Valve: “We need a credit card on file to prove you’re 18”

Me: “My account is 23 years old”

Valve: “That just proves your account is old”

Me: “A credit card just proves you know someone with a credit card”

🎉 The critical amendment 34 (rejecting automated assessment of unknown photos and texts) PASSED by ONE vote, paving the way for the extension of Chat Control 1.0 to be overwhelmingly REJECTED!

Initial analysis by @echo_pbreyer : https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/end-of-chat-control-eu-parliament-stops-mass-surveillance-in-voting-thriller-paving-the-way-for-genuine-child-protection/

April 6, 2026, will mark a historic turning point. The European Parliament has ended Chat Control 1.0—the proposed legislation that would have mandated mass scanning of all private messages across the European Union.

For two years, the debate raged. Proponents argued that mass scanning was necessary to combat child exploitation. Opponents—including digital rights organizations, technology experts, and millions of ordinary citizens—argued that security cannot be achieved at the cost of freedom, and that infrastructure designed for mass surveillance inevitably expands beyond its stated purpose.

Germany became the center of resistance, joined by Austria, the Netherlands, and the Czech Republic. Their constitutional arguments, combined with public pressure and technical evidence about the impossibility of mass scanning without destroying encryption, forced the European Commission to retreat.

What does this mean for ordinary people? Starting April 6:

Email remains private correspondence, not subject to automatic analysis

Chat messages will not pass through AI filters

Personal photos and videos will not be automatically scanned

Encryption remains the foundation of digital privacy

This victory proves that civil society can effectively resist government and corporate efforts to establish total control. But experts warn that new versions of Chat Control are already being prepared under different names with similar objectives.

Privacy is not a state. It is a constant process of defense. Today, we won one battle. Tomorrow, we must remain vigilant.
https://newsgroup.site/eu-chat-control-1-0-ended-privacy-victory-2026/
#ChatControl #privacy #digitalrights #EU #surveillance

It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.

How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.

But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.

@pluralistic this is one of the things I like about the open social web, you can get multiaccount apps. Imagine one where you can search for a ride on Uber, Lyft and any local coop!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.plebstr.client&hl=es

RE: https://flipboard.com/@citylab/all-stories-erfg9ejaz/-/a-kBjkRm9rTKG0hofputZsqA%3Aa%3A910330703-%2F0

Link to the full text and photos:

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-paris-transformed-hidalgo/

"Visitors will discover that it’s a dramatically different place than a decade ago: lines of bikes and throngs of pedestrians where lanes were once jammed with cars, greenery encroaching on former pavement, summer swimming in the once-grimy Seine river — and a corresponding drop in air and water pollution."

#Paris #cycling #bikes #mobility #velorution #AnneHidalgo

software is a mirror that reflects the times and the environment it was created in.

this is why much software created in the 1970s counterculture was joyful and humanistic, and why much software created in the 2020s capitalistic hellscape is soul-crushing malware (adware, spyware).

#retrocomputing can mean celebrating hardware limitations and creative coding, but it can also mean celebrating personal computing - computers that are tools for liberation - bicycles for the mind, not cattle trains to the slop farm.

We signed https://keepandroidopen.org/open-letter/ ! We strongly believe open ecosystems are of paramount importance for user freedom, and that is currently in danger for Android.

As a free software project we can’t stand silent; we voice our support with other projects, and invite more to join us.