barsoap

If they're found to be tanking a continuous fine of 5% revenue because they're too darn profitable it won't take long for the parliament to change the regulation. With sufficient harm to the consumers it's also possible to simply shut down facebook, or at least their ability to do business in the EU which would make the market completely unprofitable as they're relying on EU advertisers. They definitely can unplug each and every server facebook has in the EU. The EP is way less captured by lobby interest than the US legislature is, doubly so by an uppity US company trying to skirt EU law.

What's more likely to happen though is the shareholders firing management because picking a fight with a bully the size of the EU isn't exactly good for the share price.

Timely? Hardly.

Depends on whether you count from the time facebook etc. became a problem and was recognised or such, or the passing of the Digital Services Act. The commission can't just impose fines randomly they have to have a legislative basis to do it.

EU fines are generally not a thing you can just blink at they're measured in percent of world-wide turnover. Historically they don't really dissuade companies from trying shit but they definitely are sufficient to make them stop shit. Also actually way more importantly they probably have tiktok in the pipeline but the paperwork still needs the one or other t crossed.

That’s pretty much the definition of the job of parent. To control everything around the child and how they interact with things.

The fuck. You'll breed a country of people with zero social skills, zero independence, and a lot of ressentiment for their parents for boxing them in and helicoptering leading to an authority neurosis.

In short, you'll have American conditions.

It takes a village and all that.

For one thing, don’t give kids a smartphone until they’re at least 13, they have no need for one before then.

No, give them 30 pence so they can find a telephone booth and call you if something is up. Make sure to isolate them from their peers because they can't use the same chat app as everyone else. The more isolation the more you control them which will make nurturing that neurosis even easier.

After 13 or there abouts, they are given more freedom and more responsibility to go along with it, and hopefully have been raised well enough to respect that.

If, at the age of 13/14 thereabouts they haven't learned to evaluate things for themselves, have had the opportunity to make wrong choices that they then learned from, they'll be rolled over by puberty hormones driving their frontal cortex to mindless exploration. You cannot substitute your own judgement for theirs, your judgement isn't stopping them, their capacity and ability to say "wait a minute I should think before I act" is the only thing that can.

From there, limitations and guide rails will remain in place, be it a traditional curfew in the evening, or a limitation of “screen time”, and if course of what the children interact with online.

At the age of 16 they should be mature enough to live on their own, with parental backup being present, but not imposing on them. They'll call you when they need help because they came to value your guidance. Not control. One of the two begets rebellion, the other doesn't.

Eventually you have to let go, let them be adults and make their own decisions,

I'm sure you'll be able to after helicoptering them for 18 fucking years and them going zero contact for their own sanity.

but all you can do as a parent is try to prepare them

Then fucking do that!

and the next time something writes to that area the data that was there before is disregarded.

A single overwrite might not be enough to defeat physical forensics because shadows of the old data persist in how the new data is stored. Also when it comes to SSDs you might be waiting a long time for the data to get overwritten as the drive will wear-level its erm sectors (what are those things called with SSDs?).

Information theory aside: In practice all because you can't write bit-by-bit and if you leave full bytes untouched there still might be enough information for an attacker to get information, especially if it's of the "did this computer once store this file" kind of information, not the actual file contents.

If I'm not completely mistaken overwriting the file once will be enough to prevent recovering with logical means, that is, reading the bits the way the manufacturer intended you to, physical forensics can go further by being able to discern "this bit, before it got overwritten, was a 1 or 0" by looking very closely at the physical medium, details on how much flipping you need to defeat that will depend on the physical details.

And I wouldn't be too terribly sure about that electro magnet you built into your case to erase your HDD with a panic button: It's in a fixed place, will have a fixed magnetic field, it's going to scramble everything sure but the way it scrambles is highly uniform so the bits can probably be recovered. If you want to be really sure buy a crucible and melt the thing.

Also, may I interest you in this stylish tin-foil hat, special offer.

The only way my box is blinged up is with tastefully beige-brown fans. I actually felt slightly betrayed by Noctua when they started making black fans.

You know what? They're technically correct. There's historically plenty of computer systems which came in multiple different cases, sometimes that's still the case but the most obvious examples are historical, where you would get something like the CPU (yes) in one case and then a huge-ass card reader in another case and drum memory in yet another. Those drums were used as RAM. Each case was standing on the floor, at least chest-high.

Simply integrating various peripherals into the CPU doesn't make the CPU any less of the CPU. Even ignoring the case thing and just looking at the CPU package (or even die): Modern CPUs contain a lot of things that would've been external to it, or even in a different case, in the past. You'll hear the term "SoC", system on a chip, thrown around but that's misleading most CPUs nowadays are SoCs: You have your CPU cores, yes, but you also have a memory controller, you have storage interfaces and general IO (PCIe is a storage interface), as well as a GPU. It's been a long time since mainboards came with northbridges. Newer CPUs may have enough memory on package to reasonably run without external memory (and not just "use the cache as ram during early boot" kind of stuff).

It's also lazy and they're used to not getting investigated or even called out. But even if prosecution is high and you're not lazy you get corrupt politicians doing blatantly obvious stuff like the mask scandal in Germany, making a fortune of selling FFP2 masks at ludicrous markups to the state: Their behaviour was not technically illegal (laws got adjusted since then), the only one who got prosecuted got prosecuted for tax evasion, not corruption.

Corruption, that's why. Similar to how the Italian mafia would half-build highway bridges with taxpayer money and then mysteriously have some shell company go bankrupt. OLAF is on it because of course they are when stuff makes the press. If they have a case EPPO will take over at which point that Hungarian mayor will have the questionable honour of being up against the gal who cleaned up Romania... before Hungarian courts. If those turn out to be corrupt then that's going to buy the mayor time but ultimately the ECJ would overrule them. Still no mechanism to actually set boots on member state grounds but Hungary is already on thin ice when it comes to getting suspended from the EU for various reasons, they're going to tread lightly.

See if you want to be corrupt in the EU you have to do it like the big boys: Implement some policy, then get a cushy job at a company. Or receive tons of money for boring private speeches. Something like that, directly grabbing into state coffers is so uncivilised.

EDIT: Oh, Hungary didn't join EPPO, figures. They can still freeze assets, though. Also if I understand things correctly our mayor would turn into a fugitive in the rest of the EU.

Death of the Author doesn’t really work when the author is still alive, profiting off the work,

Actually, it makes it more striking. What you're doing there is conflating art and art reception with economics and economical relations. In purely artistic terms yes she's deader than dead because anything she says about anything about her work will be disregarded if fans don't vibe with it. Usually, while still alive, artists at least have some influence on the interpretation of their works, she doesn't. Not because she's physically dead, but because fans have declared her dead to them.

What about things like this?

Which btw yes certainly has editorialising going on. The answer to "Useless projects are funded with EU money" starts with "National and regional authorities in the EU countries select projects which they think meet their needs best in line with the strategies and priorities agreed with the Commission." Which isn't saying that EU money doesn't found useless projects, but implicitly blames regional authorities for it. I don't even think they want to mislead, here, they simply want to stay diplomatic.

(This video about the canopy walk is brilliant. (enable subtitles)).

Propaganda isn’t always fake news, it can also be true stuff presented in a biased way.

It can also be true stuff presented in an unbiased way. There's a disconnect here between the proper definition of the word, which is perfectly neutral, and its connotations because the what secretary for tsunami safety doesn't call their stuff "propaganda" but "public service announcement". Still the same thing, though, the tsunami safety secretary is trying to persuade the audience to not be stupid and get to high ground as soon as the sea recedes. Very much pushing an agenda, they *gasp* want people to survive and *gasp* use communication to achieve it.