Joined the Mayqueeze.
No. This is how the legal system works. When you appeal to a higher court, they can make a call themselves when massive mistakes were made at the lower level or they can say the lower court overlooked something and then make them redo their work. It’s a convenient choice for the higher judges not to have to do more work themselves. But it’s part of the process.
Loosely defined legal terms. A “computer program” can be copyrighted. You can write your own that does the same thing but you cannot copy the other code and slap your label on it. With a lot of imagination and bending the words of the shitty outdated law, you could say a website is also a “computer program.” You cannot just go into the code and change it, e.g. by blocking ads. The lower court ruling didn’t take this possible interpretation into account and now has to rule again with this in mind. Nothing’s been decided yet. We’re running a little hot in this thread on misleading headlines.
You would be building it on pretty much the same legal foundations. So it will just be history repeating.
Let’s take a deep breath and consider what’s happened. The Federal Court of Justice has sent the case back to the lower court. They have not ruled on anything. They have not said ad blocking is piracy. They have essentially said: lower court, you had 25 boxes to tick but you only ticked 24 in your ruling. Go back and do one that ticks all of them.
It’s entirely possible that the lower court will change its ruling based on the intricacies of German copyright law, which is shit. But it’s not very likely if you ask me. Regardless, whoever loses will appeal it again. This rodeo is far from over. And when it’s eventually over the technology will have moved on, with any luck the law along with it, and the only beneficiaries will have been the lawyers.
So the headline should read more like “German court does not rule out that ad blocking could be a copyright infringement.”
The argument that Axel Springer is just doing it for their love of democracy is also comical. Media pluralism is important, I agree with them that far, but they are stuck in an outdated mindset. They launched a silly tabloid Fox News wannabe TV channel and failed. They are trying to force eyeballs on their content like you are at a news agent. Meanwhile, news is happening on TikTok and so-called AI is going to reduce their page views to dust. By the time we get a final ruling they will have pivoted strategy 10 times to keep the c-suite in caviar while the established media business that made them successful is rotting away under their assess.
[Find in Page:] “Parent”=0 “Parents”=0 “Father”=0 “Mother”=0
It’s their job to guard their kids from this content first and foremost. It’s their job to put it into context for their children. But the article doesn’t even mention that any of this is a humongous failing of parents.
Next this commissioner will want to outlaw computer mice because they’re used to click pornographic content without verifying the age of the finger on the button. And roads because adult content actors use them to get to jobs.
The way forward is not banning or making worse all sorts of useful tools as collateral damage in this “think of the children” campaign. It is to get all adult content everywhere behind a barrier toddlers cannot break. We were fine with porn mags partially obscured on the top shelf at a news agent when that was a thing. And the salesperson making sure the customer wasn’t a minor. The solution isn’t closing all digital news agents.
And it’s quite telling that the existence of VPNs didn’t play a bigger part in this UK online safety initiative. Like it wasn’t obvious that when the west entrance to porn central was closed off, people wouldn’t naturally look for the ones in east, north, and south.
Edited typo
Touché. If I were in your place I would still try and find another forum, even if you ended up giving all your data to Discord or something like that.
One of the reasons is adversarial policies. They will sniff out you’re using a VPN and they will throw stuff at you. Oh, weird activity from your account. Oh, change your password. Oh, we need to get a proper ID from you. Unless you’re getting $$$ betting info, it just doesn’t seem worth the effort.
Just out of interest: what’s on FB messenger that makes all the things you are willing to do to circumvent the grubby data tentacles worth it? I’m just asking because I came to the conclusion not to use FB a while ago and I haven’t looked back.
Become active in your local politics. That’s where this urban design sausage is made. I’m gonna go ahead and doubt that your post here will reach many decision makers and urban designers.
The reason why you can’t angle that parasol is because it will cost more money. Anything the public can use will be abused and then broken. We cannot have nice things.
Fixed typo
Never accept a pasta served by an “Australian mushroom.”
It turned out to be a Twitter clone from ten years ago and I realized I didn’t need that any more. If I didn’t need to reach some people who cannot overcome the hurdle the fediverse proper puts up before being enjoyable, I would not be using it today. But media popularity post-Elon-Twitter and relative ease of setup have given the platform relative heft. But it’s not open and not really federated so it’s masquerading and we don’t really want you know whose money is paying the bills behind the scenes either. If anything, the fediverse can learn from Bluesky a thing or two about onboarding people who cannot be asked to invest the time to make Mastodon enjoyable. It will take time, much more time, to get people, especially non-techy ones, to the new normal of being your own algorithm. I see Bluesky as a stepping stone in that direction that will survive in its own niche.
This verification efforts were kicked off earlier this month; this app hasn’t really launched yet, has it? I think proper implementation after a test phase will maybe come next year. I think it is too early to complain that aftermarket OS’s are being excluded. It seems to me that nobody has tackled that problem yet rather than this being a willful exclusion. And while the EU lawmakers thought it was okay to put the Googles of the world in a position where they get to be judge, jury, and executioner for the right to be forgotten, I have a feeling that GDPR and the general vibe within the EU will not allow this to only work with the help of one American corporation on the continent’s most used OS. We need to be watchful but not despairing just yet.
I think you can trust the operational side of it. I don’t think they’ve had many detrimental oopsies, the services work. I used them for a year and then jumped ship. One reason is the favorable comments by their CEO about the 47 administration, which I didn’t like. Another reason is the nitty gritty - they don’t clearly advertize what’s part of what package and I felt that was by design to get you to upgrade. And they definitely see themselves as a basket for all of your eggs. If you are moving there because you want to degoogle your life you end up just protonizing it. It’s better to spread around your stuff so you’re not dependent on one provider. If you just want a good VPN and don’t care about the rest of their services and the politics, you could make worse choices.
Florida Man strikes again.
I think it’s because these are people with the power to do more than thoughts and prayers. But they just stick with that while also taking health care off veterans and giving tax breaks to the rich.
If these two companies are in bed with each other, they are hate-fucking each other though. Carnal pleasure but no love lost.
I don’t find this that infuriating. And you have choices to run a different browser. Granted, most of them are chromium based. Edge’s only use case is to download a Firefox fork and/or a better chromium that is neither Edge nor Chrome.
In no situation where weed is legal minors are allowed to buy it. I would be onboard on this propaganda train if all I saw on Netflix is 15yo’s getting high. Which I don’t see that much really.
Minors should not consume it. Minors have parents. Minors’ parents’ job it is to keep them away from that along with sniffing glue, tobacco, vaping, alcohol and eating laundry capsules, just to name a few dangers more.
The negative effects on brain development I read about were all linked to regular, if not heavy use. There is enough wiggle room for school/education and, once again, the parents to step in.
Idiocracy is happening anyway.
That’s great, I wasn’t aware of that.
The American fear of a proper ID system is puzzling to me. It’s constant fear mongering of overreach by the man and not enough appreciation of the benefits. The first one is a self-updating voter registry that eliminates the process of registering or having to check on your registration to make sure you didn’t get knocked off for no good reason. All people need to update their home addresses when they move. Another benefit is - if implemented well of course - that everybody could have a 2FA-quality chip in their pocket to allow for many services to be done reasonably safely online. The dreaded lines of the DMV come to mind. Another benefit is you could prove very quickly who you are, especially if fingerprints are on the chip, to counter mistaken identity arrests that may or may not have been instigated by a so-called AI.
So the government knows everything about you, sure. But it’s not a one-sided deal. And frankly, even if the government did not have this information on you before it turned tyrannical, it would ID you as a possible malcontent in no time. Your data is already available for sale on various data broker sites.
I realize that me preaching the benefits of a proper ID system to the Americans in times of 47 and ICE raids is a bit wonky. I am not going to speculate if the self-updating voter registry could’ve prevented 47. And ICE under 47 might find its job “easier.” But from what I’ve read and heard they haven’t exactly been detail-oriented public servants. When the rule of law breaks down everybody gets effed. And so-called illegal immigrants also have phones and use the internet so their information was also available for sale before stable genius returned to the orange office.
Of course there are dangers that need to be addressed. Access to the database needs to be tighter than a sphincter and every query needs to be logged. Every system will be abused. Checks and balances need to be there, ideally with a right to find out who looked you up and for what reason for everyone. I’d prefer a system embedded in law over internet data brokers.
I don’t have much to say about the points you’re making here. I have a feeling after we sit down and discuss this over coffee/a beer we will find out that we’re pretty much on the same page.
The only thing I want to point out though it that the term “enshitification” was coined for online platforms. It describes a business catering full hog to the needs of the users to create a following, then sell access to that following to other businesses, until both followers and b2b customers are locked in and get milked for every cent possible. From the user POV that’s when the service enshitifies DVD and the b2b customers are between a rock and a hard place. Your cable example follows a similar mechanic but since it is not online it is technically not enshitification as dumped into the world as a term by Corey Doctorow.
That’s just minor pedantry that you’re naturally free to ignore as well. As I said before, I don’t see us disagreeing on the overall point you’re making. Very eloquently, I might add.
Edited typo
Well, go ahead. Discuss it. I don’t know what it is.