DocTomoe

Good, so we can agree that the minor hassle for the minority to get a slightly slower immigration line at the airport does not outweigh privacy rights for the majority.

BTW: Where, and when, those wars started is a splendid way for historians to spend an afternoon discussing.

The point is that after 1945, the US never stopped fighting wars all over the world, using euphemisms sometimes, sometimes slogans, but it always was war.

With the major distinction being that a lot of Europeans have absolutely no intention of ever visiting the United States, a country with a history of sometimes more, sometimes less hostility and aggressive intelligence agencies.

If you want to visit a hellhole, go through the hassle. But don't hand out all of our data just because you want to do joyrides.

The UK is a silly place[1] and has been pretty Orwellian for a long time. It is not a sensible idea to extrapolate their approach to a post-eu situation in the current member states.

As for burning down the house ... as it apparently seems to be the only legal route to stop the flies, alas, I'm willing to pay that price.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Npo0cmp-VY

Nothing is brought to the Commission that local governments do not secretly want, but publically rage against because the voters are against it.

When Brussles then decides, 'there's nothing we can do, it's an EU thing' ... and a moustache-twirl.

The only thing that can stop this is to completely dismantle the EU. Which means, unfortunately, voting for people any good person should rightfully despise.

Network effects are real. It is hard to convince people to move over to your platform if the selling argument is 'not quite there yet, but we got you covered on the minilib front, plus it's less usable because of our weird interpretation of our own data protection laws'.

BIFF WAS REAL.

Of course BIFF [1] was real - and he kept respawning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIFF_(Usenet)

A few thoughts.

First, many people back then did not have permanently-online systems. You loaded the new stuff, went off-line, read, answer maybe, and uploaded your answers.

That gave you some time for meaningful answers (and - if you went the flamewar route - be smarter about flaming. Some got an almost baroque way of hiding flames in meaningfully-sounding sentences, which was, at least, funny).

I loved the aspect of doing the filtering on my end - not by an admin who decided what or what not I was allowed to read based on their own political leanings. Everyone had a freedom of speech, and I had the freedom to listen.

Can kill files be implemented today? Sure they could - we already have a pre-filtering by the algorithm curating what we see - I get very few hobby horsing stuff in my feed, because that's just not what interests me. This is analogous to the olden days, where the group, and the entry barrier acted as a pre-filter.

In my part of the usenet, real names were considered 'good manners'. That changed how people talked to each others. Of course, no-one could check if you were really called Klaas Hinkelman - but xXxStoneFakker666xXx was promptly laughed away - or landed in the kill file. plonk.

Another aspect that I really liked - and kept until today, was quoting inline, picking out individual questions of what could be a long article, and going into detail, like this:

    > [question or observation about an aspect]

    [answer to said question or observation]

It is my strong belief that what killed the internet was not the September that never ended™, but vote gamification.

The generation before that (yours truly) still remembers the usenet glory days, and the liberal use of the kill file [1].

[1] https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/K/kill-file.html

Both of these are meant for operating a home/private network.

.self seems to be geared towards a 'accessible from the everyday net' kind of approach.

Please leave states out of this. The State™ is not your friend, and we don't need a future, even more criminal government to have access to the shutdown button of even more of our identity.

Note that I did not single out an individual coutnry. All governments always stride towards autocracy.

Has Apple ever lowered the price of a product line?

This is just the new normal.

As a relatively enthusiastic OpenAI user ...

what did you do to trigger a verification process?

None of Ferris' books is younger than 10 years. Used copies are plentiful, hardly a library who has not been touched.

At some time, the market has been satisfied.

Well, you can just give me a list of the domains you operate, and I can put them in the network blacklist.

It was on for me again, 6 hours later.

Ah, another domain for the blacklist.

parents could be heard telling their kids 'don't stay up too late reading', as if it could be a problem. F

Having lived on this planet for a while now, I am under the impression that anything non-adults do always is a problem, no matter what it is.

Late December 2010 was the last release of a Harry Potter movie, cutting off the movie -> book pipeline.

So ... kids did read more in a time the single most influential kids book series was popular as compared to today? Surprise.

Kids did read more when stories were more about friendship, horses and/or adventure and sci-fi rather than pre-approved content-filtered social studies messaging? Surprise.

The obvious solution would be to force kids to read more from the approved reading list, courtesy by the school board⸮ That'll make them enjoy reading again⸮

(I am not saying technology is innocent in this development. I'm saying: there are several factors, and screen time is by far not the only one.

As a non-American, that mostly is a reaction to rabid US jingoism, as in the US claiming themselves as "Numba 1" in everything, when usually, they are in the 10s or 20s at best.

And to many Americans this is even worse: If you are not best™ or worst™ ... you are unremarkable, 'E pluribus unum'.

Some do, especially in Portugal and the Azores, for tea. And I grow my own peppers and chillies in cold Germany - why would we not be able to do so on an industrial scale?

Or you buy your tea from other first-world countries, such as Japan.

In the end, it is up to the consumer.

Local variants exist. But supermarkets are convenient and cheap.

The pattern is not broken, it works as designed. This is mostly a money-pump from government(s) to private interests, mostly sitting in large IT houses.

Considering chimps and humans share - depending on source, 95-99% of DNA, I'd be much more willing to consider them closer to humans than animals. In fact, there are - biologist - voices who argue that they should be moved to the homo genus.

And in the EU, I thought individuals couldn't bring cases to a judge, they have to complain to a regulatory body that can decide whether proceeding is warranted or not.

EU regulations get made into member state laws, and these vary massively in who can sue through what way.

In Germany, for example, a common enforcement vector is the "Abmahnung" under unfair competition law. In theory, if a regulation imposes costs on compliant businesses, competitors should not gain an advantage by ignoring it.

The problem is that this has historically created an ecosystem of professional cease-and-desist mills. A competitor (or an organisation acting on their behalf) identifies a violation, sends a lawyer's letter, demands reimbursement of legal costs, and requests a cease-and-desist declaration with contractual penalties for future violations.

Whether the underlying issue is accessibility, consumer protection, labeling requirements, privacy notices, or something else is almost secondary. Once compliance becomes sufficiently complex, the enforcement mechanism itself becomes a business model. The cynic in me can't help but notice that our parliaments are made up disproportionately by lawyers.

That is why many businesses are worried less about accessibility itself and more about legal uncertainty around accessibility requirements. The concern is not "making websites accessible is bad."

The concern is that compliance costs are barely predictable, while litigation risk arising from ambiguous compliance boundaries is not.

No. The residence becomes an 'asset', and the original owner (and now owner of your friendly Mongolian NYC-condo-operations company [MNYCCOC]) now pays rent to the very same MNYCCOC as the landlord. They could even consider the condo to be a very exclusive one-suite hotel and pay by day, and deduct hotel costs for living in said condo as 'necessary business expenses'. In the meantime, the MNYCCOC is a good citizen, and pays taxes but only after ... and deducts everything necessary for upkeep, from dripping faucets to elevator repair to housemaids ('janitorial staff'), making them essentially free.

It's accountancy that makes the world go round round round...

Not middle-class, middle-income.

Also, that was 14 years ago.

Joe Homeowner already is incentivized to sell grandma's home. Homes need upkeep. No-one keeps an old home around to rot and fall down - that tends to bee bad for the evaluation. The issue is that those who can't finance a primary residence now won't be able to finance a primary residence then.

In reality, they will now just create a company in Singapore or Mongolia or another such place, which will then own the second home - while itself being owned by the original owner. Problem solved significantly cheaper than this new tax. In fact, I would not be surprised if they have already done that four months ago, when the law was being discussed.

The ones who will be hit are those who do not have the legal frameworks in place to erect such structures - Joe Homeowner who inherits grandmas city house, both worth slightly above the magic 7 figures.

1 million remains the hallmark of 'wealthy' (as in: not us), to the point where pop culture has started mocking the concept decades ago (See: That Austin Powers movie...)

Hardly everyone understands 'owning a house' as millionaire-level wealth. Which is why people cheer the policy on until they realize it is them who is being shaken down.

I assume you have not read Directive 2016/2102 and/or EN 301 549, because your approach is nice and so very, very, very suable.

The issue is not accessibility itself. I'm all for making things simpler. The issue is that the EU framework combines broad principles, partial technical references, vague proportionality requirements, and evolving judicial interpretation. In practice, that means the exact compliance boundary is often only defined by a judge during litigation, and with the website operator funding the clarification process through lawyer and court fees.

That is precisely the kind of legal environment that creates serial-litigation ecosystems like the ADA lawsuit industry in the US.

With systems becoming increasingly more complex, testing all potential code paths increases effort exponentially. With content being user-generated, not necessarily system-generated, you now technically need an editorial watchdog position that greenlights every change (if only to prevent Sally from Sales to post a meme in copy without a proper alt text, or worse, an infographic, without a wall of text describing the infographic in great detail).

And for the attacker, they only need to find one case of violation - while you need to be correct 100% of the time.

The only two ways to migitate such issues are

1. do not offer the service in Europe at all and actively prevent EUians from acessing any part of them - which becomes increasingly attractive (disclaimer: I am an EUian, unfortunately),

2. implement defensive overcompliance far beyond practical usability requirements, or

3. accept ongoing legal uncertainty and budget for it accordingly.

Unfortunately, "just build reasonable software and trust common sense" is not a stable legal strategy anymore.