But there’s no absolute truth so the best you can do is try to come to compromises and offer processes to arrive at them fairly. All democracies out there have differences in a lot of factors. You can place some safeguards so the idiots or the evil people can’t take over easily but eventually if enough people want something (even if misguided) it’s gonna happen.

Call slavery ‘freedom’ and then tell the slaves "you’re free!

Be fair now. I’m not talking about outright twisting of words. I’m talking about concrete processes for considering competing points of view before making something into a law.

And you need to strike a balance because if you make such processes very rigid and inaccessible then you may not be subject to new bad ideas but you also won’t be able to shift to new good ideas. Speaking of slavery, it was once upon a time habitual in many societies, but it was the ability to shift our points of view that changed that. Same goes for a lot of other antiquated ideas.

I mean it’s all “AI” in the very broad sense. We’ve been on a journey to research and improve AI for many decades now. You can argue that any self-reliant automation (like Roombas) is a form of AI.

you are still thinking in terms of authoritarian regimes ruling by force or intimidation. You don’t need to if you can direct the opinion of 90%+ of the population

I’m thinking like that because such regimes are always established and maintained through violence. Indimidation is much cheaper, faster and more attainable than convincing 90% of people – which is never going to happen btw, that’s a super high bar. It’s also unnecessary, you can win elections in the US with 28% of the registered votes IIRC.

it’s inefficient FOR WHAT THEY CLAIM THE GOAL IS. Because they are lying.

Let me ask you, does it really matter if people don’t circumvent blocks because they can’t (because the block is effective) or because they won’t (because they fear the consequences)? Either way they’re doing what the regime wants.

I think you’re still missing the finer point. Depending on the punishment (which under an authoritarian regime can be torture in prison or being summarily executed or dissapeared), even a semi-effective block can have a completely chilling effect.

Whether you can or cannot circumvent the block and get your hands on Taylor Swift’s latest album will be the last thing on anybody’s mind. Whether the fascists lie about the efficacy of the block will be irrelevant. They can point at a completely random person and have them shot and say it was because of “piracy”. But you can substitute any word there and it will work the same.

This isn’t a technical problem, it’s a social and political problem.

And who’s going to block all the freely available DNS servers, proxies and also TOR?

The ISPs will do the blocking if ordered and it will catch 99,99% of people. The average person doesn’t know how to use advanced techniques and it’s tricky even for tech savvy people. Using the wrong proxy for example can cause more trouble than it solves. VPNs and custom DNS are also trivial to block. Large-enough corporations can be trivially extempt from peasant blocking.

And I won’t even get into what happens if they criminalize bypassing the blocking and consider it “domestic terrorism”.

It was done in Spain, the right-holders for soccer managed to get themselves in a legal position to tell the ISPs what IPs to block and they issued overly-broad ranges to be blocked. I was in Spain this summer for World Cup and when a match was on you could not reach completely unrelated services in other countries. It’s ridiculous and probably will get reversed in court but it was done, however temporarily, and it works.

Internet censorship is very easy to do, I don’t know why some people tunnel-vision on the fact it’s not perfect. It doesn’t have to be perfect to still be very effective.

The democracy is in the process. Stuff like this gets introduced all the time by some politicians and pushed by some lobby groups, with counter-arguments from other lobby groups, and then gets rejected by other politicians and/or by the courts.

It’s how a functioning democracy is supposed to work.

If you’re an EU citizen and worried about this there are many ways to contact EU representatives and also to track what your EU MEPs are up to.

Locally, how does that work?

FWIW, identity verifications schemes that attempt to maintain privacy are a contradiction in terms and cannot work. Same as encryption that both works and doesn’t work (backdoors).

Verbose version here: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/

Based on paper here: https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/papers/age-verify.pdf

It’s incredibly unlikely that a language teacher understands Git or cares to learn how to use Git.

Hm, it shouldn’t be that hard to point them at a Github/Gitlab/Forgejo repo. It’s basically a list of chronological entries, and when you click one you can see what changed. Not a terrible different concept from what Word/Writer are doing.

I mean, UEFI was broken by design from the get-go. It was entirely designed around Windows and shims were an afterthought once the rest of the industry figured out they’d be fucked if they allowed Microsoft complete control. But they didn’t fight for an overhaul because Microsoft got all its OEM and BIOS makers on board.

So shims are the best next thing, and they aren’t just about Linux, they’re a second PKI layer that allows other entities (than Microsoft) to sign shims. Those entities can be Linux distros but also other OS, software or hardware makers.

Microsoft forgetting to revoke signatures for old shims is orthogonal to the design, but it’s also true that it’s not a very good design. Again, because it was originally made to only deal with Windows and does not deal well with other stuff. The article goes into some detail about workarounds on top of workarounds.

The unfortunate reality is that some people will buy anything that expires, on the remote chance someone might be interested. If they’re set on doing that there’s nothing you can do, they will grab it and block it for at least one more year.

IMHO the best thing you can do is nothing. I mean nothing beyond discreetly checking the domain state in whois. Don’t inquire explicitly about the domain. Don’t use the WHOIS form on websites you don’t trust to exploit such queries into grabbing domains themselves.

You can use whois from the command line (best way). Alternatively, the TLD registry will have a WHOIS form on their official website.

If you don’t generate any apparent interest they will eventually let the domain lapse. Check back a year from now.

The problem is that the main container can (and usually does) rely on other layers, and you may need to pull updates for those too. Updating one app can take 5-10 individual pulls.

How do you avoid interaction if it’s being done automatically by your machine when you open up a print dialog, and if malicious servers can use the same names as legit printers?

Why do you assume they haven’t warned Mozilla in advance?

Also, Mozilla was fully aware that what they were doing is in breach of GDPR. I find it extremely hard to believe that the makers of Firefox are not fully familiarized with it by now.

Last but not least Mozilla is doing this for financial gain. It’s selling pur data to advertisers. Why should we excuse it? It’s a very hostile act.

If Mozilla has hit rock bottom and has been reduced to selling our data to survive then that’s that. We’ll find another way and another FOSS browser. Accepting it is not an option.

So what, are we giving Mozilla a free pass to do anything now? Is the new bar “not quite as shitty as Google”?

Exactly.

The reason most companies decide to contribute to FOSS is because it’s a lot more efficient to fix bugs and add/influence features upstream than to do it at your end of the code independently of everybody else.

I use whatever online storage service I want because you can add your own encryption layer so you only sync encrypted files. rclone supports lots of services and will also encrypt files for you.

You don’t have to install drivers or CUPS on client devices. Linux and Android support IPP out of the box. Just make sure your CUPS on the server is multicasting to the LAN.

You may need to install Avahi on the server if it’s not already (that’s what does the actual multicasting). The printer(s) should then auto magically appear in the print dialogs on apps on Linux clients and in the printer service on Android.

On Linux it may take a few seconds to appear after you turn it on and may not appear when it’s off. On Android it shows up anyways as long as the CUPS server is on.

From what I understand OP’s images aren’t the same image, just very similar.

Any PC can do that, it’s called “status after power off” or something like that.

Isn’t it fourth?