Hacker News: fivetomidnight

New comment by fivetomidnight in "Mini Micro Fantasy Computer"

fivetomidnight — Wed, 27 May 2026 10:49:54 +0000

Free but not Open Source? Did I miss that?

New comment by fivetomidnight in "Schools Never Taught Critical Thinking: AI Exposed the Lie"

fivetomidnight — Tue, 14 Apr 2026 19:58:29 +0000

Looks like you found the ad/sponsor block in the article.

New comment by fivetomidnight in "Mozilla to launch free built-in VPN in upcoming Firefox 149"

fivetomidnight — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:42:19 +0000

I see it more like a question than a rule.

"The service is free. Am I the product?"

That is a valid thing to ask. Even with FOSS sometimes.

Some FOSS projects are backed by companies, then yes, plausible to ask.

Otherwise, I would answer with a clear no.

(Projects can still collect telemetry and other data and sell that, though the sell part should be very rare, imo...)

Edit: Was that a bad faith argument or a honest question?

Sometimes I can't tell, maybe because of old or ESL...

New comment by fivetomidnight in "Meta Platforms: Lobbying, dark money, and the App Store Accountability Act"

fivetomidnight — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 10:34:46 +0000

I get what you mean, but I might have miscommunicated a bit.

Clarification: "are set to" means by the parent. "Accounts and Applications to services that provide countent" like media content providing apps like discord, netflix, etc. that ARE able and/or bound to rate their content.

Package Manager and Software Installation in general are usually locked behind root/admin passwords anyway. Especially on kids' devices their user should be non-admin, no?

So, when any piece of software is installed, it is by choice of the parent.

That's not unreasonable then?

New comment by fivetomidnight in "I traced $2B in grants and 45 states' lobbying behind age‑verification bills"

fivetomidnight — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 12:41:49 +0000

No. This is not the way.

> give parents the ABILITY to advertise the users age to browsers, apps and everything in between.

Accounts and Applications to services that provide countent are set to a country-specific age rating restrictions (PG, 12+, 18+, whatever). That's it.

None of the things you mentioned have any point to concern themself with the age or age-bracket of the user in front of the device. This can and will be abused. This is very obvious. Think about it.