Weird. The article does have today’s date but only mentions the Nov 10 decision. I think maybe what happened today is the publication of the full text of the decision?

It’d be great if that was how it works, unfortunately it seems like the penalties are closer to once every 3-5 years than monthly, skewing the balance even further to “screw the law, just pay the fee”:(

I’d say that’s a huge problem actually.

For a normal company, abusing data is a small part of their business and profit is a few percent of revenue, so such a fine would be devastating.

For some tech companies, profit is in the double digit percent of revenue and half of it comes from breaking the law, so the 4% are a tax they can happily pay and still be more profitable than if they followed the law.

Same misleading nonsense. If you follow the links it becomes obvious that it’s the old news banning FB from using the data on the basis of contract and legitimate interest - which they’re avoiding by claiming “consent” after people choose that they’d rather not pay a triple-digit amount per year to use the site.

No, the article is just regurgitating old news and the old misleading claim (omitting the critical part that they’re only banned from using data “on the basis of contract and legitimate interest”).

This “news” is what made Facebook start with the “agree or pay” bullshit.

Sometimes they also came up with literal malware as DRM.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal

Piped experience: page loaded, play button did nothing. After a large number of taps it finally played, for about 20 seconds, then reloaded mid-play.

Imagine, 100 people trying to load a video from your single hard drive, it’s not fast enough for that.

YouTube 1080p is 8-10 Mbit/s according to what I could find. That’d be 100-125 MByte/s for 100 people. I think my SSD is more than fast enough for that.

Even better, a 1 Gbps connection is also (just) enough to actually upload the video to those 100 people.

And with 100+ people watching, P2P distribution should work really well too.

They might be able to relay them in a way that the end to end encryption is actually handled on the phone and the relay only relays encrypted messages.

That would likely still give them a capability to MitM but it’s plausible that they couldn’t passively intercept the messages.

I don’t understand how many business practices by airlines don’t result in criminal charges. Selling so many tickets that you know you will occasionally fail to fulfill your contract should be fraud. Jail time for leadership and full reimbursement of all damages (e.g. private air taxi to still make to to the destination on time) would quicky make the airlines competent at finding voluntary agreements that make everyone happy.

Likewise, deciding that a flight isn’t profitable and cancelling it - WTF. That’s called making a bad business decision, you eat the cost. You don’t just decide “eh, let’s just not” and leave people stranded because it’s cheaper.

Most importantly, they don’t let you substitute a different passenger. If you get sick and can’t make your flight, but your friend wants to go instead, you have to let your ticket go unused and your friend has to buy a (now much more expensive) last minute ticket.

I didn’t check for this one, some news communities require it, some don’t.

Still shouldn’t reward news sites for doing this unless you want more clickbait titles.

If the community allows, posting with a better title is also an option.

Thanks. (Clickbait title = article downvoted)

One conspiracy theory I like is that it’s a measure against people working at two companies, collecting two salaries.

The Iron Dome is there to stop rockets, not cars and paragliders. (The latter could potentially change.)

Any air defense system is vulnerable to saturation.

I’m not gonna risk my computer by turning off my ad blocker, but I wonder if that article comes with exactly the kind of chumbox ads that they’re rightfully criticizing.

It’s unclear and as I said, some privacy regulators are saying it’s OK. Hence the need for clarification.

Unfortunately, due to lack of clarity (and lack of clarification), many DPAs (privacy regulators!) have explicitly declared the “pay with data or money” model OK.

Google may have been one of the very few cases where a meaningful fine was given. For almost everyone else, blatantly breaking the law paid off big time.

GDPR has turned into a joke due to lack of enforcement (partially due to Ireland serving as a “privacy violation haven”). For years saying “no” to tracking required many clicks, and I don’t know of any companies that received penalties that would exceed the extra profit they made from that. Even blatantly illegal schemes where not agreeing locked you out of the web site usually didn’t get punished.

Many sites still don’t get proper consent, and also check out what many consider under “necessary” or “legitimate interest” cookies/tracking that you get after you said no. In hindsight, breaking the law was the only smart thing for sites to do, and many did.

Then, this bullshit. GDPR and the original explanations were pretty clear that the intent was to ban this kind of “agree or pay” scheme, and here we are. Of course they’ll do it, because they win either way. Either it’s considered legal, or there are no meaningful consequences…

This is not the only thing where the EU moves at a snails pace, ignoring that industry is making a joke out of well intended regulations. Many praise the EU for making Apple adopt USB-C. What they miss is that the attempts to standardize chargers started in 2009, when most manufacturers, Apple included, promised to agree on a standard, and then the EU let Apple dance on their nose flying loopings though loopholes for 14 years. That’s right. Apple introduced Lightning after they were supposed to standardize, and the EU let them.