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Comment by gattilorenz | Hacker News Reader

For the fellow Europeans that cannot read the LA Times: https://archive.fo/heTle

I am curios what things the la times is doing with the data it collects that it still after all these months has not been able to offer a GDPR compliant page.

I suspect that the LA Times, like various other online publications, has simply made the decision that they have approximately zero economic benefit from having EU readers. They're an essentially local newspaper.

Therefore, it's not worth any staff or contractor time to figure out what GDPR compliance would mean. Maybe they're GDPR compliant today. Maybe not.

But it's pretty understandable why they might choose to simply geo-block the EU to send a clear signal that they're not marketing to the EU. They can't keep EU residents out of their site but this approach would seem to be a pretty good low-effort approach.

As an aside, I can see now that laws around the world like this will be what breaks up the internet, to the extent that isn’t already the case.

There is a risk. Google and Facebook won’t pull out of Europe. But to the degree there’s too much divergence of laws and regulations affecting smaller sites I could definitely see fragmentation happening.

I've oft wondered if we'll ever see any big discussions (i.e. Not just some random person's blog post) of post-Westphalian sovereignty applied to the Internet. Maybe GDPR is something that will kick that nest.

An assumption I have is that so much news on these sites comes down the wire from AP, Reuters, et al. that there’s little to no value in catering to that audience when plenty of compliant websites over there will be doing it better already. So I’m kind of repeating what you say there.

While at odds with the value of the internet, it is understandable that they decide that their business isn’t really in global news/reporting to international audiences and GDPR is a reason to focus on what works better for them. Before then it was purely incidental.

Conversely I actually kind of like this; it's far too easy as a Brit on the Net to end up with a US-heavy worldview and supply of news. If it's really of global importance I should be able to get it from local coverage or some other route.

This site can’t provide a secure connection archive.fo uses an unsupported protocol. ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH

Remember when the web just worked?

No, I remember an absolute load of ways it didn't just work, or worse, worked in silently incorrect or insecure ways. I think you get my point so I'll leave out the laundry list of things I remember being broken throughout the history of the world wide web. A TLS error here and there is not so bad :)

> Remember when the web just worked?

I don't think there's ever been a time where incorrect webserver configurations like that were impossible to make.

I remember when pretty much everything was http rather than https. It's better now.

How?

Why do I need an https connection to read a newspaper?

Herd immunity is one perk.

It prevents anyone between you and the newspaper from inserting some js to turn your machine into a cannon targeting someone else.

"Need" may be a bit strong, but there are positive security externalities.

When has this ever actually happened? Would be curious if there are any good case studies.

go read: verizon supercookie

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

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