IMO, this whole case has a smell of politically motivated prosecution. The fact that the mom worked for Senator Jill Holtzman Vogel that pushed Virginia's free-range child law, which the judge allowed the prosecution to present a wild legal theory in direct contradiction to is just rather convenient.

It's far from improbable that a family court judge would have a bone to pick. Law enforcement gets a weird lens about public safety because of selection bias.

You can waive your right to a jury trial, and it's sometimes a good idea in cases where either A) you're definitely guilty, and the trial is mostly going to be about sentencing or B) your defense is more complicated than "I didn't do the thing", because jurors are not good at making decisions based on complexities of the law.

Additionally, you don't have the right to a jury trial for minor offenses that carry a maximum sentence of less than 6 months in prison. Contributing to the delinquency of a minor in Virginia carries a maximum 12 months, but to my understanding it is possible for the prosecution to waive any greater sentencing in order to avoid a jury trial.

I recall going to a carpet/tapestry shop in Turkey where, as we enjoyed the ever-present sales-pitch tea, the owner showed us his wares. After the 5 grand mark, he just stopped listing prices. For the final assortment, he brought out some exquisite silk tapestries about the size of welcome mats. He joking clarified that these were tapestries, to be hung on walls. If you bought one without having a wall to hang one on, he'd be happy to fly out and build you one.

My family is Persian and I grew up in Turkey. You definitely develop an appreciation for carpets, and it's sooooooo heartbreaking to see people use art as an entryway rug, simply because they don't know :(

Yeah, and if you're in the sub-continent, you better not walk all over the carpet with your shoe on!

So, this kind of thing happens all the time, and there's the Public Suffix List for exactly this problem.

There would be no issue at all if Verisign, or maybe Global Name Registry, decided to stick to the 3rd level registrations exclusively. Problem is, the chucklefucks over there decided it was a good idea to also hand out 2nd level registrations. Those 2nd level registrations outnumber the 3rd level registrations by an order of magnitude, so the PSL decided to just let joe.smith.name and john.smith.name share cookies. Which, IMO, was not a good decision, but it is what it is.

Fascism is Capitalism's immune response. Under stress, whether real or imagined, the rich and thus powerful begin dismantling the very systems that made them that way, gambling that their existing positions of influence will ensure their own survival (whether economic or literal).

They certainly dismantle systems of support, but the "system that made them that way" is more often than not simply inheriting wealth and power.

Capitalism only functions when you have people willing and able to buy your stuff, a state that protects fair dealings, and maintains a peaceful public order. It a luxury maintained by having a safe, stable society. Imagine trying to run a business in a world where the workers can just decide to cut you out of your investments, and then you have to hire PMCs to retake your factory, but then the PMCs renege on your contract and decide to run the business themselves. A society where you need to build your own roads, spread your own pro-business propaganda, and lack any recourse when your suppliers decide to take your money and run.

That's capitalism: owning capital attracts more capital, until eventually an all-powerful oligarchical class emerges that is then emboldened to dismantle the liberal democracy that built them, in order to secure their position at the top.

Hitler was sponsored by the industrialists of its nation. So was Mussolini. So is Putin. So is Trump.

"Capitalism is incompatible with democracy" is the one lesson I hope people finally learn by the end of this century.

Congrats on rediscovering Anarchism from first principles. Hierarchy begets hierarchy. As long you have a society where some people can coerce others into acting for the master's benefit and against their own, you end up on a ratchet. Power accumulates, leading to more coercion, leading to more power. Such systems select for individuals who are the most feverishly driven to amass power at any cost and put them in the position to seize more.

KeypassXC was threatened with blacklisting for deigning to let users access their private keys. Passkey Consortium lackeys will try and reassure you that you have control over your keys, but they are lying through their teeth.

The elevator pitch for passkeys is okay. A bit more complexity than we should be pushing non-technical users, but fine. A deeper dive into the the actual implementation reveals that the whole thing is a massive vendor lock-in hell-hole, pushed by megacorps who want nothing short of complete domination of your life.

First off, sites are extremely pushy about replacing your perfectly good password with a passkey, but then they hide the process for adding additional passkeys, if they offer it all, deep in the settings somewhere. Guess what? That means people locking themselves out of their accounts. All the time. Sites should not be able to choose to only accept 1 passkey. The process of making multiple keys should have been entirely client side. It's nothing short of malpractice to coerce users into setting up exactly 1 passkey.

Second off, the villains in the consortium decided that sites should be able to discriminate about what vaults they want to accept. This is a massive recipe for vendor lock in, and it's already been wielded as cudgel against KeypassXC for having the audacity to let users access their own keys, by threatening to add them to a blacklist. Sites ought to have ZERO say over what vault I use. If I want my vault to be a powershell script with a bunch of hard-coded values, that should have been my prerogative. Instead, you're trusting a bunch of oligopolic assholes to deign your vault acceptable.

It is much, much, much easier for non-technical people to understand the concept of "don't give strangers your passwords" than it is to get them to understand that by giving into the nagging prompts that their email is showing them every single time they log in, they've effectively locked themselves into only ever logging into their email on this computer.

Don't use passkeys, make sure your less-technical peers understand the danger of passkeys, and don't let the holier-than-thou, patronizing ghouls of the consortium spread their propaganda unopposed.

> sites are extremely pushy about replacing your perfectly good password with a passkey

Your password was never “perfectly good” because it is easily phished. Even with TOTP or a push notification app as MFA.

Phishing is an huge risk even for “expert” technical users, and such phishing is the cause of a huge number of breaches and supply-chain attacks.

The California version of "age verification" IS parental controls. There is no actual verification happening. The OS is required to have an age associated with a user, declared, but not proven in any way, at setup. That value is then accessible to handle age gating.

OK, sounds workable.

I'm still bothered by that data being available on a child's phone. I guess we'll see what people decide.

Don't try to deflect blame from the irredeemably evil fucks over at the Chrome team, who are sitting in their dark lair rubbing their hands together, scheming about how they can fuck the user over today. They are always to blame.

gorhill made the reasonable move of not updating in-place because the new version is strictly inferior and you don't just make a massive downgrade like that without the opportunity to explain it to people.