anfogoat

I don't know about you but ruin your life brings to mind something like what almost happened to Steven Donziger. No corporation is able to do that to you without the help of governments.

Not being able to interact with a business on Facebook or on any of the other equally insignificant platforms simply does not rate.

And if a governmental agency requires you to use Facebook to interact with them, without any stipulations to bind Meta to serve you, well it's alarming that anyone would have time to say a single thing about Meta instead of address the real issue of the agency having the power to in effect force you to interact with facebook.com.

As long as they manage to somehow manipulate the government to help them do it.

> Sometimes you just wanna share your unhinged thoughts with a friend

Oh my, meanwhile I'm too scared to type even the most generic of questions to ChatGPT. Keep in mind that your "friend" in this instance ends up being OpenAI, the company, made of bunch of people, people other than your friend.

Can't believe I missed that, especially for how off it seemed in the latter form. Thank you.

Thank you for the told you so, Netgate. And they knew they were going to do this the very moment they conceived of the idea of Plus but sure, if you must accompany this with a multiparagraph BS ridden sob story, go ahead. Expect nothing less from you lot.

This weakens your privacy with regards to sharp governmental powers, something the GDPR never strengthened or addressed to begin with due to its categorical exemption of law enforcement. Well, competent law enforcement (if you needed a laugh).

And to all the EU cheerleaders about to educate me how, thanks to the GDPR, my local municipality has to treat my email with care when I go ask for a building permit: go gaslight your grandma instead.

I wonder how far off we are from a time where functionality like this will not require you to announce your daily activities to OpenAI or any other third party.

This looks so useful to me but at the same time I could never use this, or the hundred other insanely useful things like this that all rely on OpenAI or some other equally dubious party. (Dubious meaning the party being someone other than me.)

Now now, millionaires need hobbies too. They can't swing for the outer edges of the atmosphere so decimating privacy on the Internet will have to do I guess. Ashton's urge to protect the children apparently trumps the privacy of 450 million EU citizens and you would think he'd be able to extend some of that zeal to adult victims of abuse as well but going by his letter to the jury on behalf of Danny Masterson, you'd be wrong.

From my understanding, Johansson is also the Commissioner who, after it coming to light that the Europol had had a little too much fun mass collecting data and gleefully violating EU citizens' privacy rights, stepped into action that resulted in an effort to pass a new law that retroactively made everything the Europol did legal.

There's many great things in these laws that, in a vacuum, I'd love to have. Outside of the vacuum, I couldn't care less. The benefits absolutely pale in comparison to letting ghouls whom the mere existence of the Internet offends have any sort of say on anything remotely connected to anything that has even tangential proximity to the Internet. The greater the year and number of laws passed, the clearer it is that the only correct position on this is an absolute one.

If there is a discrepancy between what is legal offline vs. online, and you feel you must correct it, then you can strip down the laws that govern the offline. There, solved. The threshold between governments and privacy on, and control of the Internet has been worn down low enough, and has been for over a decade. The only laws we need that have to do with the Internet are to curtail the power of law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Anything other than that betrays all the things the EU says about privacy and fundamental rights as the marketing bauble it is.

And an EU Commissioner saying "we're bringing our European values into the digital world" should scare people. It's a good time to remind everyone that part of these values is letting the Europol do whatever and then rewriting laws to reatroaticely protect them when they've found to be systematically violating them. And for Ursula specifically, those values are what drove her to try over and over again to curtail online freedoms regardless of having it made clear to her that her ideas are unwanted. The Commissioners might be democratically elected -- if you're willing to take the concept of representative democracy to its 100000000th degree -- but they're undemocratic in spirit.

But sure, lets all focus on protecting ourselves from the fucking ads again.

Let's rein in Big Tech. Now what? Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are going to leave it at that and not seek alternative paths? I do not understand how anyone is more eager to address something that merely facilitates the problem than the actual problem itself.

They're not even close to comparable. Worrying about privacy and then focusing on Big Tech is like trying to swat away a mosquito while you're being devoured alive by three bears.

Reminds me of MINEC 1000, which came out in the early 90s (I think), had a decent enough mechanical kb, came with a built in modem (and serial ports ofc), and could be used as a generic terminal thanks to its VT100 emulation.

https://flickr.com/photos/zachetus/535850505/in/photolist-Pm...

https://flickr.com/photos/zachetus/535850501/in/photolist-Pm...

> GDPR was passed not that long ago.

Sorry, I should have been more careful. It's a citizen versus a consumer thing; GDPR is about the latter and does not give you any real privacy gains in regards to your government except in areas where your relationship is business like.

Some Menial Low-Stakes Agency is required to handle your email and address details appropriately, sure, but meanwhile Europol was still able to mass collect data and have the Commission cover for them after they were found out.

> EU commissioners propose laws, they don't vote for them.

The distinction isn't meaningless but it's certainly a generous one when left to stand on its own.

The commissioners hold little allegiance to the spirit of democracy and these proposals are either career boosters or pet projects for them. They're not just going to pass it on to the parliament and leave it at that. They're going to do their best to finagle behind the scenes, horse trade, intimidate and pull from their endless infatuation with coddling the children the most fantastical justifications that, by pure chance I guess, smear any opponents.

> As a brit, let me tell you that leaving the EU will not solve this problem. Your local politicians will just do that anyway.

But it will help. No modern government will pass a law that grants its citizens more privacy. It's better to have a many smaller ones, each with different rates of deterioration (re privacy) than a super government where every little nudge towards the eventual zero-privacy Internet affects us all at once.

Sadly, residing in a region formerly part of the Russian Empire, together with last year's events, kind of kills the glee I felt in the past whenever I fantasized about the EU disintegrating, which is to say voting to leave the EU would only makes sense if online privacy was the only thing you cared about.

> "So how much longer will we look away from this threat to the future of the internet? How many more consumers will be denied choice? There's been a lot of talk. Talk is helpful but we need action

Jesus, laying it on a bit thick, don't you think? Spotify, Twitter, Facebook, Epic, Apple and their asshat CEOs could all disappear tomorrow and the future of the Internet would not suffer one single iota.

> Musk is expected to talk with European Commissioner Thierry Breton via videocall on Wednesday afternoon, though the agenda was unknown.

And why is an EU Commissioner having one-on-ones with Musk? Last time I heard of this it was another Commissioner talking with Ashton Kutcher about his pet project of saving the children by eradicating online privacy.

> This is normal behaviour of programs. In fact most macos programs work this way. Windows still shows Discord in the bottom right no people can access it if they need it even if they don't want a window for it.

Excuse me, it's the EU who determines what is normal and what is not. Not some decades old conventions.

Sometimes as in it rarely is not. This is the reason you'll risk fines serving images, CSS, JS, fonts, and whatever from a third party web server without first ensuring users' consent to having their IP exposed to those servers.

> Are there other options besides: 1. locally hosted resources, 2. an annoying consent popup?

As far as I understand it, the only situation where you are allowed to send a third party request without consent is one where there are no other ways to achieve whatever the request is in service of, and that whatever itself has to be something you don't need consent for ofc. Assuming I've got that right, then that's a no for images, JS and CSS.

I don't see what this has to do with Google Fonts, it's an aside at best. What's illegal is causing a user agent to send an HTTP request (to a third party) without the operator's consent.

I read a few paragraphs but had to stop for fear of wasting my time reading through the whole thing and coming up empty handed. To save some time: what parts of it specifically signal wokeness to you?

> This is a "In Case of Emergency Break Glass" type of situation

The only difference being that when you pull the alarm for lols there are consequences -- for you. Members of law enforcement on the other hand do that on the regular and face zero consequences.

That said, Google doing this might ease the pressure to enable this across the board through legislation. So maybe a positive in the end; I wouldn't really expect any privacy with Nest anyways.

I was excited when my bank first announced Open Banking; I could use it to replace my embarrassing, then Selenium based mess with something more sane. Then Open Banking went into production and I learned I need a business entity and a whole host of other bs to make use of it without relying on some third party bottom feeder.

I don't know what I was thinking. This is Europe and there is very little chance a good idea won't be ruined with some sort of bureaucracy, licensing requirements, utterly vapid credentialism, or as a last resort, some other form of obtuse gatekeeping.

Sadly, as far as I can tell, it is not the same. Under combined inbox (unified folders) threaded view shows your own messages while the supposedly same threaded view will omit them when viewed in any single inbox.

For me, Thunderbird's number one defect is that it is unable to show threads unless you view all your accounts under one combined inbox. And it's not only a major defect but an absurd one as well.

To become a registrar, you need to register with Traficom (the Finnish Transport and Communications Agency). They've got a section on their website devoted to domains[0] and another for registrars specifically[1]. The important bits are the Registrar's Guide[2] and the registration form[3].

Register as a private individual and leave the field where they ask if you want your contact info listed for consumers unchecked. Then, once they process the application and you're a registrar, never register domains for anyone but yourself.

The bit about not needing to host or code anything was a reference to the fact that Traficom maintains a registrar web interface[4]. If you're a low volume registrar, which you should be since you're a registrar for yourself, the web interface is all you need.

Now, couple of things I'm uncertain about: whether or not the registration process involves fees for non-citizens, and which payment methods they support besides SEPA transfers.

[0]: https://www.traficom.fi/en/communications/fi-domains

[1]: https://www.traficom.fi/en/communications/fi-domains/domain-...

[2]: https://www.traficom.fi/sites/default/files/media/file/regis...

[3]: https://www.traficom.fi/en/services/registration-registrar

[4]: https://registry.domain.fi/s/

> Unfortunately, unlike other things I cannot self-host a registrar

Use .fi domains and you absolutely can. You really don't even need to code, run or host anything either unless you wanted to. Probably goes for some other lesser known ccTLDs too I'd assume.

We're about to lose the freedom to have encrypted communications and one of the important things to highlight is that the people pushing for this are genuine? I don't think so.

> But to not see that the guy you’re agreeing with is drowning in opinion is almost comically lacking in self-reflection.

While I find Breyer's text infinitely more valuable than that of the suggested supposedly impartial Fact Reciter, I'm not in lockstep with his position, and most importantly, I have no trouble separating his opinions from facts. On lack of self-reflection, I don't feel like I'm particularly guilty of it but then again I guess I wouldn't. I did read the EURACTIV About page and it wouldn't surprise me if something rubbed off of there. Whether it did or not, as far as lack of self-reflection goes it's a prime exhibition.

An impartial publication is a work of fiction. Claim you are one? You cosplay one.

> FWIW, on the merits, this is 100 % good for the consumer/citizen. There is nothing in it for companies, except that it maybe could have ended worse. It isn’t a compromise where each side got a bit of what they wanted. It started out with ideas of completely fucking over tech companies, now it graciously settled on just mildly tying them down and setting a bit of their clothes on fire.

It's the EU once again fiddling with the Internet. It doesn't really matter what the marginal benefits are in the short term if you don't trust them with that power to begin with and believe their unending need to make use of it will eventually ruin the Internet. Drop the citizen and I'm with you.

I know Breyer's agenda while ascertaining what EURACTIV's agenda is seems like year long endeavor. Plus their About page actually has the phrase EURACTIV content is produced in full impartiality, a phrase whose laugability is a major BS marker. EURACTIV is not impartial and then refuse to clearly state their bias; they're dishonest from the very beginning.

Unsurprisingly, the article simply repeats EU marketing speak and the facts in it are in the vein of bathing in nuclear waste will kill cancer cells.

> This almost reads like satire. Banks and credit card companies are exactly not neutral, this is perhaps the only widely understood reason Blockchains and cryptocurrencies exist.

I forgot to tout the banks' other well known qualities that perfectly demonstrate the vapidity of cryptocurrencies. Chief among them, their ability and willingness to facilitate high volume of transactions to a mass of semi-anonymous website users.