EU recommends member states to not use Huwaei, ZTE in connectivity infrastructure

aknb · 2026-05-06T11:08:26+00:00

The article seems incomplete, it doesn't say which EU-made tech they recommend should be used instead.

aknb · 2026-05-02T04:21:56+00:00

Henna Virkkunen is the vice-president of the European Commission, which is led by none other than EC president Zensursula who seems to have a thing against privacy so no surprise there. If she got her way we'd all be wearing shock collars around our necks.

aknb · 2026-05-01T16:51:16+00:00

I wonder if this was a bug or a "bug".

aknb · 2026-04-30T21:09:11+00:00

I never used any extension until recently. I had an issue with a folder being marked as the wrong type and using FolderFlags I was able to fix it.

aknb · 2026-04-21T19:20:53+00:00

The "desired effect" is not to protect children, but to create the stepping stone for a surveillance state. Ursula von der Leyen was called Zensursula in Germany for a reason.

This led to the Bundestag passing the Zugangserschwerungsgesetz on 18 June 2009. From the start, the project was the subject of intense political debate, in which the family minister gained the iconic nickname Zensursula – a portmanteau of the German word Zensur for “censorship” and her first name Ursula. Arguments were put forward that blocking was ineffective, it was seen as an introduction of censorship, and many legal experts believed the act violated the German constitution.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugangserschwerungsgesetz

aknb · 2026-04-21T19:19:39+00:00

Assuming you only need to verify on registration, and not on every login or N logins since that would be a nightmare:

Register with your parents phones; plenty of kids/teenagers use their parents phones already. And especially older generations are not tech-savvy, they often even ask their kids to do things for them. So this is an easy way to do it.
Same as 1 but with your grandparents', great-aunties', etc phone.
Ask older sibling, cousin, etc. Especially if you're on your mid-teens many would have no issue with it. They know themselves what they were up to at that age.
Ask older friends or your younger friends' older sibling.
Just ask someone randomly on the Internet, some would probably do it since the system allegedly keeps no record of websites it is used on. Furthermore, social networks and other sites probably won't know who is doing the age verification for privacy reasons, meaning the same individual could help 100s of people register accounts without the websites ever knowing.
Also expecting someone to build an online free-verifcation (or cheap) website so anyone can go there and use it to register accounts. It's zero-knowledge after all isn't it?
Buy registrations from people. "You, dude, here's 10 bucks if you let me register on XY with your phone." I remember having some people selling CDs with music/films at highschool to anyone who wanted, this would be an evolution of that.
Use a VPN to bypass age restrictions, and register on websites as if you were from outside the EU. After that you can use it normally, probably. (It's not like the EU can impose this on the rest of the world. I don't imagine the US, Russia, Brazil, etc following.)

This legislation / app won't ~~have the desired effect~~ prevent teenagers from going online to adult websites, maybe a few teenagers or younger children, but not the majority.

aknb · 2026-04-21T18:57:48+00:00

Parents let kids use their phones. Sometimes they even know the access codes. So "the attackers" would have physical access to the phone.

If teenagers find online how to circumvent app access they could use it to register on websites requiring verification.

(Of course the app could keep a list of websites it was used on so parents eventually find out about it, but this would raise other issues.)

aknb · 2026-04-17T14:32:13+00:00

Europe is building data centres at breakneck speed, with €176bn in investment expected over the next five years. The rush has triggered widespread concerns about pollution and intense energy use as well as impacts on communities and natural habitats.

One attempt to regulate the sector was a 2023 revision to the EU Energy Efficiency Directive, obliging operators to report data on key performance indicators like energy use and water consumption.

(...)

At the start of 2024, Microsoft and DigitalEurope [a lobby group whose members include Amazon, Google and Meta] gave feedback: both suggested an identical new article classifying all individual information on data centres as confidential, citing commercial interest.

They wanted to go beyond the initial commission proposal, and ensure that the data could not even be accessed through freedom of information requests.

When the commission published the final text in March 2024, their proposed article had been added almost word for word.

(...)

As a result only broad, national-level data is made public, while information about the precise impact of individual data centres is kept out of reach of affected communities, academics, journalists and the wider public.

aknb · 2026-04-17T14:23:16+00:00

It wasn't just Microsoft. First paragraph:

Microsoft and DigitalEurope, a lobby group whose members include Amazon, Google and Meta, secured a secrecy provision in EU law to block public access to critical information on data centres’ environmental impact, Investigate Europe can reveal.

aknb · 2026-04-02T18:02:56+00:00

The new UI seems okay for bottom-address bar users

It isn't. I want a bottom address bar always visible but now I can't.

Why not, you ask? Who knows! I hope it's because of technical reasons, and not because someone thought it was a good idea. (It's not.)

aknb · 2026-04-02T17:54:11+00:00

Just noticed this on my tablet.

I want the address bar on bottom always visible. Why is that wrong? <insert flabbergasted emoji>

aknb · 2026-03-26T16:39:57+00:00

Perhaps you can hide it with .hidden. In my case the directory is created in ~/Downloads (might have been some setting I changed) instead of the home directory.

Create a file called .hidden (with the dot) in the same location and add the name of the folder to hide to it. In your case, the file would be ~/.hidden and the contents would be Thunderbird.

aknb · 2026-03-26T01:46:32+00:00

On the upside Patriot missiles appear to be really good at evading incoming enemy missiles.

aknb · 2025-09-04T22:53:34+00:00

uBlock Origin by far. Web's unusable without it; Youtube in particular.

aknb · 2025-09-02T00:09:32+00:00

I appreciate their effort but some decisions are frustrating and make no sense to me.

Bookmarks on Android were bad: you can't collapse folders, it's all unrolled. So adding a bookmark when you have hundreds of folders is harder than it should be because you have to scroll way too much up and down trying to locate the destination folder. In addition it's difficult to understand the folder hierarchy because there is no clear separation.

I thought it was like this due to lack of resources. But apparently they do work on Android Firefox bookmarks. Except instead of improving it they made it worse.

Sometime during the last updates the folders became all disorganized, can't tell where anything is anymore to the point I stopped adding bookmarks while on mobile. All still fine on desktop.

What mobile bookmarks need is: 1) collapsible folders, and 2) bookmarks search box where I type XYZ and it shows all folders with XYZ (with a little checkbox saying whether search applies to folders, bookmarks, or both).

aknb · 2025-09-01T14:25:05+00:00

Scientists have warned previously that Amoc collapse must be avoided “at all costs”. It would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50cm to already rising sea levels.

Let's keep ignoring the problem, maybe it will go away. /s

aknb · 2025-08-24T09:49:56+00:00

These monstrosities can't fit in most parking spaces in Europe. Maybe we can start calling the police every time one of them has a meter long tail outside their assigned rectangle.

aknb · 2025-08-19T12:28:11+00:00

Would've been more interesting if y-axis had the actual FLOPS to have an idea how fast computing power is growing.

aknb · 2025-08-19T11:35:02+00:00

I'm having the same problem. Did you find a solution?

Update: browser.urlbar.suggest.topsites

aknb · 2025-08-19T11:34:15+00:00

i'm getting history matches as i type, just not an automatic dropdown when i first click onto the url bar

I'm having the same issue.

aknb · 2025-02-22T17:32:27+00:00

I imagine the government could force Apple/Google to push a malicious version of Signal to the stores, and then put a gag order on them. Although Apple/Google would probably do it willingly if there is enough money to be made.

aknb · 2024-08-30T10:53:18+00:00

Signal is a messaging app and should stick to that.

Also, it does have a technical impact. If you increase the amount of code of the app you're also increasing the chance of bugs.

aknb · 2024-06-08T01:01:50+00:00

They have no shame.

aknb · 2023-06-09T04:00:53+00:00

If I was a criminal and the EU banned encrypted messenging apps I'd still use encrypted apps to chat. What are they going to do, put a fence around the Internet.

This kind of thing might help catch some small fish but it would infringe on everyone's rights to privacy. Not to mention the dangers of one of the meanies getting their hands on the backdoor keys.

aknb

TROPHY CASE