yeahforsureman

I’m pretty sure they’re covered by the so-called sui generis protection of databases within the EU/EEA at least. That one is about protecting the effort and investment, not originality of expression.

Well, yeah, I’ve turned a knob or two through the years I might’ve easily failed to consider now, as well...

It can make a small difference on this site, though. Testing it with three browsers (Safari, Brave, Firefox Focus) on iOS with Private Browsing on, each gets a different name and hash — then again, those do stick to the browser pretty well after that and are resistant to incognito mode (or session switch by other means), for example, just like you’d expect. On Safari, Private Browsing masks the IP at least, and Brave has its own tricks.

Not to forget the European Human Rights Convention as interpreted by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), although it's not an institution of the EU but the Council of Europe, spanning all EU states and then some.

The Court's case law is recognized as is by EU, and includes some landmark privacy rulings, e.g., against access to contents and metadata of electronic comms without a court order (or comparable legal safeguards), or any forms of bulk surveillance.

Truly, this is what the Lord's prophets have revealed to us! (Eliezer 11:52) Keep strong in your P(singularity), for when the Kingdom arrives, He shall judge us in His righteous glory, whether to eternal annihilation, or rebirth and life in His Memory Eternal!

No, in the EU, you don't "own" the data about yourself in any meaningful sense. For example, under the GDPR, consent is just one of several potentially available legal bases for processing personal data — in fact, it's the one basis you usually want to avoid as a business if at all possible — which also means that for most uses of your data, you do not have any unqualified right to demand a controller cease processing or remove your personal data.

Weren't we talking about criminal liability, though? And ‘tort’ — in addition to sounding like something you'd rather eat during a kaffepaus with those Nordic buddies of yours — is so common-law(ish) that if asking for trouble were a crime, using it in dialogue with those Nordic lawyers could well be deemed as intentional under most current local varities of criminal law theory up there, perhaps merely because you surely must've considered that consequence "quite probable", at minimum, or due to your indifference toward the same (or some combination of these) ;)

The mismatch between the existing monetary union and the lack of fiscal integration (ie, not even any imaginary authoritarian eurofederalism) indeed is the economic macro issue above everything else, and remains a major unsolved tension even after the acute years of the Eurocrisis. Basically, if you take it as described, we're in a highly suboptimal state with two radically different directions to go to try to fix it. Politically, it's a nightmare, at least in terms of having much hope for sensible public debate and deliberation, let alone giving politicians the potentially necessary wide room of maneuvre.

I wasn't aware of these things back then, but I've been sad to find out it's not like we weren't warned about exactly this way back in the 90s when the crucial first steps were taken. Including by Paul Krugman, of all people!

Of course, it was the 1990s, from "Winds of Change" to Western neoliberalism as the End of History. And the elite belief in integration advancing "one crisis at a time" was well-established by then. Easy to say now, but did they really think public debt crises and bailing out national governments would create better conditions for having a mature discussion about EU-level fiscal transfers and taxation without drawing in the worst of our national stereotypes and trust issues, zero-sum thinking, and widespread beliefs about the Brussels bureaucrats completely detached from the realities of the common man, issuing directives about the correct curvature range of cucumbers while shoveling regional aid funds to smooth-talking Neapolitan gangsters to promote more sustainable EU waste management strategies, or whatever?

You must know that this stuff was later also codified in successive (so-called hard) international human rights treaties like the ICCPR (see Article 17 in this case), right? That Covenant now has 175 parties, plus six more signatories without ratification (most notably China and Cuba) — North Korea is the only state that has tried to withdraw.

In some of those states, the provisions of the Covenant may be considered directly applicable/self-executing, having the legal force of a provision of constitutional rank, while others require some kind of national step or implementation. Whatever the case, it's arguably at the level of incorporation into national law, though, that the ICCPR has exerted its greatest impact. Basically, post-WW2, when anywhere in the world a national constitution has been framed, the ICCPR has served as the natural yardstick for drafting the fundamental rights provisions.

And beyond nation states, I'm glad we're not dependent on UN bodies and agencies for the development and enforcement of human and fundamental rights more globally either. Sure, the European Court of Human Rights doesn't have an army of its own, and part of the influence and relevance of the law it creates is a bit squishy, frankly, hinging on the authority, gravitas and respect bestowed on it by a somewhat opaque and shifting web of institutions and so on. It's certainly not nothing, though, especially since nowadays the ECHR's jurisprudence is mainlined by the ECJ basically uncut, and also applied as constitutional-level law by the rest of the eurocracy basking in the supremacy of Union law.

But I don't know, man, this human rights talk is always a bit of a gamble in terms of using your time well, at least if addressing a crowd where potentially more people support the death penalty than the ICC.

Jesus, what country?

+1 for boring!

Ericsson is Swedish, though.

Not surprised to see "German" quotation marks in this petty complaint...

Just an observation: The different approaches mentioned in the replies to this post seem to all neatly fall into one of the three types of individual response (exit, voice, loyalty) there are to any sort of decline in/of firms and organizations of any kind within Albert O. Hirschman's well-known economic framework, originally laid out in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (1970).

Personally, I find "loyalty" perhaps the most fascinating one of those, being "irrational" for the individual almost by definition but sometimes, for example, proving out to be the only "glue" holding an organization together through a period of incurable-looking decline followed by an eventual recovery (in the lucky cases).

You're still mixing up contributor license agreements with the kind of arrangements where the copyright is actually transferred and assigned "away" from the creator to another copyright holder (generally a copyright assignment agreement). This is far less common than CLAs.

I don't know what you mean by a rugpull exactly, but of course in theory you can grant/obtain very extensive rights under a CLA as well, including eg the permission to relicense your contributions under whatever terms the licensee prefers. CLAs are a great way to centralize the IPR in an open source project for practical purposes like license enforcement, but in case the CLA terms allow it, the central governing entity could also obtain the right to switch the license even to a, say, commercial one. (Such terms would usually be a red flag for contributors though.) And in any case, that kind of CLA wouldn't still close off the code already released under the previous open-source license, and neither would it prevent you from licensing your own contributions under terms of your choice.

Confusingly, though, there's the chance we might still not be talking about real cognates. The Old Norse víkingr can be derived from (Old Norse) vík (inlet, cove, fjord) + -ingr ('one belonging to', 'one who frequents'), or possibly even something close to Old Norse vika (sea mile), originally referring to the distance between two shifts of rowers, ultimately from the Proto-Germanic ~wîkan 'to recede' and found in the early Nordic verb ~wikan 'to turn', similar to Old Icelandic víkja 'to move, to turn', with well-attested nautical usages.

The Old English wīc, on the other hand, has an old Germanic etymology referring to 'camps', 'villages' and the like.

God knows there are a lot of inlets and fjords in Scandinavia, which incidentally were also places from where the surplus "víkingr" males surged west, possibly having adapted the term as an ethnonym by then; at least in modern Scandinavian languages cognates like 'viking' (pl. 'vikingar') are definitely associated with the geographic root 'vik' — as are innumerable surnames like Sandvik, Vikman, etc. Then again, those roving Vikings did of course build up "camps" and "settlements" wherever they went, although this perhaps sounds more likely a name someone else would give to them...

As for the difference between the Norse (ie North Germanic/Scandinavian) tribes/people and their more southern cousins (Angles, Saxons, Franks etc.) prior to and at the beginning of the Viking era, you might say the former were in fact quite clearly relatively more isolated in terms of geography, language and still-very-much-pagan culture. (And while eg Angles and Saxons did invade and settle much of Britain from current Northern German and parts of Denmark, this was already a couple of hundred years before, and a lot happened since.)

Well yeah, there definitely was the period and cultural phenomenon called the Nordic Bronze Age, which also seems to closely match the dating of those rock carvings. You can read more about it elsewhere, but we're talking about relative largesse, reach and cultural interaction easily matching or exceeding that of the Vikings, originating and spanning a large part of the Indo-European sphere of dominance from Scandinavia to Mycenaean Greece and even beyond. Making and accumulating bronze itself drove the development of trade networks and connections of pretty extreme reach and complexity, unmatched for a long time after the Bronze Age Collapse.

A dry sauna sounds terminally boring. The point of Finnish saunas is that they are dry and hot, but you can adjust the pain...experience, I mean, by throwing water on the rocks at intervals of your choice.

Would those be "dry saunas" or proper ones where you're allowed to throw water on the rocks? Adding humidity ('löyly') is kinda the point, and 73°C might be just fine for a small sauna, giving you a nice punchy löyly.

I guess you'd be assuming that both the original CC code and its ports are computer/AI-generated? As a lawyer, though, I'd still maintain that you wouldn't need much original human input in the CC code to kind of ruin that theory. The threshold for copyright protection isn't that high, really.

No, not any random law. To the extent the relevant law-making is within EU's competence (ie excluding certain areas like national security and similar), the general framework for rules on the processing of personal data has been laid down by the GDPR (and for law enforcement related stuff, a similar Directive[1]), in particular, considerably restricting, limiting and in part downright precluding national law-making within that legislative and policy area, including eg the legal bases available for in-scope processing activities (Art 6 GDPR, also Art 9 for certain sensitive data categories).

Anyway, as far as human/fundamental rights go, the encryption and related issues in Chat Control tend to fall more on the Article 7 side of the Charter[2] like many similar questions related to different forms of (mass) surveillance, secrecy / confidentiality of (electronic) communications, including related national regimes with often diverse jurisdiction-specific histories, etc.

[1] The main difference between a Directive and a Regulation under EU law is that a Directive requires implementation on the national level to work properly (ie national legislation, usually with some room for discretion and details here and there), while a Regulation is directly binding and effective law in member states wholly in itself.

[2] And similar/corresponding language in the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), including the related case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). While these are not EU institutions, European human rights law is recognized and applied as constitutional / fundamental rights-level law both by the EU and member state courts.

Can't recall the source right now (it would've been on one of the several podcasts I listened to on Friday I think), but there's a story/rumor to the effect that at some point during Claude's earlier deployment at the Pentagon — might've well been in the context of the Venezuela/Maduro operation — someone at Anthropic had in one way or another flagged some kind of legal(ity) concerns regarding the relevant operation (and/or perhaps Anthropic's role in it) with Palantir, who was maintaining the Claude deployments for the DoD. The story goes that after Palantir had then relayed this information further to DoD, Hegseth had this major fit over how Anthropic's hippie-ass North California woke bros should have no say in matters relating to national security, that of Hegseth's "warfighters" or whatever, etc...

Also, in the latest Hard Fork episode, Casey or Kevin mentions how the DoD undersecretary in charge of this contract doesn't apparently get along with or even pretty much hates Amodei for some reason. I think this might be the same undersecretary dude who actively commented the whole contract term controversy on X yesterday. Too bad I can't recall his name either.

Funny, I tend to use larping for similar analogies. Not a huge insight or anything, just crossed my mind... I guess there's also overlap, or at least some kind of similarity with cargo cults, too? :)

EDIT: Trying to stay on topic and score some po--, cargo I mean...

This is so off in many ways.

In short, there are three core institutions, the "technocratic" European Commission, the European Parliament elected by direct popular vote, and the Council ("of the EU"/"of ministers") made up of the relevant (in terms of subject matter) ministers of the standing national govs. The law-making procedures depend on policy areas etc. but usually in the policy areas where EU is fully competent, the Commission — the democratically least accountable of the three bodies — by default makes the initiatives and negotiates/mediates them further along with the Parliament and Council, but only the last two together really have the power to finally approve actual legislation, usually either Regulations (directly applicable in member states as such — so an increasingly preferred instrument of near-full harmonisation), or Directives (requiring separate national transposition / implementation and usually leaving more room for national-level discretion otherwise as well).

While not fully comparable to nation-state parliaments, the powers of the EU Parliament have been strengthened vis-à-vis both the Commission and the Council, and it's certainly long been a misrepresentation to say that they, e.g., only have the power to "approve or turn down" proposals of the Commission and/or the Council.

Looks like you almost have this habit of explaining/talking about things 'as a European', particularly when bringing up USA in the context of international relations like now...

I guess it's OK — I'm European too, for example — but it does seem like you're doing it to imply that your views are somehow (at least relatively more) popular among, or representative of, well, Europeans. But now that we're making such massive generalisations, I'd claim that well-educated English-speaking Europeans are often likelier to be more familiar with the views and internal debates among Americans than those of many of their fellow Europeans, and that you're probably no exception.

As for your comment, had you not addressed it to 'you Americans', I'd be hard-pressed to tell it apart from a pretty standard-issue American Left (or 'Progressive') rant, perhaps somewhere from the younger and more identitarian part of that crowd, for example (despite some of the quasi-tankie undertones). While I'll admit that scoffing at things like pro-life policies and/or American poverty is certainly easier and more common throughout the political spectra in (Western) Europe, I'd say your cringe-inducing bothsidesism with USA and China falls closer to the crackpot left camp in Europe as well.

Europe contains multitudes, and undoubtedly for some but not all, up until now at least, it has been a bit too easy to comfortably observe and judge things for so long as a world-political bystander from under the US nuclear umbrella, typically further from the Russian border too — whether you were an insular French with casual contempt for all things 'Yankee', a German atomic-phobic pacifist (or worse, a far-right, Pro-Putin knuckle dragger) from that 'European powerhouse' heated with Russian non-renewables, or even a Swede from the world's leading moral superpower, or something like that, anyway... ;)

Unfortunately not (only)

I'm pretty sure that if this passes, the EU Court of Justice will eventually find it more or less in violation with EU fundamental rights.

That will take time, though, so I guess they are either hoping that some impossibly secure, reliable and unerring technologies emerge in the meantime, or they are prepared for a forever battle with the Court, coming up with ever new adjustments as soon as previous schemes get struck down[1], meanwhile allowing European law enforcement agencies to keep testing, developing and iterating on whatever client-side scanning or other techno-legal approaches they may come up with. I think this was roughly what they — ie, basically a group of a dozen or two law enforcement reps from different member states agencies and ministries along with like one lonely independent information security expert — said themselves in some working group report as part of some kind of Commission roadmap thing presented by von der Leyen not too long ago.

[1] On the data protection side we've already seen this kind of perpetual movement through the years with respect to different “safeguarding” mechanisms made available to enable transfers of personal data to the US without too much hassle, from Safe Harbor through Privacy Shield to the current Data Privacy Framework.

Yeah, accents, dialects, preserving history and mutual intelligibility by retaining old or original forms of spelling or otherwise... Lots of reasons for being conservative here.

What's your accent btw? In "standard" English, 'the' has a voiced consonant, whereas 'thing' is unvoiced.

EDIT: Sorry, I now see you already told about your regional accent.

The cookie consent provision under the ePrivacy Directive doesn't care whether they're first- or third-party. Actually, the way it's been worded, you'd arguably need a consent for (strictly non-"necessary") use of eg local storage, too — afaik this hasn't really come up in regulatory practice or case law, but may be more due to regulators' modest technical expertise or priorities.

A conceptually different matter altogether is consent (possibly) needed under GDPR for various kinds of personal data processing involving the use of cookies (ie not just the placement of cookies as such) and other technologies for tracking, targeting and the like. That's why you see cookie banners with detailed purposes and eg massive lists of vendors (since they can be considered "recipients" of the user's personal data under GDPR). In this context, a valid consent (and the information you have to provide to obtain it) is required (at least) when consent is the only feasible legal basis of the ones available under Art 6 GDPR for the personal data processing activities in question. This is where the national regulators have taken strict stances especially regarding ad targeting and other activities usually involving cross-site tracking, for example, deeming that the only feasible basis for those activities would be consent (ie "opt-in") — instead of, in particular, "legitimate interests" which would enable opt-out-like mechanisms instead. This is the legal context of looking critically at 3rd-party cookies, but unfortunately, for the reasons mentioned above, getting rid of such cookies might still not be enough to avoid the minimal base cookie consent requirement when you use eg analytics... :(

It's pretty ridiculous, I know, and it's a bummer they scrapped the long-planned and -negotiated ePrivacy Regulation which was meant to replace the old ePrivacy Directive and, among other things, update the weird old cookie consent provision.

My point was that according to the current interpretation, if they rely on cookies, user analytics (even simple visitor stats where no personal data is actually processed) are not considered "necessary" and are therefore not exempt from the cookie consent obligation under the ePrivacy Directive. The reason why personal data processing is irrelevant is that the cookie consent requirement itself is based on the pre-GDPR ePrivacy Directive which requires, as a rule, consent merely for saving cookies on the client device (subject to some exceptions, including the one discussed).

So you need a consent for all but the most crucial cookies without which the site/service wouldn't be able to function, like session cookies for managing signed-in state etc.

(The reason why you started to see consent banners really only after GDPR came to force is at least in part due to the fact that the ePrivacy Directive refers to the Data Protection Directive (DPD) for the standard of consent, and after DPD was replaced by GDPR, the arguably more stringent GDPR consent standard was applied, making it unfeasible to rely on some concept of implied consent or the like.)