My aunt visited Afghanistan as a tourist, in a christian group of women, in the 1960's. I really wish I could do the same when I retire.
Usually, an impact study is made before such type of laws are made:
- if this law is enacted, how much will it cost to the manufacturers to update their factory settings?
- how will this be impacted on the device cost in the UK compared to other markets?
- how many users will get stuck when losing the unique ID of the device, what are the recovery procedures, how costly is it to end users?
- how many users will be protected by the measure and what cost for society does it represent?
- how many users will set a dumb password anyhow and what is the cost for society?
I’d be curious to see the impact study, as many of those are actually botched.
Note that they present the issue only as a financial problem rather than an actual threat to the environment or people.
You wildly overestimate the danger nuclear waste represents.
First, transportation is done in small amounts at a time, completely encased in concrete and steel, and is of no risk of exploding: the only danger would be spillovers, which would call for expensive cleaning operations.
Next, storage. The whole waste produced by 60 years of nuclear waste in France amounts to only a few swimming pools of dangerous material. If this material was actually fully useless, we could ditch it in geological layers underground where it would become soon unreachable and dispersed, posing no discernable danger for the upcoming few billion years.
Furthermore, the only reason we don't ditch this nuclear waste right now is that this material can still be useful for plenty of uses that are not yet economically viable, but could be in the long term, such as energy generation with low-yield reactors.
Too bad neither Israel nor the US are member of the ICC. That gives them far less leverage, even though they will likely put pressure on some weaker members of the ICC.
I remember the early 90's when fiber connection was being developed in research centers.
Researchers had found a way to transmit all of a country's phone calls' bandwidth through a simple fiber cable. Then, they wondered: what could we use this for?
This was a few years before the explosion of the internet...
That's why trade unions in France maintain their own security forces, trained to spot troublemakers or hysterical militants and reign them in. Perhaps is this what makes for successful démonstrations.
What prevents you from revoking your payment mandate at your bank?
In Europe at least, your bank must honor this request and there's nothing your debtor can do about except spending 1000's to recover at most 3 months of payments with the current legal apparatus in Europe.
The product advertises its AI, the person who implemented the feature was hired as a data scientist, and the technical solution is called logistic regression.
I'm afraid forcing watermarking generated content is doomed to fail, for 2 reasons: first it has to be voluntary, second, watermarking can always be removed if one does not care about preserving the exact content.
Rather, I believe systematically signing original content may alleviate some of the issues created by algorithmic content generation.
At one of my clients, a large institution, they go further: you're not allowed to use the local browser's password manager. And still have to abide by the usual password rules: rotate every 3 months, complex passwords, etc.
As a result,, users store a plain text file on their desktop (some go as far as printing it), that conveniently allows them to retrieve their passwords.
Too much security kills security.
At my modest scale, I was banned from reddit/worldnews for pointing out that the title of the stickied thread "Iran attacks Israel" was not suited anymore to the events in gaza, and that this thread's very low upvote count was a show that its content was not so consensual.
There are lots of efforts by Likud extremists to reshape the narrative and suppress dissent.
But I'm optimistic that their efforts won't work: the students protests are strong enough, alternative communities like r/internationalnews are developing, so that a more balanced perspective emerges, that doesn't downplay Israeli crimes against humanity.