I used to have YouTube Premium.

The main reason for paying for it was that I don't like having to sit through ads. A nice benefit of Premium over ad-blockers was that a part of the revenue from YouTube premium goes to creators in lieu of advertising revenue. YouTube gets money for running the service, the creators get money for making videos, and I don't have to watch ads.

I stopped my Premium subscription not because it was getting too expensive, but because YouTube is an American company. Ever since Trump got elected for a second time I have been progressively working on cutting out products and services by American tech giants from my life, and YouTube Premium was a very easy one to cut out.

These days I just use an ad-blocker. If the creators want revenue from my view, they can upload to a platform that isn't YouTube.

Just wait till Musk learns about banking regulations.
He's already complaining about the EU regulations on social media, but they nothing compared to what banks have to deal with.

Africa, Asia, and South America

So we are not counting North-America, where the ICE raids continue then?

I have a YouTube Premium subscription

Okay.. So he went to Russia in 2003. Considering that the consensus in 2003 was that Russia was still on its way to becoming a democracy I am not that offended by it personally.
"Putin's hometown" being St. Petersburg, which is the 2nd biggest city in Russia.

What is more worrying is all the things that happened since 2003.

It really boils down to a few reasons:

• I don't like ads, and I prefer not to see them
• Running a platform like YouTube is not cheap, and I understand that Google needs money to keep things running.
• The revenue of Premium is split between YouTube and the creators, much like ad revenue is. So it also supports the channels that I follow.

From my understanding this age verification app seems to be based on the age verification blueprint they have been working on for a while now, which is supposed to be part of the European "digital wallet"

https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-verification

From my understanding it works as follows:

• There will be a central "authority", with which you can identify
• This authority will provide you with tokens indicating you are 18+ (or whatever age verfication you may need)
• These tokens are stored locally, and contain no identifying information other than a simple "is this guy 18+?"
• You can use these tokens to verify age with a website that requires age verification

This solution does seemingly address my two greatest concern with online age verficiation:

• You cannot trust the website, so they only get the information they need. They don't get any identifiable information
• You cannot trust the authority, so they don't get to know for which websites and for what reason you request 18+ tokens

Assuming that this blueprint is followed, it seems like a decent approach at online age verification.

After Trump was elected and inaugurated, Signal has finally been gaining some steam here in the Netherlands.

It's still an American company, so it's not ideal. But it's still significantly better better than letting a tech giant like Facebook have control over the most commonly used chat app.

WhatsApp needs to go and Signal is the most likely way in which we can achieve that. We can worry about the American elephant in the room later.

Pride is a protest. Let's not forget that.

You don't cancel a protest because the authorities say they won't protect you.
If they don't want you to hold your pride march, that is all the more reason to march anyway.

From what I understand this change will retroactively apply to games released in the past as well. I think that's a rather scummy move on Unity's part. "I've altered the deal. Pray I don't alter it further."

And it's not like game devs have been using a free product. They already pay for it through expensive licenses per developer.

If the justification on Unity's part is true, that for each install of a Unity game the runtime environment needs to be downloaded from their servers, then maybe they should look into fixing that rather than nickle and diming their customers for each individual install (customers in this case being the game developers)

"Everbody should use AI"

-Person financially benefiting from everybody using AI

This guy can go suck an egg..

He also added, “Let’s take Bandera back to 1880 properly. No double standards, no hypocrisy. If LPRs are ‘unconstitutional’ and invade our right to ‘public’ privacy, we need to be courageous enough to go all the way. I look forward to the ‘Privacy First’ crowd showing up to support these bans [...] just remember to leave your phones at home.”

It's not that difficult to see the difference between having the option to decide not to bring your phone if you don't want to be tracked, and not even getting an option to avoid AI-powered CCTV systems all over town.

Don't let perfection stand in the way of good enough
It may not be the holy grail, but moving away from Meta-owned Whatsapp is already a pretty significant improvement

They are the Anti-Defamation League.
Their stated goal is combatting anti-Semitism, but in practice they mainly target criticism of Israel.

The headline is a bit misleading. Trump agreed to the ABC debate if Harris agrees to the Fox debate.
This is just a ploy for him to either get Harris to show up on Fox, or if she doesn't debate him on Fox, spin it in such a way that Harris is somehow not wanting to debate him (Even though she never agreed to a Fox debate)

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think that retroactively applies to things that happened before the ToS got updated.

So 23andMe would still be open to lawsuits for the previous breach

Imo it's already difficult enough to convince friends and family to use Signal. Delta Chat would be even more difficult to pull off.

What does she think would happen if Greenland declared independence?.. That the US would just honour that?

The only two options on the table at the moment, as unfair as it is, are staying with Denmark and NATO or being absorbed into the United States. Independence would mean defacto becoming part of the US.

Tipping is a thing in the NL. But this 15% nonesense by default can go fuck itself.

Tipping is gratuity, to be awarded for excelent service. If they dare ask me for a tip, I'd consider that rude and they'll get nothing from me.