301–310 of 395 posts
> We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services The acronym "KYC" doesn't appear in the linked article. What is this even about?
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If you rent a VPS in supposedly privacy-conscious Germany they need photo id too :( Luckily there's other cheap options in Europe like in France.
I don't think that is a legal requirement in Germany. At least Hetzner lets you rent a German VPS or dedicated server without ID. Though Hetzner may require you to submit an ID if you are flagged by their automated systems upon registration.
Maybe they changed it now but they were asses about it then. I thought it was a legal requirement, they basically said as much though I don't recall the exact details, it was before the pandemic.
Eventually I just moved to Scaleway in France which is much nicer and cheaper and you can even talk to their support on slack.
PS: I don't do anything nefarious on my servers but I just don't want my ID on file anywhere it's not needed.
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That's silly, no Wordpress hosting has H100 GPUs hooked up to it. If you skim the full context of this proposal and the topics it focuses on (dedicated servers, virtual servers, AI acceleration), and you've been paying attention to current geopolitics in these areas (top chips being sanctioned), it is completely obvious that goal here is to prevent things like evading sanctions by renting hardware instead of buying i…
What stops them? You could have a WordPress plugin that uses Stable Diffusion to generate images, or encodes uploaded video, or provides an AI chatbot, and needs fast GPUs because there are a lot of users. Providers will supply anything the customer is willing to pay for. The expected AI plugins would be doing inference rather than training, but the user could use the same hardware for plugins that do something else.
I suppose every company and every service should be in scope for KYC then. /s
But the reality is that Wordpress hosts are not in the business of renting people dedicated servers the price of a nice house. And if they were asked to do so, it wouldn't be a simple automated request without scrutiny.
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>Banking is the first industry where I encountered KYC, and it strikes me as being obviously good there. This is not obvious to me as my experience has been largely negative post-KYC/9-11 vs pre-KYC/9-11. I am a legal law abiding citizen [and voter!] and it's just added extra hassle on various occasions and then the background anxiety of knowing an institution with crappy security track records hold a photocopy of my…
I am familiar with KYC from a banker's perspective (at least that of a close relative who was a bank manager). KYC helped them by deny-listing abusive clients between branches, or by allowing the bank to develop heuristics for things like allowing customers to bypass cheque clearing times. From an end-user perspective, I've had no hangups personally but I do share your grievances about yet-another-shoddy institution…
What can I do as a broke guy to stop this? Write a comment? Will it be read or considered?
This will pass regardless of comments and KYC will only get more strict from here on out. What other end result could there have been when the combined gov-corp-tech behemoth is incredibly data-hungry, obsessed with draconian surveillance, and about to be deluged with malicious AI across the internet? It starts with "suspected" foreign actors and ends with everyone needing to prove their humanity for every little thi…
That's the logical end-game of all this in case you don't have the foresight to see where this road leads.
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There is no right to anonymously express political opinions. There is a right to express political opinions, but anonymity is a privilege, not a right.
The converse would have to be true then, that the government has the legitimate power to intimidate people to not express their opinion. This does not seem like a legitimate power for government to have, but now I need to be careful whether I express it at all.
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I see controversy and a lot of dissent among Justices, but no decisions that explicitly declare a Constitutional right to anonymity. And the modern Court explicitly declared that a Constitutional right to privacy does not exist, and one cannot have anonymity without privacy, so no.
> I see controversy and a lot of dissent among Justices, Precedent is set by the majority, not the dissent. > but no decisions that explicitly declare a Constitutional right to anonymity. Weird then that there are several decisions striking down laws that violate the right to anonymous speech? > And the modern Court explicitly declared that a Constitutional right to privacy does not exist, and one cannot have anonymi…
Yes. I believe a right to privacy once existed, but it was nullified as it formed the basis of the case for Roe V. Wade. As a result even the Fourth Amendment is weakened because it must be interpreted in the light of a right to privacy no longer existing.
What I'm trying to put forth is that the assumptions you're working under are no longer valid and we've thrown the baby out with the bathwater.
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What stops them? You could have a WordPress plugin that uses Stable Diffusion to generate images, or encodes uploaded video, or provides an AI chatbot, and needs fast GPUs because there are a lot of users. Providers will supply anything the customer is willing to pay for. The expected AI plugins would be doing inference rather than training, but the user could use the same hardware for plugins that do something else.
> Providers will supply anything the customer is willing to pay for. I suppose every company and every service should be in scope for KYC then. /s But the reality is that Wordpress hosts are not in the business of renting people dedicated servers the price of a nice house. And if they were asked to do so, it wouldn't be a simple automated request without scrutiny.
The latter is one of the reasons rules like this are simultaneously so expensive and ineffective. Provider A decides to KYC everybody because they're big and risk averse, so the rules inconvenience millions of innocent people. Provider B wants to make money selling GPUs to foreigners, so they implicitly choose a structure that allows that to happen if the rules contain any loopholes whatsoever. (This ignoring that foreign customers could just switch to foreign hosts and cost US companies business for no reason.)
And if the premise is the level of resources being consumed rather than the type of service then why don't the rules exempt anyone spending less than e.g. $50,000/month? That would be almost everyone while still not being anyone buying enough compute to do major AI training. It still wouldn't work but at least it would have much less overhead.
This will pass regardless of comments and KYC will only get more strict from here on out. What other end result could there have been when the combined gov-corp-tech behemoth is incredibly data-hungry, obsessed with draconian surveillance, and about to be deluged with malicious AI across the internet? It starts with "suspected" foreign actors and ends with everyone needing to prove their humanity for every little thi…
Next thing you know if you make one comment about Israel or certain coincidences you will be debanked, cut off from all Internet services, unable to make payments, blacklisted from all employers, your payment accounts frozen, ultimately resulting in eviction for non-payment, then shortly thereafter homeless, hungry, dead, or in prison. That's the logical end-game of all this in case you don't have the foresight to se…