I invite you to search HN for 'libor' and see how many of the American users of this website were affronted by the vast fines dished out by the US government to UK-headquartered banks for manipulating the LONDON Interbank Offered Rate from their offices in London, UK. If you can find a single one I'll eat my hat.
Being a country means you can make your own laws so the authority question has a pretty clear answer. Unless you disaviow national borders and state power and such stuff generally of course. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereignty
If it affects UK citizens, living in the UK, then there's jurisdiction. Either the entities comply, remove their services to the UK, or they risk sanctions/being arrested when abroad/etc.
Why should a US company harm UK citizens just because they're in the US?
If you want to serve a market in another country you have to follow their rules.
In this case, Imgur have been misusing UK children's information. Considering the laws are pretty similar, I suspect they're misusing EU children's information too.
It was about authority, synonymous with jurisdiction, I understood it. A sovereign country can decide they have authority/jurisdiction in anything they want. For example various countries have decided they can legally assassinate people in other countries even though other counties might not agree.
Placing the fines is pretty easy; they just go through their legal system, finish up the case and get their judgement. Russia has a giant outstanding fine against Google for example since Google is not censoring things the Kremlin doesn't like, even though Google has no corporate presence in Russia and the fine is iirc now larger than the entire world economy. (So it's an unrealistic amount designed to deter Google more than anything else in practice.)
The difficulty is getting enforcement; in practice, what happens is that the fine is put down as outstanding and if any executive or employee of the company enters the country, they're arrested and held hostage until the company pays up (or are held directly responsible for whatever the company is accused of). Most countries usually have corporate presency laws to avoid this sort of scenario though.
Alternatively, the judgement can be enforced through diplomatic channels, but that's a giant clusterfuck and unlikely to succeed unless it's something that's very blatantly a crime in both countries, since it's effectively retrying the case. (And even then it can depend on if the country just doesn't feel like cooperating for that specific case, for no other reason than spite; France for example is fond of doing this.)
Arresting executives is pretty extreme and not normally done. Generally countries will only go after assets and revenues in the country.
Even for local companies. I had a UK ltd company and it got some fines for not filling in the correct forms but you can just close it down still owing money, which I did, and there's no liability for the director(s).
Right, but the UK is saying they'll fine Imgur even after Imgur blocked access. At that point, what tooth does the fine have? "You must pay this fine if you want to, err, nothing I guess"?
They used to have UK legal presence, and planning to move out. The UK is saying something like "crimes done during your presence won't be ignored".
If Imgur never had UK presence, then yeah there would be no teeth. But if you're doing business in a country you can't break the law then leave and expect them to just ignore what you did during that time.
Why does it have to be immediately enforceable? Now Imgur have thrown the baby out with the bath water and cannot serve the UK and it leaves a big market for another company to come along and capitalise on that.
American companies are too use to being able to bully their way in America. Some countries do have better consumer protection laws.
The regulatory hurdles here are quite small, actually. If COPPA were worded better, Imgur would've been in violation of that, too, from what I can tell of the complaint.
How do you expect the "pull out" to happen? They must have had a UK bank account or similar, whose transfers won't get approved as they're trying to escape from criminal prosecution. Or they'll work with the US to ensure responsible individuals are held responsible.
It isn't exactly the first time someone/something commits crime in a country then try to escape, there is lots of ways to work with others on this.
>they'll work with the US to ensure responsible individuals are held responsible.
I heard here recently during a similar discussion (about 4chan and this same British watchdog agency) that the US does not allow extradition of its citizens for breaking non-US laws if the behavior is legal in the US.
> they'll fine Imgur even after Imgur blocked access
after they have infringed the data protection laws.
For example, if I get a parking fine, and then move my car. I can't claim that now that I've moved my car, I'm not liable for the previous fine. This is no different.
There are various international economic laws, treaties and agreements between cooperating countries, whether or not any of them cover this scenario for to US, and whether the US would honour any agreement in the current political climate remains to be seen. But there are mechanisms in place that allow w the UK to reach US companies through each others legal systems to a degree and vice versa, regardless of asset location.
> whether the US would honour any agreement in the current political climate remains to be seen
That this is even a question is bananas to me. Isn't that handled by the judicial system rather than involving politics/the administration? Shouldn't be possible for the US to have a treaty, and there are questions about if the treaty will actually be enforced or not, how could anyone trust the US as a whole for anything if those aren't enforced?
If Imgur decides they want to make money in the UK after all, and they have an unpaid fine outstanding, that money can be seized to pay off the fine first.
The whole point of corporations is that the company is liable, not its employees. also the shareholders are only liable for the money they put in, and not anything else.
Convictions in the UK are non-transferable. you can't convict a company, then transfer guilt onto its employees, they need to be tried at the same time.
> Are you saying that the Pavel Durov situation wouldn't have been possible in the UK
first Durov is a French citizen, so its not like he's immune to french laws
Second france has a totally different legal system to the UK(legal code vs common law)
thirdly, he's the primary owner of telegram, not an employee
Fourthly he was arrested on fraud, money laundering and child porn charges. Those are all criminal charges, not civil(GDPR is mostly Civil, same with the online saftey act, howefver with the OSA "senior managers" could be criminally liable, but again that's for CSAM, of which possession and distribution is a criminal already)
> Seems naive.
I really wish people would actually bother to understand law, because its pretty important. For programmers is much easier, because we are used to reading oddly worded specifically ordered paragraphs to divine logical intent. The law is really similar to programming.
They're only threatening to fine them for previous violations of the law, not anything after they block access. Blocking access doesn't make the existing fine from when they were doing business in the UK go away, it just prevents future fines.
Whether they can collect the money while Imgur aren't doing business in the UK is a different argument, but it's not particularly controversial that a country can fine a business operating in its jurisdiction for violating that country's laws. Even if those laws are authoritarian bullshit.
Sure, I'm only saying that I don't think there's much they can do by way of enforcement if the company decides to stop doing business there, especially over fines this small (it's not like the UK will push to extradite over this).
Honestly, that's the most noteworthy part of this. The EU hasn't pursued any site that just blocks EU access (see any number of US sites than aren't GDPR compliant and I can't access from Europe). The UK is threatening to do something nobody else has really done before. It's crazy, imo, because I can see a whole lot of sites immediately blocking the UK to avoid any potential litigation.
Thanks. That needs to be in an HN guide somewhere, along with: online services cost money to run so don't be surprised that they need either fees or advertising.
Being accessible over the internet from a country can't be the same as having a physical presence there. Otherwise, anyone putting any content on the internet needs to comply with the laws of every single country.
The real problem is that society teaches people to suppress negative emotions. Then someone can harness those suppressed emotions and focus them on something.
If you want a custom resolution in Linux drm.edid_firmware= works well with the right EDID.
For me, the worst things about the Linux graphical console are lack of scrollback and horrible performance. Linux still has scrollback in VGA text mode, and of course it is super fast because each character is only 2 bytes. In graphics mode you can only fix this by running a program that provides its own graphical terminal, like kmscon or fbterm.
The best thing about the graphical console is ability to use bigger fonts, so your characters can be smooth and not pixelated. I like the Terminus fonts. As long as performance isn't a problem it's better to increase font size than to decrease the resolution.
Dumb question: when I boot a modern systemd-based distro installer in terminal mode, am I using "VGA text mode" or "graphics mode"? Do I have to be literally using VGA to use VGA text mode?
EDIT: I read TFA and it seems like the answer is that I probably have never used VGA text mode.
Depends. A UEFI boot is going to put you in graphics mode; I don't think you can get into VGA text mode from an UEFI boot, without some serious dark arts. UEFI has a text mode console API, but it's part of bootservices and those are exited somewhere on the way to starting the Linux kernel.
If you're doing a BIOS boot, you might be using VGA text mode, if you haven't loaded a framebuffer driver. VGA text mode works over BNC, DVI, HDMI, DP, etc, if that was your question, you don't need a VGA connector. EGA text mode might be similar enough to also work, but that's outside my depth.
I'm not sure that Linux uses it, but VGA has nice things to accelerate scrolling. You can set the top of the screen down into the buffer, and then set a line number where it resets to the top of the buffer. If you set the line stride so that it evenly divides the buffer (typically wider than the line width), it makes scrolling and wrapping around the buffer very simple and elegant.
UEFI GOP doesn't provide any mechanism for a buffer larger than what's displayed, so scrolling requires copying. :(
I was annoyed by this change so installed an older kernel to get it back. However I found, that any TTY switch clears that scrollback, so it is quite useless in practice. (This is probably why they were comfortable just removing it.) The actual change making the scrollback useless was perforce earlier. I wonder when and due to what that was.
What's the point of taking your own highly detailed photos of the moon? You can find much higher resolution images elsewhere. I usually only want to take a photo of the moon as part of a moonlit scene.
I love observing the moon, whether that's taking a picture with a telephoto or peeping through telescope.
There's something special about seeing the craters with your own eyes and then sharing that with friends. The framing & cropping, zoom, color of the sky are all unique to that experience.
Plus the moon is always looking slightly different each time, with different areas shadowed; fuzzy details one day are sharp the next.
And it's a skill like any other, which feels great to improve day after day.
Most people take photos of DSO's, but while you've got the gear, why not photograph the moon. It's also technically fun. Using a cooled camera, I video the moon/Jupiter at 20fps at 3000x3000. Then using software, I only take the frames where there is minimal atmospheric distortion. With the remaining frames, you stack them to get a very detailed image of the moon/planets.
Look up the other gear from ZWO the maker of the seestar.
They have active Peltier coolers and you use mains power, a portable battery box, or the 12V output from your car. You also need to power a computer or laptop to capture the images.
Roboscopes like the Seestar are an all-in-one kit and have internal batteries that last about 3-4 hours (although for the moon you don't need more than a minute or so). The S50 can take uncompressed video, which you can then process as GP describes but, compared to a more powerful setup, the camera is 1920x1080 and uncooled, the framerate is limited to 30fps, and it only has a 50mm aperture.
It seems like there is a continuum between being oblivious and delusional. You need to notice things, recognize their meaning, make connections and then make conclusions. Being oblivious can mean missing important signs and making bad choices due to not realizing what is happening. Being delusional can mean jumping to conclusions by "connecting the dots" in one particular way that leads to one conclusion even though that may not be the truth. A sane perspective would mean evaluating different hypotheses to come to a reasonable conclusion. Someone who is paranoid may be right about some things much earlier than others, but they may also be wrong about many other things.
I think there is a fundamental difference between such social phenomena and the seemingly solitary delusions that happen in recognized mental illness such as schizophrenia.
There doesn't appear to be. There is actually quite a bit of older literature on this.
Many of the books reference the observation that schizophrenia symptoms are commonly seen in victims of torture, specifically in returning PoWs during the Korean Conflict.
Joost Meerloo, and Robert Lifton are two well established authors that come to mind, and while there are other diagnostic criteria its fairly safe to say that mass delusion it seems occurs more regularly when the population is tortured.
The 4 elements needed for torture are isolation, cognitive dissonance, coercion with real or perceived loss, and lack of agency to remove.
These things naturally occurs where all communication channels have been jammed with misinformation. These things fall under 5th Generation Warfare.
Mao came up with some very clever ways of structuring and clustering the elements of torture into trauma loops utilizing all of the psychological blindspots we have. Cialdini's book on influence covers most of the blindspots if you are unaware, except distorted reflected appraisal.
Technically the phone-based dopamine triggers of today through associative priming could be considered a form of targeted Narcosynthesis/Narcoanalysis which has impacts on the ability to resist torture.
This is a good article, but I dislike how the start defines delusions as "fixed, false beliefs that cannot be changed by evidence". Many delusions seem wrong to others without any solid evidence that can conclusively prove that they're wrong. For example, if someone says they're the second coming of Jesus, or if someone believes the CIA has mind control satellites, that seems obviously ridiculous, but you cannot disprove that.
There is merit to everything not being on the web. Some things don’t need to be. I don’t have any dog in the fight but seems to me maybe an IpTV service which would be tailored for you could potentially be more responsive as a local application instead. No need to knock that mentality as a generational thing or “old fashioned “
I don’t always subscribe to the expression “just use the right tool for the job” sometimes it’s nice to do things differently just to learn, but in this case, I still see some more benefits in this case of iota application being a bit more “synchronous” and local. But to be fair I have worked for a few years on a cloud streaming provider, but we had “set top boxes” to work with so I am maybe a bit biased.
I think a big part of the problem is use of cool white LED lights, which produce more light on the blue part of the spectrum. That light scatters more in the atmosphere, like how the sky is blue during the day.
Around here, the LED lights do not seem brighter like the article claims.
Also, they are all full cutoff. In the past, almost all high pressure sodium streetlights meant to send light downwards had a glass globe below, which sent some light upwards. LED streetlights have flat panels instead, so none of the light fixture itself can directly send light into the sky. Only light reflected from illuminated objects and scattered by the air can light up the sky.
