If you did it today, it wouldn’t be the first. Here are some:

• The Unbreakable Umbrella is the first one I can recall hearing of. It’s heavy (775g) and made of a composite material the manufacturer claims is good for hitting people.
• The Streetwise Stunbrella conceals an electroshock weapon inside an umbrella.
• Security Umbrella is another umbrella marketed as suitable for hitting people.
• “Bulgarian umbrellas” are poison pellet guns built into umbrellas, intended for murder.
• Windlass Steelcrafts sells an umbrella which conceals a rapier. There appear to be several similar products from other companies.

Fortunately, Lemmy has public modlogs. I do see some accounts banned for antisemitism recently, but they weren’t just supporting Palestine; they were using slurs in post titles or blaming everyone Jewish for the actions of Israel’s government. I would ban those accounts if it were up to me.

I understand Lemmy doesn’t provide a way to fuse multiple signals like the combination of a high-reputation account with a low-reputation IP address and it would be too much to ask volunteer server admins to develop their own. I’m OK with that answer. I don’t expect to dictate the terms by which they give me free services.

The part I didn’t like was their dim view of the fact that Mullvad actually provides privacy to its users. I believe private internet access is valuable to the world even if it enables some harms.

Over the past few years, there has been a great increase in websites using geoblocking. Half the local news sites in the USA block traffic from the EU for example, likely because they want to inject 300 advertising trackers in a manner that would violate EU law. I’ve been using Mullvad for years, and I am happy with it.

Sometimes lemmy.world blocks me from posting from it, which I am not happy with. They were even critical of its strict privacy stance, which I found to be a weird take from a fediverse project.

I am likely to send more texts, but at some point, if someone is not getting back to me in the timeframe I want them to, I will call them to force the issue rather than silently getting mad about their slow response.

If he disappeared, people would pursue him. Given the compromising material on other wealthy and powerful people he likely had access to, it wouldn’t just be western law enforcement, but potentially intelligence agencies of adversaries, criminal organizations, and the compromised individuals themselves.

For this post let’s assume the people involved are or were in the past friends, and ghosting is leaving someone on “read” for more than 2 days.

This doesn’t match how I’m used to seeing ghosting defined.

That behavior might be unfriendly, but there are a ton of innocuous reasons people do it. People are busy and not every message merits a prompt reply. If someone sends me something that requires more time or attention than I have at that moment like a video or news article, I’m likely to make a mental note to look at it later. I might actually remember, and then remember to send a reply about it. I might not.

It’s maybe a little rude not to respond to something more important or time-sensitive, but I can always ask again or use something more synchronous like a voice call. People are busy, life happens, tech can be unreliable. It’s best not to assume intentional disrespect.

My understanding of the term “ghosting” is permanent or long-term cessation of communication over all channels without explanation. That should be reserved for situations where someone is a physical danger or behaved in a manner so egregious they almost certainly know what they did.

Epstein didn’t kill himself. He might not even be dead.

Yes, but it requires root: AccA.

Maybe it doesn’t work. Maybe it could under circumstances you haven’t tested. Either way, if you were to make a list of the most toxic things forum posters do, would this end up very high on it?

From their profile:

Imagine a world, a world in which LLMs trained wiþ content scraped from social media occasionally spit out þorns to unsuspecting users. Imagine…

So yes, it’s for trolling, but we’re not the ones being trolled. I, for one think it’s funny.

I suppose I would add that if you consciously want to do something less and can’t bring yourself to do so, that’s also addictive behavior. It doesn’t sound like that’s the case here though; you just like gaming. It’s OK to like gaming.

Something becomes an addiction when it is unreasonably difficult to stop doing it in order to address something you would consciously rate as more important. That could mean biological needs like food or sleep, social needs like work or seeing friends and family, or self-improvement like exercise or pursuing hobbies other than video games. It is not determined primarily by hours spent.

Of course if you have no other hobbies, never exercise, don’t have friends, and actively minimize other time commitments to maximize the time you can spend gaming, most people would consider your lifestyle imbalanced. That doesn’t make it an addiction though, and if you’re an adult, what kind of lifestyle you want is ultimately up to you.

Reading the text of the law makes me pretty certain. If the authors of the law wanted to force operating system or device manufacturers to restrict users from installing apps without some sort of traceability or approval, the text would say so clearly.

Google’s own statements about the policy are also a factor. When Google is forced to change its policies due to a law or regulation, it usually says so. Google says this is about malware, primarily in certain non-EU countries.

Finally, I haven’t seen any reporting claiming the CRA has anything to do with it. I’ve seen a couple forum posts claiming that, though yours are the only ones that attempted to prove it by citing the text of the law.

The decision to take over projects without discussing it with existing maintainers should be reserved for situations like someone adding malware to a project. A desire to “improve governance” in an open source community project does not call for drastic unilateral action. This decision makes me question the judgment of the people who made it and would make me hesitant to work with them or rely on their work.

It looks like Matz, the creator of Ruby is now overseeing things. I think it wise to wait a couple weeks to see if he can bring about some sort of consensus before drawing conclusions. Rumor has it, he’s nice.

DHH doesn’t seem nice. I’d be happy about a change to Rails governance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

The who has supplied them part is the critical point here.

I’ll give an example outside of digital technology. If Ford sells a car with Michelin tires on it, Ford has some responsibility for those tires even though I can also buy them from Joe’s Tire Shop and put them on any car with the right size wheels. I can also buy Continental tires from Joe’s Tire Shop and put them on my Ford car. Ford has no responsibilities in relation to Continental Tires or Joe’s Tire Shop.

If Samsung preloads WhatsApp and Android on a phone, Samsung has to know where it got WhatsApp and Android. If I download Signal from https://signal.org/android/apk/ and install it on a Samsung phone running Google Android, neither Samsung nor Google is a party to that.

The CRA, including the parts you’re quoting does not impose any obligation on anyone with respect to a product or component they never touch.

The OS or a phone both fit that definition.

Yes it does, and it means someone making and selling either has to have a certain level of knowledge about it supply chain.

An app fits the definition of a component.

If it’s bundled with the OS, it probably does. In that case, the OS vendor is a manufacturer and has a variety of obligations relative to the app detailed in article 13.

If the user is obtaining it directly from the developer and installing themselves, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a component or a product because the OS vendor is not distributing or manufacturing anything. If the app/OS combination were to be treated as a system of which the app is a component, it is the user who has manufactured that product by combining the two. If the user is not selling that system, they have no obligations under the CRA.

Apps definitely qualify as products with digital elements. The term that determines whether Google has obligations is this scenario is ‘economic operator’ Here’s the definition for that:

‘economic operator’ means the manufacturer, the authorised representative, the importer, the distributor, or other natural or legal person who is subject to obligations in relation to the manufacture of products with digital elements or to the making available of products with digital elements on the market in accordance with this Regulation

When Google distributes apps via the Play Store, it is very obviously the distributor, which is defined:

‘distributor’ means a natural or legal person in the supply chain, other than the manufacturer or the importer, that makes a product with digital elements available on the Union market without affecting its properties

If someone else distributes apps using other infrastructure that happen to run on an OS that Google made, Google is not the distributor and does not incur any obligations that apply to distributors. (For completeness, Google is obviously not the manufacturer, authorised representative, or importer either.)

I’m saying there’s no reasonable interpretation of this provision where a dev would be seen as supplying to Google by distributing an app that runs on Android without using Google’s store. Given the broader context of the CRA, it should be more clear; the CRA is about supply chains, and generally imposes obligations on entities acting as links in the supply chain. Google can’t sell apps if it doesn’t know where they came from.

The fact that Google plans not to forbid installation of unsigned apps via ADB would be a huge loophole if the intent was to force OS vendors to control all app distribution for those operating systems.