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Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

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Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#701

> On-device processing: Video selfies for facial age estimation never leave a user’s device. If true, there's little problem with just this from a privacy perspective, but that also makes it useless. Someone is going to make a browser extension to bypass/feed it a fake webcam feed. > Identity documents submitted to our vendor partners are deleted quickly— in most cases, immediately after age confirmation. However if…

This would, most likely, go hand in hand with “Discord is no longer allowed on rooted devices” and “Discord desktop is disallowed from client-side effort”, given the necessity of attestation to make it viable on mobile and the near-total absence of third parties taking advantage of the necessary protections on desktop.

sigh

I doubt it'd work here though. You know you can just print out a fake ID and show it to the camera. I doubt the app will be able to tell. Attestation doesn't really change this.

If it truly never leaves your device, you'd also be able to use the same fake ID for your entire friend group.

The cynical and best-case take is they don't actually care, and it's just a gesture to show to authorities to prevent further regulation. In which case they wouldn't try especially hard, which is a good thing.

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#702

What realistic open source alternatives to Discord are there? I'm currently considering moving to one of these with my friend group: - Matrix - Stoat, previously revolt ( https://stoat.chat/ ) - IRC + Mumble - Signal

Hard to say, I don't really use discord so I think of it as voice chat as a service, and for pure voice chat it is hard to do better than mumble. However from the way people talk about discord, it is also a text chat screen sharing file server. and it is hard to find one product that does all that well.

For video, both video chat and screen sharing I have had a lot of success with Galene, it offers text chat and file sharing, but they are sort of anemic and bare bones, which could be good or bad based on the needs of your users. https://galene.org/

What I usually do is start with a fossil server, this is trivial and gives you files, a wiki and a forum (none of them super good but like I said trivial to set up) then if I want voice, mumble is my normal route, but galene is growing on me more and more, the web interface makes buy in from the end users trivial and despite it being nice you almost never need the cool room stuff you can do with mumble.

But I am a sys-admin, I like running servers, hell, I find I enjoy running the servers more than I like playing the games. Plus, statistically, I have zero-friends, it is fine to say a server is great when only one other person has used it. That is to say, my results may not be typical.

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#704
post #182

Ignoring the implications of this for the moment, let me broach a related (and arguably more important) question: what do you do when you have multiple communities you interact with only on one platform, and suddenly that platform becomes intolerable for a subset of your community?

It is the same as what everyone did after the reddit fiasco i.e. protest, boycott, grudgingly use it while complaining and then finally accept the change. May be this discord episode will have better outcome for the masses.

In the attention economy, you rarely become obsolete overnight. It's a more gradual shift of user focused being spent other places.

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#705

It is a great irony that the heavy handed push for "protect da kids" is all happening while we learn, day by day, that the richest and most powerful members of our society have no problem hanging out with a convicted child sex trafficker. Rules for thee, free love for me.

People don't realize that all of our problems lately are stemming from lack of truly representative government. Until we find a way to ensure political candidates aren't corrupt and bought off, there will always be corruption, double standards, and lack of accountability from them.

Implement campaign spending limits, regulate or ban PAC's, and commit to an ongoing effort to stomp whatever new methods big-money comes up with to influence politics.

We do most of this in Canada and our leaders seem to be less influenced by big money. (Nevermind that we recently elected a billionaire PM...) The vast expense of running a U.S. style election campaign virtually guarantees that U.S. politicians are all bought and paid for.

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#707
post #554

I'll hardly miss using Discord, but if this isn't going to be a wake-up call to ALL (mainly) open-source projects using it, then we're all doomed. We should seriously go back to mailing lists and IRC as a standard for OSS. Everything else should be viewed as disposable.

I really don't understand the demise of usenet as a way to have a public message board. It worked perfectly well for decades and then died off all at once when the bigtechs did everything in their power to squelch it and instead replace with their walled gardens.

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#708
This part is interesting:

> [verify to] Speak in a stage channel.

My understanding is non-stage voice channels are E2E encrypted, and Discord retains no recordings, whereas stage channels are not. Is this a liability thing—Discord not wanting to have voice recordings of non-adults?

Re: Discord will require a face scan or ID for full access next month

#710

I'm biased, as I lead the Zulip project. But I think this is a reasonable place for me to post some thoughts. Given current events in the USA, I can't emphasize enough how worried one should be about the fact that a few companies like Discord, Google (Gmail), and Meta have databases with access to the private conversations of hundreds of millions of people with their closest friends and family members, linked up with…

Do you know if migrating from Mattermost to Zulip is remotely possible? I had been using Mattermost because it's also (mostly) FOSS. However, they've recently been changing their released OSS edition to restrict capabilities... Unfortunately the org I maintain it for is having some issues with it now and I have metaphorical egg on my face.

Yep, it's easy: https://zulip.com/help/import-from-mattermost.
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