So . . . the EU drives regulation to enforce seeking consent as a mandatory step, followed by browsers like brave programmatically defeating the ability of companies to seek consent? Two wrongs don't make a right.
What is the end game here, it's like watching dumb and dumber. I want a great web experience just like the next person, but not at the cost of jeopardizing the successful freemium model of the internet that has given billions of people access.
The EU didn't making seeking consent mandatory, they made tracking people without consent illegal (except to the extent that it's necessary for the service). These companies are perfectly able to simply not track people without displaying cookie banners.
This is simply automating the process of ignoring the request for consent to track you. The result is (legally) that the website may not track you because it did not receive affirmative consent. That really is the end goal, to stop companies from tracking consumes like this while still allowing for legitimate business deals.
I'd respect those moves grounded in the argument for a universal human right to privacy were it not for the glaring exceptions made to the EUs own security agencies and God knows what else under the national security exception.
Everyone in the industry tracking the privacy moves in GDPR acknowledges that far from improving privacy, they are intended to blunt US tech companies' success in the continent. And . . that's perfectly fine, i guess positioning it as a moral defense of privacy just doesn't sit well with me.
Everyone in the industry tracking the privacy moves in GDPR acknowledges that far from improving privacy, they are intended to blunt US tech companies' success in the continent.
No, this is by far the minority view and is held purely by people who are ignorant about the requirements and functionality of GDPR.
The likely endgames of 'no tracking' (accelerated by automating rejection rate up to 100%) are:
- drastically reduced free content (see the rise of paywalls on most news sites)
- an arms race to find other ways to track (see rise of cookieless tracking and retargetting approaches, first party cloaking, etc)
Not to say the latter wouldn't always be there, and but fact is a good chunk of the web is free and stuffed with ads because that's the only way to stay afloat, people simply don't want to pay for content.
How is Brave's action wrong? It's the user who needs top enable the feature of "I don't want to consent ever, please ignore such requests".
If this state was the normal, and later they were to stop blocking cookie banners that you explicitly chose to always reject, it would be seen like a huge harrassment from companies to the user.
Maybe the end game is that we managed to realize what practices were beyond acceptable, and finally forbid them via legislation.
I hate these banners. Often times, they pop up in a non-obvious location and cause the entire page to freeze - scrolling doesn't work, links and buttons don't work. I have force quit my browser on more than one occasion because I couldn't figure out there was a cookie banner on the screen.
So, in your estimation, which side am I on - Dumb, or Dumber?
Doesn't Brave block 3rd party cookies? What's the point of the banner? My cookie knowledge is entirely based on enterprise and small server-side web apps, but I assumed that 3rd party cookies were evil and allowed facebook\facebag's of the world to track people covertly. And not every webapp is going to use JSON web tokens so the ability to use first-party tokens is sort of a requirement for auth and session management
Analytics info can be interesting and neat, but given how bad the adverts I see on Facebook are, and how badly wrong Twitter categorised me according to what I found by downloading all the data they stored on me, I don't think it's anything like as useful as its proponents say it is.
(Except, possibly, for automatic bug tracking; but even then, the value is in the stack trace, not the personal info).
It's so simple: the browser should expose a user configuration setting, which can be used by any website to automatically answer whatever question the consent banner thinks it needs to ask. At the highest level, three settings: Ignore, Reject all, Accept all. More fine-grained settings could be standardized (conceivably), although I would be surprised if many people cared to use them.
This is one of the first ideas people tried, more than a decade ago before GDPR was even a thing. The Do Not Track header was proposed in 2009 and implemented only in Firefox. The problem is that advertisers don't want this solution, because they want you to accept all cookies and a single browser-wide config setting makes denying way too easy. so they just ignored the setting, and nothing ever came of it.
Please read my comment again. Comment banners are the consequence of regulation.
I'd rather poke my eye out than stick up for them. What i'm calling out is the dangerous series of events over the past few years which have been rooted in good intent to preserve privacy, that seem to be having the fallout of destroying the web experience.
[edit] I can't believe HN has turned into a reddit style downvote brigade so i'll just post my response to the below comments in this edit since i can't reply anymore <shrug>
And you've made my point exceedingly clear[1] That pretty much is the ambiguity left up to the whims and fancies of the EU bureaucracy to enforce.
According to noyb.eu , the entity behind famous decisions at the CJEU, consent IS INDEED required[2] for ANY cookies to be stored on a users device. It isn't about data collection , if some rando agency or court finds Github or HN use fingerprinting of user preferences (as an example) or are LIKELY TO. . . it is considered a breach.
A French agency fined Google and Facebook heavily for merely providing a more complex refusal flow for cookies than the accept flow.
Comment banners are the consequence of regulation.
No, consent banners are a consequence of scummy companies trying to vacuum up your personal data for nefarious reasons. They are not required by any regulation, aside from in cases where a company is asking to use your data in non-essential ways.
Consent banners are definitively not required by the GDPR. Consent is only required for non-essential collection of user data, or for non-essential processing of user data. For example, Strava would not need consent to collect user GPS location, as that is core to the product that Strava provides to users. Hacker News would require consent to collect user GPS location, as user GPS location is not essential for posting links/comments. In addition, because consent is specific to a use of data and not to the collection of data, Strava would require additional consent in order to use that GPS data for advertising.
The GDPR doesn't require consent pop-ups. Companies choose to add consent pop-ups when they exceed the minimum amount of personal data collection.
Please substantiate your claims. Your single sentence managed to pack three unsubstantiated claims into it.
* "Started with" implies that there were no motivating factors for the GDPR, nor a situation being responded to. Online surveillance is a clear harm being done to users, to which the GDPR is a clear response.
* "Ignorant lawmakers" implies that the law was poorly crafted with little subject matter knowledge. This hasn't been my experience in reading it, that the GDPR is well-crafted to make certain unethical business models be infeasible, while avoiding impact to data collection that is essential to a service.
* "Made web browsing worse" implies that the current state in which surveillance must make itself known is worse than the previous state in which surveillance could be done silently. I would argue that it is a better state, as knowledge of a hostile act is the first step in preventing it.
Has “surveillance capitalism” subsided at all after the GDPR? Did any company announce that it affected their revenue negatively?
How many people are saying “we are so glad we have cookie banners everywhere”. I’m also sure that every small business is glad to have to decipher the huge law.
* Explicit claim: "Websites complied with the law" The GDPR does not allow a refusal of consent to take more steps than an acceptance of consent. I have only seen a scant handful of websites where this is the case. Instead, refusal requires following additional links, sometimes disguised as "privacy policy details", disabling each pre-selected consent box, etc.
* Implicit claim: "Websites complied with the law" implies that the websites took the only method by which they could be compliant. This is incorrect. Websites had a choice, and could have stopped surveilling users instead. This is a breakage in the causal chain between the passing of the GDPR and the omnipresent cookie banners.
* Explicit claim: "Web browsing got worse". Appeals to a majority are not sufficient. A user-hostile website being required to announce itself as such is an improvement.
So your contention is that it’s not a bad law. It’s just an unenforced law and therefore is still ineffective?
As far as appealing to the majority, if the majority don’t like the consequences of a law, in a democratic society isn’t that prima facie a bad law unless the law is to protect the minority from the majority?
If the websites complied with a law in a form that made web browsing worse and didn’t achieve its intended purpose - isn’t that yet another sign of a badly written law?
The hitmen (using your analogy are the websites that track) are still killing just as many people. But now it’s just making it harder to drink a glass of water.
Are the two sentences completely uncorrelated? Yes, so is the effect of the GDPR on websites.
Well, it’s simple. Did Facebook announce any ill effects during it quarterly results caused by GDPR? No.
Did they announce a decline in revenue caused by Apple’s ad tracking transparency - yes by the tune of billions and they called that out as the reason,
He's not sticking up for it. He's pointing out a truth. For example, in countries like the UK, as a website owner I have a legal requirement to get consent. Brave in this example would be forcefully removing the ability for me to get the consent that I legally require.
I don't believe in consent banners but that doesn't remove my legal requirements. I've got to stick to the law whether I like it or not.
> as a website owner I have a legal requirement to get consent
Consent !== cookie-banners. Hey, you don't have a legal requirement to track people at all; it follows that there's no legal requirement to get consent to track. Tracking must be opt-in, so just provide a menu option or something, that lets your visitor opt-in to tracking, if they love being tracked (let us know how many people opt-in to tracking, if you haven't gated the entire site on a consent banner).
Maybe your site provides features that depend on tracking? No prob - gate those features with a consent dialog.
Maybe you don't want any visitors you can't track? Well, that really means that your homepage should be an opt-in dialog, returning a 404 if you opt out.
Brave is giving users the ability to automatically say no to your cookie banners. People who use Brave don't want to be tracked and will never consent to it.
You're making a mass assumption based on your usage of Brave there. Most people I know who downloaded Brave (general people, not the YCombintor/tech power user types) initially got Brave purely because they wanted to earn tokens while browsing.
They don't care about the tracking/ad blocking side of things.
Which is funny considering that Brave is a for profit company and nearly all of their money comes from displaying ads. It's popular for blocking a thing that the company needs to survive, while not caring about all the websites they block ads on.
>"Nuclear power and fossil fuels brought us here. They caused this crisis, they are not the solution."
>Strong and at times emotional speech by Robert Habeck, after weeks under pressure. Defending his actions in government, but standing by Green values. He got a standing ovation.
Reality: the Greens and their allies spent half a trillion USD on the "energy transition" and turned off perfectly good nuclear reactors. Result: energy shortages and diplomatic submission to Russia. And now they blame nuclear for it. If they had spent that half a trillion on new nuclear reactors, Germany would be an energy superpower. As it stands, they're having to burn coal and wood to get through the winter.
> Reality: the Greens and their allies spent half a trillion USD on the "energy transition" and turned off perfectly good nuclear reactors. Result: energy shortages and diplomatic submission to Russia.
Um no. Renewable energy is now actually cheaper than nuclear energy. You could build renewable energy + storage within the same range of cost. The problem is the former government shut down nuclear power plants and then did exactly nothing.
The nuclear power plants aren't perfectly good. They are very old and would need a lot of investment if run for more than a couple of month.
And germany isn't even near electric energy shortages. It's currently supplying france with a lot of energy.
If electric heating were used everywhere from now on, there would be an electricity problem. But for that the electric heaters are missing.
It's only recently cheap. It's true that if they had pivoted to Nuclear instead, they would not had these energy shortfalls and maybe even Russia wouldn't have felt they had the leverage to invade Ukraine.
The global output of battery storage isn't high enough to switch to solar/wind. Energy is a solved problem. It's a natural progression of mankind's command of energy. Wood->Coal->Oil->Fission. There's enough Uranium in the ground and oceans to supply humanity for million of years. We can't let a few accidents hold us back for ever.
And can we talk about how stupid and actively malicious it is to use the Fukushima accident as a reason for shutting down nuclear plants in Germany?
Fukushima: nuclear plant in a seismically very active region in very close proximity to the ocean where tsunamis are not really a rarity
vs.
German nuclear plants: not very seismically active (if at all), no tsunamis i've ever heard of, not counting floods as those are
1. easier to foresee and manage and
2. very much less intense than a sudden wall of water razing everything in its path.
Also in Japan you kinda have to build near the coast since its surrounded by ocean on all sides while being stretched out long and not that wide with mountains as a backbone in the middle. Germany on the other hand only has the North and Baltic Sea at its northern end then progressively gets higher above sea level the more south you go, ultimately ending at the northern end of the Alps.
This decision and especially this reasoning didn't make sense then and still doesn't nowadays. It was just a kneejerk reaction to retain voter support by exploiting the fear of the uneducated and the anti-nuclear crowd.
Your reasoning why nuclear accidents couldn't happen in Germany is moving the goalpost though. First the narrative was that they couldn't happen, then it was that they couldn't happen in western style reactors.
The reality is that nuclear reactors can lead to big events in unforeseen situations, like also Fukushima was. It's impossible to foresee what the cause for the next big event will be.
The Fukushima reactors and a lot of the german ones were built by the same company. They overlooked the flood risk on the japanese coast (which has huge tsunamis every few decades). What did they overlook elsewhere? After Chernobyl, politicians promised that western reactors could not possibly explode. Fukushima proved them wrong.
The Soviet power plan released radioactivity in the air, make an entire area inhabitable and killed a few dozen a people.
Fukushima did nothing of this, everything stayed inside the structure, no radioactivity went out.
As Fukushima had no recovery generators available (no fuel in them), it is a great proof that a totally out of control modern power plant is not deadly.
The Fukushima disaster cleanup cost a trillion dollars. Over a hundred thousand people were (at least temporarily) displaced. I would call this a pretty darn big failure.
The trillion dollar figure is a bit of a stretch and includes a lot of stuff that didn't need to happen or was double counted.
Less motivated reasoning gives about $300bn which would still be enough to easily replace every coal and oil plant in the country with renewables (as well as half of the gas).
Comparing Fukushima to Chernobyl is not really justified
Chernobyl: Core meltdown and catastrophic explosion of entire reactor. Caused by gross negligence when safety system disabled.
Direct deaths: <100
Estimated indirect deaths: 4 to 16 thousand
Fukushima: Caused by 4th largest earthquake in history. No core explosion. Hydrogen explosion destroyed non structural part of building (this was by design). Core meltdown but largely contained. Contamination of air/water from venting to atmosphere.
Direct deaths: 1 employee died of cancer
Estimated indirect deaths: 300-2000
Minority parties can make the governing parties do things. UKIP wasn't in government but they made the Conservative party promise a referendum, which the eurosceptic side won -- and that was in a FPTP system! The Greens weren't in government but they had a lot of influence in the Bundestag and in the various Länder. The anti-nuclear cause has been around for decades, they creep in everywhere like a fungus.
Merkel adopted the anti-nuclear stance to take votes from the Greens, and her administration accelerated the shutdown of Germany's nuclear power plants after Fukushima. Don't blame the Greens, although I do think they are a dogmatic single-issue party and don't see the forest for the trees.
The coal plants are running as an alternative to gas plants, as is described in the link you posted. The shutdown of the nuclear plants was long planned. Germany managed to decrease dependence on fossil fuels for electricity production while shutting down nuclear plants.
"The Large Hadron Collider is not a physics experiment, it's a Government lobbying entity"
Hate it or love it, the advertising supported business model of the Internet has transformed the lives of a large chunk of humanity beyond any belief. I come from a very poor background in a country many would consider backward and yet, i had access to the wonders of human knowledge at the tips of my fingers while growing up. The generation before me were not so lucky and its incredibly sad to contrast these fortunes.
Except it is more of an international entity to be considered a governmental. Also you probably mean CERN (the organization).
I don't understand the analogy, I'm sure that CERN carries some lobbying activities but that is probably for funding purposes to carry out the scientific activities. That is different from what we are talking about here
> The analogy is that one is a monetization model and the other is the composition of the core business.
I still cannot get the analogy.
> Also, CERN in this analogy would be Alphabet.
LHC is an experiment (Almost dozen to be accurate) [1] and could be an analogy for the Google search engine as a product (or Gmail or other google products). CERN is still the organization which organize and have several other divisions like computing and engineering that serve LHC and a couple of smaller experiments. I don't think there is Alphabet analogy for LHC (maybe EU in this case but also US and a couple of other countries)
An absolute coup that Apple might be able to pull off is if they're able to replace control electronics for Daimler with their A-Series (Or other custom ASIC) chips.
When Sandy Munroe tore down the Tesla Model 3, a remark he made hit hard. That the control electronics in that thing seemed like space age for the car industry.
That's not a compliment to Tesla alone, that's a criticism of the state of the art in the car industry where miniaturization has not kept pace with the leading edge phone generations that Apple spits out every year.
Imagine that, a common platform that Apple could upsell to ALL vehicle manufacturers with custom enterprise apps written by the companies themselves for vehicle electronics.
> That the control electronics in that thing seemed like space age for the car industry.
Part of this is that a car contains quite a lot of electronics (there are a lot of things to control!), but cars are super cost sensitive. That pretty much means the car industry is barred from using any remotely modern tech, because they need to be buying CPU's and microprocessors that are in the $1 range, not the $100 range.
Obviously, the other half of it is just that the car industry is now very conservative with designs - today a big innovation is something like having an app, whereas back in the 60's, a big innovation would be adding a jet engine or making a flying car.
They recently showed a video of some vaporware where their car software powers every screen in a car, including the speedo and stuff like that. So they might be thinking along the same lines.
Why do you consider it vaporware? It's not like Apple is some sort of Nikola that uses smokes and mirrors to obfuscate its abilities, CarPlay is in millions of cars and will only grow as people trade in older cars.
I wasn’t really trying to imply anything to be honest, I just consider all demos vapourware until they ship. I would say that Apple aren’t immune, eg with AirPower - that demo looked at least as real as the car one. But I do agree that Apple tend to ship their stuff and probably will ship something like what they demoed.
The cars will presumably fallback to native clusters when the phone stops responding. It’s still too early to tell though, but they are a very safety conscious company so I assume that people have thought about contingencies before making themselves liable.
At the least it likely won’t be worse than the multitude of cars that have moved to digital clusters anyway and may freeze themselves.
The claim of Carplay not working without Siri is also incorrect. A quick Google search shows you can disable Siri but will be limited in what you can do https://stereoupgrade.com/how-to-use-carplay-without-siri/ since the goal is hands free use.
Lastly most newer iPhones do on device Siri processing for common commands so it’s not really a privacy issue.
2. Siri is activated by user input (holding a button / pressing a button in-car) with a side feature for hot mic (hey siri) that’s disabled by default
3. Maybe there’s car implementation solely driven by Siri? Hondas is touch screen and Mazda is button/knob based (and touch screen but only when idle).
I think it's more important that we have tried and tested technology in safety critical devices than be experimented on at the bleeding edge.
Imagine a vehicle that was just a vehicle and not another platform to upsell shit on until the vendors get fed up with it because that's what you're asking for.
Absolutely 100% in the case of vehicles, less is more. Less intelligence, less nondeterminism and definitely less space age.
I'd speculate this is part of an "Opposition research" move by a political party that might benefit.
The extreme lengths that these people seem to have gone to is shocking. Whatever it is, FB has the evidence on their servers as Alex Stamos points out since they created a Workspace instance.
The background about Meta and The Wire, along with Alex Stamos' great thread about inconsistencies can be presented without resorting to conjecture on your part about the motivations of the owners of the publication.
> can be presented without resorting to conjecture on your part about the motivations of the owners of the publication
Why not? Are journalists different from politicians that we should not hold them accountable? We know these journalists quite well and we know what their political leanings are. This is not the first time they have done this. Won't be the last either. So calling them out is not a wrong thing.
The energy demands in the market right now are very different than what they were even 20 years ago (I mean, who would have imagined crypto mining or large model training in the state it’s in?)
We’re heavily constrained as a society in our use of energy. For example, you don’t just leave the heat/AC on all day when weather conditions demand it, do you?
Similarly, we don’t have massive desalination capacity on the west coast in spite of years of drought with the Pacific right on the coast.
Energy is one of those things that society has no choice but to live within its means on. We can build all the nuclear capacity we want to and yet, may still see future demand in intensive areas such as carbon capture, desalination, supercomputing clusters come up that are great candidates for any buffer capacity we may have, should we be so lucky.
This all goes without mentioning the huge surge of lower income populations that will slowly be increasing consumption over the next few decades. Hundreds of millions(perhaps billions) of people in India, Africa, Asia and South America (The global south) consume very, very little energy today because of financial constraints and development. A lot of these people may not have access to transmission infrastructure for a long time and solar, wind and the like certainly find their use in many such places today.
Build all the solar, wind whatever you want. Doing so while ignoring the low return on energy security alone is a fools errand.
I’ve sat through meetings where carbon credits have been touted as the greatest weapon to transition the world away from fossil fuels. Carbon credits.
I’ve heard very reliable stories from China about business entities solely set up to generate unbelievable volumes of carbon credits to take advantage of this accounting trick.
I think the opposition you see is to the counterproductive moves of the past two or three decades where enormous amounts of money have been thrown at present renewable strategies and the world is worse off from an energy perspective.
