Xmpp definitely wins in privacy. What is there to privacy more than message content and metadata? Matrix definitely fails the second one, and is E2E still an issue for public groups? I don’t remember if they fixed that.

XMPP being a protocol built for extensibility means it will be hard for it not to keep up with times.

Okay so how does modern XMPP protect this? When I last used XMPP, some (not all) clients supported OTR-IM, a protocol for end to end encryption. And there wasn’t a function for server stored chat history (either encrypted or plaintext).
Have these issues been fixed?

That’s the appropriate reaction to many of these so-called threats to society. Internet chat rooms, generative AI, drugs, opioids, guns, pornography, trashy TV, you name it. I think it’s been pretty well demonstrated throughout history that the majority of the time some ‘threat to public safety’ comes out and a well-meaning group tries to get the government to shove the genie back in the bottle, the cure ends up being worse than the disease. And it’s a lot easier to set up bureaucracy then to dismantle it.

The sad thing is, whatever regulation they set up will be pointless. Someone will download an open source model and run it locally with the watermark code removed. Or some other nation will realize that hobbling their AI industry with stupid regulations won’t help them get ahead in the world and they will become a source for non-watermarked output and watermark free models.

So we hobble ourselves with some ridiculous AI enforcement bureaucracy, and it will do precisely zero good because the people who would do bad things will just do them on offshore servers or in their basement.

It applies everywhere else too. I’m all for ending the opioid crisis, but the current attempt to end opioids entirely is not the solution. A good friend of mine takes a lot of opioids, prescribed by a doctor, for a serious pain condition resulting from a car accident. This person’s back and neck are full of metal pins and screws and plates and whatnot.
For this person, opioids like oxycontin are the difference between being in constant pain and being able to do things like workout at the gym and enjoy life.
But because of the well-meaning war on opioids, this person and their doctor are persecuted. Pharmacies don’t want to deal with oxycontin, and the doctor is getting constant flack from insurance and DEA for prescribing too much of it.
I mean really, a pain management doctor prescribes a lot of pain medication. That’s definitely something fishy that we should turn the screws on him for…

It’s really infuriating. In my opinion, the only two people who should decide what drugs get taken are a person and their doctor. For anyone else to try and intrude on that is a violation of that person’s rights.

I agree it’s hypocritical, but for different reasons.

I think a nude/sex scene can be important to the plot and add a lot to the story- in some situations. Yeah it’s often thrown in as eye candy to get more viewers, but sometimes it counts for a lot. Look at Season 1 of Game of Thrones for example- there’s a couple sex scenes with Dany and Khal Drogo, and IMHO that does a lot more to further the story than to show T&A-- the first one Dany’s basically being raped, but as the season goes on you see her start to fall in love with Drogo and it becomes more making love. Hard to get the same effect without sex scenes.
Same thing anytime you have two people in bed- crappy unrealistic TV sex where the girl never takes her shirt off and then cut to half a second later they’re both wrapped tightly but conveniently in sheets can break suspended disbelief.
So I can sympathize with an actor who agrees to artistic nude scenes or sex scenes because they’re important to the plot, but then has that specific 20 seconds of video taken out of context and circulated on porn sites.

At the same time, an actor doesn’t get to order the audience to experience the film in any certain way. Just as you say about ‘the piano’, it depends on how you watch it. It’s not illegal to buy the film, fast forward to the nude scenes, and stop watching when they’re done. So to think you get any sort of control over that is hypocritical, it’s like ordering a reader to read the entire book and not share passages with a friend.

I’m not fine with that, as it will have wide-ranging repercussions on society at large that aren’t all good.

But I fully accept it as the cold hard reality that WILL happen now that the genie’s out of the bottle, and the reality that any ham-fisted legal attempt to rebottle the genie will be far worse for society and only delay the inevitable acceptance that photographs are no longer proof.

And as such, I (and most other adults mature enough to accept a less-than-preferred reality as reality) stand with you and give the statists the middle finger, along with everyone else who thinks you can legislate any genie back into its bottle. In the 1990s it was the ‘protect kids from Internet porn’ people, in the 2000s it was the ‘protect kids from violent video games’ and ‘stop Internet piracy’ people, I guess today it’s the ‘stop generative AI’ people. They are all children who think crying to Daddy will remake the ways of the world. It won’t.

Probably the best idea yet. It’s definitely not foolproof though. Best you could do is put a security chip in the camera that digitally signs the pictures, but that is imperfect because eventually someone will extract the key or figure out how to get the camera to sign pictures of their choosing that weren’t taken by the camera.

A creator level key is more likely, so you choose who you trust.

But most of the pictures that would be taken as proof of anything probably won’t be signed by one of those.

I’m not talking about the copyright violation of sharing parts of a copyrighted movie. That is obviously infringement. I am talking about generated nude images.

If the pencil drawing is not harming anybody, is the photo realistic but completely hand-done painting somehow more harmful? Does it become even more harmful if you use AI to help with the painting?

If the pencil drawing is legal, and the AI generated deep fake is illegal, I am asking where exactly the line is. Because there is a whole spectrum between the two, so at what point does it become illegal?

Actually I was thinking about this some more and I think there is a much deeper issue.

With the advent of generative AI, photographs can no longer be relied upon as documentary evidence.

There’s the old saying, ‘pics or it didn’t happen’, which flipped around means sharing pics means it did happen.

But if anyone can generate a photo realistic image from a few lines of text, then pictures don’t actually prove anything unless you have some bulletproof way to tell which pictures are real and which are generated by AI.

And that’s the real point of a lot of these laws, to try and shove the genie back in the bottle. You can ban deep fake porn and order anyone who makes it to be drawn in quartered, you can an AI watermark it’s output but at the end of the day the genie is out of the bottle because someone somewhere will write an AI that ignores the watermark and pass the photos off as real.

I’m open to any possible solution, but I’m not sure there is one. I think this genie may be out of the bottle for good, or at least I’m not seeing any way that it isn’t. And if that’s the case, perhaps the only response that doesn’t shred civil liberties is to preemptively declare defeat, acknowledge that photographs are no longer proof of anything, and deal with that as a society.

It will be interesting to see that tested in court. I don’t think anyone would complain about for example a pencil sketch of a naked celebrity, that would be considered free speech and fair use even if it is a sketch of a scene from a movie.

So where does the line go? If the pencil sketch is legal, what if you do a digital sketch with Adobe illustrator and a graphics tablet? What if you use the Adobe AI function to help clean up the image? What if you take screen grabs of a publicity shot of the actor’s face and a nude image of someone else, and use them together to trace the image you end up painting? What if you then use AI to help you select colors and help shading? What if you do each of those processes individually but you have AI do each of them? That is not very functionally different from giving an AI a publicity shot and telling it to generate a nude image.

As I see it, The only difference between the AI deepfake and the fake produced by a skilled artist is the amount of time and effort required. And while that definitely makes it easy to turn out an awful lot of fakes, it’s bad policy to ban one and not the other simply based on the process by which the image was created.

It’s all good. Like I said, no insult at all. There’s no reason why you would ever have encountered a beeper, it’s one of those things that once SMS came around everybody just collectively decided to move on from. Unlike floppies or rotary phones there wasn’t some continued use for it.

That was for Beeper Mini which was an attempt at imessage on android.
I don’t think the new version runs the homeserver on the phone; with the new version you can still participate in federated chats and use the desktop client so I don’t think it majorly changed in that way.

(This is not an insult, I just had a realization that I think might affect you)-- do you know what the name comes from?

Years ago there was a thing called a beeper before everyone had cell phones. It was a one way paging system-- you’d give your friends your beeper number, they’d call it, type in their phone number, and their number (or whatever they dialed in) would appear on your beeper. You’d then use a landline phone to call them back (early versions of the system had no text or reply capability, only numbers and only one-way).

I always thought it was a cool name. But thinking about it I realize someone less than maybe 25-30 years old might literally have never encountered such a device. Much like a 5.25" floppy disk or rotary dial phone, they went out of style years ago and a young person might never have encountered one.

Curious if that’s you?

Yeah Synapse is still largely a first gen system. There will be others.

FWIW beeper is moving towards a client side hosting model where your phone app hosts the bridges. They currently have a local hosted Signal bridge which runs on the phone…

I think the issue isn’t nudity but sexualization-- IE nude scene in context of a film is fine, chopping the nude scene out of the film is basically turning the actress into a porn star and that’s not fine. Same attitude is why the actress called it molestation. Different attitude as a society I guess.

Surprised nobody here is talking about Matrix. Open source, client side / end to end encrypted, chat history stored (encrypted) on the server so it syncs to every device, supports federation, and supports bridges so you can use Matrix to access your other accounts like Signal, WhatsApp, etc and have everything in one place.

https://Beeper.com is based on Matrix and worth a look. But you can also self-host everything.

This is also why I am thankful for the American first amendment.
It would appear that in that user’s country, it is considered additionally a crime to take the nude scene out of context.
I think a lot of people online take freedom of speech for granted, not realizing that many supposedly civilized countries have an increasing number of restrictions on unpopular speech, critical speech, or otherwise undesirable speech like this.

What’s wrong with Beeper?

This is really not accurate. Matrix is not designed to be a super privacy first protocol. It’s like Lemmy in the it’s designed to solve a problem and be a useful federated collaboration tool. It borrows features from a number of popular messaging platforms. Message history is stored on the server but encrypted client side so privacy is preserved. It supports group chat rooms. It supports voice and video. And most importantly, it supports bridges- you can connect your matrix to other services that are completely incompatible with matrix using a bridge. Perhaps the best example of this is Beeper, which is built on matrix. They are trying to replicate the user experience of the old app Trillian- beeper can link with a number of chat services including Google messages, slack, WhatsApp, telegram, signal, etc. Thus you get all your chats in one place.

Not matrix? XMPP is a good idea, but the wildly different levels of support among clients cause problems even back in its heyday Matrix solves some of that, fully encrypted, chat history stored on the server in encrypted form, supports gateways to other services.

To expand on this- In general you must comply with the laws of any jurisdiction where you have a business presence. This for example Meta is a USA company, but they have offices in the EU and they sell advertising in the EU from EU offices so they have to comply with EU laws for EU users. They can’t just wave off and say ‘we are a USA company, EU regs don’t apply to us’.

Lemmy is not a corporation. There is no business presence in Texas, unless an instance admin lives there or hosts the server there. So Lemmy, both as a whole and as individual instances, can simply give Texas the middle finger and say ‘we aren’t subject to your laws as we have no presence or business in your state. We are in the state of California (or whatever) and are subject to the laws of our home state. It is not our job to enforce Texas laws in California on servers hosted in Virginia.’

Thus Texas trying to enforce their laws on a Cali company is like Hollywood studios sending DMCA notices to Finland.