I’ve run across a few sites that allow me to check out entirely through Google Pay or PayPal, but not many. I still don’t love the info going through Google, but at this point they already have all my information, so it doesn’t really make much of a difference at this point.

And of course for anything that needs to be shipped they are going to need a name and shipping address.

I would like to seeegally mandatory “guest checkout” options with protections on data use. They’ll need to keep some kind of invoice/receipt of the transaction, but it should be illegal to use it for any other purposes than order/purchase tracking for guest accounts.

Aren’t cellphone NFC payment essentially a long-form version of this? As far as the machine is concerned they’re getting your CC info, but Google/Samsung/Apple Pay are acting as a middleman and your actual credit card information is never actually shared.

Twitch is bad about this. It’s not a fucking ballistic missile installation - just tell me what you want.

I swear password restrictions are getting to the point where there’s eventually going to only be one usable password.

Anonymous data collection at scale is a myth.

Anonymous data collection on me when assembled will say that I’m a 40-49yo unmarried college-educated male working in one area in a certain industry and living in another area.

Only one person meets all those criteria, and it’s me.

Their counter-argument isn’t a legal argument. They’re saying they did it because they think the publishers aren’t being fair.

And they’re talking mostly about format-conversion, which isn’t the problem here.

You can absolutely make format conversions to digital for archival purposes. What you cannot do is them make a bunch of copies and give them away for free simultaneous use. That is not fair use. That’s 100% piracy.

The CDL was built specifically to ensure that only one digital copy was on loan for each owned copy of the material because the IA absolutely knew that was the law.

In this case, they absolutely did. They had a CDL in place specifically to comply with copyright law, and they willfully and intentionally disabled it.

The publishers also had arrangements with local libraries to expand their ebook selections. Most libraries have ebook and audiobook deals worked out with the publishers, and those were expanded during the lockdowns. Many of the partner libraries preferred those systems to the CDL because they served their citizens directly. A small town in Nebraska didn’t have to worry about having a wait list of 3000 people ahead of the local citizen whose taxes had actually bought the license the Internet Archive wanted to borrow.

The Internet Archive held a press conference right before the ruling comparing the National Emergency Library to winter-library lands, but that’s simply not accurate. The CDL they had in place before and after was inter-library loaning. The CDL was like setting up printing presses in the library and copying books for free and handing them out to anyone.

Under the existing CDL, they could have verified that partner libraries had stopped lending their phycical copies of the books and made more copies of the ebooks available for checkout instead of just making it unlimited and they’d have legally been fine, but they did not, and the publishers had every right to sue.

The publishes also waited until June to file suit: well-after most places had been re-opened for weeks.

IA does important work, but they absolutely broke the law here, and since they did it by intentionally removing the systems designed to ensure legitimate archival status and fair-use of copywritten works, they have pretty much zero defense. It wasn’t a mistake or an oversight. And after reopening they kept doing it for weeks until they were sued and were able to magically restore the legal system the same day the lawsuit was filed.

Data-mine the information you intentionally did not put on the cloud.

I work in an enclave city for the ultra-rich. We have lots of celebrities and billionaires. There are fewer than 1000 homes and the taxable value of residences in town is nearly 4 billion.

Anyway: it’s hard to know who owns what because most of them put their property under an LLC named after the address to protect their privacy.

Most of them the second button down on the right is mute, though I’ve been running into some recently that disabled the mute.

Anyway, I sharpie a “mute” next to the button on stations where it isn’t labeled for other people. It’s one bit of graffiti that I’m not at all conflicted about.

Hiding money in anonymous crypto is a way to avoid paying taxes or launder money.

Trump made crypto trading cards so Russia and Saudi Arabia could contribute to him anonymously.

Ads in Windows are infuriating whether you’re talking about panes of glass or your laptop.

The plan should be “Tracking opt-in required - no banners or notifications allowed.”

If a CCP-comtrolled company wants kernel-level access, the game should be banned. Full stop.

Advertisements are pretty specifically not free.

Or maybe make free, optional events optional and ask that parents that have their kids participating with the waiver.

If it’s that important to keep your kids out of any photos, they shouldn’t be attending the events in the first place. Even if ai don’t post pictures online, SOMEBODY will.

I’ve done photography for events in very sensitive situations, including an event at a boarding school for abused children facility in a secret location where the identities of children are kept secret so their abusive parents can’t find them. In that case I framed shots to not include areas where the kids were located, cut the video recordings any time a kid went up on stage for any of the presentation, I cut any audio where any child’s voice was noticeable among the crowd or any times a name was heard. With weeks of proper planning it can be done.

And the next day there were hundreds of pictures all over Facebook b cause everybody has a camera a in their pocket and I can’t control for that.

As someone who had done photography for school events, thie policy exists because I don’t know one kid from another, and when I have dozens of shots with 400 kids in them, some are going to slip through the cracks when photos are posted online.

“No reason to use Windows except 2 of the biggest reasons to use a PC.”