I notice there is no mention of a license, so this is not actually open source.

You can just ssh to the machine you want to run things on I think?

Is there a translation of https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence into Nepali yet, I wonder.

I agree. It should be that stores just provide enough dividers that the problem doesn’t arise.

Yeah but cashiers have eyes and can see that there is space behind the last item they are currently grabbing, I would think.

I use dividers when I can, but sometimes not enough of them are available.

In theory leaving a significant amount of space should give the cashier enough information, but then again, we don’t live in a world where everything is as it should be…

yup, that is why (if memory serves) the chat control proposal has rules in it that look like they were specifically written for messengers, the authors seem to have no clue that encryption can, you know, just be run on any device using publicly available algorithms…

The Internet has become popular enough that governments care about what happens on it. And it’s not just European countries, US states too (at least for age verification).

More specifically for your two points:

Encryption

It used to be that very little Internet traffic was encrypted, much less end-to-end encrypted. After 2013 (Snowden revelations), this changed, e.g. messengers started to E2EE, many more websites than previously started to use HTTPS. So all we are seeing now is the reaction to those positive changes…

Age verification

This has to do with mobile devices more than anything else. I think a lot of parents now just hand their children smartphones or tablets and may then be surprised that their children can then access things they don’t want their children to access. This was less of a thing in the desktop era because it was easier to see what children were doing online if it was happening on a huge computer in the living room…

Now personally I don’t think anyone (including young people) should ever be prohibited from watching or reading anything they actively want to see. For preventing young people from accidentally accessing porn, an “are you over 18” banner ought to be enough… I don’t think people who want to prevent that kind of access want anything legitimate. But you asked about why it’s happening now and not at another time and I think this is the answer.

Sidenote: I remember reading that when television was newly introduced in East Germany, it was still able to be somewhat critical of the regime; after some years, this stopped because a lot more citizens were able to watch it. The equivalent of that is currently happening to the Internet.

Money isn’t green everywhere in the world. Where I live, 100 euro bills are green, but all other bills are completely different colors.

MS already doesn’t have a monopoly in any meaningful sense anymore.

• https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-202507 - in early 2009, almost 95% of web usage was from Windows, by now it is at around 28%, no longer even the most popular OS, which is now Android around 42%
• https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-202507 - even looking only at the desktop and ignoring the shift to mobile devices, Windows fell from ~95% to ~72% during the same time period, mostly losing to macOS but more recently also Linux

Windows isn’t the main way Microsoft makes money anymore anyway…

I would have thought that by now, enough voting adults would have grown up also having watched online pornography when they were underage and realizing it didn’t harm them.

I have yet to read any coherent argument why any kind of media that young people actively choose to watch, actively seek out, would ever be harmful to them.

I very rarely remember my dreams but I definitely do remember that once a long time ago I did dream of making a forum post from my smartphone. So the premise is not correct for all people.

They come from completely different heritages.

GNU/Linux is a reimplementation of Unix, an operating system that was originally designed mainly for universities, but also mainframes.

Windows is descended from DOS, an operating system intended for home computers.

Nowadays Windows is the only widely used non-Unix-like OS; GNU/Linux, Android, macOS and iOS are all Unix-like.

If Windows became FOSS, I at least would likely switch to it. It’s really the FOSS philosophy more than anything else that makes me want to use GNU/Linux.

I don’t see any indication that it’s the games’ developers that are doing this.

Absolute trash article.

like most things on techrights.org; every time I read almost anything on that website, I agree with a lot of the substance and then wonder why it has to make that substance look so bad by adding inaccuracies and/or conspiracy theories into it.

annnnnd it’s bipartisan

The worst bills in the US Congress are always supported by both parties, I suspect so there is no way to vote against them.

Last one must have been GTA 4 (I’ve meanwhile bought this on Steam so I can play it without) or Crazy Taxi (came with a cereal box in my childhood).

This has been a thing since at least 2010 when it happened to WikiLeaks.

see also: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/congress-escalates-pressure-on-tech

so which is it, are you asking for a friend or for help improving this? :D