Hacker News: bergfest

New comment by bergfest in "PlayStation Is Deleting 551 Movies from Customers' Accounts"

bergfest — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 23:44:30 +0000

What will the end game in this licensing scheme be? I reckon once enough movies have been sold, the reputational damage of taking them away would become so large that streaming services will be strongarmed into accepting increasingly unreasonable fees.

New comment by bergfest in "Illinois Introducing Operating System Account Age Bill"

bergfest — Wed, 18 Mar 2026 21:01:11 +0000

This is exactly what will happen.

New comment by bergfest in "Paul Brainerd, founder of Aldus PageMaker, has died"

bergfest — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 19:52:16 +0000

I can still see that black and white splash screen in my head. Computers were so magical back then.

New comment by bergfest in "Pi – A minimal terminal coding harness"

bergfest — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 06:59:09 +0000

And then they will take away your right to boot whatever you want. For national security reasons and the children, of course.

New comment by bergfest in "Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright"

bergfest — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 07:08:43 +0000

The older manual rear view mirrors worked much better in my opinion.

New comment by bergfest in "I just want working RCS messaging"

bergfest — Wed, 19 Nov 2025 07:01:36 +0000

A task force of former nuclear fusion scientists has been established to fix bluetooth audio quality for once and forever.

New comment by bergfest in "Lawmakers want to ban VPNs"

bergfest — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 14:07:45 +0000

I don’t know about the US, but in UK and the EU they are certainly trying to do just that. And if not today, the will simply cook us slowly a little longer until they succeed. The problem is, that regular people just don’t care enough.

New comment by bergfest in "Lawmakers want to ban VPNs"

bergfest — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 13:52:35 +0000

It’s almost like they need these to exist.

New comment by bergfest in "The disguised return of EU Chat Control"

bergfest — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 10:35:56 +0000

I second this. And it would only be half as bad, if there was a chance to democratically undo this, when people realize the consequences. But no, this will stay forever and only become worse.

New comment by bergfest in "The disguised return of EU Chat Control"

bergfest — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 10:31:52 +0000

But they have ways to evade the law. And my dystopian inner oracle tells me, that when the pervasive online identification will soon be reality, certain people's IDs will have a special "all access, no logs" status that will allow them stay under the radar.

New comment by bergfest in "The disguised return of EU Chat Control"

bergfest — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 10:23:28 +0000

That's what I'm wondering too. I still hold out hope that the EU and the ECJ cannot override the fundamental rights guaranteed by the constitutions of the individual member states.

It is generally assumed that the ECJ has ultimate precedence over national constitutional courts, but I have my doubts. As a thought experiment, imagine it wasn't the EU, but the Chinese CCP with whom the treaties were concluded. It then quickly becomes clear why a national constitutional court fundamentally cannot accept the unconditional transfer of jurisdiction to a foreign entity.

The German Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG) already stated in its judgment on the Public Sector Purchase Programme (PSPP) that it is prepared to intervene in the event of an exceeding of competences (ultra vires). Furthermore, the BVerfG has repeatedly defended the fundamental rights to privacy against the government in the past. I am relatively certain that the warrantless chat control would not succeed at the national level in Germany. The question is how the BVerfG will react if the ECJ gives the green light to chat control. As I said, I still have hope.

New comment by bergfest in "EU age verification app not planning desktop support"

bergfest — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 15:38:53 +0000

I fear it is already too late, thanks to the phone duopoly and bulletproof secure boot environments. The EU can now make remote attestation mandatory by law.

New comment by bergfest in "EU age verification app not planning desktop support"

bergfest — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 15:27:55 +0000

We have to assume this is only the first step. The next step will be mandatory identity attestation for everything and your only choices will be to either accept it or not use any services at all.

New comment by bergfest in "Tell the EU: Don't Break Encryption with "Chat Control""

bergfest — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 17:45:49 +0000

Creating, exchanging and safe-keeping the keys is hard. But what if OS vendors would provide just that as a system level service?

New comment by bergfest in "macOS Tahoe"

bergfest — Mon, 15 Sep 2025 21:50:19 +0000

A small but important detail of Aqua was that the assumed light source was pointing straight down, whereas everybody else was usually using a 45 degrees angle. I wish Apple took a lesson from the old masters.

Also these colors make my eyes bleed. And the border radius is ridiculous.

New comment by bergfest in "Memory Integrity Enforcement"

bergfest — Tue, 09 Sep 2025 21:02:14 +0000

With EU chat control, the state will be on my device, having access to everything they want, decide what I can and cannot do. Once Google forces WEI on us, the whole web will get locked down. And secure boot and now MIE will make sure we can never take back our freedom.

New comment by bergfest in "Google can keep its Chrome browser but will be barred from exclusive contracts"

bergfest — Tue, 02 Sep 2025 21:16:31 +0000

They should be barred from shipping experimental or non-standardized features in Chrome to prevent them from abusing their monopoly and forcing others hands by creating de-facto standards without a fair discourse. Experimental features should be allowed in special Chrome builds targeted at developers only, and not be allowed to come preinstalled on any consumer device.

New comment by bergfest in "Bypassing Google's big anti-adblock update"

bergfest — Sun, 13 Jul 2025 17:53:42 +0000

Why not forbid them to ship any non-standard feature in their pre-installed default build of Chrome? Experimental features could be made available in a developer build, that would have to be manually installed in a non-obvious way, so that they cannot gain traction before standardization.

New comment by bergfest in "More assorted notes on Liquid Glass"

bergfest — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 06:09:35 +0000

Yes, I believe this is the reason. But it might backfire if people start to prefer Electron or Flutter apps over the native ones.

New comment by bergfest in "Liquid Glass – WWDC25 [video]"

bergfest — Sat, 14 Jun 2025 07:46:13 +0000

A little tongue-in-cheek speech was fine when done live on stage. But I certainly don’t enjoy their prerecorded videos anymore.