Spyke

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europe

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"We are shutting the door on the Russians", Hungary's Defense Minister says

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And Slovakia. And Serbia. And even in states that aren't already infiltrated, Russia finances useful idiots and fifth columns everywhere, from the AfD in Germany to the Rassemblée Nationale in France. These fucks would sell out their home countries to Putin in a heartbeat, yet the call themselves "patriots" and even "nationalists". If our governments were to finally take these hybrid attacks seriously, they'd set everything in motion to follow the dark money back to its source - and crack down on foreign interference.

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New EU report details age verification plans and ID requirements for accessing the internet

Since I am not inclined to spend my day on reading a 150+ pages report, I downloaded the document and did two things to it.

First, I scanned for interesting key words, particularly on ID. This was the only relevant result:

Age-assurance methods – both age verification or age estimation – must be proportionate and uphold minimum requirements, notably concerning the fundamental rights of users, including children’s rights and related safeguards. Any method employed to check age should uphold the highest privacy and data protection standards, and should not lead to the processing of identity documents and biometric data for the purpose of age estimation. Technical standards such as ‘Zero Knowledge Proof’ should be implemented to ensure that both the platform required to assess the age and the age verification provider do not receive any information that can lead to the tracking or identification of the user.

While one may be skeptical whether lawmakers will actually follow this recommendation, the document says the opposite of what OP claims, i.e. no processing of ID documents.

I also had local AI (Llama 3.1 8B Q4) comb through the document. Here's what it got me. TL;DR: again, no mention of ID requirements.

The document mentions the following points related to identifying users online:

  1. Consent for minors: The report notes that it may be difficult to validate that an individual providing consent on behalf of a child has the legal authority to do so.
  2. Data minimization principle: In accordance with this principle, controllers should only process necessary data and avoid processing sensitive personal information (such as documents indicating care arrangements) unless absolutely necessary.

However, there is no explicit mention of ID requirements for using specific services or gaining internet access in general. The report does discuss the importance of evaluating the operational performance of Article 40 data access and scrutiny requirements to ensure online platforms follow up on requests, but it doesn't provide details about user identification procedures.

It's worth noting that the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is mentioned as a reference for understanding what constitutes an Information Society Service, which includes apps, social media platforms, search engines, etc. However, this does not directly relate to ID requirements or access restrictions for internet services in general.

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Germany: Iraqi sentenced to life for enslaving Yazidi girls

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I am aware of all that. Still, this gesture is fraught with bitter irony when coming from people who did unspeakable things in the name of some political or religious ideology. Yesterday, they stood proud, doing what they did out in the open, claiming their ideology gave them the right to do it. Today, they cower and hide, not wanting to be connected with their deeds. If a human court of law and a bit of social stigma is all it takes to make your beliefs crumble, maybe your beliefs were shit to begin with, and you could have had this realisation at a fraction of the cost in human suffering. But alas...

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What are some problems you've had switching from Google logins?

Patreon made the process of switching my account off of Google so convoluted, I opted to just nuke my account entirely.

This is advisable regardless of whether the service makes switching a pain or not. Linking accounts once creates a link forever. If privacy and clean separation are your goals, break the link and start from scratch.

One retail site is giving me an error creating a new non-G account, probably because my device, a Samsung-owned tablet, is already “registered”, probably through some super invasive Google process hardware fingerprinting it and linking it to my account.

If you can, ditch the service. This kind of fuckery should not be rewarded with hard currency.

If you can't, use a desktop machine to create a new account. If things don't work in a vanilla browser, you can escalate the process by

  • deleting all cookies / using private mode (separates you from any cookie baggage you may still have)
  • using a VPN (thus thwarting IP-based identification)
  • blocking JavaScript (if the site is still usable without it) or spoofing a user agent
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The President of the United States just posted this

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all he delivers are goddamn shitposts.

Not true. He also delivered

  • 2 illegal wars of aggression (+ threats of annexing neighbouring countries)
  • plenty of open corruption
  • severe damage to American democracy at home and American power abroad
  • a record deficit, all the while slashing expenses on social programmes and funnelling money to his oligarch cronies
  • further expansion of the American surveillance state so as to facilitate an authoritarian power grab

I'd say whoever was evil or stupid enough to vote the orange moron into office again: they got a lot of bang banged a lot for their buck.

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AfD leader vows to restore German-Russian ties as she eyes chancellery

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You're not wrong, but you're giving right-wing populists too much credit. Their polling numbers are not just a product of their own efforts, but equally so the result of

  • outside interference: Russia is probably one of the most prominent actors in this sector, linked to both interference in U.S. elections (on behalf of Trump), in the Brexit referendum (on behalf of the Leave campaign), in the latest Romanian election, and so many more. But technofascists like Thiel and Musk are equally getting involved, endorsing, hosting and probably bankrolling candidates they see as conducive to giving even more power to oligarchs. Cf. Musk hosting and endorsing Alice Weidel (AfD GER) and Tommy Robinson recently at the London rallye, and Thiel essentially funding JD Vance's entire political career.
  • the abandonment of the working and middle class by the political elites: hear me out, I'm not just parrotting a right-wing talking point here. If you look at the development of both income and wealth inequality in the last few decades, you'll see that there is some truth to it. Governments from left to right have had a much more open ear to the interests of corporations and billionaires - after all, that's where all that sweet, sweet campaign money comes from, as well as the career for their lives after politics. Meanwhile, ordinary people have been struggling from crisis to crisis: from dotcom bubble to subprime meltdown, from the Euro crisis into a global pandemic, and from there into two severe energy shocks ('22 and '26). And it turns out that bailing out banks while dishing out austerity, shutting down the country and remaining mostly inactive in the face of rising inequality and inflation isn't exactly the way to win the trust of the public. That said, the far right posing as an "alternative" to failed mainstream politics is a joke, obviously: as laid out above, they are mostly bankrolled by the very elites that are responsible for people's struggles. They are here to shift the blame onto marginalised groups and give even the lower classes somebody to look down and vent their anger on. If you look at their agenda, their plan is to open the floodgates even more to the money elites, slash taxes and regulations and funnel government spending towards oligarch-owned monopolies. (The rampant corruption under Trump II bears ample testimony to that.)

So, yes, the far right has been busy in the recent past. But they wouldn't have come this far if it weren't for fascists with money supporting them and mainstream politics failing people left and right.

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Don't worry! If only the other monkeys allow that one monkey to own and monopolise all the banana trees, eventually some of the bananas will come trickling down to them... in the form of ape monkey piss.

//Edit: terminological correction