btasker

>they should have stood firm or offer up the 'Oh no we couldn't possibly figure out how to do that, it's entirely too complicated, you wouldn't understand.' excuse all other tech companies put out whenever they are told to do something trivial.

Here in the UK, that's basically what BT said back in the early days of rights holders trying to block this stuff.

The rights holders took them to court and managed to get the court to order them to use Cleanfeed (a system that was only used, at the time, to block Child Sexual Abuse Material) to block Newzbin.

Not only did it help kick all this off but, overnight, it meant there was a socially acceptable reason for people to share knowledge on how to circumvent Cleanfeed.

The rights-holders give zero shits about the collateral damage they create with stuff like this

> than you are to find any EU-based product used widely in the United States.

Spotify?

If you don't mind including companies that offer multiple things: Accenture, Amadeus, Capgemini, Mistral, SAP

I'm also assuming there that you're only referring to tech products and services, otherwise you probably want to look at the long, long, long list of pharmaceuticals, cars and other products.

I think the issue is more that you don't have a good understanding of which products and services aren't American.

> There is far more leverage with the country exporting goods

True leverage comes from import, not export of goods and materials. The thing that grows GDP is buying materials cheaper from elsewhere, turning them into something and selling on at a healthy margin (whether domestic or as an export).

> then nanny-stating them into a form they think is better.

I'm no fan of nanny-stating, but I don't think that that's the case here.

There certainly are examples of that, but then the ones that I can think of (age verification in particular) are also getting pushed hard in the US. In fact, by all accounts, a lot of that pushing is being driven/funded by Meta

Personally, I think this is the answer too - rather than mandating it across all platforms, they could have created a service which provides scanning so that there was an additional app people could choose to install (and would, presumably, present as an accessibility addon so it could access content in other apps).

That's not without its own issues though - creating external deps is more or less what they did the first time they tried to mandate age verification.

Although their plans fell through, they created an industry who'd expected a captive market and started lobbying heavily. Eventually, it worked and we've ended up with mandatory age verification.

All of what you said could be true and it'd *still* be wrong for Grok to be allowed to generate it.

All Musk actually needed to say was "oh fuck, we'll fix that". Instead, he responded with laughing emojiis and nothing's changed.

> is not technically illegal in the US

Bully for you.

X is operating in the UK and it *is* illegal here (and not just here). X can either comply with our laws (and the associated moral standards) or it can cease operating here.

There's weird nerd diving in front of Musk to defend him and then there's defending his AI generating CSAM. Neither's a good look, but one is much worse than the other

> His "don't move off 22 for ssh" is also just opinion. He argues "you will be found"

Worse than that, that post misunderstands it's own statement:

"Sure, you will see fewer attacks than before, but most of the attackers are no longer just stupid bots"

That's a *good* thing, because the move has reduced the signal to noise ratio. By getting rid of most of the crufty noise of the internet, you now know that anything hitting your logs now is more likely to be an actual threat than the poorly automated dictionary attack bots.

Moving SSH to a different port doesn't make the system much more secure (and definitely shouldn't be the only thing you do), but it does generally enable you to be more responsive.

> The author also make it feel like the only option is to use cloudflare DoH on Firefox

In fairness, the date on the post is 2018 - when Firefox first launched this, Cloudflare was the only option

Yes.

DoH requests go to /dns-query so you only need that path to proxy onto your DoH handler.

Some DoH clients will also allow you to specify a custom path, so you can also obfuscate the path by configuring client and server to use /foobar instead.

But, re-using an existing site does come at the cost of generating a bunch of extra log noise (fine if it's just you, not so fine if it isn't). If you don't have some kind of auth in place, you might also find that you suddenly come under a lot of load (when I ran a public DoH service, I eventually started getting a lot of traffic from users in an authoritarian country)

They all default to ISO sizes for me.

If I format the page size, Libreoffice does offer "Letter" and "Legal". GIMP shows them as "US Letter" and "US Legal" but again they're not the default.

It wouldn't surprise me if most non-US users hadn't seen them at all, and certainly not that they don't realise the US uses a different size.

> At some point people know if you don't care about them. If you cannot care about them why would they "follow you into battle?"

That's true, but it also works both ways.

If the "problem" person is impacting others on your team, you owe it to them to address rather than ignore the issue. After all, why would _they_ follow you into the trenches if you've shown that you don't care enough to deal with an issue that they're saying is making their lives difficult.

(Good) management is about striking a balance - between the business's needs (otherwise you're all out of a job anyway) and the welfare of everyone on the team (which IMO, should always benefit from a bit of priority over the other).

Sometimes that does mean making a hard decision about someone who's very technically capable, but damages the wellbeing or efficiency of the rest of the team.

As an extreme example - I once worked with someone who was a pretty good engineer and knew where a lot of the bodies were buried in the codebase (i.e. keeping him around would be beneficial), but one day he started regularly talking, quite inappropriately about schoolgirls in the team skype group (and even defended doing so). Good engineer or not, sometimes things have to change.

All of that being said, I think the article is too hardline, at least if those are intended to be the opening gambit. There's a ton of people engineering that you can do before you need to reach the point of making it sound like a PIP.

GDPR (including the UK GDPR) is extra-territorial by design.

It applies _by design_ to anyone or anywhere processing the data of an EU or UK citizen.

I suspect that you and I would agree about the wrongs of any law being extra-territorial, but it's where things on both sides of the pond have landed us.

You already linked to the relevant part of the ICO's guidance but *appear* to have misunderstood it: you've inserted an extra requirement - that it requires taking payment.

That's not the case, it applies just as much to free services.

Wordpress.org (and more so the associated services - slack etc) being available and (more importantly) *collecting and processing data* is offering a service.

> Fun fact, in the UK data protection laws will still cover cameras and whatnot taken from a household

They do indeed. In fact, it's not just cameras: as soon as you publicly share information you can't rely on the exemption because it doesn't cover it.

> Yea, but there is no standing for the UK to apply its laws on Matt.

You keep using the word standing, which is very much as US-centric term. I'm not, for a second, suggesting that anyone would try and enforce this in a US court.

Being able to enforce is (as I've already said) an entirely different kettle of fish.

> Their entire claim would be to apply UK law to someone not operating within the country.

Yes. Welcome to the intended design of GDPR.

Although you're right that EU GDPR and UK GDPR are now two seperate things, they're not actually particularly different things: we didn't really amend it after leaving the EU - the two are seperate since Brexit, but the way that they work is the same, albeit absent a few years of caselaw.

In fact, it's not GDPR that's extra-territorial (or intended to be). Have you seen the stuff they've been trying to bring it to make the internet "safe"? That's extra-territorial in nature too.

Ever since the US passed the CLOUD act, politicians on this side of the pond seem to have decided that what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

dotorg being run by a private citizen who receives no payments does not exempt it from GDPR, because GDPR doesn't make that distinction.

There _is_ an exemption for household processing (recital 18) - which means that I don't need to worry about taking a neighbour's contact number etc - but wordpress.org wouldn't fall under that.

Given Matt's actions (and statements made by his own team so far in the case), I think he'd struggle to claim that wordpress.org is not linked to "professional or commercial activity".

It might be quite difficult to enforce against a private citizen, but that's not the same as it not applying.

Yep, that's exactly my view on it.

I can't say for sure that it directly led to jobs, but my website has been brought up in a positive light during the recruitment process more than a few times.

Because I write about technical things a lot, it's often been viewed as "evidence" that I'm an experienced technical writer as well as an engineer.

But, it (and my github account) have also been flagged as "risks" by a recruitment agency though: I can be a bit sweary at times and they felt that having a project called F*ckAMP might put off potential employers. No-one else has cared though.

But, to echo the advice that others are giving you - the "power" of my blog lies more in it being stuff that I want to write, rather than stuff that I'm writing because I think that it'll help my career.

Deciding what to write about can be hard, and sometimes you'll find you hit a block and don't write about anything at all. Those are both fine, just write about stuff when you want to and don't pressure yourself to write "just because".