Hello!

Discord is rumored to be up for an initial public offering. As is tradition, the company is doing everything it can to improve revenue numbers to impress our feudal lords who will be evaluating it on the stock market. The details on exactly what is going to happen and when are a little muddy given the company's response to the backlash has been damage control claims about who will need to verify and to delay the rollout until the second half of 2026.

For now, let's take a look at some of the claims on Discord's FAQ page.

"Most users never access age-restricted content or change their default safety settings. For those who do, we have an internal system that determines your age using account-level signals — like how long your account has existed, whether you have a payment method on file, and general patterns of account activity. It does not read your messages, analyze your conversations, or look at the content you post."

I don't think the existence of a system that verifies age based on data collection is much better. While under no circumstances do you "gotta hand it to em," let's assume we can trust Discord now and in the future with not selling or using your data for any other purpose. There's a metaphor I would like to introduce you to: Data is radioactive. If you decide to collect data, even in a seemingly insignificant way, you assume a massive responsibility when it comes to storing and disposing of it. Consider the story of a French power company that decided to upgrade their customers' power meters to internet enabled devices. These 'smart-meters' collected electricity usage statistics for a home and with this data one could infer which homes had routine changes during Ramadan. The power company was now inadvertently in possession of a registry of every muslim household under their service.

I don't trust companies with data. Even if policies are good there's no guarantee they will continue to be in the future and there's no guarantee your information won't end up exposed in one of the data breaches that now occur regularly.

"If you're among the less than 10% of users who do need to verify, we'll give you options — designed to tell us only your age and never your identity."

"We're adding more verification options."

See the above.

We're committed to vendor transparency.

It remains to be seen which company Discord will partner with for their face-scan age verification going forward, but it's worth noting that their first choice was Persona. The age verification software they provided Discord performs 269 distinct references between internet and government sources for potential matches to individuals of interest. Persona is also backed by Peter Thiel, founder of global surveillance company Palantir. Palantir is a company that provides automated data collection and analysis tools to various government agencies, militaries and corporations.

Here is a small collection of the weird shit Peter Thiel has said.

"I'm looking into parabiosis stuff, which I think is really interesting. This is where they did the young blood into older mice and they found that had a massive rejuvenating effect,"

"Palantir is here to disrupt, [...] And, when it’s necessary, to scare our enemies and, on occasion, kill them."

the context makes this next one worse i promise

"I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible."

Discord has dropped the partnership with Persona after backlash, but their first choice does not inspire confidence in me. I've been looking at alternatives (stoat.chat looks promising) in the likely case I need to move my personal conversations off of the platform, but there is essentially no company I trust given the growing surveillance legislation to handle my data responsibly and to not wreck their service once enough people are dependent on it. My personal pipe dream is that open source projects that provide self hostable alternatives for things that people normally default to 'cloud' services for will become more popular. I understand these solutions are way too much to ask of anyone who isn't already interested in software, but it's hard for me to imagine a real solution to the problem of 'owning' your own data that doesn't rely on trusting a company or government. I've grown increasingly skeptical of software that cannot be audited publicly. I sincerely hope this push for age verification crawls back into the hole from which it emerged. There are people doing good work both to dig up the funding for these bills and spread awareness of harm these laws are doing.

Thank you for getting to the end :). If you have anything to share or want to discuss, feel free to scan your face so can you use the shiny new comment section under each post. Take care.

thanks for stopping by!

This is a website! (Mostly) of my own creation where I plan to share my not-so-innermost thoughts and ideas about the things I am currently working on or thinking about. I would like to detail what you can expect to see on this page and a little bit about its creation, but before all of that I would like to mention the joy I had helping a few of my friends achieve the same thing. You can find their pages at taxidermycact.us and northofpolar.is.

My primary motivation for creating a website was a desire to share more about the things I find interesting or otherwise want to talk about while also staying away from social media and other equally shitty corporations. I've never been particularly fond of participating on social media or any online discourse for that matter so I'm still very much trying to figure out what my voice and presence on the internet actually looks and sounds like. please bear with me on that.

Some specifics about the kind of posts you can expect to see on this page are:

• my personal programming projects (like this site!)
• informational posts about any concept I want to familiarize myself with
• personal resolutions I want to help hold myself acountable for by sharing them publicly
• and perhaps some journal-esque content that I deem worth posting

I will also do my best to maintain a gallery of my favorite photos, a list of media I like, and some fun interactive stuff inspired by this page.

That wraps up the important stuff about the site if you have anything else you should really be doing right about now, but if you would like a little tour or some info about the development of the site then read on!

the 'little tour' in question

Thanks to my inability to not overbuild things, the site is currently pretty far from complete. But this is a rough idea of what you can expect to find on the site and where. At the top of the page you'll find a navigation bar with links to the four main pages of the site. The 'home' button will take you to the main page where you can find all of my posts sorted from most recent -> least. I plan on adding a comment section for each post, so the chat box will not be the only way to communicate on the site.

The 'gallery' button will take you to a page with a display of some of my favorite pictures. You can click on the images to expand them.

The 'toys+games' button will take you to a page that is currently unfinished, but it's where I hope to put a bunch of little interactive demos and games that hopefully will allow some level of of interaction between users of the site.

The 'about' button will take you to another work-in-progress page where I hope to write a little bit about myself for those that are interested in learing a bit about my interests and media I enjoy.

The site also has a live chatbox that I programmed myself! If you're on desktop it should be on the right side of the page, and if you're on mobile it'll be at the bottom of the page. I haven't done much to make the page nice on a vertical layout so I'm sorry if things are hard or impossible to navigate on a phone. One of my first experiences interacting with people on the internet was a dinky chat room made for the web browser on the nintendo DSI. I chatted using my real name and one of the admins who happened to be very religious banned me. Some part of that experience felt fitting to try and recreate on a site like this. I'm sure there will be issues with it since it's a little hard to test everything that could go wrong and I'm not particularly familiar with web stuff so expect any issues you encounter to get fixed whenever I have the time. Anyways, you have to claim a username to use the chat, after which you'll be provided with a secret key you can think of like a password for your account and a random color that your username will be displayed in. I plan on letting everyone choose their own color once I get around to writing the code for that. so don't worry too much if you get a color you don't like.

some technical stuff if you're interested

• The site was made with Zola, a static site generator meant for building... static sites.
• The backend for the chatbox and future comment system is a web server I wrote in rust using the hyper and smol crates.
• Everything (the comments,usernames, etc..) is stored in an sqlite database because... sqlite seemed the simplest to me.
• This site is currently being hosted on an old office pc behind an nginx proxy, but I plan to move it onto a raspberry pi because I have like 3 sitting around at this point.
• All the code is on github if you want to see the heinous crimes I committed because I wanted to get everything done this week.

That's all for now :) bye bye! hope to see you back here for next time