I'm not saying it isn't pathetic, but Apple has a track record of gobbling Trump's marbles for business, so it should be expected they aren't risking anything over the name of a lake in their mapping service.
What did you expect from a Trillion dollar corporation, that gifted Trump a 24k gold and glass statue, made a $100B commitment to US manufacturing, and being among the "donors" of the White House ballroom? But changing the name of a lake? Too far...
The parallels with the EU's Digital Services Act are just remarkable, both in terms of timing and substance (down to the phrasing). But on the bright side, when Facebook prompted my mom to choose between a subscription, and her being the product, it first-handedly confronted her with the platform's policies. And knowing that she believed a selfie video to be disproportionate, even in context of changing a banking app setting, she will be even more reluctant to submit it to a social media platform; especially since her joy in using the platform has also decreased over time. So perhaps this might be yet another friction point, that could lead users to stop using the platform altogether. But the sad reality is that this won't be restricted to Facebook, but also extend to platforms that are a net-positive to society.
There's too frequently a mismatch between the speed communicated by road design, versus that dictated by a sign. Mechanisms like this overwrite the driver's intuition, which can only lead to more frustration. Sure, there are incompetent drivers on the road, but that doesn't mean you have to micromanage the fleet in its entirety. There's plenty that have a functional brain and are more than competent enough to assess a given situation, irrespective of what a fixed speed limit might indicate. And if drivers used to speed to catch green, that indicates to me the waiting cycles must not have been optimized; and doing so possibly yielding the same result.
Citizens must not be forced to identify themselves to access lawful online content or services unless strictly necessary, proportionate and provided by law.
Are you not aware of the Digital Services Act? This piece of legislation alone, provides all the incentives for service providers to do exactly that; unless they change their business-model, which is rather unlikely. By default, users should be treated as adults and therefore unrestricted in their access; rather than children unless proven otherwise.
If the EU would simply mandate operating systems sold within the jurisdiction, to allow specification of an optional 'date of birth' field, which is local and purely on a trust-basis (no external verification required); this should be more than sufficient for signaling an age-bracket to a service, which may then serve an "age-appropriate experience".
A digital identity wallet should be strictly reserved for matters that already required personal identification. Using such heavy-handed measures for controlling access to adult content, or even social media, is complete and utter overkill. I'm not interested in more empty, technical, server-side "trust me, bro" promises, for something that is fundamentally disproportional.
It's sad enough to resort to consumption for happiness, but to play shopping simulators because you can't afford to, is outright depressing. And spreading awareness is fine, but it feels somewhat condescending, when (over)consumption is the coping mechanism here. These people are likely struggling to find long-term happiness, and can only afford short-term dopamine hits instead.
The study found 58.3 percent of buyers say they couldn’t live without Bluetooth connectivity
Strange, when smartphones no longer come with 3.5 mm sockets... The consumer never asked for the majority of these "features": they already had access to most of them (through their smartphone or other standalone device), or was easily and cost-effectively installed as an aftermarket gadget. All of these "safety" features, that coincidentally also happen to constitute a (future) privacy-nightmare, were pushed for by: legislators, insurance companies, and the automotive industry itself. Consumers effectively got conned into buying a duplicate of products they already owned, but which are instead subject to terms and conditions dictated by aforementioned stakeholders.
Imagine going after those seeking to protect their works from being stolen by AI, instead of the AI scrapers that caused this entire shit show to begin with. Put the blame where it makes sense, and don't try to guilt trip those that are victim of intellectual property theft, into believing they are the ones responsible for the web becoming an accessibility-nightmare; not for just the disabled, but everyone (locking content behind: a login, PoW challenges, and CAPTCHAs). Awful defeatist take.
Audio fingerprinting works because small differences in browser versions, operating systems, audio libraries, and hardware can produce slightly different results from the same generated signal. It is not necessarily enough to uniquely identify a device by itself, but it becomes much more useful when combined with canvas, WebGL, hardware, timing, and interaction data.
The gaining happens after retrieval of the results it seems: so it's just silent for the end user. And perhaps they do both fingerprinting, and ensure audio devices remain awake.
Yeah, I understand (as an ex-GOS and current pmOS user). It just feels hypocritical to crutch on monopolies for "child protection", while in the same breath criticizing monopolistic practices... The EU should pick their poison
How about requiring Apple to provide an option for the device "owner" to disable Apple's "protections"? If I want to choose freedom over "security", I should have the option to do so. But the EU seems more interested in app signatures and app distribution through centralized channels controlled by the very same monopolists (as a similar approach can be observed on Android). But everything to protect the children, right?
Interesting that Chart 1 a only shows data up to 2023, while data up to 2026 shows an even closer resemblance to the dot-com bubble and 2008 financial crisis; in terms of steepness of the growth. So the more linear growth seen since the 2008 financial crisis, really should be attributed to other (more legitimate) forces in the market; while this article should've really focused on the growth since 2022 (which it just barely does).
So after butchering the like/dislike ratio, the view-count will also become utterly useless... What's next, automatically subscribing users to inflate subscriber-count too? All these universally liked videos (no dislikes), views/exposure (zero engagement), advertiser-friendly content (threatened (shadow)banning or demonetization)! Now the only red flag to any malinformed advertiser might be a low subscriber-count; so just do it already. Well, alongside the lackluster performance of the ads themselves of course (which can only be measured after the transaction: poorly at that). And the best part: non of the ad-revenue will be shared with the propped up channels: as the recently heightened threshold, requires additional engaged viewers; as opposed to the TikTok-level, worthless kind.
And then music that gets ripped off by AI, gets the original creator flagged as AI, that in turn has to prove to an AI, that they are in fact not AI...
Law enforcement shouldn't become too convenient ("The company built a staff of hundreds of compliance officers, many of them veterans of U.S. and European law enforcement agencies. The police could often get information about accounts far faster from Binance than they could from banks."), but equally not be excessively hindered by procedures or cronyist governments ("[...] unable to obtain account records from some Binance users based in the United Arab Emirates. [...] certain information requests flow through the Emirati government [...] conflict of interest, because the investment firm MGX is funded by Abu Dhabi royals."); so I'm quite mixed on the change of direction.
It might be positive for legitimate users of the platform (which are less likely to be investigated, let alone receive specialty-treatment), but simultaneously protect Trump's crypto-scamming inner circle, alongside other high-value targets.
Having no issues with the Bypass Paywalls Clean addon. It's so good, it got removed from: the Mozilla add-on store, GitLab, and Github (which is why it's now hosted on the Russian GitFlic).
Maybe because now it's Google Gemini under the hood?