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Which, in my opinion, means that the blame should really go the app developers of these apps.

Who are those people that think it is a good idea to send your medical details (the article also mentions "Flo Period & Ovulation Tracker", which apparently sends whether you may be ovulating to Facebook) to a third-party, let alone Facebook?

(Actually, at least for Android apps there is a answer to who these people are... and there are quite a lot of them: https://reports.exodus-privacy.eu.org/en/trackers/66/)

I like the idea, but there still seem to be some glitches: When I look for VPSs with at least 5GB RAM, I get a lot of VPSes with 1.5GB RAM (e.g. https://www.serverhunter.com/?search=D21-C9F-3C1).

Also, when you use the "reporting" feature, the report seems to get sent, but submitting it clears the "Issue description" field which is then highlighted in red which at first made me think something went wrong... Probably it should just close the modal window after the submission?

> Yeah, it was just a coincidence that when China stated opening up their markets that their quality of life improved immensely and hundreds of millions are lifted out of extreme poverty. When you're talking about economic success in general then you can't forget the ex-Soviet states either. The ones that embraced free markets the most recovered the most.

China is interesting because you can really use it both ways: Free market enthusiasts will argue that China took off after it embraced free market reforms. State intervention enthusiasts will argue that China has been so successful because it is still very far away from the "free market policies" which e.g. the IMF is pushing on poor countries. In particular it has totally not opened up its capital markets or many of its import markets.

And the same holds for the ex-Soviet economies, too: The ex-Soviet economies that have done best are those that have joined the European Union, which most people especially on the American right would not exactly call a free market paradise.

For me, the answer to this apparent contradiction is actually quite simple: as so often, the answer lies in the middle. Total deregulation and extremely opening up your markets probably is not a good strategy to quickly pull your country out of poverty. But too much state intervention is at least as big a recipe for disaster.

Also, I would add that the optimal level of state intervention probably also depends a lot on how corruption-free your government is: with a very well functioning, corrution-free bureaucracy, you can operate effectively at a higher level of state interventionism (e.g. Scandinavia, Singapore) than if you hand that power to corrupt and/or inept officials.

To be fair, Hickel is discussing the different poverty lines because he is refuting an explicit argument from Pinker in his letter:

> "2. The level at which one sets an arbitrary cutoff like “the poverty line” is irrelevant — the entire distribution has shifted, so the trend is the same wherever you set it."

Hickel argues (using data) that this statement is at least not qualitatively true, as the trend is quite different if you set the poverty line at higher level.

> If they're not paying and blocking ads, they're not customers. And if they weren't willing to pay for Spotify, why would they suddenly be willing to pay for Apple Music?

Well, because they have been terminated by Spotify, of course. I mean, it is pretty easy to imagine that your preferences are "free Spotify with blocked ads is better than Spotify / Apple Music / etc. for 10+$", but that after the "free with blocked ads" option disappears you will (grudgingly) end up paying.

And the right move by Spotify would be to support this transition in a way that does not drive this business to their competitors. If you end up moving these people to choose between "ok, now I have to contact customer support to get my account unblocked so that I can then start entering my credit card details" versus "ok, I can just use this big 'Start Free Trial' button here on Apple Music", I don't think that is a very difficult choice.

Also, while Pi-Hole might be quite niche, the point I was trying to make was more that many people use adblockers (about 20% in Europe[1], far bigger than a rounding error), but many of those probably don't do so specifically for Spotify, this is just a side-effect of running Spotify in the same browser. So they might be amenable to a warning that they should disable their adblockers on Spotify, while just terminating their accounts will just drive these users to competitors.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-percentage-of-Internet-use...

I think it will all depend on how this plays out in practice. For now, this is only some fineprint in a ton of other legalese that might or might not be used in the future.

I mean, if they show you a notification that you should really sign-up for a paid subscription or disable your adblocker, this does not really seem a big deal for me and all right for Spotify. However, if they terminate your account because you happened to use Spotify for a while on a system with adblocking enabled (does being on a Pi-Hole network count?), I am wondering if they won't just drive a lot of potential customers to Apple Music & Co, which is the last thing they need right now... I mean, if they would terminate my account like this, I definitely would not come crouching back to them asking for mercy to be allowed to sign-up for a paid subscription. I mean, I do have some dignity left.

(I usually use Spotify using their apps, so without ad-blocking, but I cannot guarantee that I haven't been using their web player from time to time, too, and of course my browser has an enabled ad-blocker. I don't pay for Spotify because I buy my MP3s and use Spotify primarily to discover new songs.)

I'm not sure the comparison to the phone company is very applicable. This would be the case if Patreon would be a pure payments proessor, like Mastercard or Visa (or maybe Stripe). But Patreon provides pages on their own website within their own brand identity for these creators, stores their digital media, promotes them through their search interface etc.

In my opinion, Patreon is more akin to a newspaper deciding which ads to show next to their articles or to a shopping mall deciding which shops to rent space to. And of course every newspaper will reject ads that would infuriate their readers (or journalists) and shopping malls will not rent to businesses that might damage their reputation (depending on how "upscale" it is this might be everything from soup kitchens over gambling outfits and payday lenders to brothels).

Now, you might disagree with them whether they have drawn the right line there and consequently take your business elsewhere (just as you might not want to visit a shopping mall with the wrong mix of shops), but I find it a bit of a stretch to frame this as a "free speech" issue.

Salaries especially for specialist jobs tend to be quite a bit lower in Germany (as is the case in Canada) than in countries like the U.S. or Switzerland which have much less generous parental leave, though. Of course, parental leave is just one variable here, but in a way this is the obvious trade-off: You can have more parental leave and lower salaries, or less parental leave and higher salaries. (The same is true for all other non-monetary benefits of a job such as job protection etc.) On a country-level, both options can work equally well.

Me, personally, I would pick the "more parental leave and lower salaries", but I get that other people might feel differently.

(Edit: This cuts the other way around, too, by the way. Often people in Germany will complain that people across the border in Switzerland -- or in Silicon Valley -- will earn much more, but they ignore that working days are longer, with less vacation time, less parental leave etc.)

To be honest, I was quite surprised because I heard that Der Spiegel has an „extraordinary reputation“ in the U.S. for the first time today on HN.

I am German and even when I went to school (before the „life-sucking Internet“ from a comment below) there was the saying that all you could trust in Der Spiegel are the dates and numbers (although this article suggests even that might be too much).

IMHO, there are much better German-language news sources out there (Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine, Süddeutsche, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Brand Eins, to name just a few with differing political leanings).

These accounts are not being taken down because „they want to sow discord“, though, and rightly so: what „sows discord“ is highly subjective and not a good criteria to take anything down.

They are being taken down because they are (allegedly) faking who is behind those accounts (i.e. they are fraudsters with political instead of financial motives).

There is Pleroma, which aims to be a Mastodon-compatible platform which will run even on a Rasperry Pi: https://pleroma.social

It also separates front- and back-end, so it might come close to your „server-only“ idea.

> OS fragmentation: doesn't apply if you're not a developer, just pick a phone that will have a reasonable amount of updates over its lifetime

Can you make a recommendation here? I am an iPhone user who might be inclined to switch to Android, but I still haven't found a phone that would satisfy this criterion. To clarify: "reasonable" for me means ~5 years, as this is how long I expect to keep using the same phone.

Mathstodon is cool, and it allows LaTeX formulas in your toots: https://mathstodon.xyz/about

And if you are into data science and especially data visualisation, also check out vis.social: https://vis.social/about

Both are also well run, IMHO.

There exist quite a few attempts at this and most work pretty well in my experience:

- Publibike in Switzerland (publibike.ch) operates your idea of cheaper docks: they are just a metal sign next to parking space with some (bluetooth-like) electronics in them to communicate with the bikes. You can only return your bike at one of these parking spaces. At the same time, they avoid the cost of installing fixed docks for each bike. They had some problems with their locks on the bikes not working properly, but these seem to be resolved and otherwise they work really well IMO.

- INDIGO weel (https://www.indigoweel.com/) is a free-floating system, but not totally free floating: you can only return your bike in GPS-fenced "allowed areas", which should be bike parking spots, avoiding the chaos of completely free-floating bikes. As GPS fences are quite broad, this doesn't work perfectly but it helps. Some of the schemes operated by Nextbike in Germany also work like that (they also operate with fixed docks in some cities, though).

I prefer these dock- or semi-dock-based systems to the totally free-floating ones, as if you know where the docks are its much easier and more reliable to actually find a bike there. Especially if you are travelling in a group, it will be a challenge to "collect" enough bikes with a free-floating system (unless you have so many bikes standing around on the streets that they become a public nuisance).

Nevertheless, I do not think judging free-floating systems by oBike is a good idea: oBike was uniquely bad in many respects (the quality of the bikes, the lack of local staff and support, the lack of GPS on the bikes, the need for a deposit etc.) and other free-floating schemes such as Limebike seem to work quite well.

I was looking for that a while back, too, and a Wikipedia search led me to BlueGriffon (http://bluegriffon.org/), which (through various forks like Nvu etc.) was apparently originally based on the "Composer" part of Netscape / Mozilla.

Well, that's why they don't want to limit Android's market share, instead they want to open up Android licensing restrictions.

In particular, the EU alleges that if you want to install Google Play on your phones, you need to sign a license agreement which also forces you to: a) install Google Chrome; b) make Google Search the default search engine; and c) not sell phones with Android forks at the same time ("Anti-Fragmentation Agreement").

They want to force Google to allow manufacturers to more freely chose which apps to pre-install and also to be able to offer Android forks in parallel to "Google-finish" Android.

I'm not sure if this will really be good for consumers... I would argue that most smartphones have too much crapware on them, not too little. On the other hand, the Microsoft Internet Explorer unbundling case arguably helped fuel the success of Firefox in breaking the IE dominance, which I would argue was good for consumers.

Well, the European Commission alleges that Android has an 80% market share in Europe:

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-16-1492_en.htm (fifth paragraph)

But for this case, they are using a definition that makes Android even more dominant: they allege that Google restricts device manufacturers' freedoms. And from a device manufacturer point of view, Android has a 90+% market share of "licensable smart mobile operating systems", with "licensable" being key: as a device manufacturer, you cannot use iOS, so that doesn't count if you buy into this line of argument:

http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-16-1484_en.htm

While the trend is correct, I would argue that the original authors statement that this is due to Chrome having been "a faster, more secure and versatile browser" is omitting the elephant in the room:

The main reason for Firefox's (and IE's) decline IMHO is the pink line "Mobile vs Desktop" in the chart you linked to. People won't bother installing a different browser if the one that comes with the device they use is halfway decent (on iOS, they don't even have a choice). And so as more and more browsing comes from smartphones and tablets, more and more people will use Chrome (Android) or Safari (iOS).

Unfortunately, this is quite a depressing finding for Firefox, because it means that all technical enhancements will not be able to move the needle much. (The rise of Firefox on the desktop was arguably helped by the EU requiring Microsoft to implement the browser choice window in Windows; unless something like this comes along for the dominant mobile platform(s) it will be an uphill struggle.)

Edit: And the move to mobile might even affect desktop browser usage because of things like link- and password-syncing. If you use Chrome on mobile, you might want to also install Chrome on your PC to be able to sync your settings across.

Are you sure this isn't some Firefox add-on that you are using that is causing this? (E.g. uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger or activating Firefox's built-in anti-tracking protection or maybe just blocking third-party cookies; which could be solved by whitelisting the problematic webpages.)

I am using Firefox exclusively and I rarely find sites that don't work with Firefox after I disable blocking extensions.

I don't think that running your own cloud server is a feasible strategy for most people who put hobbyist content out on the Internet. You are over-estimating the technical abilities of many people here, I believe.

So the next best thing to achieve decentralization is federation: what Mastodon (joinmastodon.org) and to a lesser extent PeerTube are successfully implementing. This means most people will still entrust their content to third-parties, but there will be a lot of these third-parties which federate among each other and you can pick e.g. the Mastodon server of your local hackerspace or the PeerTube of your university to publish content.

And this is why these proposed new EU rules are so horrible: because they won't "punish" Google or YouTube so much (after all, they already have a lot of licensing arrangements and automatic content filters in place) but they will kill off your local hackerspace's Mastodon instance: because they now either would have to pay a lot to a) lawyers, b) content ID providers, c) link licensing services or face lawsuits.

So in my opinion these laws are actually horrible for decentralizing media...

Of course, that‘s the point: with photoTAN et al. it will request a one-time token for each wire transfer, and the token is based on the information (amount and recipient) of the transfer, which the user needs to confirm on its 2FA device.

Even TOTP is not a good 2fa system for a bank login, at least if that account allows you to send money somewhere: TOTP codes do not differentiate by transaction type, so if a fraudster has taken over your computer, it can wait for you to login using TOTP and then send a wire transfer in the background (using the same TOTP quickly enough if necessary or just asking you to log in again, pretending your first code was wrong).

That’s why proper banks should use 2FA mechanisms that will ask the user to confirm the transaction on a second device (e.g. photoTAN or similar).

Of course, this won’t help against attacks if both devices are compromised or you are using the second factor device to access the system, but it’s still better than TOTP.

And, of course, TOTP is still way better than SMS 2FA or no 2FA.

I think it depends a lot on the country you are in. In many European countries, the SMS is practically dead: in Germany or Switzerland it's all WhatsApp these days, with a bit of Telegram or Signal mixed in. Given this, I was surprised to discover how many people are still sending SMS here in Canada.

I think it has a lot do with mobile carrier pricing: here in Canada, mobile fees are enormously expensive, but SMS are almost always included for free. In Germany/Switzerland, many people use prepaid cards where SMS are (still) charged per message.

There are a lot of other cloud providers in Europe besides OVH and Hetzner:

- Upcloud (based in Finland)

- Cloudsigma (based in Switzerland)

- Deutsche Telekom TelekomCLOUD (based in Germany)

- Online.net / Scaleway (based in France)

- Aruba Cloud (based in Italy)

- Swisscom (based in Switzerland)

- etc.

Unfortunately none of them offer the breadth of services like Google Cloud, Amazon or Azure, but they most likely will be more than enough for many purposes.

I think the author misses a key ingredient when he talks about the “lack of skills”: German companies are notoriously stingy (or frugal, however you want to call it) when paying their engineers. Combined with a hesitation to greatly differentiate pay between great and average staff (due to culture and also the “Gesamtarbeitsverträge” between employers and unions), this means that really great and innovative employees will be able to earn far more in nearby Switzerland or far Silicon Valley. I’m always a bit sceptical when (allegedly free-market loving) managers talk about a skill shortage: remember, economic theory states that in a free market there will be no shortage, because prices will rise to accommodate supply and demand.

Just in case anyone is reading here first and because this could really hurt the business: The infoteam.ch people have stated above[1] that the provider was not Metanet.

(I do think, however, that it would be important to know.)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16529273

I like the way it works in France: There, many coffee shops have set-up co-working rooms, which are separate rooms where you can rent a place by the hour.

Yes, it is a bit more expensive (usually ~20$ for a day), but you get the same "coffee shop experience" and don't have to feel guilty or obliged to eat/drink (often not so healthy) stuff all the time.

Some points (probably not complete):

a) You can ask your trading partners to trade with you in your own currency, which eliminates currency risk for your companies. E.g. an American company can just sell their stuff for a fixed USD price, and their trading partners will have to take (or hedge) the risk of their currencies fluctuating against the USD.

b) You will have lower borrowing costs for your government debt. If your currency is a reserve currency, that means that many foreign central banks will hold your currency as currency reserves. And they won't stash cash in their cellars, they will buy your government debt (e.g. Treasuries). More people buying your debt means lower borrowing costs (and thus interest payments) for your government.

c) If you control a currency that is used for international transactions, this gives you extra-terrestial legal leverage over the parties of these transactions. The U.S., for example, uses its "ownership" of the USD to enforce their sanctions regime and other laws: many banks e.g. in Europe will not process your payments to Cuba (particularly not in USD!), even though there are no European sanctions against Cuba, just because they can't afford to lose access to USD clearing in the US and thus don't want to risk antagonizing the US.

d) You can borrow internationally in your own currency. This is not an important thing for China, which has huge reserves, but it will be for other countries. If people don't trust your currency, you will have to borrow in USD or another foreign currency. This means your country can go bankrupt: If you are running out of USD / EUR / etc. you can't service your debt anymore. If you borrow in your own currency, you cannot really go bankrupt: you can always just print more money to service your debt (this will have negative effects such as inflation, of course, but it might be less catastrophic than a default).

And what's worrysome for Amazon is that in this case it is just a small step to go a bit further: If you don't care too much whether the item is junk, you can just buy it on AliExpress. Most likely it will be cheaper than Amazon and at least you know that you have opted for the "cheap and often junk" route.

Can you elaborate on the laws you mention a bit? I understand that there are requirements for organizations (GebüV and VAT-related laws), but for people? Which documents do you need to store physically as a private individual in Switzerland?