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Contractual agreement? Nobody reads things like EULAs or terms of service. It's probably in there already.

I should have been a bit more clear. We should ban retention for any purposes where it is not explicitly required for the intended function and clearly agreed to by all parties. Think somethig like strava or asset tracking. You know it stores gps data, and why.

There is no such things as "clearly agreed to by all parties" when it comes to end users. Companies provide a one-sided, "take it or leave it" EULA, and if you don't agree to everything in it, you don't use the product. There is no meeting of the minds, there is no negotiation, and there is no actual agreement. It's a rule book dictated by one side.

Then it's not a valid contract and therefore does not absolve them of criminal liability for stalking you.

Contracts of adhesion can be valid contracts. The ability to negotiate or equal bargaining power is not a required element of a contract.

Furthermore, you cannot contract away criminal liability if any exists.


Even attempting to use a contract of adhesion to justify selling GPS location data to a third party should be a criminal act.

Yes, the US is in desperate need of better privacy laws.

You click on “accept terms and conditions” which means you agree to the contact.

You can't just bury literally anything in an EULA. There's a fair amount of case law establishing that EULAs clauses that are surprising or illegal aren't enforceable.

That fact does not change the point of the individual to which you replied. Regardless of whether the clauses in the EULA are 100% legal, some mixture or 100% illegal, the entire EULA is a "one sided rule-book dictated completely by one side". You, the person held to the EULA's rules, do not get to negotiate on the individual points. You simply have a "take it or go away" set of options.

If the product has any serious audience / traction, it becomes profitable to scan its EULA for illegal clauses, and sue the company for damages (and maybe extra punishment for breaking the law).

The fact that 100% of its users, except the litigant, skimmed through the EULA and did not notice anything does not relieve the company from the responsibility.


You're talking about contracts of adhesion and they are overwhelmingly common for B2C agreements. Most red-lining of contracts only happens in high-value B2B transactions where the sums of money involved are enough that it makes sense to bring lawyers into the loop.


when you already pay for the device and a contract, then surprise now that you have skin and flesh in the game, you HAVE TO agree to this EULA or your property is a brick and we keep your money.

that is defined as extortion, but labled as onboarding.


Courts do look poorly upon this -- to have a valid contract of adhesion there is some degree of advanced notice required and ability to reject it.

There is the GDPR.

Instead of “I accept”, you’re given a quiz

if it were up to me i’d require a hand signed contract that explicitly, up front and in plain english gives permission and is not transferable to any “partners”.

Right, privacy terms are written to be vague and permissive. Even if you read them you can’t usually understand how the data will be used or opt out.

People lend phones or computers to kids. The age associated with the user account means absolutely nothing.

And there obviously gonna be market for "verified" devices. Not like there is anything at all that could stop people of any ages looking at porn.

Identify devices, not people.

Distinguishing between child-locked and unlocked devices is something any website should be able to do easily. Adult-only should be a config setting.

Vendors shouldn't sell unlocked devices to kids.

Then it's up to parents take sure their kids only have locked devices. (Or not, if they're okay with it.)


> Vendors shouldn't sell unlocked devices to kids.

This part is neither necessary nor sufficient.

Put aside the Orwellian premise of "devices are locked by default". People keep making the analogy to things like cigarettes, but if a kid wants a steady supply of cigarettes then they need a steady supplier. If they want an "unlocked device" they just need money and Craigslist, once. It doesn't matter what you make Walmart do and it correspondingly doesn't make any sense to involve them.

If your kids have enough unsupervised money to buy electronics then you're either fine with them being unsupervised or you already have bigger problems than a used laptop.


Kids having $20-30 means you're fine with them being unsupervised? Computers and smartphones are incredibly cheap.

In person, we expect stores won't sell cigarettes to kids. We should simply expect companies won't provide age restricted services to kids. The liability and requirements should be on those companies.


If they're able to get a burner phone unsupervised then I think they could also pay an adult to do the face scan for them or borrow your ID from your purse to authenticate an account. What level of security would you need to totally prevent that kind of thing? Unless it checks your age every time you log in with biometrics I don't see it.

(Of course adding any level of friction will deter some kids, but needing to get a whole new device other than the one their parents gave them is already a lot of friction, isn't it?)


We could e.g. try saying it's sufficient that the user makes ongoing credit cards payments as a proof of age. Or sure maybe you need to verify with every purchase, which is how e.g. alcohol works.

Don't currently take payments for your business model? Probably what you're doing is anticompetitive and we shouldn't allow it anyway.


What about non businesses, like nonprofits, hobbyist groups, or individuals offering a service out of their own charity?

> In person, we expect stores won't sell cigarettes to kids. We should simply expect companies won't provide age restricted services to kids.

Stores won’t sell cigarettes to kids because doing that will probably get you arrested and shut down pretty quickly.


You are gliding past the crucial difference: detecting that someone is a minor in person is magnitudes easier than doing so online.

I'm not seeing how that affects my framing. Yes, it is more difficult. That sounds like a problem for businesses that want to offer restricted services online, and we should ensure it stays their problem, not everyone else's.

What for? I use family link for my kids devices. It works good enough. Everything else seems way too intrusive.

Apple is horrible in this regard. Their solutions never really work.

A joint venture for an (optional) cross-platform family app would be more than enough. This, plus a (voluntary) content rating that's offered via an API (could even be simple meta data on a webpage). Done.


Nice. How does pornhub.com "verify" your age when accessing it from your family computer's Ububtu account "my kids account"?

Oh, there is no config to retrieve, no We API to speak to.

"I'm 18 or older"-button it is. Is that a workable solution?


Well let's postulate parent set age on that up Ubuntu account to 13. Pornhub will query browser spi, which will query os API. Very elegant.

Ofc as soon as you give your child root access it is over but that is on you


the answer, as always, is always a protocol.

the major players need to allow me to elect one of them as my family manager, and control permissions across ecosystems, from my management portal. i should be able to freely swap apple, google, microsoft, facebook, or a startup as my management and permissions tool.

instead I have a disparate management account and portal for every service on the planet. roblox, fortnite, facebook all want to appear to "make it easy" as if they hold the delusional belief that their management portal is the only one I have to manage. then add a spouse that also wants to change or tinker a setting.

if any law is going to get passed: it should be that any company over a certain size, who adds parental controls, needs to expose them externally to 3rd party management software.


Very plausible that they would outlaw this if these bills pass and consolidate. Would be seen as a loophole.

Probably works as well as "forbidding" adults to sell or give beer to underage.

Sounds like a problem. Luckily it turns out my phone has two cameras and a laser dot projector pointed at my face right now. Not hard to imagine a future solution to this issue were we to pass this legislation, sadly…

Any way to disable the entire cloud tag system?

A video posted by McDonalds Canada reveals how they stage the burgers for photographing them. They shift each layer backwards (bun, meat, etc) so that the ingredients of the layer are more visible when photographed. The top bun ends up being a few inches backward compared to the bottom bun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSd0keSj2W8


However, the buns on the Japanese menu are much more obviously askew than other countries menus, which is the interesting point I imagine the OP was getting at.

Compare for example with the UK images which are much more symmetrical:

https://www.mcdonalds.com/gb/en-gb/menu/burgers.html


Maybe the haphazard/devil may care look feels more authentically American

I wonder if they got the instructions on how to photograph them in text, without example pictures, and followed them verbatim.

I used to work in food photography (in an admin role).

Sprayed on glycerine for condensation on cool things. cigarette smoke for steam.

It was super nasty, but the photos looked good.


When I had a contract with a company that makes machines to mass produce spaghetti and also stuff like pudding I watched a photography session. They used motor oil as chocolate sauce.

I was told once everything in those food photos in the United States had to be edible. You could substitute sour cream, but not glue, for whipped cream. I wonder if that was true.

In the US, photos of food must depict the actual product being advertised. So all the photos of burgers on the McD's menu are what is being sold, albeit with carefully selected "hero" ingredients skillfully assembled for the best presentation.

For a product that is only advertising one thing in a photo, e.g. an ice cream cone with ice cream on a package of just cones, I don't think there are any restrictions on what the "ice cream" can be made of. (It's probably mashed potatoes, though.)


I remember reading a book in the '80s where one of the characters was a food photographer and mentioned that some kind of plastic had to be used for the cheese in hamburgers or it wouldn't be realistic.

But also many post 2000 claims that it was all actually real food because of various "truth in advertising" regulations around the world.

The linked Canadian McDonald's video would be one example.


Elmers glue is edible.

Surely all glue is edible, you just have to commit a bit more to some glues than others.

It's like that saying about mushrooms: "All mushrooms are edible. It's just that some mushrooms you only get to eat once."


I recently watched a video about death cap mushrooms (the deadliest, supposedly), and apparently about 80% of people still survive (requires prompt medical treatment), not that they would want to repeat the experiment. Apparently, the mushrooms even taste good.

Anyway, edible normally means "safe to eat," not just "possible to eat." (As you are no doubt aware). IIRC, Elmer's glue is considered safe to eat though not necessarily appetising.


We had a mass murder in Australia a few years ago involving death cap mushrooms. 3 of the 4 victims died, and the 4th required a liver transplant.

Surprisingly the doctors involved quickly identified mushrooms as the culprit, despite that the 75% died.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leongatha_mushroom_murders

It was a super interesting court case.


When that incident first happened and was on the news it was so weird.

Did she really expect to get away with that? It seemed so obvious and her attempts to not be culpable were terrible.

Reading that, there's a strong implication she tried to poison her husband once already, and that information was not allowed into this case!

Also, apparently she inherited $2 million?! Actually it's a little weird that she gets a page long "Early life and background" style section. Lots of public people have shorter ones. That's somewhat uncomfortable.


I was taught “Edible (fit to be eaten as food) vs Eatable (capable of being chewed up and swallowed)” but modern usage seems to treat them as synonyms (the former just being more pleasant to eat than the latter).

Hah, old memories unlocked. As a kid I remember using “eatable” to mess with people because it “wasn’t a word”.

Is it edible? Yeah, it is eatable.

Here I am, years later, learning I was right all along.


That's backwards, eatable is the stronger claim that means fit as food while edible just means safe to eat.

Pedantic difference; most people would reasonably assume either meant "OK to eat".

No more pedantic than the comment I was replying to. My advice would be not to use "eatable" at all because others will just think you're saying edible incorrectly.

Elmer's white glue is "non-toxic" but today, it is made with synthetics. Since my youth in the early 80s, Elmer's has never been particularly appetizing or appealing to put in my mouth.

I believe that the stereotypical "craft food" is actually paste, which is often based on starches like corn or wheat. Children are very likely to put paste in their mouths and try eating it, because it is indeed based on food products.

I've frankly never been in a school that provided a lot of paste, and the switch to Elmer's glue may have been a strategy to stop kids from consuming the food-based stuff. However, I was in a summer science course where we crafted "Oobleck" which is also sort of "edible" if you like eating clay that's been squeezed between the filthy little hands of 8-year-old boys.


I ate so much paste in elementary school, was probably one of the high points for me.

Nice video. Thanks for sharing. I gotta say, ever since I saw that comparison video of the Burger King CEO and McDonald's CEO eating their own burgers, I can't get the question out of my head: WHY DOES NO ONE AT MCDONALD'S EVER EAT THEIR OWN PRODUCT?

everybody i know that works at mcdonalds eat there at least once in a while. if you mean the ceo thats just your average top level exec with a private chef and a health nut wife who only eats out when its a place with a month long wait list and no prices on the menu. last time he had "normal people food" was way back when he was just a middle manager. its not because he knows its dangerous or unsanitary, he could always just tell the test kitchen people to make something that looks exactly the same but with organic fresh ingredients. he probably got to the point where even the concept of a burger sounds too low class for him.

I read this and chuckle because I'm the type to eat at a Michelin Star restaurant for dinner and then get Taco Bell for lunch the next day.

I don't think I'll ever consider myself above most fast food. I'd take a McLaren to McDonald's.


That photo burger paddy looks very different from the restaurant bought one?!

You summon Wesley Willis of course (rip).

"GetMessage" can do a lot of things you don't expect it to do. Ever used a global keyboard hook? Your keyboard handler code is called because "GetMessage" is calling other functions to have it get handled.

You can modify this stuff if you go deep enough and are willing to detour the native Win32 API functions. Some things implemented in User32.dll don't make the appropriate API calls back to other User32.dll functions, and you need to detour Win32U.dll instead.

Winforms is built on top of Win32, and you can use your own Win32 code alongside it, even overriding how a control behaves.

Even a minimal Hello World program (1.5KB executable) takes 340K of active private working set, and 552K of commit size. Windows just don't allow programs to use any less memory than that. You're bound by what the system libraries allocate (either statically or dynamically).

Once you create a window, even if you haven't drawn that window, your minimum is now around 500KB.


ARMv7 and ARM7 look very similar, but ARM7 is ARMv3, and ARM9 is ARMv4. Similar names are very misleading here.

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