It all depends on your security model.

If you want to stuff some cash, you probably want that easily accessible.

If you want to hide something you’ll need in a few years, you’ll probably stuff it under a pile of junk.

If you want to make your family heirlooms safe until you reveal their location on your deathbed, planting a tree or building a house on top of them is a valid ultra-long-term option.

No. They want to protect themselves from… Their own security forces.

Yeah, checks out. Our little parlamentarians are all big pedos (at least the ones pushing for this shit).

There’s the EU-wide ePrivacy directive, explicitly stating (Art. 5):

Member States shall ensure the confidentiality of communications and the related traffic data by means of a public communications network and publicly available electronic communications services, through national legislation. In particular, they shall prohibit listening, tapping, storage or other kinds of interception or surveillance of communications and the related traffic data by persons other than users, without the consent of the users concerned

There’s also other EU-wide stuff, like:

Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (Art. 7):

Everyone has the right to respect for his or her private and family life, home and communications.

European Convention on Human Rights (Art. 6):

Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life, his home and his correspondence.

Then there’s the UN-wide Universal Declaration on Human Rights (Art. 12):

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence

And as if that wasn’t enough, most member states have confidentiality of communications codified in their constitutions. They are:

Belgium (Art. 29):

The confidentiality of letters is inviolable.

Bulgaria (Art. 34):

The freedom and confidentiality of correspondence and all other communications shall be inviolable.

Croatia (Art. 36)*:

Freedom and privacy of correspondence and all other forms of communication shall be guaranteed and inviolable.

Cyprus (Art 17)*:

Every person has the right to respect for, and to the secrecy of, his correspondence and other communication

Czechia (Art. 13)*:

No one may violate the confidentiality of letters or other papers or records.

Denmark (Art. 72)*:

Any breach of the secrecy that shall be observed in postal, telegraph, and telephone matters, shall not take place

Estonia (Art. 43)*:

Everyone has the right to confidentiality of messages sent or received by him or her by post, telegraph, telephone or other commonly used means

Finland (Sec. 10)*:

The secrecy of correspondence, telephony and other confidential communications is inviolable.

Germany (Art. 10)*:

Secrecy of the mail as well as secrecy of the post and telecommunications shall be inviolable"

Greece (Art. 19)*:

Secrecy of letters and all other forms of free correspondence or communication shall be absolutely inviolable

Hungary (Art. VI):

Everyone shall have the right to have his or her private and family life, home, communications and good reputation respected."

Italy (Art. 15)*:

Freedom and confidentiality of correspondence and of every other form of communication is inviolable.

Latvia (Art. 96):

Everyone has the right to inviolability of his or her private life, home and correspondence."

Lithuania (Art. 22):

Personal correspondence, telephone conversations, telegraph messages, and other communications shall be inviolable."

Malta (Art. 41):

No person shall be hindered in the enjoyment of […] freedom from interference with his correspondence.

Poland (Art. 49):

The freedom and privacy of communication shall be ensured.

Portugal (Art. 34):

Personal homes and the secrecy of correspondence and other means of private communication shall be inviolable.

The Netherlands (Art. 13)*:

The privacy of correspondence shall not be violated, […] The privacy of the telephone and telegraph shall not be violated

Austria, Luxembourg and France are outliers in that I didn’t find anything in their constitutions during my brief little search.

They shouldn’t.

Most include features such as a (subpar) news feed and weather.

These things are nice, but there’s no need for a launcher to have them. They can, and should be done by other, dedicated apps. Someone mentioned widgets, but the launcher doesn’t talk to the widget’s app via Internet… it talks to it via IPC (inter-process communication). Ergo, no Internet permission needed.

Same with keyboards. They give you access to stuff like “ID this song”, “get user-created themes” or “better swiping and handwriting recognition”, all the while doing god-knows-what with your data.

It’s basically a ruse. Give the users something thst needs the Internet permission, even if optional, so you can sensibly request it. Wheb you do, you get the unlimited, impossible-to-control permission (revokable only via ADB), allowing any and all Internet traffic.

As they say, “with power comes responsibility”. This is a lot of power. And most apps in the Play Store don’t give much confidence in their devs’ data responsibility.

You can try looking at Settings to disable Internet access, but YMMV depending on the exact flavour of Android.

I don’t think individuals should have to pay - even with their private data

Agree.

[…] and that means companies shouldn’t either.

Disagree.

Whn a person pirates, they usually do it for a) themselves, b) their family or c) a close friend. Some might share on a larger basis.

And other than that, they also usually use it for a) educational or b) entertainment purposes.

For companies, it’s alsmost always d) On a larger basis and c) commercially.

As most licences and contracts differentiate the two uses, so should the law.

The fact that I can download a book online and read it (sneakily, and technically illegally) doesn’t mean that if I became an AI LLC I could download it, along with thousands of others, to then sell as my AI’s “knowledge”.

Making that an AI’s knowledge is “storing in a retrieval system” and commercial use isn’t a free use criterion.

The true problem with (common law) copyright is the fact that it can be bought and sold. Or rather, the author doesn’t own it - the publisher does. Which goes against the initial idea of the author getting dividends from their works.

The EU is not an alliance, since member states give up a good portion of their sovereignty to the bloc. It’s much closer to a “loosely bound US” than a “NATO on steroids”.

It merely says “go European”, not “go domestic”. Of course you can join!

Eh. You might not, but the “normies” might. Expanding the userbase is always a good idea for open source projects.

He clearly needs his mornings to contemplate and relax so he can be infinitely more productive than the average peson.

If only everyone got to choose their schedules as freely and arbitrarily, everyone could be a billionaire like him.

They don’t need the data perpetually to train their AI. Just dump it once into the black box and be done with it - no need to save it for even a second. Of course, if they want to train and re-train, and perhaps build ad profiles, that’s a different matter.

Checked the site quickly and didn’t find the information, but judging by the top-level comment, they don’t charge you if you want to use their cloud service, but if you want to “unlock” the ability to use someone else’s.

Maybe those are imperial seconds and the ohers metric?

Probably “dumb” in the sense it doesm’t actively spy on you. Which is a god-awful definition of dumb.

Personally, I’d go with non-malicious, shortened to non-mal which basically loops back to “normal”.

When your job suddenly rolls out G-Workspace or Office Online without you knowing and you come to work to a Google account with all your personal data, already out of your control, is it really a choice?

Have a job or your data. The stakes are becoming increasingly high.

“If it’s useful, just use them” is an option, in some circumstances. In some, unfortunately, that doesn’t apply. Is keeping your job a “convenience”?

Don’t mean to attack you personally, just want to share my thoughts on the level erosion of privacy to Big Tech.

Ah, the third option.

Is that Motorola’s EULA or buying throug a carrier?

Cloased source does for privacy and security what sweeping problems under the rug does: it mitigates them, a bit, but then when they inevitably do hit, they hit hard.

About that. I heard somewhere wordpress.com and wordpress.org are seperste entities, one for-profit and the other not, but Wikipedia doesn’t mention why they share the same name.

Meh. CTU means stuff comes into e.g. Rotterdam and then easily wherever it needs to go from there, and complaining about “evading sanctions” seems to me like an exercise in futility.

About the Ribbon: Apparently M$ has a patent (or multiple ones on) it, so they ultimately have the last say on what is and isn’t allowed. They did make a licence availiable royalty-free, but I assume that that licence didn’t cover enough of what LibreOffice needed, so they probably struck a deal with M$ about having the option, just not as the default.

I haven’t researched this all that much, so mostly speculation. Although the M$ having a patent part of someting so true. And that patent (apparently) explicitly states that use in directly competing software with M$'s is forbidden, at least for-profit.

Idk, maybe it’s a case of patent restrictions, or LibreOffice being LibreOffice.

Honestly, a really interesting rabbit-hole.