Humanius

The countries that oppose Chat Control are:

• Austria
• Belgium
• Czechia
• Finland
• Germany
• Luxemburg
• Netherlands
• Poland

Supporters are:

• Bulgaria
• Croatia
• Cyprus
• Denmark
• France
• Hungary
• Ireland
• Italy
• Latvia
• Lithuania
• Malta
• Portugal
• Slovakia
• Spain
• Sweden

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:

• The website that needs your age shouldn’t get to know your identity. They only get to verify your age.
• The government age verification shouldn’t get to know what service you are requesting access for. They only provide age verification.

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:

• The European Parliament is directly elected in European elections every five years
• The European Commission is made up of commissioners from each country, which are in turn appointed by their democratically elected governments
• The European Council consists of the heads of state or governance, which are also democratically elected in the respective countries.
• The Council of the European Union is made up of government ministers, which are appointed by the democratically elected governments.

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:

• Nextcloud
• Jellyfin
• CUPS

It costs a bit of money up-front, but for me it was well-worth the investment.

I wish there was a good alternative to YouTube. I’ve been meaning to host a Peertube instance but that process is really not as straightforward as it should be if they want the platform to gain widespread adoption

Google Maps has pretty decent alternatives though:

• For simply browsing the map I use OpenStreetMaps on desktop, and Organic Maps on mobile.
• For navigation (by car) I used to use Waze (which is also owned by Google), but I’ve switched back to good ol’ TomTom

As for iPhone… personally I have a Google Pixel which I’m going to keep using till I can’t anymore. After that I’m probably switching to Fairphone. They’re a European company and their phones are right up my alley

Not op, but for me the main problem with Authy is that it is owned by an American company.

It’s not the worst offender, but any American company is subject to the whims of the current administration. As an example, we’re currently seeing how American sanctions lock people out of their Microsoft accounts at the International Court.

I’ve slowly been moving over my 2FA codes to Aegis.

Yeah they should just sit back and do nothing while their government finishes the job! /s