I continue to believe the risk is real and supported by my links and quotes. You might notice some people in the linked discussions who seem to be thinking it’s not entirely baseless. You’re free to disagree. I’m not a lawyer anyway.

I will stop discussing since suddenly this is about “normal” and I guess “abnormal” donations, and I don’t think we’re having a clear-headed debate here.

Did you actually read the quote I gave? I’m honestly confused.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=OJ%3AL_202402847

Supply in the course of a commercial activity might be characterised not only by charging a price for a product with digital elements, but also by charging a price for technical support services where this does not serve only the recuperation of actual costs, by an intention to monetise, for instance by providing a software platform through which the manufacturer monetises other services, by requiring as a condition for use the processing of personal data for reasons other than exclusively for improving the security, compatibility or interoperability of the software, or by accepting donations exceeding the costs associated with the design, development and provision of a product with digital elements

TL;DR, just donations can already be a problem, apparently. But IANAL.

As far as I understand the license doesn’t matter at all for EU regulation, other than “non-free” software is treated even worse.

Generally if you give something away for free, you can’t be claimed to be the owner.

The CRA from what I can tell applies to software given away for free, sadly. I’m not a lawyer, though. But you can perhaps see why people don’t trust the EU.

I admit it’s a complex topic, but if you read the post in detail, it should answer your questions. The “owner” is typically the maintainer, if in doubt that’s the person with repository write access. And the EU can apparently potentially require whatever to be maintained, not that I understand the exact details. The point was that the regulation doesn’t seem to avoid FOSS fallout well.

The EU has been so far bad at making sure FOSS isn’t seen as a paid product in the eyes of regulation, even in cases where it’s clearly unpaid, see here. They can’t be trusted to get this differentiation right.

Therefore, unlockable bootloader seems like the better idea. Get people to Linux and open Android variants if the closed-source companies won’t serve them.

Real time is a privacy risk.

check the API rules

That was what I was wondering about above. For Bgpview I can’t find much.

So is it only me, or wouldn’t it be possible to write a script that 1. gets the ASN list from some place like here https://bgpview.io/reports/countries/GB and then 2. queries the list of IP ranges from here https://www.enjen.net/asn-blocklist/index.php?asn=&type=iplist and 3. commits that to a repository on Github or such, and the script could be rerun every two weeks or so? It seems like there are no terms of use attached to any of these two services that forbid this, but does anybody know?

I agree the EU has shown a higher human rights interest. But if the temptation is too high, like with a digital ID everyone is habituated to using daily, they’ll likely falter eventually. That seems to be Cory Doctorow’s angle as well. Edit: shortened.

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I don’t think arguing “a fascist government can easily force now separate institutions to connect in the future” is a misunderstanding. My apologies if I didn’t read your point right, however.

how does this work as well as it does 😭 😭 😭

Still worth reminding them some of us will vote them out unless they walk this age check nonsense back. If thousands of people do so, it can be relevant.

Read here why anonymous age verification isn’t a thing: https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/14/bellovin/#wont-someone-think-of-the-cryptographers

The mastodon.social is in the EU though, where this also seems to be coming next year: https://leminal.space/post/25089051/17854998 (Unless we all call up our EU representatives and get this reversed or something.)

It’s not only likely, it seems like it already happened and the EU appears to have actually announced a copy of the UK Online Safety Act for 2026 already: https://leminal.space/post/25089051/17854998

If you didn’t know, it seems like the EU has actually announced a copy of the UK Online Safety Act for 2026 too, as far as I can tell: https://leminal.space/post/25089051/17854998

It’s sadly led to the EU has actually announced a copy of the UK Online Safety Act for 2026, as far as I can tell: https://leminal.space/post/25089051/17854998 It’s received less press coverage than the whole Chat Control thing.