“Wir aber sagen, dass sich in einer gleichberechtigten Gesellschaft niemand freiwillig für die Prostitution entscheidet. Denn am Ende geht es hier um männliche Gewalt an Frauen und um Machtmissbrauch.”

Ich finde diese Gleichsetzung von Sex und männlicher Gewalt an Frauen sehr befremdlich. Haben wir nicht spätestens in den 60ern gelernt, dass Frauen genauso Spaß an Sex haben können wie Männer? Kann es nicht vielleicht eher an der extremen Stigmatisierung von Sexarbeit liegen, dass so wenige Menschen so einen Beruf ergreifen wollen?

Vielleicht ist meine Einschätzung sehr naiv, aber ich finde, ein Verbot sollte immer die Ultima Ratio in der Gesetzgebung sein. Und gerade in einer Gesellschaft, in der immer mehr junge Männer unfreiwillig gar keinen Sex haben, sollte man meiner Meinung nach umso dankbarer dafür sein, dass es Frauen gibt, bei denen jene ihre Triebe abkanalisieren können, sodass vielleicht die ein oder andere Entwicklung zum Incel vermieden werden kann.

Ich finde auch die vermeintlichen Erfolgsstatistiken des nordischen Modells immer etwas fragwürdig. Da Schweden Teil des Schengen-Raums ist, ist beispielsweise nie wirklich klar, ob sich der Menschenhandel tatsächlich reduziert hat oder ob er jetzt nur verstärkt in anderen EU-Ländern stattfindet. Das wäre dann also nur eine positive Auswirkung, wenn man Aus den Augen, aus dem Sinn für ein gutes Motto hält.

Am Ende würde ich einfach viel lieber in einer Gesellschaft leben, in der die Inanspruchnahme von Sexarbeit genauso normal ist wie der Besuch beim Friseur, als in einer, in der sexuell frustrierte junge Männer einen signifikanten Anteil der Wählerschaft stellen und in der Sexarbeit noch extremer stigmatisiert wird, als es eh schon der Fall ist.

I have already read that article, and while I think that Patrick does a great job in general, this particular post contains overly dramatic and, in parts, misleading arguments. For example:

The text aims to make the temporary “Chat Control 1.0” regulation permanent. This allows providers like Meta or Google to scan all private chats, indiscriminately and without a court order.".

This is a bit strange. Chats without E2E encryption, especially the ones on Google or Meta platforms, were never private. I think it would be better to raise awareness of that fact and encourage E2E messaging instead of complaining about law enforcement having access to those chats.

His argument regarding age verification is also very weak:

[…] This means every citizen will effectively have to upload an ID or undergo a face scan to open an email or messenger account. […] This creates a de facto ban on anonymous communication […]

This is misleading at best. The implementation details of the age verification are not specified in this proposal. There are absolutely ways of verifying someone’s age anonymously (Privacy Pass comes to mind). It’s totally possible that it’ll be a far worse system, but that’s just not as set in stone as Patrick suggests.

It’s definitely necessary to keep an eye on the further development of this legislature. But Patrick’s Reality Check unfortunately stretches the meaning of the word Reality a bit too much.

I have to disagree with the statement that there is no voluntary law. For example, GDPR certifications (Art. 42) have been a thing for years, are encouraged by the EU, but have remained completely voluntary for organizations.

I totally agree with you that it’s important to stay vigilant and keep an eye on the further development of this specific regulation, especially as it still has a long way to go before actually becoming law. But I think seeing the compromise as some sort of trickery is purely speculative right now and doesn’t really do justice to the activists inside and outside EU organizations who have spent the last few years successfully preventing a mandatory chat control. A lot of the comments here seem very doom-and-gloomy, sometimes almost resigned, as if nothing has been accomplished by protesting these initial proposals. And I think, while there are definitely further battles ahead, it’s also a good idea to celebrate and remind ourselves of the accomplishments we’ve made here.

Yes

As this version of the law is completely voluntary, I don‘t think it will change anything. Secure chats won‘t implement it, because it‘s practically impossible, and insecure chats won‘t implement it, because there‘s absolutely no profit in it.

It‘s still completely unnecessary to have a law like this, as it won‘t help with anything. But at least it doesn‘t force any messaging applications to either break their encryption or leave the EU.

Also, as this is proposal is finally put into law, there‘s one less battle to be fought by privacy activists (for now).

So all in all: The worst has been successfully averted, I think we can celebrate that. But the next privacy invading proposal will come soon enough.

Bei einem reinen Featurevergleich hast du Recht. Aber hier geht es ja primär um die momentan bestehenden Abhängigkeiten. Und wenn man sich die aktuelle Verbreitung von Alternativen beispielsweise anhand des öffentlichen Sektors in der EU* anschaut, spielt Open Source bisher leider kaum eine Rolle.

* Es sollte erwähnt sein, dass die Open Cloud Coalition eine Lobbyorganisation mit Beteiligung von Google ist, das Framing in dieser Quelle also verzerrt sein könnte. Die Zahlen wirken aber zumindest plausibel.

In 2023, it was €5.000/month (source).

That‘s about as much as a full stack software developer makes in Germany working a 40h week (source).

Seeing that he was a CEO, definitely worked more than 40 hours per week and was the driving force behind Mastodon, I, as someone who supports them financially, am totally okay with him getting a big payout now.

Das ist zwar immer noch nicht sinnvoller, als eine verpflichtende Chatkontrolle, aber immerhin so weit abgeschwächt, dass es vermutlich gar keinen Einfluss haben dürfte.

Die meisten Chats können ja technisch gar nicht sinnvoll kontrolliert werden, weil sie starke Ende-zu-Ende-Verschlüsselung nutzen. Und bei Anbietern unverschlüsselter Chats wird wohl kaum jemand extra in so eine Kontrolle investieren wollen, ohne davon zu profitieren.

Man muss aber natürlich trotzdem achtsam bleiben und schauen, dass sich so eine Kontrolle nicht doch noch normalisiert und der nächste Anlauf für eine verpflichtende Überwachung dadurch seine Erfolgschancen vergrößert.

Note that this is an issue from 2021. Firefox has implemented countermeasures since version 85, Chrome seems to have done the same.

So while this is definitely interesting, it shouldn‘t be an issue anymore.

To be fair, everyone was offered a refund for that game. So technically they probably haven‘t paid for it anymore.

I still totally agree that Sony shouldn‘t go after private Concord servers. This game is very interesting, because it was an unbelievable failure despite having pretty solid gameplay. And preserving that on private servers provides a great way for other developers to learn, and maybe prevent, the tons of other issues leading to the game‘s failure.

Naja, rechtlich betrachtet besteht da tatsächlich wenig Spielraum. In U-Haft dürfte der Mann nur genommen werden, wenn Flucht-, Verdunkelungs- oder Wiederholungsgefahr bestünde. Ich war natürlich nicht dabei, aber nach der Schilderung im Artikel halte ich es zumindest für plausibel, dass die Polizisten diese Gefahren ausschließen konnten. Vereinfacht ausgedrückt: 71 Jährige rennen selten weg, Personalien sind aufgenommen, zu verdunkeln gibt es nichts und das Ganze wirkte ja eher wie eine Affekthandlung, also ist eine Wiederholung zumindest nicht wahrscheinlich.

Es fühlt sich nach dem eigenen Gerechtigkeitsgefühl sicherlich erstmal falsch an, wenn jemand eindeutig etwas verbrochen hat und dann „freigelassen“ wird. Aber ich halte das für einen notwendigen Kompromiss, um sicherzustellen, dass Freiheitsrechte auch tatsächlich das hohe Gut sind, das sie sein sollen.

Am Ende muss man hier einfach abwarten, was beim Prozess herauskommt. Erst wenn der Mann dort freigesprochen wird, würde ich mir ernsthaft Sorgen machen.

This is actually not only being reported by noyb (which also isn’t an outlet, but an NGO specializing in data protection matters) but also by netzpolitik.org and even heise.de (both German).

All three have been very reliable in the past, so I don‘t think there‘s any reason for doubting the authenticity of the documents.

This is such a click-bait comment, my god…

Your source for stability issues in Hogwarts Legacy is a single user in the Steam community with other users in the same thread not having issues at all. Seeing that Hogwarts Legacy is one of the most played games on Deck (ranked 11th at time of writing ), I think many more people would report issues if crashes were common.

Furthermore, your TONNE of optional game stores is one. I can‘t really think of a game store, besides Microsoft’s, that doesn‘t work on Steam Deck.

These early performance comparisons definitely have limited value for comparing Windows/Linux performance on the device. But I’m sorry to say that your arguments have even less.

I don’t think this is quite right. CoD titles do take a long time to develop. They‘re just rotating studios, so they can achieve a yearly release cadence (the last six entries in the series had five different studios working on them). Also, they are by no means getting cheaper. According to court documents development costs rose from $450 million to over $700 million from 2015 to 2020 alone.

Although the Telekom is a European alternative, I‘d urge everyone to look for other alternatives first. They‘re actively sabotaging net neutrality (Source 1 [German], Source 2 [German]) and their CEO, Tim Höttges, is a big fan of Elon Musk and DOGE [German].

If these are things you disagree with, I‘d strongly recommend not supporting them.

Was für ein dämliches Argument. Microsoft hat nix mit Wine zu tun. Software, die per Übersetzungsschicht unter Linux lauffähig gemacht wird, bringt Microsoft rein gar nix. Wenn ich spanisch lerne, werde ich dadurch nicht zum Spanier und wenn mein Rechner “lernt” Microsoft-Windows-Software zu “verstehen”, ist er dadurch kein Microsoft-Produkt.

Wine erhöht nur die Anzahl an Menschen, die Linux nutzen können, weil die Software, die sie verwenden möchten, tatsächlich läuft.

Du betreibst einfach nur genau das elitäre Gatekeeping, welches das Wachstum von Open Source seit Jahren hemmt, weil alle Interessierten sofort die Lust verlieren, sobald es ihnen von irgendeinem FOSS-Extremisten zum Vorwurf gemacht wird, dass sie in ihrer Freizeit lieber Age of Empires als 0A.D. spielen.

Unfortunately, I think the most reliable way is to go for a paid search engine from a private company like Kagi, which allows you to blacklist sites and prioritizes quality over ad-friendliness.

As soon as a company goes public, they won‘t focus on trying to sell their product to their customers, but to their investors. And investors currently just love AI. So it goes everywhere, no matter if it’s useful or not. Private companies, on the other hand, have to make a product their customers actually want, otherwise their only source of income will dry up pretty quickly.

So, although there are some other band-aid-solutions out there, I think a more reliable way of getting rid of the slop, and also sending a message, is not to use products from slop-loving companies at all, if possible.

Germany actually does that! Quite a few government bodies are already active at https://social.bund.de/. Maybe there‘s hope that other countries will follow.

I‘d probably go with a VPS. It probably won‘t cost more than 10$/month, maybe even less, depending on how much heavy usage your Nextcloud instance requires. And you won‘t have to worry about keeping your hardware and network running, which pretty much always takes up more time than expected.

Some web hosters (I‘ve had very good experiences with Hetzner) charge an hourly rate and allow you to preconfigure VPSes with software like Nextcloud. So unless you have specific needs, you could just spin up an instance, check if it suits your needs and, if not, only pay a few cents.

That really depends on what you mean by privacy. They probably won‘t sell your data or even look at the stuff you‘re doing with your server, if you‘re not disrupting their service. But they definitely will cooperate with law enforcement if your server is used for illegal stuff and someone reports it.

In the end, you’ll always have to trust your server host to some degree. Some other hosts, like Hetzner, allow you to install your own operating systems on their dedicated servers, so you can set up full disk encryption. But even though this is definitely better than unencrypted disks, it‘s still not a reliable way of preventing access while your server is running.

So if you’re just wondering if you can host a Nextcloud instance at hostinger without your files being sold by them: Almost certainly, yes. If you, on the other hand, plan to host manuals for building bombs or, even worse, offer downloads of old Nintendo games, they‘re probably not going to respect your privacy for long.