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Lets say the beak-even cost for a single request is somewhere between $1-$5 depending on the request just for the electricity,

Are you baiting the fine people here?

Yes. It is a big problem for Europe. I don’t expect that it will be fixed in the foreseeable future. In fact, it is being made worse in many ways.

You may reference and quote journal articles. That’s something I expect will stay allowed.

I’d say that European nations have a different understanding of press freedom. Mind that the individual nations have different attitudes toward this.

In Germany, press means mainly newspapers. The publishers owning these papers are very keen on copyright enforcement. Copyright does conflict with freedom of information but, I think, most would not see a conflict with press freedom.

The EU is determined to regulate who is allowed to use data for what purpose and to create the legal tools to enforce that. That’s not limited to copyright. I’m very worried about that trend on many levels.

But I don’t think Yuri creators will face problems in most EU countries in the foreseeable future.

In short: IDK.

No.

The copyright lobby in the EU is homegrown. For example, the football league in Italy has achieved sweeping laws that can be used to block pirated live streams without much ado. Expect that to be rolled out across the EU.

It’s true that these EU corporations are in league with the US copyright lobby. After all, Europeans read American books, watch American movies, listen to American music. The books are usually badly translated and published by a European corporation, which gives Europeans a cut. European agencies, often government-sponsored monopolies, collect money and send much of it to the US. But a lot is doled out to European corporations. And the collecting agencies have a good thing going, as well.

People, including many Europeans, make a lot of assumptions about Europe.

Americans in particular seem to assume that issues fall along the same political Dem/Rep divide as in the US. That gives them bad ideas. European countries have more solid social safety nets, more accessible and cheaper health care and education, more developed and usable public transport systems, …

On other issues like immigration or racism, they are on a MAGA-level. There is no big controversy because it is widely taken for granted that European nations are ethno-states. This is less so in the former colonial powers Britain and France. But they have their own baggage that gnaws at them from within, just like the history of racial segregation undermines the USA.

Another area where Europe is just different from the US is freedom of information. It’s just not respected in the same way. Intellectual property, on the other hand, is held in much higher regard. That’s how it has been for a long time.

Now that the copyright industry is waging an all-out lobby battle against citizens, you can expect much more like this.

Ok… Here’s something you should know.

What happened there was suppressing personal data from Google’s search engine. In the EU, that is regarded as a fundamental human right. The “right to be forgotten” is exactly about hiding a shady past. The GDPR gives you the right to demand that Google must omit certain links when people search for your name. Google does comply. You don’t need a court order or anything.

So, you can’t celebrate the GDPR while also condemning what happened here.

It was something like mashed pumpkin. I forget the exact variety.

I was for dinner at some friend’s place. He gives me a bit of that pumpkin stuff, saying I have to taste it because it turned out so great. It was left-overs from the previous day. I take a spoon and it tastes absolutely rotten. Well, ok. He is trying his best to be an amateur chef, but I do have doubts about some of his culinary judgments. So, I put on the polite face and just eat it.

After a few spoons, I can’t take it anymore. I say: “Sorry, this tastes absolutely rotten.” He tastes of it, nods and hurries out the room to throw it away. So yeah. I ate spoiled food. I didn’t get sick but I haven’t eaten pumpkin since. The taste really stayed with me.

Maybe buying alcohol works differently where you live.

In both your examples the government service has your full identity, then pinky promises to forget it.

It can be like buying alcohol in a store. They look at you and see your age. Or if it’s unclear, the store clerk asks your idea and promptly forgets all about it. Except you’re not buying alcohol but a login for some age verifier.

The reverse is also a necessity: the government approved service should not be allowed to know who and for what a proof of age is requested.

It would send the proof to you. It would not know what you do with it. I gave an example in the previous post how the identity of the user could be hidden from the service.

If the middle man government service knows when and who is requesting proof-of-age, it’s easy to de-anonymise for example users of gay porn sites.

It would be a lot easier to get that information from the ISP.

The site would only know that the user’s age is being vouched for by some government-approved service. It would not be able to use this to track the user across different devices/IPs, and so on.

The service would only know that the user is requesting that their age be vouched for. It would not know for what. Of course, they would have to know your age somehow. EG they could be selling access in shops, like alcohol is sold in shops. The shop checks the ID. The service then only knows that you have login credentials bought in some shop. Presumably these credentials would not remain valid for long.

They could use any other scheme, as well. Maybe you do have to upload an ID, but they have to delete it immediately afterward. And because the service has to be in the EU, government-certified with regular inspections, that’s safe enough.

In any case, the user would have to have access to some sort of account on the service. Activity related to that account would be tracked.

If that is not good enough, then your worries are not about data protection. My worries are not. I reject this for different reasons.

Strictly speaking, neither needs to know the actual identity. However, the point is that both are supposed to receive information about the user’s age. I’m not really sure what your point is.

But this proposed data center is so big, it would have its own dedicated energy from gas generation and renewable sources, according to Collins and company officials.

The “depending on how you count” probably refers to the renewables.

Data processing mandated by law is legal. Governments can pass laws, unlike private actors. Public institutions are bound by GDPR, but can also rely on provisions that give them greater leeway.

I don’t see how that this is in any way necessary, either. But a judge may be convinced by the claim that this is industry standard best practice to keep the app safe. In any case, there may be some finer points to the law.

The state legally cannot force you to agree to some corporations (i.e. Google’s) terms,

I’m not too sure about that, either. For example, when you are out of work, the state will cause you trouble if you do not find offered jobs acceptable.

It’s another question, if not having access to age-gated content is so bad as to force you to do anything. Minors nominally have the same rights as full citizens, and they are to be denied access, too.

There are 3 parties:

1. the user
2. the age-gated site
3. the age verification service

The site (2) sends the request to the user (1), who passes it on to the service (3) where it is signed and returned the same way. The request comes with a nonce and a time stamp, making reuse difficult. An unusual volume of requests from a single user will be detected by the service.

A phone can also be shared. If it happens at scale, it will be flagged pretty quickly. It’s not a real problem.

The only real problem is the very intention of such laws.

On a surely unrelated note, the richest man of Europe, formerly of the world, is the owner of luxury clothes brand LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SE.

Bernard Arnault is currently #5 on the Forbes 500 list. His kids went to a prestigious private school where they were taught by Brigitte Trogneux, who would later marry a pupil and go on to become France’s first lady Brigitte Macron. Small world.

Anyway, I’m sure glad that us Europeans are being diligently protected by wise regulations that completely prevent the rise of oligarchs. I can’t imagine the harm caused if every trashy peasant can pretend to afford a Louis Vuitton handbag. Know your place!

violates the GDPR.

I wouldn’t be too sure. Data protection mainly binds private actors. Any data processing demanded by law is legal. You’d really have to know the finer points of the law to judge if this is ok.