A Czech here with a small correction. Countries often have a long and a short version of their name. For example "Federal Republic of Germany" aka "Germany".
We didn't change the name, rather we adopted "Czechia" as an official short variant, since we previously didn't have one. So both are correct.
Otherwise I agree with your point. This is just a bit of a pet peeve of mine.
This was already tried with the Do Not Track header. Websites simply ignore it. They don't want an easy way to get the user's preference. Because they know that most users would set it to decline tracking. Sites would rather annoy every visitor for the chance that they click 'accept'.
It is enforced, courts just work very slowly. Courts have already started interpreting the DNT header as GDPR-compliant opt-out that websites must follow.
If it wouldn't work, then I'd see no ads in my paper-based iX subscription, yet it is full of ads even though I'm paying for that paper.
But the paper has the benefit that the ads I see there don't collect information on me. This is what I want the internet to be.
Ads OK, but no tracking of me if I don't want it (which I express via cookies when in a browser).
Also, you should note how greedy these companies are that they show you the paywall after you have consented to the cookies in order to read the article. No hint on that accepting the cookies is only useful if you also have a subscription. When you can't read the article, they don't revert the setting of the cookies, but just pretend that they gave you access to the article and keep the cookies around for days or years.
It's not. Tracking leads to better targeting which leads to higher conversion ratios and overall higher "Cost Per 1000 Impressions" (CPM).
If you simply do "contextual" targeting, so targeting based on the page content, your CPM will go down and and the publisher will lose money.
> Also, you should note how greedy these companies are that they show you the paywall after you have consented to the cookies in order to read the article
Depends on the company. News media publishers use the same system but are usually barely profitable if at all.
> Also, you should note how greedy these companies are that they show you the paywall after you have consented to the cookies in order to read the article. No hint on that accepting the cookies is only useful if you also have a subscription. When you can't read the article, they don't revert the setting of the cookies, but just pretend that they gave you access to the article and keep the cookies around for days or years.
The EU Court of Law decided that offering a subscription or mandate for cookies to be enabled is not legal as an offer. So the transactional nature you propose is currently not allowed. What is allowed is a grey area which has yet to be explored.
Older folks might remember that there were a lot of people willing to make content free, just out of personal enthusiasm, and that this content was actually a lot higher quality than that pumped out by capitalist motivation.
So, actually, users and sites both had what they wanted, just not corporations.
Although I agree that news media quality is not always great (really depends from one publisher to another), I would not really qualify random people on Twitter as "news coverage".
DNT was before the GDPR. The landscape has changed considerably since then and a standardized opt out signal being enforced is not out of the question.
I installed this flatpak-packaged Jagex Launcher and RuneLite, and it works flawlessly on Linux. It does run in Wine, but the package takes care of setting that up.
To me, a "modern multi-user paradigm" is Nix with Home Manager. Where most of my software is installed in my user's environment and not on the system level. Thus, if there were another user on the same machine, we could each manage our own software and updates without affecting the other.
This is an incredibly misleading link. Most of those are online-only games that have been shutdown (or the multiplayer part of the game has been), it's not at all the same as having a DRM that needs to reach a server for a purely solo experience.
Which makes me glad I am using wayland. I am not comfortable with the idea that one browser window could be aware of things like the position of another browser window on my desktop.
The browser doesn’t communicate such things between unrelated clients, say, on different domains. The browser does allow a site to communicate with the popup that it opened, which is what this game is doing, and is not problematic.
Yes, you can access window.screenX for your own window, but not for other windows. If you’re writing code for an iframe embedded into a domain that’s not yours, your code does not have access to the parent’s windows.screenX.
Firefox knows where all its windows are, of course, but that’s not the potential issue being raised. The problem is allowing untrusted javascript access to that info. Luckily, Firefox doesn’t do that, it only allows you (JavaScript author) window information for the windows you’ve directly opened in code.
Actually I don't think Firefox knows the position of the window in Wayland. I thought that coordinates of windows were considered as a compositor concern and not shared with the client.
Better even: the parent window knows the position of it's child window. So firefox only knows the one window. And that in a situation where you actively had to allow the permission for the parent to spawn the child in the first place.
EU legislation previously mandated micro USB on phones. That didn't seem to kill innovation, we still got USB-C. The only thing it killed was every manufacturer using a different bad connector. I don't see any downsides.
> Apple was an exception and this feels different to me.
They were an exception because they already had the bestselling smartphone at the time they switched away from the 30-pin connector. Apple could have put a DC barrel-jack as the main power connector and the market would have no choice but to adopt it. They seized the opportunity to create a functionally-identical protocol to USB and encumber it with a licensed connector for personal gain. Regardless of how you feel about the connectors at the time, this was not a serious alternative to USB.
> Everybody and everything is standardizing on USB-C.
Yeah, I wonder which company was known/hated for pushing USB-C early-on as a connection standard yet not fully adopting it themselves.
> If you don’t see any potential downsides you aren’t looking hard enough.
No, if you don't see the problem with the status-quo then you're being blinded by baseless loyalty.
From a regulatory perspective, the situation is this; public utilities cannot converge on a serial specification as long as the iPhone uses Lightning. So, they have to weigh the benefits and downsides to the scenario. Apple's connector is more physically advanced, but also license-encumbered and genuinely impossible to standardize a-la USB. Apple made no attempt to formalize Lightning under USB-IF. Their horse isn't even on the racetrack.
If you consider Lightning's value to be greater than the overall harm of converging on a USB standard, then you should lobby Apple to make it an open spec and remove MFi in favor of USB class-compliance. Until that point, it will be deservedly remembered by history as a petty attempt to push unwanted IP on customers who would otherwise have no choice in the matter.
We didn't change the name, rather we adopted "Czechia" as an official short variant, since we previously didn't have one. So both are correct.
Otherwise I agree with your point. This is just a bit of a pet peeve of mine.