Facebook copped a 1.2 billion euro fine for shitting on the EU's GDPR rules for years. The Irish DPC (because Facebook's EU business is based in Ireland for those sweet tax loopholes) found that "Facebook transferred data of EU-based users of the platform to the United States, where data protection regulations vary per state and have been deemed inadequate to protect the rights of EU data subjects" back in July 2022, but decided not to fine Meta for it. The European Data Protection Board said that's bullshit and to fine Meta, so here we are. The EU and USA have been trying to get a treaty going (the EU-US Data Privacy Framework) to US companies can avoid getting fined like Meta, but nothing's been formalised yet.
Also in the EU - a leaked "European Council survey of member countries' views on encryption regulation" found that "the majority said they are in favor of some form of scanning of encrypted messages, with Spain’s position emerging as the most extreme". The Spaniards want to go as far as to make end-to-end encryption illegal. Think about that for a minute. Unlike other jurisdictions (USA, UK, Australia) that go around saying they want a backdoor in to E2EE, Spain is straight up advocating to ban it entirely. The justification for this, is as usual, scanning for CSAM (child sex abuse material). Finland, Estonia, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands appear to disagree, so that's some relief. Wired was good enough to publish the entire document if you wanna read more.
Lia Haberman got her hands on a confidential slide deck Instagram has been sending "select creators" about Project 92 - a "a new, decentralized, social network" based on ActivityPub, like Mastodon. You log in with your Instagram account and all the data is carried across, like followers and your username, bio and so on. 500 character posts with photos, links and videos. Reposts, likes and replies. Sounds a lot like Twitter to me. Leveraging that Instagram userbase will be huge as the worst thing I've found with all these Twitter "replacements" is the lack of your mates on there. Instagram also doesn't have the same bad stench around it like Facebook, so yeah, it's probably got a good shot at getting some huge traction.
Here's some cool gadgets I've seen recently:
I saw the very first DVD at the Toshiba Science Museum in Tokyo when I visited back in 2018. Eraser, along with The Fugitive, Blade Runner and Assassins were the first titles released on the new format.
📻 Get Away - Yuck
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