For real

How about I don’t pay the invoice, because we’re such good “friends”?

As a Dutchman, I agree we have great infrastructure and “walking” cities. But you’ve only seen Amsterdam. Outside of the cities, The Netherlands is more dependent on cars than you might think. I live on the border of the country and public transport is basically non existent and cycling is not viable due to travel distances, every adult has a car in my area. A family of 4 adults (children over 18 living at home) have 4 cars parked in front of their house here. We’re not as car dependent as the US, but we don’t live in a fairytale either.

I’m curious: why?

Removing IP law just feels like it would only benefit those with the resources to scale new technology quickly. It basically kills all start ups.

edit: word

This isn’t as much about the social media platforms, competing with those is relatively feasible. This is more about the professional infrastructure market. Microsoft Azure, AWS and Google Cloud. There isn’t really a European competitor there, the US dominates this market. We have a huge trade deficit on these services, which Trump “conveniently” didn’t include in his trade war analysis.

Basically the only reason I read the article is to know if they needed a “backdoor” in encryption, guess the don’t need it, like everyone with a little bit of IT knowledge always told them.

Want to setup a more privacy friendly solution?

Have a look at Home Assistant! It’s a great open source smart home platform that recently released a local (so not processing requests in the cloud) voice assistant. It’s pretty neat!

Tesla was ahead 10-15 years, sure. But they mostly lost that lead. Yes, their software is great, but at the same time Tesla doesn’t seem to be able to do basic car features right. For instance, it doesn’t have a rain sensor and relies on the front facing camera to detect rain. I can tell you from experience that it doesn’t work as well as a sensor. It’s even worse when it detects rain, while it is completely dry. But you cannot turn the wipers off, because then you won’t be able to use cruise control anymore. Cruise control, which by the way (non FSD) is shit in comparison to the competition.

The tablet might be a couple years ahead of the competition. The value they bring in bang for buck with a great feature package is also greatly competitive. But the car is behind when it comes to just normal car things. I have buttons on my steering wheel as indicators for fuck sake, a problem we already fixed when we were still prosecuting Nazis.

Not sure if we can really blame Steve Jobs for this though, he wasn’t around when things turned to shit. The iPhone he introduced was merely a phone, web browser, email and music player.

I think it’s fair if we blame Tim Apple for this and the other big tech CEO’s of the recent past.

Not sure how to effectively do that, but I reckon it would be no different than the cookie mess today. Which unfortunately is, hardly ever. The big GDPR related fines can still apply. Let’s say a data set is leaked that includes tracking data that was not necessary for the service to have, then the company can receive a hefty fine. As long as the fine is larger than the reward, it might not be worth it for the company to track you anymore.

Which is why I had hoped the EU would ban all forms of fingerprinting and non-essential data tracking. But they somehow got lobbied into selecting cookies as the only possible mechanism that can be used, leaving ample room to track using other methods.