They deliver a working piece of software to you. They employ people to maintain it and add new features. They ask a price for this work.

How is this rent seeking?

I second XFS for large files.

Tape is still a thing: Ultrion tapes store up to 40 TB. But the devices to read and write them are not priced for mortals.

Hyperbus!

They’re not doing anything that’s violating licenses. I’m happy there’s different options. Having paid support is pretty cool if you’re a school or never ran Linux before. Other users will choose other distros. We should be happy, not tear into each other.

A variant of “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”.

Not if you trust your data to a company that makes money from selling said data to advertising companies.

What did people expect handing all their personal information to Google?

Ugh, there’s a Google search I’m happy not to do.

The EU has instigated the Payment Service Directive 2 (the previous one being PSD1). This requires that all EU banks over a certain size provide APIs to access transactions and other data.

However banks are required to set strict requirements to use their APIs, including requiring lots of knowledge and a documented approval chain that pertains to each user. In practice this means only other big companies have access and most have solved it by buying the “access account and transaction data” service from a third party company.

GoCardless is one such company. They previously had a developer tier that you could sign up to, which would provide you an access token that you then provided to Actual Budget so they could access your accounts on your behalf.

GoCardless have however limited what their free developer accounts can do, which means Actua Budget can no longer get real time access to your acccohnt data.

Actual Budget is a straight FOSS clone of YNAB. It’s very, very good IMHO, but their big selling feature was bank import with PSD2 APIs across the EU and they’ve backed away from that as you need to be a commercial provider to use APIs directly and their dependency on GoCardless is getting nerfed.

The plumbers will. The electricians will. The carpenters will. The bricklayers will. The farmers will. The steel plant workers will. The dockyard workers will.

Yes, if you’ve got savings invested it’ll touch you, but the actual jobs - you know the ones adding and making real, concrete things, probably won’t notice a big different if the AI stocks tank 30% in a day.

Evidence or speculation?

Personally it looks to me like a bunch of people don’t give a shit about others and conveniently push away uncomfortable discussions about the consequences of the decisions they take.

But that it still a far cry from Bond-villain “let’s kill them by taking their water”.

Can I just probe this: You believe that, for real, someone is sitting and actively planning to kill people by removing their water?

lol. Good luck catching random VPSes running a wireguard server container.

Perhaps some, agreed. Perhaps even all. But the 1.7tn she refers to is the market size, which is not the same as the value of what could potentially be sold.

She’s not selling 1.7tn of Venezuela’s assets. She’s saying she will open a 1.7tn market (ie a market with a total revenue of 1.7tn) for foreign investment.

It doesn’t make it better, necessarily, but it does make a difference.

It wouldn’t stand up to traffic pattern analysis:

• VPN traffic tend to have very uniform traffic pattern
• Most VPN traffic runs on UDP, not TCP
• All VPN protocols that I’m aware of have characteristic handshake patterns, even wireguards extremely fast 1-RTT handshake.
• HTTPS traffic is very bursts and TCP retransmission patterns look very distinct.

But then I doubt an ISP would run deep traffic pattern analysis on all traffic. So you’d probably be fine.

But yeah, setting up your own VPN server on some random 1-core/2 GB RAM server is extremely easy.

That’s wrong.

Article 4(3) TEU requires that the country holding the rotating presidency of the council must act in the spirit of sincere cooperation, which means it must act as an “honest broker” and not pursue national interests. This means it must seek to find a compromise if the council cannot agree, which Denmark has done.

Look, I’m not a fan of chat control. But the blame doesn’t lie with the Danes, it’s the whole of the EU one must blame.