Nobody has tried to limit knowledge of chemistry or physics unless it was directly about doing something illegal, to the point of basically being a detailed recipe. Usually not even then. And when they have tried they've had basically zero success.
The ability for a handful of companies, simultaneously very powerful and easily susceptible to pressure from other powerful actors, to do the same sort of thing with the next generation of core learning and engineering tools, is freaking terrifying.
It's entirely possible an EU country did this; they're only vaguely guessing Belarus or whoever. In most countries, it's a big deal if the spies are caught spying on the domestic government.
> quite a few private entities do as well.
It's a risky game, doing that. You don't get any of the professional courtesies, and you're not usually eligible for the prisoner exchanges.
How is it that any NSO employee is still able to travel outside Israel without getting arrested? Seems like they're involved in criminal conspiracies in like half the countries in the world.
> Why would Craigslist stop Flock-related posts from going through? The only answer I can think of is something along the lines of a National Security Letter.
That's because you lack imagination. 99 percent chance they are blocking you because they don't want "divisive political rhetoric" on the platform. Allowing a surveillance state is "apolitical" as long as it doesn't involve rocking any boats or making any noise.
... and NSLs don't do that. It would really be nice if people actually understood what NSLs were before blaming everything on them. Trust me, they are bad enough without inventing stuff.
But actual protocols are so last century. You might have to think ahead for fifteen minutes because the design has to be staaaa-a-ble. It's haa-a-ard! And you can't sell out to somebody who'll change it and have an exit event.
> Or you have a child who is questioning their sexual orientation or identity and is targeted by an online bullying ring.
It is far more common for that child to be targeted by parents, and maybe by people they know in person, especially because of the lousy social environment their parents have pushed them into, and therefore to have limited offline support systems, and you are now trying to take away all they do have.
Um, the nginx binary would have to be in the hands of hundreds of thousands of server operators. And the set of server operators is rich in the kind of person who would attack it. Not to mention the huge number of leaks you'd get.
Maybe if it's some server-side software that you only use yourself...
I'm a bit confused. In my world, "I own it" means it's running on hardware physically in my control, by default physically in my possession, and nobody can turn off my account...
I don't think such regulation should be restricted to AI. "Google-style B2C blanket bans" routinely ruin people's livelihoods in other ways, including, of course, when Google does it. There are way too many companies nowadays that are way too central to how way too many people live their lives.
If you want to be a piece of critical infrastructure, you need to deal with the implications of that. It's not OK for private entities to be able to "unperson" people in important parts of their lives for what amounts to convenience reasons. If them not being able to do that raises the price of the service, so be it.
Honestly even banks, which are already highly regulated and at least have more nominal competition, still have too much leeway to cut off customers based on error-prone statistical methods, without recourse or explanation.
I use OpenRouter all the time on an account for which I never supplied a phone number, email address, or anything of the kind. Maybe that was because I used an Ethereum wallet to authenticate, and paid in cryptocurrency (well, if USDC counts as "cryptocurrency"). Which admittedly makes OpenRouter's nosebleed prices even higher in effect, and supports some organizations I'd really rather not. And it's an oldish account; maybe you couldn't do that today.
In fact, I don't actually use it, but as an experiment I once set up and fooled around with an OpenRouter account over Tor. It did demand an email address, and I gave it a Proton account also set up over Tor. Both were paid for with anonymous cryptocurrency: Monero gatewayed via some random exchanger.
Whereas I never signed up for an Anthropic account because the first screen I hit demanded a phone number. I mean that was the only thing on the screen, and you weren't going anywhere until you provided it. It's been quite a while, though.
Perhaps there are different paths to getting accounts.
> Not sure where this icy, thunderstorm-prone city where it's either walk or drive with nothing in between is, but it's certainly pretty far outside my experience.
Montreal. I think there've been three thunderstorms in the past week, none of which I would have predicted if I'd stepped outside a few hours beforehand. Yes, that's an unusual week, but I've been caught in storms often enough, and you can't build your routine around conditions you can't rely on.
And only absolute fanatics ride bicycles in the winter. Even though I think the facilities are pretty good.
> From what I've observed, the vast majority of car trips in my city could be easily replaced with a bicycle trip.
You observe people driving around in cars. You have no way to know where they're going, where else they've been or may be going on the next leg of the trip, what they're carrying, anything about their physical condition, or, well, anything other than that they're driving. Even if you did a formal "study", you wouldn't know if you were asking the right questions (not that the people doing "studies" usually even try).
There's this weird "bicyclist viewpoint" where the only acknowledged possible purpose of leaving your house appears to be to get your body to a different point within a relatively small area.
Personally, if I go anywhere at all, I'm usually moving more cargo than I could move on a bicycle, and doing that is the whole purpose of the trip. Cargo or no, it's often to a place I could not practically reach on a bicycle. And when neither is true, I can usually walk. The number of trips where I could use a bicycle is not large enough to make it worth maintaining one, and that wouldn't change no matter how good the infrastructure got.
Also, for a good chunk of the year, it's icy enough here that basically nobody rides bicycles... and in the rest of the year, it's not uncommon to get unpredictable thunderstorms. Sorry, riding in that is not "enjoying life".
By the way, the economy that feeds you and maintains your bicycle also depends on motorized road vehicles and the infrastructure to support them. The converse is not true; you and your bike could go away and nobody else would notice.
Seriously, they're very, very limited, niche vehicles. If your life fits into that narrow niche, then good for you... but the rest of us are sick of hearing from you.
The reason to regulate in maybe 2000 or so was that staying with IPv4 led to NAT. NAT led to it being impossible for users to receive incoming connections. Inability to receive incoming connections led to (a) horrendous protocol complexity, (b) probably some applications never even being invented, and, (c) everybody using ultra-centralized services. Ultra-centralized services led to advertising-driven distortions of service utility, concentration of political and economic power, and choke points. Choke points led to surveillance state bullshit that's just fully ripening today.
And, yes, this was (in broad outline) foreseeable in 2000. I wasn't the only one.