bergfest

We had a choice when there were alternative clients for all major platforms. Make open APIs mandatory for large platforms and a lot of problems will disappear. UIs will be designed for the best user experience again instead of maximizing engagement. It will hurt their revenue but so be it.

This has got to be rejected by any court that has not been completely corrupted.

What will the end game in this licensing scheme be? I reckon once enough movies have been sold, the reputational damage of taking them away would become so large that streaming services will be strongarmed into accepting increasingly unreasonable fees.

This is exactly what will happen.

I can still see that black and white splash screen in my head. Computers were so magical back then.

And then they will take away your right to boot whatever you want. For national security reasons and the children, of course.

The older manual rear view mirrors worked much better in my opinion.

A task force of former nuclear fusion scientists has been established to fix bluetooth audio quality for once and forever.

I don’t know about the US, but in UK and the EU they are certainly trying to do just that. And if not today, the will simply cook us slowly a little longer until they succeed. The problem is, that regular people just don’t care enough.

It’s almost like they need these to exist.

I second this. And it would only be half as bad, if there was a chance to democratically undo this, when people realize the consequences. But no, this will stay forever and only become worse.

But they have ways to evade the law. And my dystopian inner oracle tells me, that when the pervasive online identification will soon be reality, certain people's IDs will have a special "all access, no logs" status that will allow them stay under the radar.

That's what I'm wondering too. I still hold out hope that the EU and the ECJ cannot override the fundamental rights guaranteed by the constitutions of the individual member states.

It is generally assumed that the ECJ has ultimate precedence over national constitutional courts, but I have my doubts. As a thought experiment, imagine it wasn't the EU, but the Chinese CCP with whom the treaties were concluded. It then quickly becomes clear why a national constitutional court fundamentally cannot accept the unconditional transfer of jurisdiction to a foreign entity.

The German Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG) already stated in its judgment on the Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) that it is prepared to intervene in the event of an exceeding of competences (ultra vires). Furthermore, the BVerfG has repeatedly defended the fundamental rights to privacy against the government in the past. I am relatively certain that the warrantless chat control would not succeed at the national level in Germany. The question is how the BVerfG will react if the ECJ gives the green light to chat control. As I said, I still have hope.

I fear it is already too late, thanks to the phone duopoly and bulletproof secure boot environments. The EU can now make remote attestation mandatory by law.

We have to assume this is only the first step. The next step will be mandatory identity attestation for everything and your only choices will be to either accept it or not use any services at all.