Applying cost-cutting analysis as an intellectual exercise...
Airline ticket sales are so price driven that for much of the market, losing some percentage of bags won't change purchase decisions.
I wonder if it's possible to identify which bags are from budget customers and for Kansai Airport to cut corners for those, accepting a certain loss percentage and saving money. It may not be:
> In addition to monitoring bags with sensors, employees also patrol the area to check for dropped bags. According to the airport management company, this additional step significantly reduces the risk of lost baggage.
I think you either patrol for all dropped bags or give up the patrols entirely, assuming that bags from first-class and budget passengers end up in the same area.
Maximizing corporate freedom leads inevitably to corporate capture of government.
Opposing either government concentration of power alone or corporate concentration of power alone is doomed to failure. Only by opposing both is there any hope of achieving either.
Applying that principle to age-verification, which I think is inevitable: Prefer privacy-preserving decoupled age-verification services, where the service validates minimum age and presents a cryptographic token to the entity requiring age validation. Ideally, discourage entities from collecting hard identification by holding them accountable for data breaches; or since that's politically infeasible, model the service on PCI with fines for poor security.
The motivation for this regime is to prevent distribution services from holding identification data, reducing the information held by any single entity.
> Prefer privacy-preserving decoupled age-verification services, where the service validates minimum age and presents a cryptographic token to the entity requiring age validation.
This is the wrong implementation.
You require sites hosting adult content to send a header indicating what kind of content it is. Then the device can do what it wants with that information. A parent can then configure their child's device not to display it, without needing anybody to have an ID or expecting every government and lowest bidder to be able to implement the associated security correctly.
It doesn't matter what kind of cryptography you invent. They either won't use it to begin with or will shamelessly and with no accountability violate the invariants taken as hard requirements in your theoretical proof. If you have to show your ID to the lowest bidder, you're pwned, so use the system that doesn't have that.
This solves some probelms, such as children accessing porn sites (oh the horror). But it doesn't solve other problems, such as predators accessing children's spaces. YouTube Kids is purportedly a safe, limited place for kids - and yet, there are numerous disturbing videos that get past the automated censors. Pedophiles stalk places like Roblox.
Sure, but other forms of age verification requirements can, in principle, solve this (at the massive cost of many other privacy and compliance issues, as the article rightly points out). For example, periodic facial recognition-based age estimation can theoretically allow only kids' accounts to a certain space.
At which point you're still letting in every pedo who has a kid living with them or can grab one at a local school, and the child trafficking networks that by their nature have access to children or to cybercriminals who know how to fool the check with a fake camera, i.e. the worst of the worst.
Meanwhile you exclude the parent who is separated from their spouse and wants to check up on where their kid is hanging out when the kid is living with the other parent, and the investigative journalist who doesn't have a young kid or their kid is 16 but the detection system guesses they're 26.
And that's on top of having the lowest bidder building a biometrics database of children.
Your proposed architecture also achieves the goal of discouraging content-distributing entities from holding hard identification data, so it sounds good to me.
I agree that the singling out of the mother for condemnation in this comment section is conspicuous and dismaying — thank you for pointing it out. Nevertheless, I would offer the father the same grace that I think the mother deserves, and I think you will be sympathetic.
We know little of the mother's circumstances, and we know basically none of the father's. He may not even be alive. He could be an "absentee", or even an abuser himself — we have no information. But he might also be active in Lucy's life yet tragically unaware of his daughter's plight.
Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
There is nothing in the article suggesting that the mother conspired with her boyfriend, or that she even knew he was a sex offender. I can imagine a scenario where the mother blames herself for not knowing and is utterly destroyed by misplaced guilt. Who knows what actually happened? The article wasn't about that.
No, parents do not always "know" about child sexual abuse.
I cited a study about this elsethread[1]. And "Lucy" was young (no older than 12, possibly as young as 7) when the rapes began, which correlates with a reluctance to disclose.
It is possible that the mother knew, but it is far from certain. The article didn't provide that context, because it chronicled detective work that led through a different chain of clues to crack the case. An obsession over maternal guilt has arisen here in the comments that was not present in the article.
No one wants to admit that their child was raped, even if they are open to the possibility — so your assertion reduces down to "there often is a realm where they should have known".
Because the article doesn't give detail, we don't know. The mother could have forcefully spurned explicit disclosures from her daughter. She could even have participated in the abuse.
But there's also a possibility that since the perp was clever enough to hide identifying details while publishing CSAM online that he was clever enough to hide abuse from those close by.
I would condemn participation but forgive ignorance. Other commenters here will never forgive the mother no matter what.
> Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
Yes. She is responsible for making sure her children is safe and well taken care of. I say this morally, not as a legal fact. She should know what they are up to, and she should notice if any of them are regularly abused over an interval of years.
Bringing the full weight of the legal system down on all parents whose children were harmed by third parties, regardless of whether the parents even knew anything about it, is monstrous cruelty.
Pray tell where did i say that all parents should be responsible whose children were harmed by a third part? I’m specifically talking about this case.
Unpredictable random acts of violence happen. Would be lunacy to punish the parents for that. On the other end of the scale here we are talking about abuse ongoing for years. By someone who the mother brought into the child’s life. Somewhere between those two ends of the scale i run out of sympathy for the excuse of “she didn’t know”. Where exactly the bundary is I don’t know. What i know is that in the scenairo described in the article i strongly believe we are in the “she should have known” territory.
Think it through. Do you think that the kid who was praying for someone to come help her, and for whom the law enforcement officers were sufficiently concerned about that they started learning brick manufacturing, do you think that kid was not at least a little bit off? You know, just enough for their mum’s to become concerned and start looking for an explanation?
You call what i say monstrous cruelty. I tell you what i think is monstrous cruelty: no kid, ever, in the history of humankind has ever had the opportunity to consent to being born. Giving life to a kid is a choice. Especially in this day and age. By choosing to father a kid or give birth to a kid one becomes responsible for the wellbeing of said kid. How far and how deep that responsibility goes can be debated. I strongly believe that the parents (both the mom and the dad) is responsible who they bring into their young kid’s life. They are responsible for knowing what is going on with the kid. (Not necessarily every step and every breath of the kid, but you know the large stuff, like for example are they being sexually abused.) The parents are also responsible to have a relationship with their kids where they would be confided by their kids if something goes terribly wrong. So the kid would go ask them for help, before praying for some help comming from who knows where. These are basics. And these are separate but interlacing failures on the part of the mother. And that is why i think what she did (or didn’t do) is monstrously cruel.
I'm reminded of the Gene Weingarten's 2010 Pulitzer Prize winning article, Fatal Distraction, on parents whose children have died from hyperthermia after being left in cars[1].
Similar to this case, some people believe that such parents should be criminally liable, and that there cannot possibly be any extenuating circumstances — despite the correlation between the rise of back-seat children's car-seat laws and the prevalence of such deaths.
> Think it through.
I have. The article provides very little to go on, and it is not hard to imagine that an abuser who is clever enough to publish CSAM material online for years without getting caught is clever enough to keep the abuse hidden from the mother and manipulate a child into keeping their trauma secret.
> (Not necessarily every step and every breath of the kid, but you know the large stuff, like for example are they being sexually abused.)
There are vast numbers of parents who do not find out for years[2]:
73% of child victims do not tell anyone
about the abuse for at least a year.
45% of victims do not tell anyone for
at least 5 years. Some never disclose.
Given how often sexual abuse happens, we're talking about millions of parents. I do not believe that every last one of them is morally culpable because they did not "know the large stuff, like for example are [their children] being sexually abused" and that they should be criminally charged.
> Would you want her charged if she didn't even know?
Yes? There are laws against child endangerment for a reason, and giving someone unrestricted accsss to your child without performing a basic background check very much falls into that territory.
I dunno. The skeeziest people I know would show up squeaky clean on paper, and several of the ones I trust the most have some kind of shit in their past, at least on paper.
There's also a lot of "WHY AREN'T YOU FOCUSING ON THE MOTHER?" whataboutism in the comments, which I find appalling. The article was about something else, and who knows what her circumstances were.
Most crimes like this are, sadly, committed by someone who has some connection to the family. It’s standard to investigate connections first. That’s not “appalling” to suggest, it’s just a sad reality of these crimes.
They should be focusing on everyone connected to the family if known. It would be negligent not to.
The confusion came from the way the article was written. They didn’t know the identity until afterward.
I just want to point out that there’s a huge difference between thoroughly investigating the family after abuse of this magnitude has been proven, and making parents legally culpable for any harm that comes to their children in general.
We can react to the fact that mothers can do more to protect their children from abuse in many ways. We can give them better access to information and support in getting away from abusers. We can create better links between police and communities they serve. We can create more pathways for children to be exposed to healthy adult behavior and connections with healthy adults, even when the family is dysfunctional.
But when we find evidence that existing supports have failed, deeply investigating why is critical.
The investigators will be able to calculate how many rounds of abuse the victim suffered. The more it happened, the less likely it is the mother was unaware. And if course, the victim can tell us directly whether the mother knew. If so, she deserves a decade of her life in prison as well.
> She said at the point Homeland Security ended her abuse she had been "praying actively for it to end".
You can provide your plausible suggestions as to what the family relationship looked like that the girl could neither ask her own mother for help nor was her father there for her.
> But it was estimated that from 30% to even 80% of victims do not purposefully disclose their misuse before adulthood.
[...]
> Arata found an inverse relationship between the disclosure and severity of abuse. Subjects reporting contact sexual abuse were significantly less likely to disclose it than those reporting non-contact sexual abuse.
> The duration of sexual abuse has a significant impact on its disclosure – the longer children are abused, the more hesitant they may be to disclose their abuse.
However damaged someone is they have a duty of care to their children. There's someone else with a blame in the story but to excuse this is very wrong.
Completely agree. It shouldn't be treated as an excuse but it's silly to ignore this as a HUGE risk factor. Probably should be considered when making policies etc.
It doesn't matter if the voice is a perfect facsimile — it only matters whether a court can be persuaded that the result is derivative.
As the article notes, the AI doesn't even have to be trained on Greene's voice for him to have a case.
> Grimmelmann said Greene doesn’t necessarily have to show definitively that Google trained NotebookLM on his voice to have a case, or even that the voice is 100 percent identical to his. He cited a 1988 case in which the singer and actress Bette Midler successfully sued Ford Motor Company over a commercial that used a voice actor to mimic her distinctive mezzo-soprano. But Greene would then have to show that enough listeners assume it’s Greene’s voice for it to affect either his reputation or his own opportunities to capitalize on it.
In other words, can you guess who someone is impersonating even if their impersonation isn't a perfect simulation?
There's a lot of characteristics to people's voices. Tons of people impersonate Trump purely through cadence. Same with Obama. How many singers impersonate Tom Waits?
Absolutely don't, and I've argued since day 1 that by refusing to try to contract for training before they just ripped it, each and every one of them should be saddled with so much legal liability as to not exist. The capitalist overlords however, will grasp at anything that promises them of being free of dealing with labor...so... Here we are.
I don't read their comment as implying this. It might in fact hint at the opposite; it's far more likely for the less senior author to get thrown under the bus, regardless of who was lazy.
There is no need to rush to judgment on the internet instant-gratification timescale. If consequences are coming for journalist or publication, they are inevitable.
We’ll know more in only a couple days — how about we wait that long before administering punishment?
It's not rushing to judgement, the judgement has been made. They published fraudulent quotes. Bubbling that liability up to Arse Technica is valuable for punishing them too but the journalist is ultimately responsible for what they publish too. There's no reason for any publication to ever hire them again when you can hire ChatGPT to lie for you.
EDIT: And there's no plausible deniability for this like there is for typos, or maligned sources. Nobody typed these quotes out and went "oops, that's not what Scott said". Benj Edwards or Kyle Orland pulled the lever on the bullshit slot machine and attacked someone's integrity with the result.
"In the past, though, the threat of anonymous drive-by character assassination at least required a human to be behind the attack. Now, the potential exists for AI-generated invective to infect your online footprint."
We do not yet know just how the story unfolded between the two people listed on the byline. Consider the possibility that one author fabricated the quotes without the knowledge of the other. The sin of inadequate paranoia about a deceptive colleague is not the same weight as the sin of deception.
Now to be clear, that’s a hypothetical and who knows what the actual story is — but whatever it is, it will emerge in mere days. I can wait that long before throwing away two lives, even if you can’t.
> Bubbling that liability up to Arse Technica is valuable for punishing them
Evaluating whether Ars Technica establishes credible accountability mechanisms, such as hiring an Ombud, is at least as important as punishing individuals.
That's what bylines are for, though. Both authors are attributed, and are therefore both responsible. If they didn't both review the article before submitting that's their problem. It's exaggerating to call this throwing away two lives, if all they do for a living is hit the big green button on crap journalism then I'm fine with them re-skilling to something less detrimental.
I agree that reserving judgement and separating the roles of individuals from the response of the organization are all critical here. Its not the first time that one of their staff were found to have behaved badly, in the case that jumps to my mind from a few years ago Peter Bright was sentenced to 12 years on sex charges involving a minor1. So, sometimes people do bad things, commit crimes, etc. but this may or may not have much to do with their employer.
Did Ars respond in any way after the conviction of their ex-writer? Better vetting of their hires might have been a response. Apparently there was a record of some questionable opinions held by the ex-writer. I don't know, personally, if any of their policies changed.
The current suspected bad behavior involved the possibility that the journalists were lacking integrity in their jobs. So if this possibility is confirmed I expect to see publicly announced structural changes in the editorial process at Ars Technica if I am to continue to be a subscriber and reader.
Airline ticket sales are so price driven that for much of the market, losing some percentage of bags won't change purchase decisions.
I wonder if it's possible to identify which bags are from budget customers and for Kansai Airport to cut corners for those, accepting a certain loss percentage and saving money. It may not be:
> In addition to monitoring bags with sensors, employees also patrol the area to check for dropped bags. According to the airport management company, this additional step significantly reduces the risk of lost baggage.
I think you either patrol for all dropped bags or give up the patrols entirely, assuming that bags from first-class and budget passengers end up in the same area.
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