🚨 UK Online Safety Act in the EU - starting now? 🚨

It appears I had suspected right and big platforms will think the UK Online Safety Act equivalent for the EU has already been decided by the EU commission in July 2025, with a deadline of July 2026 (a few days). At least Reddit acts like it: https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/50368431806484-European-Union-Digital-Services-Act-DSA

I talked about all of this here on lemmy, with more detailed explanations: https://leminal.space/post/31858818/21120139

How all of this went for the UK previously: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/aug/09/uk-online-safety-act-internet-censorship-world-following-suit https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/11/6/britain-calls-it-safety-it-is-censorship

I'm worried this might be the beginning of the end of anonymous public discourse in the EU...

For anybody reading in the EU, consider emailing one of your representatives and demand they undo this age verification surveillance stuff: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/#delegates (Site is unrelated, it just happens to have a list of representatives.)

For anybody in the US, find your representatives here: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm Since the US has similar plans: https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-don-t-force-age-checks-online

A curious response on the lemmy bug tracker... https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-docs/issues/413

Disclaimer: please don't go and harrass anybody, if you happen to reach out to anybody in any way please be calm and constructive.

The world we're building for [...] Software will be built by machines, directed by people. AI is the substrate on which future software gets built.

AKA

The world we're building for: SLOP

At least this is how this reads to me: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-act-2/ They just released this some hours ago.

If anybody is self-hosting GitLab here, then have my condolences. A possible alternative might be Forgejo.

You might find this write-up on the EU age verification plans interesting. It links the actual EU plans with quotes from them, too.

(Sorry if I'm posting this in the wrong community!)

A Raspberry Pi 5 I use (not the one in the photo) fell off the table, and the black square component pointed at by the arrow was straight knocked off the board. Yeah, if you needed a reason why you should always use a case, this is one, ooops lol...

It looks like it came off cleanly, leaving two square metal pads below. I still have the component, the small black box. This happened while the Raspberry Pi was running, and the power LED went from green to red in an instant. Afterward, booting was no longer possible. So, my questions:

1. If this happened while it was running, is it likely that this fried something else and it's not worth getting fixed? Or is this likely fixable?

2. If I want to get this fixed, how do you guys find a good local repair shop? I heard some apparently do sloppy soldering jobs, and given the RAM prices I would like not to have this Raspberry Pi unnecessarily damaged further if it's salvageable. I live in Freiburg im Breisgau in Germany, if anybody knows good local places.

The Linux Foundation apparently thinks you can look at a snippet real hard for a minute or so, and you'll magically figure out if it's stolen or plagiarized from somewhere. Otherwise, I don't understand how their policy would possibly work. It's not like they're linking some sort of plagiarism checker, and as far as I know, those aren't reliable anyway.

Does somebody understand how that's meant to work? I'm curious. If I'm judging them too harshly here, I would like to know.

Sadly, it seems like Lemmy is going to integrate LLM code going forward: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/6385 If you comment on the issue, please try to make sure it's a productive and thoughtful comment and not pure hate brigading.

Consider upvoting the issue to show community interest.

Edit: perhaps I should also mention this one here as a similar discussion: https://github.com/sashiko-dev/sashiko/issues/31 This one concerns the Linux kernel. I hope you'll forgive me this slight tangent, but more eyes could benefit this one too.

Firefox is trying to gain back user trust with this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=O-xyNkvIB9g

This is a legit question: Should anybody trust Firefox again unless they put "we won't sell your data" back into the privacy policy? I'm actually not sure if they haven't already done so, let me elaborate:

https://brave.com/privacy/browser/ Brave: "We do not sell, trade, or transfer your information to any third parties." This seems to obviously be in the legally binding text part. As is this one: "It’s Brave’s policy to not collect personal data1 unless it’s necessary to provide services to our users, or to meet certain legal obligations. We do not buy or sell personal data about consumers." (Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer.)

However, for Firefox it seems ambiguous to me, which worries me: https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/privacy/firefox/#notice There is no appearance of "sell" in the entire privacy document, excpet for the top summary where i'm not sure if it's at all legally non-binding.

Does anybody know if it is legally binding? If Mozilla were serious about it, why would they leave it ambiguous whether it is...?

Based on that, I'm not sure if Mozilla's video about getting users back is worth trusting. I wonder if it's just me.

Update for clarification: I'm not using Brave myself, and this isn't a suggestion anybody should blindly do so.

Interesting video on why apparently moltbot and other AI agents are dangerous. I'm not an expert but it seems quite concerning, especially the prompt injection. (I assume amplified by the issue with current LLMs apparently being unable to think logically: https://www.forbes.com/sites/corneliawalther/2025/06/09/intelligence-illusion-what-apples-ai-study-reveals-about-reasoning/ )

Sorry if this is considered off-topic or was posted before.

Here's a sourced article that actually shows the hands-on seeming plagiarism of AIs, how common it is, how the logical reasoning seems to be lacking, and so on. I thought perhaps people here would find it useful to convince friends that are misled by the AI craze.

cross-posted from: https://leminal.space/post/24911246

I'll be self-hosting a service with user submissions soon, so I'm worried about the https://howto.geoblockthe.uk/ situation.

Based on this I've wondered, are there any community maintained geo block lists that might be useful? All database options I found are either 1. an on-demand online service which seems questionable for privacy reasons, or 2. IPv4 only, or 3. have weird terms of use with a gag clause regarding the entire company making it and other weird stuff.

I'm not a fan of geo blocking in general, but the situation is what it is.

PS: Please don't discuss the Online Safety Act itself too much in the comments, or whether somebody should be using a geo ip to handle this. While I might appreciate useful input on that, I'm hoping this post can remain a resource for those who are looking for such a database for other reasons as well.

My apologies, since this post actually contains a swear word, id...t, which I'm going to censor. But this came up with a test reader of a text I'm working on:

You id...t actually find her fascinating, don’t you?

A test reader thought this sounded weird and unusual. So I went to research uses by others, and indeed, almost nobody says this!

This confuses me, since I find tons of uses of:

• This id...t actually is...

• These id...ts actually are...

• You id...ts actually are....

...but not for this singular form as a direct address.

Is there something grammatically wrong with it? Is it valid, but for some reason people prefer You id...t, you actually are... anyway?