Feed aggregator

Tin: A Text INdex for Postgres

Hacker News - Wed, 09/16/2026 - 12:24pm
Categories: Hacker News

How the Meta Settlement Silences Youth Activism

EFF - Wed, 09/16/2026 - 12:04pm

Since its integration into our digital world, social media has played a pivotal role in youth organizing and social mobilization. Yet, people’s access to these platforms is increasingly coming under threat from courts and legislatures under the guise of protecting young people online—presenting a significant hindrance to youth organizing.  

In a major recent example, Meta settled in a lawsuit with 52 states and territories regarding the use of Instagram and Facebook by young people. The settlement will require Meta, and pressure other non-Meta owned platforms like TikTok and YouTube, to embed age gating practices into every product while also requiring restrictions on the accounts of people under-18, such as a two-hour daily time limit and content restrictions.   

Youth Power on Social Media 

Young people have been using social media for political advocacy and community organizing for more than a decade. From organizing protests speaking out against police brutality, to organizing nationwide school walkouts demanding safety in schools from gun violence, and striking to demand lawmakers take action to protect the climate, social media has become an instrumental tool for youth to both speak out and connect with other young activists.  

Instagram has become especially useful for activism online by young people. The features on the app make it a helpful tool for being able to efficiently and quickly spread awareness, which is especially important when people need to share real-time information. For example, 17-year-old Darnella Frazier’s video on Facebook showed the world the murder of George Floyd. 

The impact of youth activism online is also evident on non-Meta owned platforms, with services like TikTok and YouTube being particularly prevalent spaces for young people to share their stories, build movements, and amplify collective engagement.

However, in a digital world operating under the settlement’s new guidelines, young people risk not being able to read crucial news due to the content being labeled as “age-inappropriate,” which has already happened for teenagers in Australia under its social media ban.  

A two-hour daily time limit and a block on Meta’s apps between midnight and 6am leaves little room for young activists to organize rapid response efforts. Being unable to see likes on a post will make it difficult to gauge the effectiveness of their campaigns.   

Add to this what we already know about Meta’s content policies which claim to “protect children” and keep sites “family-friendly” but instead label content like LGBTQ+ content as “adult” or “harmful,” youth will be left with no choice in what content they see once the ‘age-appropriate’ content filter is turned on by default. One recent report noted that Meta had hidden posts that reference LGBTQ+ hashtags like #lesbian, #bisexual, #gay, #trans, and #queer for users with the sensitive content filter on. This would specifically curtail the efforts of young activists doing work on comprehensive sex education.   

Global Trends 

Measures like this are being discussed across the globe, but not all courts have taken such a short-sighted approach. In August, the French Constitutional Council got a lot right in its decision to strike down the country’s legislation banning under-15s from social media for infringing free expression and communication for everyone online, not just young people.  

The French Court also called attention to its infringement on privacy as the legislation would have forced people of all ages to hand over government IDs, face scans, and other sensitive information to prove their age and access online content.  

Requiring this much data from users puts activists in danger of even more surveillance. Meta has already previously complied with demands from law enforcement to hand over the messages of users. The amount of personal information that will be logged and that could be demanded via a warrant from police to stifle or investigate activists’ actions or plans could cause a chilling effect, forcing advocates to pause or terminate their work.  

This is egregious because these systems misidentify or lock out people of color, people with disabilities, and trans or gender-nonconforming individuals whose IDs may not match their chosen name or align with what the system expects them to look like upon verification. And it’s often these communities that benefit from online organizing the most, especially for marginalized youth as social media can often be the only place to organize and build community. 

What Young People Deserve 

The settlement generates headlines, but it will not solve the core problem. Instead of tackling Meta’s surveillance capitalism business model that turns all online content into potential profit and centers lining the company’s pockets over protecting the speech and privacy of users, this settlement gives the tech giant an opportunity to carve out a new digital world that prioritizes its own needs, not those of young people.  

As we’ve been calling attention to in other contexts, this will force young people into digital isolation—curtailing vital access to news and resources for health and development. It also completely ignores the calls of youths themselves who favor digital literacy and education over surveillance and government control.   

Young people deserve a better internet than one regulated through panic. They deserve better than the government or Big Tech getting to decide how they use social media and what they can or cannot be exposed to or learn about. They deserve better than having their right to free expression minimized. This must not be lost in the pursuit of building a better and safer online ecosystem and environment.   

The content and technology provider has spurned the offerings of AI providers to instead develop an in-house large language model that it believes will bring significant competitive advantage

Computer Weekly Feed - Wed, 09/16/2026 - 11:38am
The content and technology provider has spurned the offerings of AI providers to instead develop an in-house large language model that it believes will bring significant competitive advantage
Categories: Computer Weekly

ProtonSync

Hacker News - Wed, 09/16/2026 - 11:38am

Introducing ProtonSync

Now you can sync your Proton Contacts and Calendar with Android native apps.

#sync #android #contacts #proton #opensource #free

https://carlostkd.ch/protonsync

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49728703

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Is AI Writing American Law?

Hacker News - Wed, 09/16/2026 - 11:33am

Article URL: https://www.effort.news/ai-congress

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49728633

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Veronese's Dogs

Hacker News - Wed, 09/16/2026 - 11:32am
Categories: Hacker News

GLM 5.3 is live on Mistral

Hacker News - Wed, 09/16/2026 - 11:29am
Categories: Hacker News

Geography Is Power

Hacker News - Wed, 09/16/2026 - 11:27am
Categories: Hacker News

Show HN: Blue – open-source governance for coding agents

Hacker News - Wed, 09/16/2026 - 11:27am

Hey HN,

After migrating to an inference gateway to serve internal usage across an organization, problems have started to pop up. Once you detach from a managed ecosystem such as OpenAI or Anthropic you lose governance capabilities that makes the transition difficult.

- Losing access to a central plugin hub for delivering MCPs, skills, etc. A gateway can sort of do this but has low compatibility beyond skills, different harnesses, and version ranges

- Inability to deliver managed config (model defaults, etc). Can sort of be done with MDM/Jamf but doesn't reach contractors and doesn't follow employees to other machines

- Gateway configuration is awkward for devs transitioning from SSO and API keys sit in plain text on their machines

The gateway transition facilitates new model families (Kimi, Deepseek, etc) which are best utilized with new harnesses beyond Codex or Claude Code. Managing these additional tools multiplies the governance problems.

Lastly, attempting to deliver an attribution program which can tag inference requests with ticket numbers and other metadata to facilitate Opex/Capex calcs for finance becomes fairly unfeasible when there are multiple harnesses across arbitrary versions. This was not solved with managed ecosystems either to be fair, but requires some self-serve program or some local MITM proxy which is a distribution and versioning problem in of itself.

I built Blue to attempt to solve these problems. It's an MIT open source, self-hostable control plane. Developers install a universal CLI and point it at their hosted control plane tenant. On launch, it reconciles the organization's policy per harness, delivers extensions, and configures the gateway. It then launches and passes control to the native CLI (Kimi, OpenCode, Codex, etc) that devs already use.

Authentication is via browser device authorization which mints ephemeral bearer tokens. For gateway access, these tokens are exchanged at the inference proxy (part of the self-hosted Blue image) for the real API keys. This means that devs don't need to manage API keys or even log into the gateway at all. Lastly, SCIM and OIDC are supported out of the box, so orgs can connect their identity solution immediately.

Curious to hear your thoughts and if you have/solved this problem. I believe it can also be solved to some degree with a harness like Pi or even OpenCode, but that of course depends on the entire org migrating to those.

Last thing I'll say is nowadays a CLI isn't enough since I've seen over 80% of devs prefer desktop apps like the ChatGPT app. We're also working on an open source desktop app that supports metaharnesses like Blue to make this transition easier.

Thanks!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49728525

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Categories: Hacker News

Pages