'Extrajudicial killing' is just an apologetic euphemism. An indirect term, since murder is usually considered to be a bad thing.

Of course, whether or not to use a VPN always depends on the specifics. (threat model, circumstances, VPN provider, etc.)

I am with the biggest telecoms provider in Germany, and I trust them about as far as I can throw them.

They are known for censoring their DNS servers, being opaque about government requests, and creating artificial bottlenecks to extort money from companies in order to avoid throttling.

Implementing end-to-end encryption on relevant communication services could mitigate many risks that come with hosting user content.

It would protect users from Big Tech spying and still allow affected users to report if something sketchy is going on. Best of both worlds.

In any case, it would be a good start.

Anyone who’s ever been unable to dismiss a nag and forced to defer via "Ask me later" knows the feeling of powerlessness and disenfranchisement deliberately planted by those making UX decisions. .. or the EU constitutional framework.

I do not think our parent is suggesting otherwise.

AFAIK Motorola and GrapheneOS are not merging, they are getting into a partnership. They do not have to think or do exactly the same.

Apple can comply with both CCP and US demands at the same time without a problem. I am sure Motorola can adjust their services to the markets they are working in, as well.

In regulated industries, like finance and taxation, regulators deliberately assign responsibility to individuals, so misconduct doesn’t get lost inside the company or within its corporate stakeholder network. That removes a lot of friction once you want to hold someone liable.

I've read our parents comment as an implicit proposal to establish similar structures in tech.

Since rare handles can generate high prices and are returned to auction once the buyer fails to meet their obligations, Twitter has a strong incentive to increase the number of handles in its auction pool.

The relevant product manager has probably ranked existing attractive handles according to their expected mobilisation/outrage potential and started confiscating handles from the bottom of that list.

This is probably also why you won't be notified about their auction of your handle, even though you'll receive email alerts for irrelevant stuff all the time. The process looks designed to be stealthy.

Money really is the trivial Occam's razor explanation here.

The EU just managed to postpone chat control for a bit, and my own country has found a renewed passion for punishing expression crimes (so-called "Äußerungsdelikte") through various legal and pre-legal means.

Social, legal or technical centralization is not a solution to any issue related to public discourse, and Euro-nationalism is not a wise concept. It will simply make us another economic bloc, just with an older population than the others.

Contrary to the current zeitgeist in the EU, power should be dispersed as much as possible. We should embrace global open-source initiatives and work towards a European Union that open-source projects (and tech companies!) want to organize under because of our superior regulatory frameworks, not subsidies, legal pressure, promised government service demand or political initiatives.

We already have a lot of failed political initiatives, so why not try the organic, good governance approach for once?

Instead, we just create more bureaucracy and red tape. This absurd CRA nugget is a good example for our european style tech regulation for open source: https://cra.orcwg.org/faq/stewards/

(rant over)

edit: A good - allthough unfortunately German - recent essay on the German speech issue might be: https://netzpolitik.org/2026/grundrechte-wie-polizei-und-jus...

Maybe wait for the next terror-attack before pushing for it, but it's an easy fix to a culture that already accepted a layer control against the user. The end user will only perceive a small difference in whether they provide full ID or just verified age information.

I want to believe that some supporters of age verification are not cynical. However, whatever good can be achieved through age verification seems such a small win, compared to the dangerous precedent it sets for the internet in general. I cannot get my head around it.

Lenovo is not going to change that, nor will they ever make a phone that is better at being a Samsung phone than Samsung.

I think that in the current smartphone manufacturer landscape, being an underdog kind of requires serving niche segments.

I did the same with about the same amount of accounts and it took me the better part of a Saturday. Even if you were really slow and needed five minutes per account, 200 accounts would still only take about 17 hours.

I don't think that's a lot of effort. You could easily spend that time fixing something around the house or garden, which often might not have nearly as big of an impact on personal agency.

A key feature of Obsidian is that it stores your notes in an open folder structure on your file system.

A very valid question is whether there are benefits to using a special note sync application rather than a standard file system sync application, and if so, what those benefits are.

However, if you export your Grok account information via the Settings menu, it will export your information, including a risk score not exposed by the browser UI. You can try it yourself.

I wonder if this risk score is compiled based on any content you produce, or if it's informed by other factors, such as VPN or app usage.

We should probably avoid posting shallow dismissals and remember that a good critical comment teaches us something.

Additionally, as your comment leaves readers wondering which parts of the divided comment section you deem "worthy of HN" and which you do not, I cannot help but think of this ambivalence as a method to spark reactions. Another word for this method would be "to bait", I think.

I own a reMarkable 2, but I fill it via RCU [1]. I will absolutely not buy into yet another opaque cloud offering in 2025.

edit: The project you linked looks interesting, though!

[1] https://www.davisr.me/projects/rcu/

For example, I would have liked to see more specifics on what they define as censorship in terms of scope.

Mainstream discourse in Germany is very conservative when it comes to defining censorship. They would hardly name de-ranking, deplatforming, intimidation, exclusion from the financial system, or even full control of information by private organizations as censorship. Government-enacted media bans, such as the Commission banning Russian state media, are rarely viewed as censorship by Germans. ( https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-rt-sputnik-illegal-eu... )

I'm not trying to make a value statement in one direction or the other, but if your communication product addresses a market or seeks to tie into public discourse, it should be in touch with its concepts.

This is true, although it is a good start, right? If a cultural practice has survived for many generations, this alone already indicates that the practice might be compatible with human society, morals, sustainability, etc.

> We also shouldn't confuse self-mutilation with healthy activities like exercising simply because both "shape one's own body".

True! We should indeed not confuse self-mutilation with healthy activities just because they share some similarities.

But would you classify scars or tattoos motivated by aesthetics as self-mutilation? What about piercings, such as holes for earrings or laser hair removal?

I believe that is an interesting and unusual position. Do you have an argument in favor of your (so far implicit) take?

Interesting. Why?

Isn't it a common and longstanding cultural practice, even among indigenous peoples? Intuitively, I'd say body modification is based on the desire to shape one's own body, something we usually embrace in fitness culture and medicine, for example.

I don't have any tattoos or scars, but I can't think of anything that would make them questionable.

Perhaps some of the objection arises from a confusion between body modification and self-harm?

While I do not agree with your take, FWIW I found your comment substantive and constructive.

You seem to be making two points that are both controversial:

The first is that generative AI makes the availability of lyrics more problematic, given new kinds of reuse and transformation it enables. The second is that AI companies owe something (legally or morally) to lyric rights holders, and that it is better to have some mechanism for compensation, even if the details are not ideal.

I personally do not believe that AI training is meaningfully different from traditional data analysis, which has long been accepted and rarely problematized.

While I understand that reproducing original lyrics raises copyright issues, this should only be a concern in terms of reproduction, not analysis. Example: Even if you do no data analysis at all and your random character generator publishes the lyrics of a famous Beatles song (or other forbidden numbers) by sheer coincidence, it would still be a copyright issue.

I also do not believe in selective compensation schemes driven by legal events. If a legitimate mechanism for rights holders cannot be constructed in general, it is poor policy craftsmanship to privilege the music industry specifically.

Doing so relieves the pressure to find a universal solution once powerful stakeholders are satisfied. While this might be seen as setting a useful precedent by small-scale creators, I doubt it will help them.