The article makes one mistake: praising Europe for having a better approach. Governments here are pushing hard to force ID requirements. Sure, they start by pretending it's "for the children" and they "only want age verification". They also claim that e-IDs will be voluntary. Camel. Nose. Tent.
These are the same governments that file criminal charges when you compare lying leader to Pinocchio (Germany). The UK records something like 30 arrests per day for social media posts. Just imagine how much better they could do, if you were not pseudo-anonymous in the Internet!
I quite like the EU approach. It's a decent spec. Most countries already have digital apps to verify identity, like Denmark's MitID (https://www.mitid.dk/en-gb/get-started-with-mitid/). These could be expanded to fully EUDI compliant wallets and deliver encrypted proof-of-age without exposing any other identity.
For example a gambling site could require MitID auth, but only request proof-of-age and nothing else. You can see in the app which information is being requested, like with OAuth.
If there's no information provided beyond proof-of-age, what's stopping my friend's 18 year old brother from lending his ID to every 14 year old at school? IRL that's negated by the liquor store clerk looking at the kid who is obviously underage and seeing that his face doesn't match the borrowed card he just nervously presented.
> what's stopping my friend's 18 year old brother from lending his ID to every 14 year old at school?
MitID is 2fa. You log in with username, then you have to open the app, enter password or scan biometric, then scan the QR code of the screen* and you are logged in.
He would need to be next to you every time you log in. I think that is too high friction to make it feasible on large scale.
* Assuming you open the website on the Desktop, and MitID on phone. If both on phone, skip this step.
If people have to go through OS auth flow each time they open a website, that will drive everyone mad. One of the key motivators for politicians is not making everyone mad, so the polls don't drop.
Also, I reckon most children know the password for their parent's phone or computer, and many more will find out if there is a highly motivational factor for doing so. How many exhausted parents just toss their phone to their child to stop them whining?
I suppose it could be a biometric sign-in with facial recognition or fingerprint, but again, that's a tonne of friction for the whole web.
That's how the user interface works. What is it doing at the protocol level? What stops someone from building a service that mints anonymous verification codes on a massive scale and distributes them to anyone who asks? Maybe with the user interface being an app kids can download to scan any QR code and pass verification.
I don't know. I would assume the account gets blocked if you do it on a larger scale, so you have to rotate account, which gets expensive fast as it's not easy to steal them?
The automated attack setup I'm envisioning is something like:
18 year old buys a cheapo laptop + phone and connects the two over ADB or some purpose built automation app (think appium). 18 year old puts the phone on a tripod pointed at the laptop screen.
14 year olds at school pay $10 a year for use of the service and install a browser extension that forwards the QR codes from whichever service they wanna use to the 18 year old's computer. Changing every couple of seconds is not an issue here, they all live in the same city and have <10ms ping.
The only high friction part of this is that someone needs to write the software for it, but that doesn't seem like all that difficult of a project and open source solutions are likely to appear within weeks of social media requiring it. If there really is no information shared with the other party beyond "yup, user is over the age of maturity" you could even run this as a free public TOR service without fear of ever getting caught.
Mhh, but then the Danish Agency for Digitisation will see that the 18 year old does a lot of age request on all day and night long. And block his account. And then he can't use his own banking, health, postal apps.
High risk, low reward.
If he throttles request to stay under a threshold, if the agency knows about it service they could use it and see which account does age requests at the same time.
Ah, so it does leak your identity through the timing side channel. In other words, your anonymity is only dependent on the govt not coordinating with service providers to de-anonymize users. I assumed the 2fa app just held cryptographic keys and did some 0kp magic to show that the cert belongs to a government-attested adult. Phoning home all the time makes it trivial for the government to abuse people's privacy; they can just compel service providers to provide logs of logins.
Well right now THAT service does not even exist. The SSO exist, the anonymous age verification was an idea from another user here. Instead of sending (face)data to a private 3rd party.
I don’t mean to be as aggressive as this sounds but the frogs probably liked the increasingly warm water too until it started boiling. How many steps between MitID and a fork that is used to enforce extreme censorship?
MitID is run by the government. How would anyone fork it? Any service implementing MitID auth can verify through signatures that they're connecting to the official service.
I don't want my kids to have access to gambling websites like Stake, but I also want to keep my digital identity anonymous. The eIDAS is a solution that achieves both of these goals.
If you can choose between the discord shitshow with a face scan, or a digital encrypted proof-of-age in a 2FA app you already use, issues and verified only by the government of your country (who have all your personal details anyway), what would you choose?
> During the 19th century, several experiments were performed to observe the reaction of frogs to slowly heated water. In 1869, while doing experiments searching for the location of the soul, German physiologist Friedrich Goltz demonstrated that a frog that has had its brain removed will remain in slowly heated water, but an intact frog attempted to escape the water when it reached 25 °C.
Gambling sites already have payment information, which should include real names! (no, you should not be allowed to do non-KYC gambling, that's just money laundering)
I think it's more that proof of identity from the union of {payment information, KYC} also includes both of age verification and name, not that name leads to age.
As in, if you're not matching the payment info to your customer info, you (which may be the company or the government passing the laws the company is following just fine) did it wrong.
Because, as pjc50 wrote, failing to do that is an obvious exploit for money laundering.
> If I'm underage, but already have a payment card, the identity of the card matches my name.
And if a gambling site stops there and goes "LGTM", it's not the "union of {payment information, KYC}".
Union, as in combination of both.
KYC, as in "Know Your Customer". Looks like MitID is a thing that would be one way to do KYC? But I've only just heard of it, so belief is weakly held.
Regarding the Pinocchio thing: Local police said „that‘s probably insult“ and sent it to public prosecutors. Public prosecutors investigated and said „nope, free speech“.
If you can disturb enough people that think differently, independent of the final result, you can end up silencing them. Is the same that happens with bogus DCMA claims in Youtube channels, when they negative reviews of products. For a normal guy, having the police showing up, going to court, lawyer, etc, can be a significant burden. I DO see a problem.
Indeed, police misusing their authority is a problem, and they require constant oversight. But this is true completely independently from if you need to provide an age to order drugs online.
> Prosecution needs to look into all reported cases.
The ramifications of that sentence in terms of cost, effort and possibly other nuances, makes me shiver.
Note how a minimal misbehavior of a relatively small portion of the population could render any police and judicial system totally inoperative. Just 2000 people across the country go doing light insults to random people… again, I can think of much better systems.
The investigation and the threat against your freedom and safety (the implication of prison is always that you'll be harmed in there) WAS the punishment.
Sure, but the fact remains that it was referred for criminal prosecution. They didn't follow through, this time, but the victim still had his "lesson" about insulting his betters.
And Germany really did sentence people for calling Mr. Habeck "Schwachkopf", which is about as mild an insult as you can find.
Weeeeeell .. to counter that argument there is pimmelgate. I know it was not legit, but they searched his house, even after he was at the police station and confessed.
That leads to selv censorship, even if what you did was legal.
Yes, I think I am with you. That search should not have happened (and consequently was ruled unlawful by a court afterwards). But it should not have happened in the first place.
I hope (but do not know) that in the Schwachkopf-case, they just took the shortcut via insult instead of opening an investigation for the Nazi stuff.
But we don’t know that.
I believe, that we can express our opinions and discuss them without insulting people (in the legal sense).
And I hope, that prosecutors do not lightly investigate each Schwachkopf they find on the internet.
And for all the other cases, the courts need to be involved.
"The professors use AI themselves and expect their students to use it, but do not have a gauge for what kinds of problems make for an appropriately difficult assignment in the modern era."
I'm a prof, recently retired but still teaching part-time. This is exactly the problem. AI is here, people use it, so it would be stupid (plus impossible) not to let students use it. However, you want your students to still learn something about CS, not just about how to prompt an AI.
The problem we are heading towards as an industry is obvious: AI is perfectly capable of doing most of the work of junior-level developers. However, we still need senior-level developers. Where are those senior devs going to come from, if we don't have roles for junior devs?
Not just that. As a 31 year old developer even I feel like acquiring new skills is now harder than ever. Having Claude come up with good solutions to problems feels fast, but I don't learn anything by doing so. Like it took me weeks to understand what good and what bad CMake code looks like. This made me the Cmake guy at work. The learning curve delayed the port from qmake to CMake quite a bit, but I learned a new skill.
Claude has a teacher mode where it will ask you questions.
I’m picking up game dev in my spare time. I’m not letting Claude write any of the code. We talk through the next task, I take a run at it, then when I’m stuck I got back and talk through where the problems are.
It’s slower than just letting Claude do it, obviously. Plus you do need to be a bit disciplined - Claude will gladly do it for you when you start getting tired. I am picking it up through, and not getting bogged down in the beginner ‘impossible feeling bugs you can’t figure out bc you’re learning and don’t fully understand everything yet’ stage.
I've been using Claude Code since last summer and had no idea about the learning mode. Between the old features i've missed and all the new features to learn weekly, if not daily, I'm starting to accept I'll never catch up.
thanks for the heads up. wasnt aware of teacher mode but always phrase prompts to "teach me" as a shortcut to get claude to explain everything its offering and prevent from just implementing code
I can't imagine that you aren't learning a lot in just getting the AI to do what you need it to do. I haven't learned as much as I have in the last 6 months in a long time, including grounding theory and new kinds of testing. I feel like a PhD student again.
what i find interesting about your perspective is your subjective perception of difficulty. nobody short of a savant is going to pick up a new language instantly. weeks (if not months) to learn a language is completely normal outside of this hyper exaggerated atmosphere we find ourselves in. that being said, language models do atrophy the brain when used in excess, and they do encourage surface level understanding, so i agree wholeheartedly with the idea of not learning anything at all by using them.
I’m 37 and have coded my entire life. I even got to pull the drop out of college and do star up and make money type thing before I took my current position.. I have to say AI has sucked the heart and soul out of coding.. Like it’s the most boring thing having to sit and prompt… Not to mention the slop, nonsense hype etc.. Never attach your identity to your job or a skill. Many of us do that just to be humbled when a new advancement occurs… I know I see programming and looking at Open Source code to contribute and all of it…. Is just lifeless. Literally and figuratively. Sorry for long rant I needed to vent.
I see open source projects entirely run by clueless LLM-using idiots, and existing projects overrun by them, and there is none of the quality or passion you would normally see.
Even if I were to apply my skill/energy to a project of my own, my code would just get stolen by these LLM companies to train their models, and regurgitated with my license removed. What's the point?
I have a block of code I will put in the CLAUDE.md file of any project where I want to get a better understanding of the tech in use where I ask for verbose explanations, forcing me to write some of the code, etc. Mixed results so far but I think it will get there. The one thing that I have decided: only one new thing per project!
Interesting. I've felt like it's never been easier to learn things, but I suppose that's not quite the same as "acquiring new skills". I don't know if it applies, but it's always been easy to take the easy way out?
I feel like AI has made it a bit easier to do harder things too.
How are you not learning from reading all the code produced by Claude? Is auditing a new codebase or onboarding to a new project any different from creating a new codebase w/ Claude?
Reading code and understanding it is a very important skill and now might be the most important skill.
It's analogous to reading a textbook and skipping the exercises. The exercises make you think and realize the gaps in your knowledge that you did "read" at the time but didn't fully appreciate.
As I was reading this exchange, I was wondering the same thing, why isn't a person learning the code from reading the code that was produced. I guess people learn differently when it comes to code.
To me it seems that the path to seniority would shift. It is difficult to answer because we're looking at it from the lens of 'fundamental knowledge'. Instead, to me it seems that now this is less of a requirement compared to 'systems-level thinking'. A very simple example could be the language syntax vs the program structure/parts working together. And with this, a junior developer would still lack this experience and I don't think AI tools would be a problem in developing it.
All I say though is from the perspective of self-taught dev, not a CS student. The current level of LLMs is still far from being a proper replacement to fundamental skills in complex software in my eyes. But it's only in it's worst version it will be from now on.
> so it would be stupid (plus impossible) not to let students use it
It's been plenty of years since my college days, but even back then professors had to deal with plagiarism and cheating. The class was split into a lecture + a lab. In the lab, you used school computers with only intranet access (old solaris machines, iirc) and tests were all in-class, pen-and-paper.
Of course, they weren't really interested at all in training people to be "developers", they were training computer scientists. C++ was the most modern language to be taught because "web technologies" changed too quickly for a four-year degree to be possible, they argued.
Everyone is just hoping, that in five years, when new seniors are needed, that eastern people are seniors by then and cheaper or that ai can replace them.
it's like when bootcamps were all the rage promising an easy career path, the floor has been raised now, companies will pay a premium for competent devs eventually when they figure it out and it will be an attractive option once again as a career path, but for now it's a shit show.
if 90% of your class turns off their brains when learning with AI then focus on the 10% who understand that you need to crawl first before attempting anything else.
To me the solution seems simple, but I have no idea how to implement it in a classroom/uni environment.
Students should be building software hands on, yes they should use AI, but there shouldn't be an end state beyond like "6 hours of work" or however long is reasonable in their schedule. The instructor should push them to build more features, or add constraints that obsolete most of their work.
Eventually there will be spots in the code that only the student and professor understands, in some limited instances the professor can explain what some generated code does.
Alternatively students can use generated code, but they have to provide a correctness proof and most of the class is based on studying proofs. Depends if it's a more CS/SE or Software Industry focused group of students and their math background
> Modern journalism goes for clicks, which means generating outrage.
Is this about journalists talking about musk, or about musk himself? I mostly learn about his views through his own tweets that twitter always makes sure to serve me in my home page, and "goes for clicks"/"generating outrage" seems to fit well how musk uses his platform. In any case, his politics seem awful to me even without any journalistic mediation of them.
Sure, and anyone who thinks that was a Nazi salute fell victim to clickbait.
"My heart goes out to you" with a throwing gesture that ends with your arm outstretched. Of course, only the final position was blasted all over the press.
> Sure, and anyone who thinks that was a Nazi salute fell victim to clickbait.
You need to be terribly naive to ignore the fact that the guy known for supporting a swath of fascist and far-right groups, to the point the guy even hosts their events, wasn't casually throwing around Nazi salutes.
Did you see what DOGE did to the government? In particular to USAID? Estimates are that this has already killed hundreds of thousands of people who relied on that aid.
The issue isn't just Musk's politics. It's that his actions have been evil, the kind of negative impact that major wars have.
We're talking something like 1 million dead people per year with a quarter of those being children. For a level of assistance that cost the US nothing (0.43% of federal spending). This is an evil that in a few years puts you on the list of biggest mass murderers in history.
It was not the "helping face of the CIA" it's a means for the United States to maintain first world power order in a quid pro quo scheme.
It's hardly groundbreaking or evil considering every single country with large wealth plays this game (eg; china, india europe ect), I give you lots of money and help your people and in exchange you do/don't do xyz. if you do xyz then we take away the money
> it's a means for the United States to maintain first world power order in a quid pro quo scheme.
Um… yes. Run by the CIA, with their helping face mask.
Even if you disagree with what is easily researched… in no fucking way were they and aid organization.
That was the low information “news follower” line put forward until it was so obviously disproven that everyone updated and pretended they didn’t complain about missing HIV vaccines to Africans.
All of Linux should do this. Add to T&C that it cannot be legally used anywhere that requires an age check. Then have the big distros enforce it. See how long Silicon Valley lives with no Linux.
Seriously, we in the tech industry can help stop this 1984 stuff.
Really, it's more about the police not doing their job. Face recognition pointed her out, the police saw she had a rap sheet, and therefore they didn't check further.
She apparently could not afford a lawyer, who would have pointed out that she was provably at home (transactions, etc.) at the time the crime was committed in another state.
Really it's not specifically AIs fault, though it made the error easier.
Yes and no. I think the interesting thing about this story is how it's been presented: AI as a scapegoat for incompetence.
The police made an inexcusable mistake out of carelessness. They simply couldn't be bothered to spend five minutes fact-checking the facial recognition match, and it caused catastrophic harm to an innocent woman.
And what's the headline? "AI did this". It's a new and exciting way for people to shirk accountability for their actions. We're already seeing it in the reporting on the Iranian school bombed by the United States: blame AI for selecting the target, and not the humans in the loop who failed to do the most basic due diligence.
I still wouldn't let AI off the hook here. Every link in the chain has to be accountable for fuckups. You don't get to pass it along to the supposed "human in the loop" when you fail spectacularly. That's how we end up with shitty "almost works" AI.
Sure, the AI contributed, but it was far less responsible overall than the humans in this case.
Don't let the AI system off the hook by all means, but by focusing on it to this extent, the narrative ignores (deliberately?) the hugely negligent actions of the police et al involved.
AI or more precisely the way it is being sold to us is the most responsible factor here. People by nature are lazy and will take shortcuts given an opportunity. AI is the ultimate shortcut these days, a "mental crutch" majority of the people using it are leaning on. Humans just did what they always do, be lazy - AI should never have been used for processes with this level of life-altering impact because what happened here was bound to happen.
Nobody's "selling it" as more reliable than it is. People are assuming it's more reliable than it is.
> People by nature are lazy and will take shortcuts given an opportunity.
So, um, the fact that humans are behaving incompetently means we should shift the responsibility onto a machine?
Suppose a human had looked at some crappy surveillance video from hundreds of miles away, and told the primary investigator "that looks like it could be her; you might want to check it out". Would that human be the most responsible person in the chain? The moron who took that as gospel and actually made an arrest has no agency at all here?
Come on, a facial recognition match? Facial recognition probably shouldn't be used because it's bad when it works, but everybody with a functioning synapse knows that facial recognition is going to get lots of false hits.
I agree, but I think the broader point here is that any automated system is a way to offload accountability. And it will be used for that without a doubt no matter how “good” the officers or human processes are.
So it’s still reasonable to be skeptical of (or outright reject) the use of the technology in systems that can ruin or end people’s lives.
You shouldn't have to have a lawyer to get something this basic entered into the record. Rule of law that can't even get that right is useless, which is part of why so many people have less, or zero, faith in it today.
Most of the comments are cynical. I read this, at least the "right to compute" part, as a reaction to the current onslaught of censorship and age verification laws. Which is a good thing.
The AI part honestly looks fairly harmless, just applying existing standards, but I may be wrong there...
I suspect ya you're right - nothing to do with Wireguard. I set it up do I could VPN into my home network from my phone. More than once, I have forgotten to turn it off. Everything worked, and I only noticed days later. Very robust, in my anecdotal experience.
IMHO the problem is allowing changes to terms and conditions for existing contracts. If I have a contract with a company, that contract was made under existing T&C. The company should not be able to change those conditions without my explicit permission. Denying me service if I disagree should not be a valid option.
I get this periodically on our overly-computerized car: Here are new T&C, click yes to agree. You can make the screen go away temporarily, but there is no options to say "no, I disagree".
Here in Sweden the thing that makes something a contract is that you can't change it-- that it has definite provisions that have been agreed and that both parties actually expect the other to hold up their part.
The US breaking its contract law to treat non-contracts as contracts is one of the most insane things I've seen a legal system do to itself.
The key difference, is that the US is many jurisdictions (Federal + 50 states + a lot of others, from counties to cities to territories to MANY others), and the variance amongst those is high.
The key thing well regulated places like Sweden get right, is that in consumer contracts you have minimum bars that you must meet regardless of what you can get the consumer to agree to. So, for instance, return policies, for goods bought online have minimum standards they must meet.
In the US, these things have huge variability. There are well regulated states, and well, the others.
>The key thing well regulated places like Sweden get right, is that in consumer contracts you have minimum bars that you must meet regardless of what you can get the consumer to agree to. So, for instance, return policies, for goods bought online have minimum standards they must meet.
Yes, but Swedish contract law actually is like this. A contract is a specific agreement, it can never be "Oh well, you can add provisions as you like if you send them to me" or "I will pay whatever".
The workaround is that each change is a new contract. If you don’t accept the changes the existing contract ends and that’s it. But the power is mostly with the provider, you need it more than it needs you, so you will want the new contract. You can also ask and negotiate terms and the provider has the same choice. If there’s healthy competition you have some power, otherwise you are out of luck.
But that would supposed need to have some explicit text stating the expiration of that contract. An existing contract can't just end when provider feels like it, I suppose?
I would guess it can end the moment either party wants, unless a length was established. At the end of the month or year you’ve paid for, perhaps with a minimum notice, would make sense. Otherwise the provider can refuse to let you stop paying, citing the contract.
Every contract has that, either party can exit the contract under normal conditions. You can cancel your Netflix subscription with a short notice period. They can do the same. They use the notice period as grace period for you to accept the new conditions. You accept a new contract with new conditions.
I negotiated my mobile phone or internet contracts again and again, to get better deals. I threaten to leave, they throw a bone. Because they know I have options. Providers who know you don’t will squeeze you however they please.
Do you think it's likely that these kinds of things come about because there's varity in the myriad of jurisdictions in America or that there are monied interests who stand to benefit from it?
Like to put it another way how much of this is 'We must do it this way because Americans are simply built different and we're just special' vs 'this makes a handful of people a bunch of money and they have teams of lobbyists, marketers, and lawyers to normalize this kind of stuff in society over time'?
It's probably a bit of both from what I've seen of how Americans tend to react to their government doing things (online anyways).
The US's quagmire of incoherent laws and many jurisdictions seems to be a bad combination of:
* Apathetic voters that are raised on a media diet of "big government bad", which impedes any regulations on a federal level. (Note that this is irrespective on if the voters actually want a small government, it's what they're led to believe.)
* Politicians that don't like to give up power; there's an unusual desire for local/state US officials to claim responsibility and get very pissy when the federal government steps in with a standardized solution. This is very unusual compared to other countries; punting responsibilities to local officials in other countries is generally seen as a way for politicians to abdicate responsibility by letting it die in micromanagement and overworked administrative workers and isn't popular to do anymore these days. (This is also a two way street, where federal US lawmakers can abdicate making any legislation that isn't extremely popular by just punting it down to the states, even if they have legal majorities.)
* The US has a court system that overly favors case law rather than actual law. Laws in the US are permitted to be painfully underdefined since there's an assumption that the courts will work out all the finer details. It's an old system more designed around the days of bad infrastructure across large distances (like well, the British Empire, which it's copied from). It's meant to empower the judicial branch to be able to make the snap decision even if there's not directly a law on the books (yet) or if a law hasn't actually reached the judiciary in question. The result is that you end up with a bunch of different judiciaries, each with their own slightly different rules. It also encourages other bad behavior like jurisdiction shopping where people will try to find the judiciary most favorable to them, crafting "the perfect case" to get a case law on the books the way you want it to get judges to override similar cases and so on and so forth - in other countries, what the supreme court judges doesn't have nearly the same lasting impact that a decision in the US has.
* And finally, the entire system is effectively kept stuck in place because lobbyists like it this way; if they want to kill regulation, they just get some states to pass on it and then hem and haw at the notion of a federal regulation. Politicians keep it in place on their own, lobbyists provide them the grease/excuse to keep doing it. (And those lobbyists these days also have increasing amounts of ownership over the US media, so the rethoric about voters not liking big government regulations is reinforced by them as well.)
It didn't end up this way on purpose; the historical reasons for this are mostly untied from lobby interests (which is mostly just "the US is the size of a continent in width", "states didn't actually work together that much at first" and "the US copied shit from the British Empire"), but they're kept this way by lobby interests.
This is not true. It is 100% possible to write a contract in Sweden where one of the paragraphs says that you can change it in this and that way. And if we're talking about business to business contracts, it will probably in almost all cases be enforceable, even if you're writing that one party can just announce changes. In fact, I think most business to business contracts have some kind of clause specifying that it is possible to raise prices or change certain things.
That absolutely isn't true. You can enter into agreements about how to form a contract, but a contract is definite, completely specific, with no changing provisions. That's what makes it a contract.
If you have an agreement that says one party can announce changes, you don't have a contract, because those changes were not agreed to.
I am not sure that is correct. At the least it sounds to be a violation of EU laws if this were possible in Sweden; but, even aside from it, I do not think a contract can be changed willy-nilly without offering termination of the service in due time.
These users have agreed to a monthly contract or, if there is no money paid, a contract with no finite end date but with provisions to change terms, essentially terminating and restarting. So the service provider has decided to amend the contract at the end of the current (one month) contract in the first case, or on some date arbitrary date in the second (unpaid). The users are free not to accept the new contracts.
So nobody is just changing a contract mid stream. Use of a service month-to-month implicitly agrees to this: your ability to stop using and paying them on the 1st of the next month is their ability to change the terms on which the service is offered next month.
And btw, everyone on here hates this, but I don't know how else it could work. The idea that if I sell a customer one month of a paid saas on a monthly plan I'm somehow obligated to never change my terms or price forever as long as he or she keeps paying is beyond absurd. If people want stable terms, they need to find software that will sell them annual or multiyear contracts.
I think the way it would normally work is that you present them with the price offer and ask whether they accept, and if they do you render the service.
Presumable in Sweeden you can agree to new contract that supercedes the current one? That's all that's (argueable) happening here.
To me the insane part is that contracts don't have to be registered with the courts (or some qualified third party) ahead of time.
Like each party could show up with their own piece of paper (or not be able to provide it). Which is largely the issue here in that one party is showing up with a 2021 document and the other a 2023 document.
>Presumable in Sweeden you can agree to new contract that supercedes the current one? That's all that's (argueable) happening here.
Yes, of course.
We don't have any rules about contracts needing to be written down or registered or anything of that sort. Even verbal agreement are valid, and you are entering into simple contracts even when you buy something in a store.
There is a strange phenomena where introducing tech makes people suddenly blind or numb to established rules.
Can you imagine buying a car in the seventies and a month later finding a technician under your parked car making adjustments to it? You’d kick them out and call the police. But put an internet connection in between and it’s ok.
Same goes for wiretapping (compare Nixon vs current state), unlicensed hotels and cabs being ok when booked by an app, and so on.
But the “initial” T&C allows them to cancel your contract unless there’s a minimum contractual period. They can take that opportunity to force you into a deal change. The change is that now just using the service is considered consent.
The real problem is that the law allows this power imbalance and doesn’t tip the scales to even it out for the end user. That for me is evidence that the law is made for the companies (probably by the companies too).
I have the same in the car. Been postponing for 2 years now.
I wonder if this can be weaponized by users too (probably no legal basis for this), just send them a new T&C again and again and say delivering the service is consent. Force the companies to say the quiet part out loud: users are not allowed to have the same liberties as the company.
> That for me is evidence that the law is made for the companies (probably by the companies too).
Yes, everything is becoming more and more convenient for big corporations while individual citizens need to navigate an ever increasingly complex world. Laws are designed to protect capital not individual citizens nor society. That never ends well.
This is just the reality of the power asymmetry and is exactly the same for small company Vs big company. As a small company your business is just not worth that much to big company, so you choices are accept the terms offered or go elsewhere. Or, in an ideal world, there is a competitor who's found a space in the market offering better terms than big company.
I did this to FreeNow (the Uber competitor). No cat though. When they changed their “late fee” that I pay to the driver they if I’m late but nobody pays me if they’re late, and made it implicitly accepted, I emailed them my conditions and said that continuing to provide me a service is implicitly accepting them.
I still have the account. Do you think it worked? I’ll need to test that in court.
The other side of this is that companies do want to change their T&C from time to time, so what do they do, force you to quit and then sign up again? That adds a lot of friction. Or do they tag things and say "Customer X signed up on this date, so he is bound by T&C number 12, whereas this other customer signed up a year later and is bound by T&C number 13". That seems unwieldy since there is a common infrastructure.
I get emails from time to time that "Policy X has changed and will take a effect in X weeks" so at least I'm given advance notice, and am basically OK with that approach as long as the changes are spelled out clearly and not hidden in hundreds of pages of legalese. Maybe an LLM would help here, and translate what the new changes in terms really means so I can decide whether to continue with the service or not. In general I'm OK as long as I'm given enough notice and it's clear what is happening.
The same thing happens with pricing. What does a company do when they want to increase rates, or change their products? They send out a notification that starting on a certain date, the prices will go up. I don't think anyone objects to that. How is a T&C change different?
I work for a digital bank and the versioning is essentially exactly how we handle T&Cs.
The user accepts a certain version of some terms, and if we launch for example a new product that requires changed T&Cs then we ask the user to accept them if they want to use the new product.
If they don't, well, then they just keep using the existing offering without accepting any new terms.
That’s sounds reasonable for services-based consumer offerings. Which would include consumer SaaS services.
Where it gets a little
muddy for me is hardware with services attached (a new EV, etc)… you pay $60k for a car, it really shouldn’t be possible to force a new ToS on something they has physical ownership. And definitely not possible to brick or de-option the car due to refusal to accept new ToS.
Versioned terms help when changes apply to a product, not the whole platform. For a new product with different rules, require explicit, time-stamped consent before first use; otherwise grandfather users on existing terms. Provide a changelog, a grace period, and an easy opt-out. At Getly, per-product terms and payout rules kept separate can reduce friction.
> Or do they tag things and say "Customer X signed up on this date, so he is bound by T&C number 12, whereas this other customer signed up a year later and is bound by T&C number 13". That seems unwieldy since there is a common infrastructure.
If the company would like their T&C to carry the force of a binding contract upon me, then yes, keeping track of my agreement seems like the absolute bare minimum they must do.
Either these things are real contracts or they are not. The idea that it's too onerous for a company to keep track of its contractual agreements is absurd. That's giving them all the benefits of a real contract with none of the obligations.
> What does a company do when they want to increase rates, or change their products? They send out a notification that starting on a certain date, the prices will go up. I don't think anyone objects to that.
Of course you do. I have a fixed contract with my mobile carrier - if they want to change rates, tough luck. Once the current contract expires, they can indeed notify me that the new contract will auto-renew with a new rate, and I can either accept it or choose a new carrier. But they very much can't change prices, or alter services rendered, while the current contract is in force.
I'm still on a contract from 2016 or so with my mobile (cell) operator. 10 years of inflation, I pay basically nothing for some occassional data use and more voice than I could ever use.
Of course it irks them much to not be able to sell me less for more. But they can't do anything short of disconnecting me and that is unspeakable for a mobile operator.
I used to have a good deal for years at Orange. They tried to get me on a new contract (slightly expensive) for a while, but at some point they just decommissioned the old program, basically they cancelled the old contracts and migrated everyone to the new plan. It was a minor change to me so went with it, then later they started to hike prices on the new plan, eventually I cancelled and left them after about 20 years.
>so what do they do, force you to quit and then sign up again? That adds a lot of friction.
Maybe that's a good thing? Imagine if changing the T&C required cancelling everyone's account and then letting people sign up with new accounts if they still want to do business. That would probably make any T&C changes much harder to justify, creating a balance against what many see as abusing T&C updates.
If you decline the new contract, you're entirely welcome to continue on the old T&C.
Worth noting, the old T&C you agreed to probably include a clause where either party can unilaterally terminate the agreement for any reason, which they can then invoke.
Also worth noting, the old T&C you agreed to probably included a clause about these sorts of updates, too.
So, right there, you've already explicitly agreed to a contract that can be terminated if you don't accept updates.
> The company should not be able to change those conditions without my explicit permission.
The legal argument is that (a) you were explicitly notified of these changes, (b) your rights to use the service under the previous contract have been revoked, and (c) you're continuing to use the service.
So, either you're stealing their service, or you did in fact explicitly agree to the new contract - "“Parties traditionally manifest assent by written or
spoken word, but they can also do so through conduct.” Berman, 30 F.4th at 855."
> If you decline the new contract, you're entirely welcome to continue on the old T&C.
I think the point of contention here is that in practice, there is no way to continue on the old terms of service/contract. Suppose you're using a note taking app, and one day they update their terms of service to say that they can use your notes to train their AI. "Continued use implies consent," so you are locked into the new terms of service unless you stop using the app right then and there. You are not afforded the opportunity to decline the new terms of service and continue on the old ones.
> I think the point of contention here is that in practice, there is no way to continue on the old terms of service/contract.
Yeah, because, as I said: the old T&C you agreed to probably include a clause where either party can unilaterally terminate the agreement for any reason, which they can then invoke.
So, when they terminate that old contract, it's based entirely on the terms of that old contract. You agreed to this up-front.
What's the alternative? Force companies to offer indefinite contracts?
I don't know where to draw the line, but if I buy a phone for $1000, I don't think the company should be able to change their terms of service on me the next day.
Clauses existing, have very little to do with it being enforceable.
Vader might say he can change the deal at any point, but consumer law generally requires that what is purchased reflects what is advertised.
If you don't agree to a new set of terms, because the service is changed from what you purchased, then both parties generally should still be party to the previous.
Notification alone, is not enough. Agreement is required.
Again, the previous terms allow them to terminate the previous contract, and ... hey look, they're exercising their rights, listed in the original contract, which you did in fact agree to.
If you want to continue using the services, and know about the change, then that's legally, as cited in the actual court documents in OP, an agreement to the new terms.
> Clauses existing, have very little to do with it being enforceable.
You cannot cancel a contract for "any reason". In most jurisdictions that will be an unenforceable term.
Usage here being consent, is an unpublished ruling. It does not set precedent, it refers only to these specific circumstances, where clients sought to understand terms before choosing to continue usage.
Legally, usage with foreknowledge, is consent. Usage where you already agreed to terms implicitly, because you sought and understood them beforehand.
It will not always be an agreement to new terms.
> This disposition is not appropriate for publication and is not precedent except as provided by Ninth Circuit Rule 36-3
The OP and I both explicitly cites their source for "usage + knowledge = consent", and it comes from fairly basic contract law. Are you saying this ruling cites another unpublished ruling or something?
I have it running locally, but speed is a problem. I have the 35GB model running on a PC with 64GB, a fairly new processor and a mid-level GPU. Ask a question, go drink a coffee.
I mean, it's great that so many models are open-source and readily available. That is hugely important. Running models locally protects your data. But speed is a problem, and likely to remain a problem for the foreseeable future.
These are the same governments that file criminal charges when you compare lying leader to Pinocchio (Germany). The UK records something like 30 arrests per day for social media posts. Just imagine how much better they could do, if you were not pseudo-anonymous in the Internet!
reply