It’s not a problem if you’re into

• (leftist) US politics
• Linux and other IT topics
• Star Trek
• German Memes

As soon as you try to talk anybody else, you might find you struggle to have a community large enough to sustain a conversation

You could add UV lights to it to blind the camera. But you are right these don’t have that. This is just a (I think very funny) marketing stunt.

where are you getting this from? dislikes where? because youtube doesn’t show dislikes. yes, there are extensions that restore that function. but those extensions are extremely imprecise, because they project the numbers based on the like to dislike ratio of their users. But even if I grant you that there where a lot of dislikes, why would you disable dislikes, if they where never displayed in the first place?

All of which brings me to believe that you are lying.

To be fair, the system in question does the math for you. It is still contra to European tipping culture though.

The vote was framed as stopping the automated renewal of an existing law.

So in favour means “in favour of not having mass surveillance”

My guess (which I admittedly haven’t checked) is that that’s also why a simple majority wasn’t enough (because they essentially would have been overturning law)

I mean, we don’t know for sure since WA is closed source. But group chats are supposed to be encrypted. You’re thinking of Telegram.

Signal instead of WhatsApp is generally a good idea, but WA is not covered by this law as they are end to end encrypting all messages. Switching to Proton Mail would help, using a VPN (most likely) would not.

What changes with the return of Chat Control 1.0—and what stays the same:

• What is coming back: US tech companies are once again allowed to scan private messages without a warrant or prior suspicion. This affects direct messages on platforms like Instagram, Discord, Snapchat, Skype, and Xbox, as well as emails via Google’s Gmail and Apple’s iCloud.
• What remains unchanged: Public social media posts and files hosted in cloud storage could already be scanned without this law. Furthermore, private messages can always be reported by users, or monitored by authorities using targeted, court-ordered wiretapping.
• What is still NOT being scanned: End-to-end encrypted chats, such as those on WhatsApp, have always been exempt from these scans. Additionally, European providers of messaging and email services have never implemented chat control measures.

Some countries even explicitly allow you to break DRM to make a backup copy of your physical media.

To pick one country, Germany for example: There it’s called the “right to make a security copy”. Paragraph 69d (nice) of the copyright law states:

The creation of a backup copy by a person authorised to use the programme may not be prohibited by contract if it is necessary to ensure future use.

That means physical copies have, legally speaking, an endless shelf life.

Flatpak

There’s also SoftMaker Office

It’s not open source and it costs money, but it’s European (German) and it has really good MS office compatibility

Sort of… It’s a different company that bought the name years ago when the old Atari went bankrupt. Technically it’s a French publisher formerly known as Infogrames.

Blizzard’s position is that the subscription is for the use of the client as well as their server. A private server allows you to play without an active subscription, thus piracy.

The way I see it there are two possible reasons:

1. incompetence: The statement in question was said by ESA’s vice president for state government affairs, in other words a professional lobbyist. Video games are her day job, not her hobby. I don’t know how much she actually plays herself. It may therefore be the case that she wasn’t briefed properly or she got confused. The ESA is currently persuing legal action against certain private servers after all. The article contains specifics on those but in short: Those servers enable piracy, the Minecraft ones don’t.
2. they are lying: the whole thing was part of a hearing on Stop Killing Games. Private servers are one of the ways to fulfill their demands. It is the industry’s position that implementing those is too complicated. Each instance of private servers existing weakens the argument. So better pretend that those don’t exist. After all gamers won’t even learn about this statement. It’s a random California state senate hearing. They don’t watch those!

And they’ve been successful with that strategy (for now)

Regardless, the Protect Our Games Act did not make it out of this stage of the legislative process. With four aye votes, three noes, and four abstentions, it failed to accrue the majority of ayes necessary to pass. Nevertheless, it has been granted a reconsideration, so it’s not the end.

Elmo’s, diegeticaly (as in “in universe”), canonically (as in officially) three and a half years old. So if he was mentioned, it would have been as a victim.

There are even solutions that automate a lot of the configuration for such a setup. I’m using Pangolin for example:https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin

But you could set up something like this manually if you want more flexibility (pangolin is based on traefic rather than Nginx)

It’s not really about fair use because European law doesn’t really have that as a concept. I’m talking about contract law, since licenses are contracts. Now, I’m not a lawyer and shit gets complicated real fast but basically EU law states that contracts need to be fair. Unfair clauses are invalid (again really simplifying here). SKG argues that this is the case for games.

Almost correct. The process of creating a new law in the EU is the following:

1. The Commission proposes a law
2. Parliament and the Council rewrite the legal text handed to them from the Commission
3. The three bodies find a compromise between the original texts and their respective edits

Since the Commission refuses to do step one the initiative plans to get parliament to get the desired changes into a law that’s currently at step two (the digital fairness act). So it’s still a new law that’s not yet in effect and the process is technically shorter (because we are skipping step one)

OK, I’ll bite.

Even Value has tried to argue that Steam is a subscription service and that you don’t own Steam games but rather licenses to games on Steam.

If you open a printed, physical book, you’ll likely see something like this printed on the first page: “copyright [author name], all rights reserved”. If the book was printed in the last year, it might also include language explicitly forbidding AI training and other forms of data mining.

If you look at the back of the packaging of physical movie releases (so for example a DVD or Bluray case) you’ll find find something like “this movie has only been licensed for personal used. Public exhibition is not permitted”

Because media has always been licenced. The question therefore is less about license vs ownership and instead about what makes a fair license. SKG argues, that the licensing as it currently exists is deeply unfair. Unfair enough that it possibly already violates EU law. That’s what the lawsuit in France is about.

A group could take SWTOR, add content, and have people donate/pay for it despite the IP holder not wanting their IP used that way.

Not really. The game has, as you yourself noted, been licensed to you. The granted rights don’t include commercial activity. Publishers could even put the videogame equivalent of the language from the movie cases into their licenses to spell that out.