• 3 Posts
  • 20 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 15th, 2023
  • Classy Hatter@sopuli.xyztoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Why is checking age at os-level that bad?
    4·
    1 month ago

    Just because one option is better than another, doesn’t mean it’s good.

    OS level age check applies to everyone, not just children. Some legislations require strong age checking, which means you need to send some identification to some service. You won’t be able to know how the information is handled, for how long it’s stored and for what purposes it’s used beside age checking. And because this applies to everyone, and is required to be able to use your computer, everything you do with your computer and phone is tied to your user account, and as such to you as an individual and identifiable human being.

    Some of these legislations uses age ranges, and the OS is required to inform applications, and such, whether the user is, for example, below 13 years old, or 13 to 16 years old, etc. Consider this simple scenario: Some user uses some application, and the OS reports the user’s age as below 13. The user uses the same app the next day, but now the OS reports the user’s age as 13 to 16 years old. Can you figure out the user’s exact birthday and age? If that application is part of some kind of larger network of advertisers and whatnots, they will now forever know the user’s exact age without the OS reporting anything else.

    These can also be used to make some software illegal, especially free and open source software. If you can replace Windows with Linux, Photoshop with Gimp, etc. it hurts the bottom line of those companies. Those companies can’t prevent you from using the open source alternative, but it would be in their interest if those pieces of software becomes illegal to use and distribute. If age checking functionality is added to some open source software, the age checking can simply be removed by the user. You only need to correctly form the age checking law and that entire software is now illegal, and must be removed from the internet.

    While the intention of these laws might to be to protect children, they cause too much harm for little good. The age checking can be circumvented in some situations, meaning the children aren’t protected. And the entire thing is a huge privacy mess (data leaks, etc.) for every single computer user.

  • Classy Hatter@sopuli.xyztoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•House committee advances bill to ban chemtrailsEnglish
    4·
    2 months ago

    Here’s a short answer: For a hundred-year time span, “diverting up to 1.7% of the flights could reduce the total EF by 35.6%. The reduction in total EF is contributed almost entirely by the reduction in contrail EF, while the change in the CO2 EF as a result of a diversion appears to be negligible.”

    Long answer:

    In that study, they created an algorithm that would divert flights vertically if they are going to create a large contrail, and if diversion is possible (the new airspace isn’t already in use). The algorithm chooses a flight path that has the best total energy forcing (EF). They then applied that algorithm for 6 one-week periods of recorded data. Those weeks were spread around the year.

    From “Supporting Information” of that research report (the main text isn’t freely available):

    To compare the climate forcing of contrails and CO2 emissions, the absolute global warming potential (AGWP), the time integral of the [radiative forcing] of CO2 over time, is used as a first-order approximation to quantify the CO2 EF and total EF (contrails plus CO2)

    Although approximately 25% of the emitted CO2 remains in the atmosphere after a millennium, we applied the 100-year [time horizon] to be in line with the Kyoto Protocol, and assumed that the AGWP is normally distributed in the Monte Carlo simulation

    For the six weeks of data, diverting up to 1.7% of the flights could reduce the total EF by 35.6% […]. The reduction in total EF is contributed almost entirely by the reduction in contrail EF, while the change in the CO2 EF as a result of a diversion appears to be negligible.

    If an AGWP of a longer [time horizon] of 1000 years […] is used to quantify the EF of CO2, this sensitivity analysis suggest that the overall reduction in the total EF will be significantly smaller at 12.2% […]. In contrast, the total EF could be reduced by up to 50.1% […] if a shorter [time horizon] of 20-years […] is used.

    While the potential changes in the global mean surface temperature, quantified using the Absolute Global Temperature Potential (AGTP) are also important, we have refrained from quantifying it because the current level of scientific understanding remains low.

    Even when considering a thousand-year time span, diverting the flights still has a positive effect. And we can always play with the idea that mankind figures out a way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, which would make those numbers for shorter time spans more meaningful.

  • Classy Hatter@sopuli.xyztoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•House committee advances bill to ban chemtrailsEnglish
    71·
    2 months ago

    According to this one study [1] that focused on Japanese airspace, 2.2% of the flights causes 80% of all contrail energy forcing (EF).

    A small-scale strategy of selectively diverting 1.7% of the fleet could reduce the contrail EF by up to 59.3% [52.4, 65.6%], with only a 0.014% [0.010, 0.017%] increase in total fuel consumption and CO2 emissions. A low-risk strategy of diverting flights only if there is no fuel penalty, thereby avoiding additional long-lived CO2 emissions, would reduce contrail EF by 20.0% [17.4, 23.0%].

    The re-routing can simply be achieved by changing the flight elevation by 2000 feet one or the other direction.

    [1] Teoh, Roger et al. “Mitigating the Climate Forcing of Aircraft Contrails by Small-Scale Diversions and Technology Adoption.” Environmental science & technology vol. 54,5 (2020): 2941-2950. doi:10.1021/acs.est.9b05608