Nostr notes by Fabio Manganiello

I am planning to shut down this account and abandon social media ...

2025-10-06T06:16:36Z

I am planning to shut down this account and abandon social media for a while.

I have canceled myself to try to help as many as possible lately, and supported everyone against slanderous accusations directed at them.

That only ended up with my account being limited on mastodon.social with no notice and no explanation, while genocide denialist trolls and nasty people who tried to halt fundraising for Gaza are still allowed to act under a blanket of absolute impunity.

I can't even communicate effectively with new accounts in need from Gaza if my profile is hidden on the main instance.

And what baffles me is the lack of support I've received myself when it was my account to be targeted.

I'll keep cheering for Aral Balkan (npub1p09…m5vl) and Joy (npub1nv8…za59) from the sidelines, they're doing an amazing job, and I'll keep supporting accounts from Gaza, because it's the right thing to do.

Just not here, much more on the sidelines, and away from the spotlights.

I may be back one day, I don't know if on Nostr or some other platform that has already taken into account the fact that the admin of the largest instance of a defederated network can also be an asshole and can still have the power to cut you from your own network Eben if you run your own instance.

Adieu.

https://manganiello.social/notice/AyucANnhcA0Crx1TlY

Why Bell Labs worked so well, and could innovate so much, while ...

2025-06-03T14:35:28Z

Why Bell Labs worked so well, and could innovate so much, while today's innovation, in spite of the huge private funding, goes in hype-and-fizzle cycles that leave relatively little behind, is a question I've been asking myself a lot in the past years.

And I think that the author of this article has hit the nail on its head on most of the reasons - but he didn't take the last step in identifying the root cause.

What Bell Labs achieved within a few decades is probably unprecedented in human history:

- They employed folks like Nyquist and Shannon, who laid the foundations of modern information theory and electronic engineering while they were employees at Bell.

- They discovered the first evidence of the black hole at the center of our galaxy in the 1930s while analyzing static noise on shortwave transmissions.

- They developed in 1937 the first speech codec and the first speech synthesizer.

- They developed the photovoltaic cell in the 1940, and the first solar cell in the 1950s.

- They built the first transistor in 1947.

- They built the first large-scale electronic computers (from Model I in 1939 to Model VI in 1949).

- They employed Karnaugh in the 1950s, who worked on the Karnaugh maps that we still study in engineering while he was an employee at Bell.

- They contributed in 1956 (together with AT&T and the British and Canadian telephone companies) to the first transatlantic communications cable.

- They developed the first electronic musics program in 1957.

- They employed Kernighan, Thompson and Ritchie, who created UNIX and the C programming language while they were Bell employees.

And then their rate of innovation suddenly fizzled out after the 1980s.

I often hear that Bell could do what they did because they had plenty of funding. But I don't think that's the main reason. The author rightly points out that Google, Microsoft and Apple have already made much more profit than Bell has ever seen in its entire history. Yet, despite being awash with money, none of them has been as impactful as Bell. Nowadays those companies don't even innovate much besides providing you with a new version of Android, of Windows or the iPhone every now and then. And they jump on the next hype wagon (social media, AR/VR, Blockchain, AI...) just to deliver half-baked products that (especially in Google's case) are abandoned as soon as the hype bubble bursts.

Let alone singlehandedly spear innovation that can revolutionize an entire industry, let alone make groundbreaking discoveries that engineers will still study a century later.

So what was Bell's recipe that Google and Apple, despite having much more money and talented people, can't replicate? And what killed that magic?

Well, first of all Bell and Kelly had an innate talent in spotting the "geekiest" among us. They would often recruit from pools of enthusiasts that had built their own home-made radio transmitters for fun, rather than recruiting from the top business schools, or among those who can solve some very abstract and very standardized HackerRank problems.

And they knew how to manage those people. According to Kelly's golden rule:

> How do you manage genius? You don't

Bell specifically recruited people that had that strange urge of tinkering and solving big problems, they were given their lab and all the funding that they needed, and they could work in peace. Often it took years before Kelly asked them how their work was progressing.

Compare it to a Ph.D today who needs to struggle for funding, needs to produce papers that get accepted in conferences, regardless of their level of quality, and must spend much more time on paperwork than on actual research.

Or to an engineer in a big tech company that has to provide daily updates about their progress, has to survive the next round of layoffs, has to go through endless loops of compliance, permissions and corporate bureaucracy in order to get anything done, has his/her performance evaluated every 3 months, and doesn't even have control on what gets shipped - that control has been taken away from engineers and given to PMs and MBA folks.

Compare that way of working with today's backlogs, metrics, micromanaging and struggle for a dignified salary or a stable job.

We can't have the new Nyquist, Shannon or Ritchie today simply because, in science and engineering, we've moved all the controls away from the passionate technical folks that care about the long-term impact of their work, and handed them to greedy business folks who only care about short-term returns for their investors.

So we ended up with a culture that feels like talent must be managed, even micromanaged, otherwise talented people will start slacking off and spending their days on TikTok.

But, as Kelly eloquently put it:

> "What stops a gifted mind from just slacking off?" is the wrong question to ask. The right question is, "Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?"

So the article is spot on in identifying why Bell could invent, within a few years, all it did, while Apple, despite having much more money, hasn't really done anything new in the past decade. MBAs, deadlines, pseudo-objective metrics and short-termism killed scientific inquiry and engineering ingenuity.

But the author doesn't go one step further and identify the root cause.

It correctly spots the business and organizational issues that exist in managing talent today, but it doesn't go deeper into their economic roots.

You see, MBA graduates and CEOs didn't destroy the spirit of scientific and engineering ingenuity spurred by the Industrial Revolution just because they're evil. I mean, there's a higher chance for someone who has climbed the whole corporate ladder to be a sociopath than there is for someone you randomly picked from the street, but not to the point where they would willingly tame and screw up the most talented minds of their generation, and try and squeeze them into a Jira board or a metric that looks at the number of commits, out of pure sadism.

They did so because the financial incentives have drastically changed from the times of Bells Labs.

The Bells Labs were basically publicly funded. AT&T operated the telephone lines in the US, paid by everyone who used telephones, and they reinvested a 1% tax into R&D (the Bells Labs). And nobody expected a single dime of profits to come out from the Bells Labs.

And at the time the idea of people paying taxes, so talented people in their country could focus on inventing the computer, the Internet or putting someone on the moon, without the pressure of VCs asking for their dividends, wasn't seen as a socialist dystopia. It was before the neoliberal sociopaths of the Chicago school screwed up everything.

And, since nobody was expecting a dime back, nobody would put deadlines on talented people, nobody hired unqualified and arrogant business specialists to micromanage them, nobody would put them on a performance improvement plan if they were often late at their daily standups or didn't commit enough lines of code in the previous quarter. So they had time to focus on how to solve some of the most complex problems that humans ever faced.

So they could invent the transistor, the programming infrastructure still used to this day, and lay the foundations of what engineers study today.

The most brilliant minds of our age don't have this luxury. So they can't revolutionarize our world like those in the 20th century did. Somebody else sets their priorities and their deadlines. They can't think of moonshots because they're forced to work on the next stupid mobile app that the next stupid VC wants to release to market so they could get insanely rich. They have to worry about companies trying to replace them with AI bots and business managers wanting to release products themselves by "vibe coding", just to ask those smart people to clean up the mess they've done. They are seen as a cost, not as a resource.

Then of course they can't invent the next transistor, or bring the next breakthrough in information theory.

Then of course all you get, after one year of the most brilliant minds of our generation working at the richest company that has ever existed, is just a new iPhone.

https://links.fabiomanganiello.com/share/683ee70d0409e6.66273547

Yesterday I got an outage on one of my Linode hosts because of AI ...

2025-04-30T10:52:35Z

Yesterday I got an outage on one of my Linode hosts because of AI scrapers.

It suddenly started triggering disk and bandwidth usage warnings.

I took a closer look, and my nginx logs were suddenly exploding with requests to my Wikiless instance (I didn't even know it was still running, let alone indexed by search engines).

And again the same pattern (or, better, lack of, with apparently legitimate IPs and user agents making hundreds of requests per minute).

It looks like stricter rules about scraping Wikipedia directly have redirected some of these scrapers to alternative frontend - such as Wikiless instances.

The solution for now has been to simply take down my Wikiless instance.

Whatever you guys are doing, please stop. You're breaking the web and doing a favour to nobody.

did it finally fix the issues with Wayland, in particular when ...

2025-03-17T21:58:35Z

In reply to nevent1q…qvyj
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did it finally fix the issues with Wayland, in particular when using a tiling window manager like Sway? I basically haven't been able to use GIMP in years after migrating to Wayland, and when I have to use it I have to start an X11 session just for that.

For those like me who have moved out of #Mozilla's services ...

2025-03-01T07:48:36Z

For those like me who have moved out of #Mozilla's services after their latest changes to T&Cs and turn towards enshittification, this can be a very valuable guide.

I've tried to setup a Sync server before, but I gave up given the lack of documentation - I'm happy that someone went all the way down the rabbit hole and documented the exact steps.

The only part that I'm still missing is how to use my own Sync server on a Firefox-based browser, since all the Sync options just point to Mozilla's instance.

https://blog.diego.dev/posts/firefox-sync-server/

Has anyone experienced regular board failures with a #RaspberryPi ...

2025-02-18T21:37:00Z

Has anyone experienced regular board failures with a #RaspberryPi 4?

I have many of them around, more or less half of them run RPi OS and half Arch ARM, but all with quite similar configurations and running similar software.

Some of them have lasted years so far, others have failed only when the SD card failed (only 2 failures in 7 years btw), but in most the cases the boards have been the same since I first purchased them in 2018.

But I've got one in my living room that I've been replacing at least one every 1-2 years because *the whole board* at some point fries up.

I've had the same SD card with the same RPi OS installation for it since 2018.

At some point, every 1-2 years, with no notice, sometimes even while no meaningful activities are running on it, the unfortunate RPi that runs in my living room just dies.

Red and green LEDs stay still without blinking. USB-connected devices don't even get powered up. The system doesn't boot and nothing is sent to the HDMI output. The EEPROM diagnosis doesn't even start when booting it without SD card. But if I put the same SD card in another device, it all works again without problems.

The first time it happened I thought it was just a bad board. The second time, just bad luck. The third time, extremely bad luck. But today a RPi4 running on the same SD card died again, after less than 2 years of usage, for the fourth time, and in the same way. Since no other devices ever gave me so much trouble, I start to see a pattern.

The only meaningful differences from other devices I run are:

- This one is connected to an always-on screen over HDMI.

- It sports a #Pimoroni Breakout Garden for easy expansion over I2C/SPI, and I have a couple of breakout sensors connected to it (an LTR559 for proximity/luminosity, a BME280 for temperature/humidity, a PMW3901 for motion, and a MLX90640 thermal camera).

Since the only meaningful differences from my other devices are in the hardware expansions, I suspect that some combination of I2C/SPI extensions may, in some very unlucky conditions, send voltage spikes that may screw up the board.

But since the board is completely fried when this happens, I don't have many ways of doing diagnostics - and 4 data points so far, separated by 1-2 years, are still insufficient to see a clear pattern.

Has anyone who has toyed with I2C/SPI breakout extensions (and specifically with any of those I've mentioned above) also experienced this type of board failures?

that's a good question and I've been thinking about it ...

2025-02-17T10:42:47Z

In reply to nevent1q…afu8
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that's a good question and I've been thinking about it for the past couple of days. I'm no legal expert, but I think that license amendments may be possible. Just like GPL limits what you can do with FOSS (like you can't repackage a modified version as closed source), and AGPL limits what FOSS software you can run in your private cloud and profit from it as a service, I don't think it's unfeasible to limit the usage of FOSS so it can't be used by openly illiberal governments. The definition of "illiberal" however is something that probably needs careful planning.

I'm quite confused when I hear my fellow European citizens ...

2025-02-16T23:33:05Z

I'm quite confused when I hear my fellow European citizens worry about our dependence on American Big Tech, and that in case America goes full Nazi we have no way of building our future.

American Big Tech is overwhelmingly dependent on free and open-source software that is overwhelmingly built and maintained by volunteers on both sides of the pond.

From the Linux kernel that powers basically all the large servers in the world, to the most popular distros built around that kernel, to the most popular database systems (MariaDB, Postgres, MongoDB...) and messaging systems (Redis, Kafka...), to Elastic (based in Amsterdam), to Blender (also based in Amsterdam), to all the open programming languages that power today's world (Rust, PHP, Python [also invented by a Dutch developer], Kotlin [developed by JetBrains, also headquartered in Amsterdam]), to the Web servers that serve most of the content (nginx, Apache...), to the Grafana+Loki+Prometheus+OTEL stack that makes the backbone of observability in most of today's large companies, to the numpy+pandas libraries that are the backbone of all of today's AI hype, large American companies could do *NOTHING*, and I mean literally NOTHING, without open-source software that is built out of collaborations between European and American developers (who are often unpaid and on the verge of burnout).

If you want a glimpse of today's technological avantgarde, you don't have to go to flashy and hollow events like ESC in Las Vegas, or any Silicon Valley sponsored event. You have to go to FOSDEM in Belgium.

American Big Tech has the ability of putting together these freely available building blocks, building finished products with them, monetizing them aggressively through unethical business models, funding them through some of the richest men in the world (because the VC world is still dominated only by rich white men), locking them up as services that run into their private clouds (companies like AWS literally fill up bottles with free tap water and make outrageous amounts of money by renting access to that water), and sucking up generous subsidies from the federal government, while the EU gives literally peanuts to those building this infrastructure - we had to wait for years and beg the commission before getting something like Next Generation Internet up and running, which provides these projects with literally 0.01% of the money that the US has provided to its already deep-pocketed giants through things like the CHIPS act, and we also have to periodically send them letters like this https://pad.public.cat/lettre-NCP-NGI# to make sure that we don't lose even those peanuts.

Imagine what we could build in Europe if only we had coherent technological programs that just funded the talent that we already have.

Imagine what we could do if instead of a couple of millions of spare change (and Von der Leyen never putting her wallet where her mouth is, because if we had one million every time she said "EU 🩷 open-source" all the EU-based volunteers on Github will be millionaire by now) we had even a fraction of the funding of acts like CHIPS.

Imagine what we could do if European companies firmly grounded in the values of open-source and ethical business models (like Nextcloud or Blender) had enough funding to compete with the American giants, instead of having to hear technologically illiterate megalomaniacs like Draghi and Macron argue for "European champions" that simply mock the unsustainable and unethical business models championed by America.

Our cousins on the other side of the Atlantic lately are going a bit nuts (like Nazi nuts). It's time to start decoupling and de-riskifying from them, nurturing our own sustainable open-source ecosystem, and, if they start leveraging their own Big Tech as a weapon against us, pull the drawbridge and cut them out of the European open-source software that runs their servers.

In a world where code and data are the new oil, access to open-source software means access to the raw materials required to make your industry wealthy. We shouldn't underestimate that.

it's fun because, as the admin of a self-hosted mail service, ...

2025-02-15T15:14:20Z

In reply to nevent1q…8w9f
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it's fun because, as the admin of a self-hosted mail service, I had to go to hell and back to get Google to accept my emails, despite having literally zero spam emails sent through my domain (Microsoft still refuses them for some reason).

And, to this day, 100% of the spam accounts created on my Forgejo server and 100% of the spam emails I receive are from GMail addresses.

I'm more and more tempted to simply block any @gmail.com account for good - both from my email server and my services with open registrations.

I run my own cloud, but I'm also someone with an IT ...

2025-02-08T19:25:12Z

In reply to nevent1q…a7q2
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I run my own cloud, but I'm also someone with an IT background. I've recently helped my mother move her pictures from Google Photos to my Nextcloud+Immich cloud, but despite her best efforts she's still struggling to understand even how to use different apps.

The thing is that running your own cloud has its barriers. Having a spare server abs being able to install and maintain a couple of Docker containers is something that probably less than 5% of the population can do (and I'm being optimistic). We need to also think of the remaining 95%. Otherwise privacy may really become a luxury affordable only by a small technical elite.

All governments in the world hate end2end encryption - since the ...

2025-02-08T09:25:54Z

All governments in the world hate end2end encryption - since the time Phil Zimmerman was tried for terrorism and illegal sale of weapons for releasing PGP.

But few governments have been so keen on breaking it at all costs (even of their own reputation) as the UK.

The UK is a country that feels entitled to spy into anyone's devices, whether they are British citizens or not.

Not happy with passing the abhorrent Online Safety Bill in 2023 (which is technically impossible to enforce, which says that data can remain encrypted but the hosting company still needs to know what the content is about, and which showed the sheer extent of British lawmakers' ignorance about encryption technology), the British government has decided to go one step further and demand Apple to open a backdoor on iCloud, which would only be accessible to British government officers (sure...), and that would provide them unlimited access to all content created *globally* (not only by British citizens) on Apple's cloud.

I bash Apple and its monopolistic practices a lot, I'm proud that I've never in my life purchased a single Apple item, but I respect most of their stances when it comes to user privacy (unlike most of the other tech giants).

If they want to stay coherent with those stances, it'd be probably time for them to threaten to pull iCloud services out of the British market.

A company that defends the right to privacy of their users shouldn't offer a diminished service to the inhabitants of a country just because their government feels entitled to spy on them - let alone erode the privacy for everyone globally just because one single government feels entitled to have decryption keys for everything.

https://www.theverge.com/news/608145/apple-uk-icloud-encrypted-backups-spying-snoopers-charter

#Kagi is implementing a pricing model that I'd like to see ...

2025-02-06T08:37:11Z

#Kagi is implementing a pricing model that I'd like to see more often around.

Subscribers churn is a metric dreaded by all business owners.

If enough paying users leave your product, investors usually start to panic.

That's the main reason behind the Hotel California subscriptions (you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave). It's the reason why subscribing to a service can be done in a click, but unsubscribing often requires a voice call with a customer service agent, a letter signed with your blood, a fax, a telegraph and the sacrifice of a goat on a full moon night.

Tell business owners that they have to maximize annual recurring revenue and minimize churn, and that their bonuses will depend on that, and they'll do anything within the borders of legality to achieve it - just like the machine that was tasked to build nails more efficiently, and turned the whole world into a nails factory.

But what if there is another way?

Subscriptions to Kagi will automatically enter a dormant state after 1-2 months without being used.

It means that you won't pay for services that you don't use, that your credit will be refunded, and you start paying again when you start using the service again.

Think of it for a moment: someone who doesn't use your product for a couple of months is probably someone with a high chance of churn. So instead of keeping them in at all costs, you just dont charge them for stuff they don't use. Then they won't even mind having a subscription that they don't use but don't even pay for. And the business can show strong user retention metrics to their investors.

Millions of folks with business school degrees around the world, thousands of pieces of literature on pricing strategies, and nobody has yet thought that this is the best ethical win-win?

https://kagi.com/changelog#6155

Two decades spent writing code in #Java or Java-based languages ...

2025-01-24T08:49:48Z

Two decades spent writing code in #Java or Java-based languages for money, millions of lines of code gone into huge projects, tens of lectures on how the JVM allocates the heap and how garbage collection works, and here I am still wondering why the hell Java applications like Kafka, Tomcat, Keycloak or IntelliJ have to eat up all of my RAM even when they're basically idle.

Is it the time to admit that Java is just an awful technology when it comes to memory management, that we're globally wasting billions in infrastructure costs just to run these technological aberrations, and that it needs to be dumped just like we dumped C for its (different) memory management issues? Or is it just time to throw another block of RAM to our applications - because trust me bro, just 4GB of RAM more and you won't have any more issues?

il fork ha diverse motivazioni, fra cui scismi ideologici fra gli ...

2025-01-23T14:14:34Z

In reply to nevent1q…he7v
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il fork ha diverse motivazioni, fra cui scismi ideologici fra gli sviluppatori di Pleroma (alcuni dei quali sono fin troppo nel campo del "free speech" a tutti i costi), il fatto che il main developer di Pleroma non era molto presente, e la necessità di implementare features più velocemente (fra cui custom emojis per le reazioni, backend più leggero, ecc.). Più dettagli sono qui: https://coffee-and-dreams.uk/development/2022/06/24/akkoma.html

Per il resto sono quasi al 100% compatibili a vicenda, e permettono anche di installare frontend custom (che è una benedizione perché il frontend di default sembra un salto nel 1999).

hai gia' provato Pleroma/Akkoma? Personalmente dopo un paio ...

2025-01-22T11:08:45Z

In reply to nevent1q…pwvs
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hai gia' provato Pleroma/Akkoma? Personalmente dopo un paio di anni passati ad amministrare la mia istanza Mastodon mi ero un po' stufato sia delle feature a cui Eugen risponde sempre con un no secco (tipo limite di caratteri estensibile via configurazione, quotes e supporto per Markdown), sia di quante risorse richiede.

Sono migrato ad Akkoma (fork di Pleroma) e non mi sono piu' guardato indietro :) (e anche il consumo di RAM sul mio server e' andato da 6 GB a 500 MB)

Proud to see #Trenitalia 🇮🇹 at the top of the most recent ...

2025-01-16T09:58:30Z

Proud to see #Trenitalia 🇮🇹 at the top of the most recent comparative analysis of European rail operators. Even above the usually outstanding Swiss and Austrian railways.

Trenitalia, once among the worst operators in Europe, has become in the past decade an example of how to do railways right.

The railway infrastructure itself can be held by a monopoly or quasi-monopolistic entity, which should be never expected to be profitable, nor be subject to market rules. That entity can lease its infrastructure to multiple competitors that run the actual trains (like Italo, which trails not far behind and on par with Swedish and Finnish trains, or smaller, local train operators to feel the gaps on "unprofitable" lines), and those leasing profits can be reinvested into high speed lines, more trains and lower ticket prices.

Not surprised to see the Dutch NS towards the bottom of the chart instead. NS is instead the example of everything that doesn't work. Once among the best trains in Europe, its services have badly degraded since 2020. Both the Dutch railway operator (ProRail) and the trains operator (NS) are de facto absolute monopolies, but monopolies that are expected to be profitable and subject to market rules, while not being accountable for bad decisions through loss of market share.

That's literally the worst of the two worlds. It means that both the companies have been struggling with chronic staff shortages for years because their salaries aren't attractive (something that tends to happen when you run what's supposed to be a public service while being profitable).

And ticket prices are among the highest in Europe: something that also tends to happen when you have to turn a profit, but you don't have to worry about overcharging your customers because your customers have nowhere else to go, so the cost of your mismanagement is eventually dumped upon your own users.

And the railway line has been a constant work in progress for the past 5 years, with most of the work running late (because of the aforementioned shortages) and cancelations and delays being the new norm. The Netherlands is the only civilized country I've been to where passengers are advised to check in real time if their train is going to run through an app (9292), because even Google Maps can't keep track of all the mess on their railway. Other countries have already figured out how to stick to their train schedules without surprises.

Oh, and the high speed railway network basically doesn't exist (besides the French-owned Thalys trains, and the British-owned Eurostar line that Amsterdam will probably see in 2125 given the current construction struggles and delays). That's because the NS CEO has done a bit of market analysis, noticed that the median trip on one of his trains lasts less than 40 minutes, and decided that Dutch citizens don't need high speed. This is also the kind of thing that tends to happen when you are expected to be profitable, but you don't have any competitors to fill the gaps or punish you when you screw things up.

For once, it looks like the efficient Dutch may have a lot to learn from Italians (and French).

Just install a #PiHole in your home network. I've got a ...

2024-09-26T08:54:39Z

Just install a #PiHole in your home network.

I've got a Samsung smart TV I purchased a couple of years ago. I've never seen a single ad on it (the drawback is that the TV's app store doesn't work either as it belongs to a domain also used for ads).

When I tried to disable the PiHole for a couple of minutes, I couldn't recognize my TV anymore. Ads in the menu, ads popping up in the corners of the TV, ads everywhere.

It's no coincidence I guess that my smart TV is the main offender when it comes to requests to blocked domains on my PiHole.

Just get a PiHole, and, unless the TV manufacturer refuses to pick the DNS server used in your network, or they've found ways to inject ads without hosting them on blocked domains, you won't get a single second of harassment.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/lg-tvs-continue-down-advertising-rabbit-hole-with-new-screensaver-ads/

A part of me cheers at the fact that a German court has ruled ...

2024-08-22T18:39:34Z

A part of me cheers at the fact that a German court has ruled that #Google Fonts violate #GDPR.

There are too many websites out there that mindlessly embed in their HTML fonts in the format of URLs hosted on Google's systems.

It means that the simple act of reading a blog or a newsletter will cause your IP address (at the very least) to be logged on Google's systems, even if you didn't directly visit a website on a google.com domain.

Such a practice violates GDPR, which states that any storage of personal data points should come with the explicit consent of the person those data points belong to - and the company should also prove that it has legitimate interest in storing that piece of information.

However, this "logging IP addresses violates GDPR" thing is a dangerously slippery slope, and I'd like the EU to draw a clear line on what is tolerated and what isn't. The jurisprudence should also start take into account the concept of "relevance" and "context" of the collected data.

All web servers out there log IP addresses. As a Web admin, I have dozens of nginx and Apache instances, all diligently logging each single Web request that hits them.

The doctrine that logging IP addresses on a Web server is personal data collection that requires consent screens and legitimate interest goes against the way most of the Web has been running for the past three decades, and it requires GDPR-compliant versions of nginx, Apache, Tomcat, Django, Express and basically any Web framework out there. Plus, it greatly reduces the security of the Web - as a Web admin, if one of my sites gets targeted by a DDoS or gets breached, I need to have the minimum amount of data in my hands to identify who did it, and that includes at the very least IP addresses, requested URLs and timestamps.

That's why I think that the GDPR should be refined with the concepts of relevance and context of the collected data.

If I run my own blog and I log the IP addresses of my visitors, I usually can't do much with that information. It's like knowing that you are 32-year-old white dude with green eyes who just visited a Wallmart, without knowing anything else about you.

If however my name is Google, and besides that single Web server log trace I also happen to run a big search engine, a big Web browser, a big OS, a big cloud, a big advertisement network, a big mail server, a big video platform, a big voice assistant, a big provider of Web fonts, a big provider of mobile notifications and a big maps service, then most likely I know that, besides being a 32-year-old white dude with green eyes who just bought a Fanta at Wallmart, your name is John Doe, your favourite musician is Taylor Swift, you live with your girlfriend, you don't have kids, you've just walked out of your office and you've bought a Fanta at a Wallmart where you regularly buy a drink on your way to the gym, and I also know exactly where you drove to get there, what exercises you'll do at the gym, at what time you're back home, what show you'll watch and when you go to sleep.

Quite a big difference, isn't it? What is an isolated data point with nearly no value in the first case becomes an extra point in a business whose job is to paint the clearest picture of you in the latter.

The EU needs to draw a clear line here.

Saying that Google Fonts aren't GDPR compliant is a wise decision - one that will impact a lot of websites, but a wise decision nonethless.

But not because logging IP addresses without showing a data collection consent popup violates the GDRP.

Only because it violates it in cases like Google's - i.e. large businesses whose job is to collect as many data points as possible about you.

That's probably a sensible trade-off between defending privacy and making the Web run the way it's supposed to.

https://termageddon.com/google-fonts-violates-gdpr/

Two Dutch cities lead the 2024 sustainability index - and the ...

2024-06-12T10:06:44Z

Two Dutch cities lead the 2024 sustainability index - and the whole top 10 is composed only of European cities.<li>Amsterdam 🇳🇱</li><li>Rotterdam 🇳🇱</li><li>Copenhagen 🇩🇰</li><li>Frankfurt 🇩🇪</li><li>Munich 🇩🇪</li><li>Oslo 🇳🇴</li><li>Hamburg 🇩🇪</li><li>Berlin 🇩🇪</li><li>Warsaw 🇵🇱</li><li>London 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿</li>

https://dutchreview.com/news/rotterdam-amsterdam-most-sustainable-cities-in-the-world/

I've been running my mail server for a while by now. In my ...

2024-05-26T23:31:07Z

In reply to nevent1q…7u7j
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I've been running my mail server for a while by now.

In my experience Gmail isn't a big problem. I mean, it's quite strict about DKIM/DMARC/SPF/RDNS stuff, it wants to wait a bit before trusting a new server, and one single mistake is enough to get you blacklisted for a while. But if you know your 21st century postmaster fundamentals, and you aren't on a Spamhaus list, you can get your mails delivered to Gmail 99.9% of the times.

The real problem out there is Microsoft IMHO. Even complying with all the best practices out there often only results in them "temporarily whitelisting" your domain. Microsoft has sent even seasoned postmasters to the hell and back with their illogical policies. And of course their support is a complete black hole - the only feedback I got once for them, after asking why they would periodically blacklist one of my domains, despite having good reputation and no issues with any other mail services, was that "they can't disclose their acceptance policies with other postmasters".

Microsoft is the real reason why people who would have all the skills to set up and run their own mail servers eventually have to resort to paying money for SMTP relays like Mailhop, Mailgun, Proton, Tutanota etc. - just to have the piece of mind that Outlook/Hotmail addresses won't start rejecting emails out of the blue. SMTP relays are literally the "Microsoft tax" for daring to run your own mail server.

> they never index anything you write on the internet That’s ...

2024-05-26T14:30:56Z

In reply to nevent1q…37l0
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> they never index anything you write on the internet

That’s a bit of a wide definition of “usage”. Anyone can run a scraper to index my blog or posts, but that doesn’t mean that I’m “using” their product.

Same goes for writing to GMail - people email me on my private server, but I wouldn’t say that they are “users” of my server.

> you never use a browser that has google code in it

That’s again a wide definition of “usage”. I mitigate this by using Firefox, which isn’t based on the Chromium engine - unless the definition of “usage” is “anything that has code committed by a Google employee in it”, but then we fall into the “purity for the sake of purity” argument.

> you never use websites that use google analytics or google fonts

Both of them are blocked by NoScript, and analytics are blocked on the DNS side before they can even reach one of my devices anyway.

All this to say that if by “usage” we mean “any potential data point that Google can collect about us, even through indirect usage”, then I agree with your statement. Even if I were super paranoid and sealed, my neighbour with a Google Wi-Fi router or an Android device part of the Find My Device network could already made me an “indirect user”.

But my definition of “usage” is usually a bit tighter and it involves mostly “direct usage”. On that front, I think that we can all try and play our little part.