Weird. The article does have today’s date but only mentions the Nov 10 decision. I think maybe what happened today is the publication of the full text of the decision?

It’d be great if that was how it works, unfortunately it seems like the penalties are closer to once every 3-5 years than monthly, skewing the balance even further to “screw the law, just pay the fee”:(

I’d say that’s a huge problem actually.

For a normal company, abusing data is a small part of their business and profit is a few percent of revenue, so such a fine would be devastating.

For some tech companies, profit is in the double digit percent of revenue and half of it comes from breaking the law, so the 4% are a tax they can happily pay and still be more profitable than if they followed the law.

Same misleading nonsense. If you follow the links it becomes obvious that it’s the old news banning FB from using the data on the basis of contract and legitimate interest - which they’re avoiding by claiming “consent” after people choose that they’d rather not pay a triple-digit amount per year to use the site.

No, the article is just regurgitating old news and the old misleading claim (omitting the critical part that they’re only banned from using data “on the basis of contract and legitimate interest”).

This “news” is what made Facebook start with the “agree or pay” bullshit.

Sometimes they also came up with literal malware as DRM.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal

Same, except it’s a sofa and I’d have the TV remote up my ass.

I don’t think the sound itself is freaky (i.e. I don’t think it’d be perceived as freaky by people not familiar with it or similar messages at all).

It’s the implication. At least I (as a non-American) associate the sound not with “generic public safety message” but firmly with “the president will now say goodbye to the nation and tell everyone to hug their loved ones one last time before the 3000 nukes/an asteroid/hostile aliens wipe out all life on Earth”.

I think some movies also used the sound for submarine Emergency Action Messages (aka the thing that makes those 3000 nukes fly).

Imagine, 100 people trying to load a video from your single hard drive, it’s not fast enough for that.

YouTube 1080p is 8-10 Mbit/s according to what I could find. That’d be 100-125 MByte/s for 100 people. I think my SSD is more than fast enough for that.

Even better, a 1 Gbps connection is also (just) enough to actually upload the video to those 100 people.

And with 100+ people watching, P2P distribution should work really well too.

Teleportation. Invisibility is a nice gimmick (until you accidentally leave it on and get hit by a car, that is).

Teleportation isn’t just incredibly convenient, depending on the distances you can travel in one hop it’d also save you a lot of time (skip your commute, instantly travel to a nice vacation destination and back), and it’d be a money maker (fastest courier in the world).

Even if it was just line of sight, being able to easily reach places that are normally hard to reach or require extensive detours would be helpful. Even just crossing a busy street without having to wait for the traffic light would be a nice thing.

They might be able to relay them in a way that the end to end encryption is actually handled on the phone and the relay only relays encrypted messages.

That would likely still give them a capability to MitM but it’s plausible that they couldn’t passively intercept the messages.

No, the network effect is too strong. Deleting WhatsApp is cutting off the primary/only way to contact many friends (in countries where it’s the primary messenger), and a mild form of “abandon everything and go live in a monastery”.

uBlock Origin explicitly advises against this. If it’s the only content blocker it doesn’t currently have issues with YouTube, if you have multiple you’ll probably hit the “disable your adblocker” warning.

The first three are using identical techniques so combining them is of very limited benefit. They’re mostly there to cover software that doesn’t have an ad blocker.

I’d stick with just ublock origin.

You can, but don’t. You will always lose quality, you don’t know if you will always be able to reliably download it in the future, you don’t know when YouTube decides that private videos are unprofitable, and you don’t know when YouTube will start applying some kind of content checks to your videos, decide they are in violation, and block/delete them.

Just pay for storage and upload encrypted copies or store an extra (encrypted) hard drive with a friend or so.

owner wouldn’t even put the electric on for viewing because she didn’t want to pay £1 a day standing charge

I bet the real reason is that turning on the power would reveal more trouble.

Oh, I absolutely understand that a lot of tracking is stil possible. But in practice, it’s usually handled by third parties via a script loaded from a third party domain, because doing any of the smarter stuff would require a) a competent IT team b) the marketing team talking to them constantly.

Much easier to just slap another tracker into Google Tag Manager.

Of course this doesn’t help against tech companies. YouTube, Facebook, Reddit etc. will most likely track your views based on the requests, which you can’t avoid. But this takes care of 90% of the tracking, and most importantly, it removes the “everyone tracking you across every site you visit” aspect of the ad surveillance industry.

uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger.

Can’t fingerprint my machine if your fingerprinting script never loads.

There is an universally available subscription that applies to all services, costs $0/month, refuses donations, and is called uBlock Origin.

Haven’t noticed any of the YouTube issues either so far.

20% of their revenue comes from the EU, almost all of it from ads. I’d argue that complying with the law would cost them more than a quarter of the EU ads revenue, without affecting their costs much -> that’d be 5% of global revenue. Breaking the law still pays.

Also, how do you conclude that 448 million people paying 90 EUR per year, for a total of 40 billion EUR, wouldn’t offset a 4.66 billion USD fine?

If the fine was 4% of global revenue every month, sure. So far it looks like it’d be every 3-5 years though…

Not too good to be true, but too good to be low risk.

15% ROI is definitely possible. Him screwing up and ending up bankrupt is also possible.

The red flag for me is “I know nothing about business” - you can’t judge the risks. You should absolutely not invest money you can’t afford to lose into risky stuff like this. In particular, taking out a loan just to loan the money to your friend would be a really stupid idea, and if he asked you to do that, he either is stupid, reckless, or doesn’t care if you get hurt.

I’d only consider loaning my own money with which I can afford taking the risk, and only if he could plausibly explain what he’s doing, and I felt like I can understand it and be confident that he can pull it off. I’d consider it a high risk investment on par with cryptocurrencies.

Given that you don’t seem to fully understand and there are other red flags: stay away.