To me what’s wild about it is that it’s completely filled with houses, and the houses seem to all respect the orientation of the nearest street.

You’d think that they’d say “Ok, well in this section we have these two roads coming at a narrow angle, let’s just make this a park”, or something to make the places where the two grids join a little less ugly.

Europe is the only place that does care about international law.

“Black Lives Matter” is a movement that has traction because right now black people are being killed by cops. “All Lives Matter” is insensitive because it’s ignoring the urgent problem that’s affecting black people now. The trans-Atlantic slave trade ended centuries ago. There’s no urgency to address something that has been over for that long.

You might see what they’re doing as being pedantic, but I think you can acknowledge that the enslavement of Africans was a terrible crime against humanity without requiring a competition to see which atrocity gets the #1 spot. There’s nothing about what the EU said that comes close to saying they don’t want to take responsibility for what their ancestors did (although having said that, it’s ridiculous to ask that someone ever take responsibility for something their ancestors did).

You can “whattabout” this all you want, but that doesn’t mean that the declaration was a good one. It was a shitty one and shouldn’t have been put forward at all.

And non-thinkers will accept propaganda headlines and never employ any critical thinking.

The statement wasn’t about “condemning slavery”, it was “Declaration of the Trafficking of Enslaved Africans and Racialized Chattel Enslavement of Africans as the Gravest Crime Against Humanity”.

The EU voted against it because:

“First, the use of superlatives in the context of crimes against humanity is not legally accurate, such as the use of “gravest” in the title and throughout the text, which implies a hierarchy among atrocity crimes, when no legal hierarchy between crimes against humanity exists. It risks undermining the harm suffered by all victims of these crimes and lacks legal clarity crucial for ensuring accountability. We firmly reject introducing ambiguity in this respect.”

“Second, the selective inclusion of lengthy, historical, and contentious references to regional jurisprudence and selective and unbalanced interpretation of historical events - such as in Preambular Paragraphs 21 and 23 - is at odds with accepted UN practice, as well as the stated universal and forward looking objective of this initiative. It risks creating divisions when unity is both necessary and achievable. The role of the General Assembly is not to substitute itself to the academic debate amongst historians.”

"Third, we are also concerned by certain legal references and assertions that are either inaccurate or inconsistent with international law. This includes suggestions of a retroactive application of international rules which was non-existent at the time and claims for reparations, which is incompatible with established principles of international law. The principle of non-retroactivity, a fundamental cornerstone of the international legal order, must be strictly upheld. References to claims for reparations also lack a sound legal basis. Any framework for reparatory justice must be grounded in existing multilateral instruments. "

https://www.eeas.europa.eu/delegations/un-new-york/eu-explanation-vote-–-un-general-assembly-action-a80l48-declaration-trafficking-enslaved-africans_en?s=63

Pretending that not voting “yes” was refusing to condemn slavery is extremely disingenuous.

I think a lot of people use it instead of Iranian. Technically it might be an ethnicity. But, for example, I can find restaurants that advertise having Afghani food but no restaurants with Pashtun or Tajik food, restaurants with Syrian food but not Arabic or Kurdish restaurants, etc. But, while most restaurants go by the name of the country, not the ethnic group, there are no Iranian restaurants, only Persian ones.

AFAIK, a lot of Iranian-Americans go by “Persian” because there was already such a stigma associated with the name Iran.

He’s failing my secret purity test. I can’t tell you what the purity test is, because it’s secret! If I told you what my purity test was, he might find out and pass it. But, if he passed it because someone told him what it was, that wouldn’t count. So, all I can tell you is that he failed it! Trust me bro!

Epstein’s “day job” was being a socialite. He was the guy who knew everybody. If you wanted an introduction, he could do it. He was the guy who made sure that the riff raff stayed out, even if they were rich.

I’m pretty sure that everybody knew he was always around “young women”, but I strongly suspect that most of the people he interacted with didn’t know about the child sex abuse. They were there for his “rolodex”.

But, the end result is that because he was the guy who knew everybody in a position of power, his network shows who has the power. My guess is that at least half the people he had in his network were not into child sex abuse, and didn’t know that he was involved in that. But, I have only the world’s tiniest violin to play for those people. I think they’re guillotine-worthy because of their abuses of power, and how they hoarded obscene amounts of wealth. For far too long, the ultra rich have had a good public image in the US. People should have been furious with them just for hoarding all that wealth. And, the Epstein folks are the ones who not only hoarded the wealth, but spent it to gain power, which they used to warp society to benefit themselves. So, now everybody’s disgusted with them and hates them, it’s for the wrong reasons, but at least they’re hated.

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This is why lawyers advise clients to use a PIN instead of face ID or fingerprints

That’s because cops don’t need a warrant if you use a face or fingerprints, but they do if you use a PIN. What you’re talking about is for protection against casual, warrantless searches.

What I’m talking about is a subpoena where you’re required to present evidence. The fact that it’s encrypted is irrelevant. If the data is subject to a subpoena it doesn’t matter if you store it encrypted or unencrypted, you’re still required to present it to the court.

If you keep you stuff updated

Keeping stuff updated is a chore, and it can take hours out of your week, often when you don’t expect it or don’t have time. When that’s someone’s full time job and they’re updating it for hundreds, thousands or millions or people, there’s a better chance they do it right, and a much better chance that they do it in a timely fashion.

I am not your lawyer and this is not legal advice for you or anyone who reads this.

I hope you’re not anybody’s lawyer, with your lack of knowledge of the law. Did you graduate from Dunning-Kruger law school?

Communication that can’t be shut down: Matrix, Mastodon, email servers you control

Uh, those can all be shut down. You may control the server but you don’t control the datacenter the email server lives in, unless you’re hosting out of your house, which is a bad idea. You also don’t control the pipes to and from these servers. There have been many plans over the years requiring that ISPs ban users who are accused of copyright infringement. And, even if you don’t infringe copyrights, we all know about how the DMCA can be weaponized against people who have done nothing wrong.

File storage that can’t be subpoenaed: Nextcloud, Syncthing

Sorry, your own file storage can be subpoenaed, you just don’t have a lawyer on call to help you through the process. If you think “haha, I’ll just delete the data”, you can be in much worse trouble. AFAIK in some cases the judge / jury are allowed to assume that evidence that you deleted was incriminating.

I self-host things and think it’s a good idea. But, don’t go overboard with how good it is. It’s still vulnerable to government and corporate actions. in many cases you’re more vulnerable because you’re on your own, you probably don’t have a lawyer on retainer, etc.

They’re not going to patch the game with an update that removes the TOS, privacy policy and code of conduct now that the multiplayer elements are no longer relevant.

It makes it easier for your lawyer to organize the briefing document she prepares for you when she’s suggesting whether or not you agree to the terms of the contracts.

What, not everybody has their lawyer look over contracts they’re about to agree to? What, so they just act as their own lawyer and carefully review these legal documents without the benefit of a law degree? That sounds risky!

OP says it’s a single-player game, but it looks like that’s not the case. If it is multiplayer, a code of conduct is 100% necessary. The rest seems pretty standard for something online: privacy policy, EULA and TOS.

I wish EULAs would go away, or at least be heavily restricted in what they can force you to agree with, but they’re standard.

TOS is useful to define what you can expect out of their online service.

I also wish there were privacy laws, so the Privacy Policy didn’t force you to agree to absurd terms, but here we are.

In theory a smart fridge could be useful.

If it automatically scanned everything you put inside, it could tell you what ingredients you had if you were planning a recipe. If you were at the store you could know what to buy. It could warn you before something reached its expiry date, or remind you what leftovers were still uneaten. Depending on how much you trusted it, it could learn what you always buy, and add them to your shopping list when you were running low, or even actually order them.

In theory this could reduce food spoilage and wastage, and could save you money in the long term. It requires trust though. Samsung is obviously mistreating users by showing them ads. But, it could be much worse. The fridge could order food that the user didn’t need, or if it ordered food Samsung could strike a deal with one company and always prefer their brands even when there were cheaper options. And, of course, Samsung could sell your buying habits to Google and Meta who would use it to more effectively target you with ads. Or, Samsung could cut a deal with insurance companies to tell them which users had unhealthy eating habits so the insurance company could deny coverage or hike rates.

The big issue here is section 1201 of the DMCA. If that didn’t exist, someone could open up a business installing a new, custom, privacy-centric OS on people’s fridges. But, with section 1201 in place, that’s illegal and you could be thrown in jail for performing that service. Even outside the US laws like that exist because the US insisted on them on condition that otherwise the US would force those countries to pay high tariffs. Of course, now the US is jacking up tariffs regardless. I have no idea why no country has yet repealed their equivalent of section 1201. Whichever country does it first will have a huge advantage.

I don’t want to have to completely redo my whole email stack.

Web services, and then various components of an email system.

I’m using automated renewals.

But, that just means there’s a new cert file on disk. Now I have to convince a half a dozen different apps to properly reload that changed cert. That means fighting with Systemd. So Systemd has won the first few skirmishes, and I haven’t had the time or energy to counterattack. Now instead of having to manually poke at it 4x per year, it’s going to be closer to once a month. Ugh.

The front page of the web site is excellent. It describes what it does, and it does its feature set in quick, simple terms.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone to a website for some open-source software and had no idea what it was or how it was trying to do it. They often dive deep into the 300 different ways of installing it, tell you what the current version is and what features it has over the last version, but often they just assume you know the basics.