Absolutely incredible that Meta, a company whose founding was dependent on a free and open and unregulated Internet, is now funding lobbying against such an Internet, supposedly in order to make sure no one can compete with them who have the money and lawyers to comply with any regulations.

When https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence was written, Mark Zuckerberg was a preteen; I wonder if he ever read it and is now consciously working against the ideas that made him rich. (I have nothing in principle against people getting rich from founding Internet companies. I do have something against them then engaging in this kind of lobbying.)

It’s not anymore tho, they switched to the euro a few months ago. 😜

Yugoslavia continued to exist after that with reduced territory (today’s Serbia and Montenegro). I have childhood memories of the existence of Yugoslavia, but not of Czechoslovakia.

The way I remember it, on old phones before smartphones, speakerphone was a very obscure feature that many users didn’t know how to turn on. I certainly didn’t (I was a child at the time) unless someone showed me.

On modern smartphones it’s very easy, maybe that should be changed again. 😁

I use speakerphone a lot in my own home too when no one is around. It’s just more comfortable to hold my phone in front of me instead of to my ear. Never in public unless specific other people need to hear it.

Was will man mehr? Ist ja nicht so, als würde es den meisten Leuten Spaß machen, einer Erwerbsarbeit nachzugehen, sondern das macht man, weil man es muss.

Nicht jeder hat jedes Jahr eine Erkältung, die schwer genug ist, um einen Krankenstand zu rechtfertigen. Ich etwa hatte 2024 keinen einzigen Krankenstandstag.

As much as I like open source software, I do not think that these kinds of bills are legitimate even for closed source software.

maybe that too, but mainly it was the move from desktops to smartphones and tablets, which Flash was (at minimum) not very suited for if it was supported at all

This may be the only good thing caused by the existence of iOS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash

Everyone who liked free and open source software and open standards and such things, which Flash was very much the antithesis of.

2006: user generated content is a revolution! We are now exchanging information and ideas directly with each other without needing information gatekeepers like traditional media or paid advertisers or anything like that! The future is gonna be a utopia where the powerful will be challenged at every turn!

2026: a significant percentage of “user generated content” is generated either by AI or people who are being paid to do so for commercial or political reasons… I suppose those are “users” too…

why, humanity, why??? ;____;

I very recently opened an account with a cryptocurrency broker and was surprised at the hoops I had to jump through. They made me show my driver’s license, show my face, read out numbers… all because I wanted to invest a few thousand euros in a cryptocurrency. I realize that this is because of the kinds of legal requirements described in the article, but it makes me worry, if they do that for banks today, are they going to do it for online platforms tomorrow…?

How does this compare to salaries for comparable positions at comparable for-profit companies?

It’s kinda the point of donations that they can afford to hire people whose labor costs that much.

If I enter archive today ddos into my instance’s search, I get several pages of threads, most of which are ones about this exact topic: https://discuss.tchncs.de/search?q=archive+today+ddos&type=Posts&listingType=All&page=1&sort=TopAll&titleOnly=false

Why are you posting this several-weeks-old piece of news that has already had several fediverse threads made about it to so many communities right now? Why is it so important to you that people think about it again? Has anything important about it happened very recently?

I’m not sure if that law will pass/has passed,

It has already passed the legislature and been signed into law, but not become operative yet, won’t until 2027-01-01.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202520260AB1043

I am not. I am from a country whose constitution starts with the statement that it is a democratic republic.

I would find it very sad if they were a majority, anywhere. :(

I really didn’t hear anything about it until recently

Yes, I expressed the same sentiment here: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/55959326/24302621

Is our entire information “ecosystem” so broken that we only pay attention to bad things after they’ve already happened, not before when there is still a chance to stop them?!

OK, that’s about the elaboration I was looking for…

Somehow I don’t think this is the central reason. I think governments are perfectly capable of doing bad things completely without billionaires having an interest in it. It especially doesn’t explain things like the California law that will regulate how we can or cannot program operating systems (hint: software code is a form of speech, meaning that this ought to be struck down as a violation of free speech), because no age verification services are involved in that.