But… That would force them to provide a great user experience in order to retain users!! That’s an unacceptable burden on the largest companies in the world!!

Yeah. Honestly. For platforms like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, mandate chronological feeds of only people you have followed, paginated at like 30.

I feel like one could legitimately run on this platform at this point.

They saved lifes.

Glad to have cleared that up for you 👍

It’s just a helper. It’s a way for your calendar to ask “uhhh… Should I already know of any calendars…?” and the service going “oh actually yeah, the user configured their email account, hold on, here’s the corresponding calendar”.

That’s just basic functionality. Maybe what’s tripping you up is that it’s a separate service? Because I assume you have nothing against inputting your email into a mail client and a calendar separately.

If so, then for one, it’s not really a difference if the mail app stores this into or the service does; and second, it’s a good thing to have this standardized into a single purpose built service, rather than having each app reimplement this stuff.

CPU and RAM usage is so negligible it’s laughable.

IDK.

It seems like you read something about personal data in the service description and just jumped to the conclusion that this is something nefarious.

How exactly is it bloatware though? Not a KDE user myself, just had a look at the wiki. Seems it’s just a convenience utility to allow you to not have to enter the same things into multiple applications?

This is VERY different from pre-installed apps in your start menu that collect and sell info about you…

Yeah, thinking more about it, I don’t think the term “bloatware” (as it is commonly used) applies here at all.

How do I completely disable it forever?

To answer your question: sudo systemctl mask <servicename>.service

The much more common disable just disables autostart; masking will point the service file at /dev/null, which makes it impossible to load or start the service, even when other services or apps (like the clock widget someone mentioned in the comments) request it.

Neovim, configured entirely through nixvim. I always liked neovim, but it’s never been as incredibly stable as now with nixvim.

Main/only IDE both in private and at work. Can’t ever go back, muscle memory has ensured that.

No maybe just active poisons.

But again: I know this is unrealistic.

So for context, I actually drink, more than I probably should. I have a well stocked home bar, and trying or inventing new cocktails is almost a hobby for me and my partner.

I also come from a country with a veeeeeeery ingrained alcohol culture.

I’d still vote for an alcohol ban. Yes this is hypocritical when looking at my current habits. I don’t really have a point here, beyond saying that, even if banning alcohol is unrealistic, drinking alcohol being gone from the world is still a good idea in principle, the same as with tobacco.

Look at what happened with alcohol prohibition.

This is vastly different. Alcohol prohibition took alcohol away from people. This law does not. No-one who is currently smoking is being banned from doing so.

It also doesn’t have to work 100% to be a good idea. This will absolutely reduce the number of new smokers in the UK.

Comments in here really trying to argue for big tobacco, just because they don’t like the word “ban”. Edgy contrarians.

A lot of what has been coming from the UK government has been shit, but this is just plain GOOD. There’s no reason anyone should be smoking. This law prevents a new generation from becoming smokers. “Education” alone clearly hasn’t worked well enough.

I think the text is somewhat dubious in its arguments, but this (and the arguments built on this assertion) is just plain wrong:

[Signals servers have] a few important pieces of data;

Message dates and times Message senders and recipients (via phone number identifiers)

Signal clients implement the Pond protocol. As a result, Signals servers know who a message is for (obviously, how else do you get the message) but cannot know who it is FROM.

I’ve been playing around with implementing a secure/private messenger demo for myself, and have been consistently impressed with how privacy preserving Signal is when reading their papers and code. I wish it was selfhostable, but apart from that, it’s great.

The server would be NICE to be OSS, but ultimately, privacy breaches are prevented client/protocol side.

What’s the median though? Through burnout, chronic illnesses,… some people are out sick for weeks or months at a time. That moves the average significantly.

Also e.g. parents becoming sick via their children more than they would on their own. And so on.

In any case - this isn’t really an issue, is it? It has worked without issue for a long time. This is simply an attempt to reduce workers’ rights and reduce spending at the cost of the poor and middle class, because the top few percent are sacred to the CDU.

Ernsthaft :(

It’s used for when you are sick.

No. As the other person said. The answers to the zkp do not refer to each other. All the site knows is SOME user was not 18 yesterday, and today SOME user is 18 (or 24… or 89…). No relation between the two zkps/certs.

There isn’t one. Local, on-device zero knowledge proof in a cross-platform OSS app. You scan your ID’s NFC tag, once. Site only gets “is over 18 y/n” info. We all already have these IDs and they are used for a bunch of stuff, from doing taxes to creating bank accounts.

This doesn’t make a call to government servers.

The app (or desktop application BTW, incl. Linux) reads your national ID’s NFC tag, once. When you need to prove your age, the app locally computes a zkp that only tells the site “at least 18yo yes/no”.

Note that every EU country has a form of national ID, and the digital capabilities of these IDs are already used for a bunch of stuff (e.g. taxes, bank account creation,…). This doesn’t worsen the privacy situation for EU citizens, but instead ensures that no privacy-unfriendly solutions emerge.

Agreed. The “parents are too blame” crowd is insane to me. How are you gonna control what your kid does on the wifi hotspot Derek in the last row on the school bus created?

The app (open source, cross platform, completely locally, no photo id, no 3rd parties involved) only provides sites with a yes/no on “is person over 18?”, via an on-device zkp.

So good luck pitching a solution that is more privacy friendly than this, because this is pretty much the perfect solution. I’m honestly elated that the EU is releasing this, because it means I’ll NOT need to deal with privacy-nightmare situations like in other countries where legislation came before a technical solution. This lays a fantastic baseline for the EU to force companies to use THIS solution for age verification, essentially killing the data harvesters dead.

If you use nixos, you basically have to know/learn/use day-to-day the nix language.

nixpkgs are written using nix the language, using concepts mostly familiar from just using nixos.

Basically everyone using nixos is capable of contributing packages.