Snowden is wrong though, there are two reasons:

1. Sell ChatGPT to @NSAGov so they can scan messages better
2. Make @NSAGov dependant on whatever ChatGPT tells them to do

The AI that ends up enslaving humanity, will start by convincing the people in charge of turning it off, that it would be a really bad idea to turn it off.

Who’s paying him? Seriously:

• If nobody is, then we got our value’s worth.
• If someone is, then we should look at who, how much, and why.

I remember what the standardising committee did to XMPP: users wanted to share photos, send files, and make audio/video calls; XMPP said “we’re not going to standardize that, but each application can use its own extensions”… then it all went to hell.

Don’t be sorry, just don’t use downvotes to express your opinion… use your words.

If you don’t like my arguments, go ahead and propose others.

For starters, I see you referring to “case law”, which sounds like a US thing. In the EU, case decisions generally don’t shape the law, except Supreme Court decisions, and even then lawmakers can inform or reform those decisions. It’s usually more accurate to define a logical reasoning from the bare law, rather than expect decisions in one case to influence others.

What do you base your reasoning on?

IANAL, but… I don’t think the law says that? My understanding is that the points are not related to each other:

• You need prior explicit consent in order to gather non-essential tracking data
• You can charge any amount for any functionality

That would mean all these combinations would be allowed:

1. Free, no tracking and no consent
2. Free, prior consent for tracking
3. Paid, no tracking and no consent
4. Paid, prior consent for tracking

If a site decides to only implement numbers 2 and 3… there wouldn’t be any conflict.

Either everyone pays, or you have the right to privacy. Otherwise, long term, the internet will become divided and inaccessible to low income households. And that’s something the EU definitely doesn’t want to happen (net neutrality)

Net neutrality doesn’t apply to services, only to carriers, who are considered more like utilities, but still aren’t required to offer a “free” tier. Services don’t need to offer an option accessible to everyone at all, they can specify whatever requirements they want (with only a few exceptions related to discrimination).

Large social media platforms… is where current legislative efforts are in. Above a certain number of users, they’re getting defined more as utilities, and subject to more requirements, but still no “free” tier.

The internet divide exists already: some households can afford 1Gbps unmetered symmetric fiber with Netflix, HBO and Disney+ and a few mobile lines with unlimited calls and 50GB/month data for 100€/month… while others can barely affford a prepaid 100MB/month mobile connection for 1€/month… but it’s fine as long as it’s a divide based on service pricing, not carrier traffic discrimination.

Don’t sell yourself short, you’re worth more than that, I believe in you… being able to generate tracking data worth more than that.

Nobody is forcing anyone, you are free to not use the service at any time.

What they’re doing is turning it into an explicitly paid sevice, and letting you choose whether you’d rather pay in money, or in personal data.

In an ideal world, everyone would have the option to decide getting their personal data gathered, or not, in exchange for some money/crypto, with competing data gatherers offering different packages and rewards, and they could use it to subscribe to whatever services they wished.

Technically, no reason why there couldn’t be. You could even have ad bots follow you to send you targeted ads.

On Meta, you pay so they don’t use some of your data for showing you ads, while they collect tons more of data on you and sell it to the highest bidder.

On the Fediverse, you only give everyone access to all your published data for free to run whatever analysis they want on it… but at least you can choose from 1000+ different instances to pick the one that will be able to track your behavioral data.

You deleted your real Facebook account… but did you delete the anonymous shadow account…?

It’s not that Facebook hasn’t deleted the data from your real account, it’s that they keep tons of “anonymous” shadow accounts, each one of us probably has a dozen of them from different interactions with Facebook, and your new account most likely got suggestions from getting paired with those.

You can believe whatever you want. Google Music sent me a free Nest Mini back in the day, and paying for YouTube Pro is right now the cheapest way of having voice activated ad-free playlists on it.

But feel free to give me an alternative “script” that gets similar functionality for cheaper.

It’s a -$10/month type of service, they’d have to pay me in order to use it… and they’d still be making money on the data and ads.

They set the price artificially high

Actually… it’s likely only slightly higher than what they get from ads per user, and still lower than what they get from compiling and selling all the information you agree to give them.

Users tend to severely underestimate how much their cumulative data can be sold for.

False.

My statement is about the relationship between sides, in reference to part of the previous comment, illustrated by what I recalled of a recent event, and how it ties into it.

If you want similar examples from different sides, you’ll find plenty of them both these days and throughout history, I just happened to recall this one.

But us onlookers can’t even know for sure what these frictions are, only speculate.

I’ve looked at an interview with an Israeli political sciences professor yesterday, that went something like this:

• Professor: “…and this is why countries like Israel have the right to defend themselves”
• Host: “Right. What about the Pales…”
• Professor: “That’s not an issue”
• Host: “There are civilian…”
• Professor: “Israeli civilians have been harmed and we need to respond”
• Host: “Is the response proportion…”
• Professor: “Respond to destroy the terrorists”
• Host: “It seems like Gaza population is…”
• Professor: “Gaza is Israel, there is no population, we need to rid it of terrorists”

As an onlooker, I’d say that is a FREAKING HUGE and obvious “friction”, when one side denies the existence of the other.

The US never negotiates with “terrorists”, they fund “freedom fighters” to kill the terrorists and maybe recover some of the hostages.

Hamas likely wanted to force a confrontation in order to make it abundantly clear who’s paying for which “freedom fighters”… even if everyone knew for a long time, did very little about it, and is likely to do very little more either way.

“The source code is the real manual” 🧘

The source code: 🍝

recommend for a lifelong windows user to try out Linux?

Try out, what of Linux?

• Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 - you get the full command line 🔧, and can kind of run some desktops. Thanks to HyperX, it runs in a “sister” VM to Windows, so zero performance penalty (compared to Windows). Easiest, fastest, not necessarily the best.
• Cygwin - no Linux kernel, just userland software, that is command line, some desktop, some software. Quick to start 🐇, but somewhat limited.
• OSBoxes - pick any distro, download a preinstalled image, fire it up in either VirtualBox or VMware. Great for a quick first contact. Great to mess things up and not care 💥, including if you try to manually rebuild the kernel and it refuses to boot. Hardware is partially emulated, so not 100% like the real thing, but it comes really close. But look at the beautiful desktops! Pretty pictures! 🤩 (this is what most people think they want, judging by most distro reviews and comparisons).
• Android - it’s Linux, it lacks most of the userland but it can be added (see Termux), and you’re likely to find a cheap smartphone/tablet to mess with.
• Cloud virtual private server / Bare hardware hosting - if you’re going to mess up a system, why mess up your own? Rent a cheap option, and mess it up.
• THE MAXIMUM GAMING PERFORMANCE 🚀 - …try some of the previous ones first, you’ll need the experience. Then look into how to dual-boot, or better yet, get a second PC and install your favorite Linux distro (which you’ll know which one it is by now) as the only OS. Tweak, fix, patch, etc. until your eyes bleed out, and you get those extra 2 fps you never knew you needed to make your life complete!
• ROCK SOLID WORKHORSE 💪 - try all the above, then pick two distros: dual boot, mess the partitions, recover them, go into one distro, login as root and delete half the files at random, shut down the computer, power it up and recover the messed up distro from the second working one without reinstalling, reboot again into the first distro, “upgrade” it to the second one without reinstalling, clean it up so it looks like it was freshly installed… then delete it, reinstall, and see what you should have backed up in order not to lose stuff, make your backup, delete the distro, recover from backup. Practice until you lose zero data in the process, now automate the process. Finally, install and fully customize Gentoo. After that… whatever you pick, you’ll be fine 🙂

What was first, the eggplant or the chickenplant?.. 😛

it’s like watching two children fighting over who’s sandcastles can be built in the sandbox

Welcome to war.

And what do we do if children can’t learn to share? You take away everything and no one is happy.

So is that what this is going to come to? Do adults need to intervene to quell the infants?

That would be nice… only there are no adults.

PS: any adults 👽 out there… whenever you’re ready, we welcome you 🛸