Wow let me list the ways age verification is a bad idea:
*Loss of anonymity for visitors. Someone will be collecting data on what actual people are visiting what actual sites. Yes, if you pay for site access with a credit/debit card you're giving up your (pseudo)anonymity, but payment with bitcoin/burner cards is possible, as well as access to free sites. If the verification has to be done through a central authority, who wants to bet the govt. will have access to that list, and it will be a huge target for black hats.
*Porn website companies based outside of the UK don't have to bother complying with this law. I imagine that's the vast majority, and the few that are in the UK will quickly move shop.
*Sites will likely use IP geofencing to only ask UK visitors for verification. A VPN or proxy would get around this; I imagine many Britons already use VPNs to access Netflix USA, or the BBC viewer when on vacation.
*Overbroad 'verification' definition will lead to "click here if you're over 18" clickthroughs which are pointless (unless the pages capture visitors who don't have a cookie set, then they might catch accidental/blind link clicks).
*Attempting to DNS block sites that don't comply with the UK law is doomed to fail. Attempting to get Google et al, and Chillingeffects, to redact mention of these sites, is futile as they will miss other search engines.
*18 is the age of majority in the UK, but too high of a requirement. Why not set it to be the same as the age of consent (16 there)? Watching porn is more akin to having sex than signing a legal contract (insert witty retort here).
*How is compliance judged? The vague "would receive an R-18 classification if it were reviewed" allows the simple excuse: "PROVE that it would receive an R-18 classification" for an accused. One could simply say that in their opinion, it wouldn't have received such a classification, and assuming the material is unclassified, it would be difficult to prove it would unless the rules of classification are concrete and publicly-known (unlike the MPAA's classification rules).
*There is some evidence that access to porn reduces the incidence of rape. This really ought to be the end of the discussion, although it needs more research before it can be considered incontrovertible. I consider it compelling enough that I think govt. shouldn't restrict access to porn. Surely there are some teens under 18 who commit rape, and allowing them to see porn may prevent some of it.
*Theoretically, if porn is 'bad information about sex', then the proper solution in a democracy should be to solve it via the marketplace of ideas: to outshout it with 'good information about sex'. If the elite are too sex-negative to think of any compelling 'good information about sex' maybe they should let the people figure it out. Ya know, Invisible Hand theory:)
There are exchanges that automatically eat fluctuations in Bitcoin value, so they adjust your account so you don't lose anything. The downside is that you don't gain anything on an upturn, either. I recommend YiD MOX (Yugioh: Duel Monsters Online Exchange) but in case the feds raid them or something you might want to hedge your bets with TNAP SOX (Totally Not A Pyramid Scheme Online Exchange) just to be safe.
For a reasonable amount of other-people's-money, they could execute a 51% attack. Or, flood the network with transactions so that the transaction time becomes impractically long, effectively DDOSing it. Or, imprison the core developers (for tax evasion or whatever) with a strong warning that anyone working on such a system will get the same. Or, forbid converting Euros or other currency to bitcoins, and punish any person/business that does so or uses a 3rd party to do so. Or, instruct all ISPs to block the ports the protocol uses, or the protocol itself, or any IP that runs a bitcoin server.
Just like the annual dollar cost of such-and-such can be estimated, such a thing could be expressed in lives per year lost due to X. However, lives lost due to encryption is indirect, as encryption doesn't directly kill people. I'd say that informants being exposed due to inadequate encryption kills more people than successful encryption leading to successful execution of deadly plots; so arguably, we need more and better encryption rather than less, if we want to minimize deaths.
Perhaps someday software will be security-hole-free, and encryption will actually be bulletproof and easy for laymen to use. Even assuming this, are there plots that could ONLY be uncovered by breaking the encryption? Are there people who are so above reproach that they would never be suspected by anyone unless their encrypted communications were intercepted? Someone who is a suspect can be tailed, staked out, have their residences searched etc. Hypothetically, someone who manages to evade suspicion could use encryption to avoid raising suspicion; however, the flipside of this is that becoming suspicious of someone via unencrypted data is only possible if there is already a data dragnet in place. Thus, a prohibition on encryption is most desired by the same people who want a data dragnet. The real question is, how many lives are saved by these dragnets? It reaches an equilibrium with an arms race between the hiders and the seekers. The only ones hiding who can only be found this way don't communicate enough to tip off informants, so they're either a tiny group (and thus not sending much data to one another), minimizing communication (and thus not sending much data to one another) or an individual (and thus not sending any data). These small groups are basically lone wolves or unconnected sympathizers, and can only do so much damage in isolated incidents. Assuming encryption is forbidden, let's say they avoid suspicion by sending steganographic unencrypted messages, so the analysis would need to understand the hidden message; good luck forbidding steganography, so it'd have to be analyzed. Let's say that some deep learning system can perfectly do so, though.
I don't know about you, but I don't think throwing away a society's privacy is worth being able to stop small isolated incidents.
Nonsense. Capital flight is trivial to a rich person, via countless methods: wire transfer, more obscure forms of electronic bank transfers, bearer bonds, stocks, hundreds of obscure financial instruments even the expert regulators have never heard of and won't for decades, precious metals, antiques and artwork, investing in a foreign business that you control, and on and on... Of course, each of those options has countless permutations which are unlikely to be broadly prohibited. Freezing bank accounts can work but that's about it.
What a great achievement for the Obama administration. Hopefully we won't piss it away with the coming wave of rising Islamophobia. I could imagine some politicians *cough*Trump*cough* reinstating the sanctions with the justification that their theocratic regime is inherently evil. On the other hand, the handling of the Iranian protests after the sketchy election isn't doing them any favors in that regard. The real question is, did the strikes against nuclear scientists, and sabotage of centrifuge SCADAs help contribute to this deal.
This can then be interpreted as saying that Ayn Rand and God are the author's figurative mother. If the line were "To my parents, Ayn Rand and God." it could imply immaculate conception. One could leave familial relationships until the end of the sentence, however.
Reading the article (gasp!) didn't elucidate things much beyond the summary, although it mentions infectious disease spreading as a possible application while maintaining privacy for unrelated health issues.
In essence the idea is to use artificial scarcity via technological means to create a 'bit budget', where those who access a database of personal info are only allowed a certain amount of flags to search for; this encourages more efficient searching and thus less retrieval of extraneous data. This could be used so that private entities could try to find suitable targets for medical research or advertising, while revealing as little info about as few people as possible; and it might work in that situation. However, there are two big problems with this idea:
1) It assumes the data is only accessible through this one database and can't be accessed in another, more privacy-invading way. If any analysts even suspect that the full dataset will be more useful, then they will use the full dataset if they can and this scheme will be useless. "More data better" seems to be the motto of Big Data despite the well-known haystack problem.
2) Governments are always saying that barriers need to be broken down for their investigators, that they need more/new powers, so there's no way they'll stick to their bit budget. They're gonna ask for more, enough that they have effectively full access to the full dataset, and that's in the unlikely event that they're somehow limited to this access scheme. They're one private 'request', subpoena, or NSL away from full access, anyhow, and political pressure or tax/import/regulatory pressure would make most for-profit entities like Facebook cave in. If this database were maintained by some international nonprofit then it might stand a chance of resisting this.
Step 1: Privately encourage companies to utilize 'govt. compliant' encryption routines 'for security purposes', implied to be tied to govt. contracts. Step 2: Hire everyone you can who has the education needed to understand said cryptographic schemes. No amount of money is too high. Step 3: Enjoy the brain drain. Every person who works for you is a person who doesn't work for those you want to surveil (i.e. everyone else). Step 4: Watch public and private sector security researchers be overwhelmed by the sheer number of ways and places to be compromised, and realize you don't have to backdoor everything your targets use, merely ONE of the things they use. Of course, very few researchers who can understand the cryptography involved, aren't on your payroll.
TL;DR: the attackers outnumber the defenders so overwhelmingly that the latter can't keep up with the former.
Our currency only has fiat value, so replacing the coins with base(r) metals is sensible. A program can be enacted by the govt. to buy up all of the existing coinage. Even poor immigrants don't care about pennies, so they should be eliminated. Nickels aren't in much better shape. Dimes are the smallest unit people care about, yet only slightly given how often I find them lying around unmolested. Quarters are the only way to pay in certain coin-op machines (e.g. laundromat washing machines), so they have value there.
Therefore, we should retain the quarter for legacy machine purposes, and make new $1 coins in addition. Two coin denominations, that's it, keeps it simple. Round the retail sales values down to the nearest quarter dollar; merchants have enough overhead with credit/debit card transaction fees that 12 cents average isn't that bad. The big question is what size the new coin should be, larger than the quarter makes sense yet it should be trivially distinguishable from the quarter's size, while not being so large as to be bulky in the pocket.
In practice, I know what will happen: absolutely nothing. The govt. wants to make cash increasingly difficult to use to encourage usage of more-traceable forms of payment. They won't outright ban the $50 and $100 bills, but will pretend to ignore the problem instead. When people don't pay with cash, inflation is easier to obscure, as well.
Any legal accountability corporations had just dissipated into the ether. It's no longer a "If class action settlement $X is less than recall cost $Y, then we do Z", now it's "if X% of affected customers go to arbitration, with average settlement $Y, and X*Y recall cost Z, then we don't recall." I'm willing to bet that the proportion of people who would bother to do the effort of arbitration for a low chance of being granted a pittance is far less than the tiny proportion of a class who apply for an already-approved class-action settlement (and get a $7 rebate coupon). In addition, punitive damages go away, unless a regulatory agency prosecutes.
Binding arbitration is now fully SCOTUS-approved, and I expect it'll become a standard component of every "take it or leave it" legal contract.
If you want something in Congress, you have to give concessions first. I say the intelligence community should give concessions before anyone helps them. Particularly, bolstering FISC with an agency that has the clearance and authority to investigate cases and programs of intelligence agencies, and the teeth to publicly expose and prosecute certain projects/actions and those who authorized them. Which projects you ask? The agency can refer one to a branch of FISC, who can hold mock trials for constitutionality, with the agency giving their case that it is unconstitutional or unlawful. If FISC is not unanimous that the project or action is lawful and constitutional, then the project is immediately put on hold pending the case being escalated to SCOTUS.
Furthermore, permanent gag orders related to national security letters and orders need to be replaced with ones that quickly expire. The no-fly list and terrorist watchlist need to be purged and reworked, with a vetting process for removal no more difficult than passing a classified information clearance background check. Policy and law should disallow mandated (or even voluntary cooperation a la PRISM) software backdoors. The agency should inspect domestic internet backbones and switching points to ensure the domestic intelligence community is not tapping them physically. Intel swapping to gain domestic data (e.g. Five Eyes) should be made illegal.
Then, and only then, should we give one fuck about what the intelligence community wants.
I imagine this move allows ownership of the LLC to be transferred to his children without invoking an inheritance tax. However, I suspect he intends to create something like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; it's enough money it could be distributed to numerous semi-autonomous sub-organizations to figure out how to spend, and be directed towards thousands of different projects, many of which would fall outside the scope of a normal charity. For example, how many charities directly engage in R&D? At most they'd funnel money towards companies already doing desired research, but if none currently exists? It could do things like what Google X does.
Making shady donations to charity for tax writeoff purposes is nothing new. I remember in the late 90s Microsoft donated large amounts of software to charity, and used its retail value (which they are able to arbitrarily set!) to calculate the value of their charitable donation. Of course since it's an infinite good it costs them near nothing.
I connect to yahoo's servers using Pidgin. I imagine Trillian also works. I imagine the client will either ignore the unsend, or give a bolded notification "The user attempted to unsend the prior message".
It makes sense that people who don't require empirical evidence would be more likely to believe in dogmas/supernatural/paranormal/gods, and alternative medicine. However I object to the term 'ontological confusions', some people's philosophies aren't founded on logic; if logic is cast aside, then internal/external consistency aren't necessarily valid ways to judge a philosophy's validity. As a metaphor, someone might say "I do not recognize the validity of this court."
If confronted with facts contradictory to your beliefs, you might believe that the facts were fabricated as part of a conspiracy to suppress The Truth. If given supporting facts, then the conspiracy must be even larger. This proves your beliefs must be true, and is the source of True Believer Syndrome.
Understanding of the psychological root of religiosity is worth pursuing, particularly to priests. If it turns out to be dimwittedness and cognitive disorders, they can just say that their flock has been "blessed by god to see the truth." Most people suffer from several minor cognitive distortions; I wonder what would happen if all the sub-clinical cases were cured...
Slashdot Mirror
*Perks up*
Someone actually bought a Windows Phone?! Holy shit! Where'd I put that speech I prepared...
Wow let me list the ways age verification is a bad idea:
*Loss of anonymity for visitors. Someone will be collecting data on what actual people are visiting what actual sites. Yes, if you pay for site access with a credit/debit card you're giving up your (pseudo)anonymity, but payment with bitcoin/burner cards is possible, as well as access to free sites. If the verification has to be done through a central authority, who wants to bet the govt. will have access to that list, and it will be a huge target for black hats.
*Porn website companies based outside of the UK don't have to bother complying with this law. I imagine that's the vast majority, and the few that are in the UK will quickly move shop.
*Sites will likely use IP geofencing to only ask UK visitors for verification. A VPN or proxy would get around this; I imagine many Britons already use VPNs to access Netflix USA, or the BBC viewer when on vacation.
*Overbroad 'verification' definition will lead to "click here if you're over 18" clickthroughs which are pointless (unless the pages capture visitors who don't have a cookie set, then they might catch accidental/blind link clicks).
*Attempting to DNS block sites that don't comply with the UK law is doomed to fail. Attempting to get Google et al, and Chillingeffects, to redact mention of these sites, is futile as they will miss other search engines.
*18 is the age of majority in the UK, but too high of a requirement. Why not set it to be the same as the age of consent (16 there)? Watching porn is more akin to having sex than signing a legal contract (insert witty retort here).
*How is compliance judged? The vague "would receive an R-18 classification if it were reviewed" allows the simple excuse: "PROVE that it would receive an R-18 classification" for an accused. One could simply say that in their opinion, it wouldn't have received such a classification, and assuming the material is unclassified, it would be difficult to prove it would unless the rules of classification are concrete and publicly-known (unlike the MPAA's classification rules).
*There is some evidence that access to porn reduces the incidence of rape. This really ought to be the end of the discussion, although it needs more research before it can be considered incontrovertible. I consider it compelling enough that I think govt. shouldn't restrict access to porn. Surely there are some teens under 18 who commit rape, and allowing them to see porn may prevent some of it.
*Theoretically, if porn is 'bad information about sex', then the proper solution in a democracy should be to solve it via the marketplace of ideas: to outshout it with 'good information about sex'. If the elite are too sex-negative to think of any compelling 'good information about sex' maybe they should let the people figure it out. :)
Ya know, Invisible Hand theory
My ATX mobos fail regularly, I dunno what they're talking about.
Time to invest in Ray-Ban.
The US Intelligence chief is just afraid that the scientists will find the backdoor they left in the human genome, and edit it out.
It's actually just a pretext for her to spend more time with her family.
There are exchanges that automatically eat fluctuations in Bitcoin value, so they adjust your account so you don't lose anything. The downside is that you don't gain anything on an upturn, either. I recommend YiD MOX (Yugioh: Duel Monsters Online Exchange) but in case the feds raid them or something you might want to hedge your bets with TNAP SOX (Totally Not A Pyramid Scheme Online Exchange) just to be safe.
EBay itself is a severe and unpatched vulnerability. Where else can you get flawless 6 ct diamond rings for just $4
YOU CAN?!?! *sets keyboard on fire typing in ebay.com*
For a reasonable amount of other-people's-money, they could execute a 51% attack. Or, flood the network with transactions so that the transaction time becomes impractically long, effectively DDOSing it. Or, imprison the core developers (for tax evasion or whatever) with a strong warning that anyone working on such a system will get the same. Or, forbid converting Euros or other currency to bitcoins, and punish any person/business that does so or uses a 3rd party to do so. Or, instruct all ISPs to block the ports the protocol uses, or the protocol itself, or any IP that runs a bitcoin server.
Just like the annual dollar cost of such-and-such can be estimated, such a thing could be expressed in lives per year lost due to X. However, lives lost due to encryption is indirect, as encryption doesn't directly kill people. I'd say that informants being exposed due to inadequate encryption kills more people than successful encryption leading to successful execution of deadly plots; so arguably, we need more and better encryption rather than less, if we want to minimize deaths.
Perhaps someday software will be security-hole-free, and encryption will actually be bulletproof and easy for laymen to use. Even assuming this, are there plots that could ONLY be uncovered by breaking the encryption? Are there people who are so above reproach that they would never be suspected by anyone unless their encrypted communications were intercepted? Someone who is a suspect can be tailed, staked out, have their residences searched etc.
Hypothetically, someone who manages to evade suspicion could use encryption to avoid raising suspicion; however, the flipside of this is that becoming suspicious of someone via unencrypted data is only possible if there is already a data dragnet in place. Thus, a prohibition on encryption is most desired by the same people who want a data dragnet. The real question is, how many lives are saved by these dragnets? It reaches an equilibrium with an arms race between the hiders and the seekers. The only ones hiding who can only be found this way don't communicate enough to tip off informants, so they're either a tiny group (and thus not sending much data to one another), minimizing communication (and thus not sending much data to one another) or an individual (and thus not sending any data). These small groups are basically lone wolves or unconnected sympathizers, and can only do so much damage in isolated incidents. Assuming encryption is forbidden, let's say they avoid suspicion by sending steganographic unencrypted messages, so the analysis would need to understand the hidden message; good luck forbidding steganography, so it'd have to be analyzed. Let's say that some deep learning system can perfectly do so, though.
I don't know about you, but I don't think throwing away a society's privacy is worth being able to stop small isolated incidents.
Nonsense. Capital flight is trivial to a rich person, via countless methods: wire transfer, more obscure forms of electronic bank transfers, bearer bonds, stocks, hundreds of obscure financial instruments even the expert regulators have never heard of and won't for decades, precious metals, antiques and artwork, investing in a foreign business that you control, and on and on... Of course, each of those options has countless permutations which are unlikely to be broadly prohibited. Freezing bank accounts can work but that's about it.
plus representatives of Cisco, Comcast [...]
there are at least 6 proposals for an undersea cable between Havana and Florida
The downside is that the undersea cable will have a 3Mbps uplink and cap the island nation at 250GB/month.
It's ok, Republicans don't think they'd need more than that.
What a great achievement for the Obama administration. Hopefully we won't piss it away with the coming wave of rising Islamophobia. I could imagine some politicians *cough*Trump*cough* reinstating the sanctions with the justification that their theocratic regime is inherently evil.
On the other hand, the handling of the Iranian protests after the sketchy election isn't doing them any favors in that regard.
The real question is, did the strikes against nuclear scientists, and sabotage of centrifuge SCADAs help contribute to this deal.
To my mother, Ayn Rand and God.
This can then be interpreted as saying that Ayn Rand and God are the author's figurative mother.
If the line were "To my parents, Ayn Rand and God." it could imply immaculate conception.
One could leave familial relationships until the end of the sentence, however.
Reading the article (gasp!) didn't elucidate things much beyond the summary, although it mentions infectious disease spreading as a possible application while maintaining privacy for unrelated health issues.
In essence the idea is to use artificial scarcity via technological means to create a 'bit budget', where those who access a database of personal info are only allowed a certain amount of flags to search for; this encourages more efficient searching and thus less retrieval of extraneous data. This could be used so that private entities could try to find suitable targets for medical research or advertising, while revealing as little info about as few people as possible; and it might work in that situation. However, there are two big problems with this idea:
1) It assumes the data is only accessible through this one database and can't be accessed in another, more privacy-invading way. If any analysts even suspect that the full dataset will be more useful, then they will use the full dataset if they can and this scheme will be useless. "More data better" seems to be the motto of Big Data despite the well-known haystack problem.
2) Governments are always saying that barriers need to be broken down for their investigators, that they need more/new powers, so there's no way they'll stick to their bit budget. They're gonna ask for more, enough that they have effectively full access to the full dataset, and that's in the unlikely event that they're somehow limited to this access scheme. They're one private 'request', subpoena, or NSL away from full access, anyhow, and political pressure or tax/import/regulatory pressure would make most for-profit entities like Facebook cave in. If this database were maintained by some international nonprofit then it might stand a chance of resisting this.
Step 1: Privately encourage companies to utilize 'govt. compliant' encryption routines 'for security purposes', implied to be tied to govt. contracts.
Step 2: Hire everyone you can who has the education needed to understand said cryptographic schemes. No amount of money is too high.
Step 3: Enjoy the brain drain. Every person who works for you is a person who doesn't work for those you want to surveil (i.e. everyone else).
Step 4: Watch public and private sector security researchers be overwhelmed by the sheer number of ways and places to be compromised, and realize you don't have to backdoor everything your targets use, merely ONE of the things they use. Of course, very few researchers who can understand the cryptography involved, aren't on your payroll.
TL;DR: the attackers outnumber the defenders so overwhelmingly that the latter can't keep up with the former.
Our currency only has fiat value, so replacing the coins with base(r) metals is sensible. A program can be enacted by the govt. to buy up all of the existing coinage. Even poor immigrants don't care about pennies, so they should be eliminated. Nickels aren't in much better shape. Dimes are the smallest unit people care about, yet only slightly given how often I find them lying around unmolested. Quarters are the only way to pay in certain coin-op machines (e.g. laundromat washing machines), so they have value there.
Therefore, we should retain the quarter for legacy machine purposes, and make new $1 coins in addition. Two coin denominations, that's it, keeps it simple. Round the retail sales values down to the nearest quarter dollar; merchants have enough overhead with credit/debit card transaction fees that 12 cents average isn't that bad. The big question is what size the new coin should be, larger than the quarter makes sense yet it should be trivially distinguishable from the quarter's size, while not being so large as to be bulky in the pocket.
In practice, I know what will happen: absolutely nothing. The govt. wants to make cash increasingly difficult to use to encourage usage of more-traceable forms of payment. They won't outright ban the $50 and $100 bills, but will pretend to ignore the problem instead. When people don't pay with cash, inflation is easier to obscure, as well.
This isn't a "tax doge"
What will the altcoin makers think up next?!
First we're told this:
Fewer than 10%
and later, this comparison:
even lower — in the single digit percentages
Less than 10% IS single-digit percentages. Without specific percentages we can't tell how much lower one is than the other.
most of us read continuously in a perpetual stream of incestuous words
Remember kids, that's where portmanteau words come from.
Any legal accountability corporations had just dissipated into the ether. It's no longer a "If class action settlement $X is less than recall cost $Y, then we do Z", now it's "if X% of affected customers go to arbitration, with average settlement $Y, and X*Y recall cost Z, then we don't recall." I'm willing to bet that the proportion of people who would bother to do the effort of arbitration for a low chance of being granted a pittance is far less than the tiny proportion of a class who apply for an already-approved class-action settlement (and get a $7 rebate coupon). In addition, punitive damages go away, unless a regulatory agency prosecutes.
Binding arbitration is now fully SCOTUS-approved, and I expect it'll become a standard component of every "take it or leave it" legal contract.
If you want something in Congress, you have to give concessions first. I say the intelligence community should give concessions before anyone helps them. Particularly, bolstering FISC with an agency that has the clearance and authority to investigate cases and programs of intelligence agencies, and the teeth to publicly expose and prosecute certain projects/actions and those who authorized them. Which projects you ask? The agency can refer one to a branch of FISC, who can hold mock trials for constitutionality, with the agency giving their case that it is unconstitutional or unlawful. If FISC is not unanimous that the project or action is lawful and constitutional, then the project is immediately put on hold pending the case being escalated to SCOTUS.
Furthermore, permanent gag orders related to national security letters and orders need to be replaced with ones that quickly expire. The no-fly list and terrorist watchlist need to be purged and reworked, with a vetting process for removal no more difficult than passing a classified information clearance background check. Policy and law should disallow mandated (or even voluntary cooperation a la PRISM) software backdoors. The agency should inspect domestic internet backbones and switching points to ensure the domestic intelligence community is not tapping them physically. Intel swapping to gain domestic data (e.g. Five Eyes) should be made illegal.
Then, and only then, should we give one fuck about what the intelligence community wants.
I imagine this move allows ownership of the LLC to be transferred to his children without invoking an inheritance tax. However, I suspect he intends to create something like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; it's enough money it could be distributed to numerous semi-autonomous sub-organizations to figure out how to spend, and be directed towards thousands of different projects, many of which would fall outside the scope of a normal charity. For example, how many charities directly engage in R&D? At most they'd funnel money towards companies already doing desired research, but if none currently exists? It could do things like what Google X does.
Making shady donations to charity for tax writeoff purposes is nothing new. I remember in the late 90s Microsoft donated large amounts of software to charity, and used its retail value (which they are able to arbitrarily set!) to calculate the value of their charitable donation. Of course since it's an infinite good it costs them near nothing.
I connect to yahoo's servers using Pidgin. I imagine Trillian also works. I imagine the client will either ignore the unsend, or give a bolded notification "The user attempted to unsend the prior message".
It makes sense that people who don't require empirical evidence would be more likely to believe in dogmas/supernatural/paranormal/gods, and alternative medicine. However I object to the term 'ontological confusions', some people's philosophies aren't founded on logic; if logic is cast aside, then internal/external consistency aren't necessarily valid ways to judge a philosophy's validity. As a metaphor, someone might say "I do not recognize the validity of this court."
If confronted with facts contradictory to your beliefs, you might believe that the facts were fabricated as part of a conspiracy to suppress The Truth. If given supporting facts, then the conspiracy must be even larger. This proves your beliefs must be true, and is the source of True Believer Syndrome.
Understanding of the psychological root of religiosity is worth pursuing, particularly to priests. If it turns out to be dimwittedness and cognitive disorders, they can just say that their flock has been "blessed by god to see the truth." Most people suffer from several minor cognitive distortions; I wonder what would happen if all the sub-clinical cases were cured...