Possibly. But some people really need it spelled out.

No violence

No stealing

No billionaires

What we call AI today is also not going to evolve into an actual AI.

You can call the field of research what you want, but the current products are not AI. Do you also call potatoes vodka?

Let’s start by not calling it AI anymore. Cause it isn’t.

they could steal your personal data without you knowing

Is that supposed to be more intimidating than corporations stealing my personal data with or without me knowing?

Which means tips up to minimum wage are just extra money in the bosses’ pocket.

On the other hand, if it was 107°C outside, the outrage would be so much more justified.

Whatever brother printer is on sale

Even in your example above, with only two letters, no numbers / special characters allowed, requiring a capital letter decreases the possibilities back to the original 676 possible passwords - not less.

No it doesn’t. It reduces the possibilities to less than the 52x52 possibilities that would exist if you allowed all possible combinations of upper and lower case letters.

You are confused because you only see the two options of enforcing or not allowing certain characters. All characters need to be allowed but none should be enforced. That maximizes the number of possible combinations.

that passwords should all require certain complexity, but without broadcasting the password requirements publicly?

No, because that’s still the same. An attacker can find out the rules by creating accounts and testing.

By adding uppercase letters (for a total of 52 characters to choose from), you get 52 * 52 = 2704 possible passwords.

You don’t add them, you enforce at least one. That eliminates all combinations without upper case letters.

So, without this rule you would indeed have the 52x52 possible passwords, but with it you have (52x52)-(26x26) possible passwords (the second bracket is all combinations of 2 lowercase letters), which is obviously less.

The only way you would decrease the number of possible passwords is if you specified that the character in a particular spot had to be uppercase

Wrong. In your example, for any given try, if you have put a lowercase letter in spot 1, you don’t need to try any lowercase in spot 2.

Any information you give the attacker eliminates possible combinations.

Which is funny because those strict rules reduce the number of combinations an attacker has to guess from, thereby reducing security.

Nope. You cannot.

Of course they are. You can pay or consent to tracking.

You called bullshit on it being common on the continent, I provided examples from the continent.

At least one German outlet has been shown to still track you after paying. Just a bit less. So they use a rubber with a few holes poked in.

the user can simply choose not to read the article, so there’s an option where they don’t get fucked.

We are rapidly nearing a point where you can’t read online news from any major (ergo “widely considered somewhat credible”) source without one of those schemes. So I’d argue that the alternative is to just not get access to online news, and that may be considered too much pressure to still consider consent as voluntary.

Sadly, newspapers are not considered “platforms”. A platform is a site that publishes user generated content, so lemmy or facebook. And not all platforms are large platforms too.

So while this is a good first step, it doesn’t cover all online services.

www.spiegel.de

www.faz.net

www.sueddeutsche.de

www.heise.de

www.golem.de

www.derstandard.at

www.repubblica.it/

It’s not a grey area, it’s clearly illegal (consent has to be given voluntarily. If you can’t use the site without paying, that’s not voluntary). Agencies so far just decided to look the other way and play dumb. There are lawsuits ongoing.

German news outlets all do it. The data protection agencies have sadly so far ruled it’s ok (there are still ongoing lawsuits afaik).