I'm sitting here with a very performant computer running its native web browser.
It's ridiculous that I kept losing my place in that article because the page kept getting shifted to fit yet another damn ad (there were at least three in-view at all times as I was looking at it) onto the screen.
Either make the ads fast and don't load the page until they're all there, or better yet, admit that online content isn't a way to make your private equity group even more obscenely rich, and cut back on the monetization that you put on it.
Everything's for sale. The Dutch were still buying natural gas from Russia as late as 2020 [0] despite 6 years of irregular warfare in the Donbas at that point and 12 years of South Ossetia in Georgia. Hell, they still might be through some sort of third-party reseller.
Compared to the early years of the Donbas invasion, having a leader full of hot air is small potatoes.
There's always room for spies to get what they want. It's just a matter of what that will be.
The main reason for the Dutch dependence on Russian gas is the rapid shutdown of the Slochteren field for political reasons[0], while there weren't yet any LNG terminals available to import it from outside Europe. Considering Europe didn't yet view Russia as a genuine threat it's not exactly surprising that importing Russian gas was seen as a viable short-term strategy.
[0]: The Slochteren field still has plenty of gas remaining. It was shut down due to pushback from the inhabitants of Groningen, whose houses were being destroyed by earthquakes - caused by soil subsidence as a result of gas extraction. If there were to have been a serious war with Russia at that point, The Netherlands could've trivially shut off all gas imports by scaling the extraction back up.
The point isn't about the potential for future production of natural gas or other petrochemical products from Slochteren. The point is that Europeans regularly participate in dealings with countries that act against their best interests on a regular basis, and that there's no real reason to believe that the Dutch will behave any differently with Trump.
> Considering Europe didn't yet view Russia as a genuine threat it's not exactly surprising that importing Russian gas was seen as a viable short-term strategy.
That's exactly what I'm talking about. Everything should have told Europeans that Russia was reverting back to its old autocratic imperial ways. Everything. Ukrainian politicians and internal dissidents were being poisoned with dioxins and radioisotopes almost 20 years ago by Russian agents. Putin was stacking on more and more repression as the years went by. Hacking campaigns have been a constant problem in the West for decades with strong evidence to suggest the Russian government as a threat actor. The Russian military was building weapons specifically designed to counter NATO, which is the backbone of strategic defense in Europe. And that's before you take into account things like the South Ossetia war which saw the Russians literally invade another country for wanting to move towards a Western sphere of influence.
What was funding all of this? Purchases of Russian petroleum products by Europeans who were told over and over to stop by American allies, only to be caught with their flies unzipped when the tanks started rolling into the Donbas three years ago.
I have no reason to think that the continent will behave any differently when faced with a Trump administration that would give them benefits to look the other way. The damage he could do to the continent is insignificant compared to what Putin did.
> Regarding "their loss": the self-destruction of the US on the international stage is directly leading to a "massive scale-up" of the way various European agencies work together. If anything, I'd call that a win.
It's going to take time and resources to match what any sort of "lost" cooperation with the US had, assuming they even can match the capabilities. That's a naturally bad thing for intelligence agencies in the interim.
The 2000s / early 2010s US is definitely leaving behind some big shoes to fill, no doubt about that. I'm not going to pretend it won't be a painful transition - Europe has been relying on the US far too much since the Second World War.
On the other hand, 2025 US has a president who seems to flips sides in the Ukraine conflict every other week. Considering that the main threat in Europe right now is Russia, that significantly reduces the value of US intelligence. Who needs enemies when your "friends" are just as likely to help you as they are to feed you misinformation?
I don't think they care nearly as much about that as many suspect.
Trump's a loudmouth idiot and the Dutch government has to look like they're doing something about it. Telling a nation that they're "not" going to share intelligence is one way to "do" that.
The only problem is, spies are born liars and the world of espionage is inherently opaque to the public, so what this really means for US-Dutch intelligence sharing is probably going to depend on what the intelligence is, what the Dutch have to gain from sharing it, and what could be prevented should it be shared.
If the Dutch government thought that they could benefit from what Trump's doing, they'd go through with it, humanitarian consequences be damned. Nations don't have values, they have interests. People in Amsterdam aren't going to stop drinking coffee en masse because of the coffee trade's reputation for economic exploitation of the global south, and they're not going to stop talking with the US if they can get to draw benefit from it, either.
2) People who thought that just having stuff "in the cloud" meant that it was automatically spread across regions. Hint, it's not; you have to deploy it in different regions and architect/maintain around that.
Not to speak for the other poster, but yes, they had people experiencing difficulties getting into the data centers to fix the problems.
I remember seeing a meme for a cover of "Meta Data Center Simulator 2021" where hands were holding an angle grinder with rows of server racks in the background.
"Meta Data Center Simulator 2021: As Real As It Gets (TM)"
> This has become far too normalized due to decades of bad behavior by the US, and it’s going to come back to bite us as US power declines.
This has been happening long before the US started doing it.
If anything, it's normalized in the US because of the bad behavior prior to the US doing it. China's a great example. What does brutally crushing dissent internally and abroad without even a facade of a single care about human rights get you? Well, in their case, damn near superpower status. Been that way since at the very least Nixon's administration.
The net effect was people started to wonder why we bother with the inefficiencies of "rights" and "privacy". The concern for human rights shown since the end of WWII in the West (particularly the US) is an exception, not norm, in history.
>The net effect was people started to wonder why we bother with the inefficiencies of "rights" and "privacy".
Who are these people you're talking about, tankies, faschists?
The Chinese have the government that they deserve. They screw each other over, and what goes around comes around. It's a cautionary tale, not an example to follow.
Ofcom does know that they're dealing with 4chan, right?
Ultimately all of these sorts of regulations rely on people feeling the need to comply. 4chan feels no needs, least of all to comply.
It's the immovable object of online forums. It has not encountered a true unstoppable force. I doubt it ever will.
If they want it "gone" they'll have to both block it at the infrastructure level leading into the country and keep people from using internet infrastructure that isn't subject to these blocks from within the UK. That's... not really possible.
Ofcom is simply doing their job. I doubt they care about the users of 4chan. They will fine the company in accordance to UK law. Then if the company does not comply Ofcom will target their advertisers and it's Japanese owner who lives in France as well as having UK ISPs block 4chan. I can't think of any reason as to why France wouldn't work with UK authorities on this.
Contrary to HN and other USA tech forums might think, this will likely be recieved favorable by the the UK public.
For France to be legally able to give a shit Ofcom would need to go to court in the UK, pierce the corporate veil, and receive a final judgment against the owner of 4chan. Only then would they have some routes to petition French authorities for assistance.
There's no agreement between the UK and France that would require or even permit French authorities to enforce fines by a some random UK entity willy-nilly.
There are far too many "luminaries" in the tech industry who've had the last 20 years of "must create value!" go to their heads, even in the FLOSS space.
When profit motive does not exist (and it shouldn't in FLOSS) then you need to stick to things like the UNIX philosophy and KISS (keep it simple, stupid) in order to create good software. Trends mean nothing when you're in this mindset.
It's Firefox. It's a browser. It does browser things; namely, it sends HTTP requests, possibly executes JavaScript, and renders the resulting computed data on a screen as HTML. It does not need to have AI integrated. At best, AI should be a downloadable extension.
If the group's leadership cannot comprehend this, then they need to be removed immediately and blacklisted from leadership at future organizations in the future.
> If the group's leadership cannot comprehend this, then they need to be removed immediately and blacklisted from leadership at future organizations in the future.
You have no power to do this. They would have to remove themselves, or Google would have to make a phone call.
Or just watch its market share erode until it vanishes from the charts. You picked "beginning" too, and indeed it started when they betrayed the power-users userbase they had (the one that installed FF on their mum's computer and actively promoted it) to be more like the oh-so-successful Chrome (which was pushed with dark patterns like being bundled with AV updates). Personally, it made me go to the "old" Opera (Opera 12) until it got "Chromified" and sold to China.
They have consistently been doing the opposite of what the majority of their userbase expect from them (Pocket, paid sites forced to the "Speedial" page,...). To me, the only remaining value of FF is being up-to-date with web shena^H^H^H^H^H standards.
A FOSS project shouldn't be focused on succeeding; they should be focused on doing the right thing. No little compromises or play-on-words on your values. And if that means less funding, too bad, but so be it.
This is an opinion, yet you state it like fact. While I'm hesitant to want any AI features in my browser, what a "browser" does isn't necessarily a settled debate.
No, the market states it like fact. 15 years ago FF was the belle of the ball. Now it has minuscule market share and is looking at an uncertain future.
> While I'm hesitant to want any AI features in my browser, what a "browser" does isn't necessarily a settled debate.
That's a fairly concise definition I gave, unless I'm responding to Diogenes.
I'm sitting here with a very performant computer running its native web browser.
It's ridiculous that I kept losing my place in that article because the page kept getting shifted to fit yet another damn ad (there were at least three in-view at all times as I was looking at it) onto the screen.
Either make the ads fast and don't load the page until they're all there, or better yet, admit that online content isn't a way to make your private equity group even more obscenely rich, and cut back on the monetization that you put on it.
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