thisislife2

Sure. But 25,000 (bot hits / day) x 50kB (static webpage) = 1.25 GB / day / page x 30 (days) = 37.5 GB of data transfer / month / page. And that's assuming a static resource - if any of the resource is dynamically generated by the server, there's a CPU and memory cost too. Overall, even if you treat the impact on the server as "negligible", it's still an unnecessary waste of resource was the point I was trying to convey.

Here's a more real-world projection of the cost and server impact - The Bandwidth Cost of AI Crawlers: What Scraping Really Costs Publishers - https://aipaypercrawl.com/articles/ai-crawler-bandwidth-cost

Good for him. One thing I don't get - if he won now arguing 'domain squatting', why didn't he argue the same before?

When did Airlines start scanning Bluetooth devices?

Just as criminal laws don't end all crimes, copyright laws and anti-scraping regulation won't end all scraping. But it will greatly reduce it and limit it to rogue actors. Two examples I can cite here are the laws against email spams and laws against unsolicited marketing calls - they had a definite impact in reducing both (even in India, from where I am, where implementation of laws are often lax).

True. But it still wastes your server resources, right? And it's sad that you have to accept that as part of the "cost" of hosting a site ...

The only solution is regulation. If all content created by anyone has a copyright, how does an implicit opt-in (which is what happens if you don't create a robots.txt file for your website) for scraping make any sense? Moreover, even if you have a robots.txt, AI (or whatever) bots often don't respect it (or use workarounds - they outsource scraping of such "restricted" sites to unethical third-parties to get the data; Meta has even resorted to piracy, openly!). So clearly, the logic and the "honour system" has failed.

Cloudflare, Google Captcha, HCaptcha etc. are all shitty technical solutions because, as we are all discovering, it comes at the cost of our privacy (i.e. our personal data may monetise these services) and / or our computing resource and time. If current copyright laws aren't sufficient to prevent this, we have to acknowledge the system is broken. The answer could be enhancing it with some kind of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) -like laws, but in favour of the creators against BigTech or rogue actors.

- Web-scraping and copyright law - https://www.neudata.co/blog/web-scraping-and-copyright-law

- Why DMCA Claims Against Web Scrapers Face Long Odds - https://capstonedc.com/insights/why-dmca-claims-against-web-...

I agree, but note that the article title may have been updated after OP posted here (see the Wired hyperlink).

Apparently chinese versions of ios (specifically for China) already have this feature because the Chinese government mandates it!

Apart from this, what is most needed in both platforms is an application firewall - not every app needs to be allowed to connect to the internet.

That's not entirely fair to the author as the article also states that the consumer being in control is a must:

> Every step subtracts a degree of sender control. Some of it passes to the user, and that is a good thing: a person deciding what is allowed to interrupt them is the channel working as it should. The rest passes to the platform, and that is the part that should concern a sender, because the platform's judgment is opaque, unappealable, and increasingly made by a model rather than by a setting the user chose.

A platform has essentially two "clients" - the user and the developer. Without both, it wouldn't exist. And it is in the interest of both that the platform should have very limited arbitrary authority over them. Nobody can deny today that the platform owners today have too much power over their users and their developers, which makes it easy for them to commercially exploit them while undermining their rights. We need regulations and standards (for interoperability, which is one of the arguments being made) to counter this.

Right. And in some ways, that is disappointing, and exasperating, at the same time. Strong privacy regulations would be a better way to go about it. (Note that this criticism is not specific to Netherlands - a lot of countries are, in my opinion, treating "digital sovereignty" as a matter of control between one or more countries and corporates without any real consideration for the individuals right.)

The Dutch should be aware that if Netherland has some information-sharing agreements with Five Eyes or Fourteen Eyes, all this data will still be available to the US (and other allies) (hopefully, presumably, with your government acting as the gatekeeper).

Maybe it's the pronunciation - ente means "mine" and ante means "yours" (in Malayalam) which is what perhaps you may be referring to? (Former South Indian kingdoms and South East Asia have historical cultural ties due to trade and conquest, and thus they share some common words, which I assume is, largely borrowed from Tamil and Malayalam).

It is as simple as that. They read the writing in the wall and knew that the native would take back power. They didn't trust, and want, the native blacks to have nuclear weapons. The whites in Africa still have deep political ties with the Anglo-Americans, and that's why we see Trump complaining about "white genocide" in South Africa.

More here: Microsoft reports are exposing AI's real cost problem: Using the tech is more expensive than paying human employees - https://fortune.com/2026/05/22/microsoft-ai-cost-problem-tok...

I would say that just the old "stupid" corporate practice of overhiring - for stock manipulation, reduce the talent pool for competitors etc. - Why Do Companies Overhire Just To Lay Off? - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCF78a2wTHM

The argument over the UI in GIMP and Photoshop is actually based on the kind of "false" premise that Photoshop has a "superior" UI.

It reminds of my first experience using macOS, as a long time Windows user. The first few months on macOS was a totally frustrating and negative experience for me - "What the ...? why does the ENTER key not open files or folders? Why is it going to 'rename' mode? Why doesn't double-clicking the title bar on a window maximise the window? Why are some windows maximised and others take their own custom width? Why is the Maximise button making apps full screen!?" - and so on.

The point is that I had become so familiar with the Windows UI, that every other OS UI suddenly seemed alien - "This is not how a UI should work on an OS". (This was also the reason that I hated Ubuntu's DE, as it tried to imitate the macOS UI I was then unfamiliar with). Familiarity means when you face a new UI, you have to spend effort to re-learn your way of thinking around a UI, which can be a frustrating experience (especially as you grow older). That effort / stress also unconsciously creates a negative impression in your mind about the UI. Both Apple and Microsoft know this and that is why they deliberately make their UI distinct and different from each other - whether it is Windows vs macOS or Windows Phone vs ios. Recently someone (a non-geek) asked me if they should buy a Macbook as they had an iPhone too. As they were a Windows user, I warned them that the macOS UI would be frustrating and to try macOS before committing to it. They did, and ultimately decided against it and chose to stick to Windows (buying a Surface Tablet).

As a former graphic designer, and an experienced Photoshop user, I only considered GIMP as a replacement when Adobe decided to make it a subscription. And just as with Windows to macOS, re-learning to use the GIMP UI was a frustrating experience because I was always thinking of "this is how it is done in Photoshop". Once you let go of that "familiarity", and are willing to actually test if the "GIMP way" is maybe better, it becomes a less frustrating experience. (All that said, while I have got used to using the GIMP tools the GIMP way, the overall GIMP layout does have a cluttered feeling and I do recommend installing Photo GIMP - it won't really make GIMP a Photoshop clone, but it will make it more "familiar" and thus easier to "re-learn" how to use it).

PC's that can be upgraded form the bulk of the second-sales industry and don't end up in the landfill for a few more years because they can be upgraded / repaired and used for a few more years.

That's the "minor" exception I mentioned. But, as you must be aware, there is also a strong political campaign in Israel to remove this exemption. This is also likely to be a major political issue in the upcoming election.

Good effort! Did you consider using Netsurf codebase ( https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ ) or contributing to it? (The website is outdated but the development is ongoing and active).

Why does the controller need to be on the SoC when the market already has SSDs with built-in controllers that follow a standard and allow you to easily replace it?

You are concerned about 2 sticks of RAM as "e-waste" (even though it can be reused), but not about a whole Mac ending up as an e-waste because it can't be repaired or run other system softwares?

Bloated Electron / WebView wrappers also tout the feature of running on macOS - and many are forced to use such apps on the mac too ... what then? Apple deciding how much RAM is "enough" for you is based on the use case it has decided for each category of the device. If that isn't sufficient for you, you are supposed to buy the more "premium" edition, even if your use case for that is rare. Imagine if you suddenly need more RAM for a popular app 2 years down the line but you can't really do anything on a Mac now a days because the RAM is soldered and fixed. Buying upgrade-able RAM is obviously much cheaper, and much better for the environment, than buying a whole new device.

That's an acceptable compromise to get a system that can be upgraded and / or repaired. Apple already charges a "premium" so nobody (except their shareholders) are going to cry if they make a dollar or two less on each device because of this. Customers do care about such things when they decide to upgrade their device or, more importantly, when they have to repair it.

And to think that in the 1920s, doctors prescribed cigarettes for weight loss. And now the tobacco industry is moving on to weed, and repeating the same marketing tricks that they used to sell cigarettes nearly a 100 years back ...

Just a thought - stop bloody soldering the RAM and the SSDs. That partially transfers the burden on to the customers and makes their product more repairable ... Mac Minis (with un-soldered RAM and HDD / SSDs) used to be sold with minimum 4 GB RAM, if I remember right). This, way, you can still sell devices with lower RAM, and customers can upgrade in the future when supply increases.

I once got abuse from an Income Tax official for claiming that an email with the details they requested had been sent to them, as the official opened Outlook and searched for it in front of me and couldn't find it! Had to convince the guy to try multiple different keywords before it luckily emerged in the search results.

It's a country with two power centres and two national armies. Thus, "divide and rule" politics works exceptionally well there and no one should be surprised their lack of political unity is working against them. While the Lebanese army has no love for the Israelis they are acting under US pressure and advise to not get involved as Hezbollah is taking the brunt of the attack, which the US and some Lebanese political actors hope will hope weakens it enough and eventually lead to its merger / absorption. It's an idiotic way to think of, ofcourse, because there is no guarantee that the US and / or Israel are likely to stop the war (or their ethnic cleansing / genocide), or stop making political demands on Lebanon once the Hezbollah is gone. The loss of Hezbollah fighters will mean Lebanon's military actually becomes weaker.

In some ways, Israel is a military State because everyone (with some minor exception) is required to serve in the military. If everyone is a trained soldier, the only true civilians are the children ...

Both are true. Firefox could be so much better and innovative with the amount of money it has but ...