Author: Lauren

I’ve written in the past about inaccuracies in Google’s Search AI Overviews (let’s call them AIOs) that so often seem to provide specific answers to search queries, usually in rather authoritative wording. And there have been many concerns about how accurate or not these AIOs actually are. I’ve publicly noted a number of examples where AIOs were just flat out wrong even with simple math questions, which certainly doesn’t give one much confidence in more complex kinds of queries.

Now a firm called Oumi, led by a team of former-Google and former-Apple employees, has conducted a study that, combined with what Google does say about these issues, gives us considerable insight into some real statistics about Google AIOs. And those numbers are quite disturbing.

Of course Google has disclaimers all over the place saying that AI answers could be wrong and you should double-check them. But other studies have shown that hardly anybody bothers to do that. And why would you expect them to? What’s the point of being handed an “answer” if you can’t trust that’s it’s correct? And what does “correct” even really mean? Some answers from Google AIOs are fully correct, some are completely wrong, and some are only PARTLY correct — this last case can be particularly insidious. Even when Google AIOs provide links to what are supposedly the source sites related to an answer, often those sites had the information wrong themselves, and then Google unfortunately accepted it as correct and just stirred it into an AIO answer. Sometimes when you look you can’t even find where on those sites Google supposedly got that information at all — it just doesn’t seem to be there.

So what’s the scope of this problem as determined by this new study? Keep in mind this IS a tough nut to crack, for a bunch of reasons, one being Google AIOs are not particularly consistent. In fact, you can ask the same question twice just seconds apart, and, as you may have noticed you may get entirely different and even completely contradictory answers.

Another foundational point is that percentages alone don’t tell the whole story. The massive scale of Google — they have BILLIONS of users across their ecosystem — is absolutely crucial to consider. This applies whether we’re talking about their continuing account recovery policy failures when it comes to innocent users losing access to their accounts, or when it comes to this question of AIOs. The point is, at Google scale even relatively small percentages will represent vast numbers of actual human beings.

Summarizing the numbers it shakes out like this. There are a lot of factors involved but let’s be generous and say that AIOs are inaccurate overall about 9% of the time. There are significantly larger inaccuracy numbers when you look at specific related Google Gemini AI statistics and whether particular answers seem to be ungrounded as relates to referenced sites or inaccuracies at those sites.

Now let’s cut to the chase. At Google scale of around 5 TRILLION search queries a year — that’s trillions with a “T” — the study says that we’re dealing with on the order of tens of millions of wrong Google AIO answers EVERY HOUR, hundreds of thousands PER MINUTE. To me, especially when you consider the impracticality of really double-checking such answers, this is a terrible situation.

Google has become a misinformation machine on a colossal scale, virtually a mirror image of the trust we used to be able to put in their traditional search engine results without AIOs. Because it’s NOT the CORRECT answers we have to worry about, it’s the damage potentially done by wrong or partly wrong answers that people nonetheless understandably accept and act upon as if those answers were correct.

SCALE MATTERS, and enormous scale like Google’s matters enormously. But it’s the human beings around the world being impacted by that scale who Google should care about. The situation is made even worse since Google really won’t take responsibility for inaccuracies in their AIOs impacting those persons. Google is making money hand over fist, but when it comes to really caring about their users, they’re failing more than ever.

–Lauren–

Regular readers know that I don’t routinely do product reviews or announcements here, but when something pops up that could have significant impacts to the tech industry and broader society I’ll explore those. And that’s what we’ve got now with Apple, and it really is quite stunning because it pretty much goes directly against the pattern we’ve come to expect from Apple over the many years.

I’ve never been an Apple fanboy, in fact I’ve generally avoided using Apple gear at all for a number of reasons. One is that their products have been widely viewed as overpriced for the value provided compared with products from other manufacturers. Even their accessories to their main products often seemed way too expensive. Remember Apple’s thousand dollar monitor stand? Another reason I’ve avoided Apple products is that they are single sourced. That is, if you want to buy a Windows PC or an Android phone or a Google Chromebook, you can get one from a wide variety of manufacturers with different feature sets and pricing. If you want a Mac computer or iOS iPhone, or an iPad, you get what Apple manufactures and that’s the whole enchilada.

So, what has Apple just now done to shake up the entire PC industry and trigger a flood of positive reactions across the world, even from usually critical reviewers? Very recently they released a new Mac laptop at a price point utterly uncharacteristic of Apple, so low that it’s caused a tsunami of interest from existing Windows and Chromebook users, among others. Apple calls this the MacBook Neo and priced the base model with 256 gig of storage at 599 dollars, and an upgraded version with 512 gig of storage and touch id capability for $100 more. For buyers with a qualified educational discount, both versions are reduced by $100.

By normal Apple standards pricing this low seems nuts. So what’s going on? The first reactions were that this must be a really stripped down laptop with quality corners cut here, there, and everywhere. But this appears not to be the case. People who got their hands on these — and they’re sold out at some suppliers — are praising the quality throughout. A completely aluminum case, with an excellent display, keyboard, trackpad and so on.

Two specs that caught a lot of attention were that the Neo doesn’t use the class of Apple CPU chip you’d normally expect in a Mac, but actually uses the Apple chip from a recent iPhone. And the Neo (both models) has a fixed and unexpandable RAM memory of 8 gig, seemingly small for a Mac.

So the assumption was that performance would be on par with sluggish, cheap Windows PCs or low end Chromebooks. But apparently not. Users have been throwing all sorts of tasks at the Neo, all the way up to 4K video editing and the like, and while they’re not getting the ultra performance you’d expect from a much more expensive computer model, there’s surprise and amazement at how capably the Neo is handling these tasks, far better than would be expected from a computer at this price point with these listed specs.

This appears to be a situation where Apple’s control of the entire manufacturing pipeline has really paid off for them, especially given RAM unavailability problems and sky high RAM prices triggered by AI data centers.

Apple’s strategy with the Neo seems both clear and unexpected. By releasing a highly capable Mac laptop at a price point significantly lower than Apple’s typical pricing model, they’re making the bet that they can bring many new users into the broader Apple ecosystem, both from the education sector where Chromebooks currently dominate, and from the broader universe of Windows and other non-Apple computer users. And judging from the enormously positive reaction to the Neo so far, this could very well be a bet that’s going to pay off enormously well for Apple, while creating serious headaches for Google and Microsoft, and for others in the PC industry as well. We shall see.

–Lauren–

Data centers are now at the heart of a rapidly growing battle between Big Tech billionaire CEOs and ordinary people that those billionaires are used to treating like bugs to be swatted away. And increasingly it’s looking like politicians who find themselves on the billionaire side of data center disputes may find their political careers seriously affected, and not in a good way.

A recent statement I saw sums this up quite nicely:

“It’s cutting across all political, socioeconomic and cultural lines. These data centers are being opposed in every community where they are proposed, including communities which are heavily industrialized already, which are rural agricultural, which are heavily Republican, heavily Democrat, wealthy, poor, and everywhere in between.”

That’s from Marjorie Steele of the Michigan Economic Development Responsibility Alliance.

In fact, there’s pushback even in places like Virginia where there are more than — get this — 500 data centers already and applications for building many more. Virginia apparently has almost 35% of all the hyperscale (those really big) data centers globally. But even there, residents are now pushing back on new projects from Amazon and others.

Up until recently, politicians of both parties were able to claim that data centers were GREAT for their communities — mainly due to increased tax revenues. But the real costs to communities have often been swept under the rug. Massive electricity demand creating higher rates for everyone in the areas. Enormous water demands for cooling even in regions that already are short of water for their communities. Noise and air pollution from massive gas power generators that in some cases run 24/7, literally driving residents permanently from their homes in what were once beautiful, unspoiled rural areas.

Big Tech often claims there will be lots of new jobs related to these massive data centers. But while there can indeed be many jobs during the construction phases of these facilities, once they’re up and running it usually only takes a handful of workers to keep them going. Those other jobs just evaporate into thin air after construction is finished.

Keep in mind that these Big Tech billionaires are DESPERATE to find ways to make back their staggeringly large investments in AI systems, AI which so far by and large most businesses and individuals have found to be insipid and largely useless at best, and nothing they’d be willing to routinely pay for. And the Big Tech billionaires and their political sycophants will insist that we MUST have AI. That we MUST build those data centers. That society CAN’T advance without a continual DELUGE of Large Language Model Generative AI misinformation and other AI SLOP.

That’s all actually little more than pure propaganda. Very few people outside the industry itself asked for this AI garbage. Somehow the world has managed to survive and rapidly advance technologically without generative AI.

This category of AI is indeed a logical development in the normal course of tech evolution. But the current terrible situation was NOT inevitable, absent the greed and sometimes seemingly bizarre sci-fi mindsets behind much of the AI push.

The handwriting isn’t only on the wall, it’s written in giant letters in bright fluorescent paint. Politicians of either party who continue to ignore their constituents’ anger over data centers ruining communities, are increasingly going to find their own political careers cut short by the voters, and when it comes to this, even the Big Tech billionaires might not be able to save them.

–Lauren–

Various AI firms have launched so-called “AI browsers” and in particular what are called “agentic AI” browser features. And now Google has announced they’ve made massive AI upgrades to their Chrome browser which is by far the most used Web browser on this planet. And these Google Gemini AI features are becoming available to different classes of users paying or not paying over time, so you may not see some of them yet but you can feel pretty confident that eventually you will.

Frankly, I don’t recommend voluntarily using ANY current generative AI products from any firms. Google is indeed trying to push their Gemini AI into everything. But right now I want to warn in particular about what Google is calling Chrome “Auto Browse”. This is Google’s Gemini “agentic” AI system. And I’ll cut right to the chase at the start here, my very strong recommendation is, even more so than with other AI features, that you do not enable Auto Browse, do not use it, do not touch it. And I have the same advice for any other agentic AI systems from other firms.

What these systems do is in various ways take over your Web browsing. The AI literally masquerades as you, using your accounts and other credentials, and clicks its way around the Web to perform actions that normally you would do yourself. The concept is that in theory you could just tell the AI to find the best deal for something on the Web or book your vacation or clean up your duplicate photos or whatever, and the AI agent would run around and do all this for you.

I’m sure you already see why this has so many experts concerned, because we all know how AI systems spout misinformation and get confused, often can be manipulated in nefarious ways by hidden prompts on their inputs and so on. A three year old has more common sense than AI, because these AI systems have NO common sense. And we’ve already seen stories of people devastated when using these agentic AI systems when the AI deleted all their files or took other just awful actions.

Now, here’s the REALLY important part. It might be assumed that if these systems make terrible mistakes on your behalf using your accounts and credentials, that the AI firms would take responsibility. Well, think again. Google for example with their new Chrome Auto Browse pops a warning saying explicitly that actions taken by their AI on your behalf are YOUR responsibility. If the AI screws up, YOU get the shaft.

That’s the WHOLE ballgame as far as I’m concerned, and why I don’t recommend using agentic AI at all. These systems typically have settings that again in theory are supposed to let you control what sorts of actions they take, what files of yours they have access to and other parameters. Google’s for example at this point reportedly is supposed to stop just short of letting the AI click the final BUY NOW button creating a charge on your accounts. And of course they say you should monitor the AI’s actions.

This is all basically hogwash. Google must know that most people do not have the background or time to keep track of how these AIs are configured or what they’re actually doing, and if you have to monitor the AI to see if it’s messing up, much of the whole ostensible purpose is lost from the get go.

There’s a lot more technical detail of course. For example, your private browsing activities may be uploaded to Google as part of all this, triggering an array of additional privacy issues.

But as far as I’m concerned, this is a very straightforward decision. Even if Google for example were willing to accept responsibility for errors that Auto Browse makes that could potentially cause enormous problems for users — and AGAIN they’re refusing to accept that responsibility — I would not ever want these AI agents performing actions on my behalf — I won’t be using them.

If you’re willing to let these hallucinating Large Language AI models loose on your phone or desktop computer and let them go merrily clicking around the Web using your accounts and credentials, that’s your choice of course, but being a guinea pig for Big Tech AI isn’t anywhere on my personal bucket list.

–Lauren–

UPDATE (3 February 2026): New York State introduces its own utterly impractical and damaging legislation attacking 3D printers and other equipment, similar to the Washington State legislation I discussed in this original post. Please see: https://blog.adafruit.com/2026/02/03/new-york-wants-to-ctrlaltdelete-your-3d-printer/

– – –

Proposed legislation in Washington State would attempt to ban the use of 3D printers or CNC machines from being used to create guns or gun parts, likely expanding to other items that would be banned later. They also want to somehow require “blocking systems” to technologically prevent these devices from being able to create such items. This concept has been proposed in other venues as well.

Ostensibly all of this is to push back against the creation of so-called untraceable “ghost guns”. Over the last few years 3D printers have evolved from finicky devices requiring quite a bit of expertise to use, into more of consumer products that still need considerable knowledge to use at their best, but that generally are much simpler for non-experts to use. 3D printers work with plastic. Less familiar especially to hobbyists are CNC equipment, that’s Computer Numerical Control — that can also work with plastic but more commonly are used to fashion metal or wood.

Here’s a key reality: These machines themselves don’t know what they’re creating, other than some that display the shape of the objects. These objects can vary enormously and can be in virtually infinite numbers of specific forms, and could typically be used for all sorts of assemblies having nothing to do with guns. 3D printers and CNC equipment are literally robots following a long list of specific instructions — move this far in X direction, this far in Y, this distance in Z. Extrude this much plastic. And so on.

They generally don’t even need Internet connections. They can follow a long list of these precise instructions in what’s called g-code (which stands for “geometric code”), even if presented on a simple microSD card. And by the way, g-code was invented in the 1950s at MIT! It’s been augmented over the years of course.

What creates the g-code? In the case of 3D printers, typically g-code comes from software generically referred to as slicers. CNC gear uses similar software to generate their g-code. Slicers input the data from CAD — Computer Aided Design — files often as what are called STL files, and processes these to create the specific lists of g-code instructions.

While there are some versions of all this that are proprietary, crucially all of these various elements in this engineering pipeline can be implemented using easily available parts and open source software. So it becomes obvious why so-called “blocking” technologies would be impractical at scale against anyone with the desire to ignore them.

Guns can be created using parts from a hardware store — 3D printers or CNC machines aren’t necessary. Remember, the equipment itself doesn’t know if it’s creating a component for a gun or a similar looking object for a harmless school engineering assignment having nothing to do with firearms. Should screwdrivers be banned because they can be used to create weapons? Of course not.

I could go on but frankly the concept of requiring “blocking” technology in 3D printers and CNC machines isn’t even a close call in terms of technological reality. It wouldn’t accomplish its stated purpose, but it could cause enormous problems in a vast array of ways since these tools are used by factories, businesses, educators, farmers, hobbyists, and many others who are doing nothing related to firearms at all, but would find their work constantly hobbled by such government edicts and attempts to implement them.

The blocking concept for 3D printers and CNC equipment is somewhat akin to wishful thinking. It’s not practical, and it should absolutely be rejected.

–Lauren–

An experiment in AI coding with Google Gemini. I try to be fair. When I call generative AI mostly slop, I don’t do so blindly; I attempt to conduct reasonable tests in various contexts.

Yesterday I needed a couple of routines — one in Bash, the other in Python. I tried the Python one first. This required code to asynchronously access a remote site API, authenticate, send and receive various data and process what was returned, relying on a well documented Python library on GitHub written specifically to deal with that site’s API.

After almost two hours, I gave up. Gemini was consistently cheerful and cooperative — almost to a creepy extent. It generated code that looked reasonable, was very well commented, and even provided helpful examples of how to configure, install, and run the code.

Unfortunately, none of it actually worked.

When I noted the problems, Gemini got oddly enthusiastic, with comments like “Wow, that’s a great explanation of the problems, and a very useful error message! Let’s figure out what’s wrong! Here is another version with more diagnostics that accesses the library more directly!”

Sort of made me feel like I was dealing with an earnest but incompetent TA at an undergraduate CS course at UCLA long ago. Which was not something I enjoyed back then!

After a bunch of iterations, I gave up. Even starting over didn’t help. Gemini never seemed to produce the same code twice, no matter how I worded the prompts. The code would use completely different models each time, sometimes embedded configuration values, sometimes external files, sometimes command line args. And the way it tried to use the Python library in question also varied enormously. It almost seemed random. Or at least pseudorandom.

I spent half an hour and wrote plus tested the code I needed from scratch. It worked on the second try, and was about half the number of lines of any of the code Gemini generated, and much simpler, for whatever that’s worth. By comparison, Gemini’s code was bloated and definitely unnecessarily complex (as well as wrong).

I did give Gemini another chance. I also needed a simple Bash script to do some date conversions. I offered that task to Gemini since I didn’t want to bother digging through the various date format parameters required. Gemini came up with something reasonable for this in about four tries. Whether it’s completely bug free I dunno for sure, I haven’t dug into the code deeply since its not a critical application. But it seems to be working for now.

So really, I haven’t seen a significant improvement in this area. There are probably some reasonable sets of problems where AI-coding can reduce some of the grunt work, but once you get into anything more complex the opportunities for errors, especially in larger chunks of code where detecting those errors might not be straightforward, seem to rise dramatically.

–Lauren–

Drone leader Chinese company DJI this morning announced a new drone in their economical but powerful “mini” drone lineup, the “Mini 5 Pro”. Speculation and rumors about this product have been circulating online for many months, and on Monday the world got to see a short video tease telling that today at 8 am Eastern Time there would be an announcement. That is, unless you were in the USA, since accessing the DJI site from here, unlike the rest of the world, would not show that tease.

Because once again the administration and our bipartisan tech morons of Congress have forced DJI into the position of not officially making the new drone available here at all, as happened with a larger, more expensive new drone in their lineup recently.

The confluence of the insane self-imposed injuries of oppressive tariffs that must be paid by American consumers, bizarre customs blockages, and legislative and executive branch actions to target Chinese drone makers in general and DJI in particular, are turning us into a laughingstock when it comes to this important tech.

Law enforcement, search and rescue, and other public safety organizations depend on these (normally) easily accessible drones, and it is likely that lives and property will be lost by their being cut out from this new drone, which brings for the first time a larger one inch camera sensor, and LIDAR for advanced obstacle avoidance and the ability to “return to home” in many well-lit environments even if GPS satellite signals are lost.

The U.S.’s claims of security concerns regarding DJI drones have never to been shown to be reality. The rest of the world, including U.S. allies, apparently don’t have these fake concerns — so their citizens will get the benefit of this new drone, while we’re at the mercy of ever more bipartisan political stupidity.

The Mini 5 Pro actually is authorized to be flown in the U.S. and will likely will be the last DJI drone for the foreseeable future to receive such approval, given the various restrictions that I’ve previously discussed in detail already in the pipeline, including one triggered at the end of this year, absent drastic last minute changes.

Are there any ways for U.S. residents to get hold of the Mini 5 Pro? Since DJI is not officially releasing the product in the U.S., that leaves the gray market (domestic and international) with all the associated risks associated with potentially drastically elevated pricing, lack of manufacturer warranties, and possible problems ever getting repairs. Some U.S. residents are reportedly already planning trips to Canada or Mexico to obtain these drones and then deal with our nightmare borders import mess to bring them back into the U.S.

Frankly, our country is being humiliated by so many pathetic leaders, especially when it comes to tech. And this is but the latest example.

–Lauren–

Calls for Google’s Chrome Browser to be separated from Google could potentially result in a privacy and security disaster for literally billions of people around this planet.

An AI firm just offered 34.5 billion dollars (about twice what that company is theoretically worth) for Google’s Chrome browser, and then almost immediately another AI firm offered a full 35 billion — what’s 500 million dollars among friends, right?

Of course, there’s no obvious indication that Google has any interest in selling off Chrome at this time. Another factor is that there’s speculation that the judge in an antitrust case that Google lost might order that Google divest itself of Chrome as part of a penalty, though that case is very likely to be appealed and go through considerably more litigation so we don’t really know where that case will end up.

But the question you gotta ask yourself is WHY these firms would be willing to pay so much for Chrome. Yes, Chrome has about three and a half billion users who consider it to be their primary browser, and around a two-thirds global market share among the various browsers that users can choose from. And you’re still talking about paying about $10 per user to get up to a $35 billion dollar offer. But the thing is, Chrome is effectively open source. These firms could essentially get the browser sources for free. The Google Chrome browser is based on the Chromium open source project, and that’s the origin not only for the Chrome browser but also various other browsers. In fact, Microsoft’s Windows Edge browser, that they’re constantly trying to manipulate Windows users into switching to from other browsers, is itself based on the Chromium project.

So again, why are these AI firms willing to pay such an enormous sum for Chrome? And the answer is, they probably don’t really care about Chrome per se, they care about those three and half billion users who use Chrome and could be dragged with Chrome over into these other firms’ “AI First” philosophies, perhaps along with their browser histories and all the other data associated with routine Web use. So it’s not the browser they lust after, it’s the people who use the browser.

Now, as we’ve noted frequently, Google itself is going “full speed ahead” into AI whether users want it not — and mostly it seems they don’t want it. But that said, Google still has an excellent history of protecting and securing user data and privacy, related to their Chrome browser’s use and other associated applications. This includes many routine Google and other services and for example the Chromebooks that are so popular in education and industry.

The thought of any of that data being handed over to some external entity or entities outside Google is of great concern to many observers in the security and privacy fields. What will happen if those 3.5 billion Chrome users are sucked into those other firms’ AI fever dreams that again many — polls say by FAR most — users don’t want to have anything to do with at all!

Yes, many people are critical of Google. But there’s an old saying that the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know. And yes, I myself have been quite critical of various of Google’s policy decisions, especially related to their Large Language Model generative AI push of late. But I’ve had, and still have, a great deal of respect and trust in terms of how the regular employees inside Google — the Googlers many of whom I’ve known — work to protect our data and our related privacy.

The upshot of all this is that billions of people conduct their Internet usage through the Chrome browser, and it’s difficult to see how handing that browser — and those users — over to another firm doesn’t stand a high probability of creating new privacy and security risks for those users who already have enough Internet problems to worry about.

–Lauren–

There is currently what amounts to a “war” between the U.S. federal and state governments against specific Chinese drone makers, with the big target being DJI. And a major issue has been what would happen if the many organizations — law enforcement, search and rescue, other public safety, farmers, utilities, on and on — couldn’t continue to obtain or use the DJI drones in particular that they have depended on for years.

And the discussion has been largely theoretical for most of this period because DJI drones, repairs, parts, and service have continued to be available. But now that’s changing and moving beyond the theoretical and into real world effects, and yeah the situation is deteriorating even faster than even most pessimistic observers anticipated.

I’m not going to try review here all the deep details of how we got to this point, except to note that there are multiple aspects. Confusion over rapidly changing tariff rates is one factor. There have been claims that DJI drones have, or maybe in the future could have security issues, though this has never been demonstrated — apparently DJI has passed every security audit conducted on their products.

Many observers have long suspected that what’s really going on is politically-motivated protectionism from politicians in both parties, because the organizations that buy DJI drones apparently consider them to be more affordable, reliable, and rapid to obtain compared with currently available U.S. made alternatives. And remember we’re not talking just about little DJI drones you can hold on your hand, they also have very large drones that farmers use to spray crops, and big drones that can lower or gather heavy payloads in rescue situations in isolated, rugged areas and so on.

But now, with this confluence of factors, including U.S. Customs reportedly pretty much choking off the supply of DJI products into the U.S., we’ve reached a point where the rest of the world can buy these advanced DJI drones, including new ones just recently released and others likely to be very soon released, but the U.S. is cut off. The supply of DJI products has dried up in the U.S. Out of stock virtually everywhere. Repairs are reportedly taking longer, and parts are difficult or impossible to obtain.

DJI is still trying to get a government agency to do the security review mandated by the National Defense Authorization Act as passed by Congress, and the deadline that would trigger an associated DJI drone ban is at the end of this year. The whole situation is completely nuts.

In Florida, the state government ordered official usage of DJI drones stopped. That means grounding 200 million taxpayer dollars of drones used for police work, fire fighting, mosquito control and more. And the state is apparently only willing to provide a tenth of that much to replace them with U.S. made drones that are typically many times more expensive than DJI drones, and sometimes take months rather than days to obtain.

In some states 90% of public safety drones are DJI. Their drones are known to be exceptionally reliable. An Orlando police department indicated that they had five failures of “approved” U.S. made drones over a year and half, but no failures among the DJI drones they’d been using.

We could keep going through the statistics and more of these cases but you get the idea. We all want a strong domestic drone industry, but agencies and other groups who rely on DJI drones in the U.S. are being cut off from vital technology that the rest of the world can still easily obtain. There haven’t been publicly demonstrated security problems with DJI drones despite the alarmist hype from the politicians.

This entire mess does appear to be politically driven and BOTH parties are to blame. These politicians need to stop this craziness, because they’re not just putting important U.S. businesses and other organizations at risk with this drone ban nonsense, they’ll be putting U.S. lives at risk as well. That’s irresponsible and it really needs to stop, RIGHT NOW!

–Lauren–

We all want to prevent children from being harmed on the Internet, but exactly how to do this without creating even more problems for them and for adults has turned into quite a complicated and political situation.

There have been broad concerns that various website age verification systems could be privacy invasive, ineffective, and in some cases actually might cause even more harm to children than not having the verifications there in the first place. And now with more and more of these systems appearing — the Supreme Court just declared them legal for states to require for commercial porn sites — we’re starting to see various of these predictions coming true.

Remember that age verification systems — whether for porn sites, or social media sites, or pretty much any site like the situation in China where virtually all Internet usage can be tracked by the government — doesn’t only affect children and teens. No matter your age, you have to prove you’re an adult for access. And that opens up tracking possibilities that many politicians in both parties would love to have here in the U.S, with various state and federal legislation already in place or in litigation. And this quickly creates a situation where your basic privacy involving what sites you visit, what topics you research, what videos or podcasts you view or listen to, on and on, may be seriously compromised in ways never possible before now.

There have already been breaches of age verification systems that publicly exposed users’ identity credentials, a treasure trove for crooks. We can reasonably expect directed hacking attacks at these systems as they expand, and if history is any guide many will be successful. Some of these systems use government credentials, some require credit cards, some are using systems to estimate your age from your face, or by how long you’ve been using a particular email address, and so on.

Many adults who don’t want to hand over a credit card or their driver’s license — and their privacy — to these firms have already found various bypass mechanisms, and it appears that — as expected — kids are already WAY AHEAD of adults at this.

A broad age verification law just took affect in the UK a handful of days ago and is already being widely breached, with it trivially easy to find public discussions with users trading bypass hints and tricks. The degree to which these systems are political theater is emphasized by rules that for example order sites not to tell users that they could use VPNs to bypass the checks in many cases — as if VPNs haven’t been used to bypass geographic restrictions for many years — and most age verification systems are geographically based.

But it actually gets even more bizarre. Some of these age verification systems do indeed try to estimate your age from your face as seen on your camera. Of course if you don’t have a camera on your device or don’t want your face absorbed by these systems you’re out of luck in this respect. For that new UK age verification system, kids very quickly realized they could use a video game that generates very realistic faces to bypass the age verification system. And of course as the nightmarishly advanced AI-based video generation systems continue to evolve — we know where this is headed.

The worst part about all this is that age verification systems broadly applied as some politicians desire, not only have the potential to cut children off from the ability to access crucial information about their own health and safety in cases of abuse, but could actually drive children to all manner of disreputable sites — the kind that can pop up and vanish quickly — that could potentially do them real harm but will never abide by age verification rules.

Age verification seems like an obvious solution to a range of Internet-related problems. But the reality is that many observers feel that it creates more problems than it solves, creating new hacking opportunities and privacy risks, and that in many cases the kids will find ways to bypass it anyway. When trying to fix a complicated problem on the Internet, or anywhere else, the first step probably should be, “Try not to make things even worse.” An idea worth keeping in mind.

–Lauren–

For many, many years, the U.S. has been considered to be the world’s technology and science research leader in all sorts of areas of science — medicine and computer science broadly are just two — it’s a long, long list. But increasingly observers are seeing signs that this is changing in a negative way and for a number of reasons, with potentially dramatic impacts on consumers and businesses.

One obvious issue is that so much tech spending is being poured into these often awful large language model generative AI systems including chatbots and the rest. And we’re not talking about all AI. There are many wonderful applications for AI machine learning in scanning medical test results and storm predictions, and a vast number more. But that kind of AI often gets confused with generative AI like the chatbots and the other generative AI applications that Big Tech is desperately trying to force us to use.

Because it seems that most people really aren’t interested in using that kind of AI and Big Tech has been pouring many billions of dollars into it, and is desperate to find a way to profit from it.

So it seems like other kinds of important research are often being left behind because generative AI has so much hype associated with it that it’s sucking up funding that could otherwise be used in research that could actually help people far more effectively. Much generative AI has become an excuse for firing your best workers and as automated cheating machines to drive teachers crazy.

Also we know there have been major cutbacks in a range of U.S. research efforts like the NSF — National Science Foundation — and major university research programs that have long been considered to be the crown jewels of the U.S.’ global science leadership in everything from medical research like cancer and Alzheimer and other disease research, to pretty much any other crucial science aspect one can name.

It’s certainly possible to find waste in some studies but when you suddenly cut funding to NSF by more than 50% there’s really no way you’re not going to cut into essential work and sometimes disrupt long term studies that might have brought real breakthroughs.

And a side effect of this is the brain drain. Other countries are using this situation to entice some of our best researchers to move their work to those countries. Then in many cases those countries will then have the commercial advantage of breakthroughs that otherwise could have been ours here, and that could mean the loss of billions and billions of dollars.

And something else just happened maybe for the first time ever that I can recall offhand. A major tech firm from another country — in this case DJI of China — who makes the drones widely used by law enforcement, search and rescue and other public safety organizations, farmers, utilities, and consumers — just introduced a new flagship drone that could be very useful in many ways including saving lives.

But DJI has decided not to market it in the U.S. at this time, and you really can’t blame them. The rest of the world where DJI does business can get this new drone, but you can’t officially buy it in the U.S. And this is apparently due to the lack of stability regarding U.S. tariffs, and various anti-drone legislation pushed by politicians here, even though police and those other public safety organizations, and other groups, keep explaining that they really don’t feel that they have affordable, practical substitutes with similar capabilities and support, that could replace those DJI drones.

Science and technology matter. And falling behind in these areas, whether due to funding for generative AI hype starving other projects of resources, or due to ideological disagreements unrelated to the actual science research projects themselves, or for any other reasons, could end up not only costing us financially, but directly impact us in terms of poorer health and lost lives, as wonderful breakthroughs that might otherwise have occurred slip away from us. And if we let that happen, future generations will probably not be looking back kindly on our behavior, and we couldn’t reasonably fault them for feeling that way.

–Lauren–

UPDATE (May 12, 2025): The administration has agreed to lower its enormous tariffs on China, and China has agreed to lower its enormous retaliatory tariffs on the U.S., temporarily for 90 days, as shipping between the two countries has almost halted. No announced agreements on the underlying issues have apparently been reached at this time, but negotiations will reportedly continue.

UPDATE (April 12, 2025): The administration has announced that smartphones and various other computer-related electronics items will be exempt from new reciprocal tariffs (including those currently in effect for China approaching 150% and in some cases higher). However, it is widely anticipated that this may be a prelude to the imposition of new specific tariffs related to these categories of items (and/or semiconductors in general) that may be implemented later.

 – – –

Well, the executive summary for this one is that we’re probably facing VERY significant price hikes across the board that are likely to seriously impact consumers, businesses, Internet firms that build those massive data centers, basically everybody. These technologies are of course now fundamental to our everyday lives.

The administration has now announced what would be a total tariff on China of over 100%. The fact is tariffs ARE effectively taxes and they’re paid by us in the importing country not by the exporting country. And part of what likely is driving a lot of confusion is that we’re often getting conflicting statements and conflicting ideas about what the goals of these tariffs are.

Are they to raise money? To punish countries for their own tariff regimes? To punish countries for trade imbalances? Some combination? Tariffs WILL raise money for the government, but again that tariff money is coming from us not from those other countries. And not all trade imbalances are necessarily horrible things, they can represent the fact that the U.S. is a relatively wealthy country that can choose how and where to obtain products the most economically, especially when making them locally isn’t really practical.

There are conflicting signals from the administration regarding whether the tariffs are negotiation tactics and/or if they’re intended to try drive manufacturing back to the U.S., and those goals also can easily be in conflict with each other.

It’s understandable why there’s nostalgia toward the period many years ago when the U.S. was a manufacturing powerhouse before it moved more into the services sector over the decades. But realistically that’s being somewhat viewed through rose-tinted 20/20 hindsight. Right now we’re a quarter of the way into the 21st century. Not just the U.S. but the entire global trade, manufacturing, and supply chains have utterly changed since way back then, in many ways significantly to the advantage of the U.S economy overall in the long run.

Now maybe in theory, if you were willing to spend enough on factories and had workers willing to work at wages similar to those paid in countries like China for example, and you were willing to wait the years necessary to build up those factories and infrastructures — maybe theoretically you could get some significant portion of that high tech manufacturing back, assuming stable economic signals from the government.

But is this practical? Well, there’s the rub. The infrastructure, the resources (some of which like rare earths are almost completely controlled by countries like China), engineering expertise, worker structures, and all the rest do not seem as if they’re likely to ever significantly return here anything like they once were.

Take the iPhone as just one example, because as I said, this affects these industries across the board. Something like 90% of iPhones are reportedly manufactured in China. It’s estimated that it would take three very disruptive years, and 30 billion dollars for Apple to move just 10% of their supply chain from Asia to the U.S.

And since you can’t reasonably expect U.S. workers to work for Chinese wages, plus so many other costs that are much higher here, you’d probably be looking at iPhones that could cost three times as much as they do currently.

Now the billionaires would still have those silly grins on their faces and couldn’t care less about much higher prices whether from tariffs or anything else. But for ordinary consumers and even firms of pretty much every size, the effects from the kinds of price increases we’re likely see from these tariffs on a vast array of tech products can’t help but have major negative impacts. The additional costs to consumers and businesses will likely be dramatic and could trigger many additional negative ripple effects.

In a short report like this I can’t really do more than address the tip of this giant iceberg, but the bottom line is that at least as far as the tech segment is concerned, it’s very difficult to find realistically optimistic aspects to any of this. We should keep our eyes open for any positive developments of course, but this is yet another one of those situations where it’s probably not a great idea to hold your breath.

–Lauren–

UPDATE (April 10, 2025): Social Security Administration reverses entirely, says they will permit all claim types to take place over the phone, no longer requiring website use or in-person visits to Social Security offices, as had been previously announced to start on April 14, 2025 for many transactions.

UPDATE (March 26, 2025):  Social Security Administration begins backing out of their horrific planned changes to curtail phone support: (1) Changes pushed to April 14 instead of March 31. (2) Changes will no longer apply to Medicare, Supplemental Security Income (SSI), or Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) applicants.

The elimination of previous phone support will still apply to regular retirement benefits, and this will still leave vast numbers of retirees at horrible risk.

– – –

Social Security is in a DOGE-created crisis, and seniors are already at terrible risk.

DOGE moved quickly to order massive changes to Social Security, originally to essentially end all phone-based Social Security support, and then after major blowback to that — since so many people dependent on Social Security don’t use computers or have Internet — this was revised to continue phone support other than for changes to functions like payment accounts, and also for identification issues. Those crucial functions will no longer be doable by phone and will have to be by Internet — which again many of the people who need Social Security can’t use, or via in person visits to Social Security offices — which can be difficult or completely impossible for many elderly or disabled persons, especially in rural areas.

On top of this, DOGE ordered the closure of around 50 Social Security offices and the firing of thousands of their employees, so in person visits become even harder.

As I’ve said many times before, technical people often don’t really understand the situations that nontechnical people, especially older persons have to deal with. Often there’s a totally wrong assumption that pretty much EVERYBODY uses the Internet. But like I said, a large percentage of seniors do not use the Internet for anything like this, or at all.

Now DOGE originally said all of this was to fight fraud. But its early claims that 10s of millions of deceased persons over 100 years old were getting Social Security payments were apparently incorrect — it’s important to understand these systems — DOGE reportedly didn’t realize that those historical records did not mean all those dead people were getting payments, other aspects of the systems prevented payments to them.

And studies have shown that apparently improper Social Security payments amount to about 1% of overall payments, mostly errors not fraud, and 2/3 of mistaken payments were clawed back.

This all really erupted over the last few days when the administration’s new Commerce Secretary, billionaire Howard Lutnick, made some stupendously tone-deaf and clueless comments in an interview. He said that it’s fraudsters who would complain most loudly about missing Social Security payments, saying that his 94-year-old mother in law wouldn’t call to complain — she’d assume there was something messed up and she’d get her payment the next month.

That of course means having faith that the next payment won’t also fail to appear due to the same problem, but then again having a billionaire son-in-law probably would make that missed payment of somewhat less concern. Unfortunately, most Social Security recipients don’t have billionaire sons-in-law. He said cutting off payment system payments is the easiest way to find a fraudster, because whoever screams is the one stealing.

As you can imagine, Lutnick has been widely criticized for these statements. You really have to wonder what planet he’s been living on.

Because the reality is that 40% of retirees rely on Social Security as their sole source of income, and for many more it’s a primary source. You cut off Social Security from these retirees, even for just one month, either by declaring them dead when they’re still alive — reports of that are already increasing — or by making it impossible for them to quickly fix payment or identification problems by phone when they can’t travel to a Social Security office or use the Internet, and many won’t have any way to pay for food or lodging or anything else.

And these changes that are going to so negatively impact so many seniors dependent on Social Security, were only announced VERY recently and are being rushed into effect at the end of THIS month just a week from now, leaving seniors in an even worse situation, and many of them don’t have anyone locally to help them even if they had more time.

This situation has gone from bad to disastrous. Actually improving Social Security is indeed a good goal, but creating a massive mess that will leave so many vulnerable seniors at such risk, is both gruesome and utterly unacceptable.

–Lauren–

I have long held that efforts to tamper with Section 230  from the Communications Decency Act of 1996 are dangerously misguided. It is this section that immunizes online service providers from liability for third-party content that they carry. I have also argued that attempts to mandate “age verification” for social media will spectacularly backfire in ominous ways for social media users in general, and will not actually protect children — and I continue to believe that age verification systems cannot achieve their stated goals and will cause dramatic collateral damage.

One of my key concerns in both of these cases is that they would over time cause major social media platforms to drastically curtail the third-party content that they host, eliminating as much as possible that would be considered in any way controversial, in an effort to avoid liability.

I still believe that this is true, that this would be the likely outcome of Section 230 being altered in any significant ways and/or widespread implementation of the sorts of age verification systems under discussion.

But I’m now wondering if this would necessarily be such a bad outcome, because the large social media platforms appear to have increasingly eliminated all pretense of social responsibility, making it likely that the damage they have done over the years through the spreading of misinformation, disinformation, racism, and all manner of other evils will only be exacerbated — become much, much worse — going forward.

Seeing billionaire Mark Zuckerberg today proclaiming nonchalantly that he’s making changes to Meta platforms (Facebook, Instagram, etc.) that will inevitably increase the level of harmful content — he essentially said that explicitly — is I believe a “jumping the shark” moment for all major social media.

I feel it is time to have a serious discussion regarding potential changes to Section 230 as it applies to large social media platforms, with an aim toward forcing them to take responsibility for the damage the content on their platforms causes to society, whether it is third-party content or their own.

I would also add — though this extends beyond the formal scope of Section 230 and social media — that firms who have deployed Generative AI systems (chatbots, AI Overviews, etc.) should be held responsible for damage done by misinformation and errors in the content that those systems generate and provide to users.

It is obvious that the major social media platforms are at best now providing only lip service to the concept of social responsibility, or are effectively abandoning it entirely, for their own political and financial expediency — and the situation is getting rapidly worse.

We must make it clear to these firms that they serve us, not the other way around. Changes to Section 230 as it applies to the large social media platforms may be the most practical method to convince the usually billionaire CEOs of these firms that our willingness to be victimized has come to an end.

–Lauren–

I just had a good laugh. Someone asked me this morning how they could reach the “Google Ombudsman” for help with an account lockout issue. And I laughed not because their situation was funny, but because of the sad fact that I’ve been pushing for Google to establish an Ombudsman (or these days, often called Ombudsperson) role, for … well … decades. I’ve pushed from the outside. When I had the opportunity, I’ve pushed from the inside. Obviously, I never had any luck with this.

But I did get curious again today. For years, my essays on this topic ranked very high on Google Search. What about now?

Another laugh! I searched for:

google ombudsman

and a blog post of mine on this topic from 2009 is still on the first page of search results — 16 years later!

This was actually superseded by my more recent posts about this, such as 2017’s “Brief Thoughts on a Google Ombudsman and User Trust”:

https://lauren.vortex.com/2017/06/12/brief-thoughts-on-a-google-ombudsman-and-user-trust

But the story is still exactly the same as it was originally — Google has never been willing to budge on this issue, even as the need for such a role (or roles) has dramatically increased over the years, not just for issues related to account lockouts and other traditional Google user problems that cry out for valid escalation paths, but of course now related to the rapidly rising range of AI-related controversies.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Very sad.

–Lauren–

I’ll use very simple words for these government officials: You ban Chinese drones, you’re putting U.S. lives at risk.

Congress with bipartisan support very recently passed what is effectively a ban on import of (and perhaps, but less likely, the use of existing) Chinese drones such as those from market leader DJI, taking effect in a year against the firm if DJI can’t convince a government agency to certify that they are not a security risk — and of course, how DJI is supposed to accomplish this isn’t spelled out.

So now it gets even worse. The U.S. Commerce Department is considering its own Chinese drone bans, and has opened a public comment period through early March.

The absolute bull-headed STUPIDITY of these bans is beyond belief. There is no evidence extent that DJI drones present a security risk — only theoretical. politically-motivated speculation from both political parties that make virtually no sense at all.

The organizations and businesses that depend on these drones — law enforcement, search and rescue, agriculture, utilities, and a long list of others, have not found practical alternatives to DJI drones in the vast majority of cases. DJI dominates the market because they make the highest quality drones at prices these entities can afford, and provides world class support for them.

The politics of this situation are beyond disgusting. Is it too much to hope that the Trump administration will be more reasonable about this? Yeah, probably not a good bet, but being more sensible than both parties in Congress — and the current administration — on this score is a very low bar at this point.

Here is the current official Commerce URL with their announcement. This was not easy for me to find — not a single media source I saw bothered to include this crucial information!

https://www.bis.gov/press-release/commerce-issues-advance-notice-proposed-rulemaking-secure-unmanned-aircraft-systems

Absolute insanity. -L

According to reports, in a recent employee meeting, Google CEO Sundar said that (essentially) the entire focus of Google in 2025 will be AI and pushing it out to consumers in a “scrappy” way — with him referencing the early days of Google. This was when, I would note, their rush resulted in massive arrogance, and privacy problems at the firm were at a peak. Over the years these both were reduced — especially privacy issues where Google actually has become world class in terms of protecting users’ privacy (and security). Both could return to former terrible levels under Sundar’s deeply flawed AI approach.

With such a focus on AI and so much money between poured into it by Google, it is inevitable that other core Google services will ultimately suffer, and given Google’s notoriously deficient “customer service” when things go wrong — from account lockouts to a wide range of other problems — it’s only going to be getting worse. Word is that Google  teams not mostly devoted to AI are already suffering cutbacks. How long before Google decides that Gmail, etc. just aren’t worth keeping around anymore? Couldn’t happen? Think again.

Google’s AI continues to be an endless source of mediocrity and wrong, confused, and even utterly inane and nonsensical answers and false statements, and Google refuses to take responsibility for these and how they could negatively (sometimes even dangerously) impact users. This renders Google’s incredibly reckless pushes to embed AI deeply into Google Search (thanks to AI, decreasingly trustworthy), and the introduction of their new “AI Agents” (taking over web browsers on behalf of users — an enormous target for hackers and phishing attacks), both horrific risks for consumers.

Sundar would (I suspect) say that unless Google moves in this direction, Google is doomed. I believe that he and his executive team have it exactly backwards. Consumers do not want AI. The more they learn about it, the less they trust it or care for what it does in their day to day lives. They don’t want to pay for it. They don’t want it popping up in their faces constantly and being shoved down their throats. They certainly DO want Google to take 100% responsibility for what it does.

Sundar wants Google to be scrappy. We might as well delete that leading “s” — unfortunately, that’s Google’s likely fate, because his AI path will lead to Google’s almost certain doom one way or another. The exact timing and form of that doom cannot be accurately predicted right now, but billions of Google’s users will suffer in the process.

And one more thought. It’s been reported that apparently Sundar has now joined the exalted ranks of the billionaires. How that may or may not be affecting his thinking in these matters I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.

Dark times for Google’s users, indeed.

–Lauren–

All the talk now is about using AI-based mechanisms to authenticate social media users as being not underaged for access, through analysis of their faces on video feeds. The multitude of ways in which this could fail in both directions (declaring faces either older than they really are, or younger than they really are, not to mention how you determine from a face if someone is 15.5 or 16 years old when the minimum age required for access is 16) are far too many to even list here.

But given all of the attention, I feel that we need terminology to quickly describe the entire area of bypass techniques targeting these age verification/gating systems.

I propose the term:

BALOK

As in, “The 11-year-old easily baloked the system and gained quick access.”

or:

The free software was capable of baloking the ID portal within seconds to bypass the age restrictions.

BALOK is an acronym for:

Bypassing Age Locked Online Keys

Of course, fans of the original “Star Trek” already know what’s really going on.

Balok was an alien in the first season of “Star Trek” from an episode called “The Corbomite Maneuver”. In appearance he was a very young, vulnerable child. But in his audio and video communications with the Enterprise ship, he employed an artificial booming voice and what turned out to be a menacing appearing puppet to fool the Enterprise crew into fearing him.

The parallels with the current face ID age verification systems are obvious.

Children will be baloking the social media age gating systems in a myriad number of ways, while adults who were supposed to have access will be blocked due to both face analysis errors and technology access problems. Not everyone uses smartphones with cameras to access social media, and many people rightly fear sending video images of their faces to these or other firms due to justifiable concerns about potential abuses.

I anticipate both freeware baloking software and baloking as a (largely free) service. Kids will band together in groups to develop new baloking techniques. They are extremely resourceful when it comes to these areas, more so than the vast majority of adults.

Balok knew that it was easy to fool his potential adversaries with a faked persona. The ingenuity of kids today pretty much guarantees that their own efforts to balok the social media firms, and in essence the politicians who pushed age blocks in the first place, will be even more successful in the real world.

–Lauren–

Is this happening around the world, or is it only here in the USA that everything appears to be going totally nutso? Seemingly all at once, politicians of both parties look and sound like they’ve given up all pretense of being educated human beings and are behaving like infantile idiots with political agendas. Oh boy, what a mix.

Logic? Forget about it! Pandering to fear and nonsense? That’s the way to win elections!

We don’t have much clearer examples of this than two simultaneous situations involving drones.

First, as you probably know by now, there has been a hysterical panic in New Jersey and surrounding areas about supposed swarms of mysterious “drones”. All evidence to date is that this is entirely nonsense, fed by clickbait social media, opportunistic mainstream media, and politicians in both parties out to seize an opportunity to score political points from people’s ignorance about technical realities.

So far, other than legal hobby and commercial drones that are routinely in the air — there are something over a million licensed in the U.S. — people have been reporting as “mystery drones” various shaky, blurry images of stars, helicopters, and airplanes (maybe the green and red flashing lights and the white strobe lights give them away, huh?), plus all manner of other completely ordinary stuff that most people just never notice most of the time. And you have politicians like Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer irresponsibly trying to ram a new surveillance bill through the Senate to protect us from this nonexistent threat — Republican Senator Rand Paul blocked him. When we have to depend on Rand Paul to be the sensible one, we must be in The Twilight Zone.

Politicians in both parties including Trump have been making all manner of claims feeding the drone hysteria — based on nothing real, and calling for shooting down the supposed “drones” if they “can’t” be identified, putting the lives of pilots and passengers on ordinary plane flights at risk. People have been shining lasers at planes — a criminal offense — again risking pilots and passengers.

The whole thing is totally nuts. It’s reminiscent of a notorious panic in Bellingham, Washington in 1954, when people started noticing ordinary manufacturing defects in car windshields and mass hysteria broke out with people fearing it was nuclear radiation or some other kind of attack. I’m not kidding. Google it.

The drone panic wasn’t helped by the sluggish reaction of government agencies to speak clearly to the issue, but the fact that there were no collisions between supposed drones and other air traffic spoke volumes about the ridiculous nature of the entire situation. The FAA has now issued some temporary drone flight restrictions in various areas of New Jersey, to try calm things down even further. But if agencies had gotten ahead of this issue early on, the information vacuum might not have been filled with so much ridiculous nonsense.

One of the best new videos I’ve seen explaining the current drone hysteria is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAWCIfs0ER4

I strongly recommend that it be widely viewed.

Meanwhile, the political hysteria over Chinese drone maker DJI’s drones as a claimed national security risk — with absolutely no evidence of this being presented — has reached a bizarre and dangerous inflection point in Congress.

DJI holds a very large majority of the U.S. drone market not just for hobbyists but in the absolutely crucial areas of law enforcement, search and rescue, other public safety groups, agriculture, utilities, and many other areas of society. The reason is simple — these groups have not found practical competing products from other manufacturers that meet the quality, reliability, and service support levels that DJI routinely provides. DJI drones are used in myriad areas to directly support the protection of human lives and property, keeping critical infrastructure operating, and an almost endless list more.

Still, some politicians in both parties keep screaming at the top of their lungs that DJI’s drones must be banned, no matter how many lives are lost or hurt in the process. Again, there is zero evidence that has ever been presented that these drones are a security risk, and DJI has bent over backwards to demonstrate that they do not threaten security. But trying to logically argue with politicians who have their own agendas (e.g., by pointing out to them that a foreign power could just buy satellite surveillance photos — they don’t need to “spy” through commercial drones!) is like debating a moldy sponge. All you get for your efforts is a rotting odor.

It was thought that the current defense appropriation bill might push through a DJI ban. This was likely to include DJI drones, cameras, audio equipment, and other products — either import bans alone, or more likely import bans combined with telling the FCC to prohibit their use of U.S. radio frequencies, which could also in theory — but probably not in practice — block use of these DJI products already received and in routine use in the USA.

Instead, with so many crucial public safety and other groups opposed to the ban, the final language puts off a ban for a year, and says to avoid the ban DJI must get an appropriate national security agency to certify that their products are not a security risk.

Proving a negative is always, uh, challenging. But worse — and this is something straight out of Putin’s Russia — the language does not say which national security agency should do this or require any of them to do it. Franz Kafka would love this. Putin would smile.

It’s possible that the next administration will be more receptive to logical arguments about why DJI products should not be banned, and if the ban moves forward DJI is virtually certain to litigate through the courts, as well they should.

But the sheer irresponsibility of politicians wanting to ban such crucial products based on zero evidence and a lot of wild-eyed political posturing is nothing short of disgusting and irresponsible.

So here we are. Blurry photos of stars and planes are being touted as terror drones, with politicians more than happy to latch onto the panic for their own purposes. Actual drones crucial to a vast array of industries and to saving lives are at risk of being banned by politicians who scream “national security” without evidence.

Yeah, I don’t know about the rest of the world, but here in the USA it sure looks like we’ve fallen off the deep end of sanity.

–Lauren–

 

Ah yes. Poodle skirts and bobby socks.  Jimmie Rodgers and the Everly Brothers. Around the world, there seems to be a collective longing for a rose-tinted, 20/20 hindsight, fantasy view of “the good old days” of the 1950s, before those damned computers starting infiltrating so much of our lives.  And social media bans have become the means by which governments hope to force children off their phones and back to sometimes rather violent competitive sports and other ultraviolet light suffused outdoor activities.

It won’t work. The latest example of this yearning for the past is in Australia where, with very broad public support, the government just pushed through (in about a week!) a ban on children under 16 using social media. There are no exceptions for anyone with current accounts. There are no exceptions to allow parents to permit their children to use social media if the parents determine that’s best for their own children. The ban likely will include all of the major social media platforms except (for now at least) YouTube, which is widely used in schools.

Clearly, there have been enormously tragic incidents involving children who were, for example, bullied or otherwise abused over social media. But there are also many examples of the positive benefits of social media helping children who were being abused by family members, for whom access to assistance over social media was crucial. And many examples of isolated children for whom social media has been an important benefit to their mental health. And children who have created educational outreach and other extremely positive projects via social media.

I’m not a sociologist. I’ll leave it to the experts in that and related fields to explain the complex and sometimes competing aspects of social media and young persons.

But I am a technologist. And as such, my view is that Australia’s ban almost certainly won’t work and will end up doing far more damage than the status quo before the law, as it creates a culture of false hopes, push back, and circumvention.

Like all social media age gating laws, the Australian law would require ALL users of social media to be age verified. That’s how you (in theory) block the children. The law wisely does not penalize parents or children who circumvent the law, instead depending on financial fines against the social media firms. And at the very last minute, a provision was apparently added that prohibits requiring use of government credentials for identification. This was a positive change, because as I’ve discussed many times, age-verification based on government credentials for websites access would lead almost inevitably to broad tracking of Internet usage by the government in much the style that users in China are subjected to today.

So how would Australia do age verification for this law? The law is planned to take effect a year from now, and an age verification trial is supposed to take place before then. Most frequently discussed are AI-based (oh boy, here we go …) techniques to analyze users’ faces, online behavior patterns, types of content they access … and so on. 

It doesn’t take much imagination to create a long list of ways that such techniques not only have errors in both directions (passing users who were too young, blocking users who were actually old enough) — even in the absence of circumvention techniques. E.g., how do you determine if a child is 15 and a half years old or 16 years old from their face? Uh huh. Hell, I’ve known people who were 30 and had faces that looked like they were 15.

But even beyond the mumbo jumbo of supposed AI-based solutions, the list of relatively straightforward circumvention techniques seems almost endless. And anyone who thinks that children won’t figure this stuff out are in for a rude awakening.

One obvious problem for the law will be VPNs. Unless the Australian government plans to detect/ban VPN usage — which would have enormous negative consequences — simply creating accounts on these social media platforms that appear to be coming from countries other than Australia is an obvious circumvention methodology.

Attempting to ban children from social media won’t work. It will make a complicated situation even worse, and it technically is impractical without creating a hellscape of government-verified identity Internet usage tracking for all users of all ages — and even then circumvention techniques would still exist.

The desire to eliminate the negative consequences of social media is a laudable one. And there’s much that could be done by social media firms to better prevent abuse of their platforms, especially when children are targeted for such abuse. 

But age-based bans are a “feel good” effort that will create new harms and will fail. They should be firmly rejected.

–Lauren–