More humorous:

"Italy is prominently featured too, with the report referencing a former pirate operator turned informant who told Italian television that 'those who pay for IPTV are funding the Camorra."

So ... the mob is no longer doing doing evil... instead they're providing a service to the rest of us in exchange for money. hmm isn't that called capitalism???

Would you rather the mob be shooting up businesses and holding owners for ransoms and kidnapping people? I mean really.

It sounds WAYYY better than petty theft and shoplifting. There is this thing called organized shopping lifting and it's far worse than copyright infringement. With copyright infringement there is no genuine victim. No one lost anything. With a store the owner bought something and you umm stole it. He can't sell to someone else something you stole.

This is wayyy better than credit card fraud too. Again- someone is actually losing something whereas with piracy NO ONE HAS LOST ANYTHING. Or certainly nothing that wasn't an artificial creation to begin with and only has value because of artificial scarcity. In ANY OTHER BUSINESS we would prohibit it, but for some reason the entertainment cartel insist they should get a monopoly.

The humorous thing is thing is the DoJ went after Microsoft when their monopoly became more problematic, but somehow the entertainment cartels ... nope. Nothing.

We have instituted a new policy @ ThinkPenguin! We will NOT comply with domestic or foreign age verification laws for either our PenguinVPN services NOR systems. This is an extension of already established policies of the LibreCMC project of which we're the primary sponsor. LibreCMC is a free software distribution that is geared at embedded distributions.

https://www.thinkpenguin.com/gnu-linux/penguin-t4-gnulinux-laptop

"'Children cannot be left with the responsibility for staying away from platforms they are not allowed to use,' Karianne Tung, Norway's minister of digitalization, said in the statement. 'That responsibility rests with the companies providing these services.'"

And why shouldn't they be allowed to use them? This is dumb. There is nothing wrong with a bit of social media use. The problems stem from a lack of other activities and personal responsibility. I'll be the first to say that people at large are TOO attached to their phones, and I don't even have a phone with a SIM card (though I do use wifi on the go here and there). Point is though there is no good reason to blame tech for your personal failures and life choices.

If there were blame to go around I'd call out these very politicians for FORCING phones on us through things like automated tolling and parking meters that demand you pay them with your smart phone.

"'We want a childhood where children get to be children,' Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store said in the statement."

Really???? Your calling TEENS children???? Ya know in my dads day he was driving at 14 and working before even that. So was I for that matter.

Historically 13 year olds and were getting married and getting pregnant... and now we're calling them children???

This infinttization of youth has gotten ridicules. It was ridicules when before, but this is just outright absurd.

Hell, we even sent kids to WAR @ 14-16 throughout the ages.

Even if you can fathom a rational reason to ban tikes (0-5) from screens... and even if we took it to a bit of an extreme and upped that to 6-7 it would still be far less ridicules than these bills.

Bans never work and the appropriate response is getting back to the basics and teaching kids about personal responsibility.

God- I hate that choice wording- but it is what it is.

We should lower the working age or eliminate it and then make kids earn their keep with employment and the likes. I don't mean teens either. Like actual children. Putting kids to work is just part of growing up as play is. The lack of life skills has been demonstratively dangerous to society and we're heading toward economic collapse and poverty.

I'm not against all social or progressive ideas, but teaching kids restraint is a far better solution since you can't pass law after law that regulates normal human behavior. Sometimes people just need to take their own interests into account and do whats best for them. What is best for me is not necessarily what is best for you and one size fits all NEVER works. This is exactly that. A one size fits all solution that will NEVER work. Plus some collateral damage.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-24/norway-wants-kids-to-be-kids-with-social-media-ban-for-under-16s

"Norway Set to Become Latest Country to Ban Social Media for Under 16s"

You know the nanny state is in full swing they start mandating seat belts, and then helmets for under 14s.

But for christ sake- social media? Weren't we suppose to be pushing kids to be more social, not less???

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/norway-government-plans-social-media-051028496.html

Headline: "France Confirms Data Breach At Government Agency That Manages Citizens' IDs"

And soon every app, site, OS, and device will be demanding your ID.

If you think age verification is a good idea your an idiot.

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/22/france-confirms-data-breach-at-government-agency-that-manages-citizens-ids/

"Nearly half of US children are breathing dangerous levels of air pollution, report warns"

While I'm not against efforts to improve air quality it's amazing the amount of twisting and fear mongering that goes on all around us. We've had wayyyyy worse air pollution in the recent past. Until the 2000s or thereabouts many places had crazy bad air quality. No matter how you look at it, no matter how bad things may seem from absurd fear mongering in the media, the situation isn't anywhere near as bad as being projected.

When I was a young person smoking was common and it was even the norm around young people. In cars, in airports, in restaurants.

Cars were wayyyy worse polluters than they are today.

Just prior to my birth dumping of all sorts of bad shit into the environment was the norm. Factories belched smoke like a mother fucker. And trucks, does anyone remember the black soot that shot out of those???

Undoubtedly the generators being used in the short term to power data centers and AI aren't optimal and I'm sure they'll have a negative impact within a certain distance around those data centers.

However these things aren't last I checked being built down town. They're in fields and surrounded by farmland mostly. There are some examples you can point to of housing developments sitting nearby, but it's far far far from being a major problem. Rather it's likely the best course of action is something along transitioning to cleaner sources and/or buying up the properties surrounding these data centers.

These power plants are also used elsewhere as means to supply power on a temporary basis when spikes occur. While not quite to the same degree as running these 24/7 it's an issue that can be resolved if governments doesn't interfere.

"The Trump family's World Liberty crypto venture is being sued by one of its billionaire backers over allegations of extortion. Justin Sun has accused World Liberty of an 'illegal scheme' to seize his WLFI tokens, a cryptocurrency issued by the company. Sun alleges the firm, co-founded by U.S. President Donald Trump and his son Eric Trump, has 'frozen' all of his tokens and stripped him of his right to vote on governance issues. "

It's amazing how stupid people are. The abuse of words astounds me.

So you might be able to claim this is some kind of "digital currency", but it's NOT a cryptocurrency. A cryptocurrency does the opposite of what these people claim. If Trump or some arbitrary person or entity controls the crypto it's clearly not a cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrencies are things that exist which are based around decentralization and can be freely exchanged independent of any government or entity.

There may be a fraud going on here, but the masses are too stupid to realize it's not crypto that's the problem. It's government entanglement and stupid people gambling. Whether it's a romance scam involving crypto that ends up coming attached with inheritance or something else all these things fall into the same general playbook. The participants are usually in some way greedy pieces of shit who at some level are themselves to blame. It's not just senile old farts being misled, but a combination of greed, stupidity, and so forth. From the law enforcement agents drumming up business for themselves to the prosecutors to the scammers to the little old ladies.

There is nothing wrong with taking risks to the degree your willing to accept the consequences, but when a society refuses to accept the risks it's doomed to economic collapse.

In relation to the story of the attorney general in Florida going after an AI company because their product provided information that helped a school shooter.

A comment elsewhere I found:

"As for the makers of ChatGPT being stupid -- no I don't think that either. They're among the smartest people on the planet. If anything I'd say they were careless, for not building a red-flag alert into their product that reports suspicious behavior. Maybe there should be laws that require such a thing."

Seriously? Was a manufacturer of a library card catalog also careless for not getting the library to sign off on a statement saying they'd have someone constantly supervising visitors using the card catalog ??? I mean, someone could look up a book on explosives! Heaven forbid.

No, in a free society people can use tools in ways they weren't intended and it's the liability of the person using said tool, not the liability of the toolmaker to jump through hoops to make sure a product isn't used improperly.

There may be some argument for warning users of said tool about risks when using said tool or improper use of said tool even, but liability for foreseeable misuse is certainly not something that aught ever be extended to the tool maker. The danger there is enormous and puts the economics of tool development at risk. We do want car manufacturers to continue making cars don't we? We want hammer manufacturers to continue making hammers don't we? If we continue down this path our economy will come to a standstill and we'll see even more people ending up in poverty.

We already have major poverty because of the excessive regulations/laws. If you can't start a business without scale you end up with mon/du-opolies/unemployment & out of control costs of living.

In relation to the story of the attorney general in Florida going after an AI company because their product provided information help to a school shooter.

One comment against the stupidity said:

"Exactly, next people are going to be doing legal discovery on levi's jeans because the jeans helped the shooter keep his balls from flapping during the shooting. Stop trying to blame tools and keep the blame squarely on the human that does the evil thing."

A counter point:

"Osama bin Laden was not on any of the planes that flew into buildings. All he did was sit there and help plan and train the people who did it."

My point: umm so go after the HUMAN. These scenarios aren't alike. The AI company didn't develop a product or provide information with the intent to help the school shooter just like the jeans company didn't intend for the their product to be used to hold the balls of a school shooter.

Intent matters and so does marketing. No no one marketed "AI" for the purpose of assisting people in shooting up schools.

Osama bin Laden used tools for purposes that the tool maker could never have envisioned and even if they had it wasn't the intent of that tool maker. We didn't go after the tool maker (ie the PC maker for the PC he used to plan the attack). We or I should say the US government went after the person using that tool (ie the PC to do evil things).

The lack of humanity to reason soundly just blows my mind.

Under this logic the car maker is responsible because they know that evil people will use them to kill folks. Look at Charlottesville, NC a number of years ago where someone drove a vehicle into a bunch of folks protesting racists.

What happens to the availability of cars? Prices go up to account for liability and sales plummet.

The attorney general of Florida like all attorney generals I suspect is just plain loony. He wants to treat the company behind an AI technology as a responsible party for doing nothing more than providing information to a school shooter no different than a search engine or a library card catalog might.

Maybe instead of asking the question of whether or not the AI company should be liable we should be asking whether or not a person providing said information should have been (and they would have been). No one should be responsible for the actions of another though and so I think irregardless of possible consequences providing information should never in and of itself be a crime.

We don't expect gun manufacturers or car manufacturers to be responsible for others actions when people die from their use even though it can be "foreseen". We undermine the existence of fundamentally neutral goods useful for many positive and productive purposes by entertaining these ideas.

Under this logic companies should be held to account not for a mere product or service, but rather for a products unintended consequences. With copyright law the US supreme court ruled that it was not enough for an ISP to know their customers would infringe copyrights. Rather it would only be secondarily liable if they marketed it as such.

Has any AI company marketed their product to the public for the purposes of shooting up schools? I think not and nor should they be any liability as such.

“accused gunman Phoenix Ikner consulted ChatGPT for advice before the shooting, including what type of gun to use, what ammunition went with it, and what time to go to campus to encounter more people. 'if it was a person on the other end of that screen, we would be charging them with murder,'”