News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

AnssiH

The big ones that come to mind that were not already mentioned are MySQL => MariaDB, XFree86 => X.org.
LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice.org in 2010, way before the difficulties of Apache OpenOffice (which didn't even exist back then).
CMS has a public tracker of GDPR fines (https://www.enforcementtracker.com/) listing over 3000 cases, most are companies HN readers have not heard of.
"ChatControl 1.0" is entirely voluntary so there is much less opposition in parliament.
> So the EU will eventually require backdoors in encryption. It's only a question of how many tries it takes...

So how many tries (i.e. EU parliamentary votes on an actual legislative text brought in by commission) has there been for encryption backdoors or mandatory screening of chat content?

There has actually been only one, the November 2023 vote on CSAR regulation, and it was rejected overwhelmingly (https://edri.org/our-work/eu-parliament-committee-rejects-ma...).

There is no reason to believe the same thing won't occur in future votes.

The article in this HA submission itself is from April 2025.
This is from April 2025.

Also, whether the plan pushes for backdoors is debatable since those are not actually mentioned.

Re:Credit Card Rewards Became a $9.2B Wealth Transfer on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @08:39AM (#49432980)
At least in Finland merchant contracts often specify higher rates for non-EU cards.
Re:Credit Card Rewards Became a $9.2B Wealth Transfer on Tuesday August 25, 2026 @08:19AM (#49432698)
My understanding is that they are much less generous on average compared to U.S.

E.g. for now I have the most premium card offered by my bank (50€/mo), and it gets me extra product insurance, rental car insurance, travel insurance, free lounge access, and some other things like that, but no cashback or similar.

I think some premium cards do offer cashback nowadays, but they are in the minority. Some cards also offer airline reward points. My experience is limited to Finland, though.

Re:How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs on Monday August 24, 2026 @11:18AM (#49421016)
I don't think any EU One-stop-shop scheme covers "local" goods sales in other EU member states yet, i.e. an EU company has to register in all EU countries they hold stock in.

That is changing with the Single VAT Registration (SVR) legislation, effective in 2028.

Re:France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @08:36AM (#49257315)
In Finland international inbound calls using Finnish caller ID are simply blocked (mandated by regulation since 2023).
Re:France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @07:30AM (#49256533)
It is technically possible, here in Finland such blocking (i.e. all inbound international calls with Finnish caller ID, except for roaming) has been obligatory for a few years now (https://traficom.fi/en/news/obligations-regulation-come-effe...).
Re:France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @06:34AM (#49255991)
Or just block international spoofing, to allow the case you mention.

E.g. in Finland the relevant regulation (https://traficom.fi/files/media/regulation/M_28_L_EN.pdf) says (in section 10):

> Telecommunications operators must block calls terminating from the public international interface when the calling party number is clearly incorrect or the calling party number is a Finnish telephone number and the situation does not involve roaming as referred to in section 7.2.1.

Re:France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls on Tuesday August 11, 2026 @05:38AM (#49255482)
If a legitimate French business contracts with a Moroccon call center, they will then of course follow French law since the French business is liable.

As for international scam calls, not sure what the situation is in France and what measures they have in place, but one relatively easy way is to block international callers from spoofing a local caller ID, which decimated these calls in Finland a couple of years ago: https://traficom.fi/en/news/obligations-regulation-come-effe...

For residential users in Finland, the last-mile replacement for POTS is not fibre but cellular, at least where phone calls are concerned.
Direct debit is not the same as debit card. You can pay in physical stores with debit card but not with direct debit (which does not involve a card at all).
Medical bills are covered (the Wikipedia summary seems accurate to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle_insurance#Finland). But I'm going to guess that those medical bills, and related damages, are much lower than in the U.S.

Maybe also lower average value of cars and less accidents here plays some part. But not sure how large that difference actually is.

Could also be some difference in the insurance premium systems: The amount of accidents changes one's cost for next year based on fixed rules - the ~$20/mo is with the highest discount (no liability insurance covered accidents in many years). The maximum it can grow to (for me, with my modern car) is ~US$100/mo, by having 4 consecutive covered accidents without accident-free years. Not really sure how wildly this varies in other countries or if the systems are similar...

The optional car insurance is more expensive, my full coverage (including damage, theft, parking, glass, fire, towing, substitute car etc.) is in the ~US$100/mo range, with ~$230 deductible on most coverage, and towing, substitute, glass repair at $0.

Re:Introducing Waymo Premier, an elevated rider experience on Thursday June 11, 2026 @04:51PM (#48496237)
Hmm, for my €209/year (~$20/mo) liability insurance I get unlimited coverage for personal injuries and €5M coverage for property damage (both mandated by Finnish law).

It sounds like you pay much more. Any idea why?

Re:Mythos Finds a Curl Vulnerability on Monday May 11, 2026 @04:50AM (#48092585)
The test was run by an unnamed third party, so cURL's history has no relevance to their benevolence.
Re:Making RAM at Home [video] on Wednesday April 22, 2026 @05:23AM (#47861094)
They also have "Underrated" and "Overrated" which apply points but do not act as tags. So I guess the easiest way to get +5 Troll is to have many Troll and Underrated votes, if it works the way I think it does.
Re:Telnyx v4.87.1 and v4.87.2 are compromised by TeamPCP on Saturday March 28, 2026 @05:38AM (#47553051)
I tried, but they used some 3rd party KYC platform whose country selection dropdown seemed to have every country except Finland (even Åland, a region of Finland, was there).

Support wasn't helpful.

Went with Twilio instead.

My impression was that the temporary permission-granting regulation was passed before the relevant privacy law came into effect, but I didn't check the dates now.
Here is the regulation that will be voted on: https://oeil.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/en/procedure-file?refer...

Note that the amendment was already amended on 11th March to set expiry to Aug 2027 and to also exclude E2E communications.

The proposal they are voting on is about continuing the current time-limited implementation (voluntary scanning, Regulation (EU) 2021/1232).

This is not about mandatory scanning.

The majority of the MEPs are not onboard mandatory scanning, otherwise that would've been passed already.

The site is conflating mandatory scanning with voluntary scanning (status quo). The upcoming vote is about continuing the voluntary scanning (which would otherwise expire).

I don't think the vendor ever said "unhackable" in this case, though. At least not publicly.
Re:RISC-V Is Sloooow on Wednesday March 11, 2026 @06:18AM (#47333769)
The cross-compiler part itself is easy, but getting all the build scripting of tens of thousands of Fedora packages to work perfectly for cross-compiling would be a lot of work.

There are lots of small issues (libraries or headers not being found, wrong libraries or headers being found, build scripts trying to run the binaries they just built, wrong compiler being used, wrong flags being used, etc.) when trying to cross-compile arbitrary software.

All fixable (cross-compiling entire distributions is a thing), but a lot of work and an extra maintenance burden.

> There was an interesting case in Finland. Finnish customs used to apply a 22% tax (ELV) on top of the car tax for imported used cars from other EU countries. On top of that, Finnish law required VAT to be charged on the car tax itself.

There was no VAT payable on the car tax of imported cars, only the ELV (ei-arvonlisävero, literally "not value added tax").

The ELV idea was that for locally bought new cars you did have to pay VAT on car tax, but for used EU imports that was not legally possible (cannot charge VAT again when importing used item from another EU country), so an equivalent non-VAT tax was invented so the full tax (inc. VAT/ELV) stays the same.

But this was unfair for e.g. the reason that Finnish companies buying cars could deduct Finnish car tax VAT on local new cars on their VAT return but not the car tax ELV on imported used cars (since it was not VAT).

That site lists many of candidates as "support" just because they have not publicly opposed, so it is not a realistic view on the opinions of EU parliament. Better to look at actual votes cast.

Also, they are not distinguishing between supporting mandatory monitoring and other forms (e.g. present legal situation where monitoring is allowed).

The current proposals do not include mandatory monitoring. If mandatory chatcontrol had the wide support that site suggests, it would have been introduced and passed long ago.

Also, VTT had publicly confirmed earlier that they had conducted tests for Donut Lab.

I'm confident the document and tests are real, but other shenanigans are still possible (and likely IMO).

Older »