on 8GB of RAM"

big85 — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 00:20:16 +0000

It's bizarre to see 8GB spoken of as barely sufficient for basic uses. I remember when the baseline was measured in megabytes.

New comment by big85 in "Wikipedia escapes Category 1 designation under the UK Online Safety Act for now"

big85 — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 17:21:44 +0000

If you don't fight government overreach now, it becomes permanent.

New comment by big85 in "Show HN: Chiptune Radio"

big85 — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 02:00:04 +0000

There's also Nectarine Demoscene Radio: https://www.scenestream.net/demovibes/

New comment by big85 in "Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament"

big85 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:15:57 +0000

No, I want to know specifically.

New comment by big85 in "Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament"

big85 — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 16:02:17 +0000

The Wikipedia entry on Chat Control doesn't go into enough detail on what exactly it does, only the history of its legislative process. Can someone update it?

New comment by big85 in "Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech"

big85 — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 10:43:23 +0000

Parental controls. Client-side blocking of content. Apple's parental controls are so good that parents give young children unsupervised internet access--the entire generation if iPad babies. Current iPads even use on-device AI to detect nudity in photos and prevent them from being taken, sent, recieved, or viewed.

New comment by big85 in "Age verification is just a precursor to automated attribution of speech"

big85 — Mon, 29 Jun 2026 10:36:37 +0000

The existing paradigm is on-device parental controls. It's worked for the past 30 years, and the alternative is forcing everyone to show government ID to use websites.

New comment by big85 in "Did my old job only exist because of fraud?"

big85 — Mon, 22 Jun 2026 00:15:32 +0000

I vaguely recall a story about an employee who discovered that their company's sales department was acquiring a lot of new customers to hit some metrics, but rarely actually closing the deal. The employee spent months chasing up incomplete sales orders, and discovered that the sales department's apparent success was illusory.

New comment by big85 in "VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'"

big85 — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 16:56:39 +0000

Most VPN companies won't implement age verification, because their purpose is privacy. This is really an attempt to ban VPNs. This won't be popular when 70% of the population uses VPNs.

New comment by big85 in "VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'"

big85 — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 16:47:52 +0000

UK government has been talking about digital ID for a while now. The existing verification methods are too vulnerable to cheating (fake beards, fake ID, borrow dad's credit card, etc...), so the logical next step is direct government ID numbers. The goal is to link all online activity to a unique identifier to make it easier to punish dissent.

New comment by big85 in "VPN ban update for UK households as government looks at 'age-gate'"

big85 — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 16:43:24 +0000

> You don’t. You can’t. So everyone gets carded.

Exactly. A little at a time. First it's adult sites, because if you need to show ID to buy alcohol, shouldn't you need ID to buy pornography? Once that's accepted, expand the sphere of control to non-adult sites too by redefining everything as 16+.

New comment by big85 in "Think of the children: How to force real ID for all internet traffic (2023)"

big85 — Sat, 20 Jun 2026 01:42:11 +0000

I suspect something like this is on the way, in the long term. Every site has some Cloudflare captcha or the like to guard against the AI scraper bots. Eventually, we may need some kind of token which is only issued to real humans.

New comment by big85 in "Think of the children: How to force real ID for all internet traffic (2023)"

big85 — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 23:33:34 +0000

I wonder why the rating code is so complex. Pornhub.com has this code enabled, but it also uses a simpler . 4chan also uses the latter.