I'd imagine Friendster uses NFC. I developed a proof of concept of a tap-to-connect social network a couple of years ago which used NFC - on both phones you had to have the app open and press a button in the app to put it in both broadcast and receive mode, which seems like what is shown here. Some notes:
- It had to be an app because the web NFC API[0] only allows a browser to act as an NFC reader rather than emulate an NFC card. Nothing stopping other functionality outside of the tap-to-connect working in a browser of course.
- Permissions to act as an NFC card were fairly easy to set up on Android, but needed specific developer permissions for Apple[1], which had to be applied for[2][3].
Worth also noting that other proximity techniques such as QR scanning and geolocation are much more easily spoofed than NFC, making them much less useful as a proof-of-human validation.
There isn't much further to go down the slippery slope it seems, if he only did what he claims: attending a pro-Palestine / anti-genocide protest at a university for five minutes.
"The comments that followed were a bit off the rails. There's no conspiracy here from Microsoft. But the Internet discussion wound up catching the attention of Microsoft, and a day later, the account was unblocked, and all was well. I think this is just a case of bureaucratic processes getting a bit out of hand, which Microsoft was able to easily remedy. I don't think there's been any malice or conspiracy or anything weird."
Hopefully, this isn't just something Microsoft made them say as part of an agreement to get their account back.
I would guess they realized they missed a notification or warning and feel a bit bad about the whole thing blowing up. Hopefully not though. The fact there were several high profile projects that got caught off guard puts the blame mostly on MS IMO.
I think the reason these things go viral is that a ton of people reading about them can see themselves in the same situation, minus the clout needed to get it resolved. A short term PR crisis is the best we can get, so everyone piles on.
I don't think MS will fix it though. IMO, they're more likely to create a program for open source code signing. That way they can capture all the high visibility projects, get a bunch of goodwill for being philanthropic, and all the small projects that don't qualify are too small to cause a fuss, so they can continue to treat them poorly.
I don't want to feed my biometrics and identity into AI companies' models so they can train on them for free and then sell facial recognition systems to the government.
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