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Cake day: July 27th, 2025

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  • According to the article, the lie that the current Danish chair of the rotating Council Presidency is being accused of making by Patrick Breyer is that the European Parliament will refuse to extend the current soon-to-expire voluntary scanning regime unless the EU Council first agrees to implement Chat Control:

    “This is a blatant lie designed to manufacture a crisis,” states Dr. Breyer, a long-time digital freedom fighter. “There is no such decision by the European Parliament. There has not even been a discussion on this issue. The Commission has not yet proposed to extend the current legislation, and the European Parliament has not yet appointed Rapporteurs to discuss it. We are witnessing a shameless disinformation campaign to force an unprecedented mass scanning law upon 450 million Europeans. I call on EU governments, and particularly the German government, not to fall for this blatant manipulation. To sacrifice the fundamental right to digital privacy and secure encryption based on a fabrication would be a catastrophic failure of political and moral leadership.”



  • This is what I’m doing. I recently switched from the email service offered by my web host to Zoho Mail. I pay them $12 a year for a couple of gigabytes storage (which isn’t a whole lot but enough for me and I’m cheap).

    As someone else says elsewhere, as well as changing the MX records to the new server, you need to add SPF, DKIM and D-MARC records in your DNS to ensure mail you send is accepted by the receiver’s mail server.




  • this is what the mesh networks are that people have mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

    It is theoretically possible to create a purely peer-to-peer network where each individual connects to people nearby, and then any individual can in theory communicate with any other, by passing data packets to nearby people on the network who then pass it on themselves until it reaches the other person.

    You can probably already grasp a few of the issues here - confidentiality is a big one, and reliability is another. But in theory it could work, and the more people who take part in such networks, the more reliable they become.



  • I stopped paying for YouTube when they started cracking down on free users, and stopped using them pretty much entirely. It was hard though - even though I have Netflix, I always found it easier to find interesting and informative things to watch on YouTube than Netflix. I’d watch YouTube several times a day, whereas with Netflix I usually spend about 10 or 15 minutes scrolling through their god-awful UI before closing it and finding something else to do.


  • Just had a look - $6 a month, based in NYC. Definitely better than giving YouTube money, for now at least. They say they have a 50/50 profit sharing model with creators - profit presumably is after salaries (including bonuses?) have been paid, so it’s not clear exactly how much of your subscription does in fact go to the video creators. Still, a better option than YouTube, if only to support competition.





  • You can choose any font you have locally available by setting the “reader.font_type” to the font name in about:config

    You can also set “reader.content_width” to values beyond the 9 allowed by the UI to have the text take up even more of your screen width. Setting it to 12 is just about perfect for me.

    These values will be lost if you update the font style or the width via the Reader “Text and Layout” menu though. For fonts, you might be able to avoid that by putting fonts you want to be able to select from in the “reader.font_type.values” list but I haven’t tried that.


  • Firefox reader mode is great. I started using it just to avoid having to tell sites to piss off with their cookies, and to dodge some paywalls, but now I use it on a lot of sites even when there aren’t any dialogs to dodge.

    I actually prefer having articles take up my screen width rather than be all squashed into a skinny little column in the centre. It’s also nice when trying to read someone’s blog with questionable text colour.


  • That’s good, thanks for that info. It does say it’s a “good will” gesture from the various train companies, but it seems to be a firm offer - would be good to have it enshrined in law nevertheless.

    From what I read, you need to get a Delay/Cancellation Confirmation somehow. You then would need to book a seat on one of the following trains - on some routes, most trains are full by the time of travel, and in the event of a delay like this, you’re probably not the only one needing to reschedule. You may well need to get a hotel overnight and travel the next day. All possible, but potentially stressful.

    I will still avoid getting long distance trains with connections - but saying that, none of the several international train journeys I’ve made so far have been delayed more than 15 minutes.

    Missing a connecting flight is no less stressful - and I also always avoid those as much as possible, although because long-distance flights are shorter, the knock-on effects of missing a connection tend to be less (more likely to be able to find a seat on a replacement flight on the same day for instance).