> A system-level age flag becomes another point of control tied directly to the platforms that mediate how billions of people use software.
> Open ecosystems would feel the pressure. Independent browsers, community distributions of Linux, and other user-driven projects could be pushed toward government-linked identity requirements simply to maintain compatibility.
> Centralizing verification at the device level might reduce repetitive data exposure, but it also concentrates power in a handful of firms that already hold vast collections of behavioral data. People should not be forced to use Big Tech tools to access the open internet.
Many of these characters actually have genuine uses in non-English languages, so it would be hard to just blindly remove all of the characters from every prompt without breaking other things.
I don't think everyone gets what is going on here. This is not just to save a few cents, as they could just add a $1.00 charge to every order if they wanted that.
AV1 exists and is both better than HEVC and royalty free. H.264/AVC patents are either expired or rapidly expiring. Their likely end goal is to phase HEVC out completely, avoid VVC, and not have to deal with this licensing system at all anymore. And that makes sense. There's a good chance that practically all manufacturers will start doing this.
For users, does it really matter? AV1 is being adopted faster than HEVC ever was. Beyond that, AVC has always been far more common than HEVC. It likely won't affect you, and if it does, it's easy to fix or will fix itself.
The actual stopping power here is that any grandma who uses a Linux desktop has a family member (or other contact) who helps with technical matters. They've been educated about internet & phone scams, and will immediately call their technical contact when anything is suspicious.
Even cheaper, unless you want the really high-end enterprise stuff. You can run ComfyUI pretty comfy for $0.30 to $0.40 per hour, if AI art is your goal.
Gizmodo is just regurgitating this Financial Times article into a poor quality opinion piece. Journalism is preferred to someone ranting from an armchair IMO.
Headline is also misleading. It will do so in November 2026, about a year from now.
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