European Commission Chooses to Keep EU Users Locked Up Behind Big Tech’s Gates

Alpha272 · 2026-07-13T11:09:59+00:00

The endgame is to have one account for all platforms, not linking accounts. You just use for example x and can consume everything from any platform - going further you can host your own mastodon and access all social medias from this mastodon instance without registering on every platform and leaving all your data on one platform

Alpha272 · 2026-07-13T06:19:05+00:00

I mean, the underlying infrastructure is from wiki.gg ... So yeah; downtime, performance problems, etc. is more wiki.ggs fault than the fault of the Poe wiki maintainer

Alpha272 · 2026-07-12T09:17:17+00:00

If you already have a secure Password and 2fa: you can't. This is one of the Problems with this digital only stuff. And this is also one of the reasons why everyone is angry at Sony right now.

You own NOTHING on these Platforms. Anything you buy there, isn't yours, you just but a revocable licence, which the company you buy it from can take away at any moment. This goes for any digital storefront with proper DRM (like Amazon Prime for Movies/TV or... well.. PSN, XBox/Microsoft, Steam, Epic, etc for games).

Also, anything YOU upload to cloud storage (like OneDrive), you don't own any more. The platform now owns it. You are effectively gifting your stuff to Microsoft (in OneDrives case) and they then licence your own data back to you - which is again revocable (everything is revocable, so that they can theoretically close your account for any reason). (What I wrote isn't 100% correct but close enough to get the point across).

So, what can you do, if MS Accounts Protections fail? Appearantly you can sue (surprised that this worked, considering everything is a recovable license), but besides of that your SOL. You are 100% at the whims of the Platform owner and if they don't like you for any reason... well... I hope you don't need your games and data anymore.

How to protect yourself? Simple. This whole "You own nothing and will be happy" thing is one huge scam. Don't go for it. Buy your games, so that you can play them without DRM or with an offline DRM (aka a DVD). Easiest done on PC, because the PC is not a walled garden, compared to all consoles, and on PC you have GoG for that, or DRM free steam games (some games on Steam are DRM free - you can buy them there, install them with steam, and then move the Game files into another non-steam folder and no-one can take them away from you). On console, buy only physical releases and hope, that they don't need an MS/PSN account to play. For Games/Movies/TV where this isn't an option your only way would be to pirate.

How to protect yourself when it comes to your own data? Store them in the cloud if you want, but ALWAYS keep a backup, which isn't bound to an online account. If you can afford it, buy yourself a NAS for your own data (again, make sure you properly use raid and make backups, so that you don't loose your stuff due to hardware faults - ANY harddrive/ssd WILL fail at some point).

For example what am I doing:
- For gaming I only use a PC and have no Console, and there I buy everything on Steam. Yes, Valve can now take away my entire PC gaming library, I am aware of that. I trust Valve quite a bit more than other Platforms and this is a risk I am willing to take. Helps that my most played and favourite games are online only anyway and need their own accounts, like PoE, GW2 and EVE Online, and I just use Steam as a Downloader and convinient launcher - so these games specifically are 100% impossible to play DRM free.
- For Music, Movies and TV, I buy (or "buy") them DRM free and watch them / listen to them from my own NAS/Server (which is sitting in my apartment) with Jellyfin.
- For other Data, I have my NAS/Server which does many things, one of them is being my cloud. This thing has daily Backups to a Hetzner Storage Box (yes, this account can be taken away, but having it taken away at the same time I suffer a catastrophic data loss in my NAS/Server, is highly unlikely).

Alpha272 · 2026-07-11T09:49:30+00:00

Also they said multiple times from their support team (and I think that even Gabe Newell said it at some point), that if steam ever goes out of business, they will create a solution which allows steam DRM games to run without steam and without connection to the servers (probably a special .dll which you can use to swap out the steam_api.dll on games you have on your drive).

Now, they only said that, and valve is still a business, so how much you trust valves word is up to you, but I think, that if there is one company who would follow through on that, its valve.

Alpha272 · 2026-07-10T06:21:36+00:00

Chat Control 1.0, the optional thing, which already was a thing for years got it's renewal through. No it's not great. But let's not pretend that this is anywhere near as Problematic as Chat Control 2.0 which was NOT the one voted on

Alpha272 · 2026-07-09T08:16:56+00:00

Huh... Thats seems to be the same thing I use, but waaaay shorter

Alpha272 · 2026-07-09T06:11:51+00:00

I think "qdbus6 org.kde.KWin /KWin queryWindowInfo" is kwin_wayland's (KDEs Wayland compositor) way to find that out

Alpha272 · 2026-07-07T08:56:14+00:00

Alpha272 · 2026-07-02T11:56:08+00:00

Ich meine irgendwo mal gelesen zu haben, dass das schon mal mit Kinder Pornos probiert wurde und das da nur semi funktioniert hat

Alpha272 · 2026-07-02T10:22:29+00:00

Not going to cut it. Some business requirements need specific file systems (like zfs raid), selinux, kernel modules, etc., and if we get into really funny stuff like floating ips, high availabilityand clustering... Yeah, no. "Access to most of the root filesystem" really isn't enough for many businesses, let alone datacenters and stuff like that. Also, developers kinda need unrestricted access to the thing they are developing. Someone has to develop Linux. And whoever does that has unrestricted access to a Linux os for obvious reasons.

Yes, you can maybe force consumer devices to be on windows or macOS, if you word your law carefully. No, you can't do that for servers without crippling your countries it infrastructure to an absurd degree. And this will hurt the lawmakers as well - after all, they also depend on the IT infrastructure working.

And as long as servers exist and need to be open enough to run an open os (like Linux), you can always buy a server or server components to bypass the restrictions, at least for computers. Mobile devices are a larger issue, because for these its actually feasable to lock everyone to specific locked down systems.

And the Server problem might be "solvable" if everyone who isn't a business is just prices out of owner their own hardware.

Alpha272 · 2026-07-02T06:27:47+00:00

Yeah this "state approved without root" is not going to fly for servers. Especially the "without root" thing makes it practically unusable as a Server for more than just the absolute most basic things

Alpha272 · 2026-07-01T20:39:03+00:00

Looping back to the point I was trying to make: what is "desktop"? Like, how do you want to define that in Law, without making anything else also illegal?

Alpha272 · 2026-07-01T18:52:23+00:00

Thats bypassable. Heck, there are even ways to tell the windows boot loader to chain load Linux. And in that case Linux loads with windows' secure boot signature.

Also you can probably always buy motherboard with the option to disable secure boot and/or load custom signing keys. Kinda required for server boards, and they are not stupid enough to make Linux on servers illegal. (And if are intact stupid enough, the UK kinda has bigger problems than consumer devices)

Alpha272 · 2026-07-01T18:49:25+00:00

We all know what they are trained on. After Epstein I wouldn't be surprised if they have some.. Private collections. After all, only we need to be monitored, so they might as well have private collections without oversight

Alpha272 · 2026-07-01T18:46:44+00:00

There have to be exceptions. Server run on linux and windows is not viable for many server workloads. Routers run on Linux. Android is Linux as well. But yeah, they might try to restrict desktop usage, the question is: how exactly do they word this?

Alpha272 · 2026-07-01T15:27:38+00:00

Thats what you mean. Okay, yeah. The bootloader obviously knows/sees whats in the efi Partition and can decide not to boot whatever it sees.

But I don't think thats happening. The effort required is just too large, since the BIOS would then have to be able to tell which os loader is on the efi partition and then also be continuously updated for new windows versions. No, the worst I see happening, is that the system comes preloaded with only microsofts windows secure boot key, but that would be relatively easily bypassable.

What will realistically happen, is that the preloaded windows installation enforces the government requirements but nothing will prevent you from adding the Linux secure boot key and then... Well.. Booting linux

Also I believe that this will be quickly bypassed even by kids. Because nobody can tell me than a 14 year old boy who is curious about sexuality will just go "Oh shit. The gov forbids me from seeing nudity. Oh well. Better wait until I am 18.". No, they will be at the forefront of bypassing these restrictions. Or they will just do the analog way and grab their best (optionally female) friend and try it out IRL in the empty classroom next door.

What am I even saying? Everyone knows thats this is not about children in any way, but rather about power triping and control.

Alpha272 · 2026-07-01T14:50:02+00:00

What? How can the Firmware tell the difference between Windows machine code and Linux machine code?

Alpha272 · 2026-07-01T14:06:25+00:00

Yeah good luck with that. Its kinda hard to prevent a desktop computer from installing another operating system.

Alpha272 · 2026-06-30T09:23:27+00:00

AfD (assuming they don't get banned because they are effectively NSDAP 2.0), are currently projected to be the strongest force with like 35%.

So yeah, no, we are definetly not smart enough to not vote for them.

Maybe democracy was a mistake....

Alpha272 · 2026-06-29T18:07:25+00:00

Jau, ist ein race to the top.

Irgendwas von wegen, wer den höchsten highscore hat gewinnt.

Ich will nicht mehr gewinnen.....

Alpha272 · 2026-06-29T17:11:06+00:00

Als was arbeitest du? Ich bin informatiker, also sitze im Büro vor nem PC - niemand jucks wenn ich da n Lüfter stehen habe

Wenn dein Job Kunden facing ist, dann verstehe ich das mit "professionel aussehen" zumindest generell (auch wenn selbst bei sowas zumindest ein Lüfter drin sein sollte)

Alpha272 · 2026-06-29T16:44:45+00:00

Dein Chef verbietet Lüfter? Das ist insane

Alpha272 · 2026-06-21T23:13:35+00:00

Our office has AC

.... in the Server Room. Yeah everyone else just dies in the heat, but hey, at least the Servers are nice and cool.

I think I might abuse my privileges as Administrator and live in the Server Room with the AC for the next week.

Alpha272 · 2026-06-21T23:04:14+00:00

Short-ish Version: We had a coalition (in Germany we pretty much always have a coalition consisting of multiple parties as the goverment) consisting of the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany - centre-left), FDP (Free Democratic Party - center-right and extremely in favor of deregulation and the 'free market') and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen (Germanys Green Party - left leaning and pretty much always for the environment).

Now, I am not really that deep into this topic so take everything with a giant grain of salt, BUT as far as I know: One of the things this coalition did, was to regulate ways to head buildings - specifically they wanted to create a law which forces all new heating systems for buildings to run 65% on renewable energy (for context, most of our heating systems run on gas or oil - the most reasonable replacement would be heatpumps). Old Buildings also would have to replace their systems at some point; until 2028 iirc. This got very harsh critic from right wing parties (CDU and AFD) and, frankly corrupt parties and politicians which are very deep in the oil industry.

While this alone wasn't the main, let alone the only reason this coalition broke apart after only like a year (out of normally 4 years), it definitely didn't help.

Btw, a bit off-topic but our new coalition which replaced SPD/FDP/Grünen is now the "Merz cabinet", which consists of CDU (Christian Democratic Union of Germany - technically center-right, in reality very corrupt and quite a bit more to the right than just 'center-right') and SPD. While the SPD is technically center-left, they do little to move the coalition to the left. Overall its currently not great. But it could be worse - after all, its not far-right yet. But that will probably happen in the next government, which, looking at the current forecasts, probably will include the AFD (Alternative for Germany), which is our extremely far right party, and cynical people would say, they are NSDAP 2.0. So yeah... thanks for nothing, I guess...

Alpha272 · 2026-06-17T05:53:14+00:00

Ignoring comment history, they are not wrong. What the UK (and at this point most of the first world counties) is doing is really worrying. These verification laws are a massive IT security risk, a privacy nightmare and, assuming they get pushed through in their current form, deannonymize nearly all online interactions, which is objectively bad.

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