> If that's all they offer, it's on the companies to implement a fallback for edge cases like these.
These news articles and the adjacent online discussion are textbook warfare psyops 'nudging'.
Doesn't matter if you are real/bot, being payed or not. The discourse is now changing the goalposts to focus on the details of OSA implementation, not OSA itself. Mission acomplished.
It's on governments to stop pushing legislation that slow boil us into autocracy. It's on us to not be ok with that.
This is (mostly) about Tech companies' money, namely:
- Palantir Technologies
- 'not-for-profit' Thorn
> The Commission’s failure to identify the list of experts as falling within the scope of the complainant’s public access request constitutes maladministration. [0]
> ... the complainant contended that the precision rate of technologies like those developed by the organisation are often overestimated. It is therefore essential that any technical claims made by the organisation concerned are made public as this would facilitate the critical assessment of the proposal. [1]
> The Commission presented a proposal on preventing and combating child sexual abuse, looking in particular at detecting child pornography. In this context, it has mentioned that support could be provided by the software of the controversial American company Palantir... [2]
> Is Palantir’s failure to register on the Transparency Register compatible with the Commission’s transparency commitments? [2]
(Palantir only entered the Transparency Registry in March 2025 despite being a multi million vendor for Europol and European Agencies for more than a decade)
> No detailed records exist concerning a January meeting between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the CEO of controversial US data analytics firm Palantir [3]
> Kutcher and CEO Julie Cordua held several meetings with EU officials from 2020 to 2023 - before the former stepped down from his role - including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson, and European Parliament President Roberta Metsola.[4]
> The Ombudsman further concluded that Thorn had indeed influenced the legislative process of the CSAM regulation. “It is clear, for example, from the Commission’s impact assessment that the input provided by Thorn significantly informed the Commission’s decision-making. The public interest in disclosure is thus self-evident. [4]
> EU Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly has announced that she has opened an investigation into the transfer of two former Europol officials to the chat control surveillance tech provider Thorn. [5]
The EU is by far one of the least corrupt and most transparent organizations in European History, by design and by process.
The fact that I am able to produce all those reference documents in the previous comment is substantial evidence of this.
The issue here is the European Comission. Both in the appointment of Commissioners as well as in the checks and balances against the Comissioners and President of the EC.
To be anti-EU is throwing the baby with the bathwater and more seriously plays into the hands of every geopolitical player around us.
I don’t dispute that we can dig up documents after the fact. That’s not the same as being transparent by design - that’s damage control.
The Ombudsman’s findings themselves show maladministration, secretive lobbying, and conflicts of interest. That’s not a healthy system keeping itself in check; that’s outsiders catching it after the harm is done.
Saying ‘it’s only the Commission’ is like saying ‘it’s only the engine’ when your car catches fire. The structure allows it, the culture rewards it, and the safeguards are paper-thin if not non-existent.
If the EU really is ‘the least corrupt in history,’ then why are Palantir and Thorn shaping surveillance laws (terrorism dressed as such) in back rooms while the public only finds out years later - and law enforcement looks away? That’s not just a bad apple problem - that’s systemic rot.
Plenty of EU states already have a constitution in which this proposal would be de facto unconstitutional.
The issue is what is the European Commission willing to do in order to guarantee that fat contract check goes to Palantir or Thorn or whoever has the best quid pro quo of the day.
This is not Stasi this is Tech billionaires playing kings and buying the EC and Europol for pennies on the dollar and with it the privacy of virtually every citizen of zero interest for law enforcement or agencies.
The online Stasi analogies are simplistic. This is (mostly) about Tech companies' money, namely:
- Palantir Technologies
- 'not-for-profit' Thorn
> The Commission’s failure to identify the list of experts as falling within the scope of the complainant’s public access request constitutes maladministration. [0]
> ... the complainant contended that the precision rate of technologies like those developed by the organisation are often overestimated. It is therefore essential that any technical claims made by the organisation concerned are made public as this would facilitate the critical assessment of the proposal. [1]
> The Commission presented a proposal on preventing and combating child sexual abuse, looking in particular at detecting child pornography. In this context, it has mentioned that support could be provided by the software of the controversial American company Palantir... [2]
> Is Palantir’s failure to register on the Transparency Register compatible with the Commission’s transparency commitments? [2]
(Palantir only entered the Transparency Registry in March 2025 despite being a multi million vendor for Europol and European Agencies for more than a decade)
> No detailed records exist concerning a January meeting between European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and the CEO of controversial US data analytics firm Palantir [3]
> Kutcher and CEO Julie Cordua held several meetings with EU officials from 2020 to 2023 - before the former stepped down from his role - including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson, and European Parliament President Roberta Metsola.[4]
> The Ombudsman further concluded that Thorn had indeed influenced the legislative process of the CSAM regulation. “It is clear, for example, from the Commission’s impact assessment that the input provided by Thorn significantly informed the Commission’s decision-making. The public interest in disclosure is thus self-evident. [4]
> EU Ombudsman Emily O’Reilly has announced that she has opened an investigation into the transfer of two former Europol officials to the chat control surveillance tech provider Thorn. [5]
What evidence is there that Palantir is lobbying for Chat Control? I can't find anything online.
I know you said "probably", but is your speculation based on anything? To me that would be considerably worse than just selling surveillance and investigation software to governments.
This dystopian direction of the European Commission coincided with a lot of interaction between Thorn, the European Commission, and Europol. [0][1][2]
Thorn is coincidently is also the vendor of Spotlight, software which solves exactly the problem they are lobbying against.
Thiel's Palantir also has overlapping software capabilities and is also raising questions in their work with Europol. [3]
Connecting these dots was the only thing that made sense to me in order to explain why these repeated repackaged proposals keep steam rolling everything despite all the security concerns, unconstitutionality, and general lack of common sense.
I don't know your reality but literally anywhere in the 744 million users in Europe if you consider the technology literate average of internet users I guarantee that someone who is not even bilingual is precisely the exception.
I would hazard say the same is true in most of Asia and Africa perhaps less so in South America where Spanish/Portuguese are more monolithic.
I don't think you understand the proficiency needed to comfortably consume content in another language. Save for a few hotspots (Benelux, Nordics) most people say "yes, I speak a second language" because when they focus hard, they can say "me wants toilet" and that's enough for their use case (holiday abroad once a year). My mother is a teacher of English but when I brought a friend who only spoke English, I had to translate the conversation between them. This is the reality of bilingualism in small towns.
Just thought about it jokingly yesterday that every developer's first blog post is how they set up the blog or how they wrote a blog engine... :)
Long story short: Sign up for Scaleway, get your account approved, launch an instance, they have affordable "learning" instances that still feel "real" and can later run real services that need backend. I don't expect lot of traffic and I don't care if my stuff would go down from time to time, it's for fun. Set up SSH. Buy a domain, set up the DNS records to point to your instance. Run Caddy on the server to serve a dummy HTML file. Set up HTTPS. Verify you see your stuff in the browser. Now, create an actual site. Install hugo, pick a theme, install locally, build locally. Set up a script that copies the build folder onto your server where Caddy is serving, then restart Caddy. Write some content, check the limits of the theme / your set up, make sure everything works correctly. Even with the best of themes, you'll want to fix or change something, do that, if it looks good and you still have energy to work on your blog, start writing posts and let the world know.
Another financial point with impact on birth rates and demographics.
It is now very difficult (I can count with my fingers) to find a <100k car that can have 3 child seats in a row. Or that can sit 7 people that is not a SUV pedestrian child killer.
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