From the coverage that I read in my national newspaper (which admittedly isn’t Slovakian) the speed limit applies to everyone on the sidewalk. Not just to e-bikes and e-scooters, but also to pedestrians.
The speed limit is set to 6 km/h. Joggers and people making a sprint to catch a bus, would easily be breaking that speed limit.
To my knowledge, there are designs which allow you to pop out the latch without the need for electronics.
However, if I’m reading the article correctly those wouldn’t be allowed either because in their default state they don’t have “enough room for a hand to grip behind them”. That wording alone explicitely bans flush doorhandles, and not just electronic doorhandles
The countries that oppose Chat Control are:
Supporters are:
All other countries are currently undecided
Source: https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
Contact your representatives and tell them they should oppose Chat Control. The link above lists who they are and provides some templates for emails you could send them
From my understanding a significant portion of asylum claims in Europe came from Syrian refugees.
In December of 2024 the former Syrian president Assad was deposed and the country has (seemingly) gotten a lot more stable since. So it makes sense that asylum claims would be down in the first half of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024.
This is a good development. Not only does it mean that people will be able to go home in relative safety, it also takes away a lot of the ammunition (the fallout from the refugee crisis that has been ongoing since 2015) that the right-wing populists and fascists all over Europe have been using to gain power.
I’m at the “I’d like to ditch Windows, but whenever I try another Linux distro there are too many little issues really consider it a viable alternative” stage.
Funnily enough that is roughly the implementation the EU seems to be working on.
https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-age-verification
On a side-note. I do not consider the government to be a trusted party. Whatever solution gets implemented needs to not provide the government any information that they can use for mass surveillance.
The two main requirements in my view are:
Edit: You mention the certificate being short-lived, but one of the concerns mentioned in the proposed implementation for the EU age verification states that if that window is too short it can be used to determine identity.
While I agree that the cost of operation and yield are a valid concern, the same argument could have been used against renewable energies like wind and solar only 30 to 40 years ago.
The price of these energy sources has come down a lot since, for a large part thanks to the modern day widespread use. We have a lot of experience generating power this way which drives down cost, and increases yield.
Novel techniques like the one described in the article don’t yet benefit from that experience and scale. And if we don’t try new things every now and then they never will.
That is not to say all novel techniques will be equally fruitful, but if you don’t occasionally try new things you will never learn.
Edit: Misspelled “energy” as “energie”
I’m currently using Ecosia as well, because they are working together with Qwant on a European search index. I want to support that.
The article speculates that the increase in pedestrian deaths is due to e-bikes and e-scooters. I’m not convinced that this speculation is based on actual data though.
After a bit of digging I found a government resource on road fatalities:
https://catalogue.data.infrastructure.gov.au/dataset/australian-road-deaths-database
This data does not seem to track the vehicle that caused the road fatality, unless that vehicle is a bus, heavy-rigid truck, or articulated truck. So there would be no way to determine from the data available whether the increase in fatalities is due to e-bikes and e-scooters.
Republic and democracy are not mutually exclusive…
Citizen’s Initiatives are great, but I’m not sure they are the right mechanism in this case.
They are meant to make parliament address a concern, and not to inform legislators how you feel about a law proposal that is already on the table. All a Citizen’s Initiative does is force the European parliament to address a concern if a certain threshold of signatures is met. They will be doing that anyway when the law proposal is being voted on.
And on top of that, the time frame for a Citizen’s Initiative is too long (over a year) to be a meaningful shield against Chat Control.
Contacting your representatives to the European Parliament is probably the best way forward at this point.
I’m not sure how contacting my representatives in the European Parliament over something that I am concerned about, would be spam.
I don’t care what party they are from, or what part of the country they are from. They are still my representatives.
They sit there to represent the concerns of their constituents in parliament, and they cannot effectively do that if they do not know the concerns of their constituents.
If you have good ideas for collective action I’d love to hear them, but until then shooting an email can never hurt.
Edit: Just so there is no confusion, I don’t think signing a four year old change.org petition is any more effective than directly contacting your MEPs
Instead it might be more helpful to directly contact your representatives.
This website can help you figure out who they are, and help formulate an email send to them:
https://fightchatcontrol.eu/
(Obviously it is best to write your own response, or at least update the text to be your own, but it could be a good springboard)
The EU is a democracy.
While it’s not perfect (no system is), each of the bodies that make up the EU legislature are democratic:
Not every body is directly voted on, but each body comes forth from a democratic election
Edit: The message I responded to originally made the claim that the “EU is no democracy.”
Oops! We accidentally added Putin himself to our top secret summit Signal group-chat
This looks like an AI generated article
It is not that funny when it is your home that gets blown up
I’m Dutch, but I don’t live in a place that is particularly affected by these explosions, nor am I an expert on the matter… but I’ll drop my two cents, based on my reading of the situation
These explosions are happening in cities like Rotterdam and the Hague. They are places that traditionally have gang/mafia activity.
From my understanding a lot of the explosions are related to underworld dealings. It’s possible that there is some petty conflicts as well, but the individuals are almost always connected to the underworld somehow.
It’s also worth noting that in the NL (as I imagine it happens in other places?) crime tends to come in waves.
Criminals figure out a new effective method to commit crime. The police and institutions scramble at first in order to deal with it. Then eventually they figure out an effective method in order the combat the issue. After which criminals lose interest and either the problem moves to a different location, or they change tactics.
Edit: The article also mentions that “the use and possession of fireworks generally are also laxer in the Netherlands.”
This is simply not true. The kinds of fireworks that are legal in the NL are much more restricted than they are in Belgium and Germany, and you can only legally purchase and use it leading up to New Year’s Eve.
The dangerous stuff is illegally imported from Belgium and Germany.
OS: Unraid
It’s primarily NAS software, with a form of software raid functionality built in.
I like it mainly because it works well and the GUI makes is very easy to use and work with.
On top of that you can run VMs and docker containers, so it is very versatile as well.
I use it to host the following services on my network:
It costs a bit of money up-front, but for me it was well-worth the investment.
I’m no expert, but I believe this is down to the individual member states.
In my country (the NL) it is technically not allowed to film the public street with an automated camera, which effectively makes Ring and equivalents illegal to install in most places
Practically this is not really enforced though, so you see them everywhere anyway.