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This certainly smells like a History Channel "documentary" to me! Right up there with Ancient Aliens and the like.

- Analysis that is not shared to review

- Data that is not shared for review

- Broad assumptions that are quickly narrowed down to "facts"

- There is "more evidence but we can't show you because.... reasons"


Besides the idea that DNA can show from 500 years away that a person came from one or another side of a modern border is just not understanding how any of this works.


And the fact that this pseudo-science was broadcasted on national television is a disgrace for Spain and embarrassing for the Spaniards quoted in the article who are trying to do actual science.


To be fair, the Dutch government basically banned the use of any kind of intelligence a long time ago.


This printer looks quite ingenious! And the creator, Kralyn 3D, is releasing the plans for free under a Creative Commons licence.

The video on how he got there is a nice watch too.


So after years of profiting from the dark practices cookies allowed they decided to replace them with something new, better, more powerful, and potentially harder to block (when they decide to make it mandatory or burry it so deep that the average person can’t find the off switch).

Are we supposed to be grateful now? Are we expected to celebrate this as a “huge win for the end user”?

This looks like a typical case of “fighting symptoms, not the cause”.


We don’t know whether Apple’s apps will ask yet do we? Not until the next iOS update.

And when an app doesn’t ask, does that just mean there is no tracking going on or is it some nefarious scheme to achieve who knows what?

The nefarious option will probably become most popular on the interwebs, obviously. I can already see the HN posts: “Pages caught loading an asset from apple.com, violating their own tracking policy! Is Apple doomed?”


Check out your iPhone’s Settings > Privacy and scroll to the very bottom. You’ll see “Analytics & Improvements” and “Apple Advertising”, which both contain toggles and details about the data that has been gathered so far. There was also an iOS update in the past where the onboarding flow asked me to grant these permissions, though I vaguely remember seeing it on every major iOS version update.

Now, that’s not to say that the iPhone setting guarantees that Apple is not up to something sketchy. We can’t tell what’s going on under the hood or in their servers, but if we really wanted to be extremists about privacy, then we have to resort to apps that we’ve built and self-hosted ourselves.


The norm is already getting to be 2 unskippable pre-roll ads, the creator’s sponsor read (not uncommonly > 3 minutes long), several badly timed mid-roll ads, and a post roll ad. The ads themselves are mostly repeats to the point that I’m getting an aversion to the companies and products they try to sell. Goolgle is clearly hoping to get more consumers on YT premium but that’s just priced too high IMHO.


Oh well, it’s 2020 so we’ve probably just pissed off some huge space monster by landing on one of its eggs and scratching it.


this is not Reddit


Something like that already happened in Star Wars!


Well, that doesn’t sound like a well thought out software architecture does it. What did they do to get 2 completely separate applications mashed up together so badly that it “costs billions” to untangle?


If we would always think about “what could go wrong” and decide whether to go forward based on that we still wouldn’t use fire today.... in order to make something safe we need to make it work first. No guts, no glory.


This might look nice but sadly this kind of reasoning by Dutch parlament isn't consistent at all!

- For some reason Google is allowed to act like "a postal worker who delivers a letter, looks to see what's in it, and then claims he hasn't read it."

- Judges can rule blocking of websites (like they did with the pirate bay).

- Mobile operator fees are unregulated an artificially kept way too high.

- We pay a regulatory fee for every empty CD, DVD or Tape we buy because we just might use it to put copyrighted stuff onto it.

There is no straight line of thinking when it comes to this kind of law.


Slightly OT Well, as an italian living in the Netherlands, allow me to disagree with 3 and have empathy about 4, since we have that in Italy as well.

As for 3, every time I go back to Italy I'm amazed at how much they pay for calling, sms-ing and navigating with their mobiles. Here with Vodafone NL I pay for 15€/month for 400min/sms + 1GB of data. My father in law pays 20€/month for 620min/sms + unlimited data.

In Italy you can forget anything similar to that. I agree that now prices are going up, but that is especially the case when you get a subsidized phone with your plan: there they'll charge you a steep premium. It's very sad but the introduction of smartphone whose price was above 400€ (iPhone, I'm looking at you, not the first but the most popular) allowed the providers to pumps the price saying: "Hey, here this 500€ phone, but let's sign a 1500€ two years contract". People began stupidly falling for these sort of things, and the result is that prices are soaring and people are outraged. In the meantime providers are happy. /OT


- what Google eavesdropping are you referring to? Them displaying advertisement next to your free email? Get a paid account - here in USA a simple plans starts with $60 dollars w 2Gb data, and service completely sucks. As a Dutch expat, my Vodafone connection is one of the few things I really miss here in Silicon Valley.

And yes it is old news as parliament already passed this law, still I am proud of my tiny home country


I agree about the other stuff but

> - Mobile operator fees are unregulated an artificially kept way too high.

What do you think OPTA does? There's been several cases in fact where operators (both mobile and otherwise, iirc) were caught price-fixing. It's a few years ago, but at least something is in place.

Maybe it doesn't work as well as it should though, is that what you meant? I'd be interested to hear.


What does it mean to be "artificially too high"?


Result of cartel?


cartels tend to fall apart eventually.


There is a NMA (competition regulators) investigation going on into mobile operators, and there is proof that for pre paid services there was price fixing going on.


I'm not saying you're wrong here, but do you have a source for that? Though I had heard of the investigation, I didn't know any proof had been found.


No hard proof maybe, but a senior official/whistleblower said he had proof. News was related to visits to mobile providers early december I believe.


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