Performing security verification This website uses a security service to protect against malicious bots. This page is displayed while the website verifies you are not a bot. Incompatible browser extension or network configuration Your browser extensions or network settings have blocked the security verification process required by electroblog.hashnode.dev. To resolve this, try the following steps: Temporarily disable browser extensions: Go to your browser settings. Locate your browser extensions and temporarily disable them. Once browser extensions are disabled, refresh this page. Check your network settings: Verify if your internet or firewall settings have blocked your device from reaching “challenges.cloudflare.com”. You may need to consult your operating system's help documentation or your network administrator for guidance on adjusting firewall settings. If you do not have permission to adjust network settings, try connecting to a different network. If these steps do not resolve the issue, refer to Cloudflare's troubleshooting documentation for more help. For detailed guidance on how to disable your browser extensions or check your network settings, refer to your browser or device’s documentation.
Indeed. I’ve hit this kind of page like 4 times now in the past few days, so it’s an emerging new piece of hit-and-run garbage that wastes my time. Perhaps it just replaces Cloudflare’s broken CAPTCHA pages, in which case it may not be not adding to the time waste that CF already does.
WTF is this about? Is uMatrix visible to the server and triggering this?
Performing security verification This website uses a security service to protect against malicious bots. This page is displayed while the website verifies you are not a bot. Incompatible browser extension or network configuration Your browser extensions or network settings have blocked the security verification process required by electroblog.hashnode.dev. To resolve this, try the following steps: Temporarily disable browser extensions: Go to your browser settings. Locate your browser extensions and temporarily disable them. Once browser extensions are disabled, refresh this page. Check your network settings: Verify if your internet or firewall settings have blocked your device from reaching “challenges.cloudflare.com”. You may need to consult your operating system's help documentation or your network administrator for guidance on adjusting firewall settings. If you do not have permission to adjust network settings, try connecting to a different network. If these steps do not resolve the issue, refer to Cloudflare's troubleshooting documentation for more help. For detailed guidance on how to disable your browser extensions or check your network settings, refer to your browser or device’s documentation.
GDPR Art.5 and other parts try to guarantee data subjects transparency on how their data is processed. The overlooked problem is when a data subject installs a closed-source app, they have no idea how their personal data is being processed inside that black box. And since the processing is performed by the data subject themself, ...
Is “they” me? Hosting services is not an issue because it’s a service, which means the hosting service has a GDPR obligation to express in plain language how data is processed. Code transparency does not matter in that regard.
When a controller pushes closed-source software onto data subjects who are expected to execute it on their own equipment, then the GDPR hole manifests. The controller has no obligation to tell you how your data is processed by their black box software. And worse, they go as far as to contractually block you from studying the code. In this case, your only hope for transparency is to use FOSS instead. And (as you say) that ad hoc privilege is only useful for those who can read code. But at least reviewers can explain in plain language to others what the code does.
If “they” is Google, Google is claiming closed source benefits data protection:
“Walker suggested that American companies could collaborate with European firms to implement measures ensuring data protection. Local management or servers located in Europe to store information are among the options.”
A “fund” is not an individual stock. A fund is a huge collection of stocks managed by someone else. I have had retirement accounts where I just get tick boxes like: aggressive, conservative, and moderate. If you look at the docs for a mutual fund, typically only their 10 biggest holdings are disclosed. They don’t bother to list the other 500+ holdings.
I would love to specify corporations who I want to blacklist and require funds to be filtered on that, but I have never seen an investment tool that has such a thing. If you find one, please let me know.
Of course to get that level of purity means ditching all mutual funds and other managed funds and just picking unmanaged/specific investments. Which he suggests could be a full-time job.
According to Google, the idea of replacing current tools with open-source programs would not contribute to economic growth.
Does Europe need growth?
And either way, how does making public service more costly by way of licensing fees increase growth in Europe? The license costs could instead be spent funding more European public workers. That’s growth, no?
Google is advocating for US growth at Europe’s expense.
Walker suggested that American companies could collaborate with European firms to implement measures ensuring data protection.
Closed-source software processes data non-transparently, thus compromising GDPR art.5. It’s also a shitty loophole around the GDPR, because when you run a closed-source app, you are technically the one processing the data.
Walker argues that the market moves faster than legislation and warns that regulatory friction will only leave European consumers and businesses behind in what he calls “the most competitive technological transition we have ever seen.” … Kent Walker suggested that this initiative would stifle innovation and deny people access to the “best digital tools.”
The irony. Is the EU going to fall for this? Or does the EU realise that copyright is in fact the “regulatory friction” that “stifles innovation”?
Indeed you should, but it’s still insufficient. Musk did not get the data from the credit bureau. Freezing credit data does not prevent Musk’s exfiltration. Freezing your data also does not change the data. E.g. If a debt collector knows where you bank (from a leak), they can still tap that account directly even if your credit file is frozen. If a prospective employer knows your health history, you may be passed over for a job. Knowing your home address is useful for stalkers. All that info that was leaked is valuable to social engineers in countless creative exploits.
(edit) One of the intended exploits by Musk is to manipulate elections. How do you think freezing your credit bureau file mitigates election manipulation when the data was taken from the social security administration? Even if Musk were to have harvested the credit bureaus, the credit freezes would not have impeded him.
In any case, the best move w.r.t banking is to find a bank that is not a member of any of the credit bureaus. In principle, an account that extends no credit does not require credit worthiness. But banks are sloppy because consumers are pushovers. Banks systemically exchange info with credit bureaus anyway b/c consumers are not smart enough to demand otherwise.
Moving to a country with some version of GDPR protection would be the most effective way to avoid a repeat.
The US has what the Scottish call a “running goat fuck”. Americans’ data is compromised and abused repeatedly on large scales, to the point that when the data is exploited it can no longer even be attributed to a specific breach.. too many breaches, too many fingers pointing. The only proper recourse is to bounce from the country.
It is what it is. It’s a painful reality. Though “impossible” would be mostly exaggerated. Certainly it’s inconvenient in a country where most people are addicted to convenience.
Your option is a collective action. Mine is individual. These are not mutually exclusive. But I cannot do a collective action on my own. I don’t have a guillotine but I can afford airfare out and I don’t need to rely on actions of others to take the individual action.
You must have a lot of confidence in democracy in the US to do right by the people. I’ll leave this quote here:
“In the United States, the political system is a very marginal affair. There are two parties, so-called, but they're really factions of the same party, the Business Party.”
Who’s they? By “they” you mean government. That’s not an atomic unit. The gov has many govs therein and those govs are not aligned. Read the article.
“A filing summarized on Representative John Larson’s website states that DOGE workers used the third party service Cloudflare in March 2025 in a way that violated Social Security’s own security policies, and that DOGE employees attempted to pass sensitive personal records to an outside advocacy group seeking to overturn election results.”
…
“The Department of Justice has since admitted in another case that earlier statements to the courts about DOGE’s access were inaccurate.”
…
“A press release from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees describes how Justice Department filings acknowledged that individuals’ personal data had been disclosed to third parties using a non-government server, and that DOGE operatives entered Social Security systems without proper authority, bypassing safeguards and putting bank accounts, health records, wage histories, and immigration status at risk.”
So policy violations, inaccurate testimony, and improper authority.. clearly some key gov agencies see this as a data breach.
Indeed the credit freeze is a simple no-brainer. And it’s not mutually exclusive with any other action. Most people don’t realize credit freezing should be a default way of operating. Particularly in a system where you don’t have control over your data. Banks ToS vaguely say “you agree we can share your data with any credit reporting agency”. They typically don’t even name the credit bureau so you don’t have transparancy or control. Your blunt instrument is the choice to open the bank acct, or not.
The best theoretical option would be to open an asset acct that disallows credit and then does not stick a fucked up credit bureau in the mix. Consumers are not smart enough to demand that and so I don’t believe any bank offers that.
It’s much harder to move, change ssn, etc.
Yes, but it’s not either or. You can make the data stale while also freezing your credit.
You cannot comprehend English written by someone whose first language is English.
You cannot meaningfully articulate in English why you cannot comprehend it.
You don’t know that “therein” is spelled as a single word.
You’re clearly the one struggling with English.
There are literally thousands of governments within the US. The US loves to create new govs. If you cannot grasp that, then you simply will not be able to understand the problem with trying to consider “the gov” as a singular entity in this context. In the very least, you should try to understand that there are 3 branches of government. From there, copious jurisdictions divided by geography and scope of law.
Do a search on “ICE Minnesota” if you want to understand hard and fast how govs in the US can be unaligned.
I am not going to write a whole book right here so you can understand. Go back to school.
Sounds like a great idea. If there is anything structured in place, “ESG” (environment, social, governance) would be the keyword. Some time ago individual equities got ESG scores for ethics. It was gamified by marketing. E.g. Microsoft got a high ESG score despite being atrocious. But Canada is taking real moves toward killing off the greenwashing and forcing provable measurements. So we can perhaps expect ESG figures to be relatively honest in Canada.
From there, I have no idea about mutual funds and I did not even know that muni bonds existed. It would indeed be useful to invest in green cities. It would be quite hard to find them in the US. But I don’t suppose anything stops a US resident from investing in Copenhagen bonds, if they exist.
I think it was Atlanta, GA which built a pedestrian + cycling ring in the city. I don’t know if that was just a 1-off gesture move, or if they continued to develop along those lines.
I suggest posting that info to Individual🌡 Climate Action ✊. That community would perhaps be useful for posing your question. Note these threads in particular:
A couple yrs ago Google announced that it was discontinuing use of the caches. They were directly accessible and also accessible via 12ft.io. So loss of 12ft.io was expected at that point. But strangely I continued to enjoy access well after that announcement. I wasn’t sure what happened; wondered if it was just that Google discontinued caching new pages. It was a bit hit and miss.
Google’s wording was bizarre because surely Google still needs the cache for indexing. I wondered if Google made a false statement where the reality was just removing public access to the caches, not actually discontinuing use of the caches.
12ft.io was a clever service that exploited the fact that paywalls allowed Google to crawl their articles. By licking the boots of Google’s crawler, paywalls pollute the search index with their exclusive/closed content. Enshitification culminates by cluttering our search results with paywalls. ...
The fosdem.org website has a rich history of FOSS tech presentations. It’s a good youtube-free place to find videos. But searches only reach the last event. Kinda sucks that we have to use a general search service to look through the archives. ...
Google has criticized the European Union’s intentions to achieve digital sovereignty through open-source software. The company warned that Brussels’ policies aimed at reducing dependence on American tech companies could harm competitiveness. According to Google, the idea of replacing current tools with open-source programs ...
Just to clarify, the article I linked is not related to Belgium’s policy to exempt public services from GDPR fines. That FATCA article just happens to be where I read about the exemption. Sorry for the confusion. I probably should have linked this article instead.
But indeed FATCA is a shitshow on its own. Shame on every country that agreed to it.
I would not call it pointless to fine public administrations. The money from the fine would go from one gov pot of money to another. There are consequences and power plays; winners and losers. Whoever holds the money has the power. The incompetent agency who must beg for an offset may not get it all back. There could be conditions attached it.
Neutering the DPA enables agencies to be sloppy and cavalier.
Bad public services should be defunded. From there, data subjects benefit from the restructuring, which ensures the GDPR is taken seriously. The incompetent lose. They get shown the door. The people benefit from the money (which does not disappear) going to public services that respect their rights.
There is also deterrance. A DPO for a school who knows they could become responsible for the school losing funding due to their negligence will act more responsibly. The boss of the DPO who also knows a fine is possible will hire a qualified DPO, as opposed to a clown. When a data subject makes a GDPR request, the DPO and school won’t laugh at it (which is what happens now).
Imagine a school gets fined £100k.
It sounds like you have selected a suboptimal amount, by your own admission.
Absolutely nobody benefits from a fine. Everyone loses.
Privacy is a human right. Throwing human rights under the bus harms the data subjects. Data subjects benefit from effective GDPR enforcement. In the EU, such a circumstance harms the whole EU because the protection is not uniform. The GDPR becomes spotty, hit and miss.. unreliable.
The alternative that you allude to is holding DPOs personally liable for breaches and non-compliance. Again nice in theory but in practice it means that in most cases you’re holding one person responsible for the actions of someone else.
I doubt it’s legal to hold someone personally liable. I know a bar owner who would do a money grab on his bartender’s paycheck whenever he did something objectionable. I don’t think that was legal, nor would I suggest it.
The main purpose of a legal person is to shield natural persons from lawsuits. The DPA would be fining the public agency as a whole.
The public agency should of course internally attribute the DPO’s failures to the DPO. From there, I doubt it would be legal to do an instant money grab on the DPO. But there are of course legally sound corrective actions. If the DPO is an outside agency, it’s simple to outsource to another provider of DPO services. If it’s a direct employee, they can be sacked or reassigned a different role. They could be given a pay cut in the future, like at their next annual appraisal, at which point they can decide whether to accept the new terms. They could be required to attend training. It’s a management issue.
My org had a high impact breach a couple of months ago.
A breach is not in itself an infringement by a data controller. But if the data controller was negligent in their infosec and not up to GDPR standards which is then attributed to the breach, then the negligence would be an infringement.
wouldn’t teach the DPO a lesson - they’ve done everything the law requires.
Without having the details I can only figure that if the DPO did everything the law requires, then a conviction and penalty has no merit in the 1st place.
And without knowing about your org, I cannot judge whether resources are being sensibly allocated. It sounds like GDPR compliance has an low priority there (which actually makes sense if the org is legally immune to GDPR fines anyway).
The DPA is not limited to fines. A DPA can give advice, issue warnings, and orders. A DPA is unlikely to use a heavy-handed but simultaneously ineffective or inappropriate tool for enforcement. The DPA also has discretion in the amount of the fine. The law at hand w.r.t this thread disempowers the DPA from fines -- which would be increasingly important for repeat offenders.
I think it’s far-fetched to suggest that a DPA would ruin or sink a school. But it would be sensible for the penalty limit to be lower for public data controllers if that concern is realistic. There could also be an imposed leniency on 1st time offences.
I think a surveillance advertiser known as “Microsoft Corporation” acquired OpenAI. If chatgpt works for an advertiser, then it’s working to manipulate people into buying shit they don’t need, which is obviously not good for the environment.
I'm interested in adding some spicy kick to my next brew, and was wondering if anyone had any tips for adding chili peppers to their brews. Currently, I have a bunch of dried Habanero peppers, but I could conceivably go for other ones. Any advice would be appreciated. Cheers!
Green chili beer is a thing in New Mexico. I tried some a long time ago, back in the days when decent beer was still non-existent in the states. And it was quite nice. So if you ever pass through NM then it’d be worthwhile to see if any breweries would share their knowledge.
(edit) I also tried red chili beer from the same brewery. The green chili was much better, which is also what I find with chili in food.
Did you try eating the peppers after the tincture is made? I wonder how effective the alcohol-based extraction is.. if there is any residual capsaicin left in the peppers.
It’s something boycotters of Microsoft use to communicate to MS-hosted agencies to avoid supplying recipients with an email address. It gives us control over what MS is allowed to see.
It also channels money better. The recipient who needs to respond is forced to support the postal service instead of Microsoft.
It last worked in 2024. Throughout 2025 it presents the forms, accepts the document, then gives an instant permission denied when sending. Tried creating a new acct and same problem.
Looks like a couple good finds there. The 2nd one put me off at 1st w/an apparent dependency on Google drive, but after clicking forward it’s clear that we can skip Google and do a direct upload.
During an appearance on public broadcast service Franceinfo, Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs Anne Le Hénanff said VPNs might be the next target. ...
How will they know the difference between an HTTPS connection to a website and a corkscrew (VPN nested inside of HTTPS)?
There is also a human rights issue here. Some servers discriminate depending on where vistors come from, which is determined by IP address. Getting equal treatment sometimes requires us to appear as the unmarginalised group by using a VPN.
I bought some cola flavored candy and cola popsicles recently. Both had a hint of mint or eucaliptus or something fresh and penetrating like that.. I wondered if that was part of the cola ingredient or if it was added.
Cloudflare has a new kind of blockade to push access inequality & enshitify the web further.
cross-posted from: ...
Cloudflare has a new kind of blockade to push access inequality & enshitify the web further.
WTF is this about? Is uMatrix visible to the server and triggering this?
Google criticizes Europe's plan to adopt free software -- this abuses a GDPR hole that FOSS compensates for ( sopuli.xyz )
GDPR Art.5 and other parts try to guarantee data subjects transparency on how their data is processed. The overlooked problem is when a data subject installs a closed-source app, they have no idea how their personal data is being processed inside that black box. And since the processing is performed by the data subject themself, ...
Google criticizes Europe's plan to adopt free software ( pplware.sapo.pt )
cross-posted from: ...
Americans should close all their bank accounts & open new accts, thanks to Elon who exfiltrated the entire social security DB & leaked it to Cloudflare ( www.ecoticias.com )
Replace your bank accounts, change your SSN, change employers, and move address. All your data has been compromized. Specifically: ...
Investment Funds for 'Green' Municipal Bonds
Are there any investment funds (ETFs or mutual funds) which exclusively purchase municipal bonds in “green” cities? ...
We need a browser that masquerades as a crawler -- to disenshitify pollution in our search results by unreachable content
cross-posted from ...
12ft.io is critical to disenshitification and netneutrality. Now it’s gone ( rbfirehose.com )
cross-posted from ...
12ft.io is critical to netneutrality, and now it’s gone ( rbfirehose.com )
cross-posted from: ...
12ft.io is critical to netneutrality, and now it’s gone ( rbfirehose.com )
12ft.io was a clever service that exploited the fact that paywalls allowed Google to crawl their articles. By licking the boots of Google’s crawler, paywalls pollute the search index with their exclusive/closed content. Enshitification culminates by cluttering our search results with paywalls. ...
FOSDEM searches cannot reach past years
The fosdem.org website has a rich history of FOSS tech presentations. It’s a good youtube-free place to find videos. But searches only reach the last event. Kinda sucks that we have to use a general search service to look through the archives. ...
Google criticizes Europe's plan to adopt free software ( pplware.sapo.pt )
Google has criticized the European Union’s intentions to achieve digital sovereignty through open-source software. The company warned that Brussels’ policies aimed at reducing dependence on American tech companies could harm competitiveness. According to Google, the idea of replacing current tools with open-source programs ...
What is an “accidental American”, in legal terms? ( www.ifcreview.com )
The linked article: ...
🇧🇪Belgium: “public bodies are exempt from GDPR fines” ( web.archive.org )
cross-posted from ...
🇧🇪Belgium: “public bodies are exempt from GDPR fines” ( web.archive.org )
Gem from the article: ...
JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley Are Pausing on Some US Renewable Deals ( www.bloomberg.com )
Chat gpt
Hello, I’m not that aware of why or how chat gpt is not good for the environment, can someone please explain to me? Thank you
Qubes OS has no jigdo template? So every ISO must be fetched from scratch (~8gb), correct?
This mirror: ...
Anyone have tips for working with peppers in your brews?
I'm interested in adding some spicy kick to my next brew, and was wondering if anyone had any tips for adding chili peppers to their brews. Currently, I have a bunch of dried Habanero peppers, but I could conceivably go for other ones. Any advice would be appreciated. Cheers!
📠 FAX service suggestions for Europe? (need a replacement for PDF24)
cross-posted from: ...
France might seek restrictions on VPN use in campaign to keep minors off social media ( www.engadget.com )
During an appearance on public broadcast service Franceinfo, Minister Delegate for Artificial Intelligence and Digital Affairs Anne Le Hénanff said VPNs might be the next target. ...
Coca cola reverse-engineered recipe for "homebrewing" ( www.youtube.com )
I know it's not wine, beer or mead, but what do we say about this, guys? I may give it a shot come spring. Anybody else interested? ...