They didn’t hack anything. Just your plain old DDoS attack which took the service offline for a while, nothing was (at least based on what I read) actually hacked (or cracked as old-school folks like me would like it to be called) or stolen.

Is there a safe and private way to verify that I am in fact a real human on the internet?

In Finland we have this thing called ‘mobile verification’ which I use almost daily. It’s a service where my phone number is verified to my identity in a secure manner (via multifactor bank account on my case but there’s multiple ways to achieve that verification) and it works as an “middleman” where I can just click an icon on a website, feed in my phone number to the identification service, check MFA on my cellphone and then I’m shown a web page where the identity provider shows what information is delivered to an original website. Most of the cases, at least on my usage, it sends out my social security number, so that I can access my invoices, sign legal documents, check my tax forms or whatever I’m doing but the underlying system can provide pretty much whatever data they have stored. There’s no technical reason why it couldn’t be used to verify that I’m an actual human being too.

Say, if that was used in Lemmy (unlikely as the service costs something per each verification), identity provider would just send to my instance that I’m an actual human being but nothing else. The instance could then store that data and show a pretty blue checkmark next to my username without any personal data from me.

Disney+ subscribers will see interactive ads pop up as well.

The Mouse can fuck the right off with that. We’ve had subscription for quite a while since there’s a ton of stuff for our kids but if they start to overlay shows with pop-up ads not unlike The Truman Show I’ll rather set up a jellyfin server and dust the old pirate hat than continue to give them money.

Why would they even need an “AI” to run a power plant?

Because when you call your automation “AI”, no matter how dumb PID or whatever you might be running, the product is at least 30% more fancy and gains more news articles, possibly funding and atleast some coffee with pastries and pats on the back to some front figure in a suit.

I think there already was case like this with either Google or Meta somewhere around Europe few years back. Or it might’ve been actual search results instead of extracts. The decision was overriden shortly as their web traffic dropped drastically. They’ll 100% do this and don’t think twice.