What resources are you concerned about? An n100 minipc should be capable of serving something like a blog at 20k+ requests/second (or saturating its network).
The only solution is regulation. If all content created by anyone has a copyright, how does an implicit opt-in (which is what happens if you don't create a robots.txt file for your website) for scraping make any sense? Moreover, even if you have a robots.txt, AI (or whatever) bots often don't respect it (or use workarounds - they outsource scraping of such "restricted" sites to unethical third-parties to get the data; Meta has even resorted to piracy, openly!). So clearly, the logic and the "honour system" has failed.
Cloudflare, Google Captcha, HCaptcha etc. are all shitty technical solutions because, as we are all discovering, it comes at the cost of our privacy (i.e. our personal data may monetise these services) and / or our computing resource and time. If current copyright laws aren't sufficient to prevent this, we have to acknowledge the system is broken. The answer could be enhancing it with some kind of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) -like laws, but in favour of the creators against BigTech or rogue actors.
Or you could let information be free, at least the stuff that’s on the public net.
As for issues like bots overloading websites or using too many resources scaling laws will take care of it quickly, it’s not like you can’t serve thousands of RPS from a Raspberry Pi these days.
I don't think regulation will stop web scraping, not least of which because it can be done from locations outside the jurisdiction of the regulations.
> we have to acknowledge the system is broken
The system is broken. It probably takes, what, 10 seconds or less to use a residential or foreign proxy, 6+ months to internationally track and prosecute a single offender? So like a million times more effort going the regulatory route.
Just as criminal laws don't end all crimes, copyright laws and anti-scraping regulation won't end all scraping. But it will greatly reduce it and limit it to rogue actors. Two examples I can cite here are the laws against email spams and laws against unsolicited marketing calls - they had a definite impact in reducing both (even in India, from where I am, where implementation of laws are often lax).
I can't believe this still isn't a thing outside of GrapheneOS. Being able to revoke network permissions is a fundamental security and privacy tool that's willfully left out of both Android and iOS.
There's zero reason not to include it as a toggle.
On iOS it wouldn’t even be that hard. There’s already a toggle to disable use of cellular connectivity. Add a separate one for non-cellular (iPadOS can connect via Ethernet), and/or a “disallow all” toggle.
We are partly there in spirit with App Transparency keeping track of the IPs and hostnames apps connect to.
That's not entirely fair to the author as the article also states that the consumer being in control is a must:
> Every step subtracts a degree of sender control. Some of it passes to the user, and that is a good thing: a person deciding what is allowed to interrupt them is the channel working as it should. The rest passes to the platform, and that is the part that should concern a sender, because the platform's judgment is opaque, unappealable, and increasingly made by a model rather than by a setting the user chose.
A platform has essentially two "clients" - the user and the developer. Without both, it wouldn't exist. And it is in the interest of both that the platform should have very limited arbitrary authority over them. Nobody can deny today that the platform owners today have too much power over their users and their developers, which makes it easy for them to commercially exploit them while undermining their rights. We need regulations and standards (for interoperability, which is one of the arguments being made) to counter this.
Been an app developer since 2009, worked on Android for 6 years at Google. Push notifications suck, users hate them.
Simultaneously, I cannot match the pull quote, an argument summary, to their argumentation. IIUC if the reword patent / Apple’s summarizing disappear there’s 0 reason to say it wasn’t control passing purely to the consumer.
So I’m left a bit empty as the high-minded purpose has little backing, and thus comes across as bloviating.
The Dutch should be aware that if Netherland has some information-sharing agreements with Five Eyes or Fourteen Eyes, all this data will still be available to the US (and other allies) (hopefully, presumably, with your government acting as the gatekeeper).
It's not only about the data, it's about the risk that the US would basically turn off things like tax collection and doctors' visits in the Netherlands as part of (say) a first strike on Greenland.
Sure, the chance is low. But in the current climate people are nervous and it's best not to risk it. The current government has already embarked on a long-term strategy to bring more of critical software infrastructure back in-country, selling the core identity provider software abroad would go directly against current policy.
Sanctioning people is basically risk-free and more importantly dollar-free. Fighting wars is extremely not-free, as Trump is currently discovering in Iran. I personally rate the risk of the US actually invading Greenland as not higher than about 10%, with the matter most likely being resolved by the US administration re-discovering that the US is allowed to establish a base on the country, doing so and then announcing with big fanfare that they solved the terrible terrible problem of Greenland being "the most unsafe".
Still though, that is about 10 percentage points higher than before Trump took office. Better not to hand him too many tools to exert leverage with.
> Sanctioning people is basically risk-free and more importantly dollar-free.
In the long term, I think this was actually really expensive. People talk and worry about this, and as a result of this (and similar developments) general consensus seems to have shifted towards preferring EU companies over US companies for tech. That used to be the exact opposite for as long as I can remember.
The issue was less privacy concerns, and more "hey lets not hand over one of the most critical pieces of infrastructure to a potentially hostile state". DigID is the user authentication platform for basically every government site in The Netherlands. A foreign government could use sanctions to pressure Dutch individuals to comply by limiting access to it.
More broadly, I think it's "let's not hand over essential infrastructure to any foreign state". Friendly or not, it doesn't matter.
Private companies ought to have the freedom to do business with whomever they like, but for essential public services, better to assume essential public infrastructure simply must not be offshored at all.
I don't know about that. I don't think it'd have been a major issue in the country if it were a Belgian or German takeover. It may still not have been desirable, but I doubt the government would have stepped in like they did here.
> (hopefully, presumably, with your government acting as the gatekeeper)
Exactly, that gatekeeper role is what's the difference here. Do you give all data to another country and ask them for pieces back as needed (whenever someone wants to use DigiD, the country can block it), or do you host it yourself and only share the parts that are relevant for this other country's investigations?
Right. And in some ways, that is disappointing, and exasperating, at the same time. Strong privacy regulations would be a better way to go about it. (Note that this criticism is not specific to Netherlands - a lot of countries are, in my opinion, treating "digital sovereignty" as a matter of control between one or more countries and corporates without any real consideration for the individuals right.)
Maybe it's the pronunciation - ente means "mine" and ante means "yours" (in Malayalam) which is what perhaps you may be referring to? (Former South Indian kingdoms and South East Asia have historical cultural ties due to trade and conquest, and thus they share some common words, which I assume is, largely borrowed from Tamil and Malayalam).
It is as simple as that. They read the writing in the wall and knew that the native would take back power. They didn't trust, and want, the native blacks to have nuclear weapons. The whites in Africa still have deep political ties with the Anglo-Americans, and that's why we see Trump complaining about "white genocide" in South Africa.
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