Technology

https://archive.is/2026.02.13-154631/https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03967-9

I know this topic, as well as most online topics, is more about emotions than facts. But here we are. You probably don’t understand how Discord's new policy is intended to help protect children because you aren’t trained to think like a child predator. (That’s fine.) I’ve had to take a lot of child safety trainings over the years for professional reasons. Here’s how online child predators work.

They start by finding a kid with a secret. Just like a lion will generally choose to attack the weak gazelle, child predators go after vulnerable kids.

They find the kids with a secret and say “hey want to see some porn?”, and of course the kid is curious. They didn't start with anything bad. This is a process for them. But they will tell the kid, “be sure you don’t tell your parents about this. This is our secret." Then they slowly try to pull into deeper and deeper secrets and start to blackmail the kid. They start to demand that the kid send them nude photos. They trap the kids into deeper and deeper secrets and guilt to get more and more out of them. In the worst cases this results in meetups with the predator in person.

The easiest places for the predators to start this process is porn sites where the kids are visiting in secret to begin with. Especially those on Discord where the messaging between users is the main feature. Those are the kids that are most vulnerable.

How how is Discord's policy supposed to protect kids? The goal is to keep the vulnerable kids out of spaces where they would be targeted to begin with.

So there you go. I’m all ears for how to do this better. That's one beef I have with the EFF right now. They offer no alternative solutions to this. They just didn't want any kind of protections at all.

https://archive.ph/2026.02.12-174153/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-12/google-hit-by-fresh-eu-antitrust-probe-over-search-ads-pricing

Instagram has suspended the account of Track AIPAC, a widely followed watchdog project that tracks political spending by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and related pro-Israel lobbying groups. The social media giant cited alleged violations of the platform’s intellectual property and trademark rules. The suspension places the account at risk of permanent deletion unless successfully appealed within 180 days.

Track AIPAC — also known as AIPAC Tracker — was launched in 2024 by Cory Archibald and Casey Kennedy as a transparency and advocacy platform documenting AIPAC’s political donations, endorsements and influence on US elections. The project publishes Federal Election Commission data on pro-Israel political spending, highlights which lawmakers receive the most support, and endorses opponents of candidates reliant on AIPAC funding.

The watchdog has become a prominent source for voters and activists seeking to make AIPAC funding “politically toxic” and to hold elected officials accountable for their ties to the pro-Israel lobby.

Discord have released some clarifications around the new forced age verification system coming worldwide next month, as people look to flee the platform.

This comes as Google Trends show a huge increase in people looking for alternatives across the world. Clearly people aren't just sitting on their hands here thinking all will be okay

In an updated announcement, the Discord team said that the "vast majority of people can continue using Discord exactly as they do today, without ever being asked to confirm their age". How then? Well, they're using an age inference model / a machine learning model already in the background based on what you do and how you interact with Discord to predict what age group you fall into. This age gating system also only affects people who specifically want to access age-restricted servers, or who want to "modify certain safety settings" like a sexual media filter or a graphic media filter according to Discord.

https://archive.ph/2026.02.10-184910/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-02-10/musk-s-starlink-in-crosshairs-of-iran-russia-at-un-space-confab

https://archive.ph/2026.02.10-043801/https://www.ft.com/content/3260bc45-e09e-45a7-ae30-e55effbaf29b

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