rt.com is blocked for me. If you can access it and you're based in the EU it means you're using a foreign DNS provider like 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8.
I understand well the arguments used by governments to restrict access to books and websites. I reject them. I believe I am the best person to decide which knowledge I am allowed to access. I am certainly far more qualified than the government.
How quickly we shift from "it's not happening" to "okay it's happening, and here's why it's a good thing!" It's fine that you prefer the government to choose which information you're allowed to view. I don't. I believe I should be allowed access to all information, and I should be allowed to choose what I want to read. I think banning books and websites and news is wrong.
No I mean actual censorship. For example, RT and Sputnik. They have also banned PressTV and CGTN. They suspended broadcast licenses for EADaily / Eurasia Daily, Fondsk, Lenta, NewsFront, RuBaltic, SouthFront, Strategic Culture Foundation, and Krasnaya Zvezda / Tvzvezda. All of these sites would be explicitly banned from any EU based search engine.
Note that I am not giving American tech companies a free pass here. Google is one of the worst.
Also note that "censorship" doesn't exclusively refer to government censorship. That is an American-centric perspective using the Constitution as the lens. Censorship is often conducted by individuals and organisations. In this case I am referring to the EU.
The EU has made numerous moves towards restricting free speech and communication over the last decade, especially in the technology space. These include:
The DSA imposes strict regulations on large online platforms and search engines (such as Google and Meta).
Requires platforms to remove "illegal content" quickly, though the definition of illegal content varies by country.
Mandates content moderation transparency but can pressure platforms to suppress speech preemptively.
Enables regulators to demand access to platform algorithms and recommend content moderation changes.
Forces messaging apps like WhatsApp and Signal to comply with EU orders, potentially compromising end-to-end encryption.
Primarily aimed at tech monopolies, but also affects search engines and app stores.
Limits the ability of platforms to rank their own services higher (e.g., Google prioritizing its own results).
Forces companies like Apple to open up iMessage to other messaging services, potentially impacting security.
Requires platforms to remove flagged terrorist content within one hour or face heavy fines.
No clear appeals process, raising concerns about automatic censorship by algorithms.
Governments can demand removals across all EU member states, limiting national sovereignty over content moderation.
Although GDPR focuses on privacy, it has been used to delist certain search results (right to be forgotten).
Some critics argue that GDPR can be weaponized to suppress critical information about public figures.
Requires platforms to filter copyrighted content before it is uploaded.
Forces platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook to proactively block content using automated filters, which often lead to false positives and excessive censorship.
Criticized for making memes and satire more difficult to share due to automated copyright enforcement.
Although voluntary at first, compliance with fact-checking and disinformation policies is now mandatory under the DSA.
Forces social media companies to demonetize or downrank "misinformation," often without clear definitions.
Involves close cooperation with government-backed fact-checkers, raising concerns about political bias.
Requires messaging platforms (e.g., WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal) to scan private messages for child abuse content.
Critics argue this destroys end-to-end encryption, making all private communication vulnerable.
Could lead to mass surveillance under the guise of child protection.
Requires all online political ads to be labeled and traceable.
Platforms must track funding sources, but unclear definitions of political content could impact activism and independent journalism.
Could be used to limit grassroots campaigns that lack formal funding structures.
Gives the EU more oversight over media ownership and state influence on journalism.
Some journalists worry it could be used to pressure media outlets to align with EU narratives.
These are just the laws. There have been uncounted statements by EU leaders about greater control over the kind of information they wish to allow transmitted in the EU. All of these Acts are rooted in good intentions, but the road to hell is paved with good intentions. At minimum, a significant portion of the results in the test list above would be banned under existing legislation.
I use Kagi because of their strong stance against censorship. If I want to find information about controversial topics, I expect my search engine to give me the results it has crawled. I use this community test list to determine if they're censoring results. Most search engines fail this now. I imagine any EU search engine will fail this on day one.
Eutelsat
Eutelsat has about 9% the number of satellites and Starlink is expanding fast. This significantly limits the potential backhaul, which is why Eutelsat doesn't really focus on consumers, but rather governments and enterprise. They don't have the backhaul to offer wide consumer products. Their cost of launch is 10x higher than Starlink, at least, so they'll never be able to compete in backhaul or the consumer space. Of course they could contract SpaceX to launch their satellites, but then they're basically paying the competition to operate, and this power imbalance would be immediately leveraged to their detriment.
The bottom line here is that competitors need reusable rockets, and no one else is even close. However Musk put together the company and strategy pushed space transport forward by decades in a very short space of time, and it's unlikely another Musk figure emerges in Europe. I do not subscribe to the common notion that if we throw enough money at the problem we can solve it. Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin confirms this. It appears to require an appetite for extreme risk; the will to blow up hundreds of expensive rockets; and likely a penchant for the disregard of existing safety laws. The EU would never permit this.
They kept jacking up the prices and making the streaming services worse so I finally pulled the plug and went offline. It's a pain in the ass, to be honest, but once it's all set up it's really quite nice. The only long term issue is discoverability. I feel a bit like I'm stuck with the music I have now and discovering new music and listening to it is such a hassle that I just don't do it. That said, I no longer pay for streaming, and I like what I have, so I'm not complaining.
I can strongly recommend Plexamp, which integrates well into an existing Plex setup.
Lidarr is a great complement to an existing Arr stack. And if you're going to host your own music, you might as well look at Sonarr and Radarr, which are so great.
The operative word there is "entirely." We have philosophy going back thousands of years playing with the subjective nature of reality. There is some truth to this. However most of human history has been an exercise in "might makes right," and truth was whatever the person with the biggest club said it was. Then the Enlightenment happened and it was suddenly considered virtuous to observe, document, and publish objective reality. See the early days of the conflicts with the Church to understand how uncomfortable it can make those who enjoy subjective reality suddenly being confronted with the concept of objective reality.
It's only relatively recently (post Enlightenment) that large portions of society decided it was a good idea to disregard objective reality in journalism, science, and politics, in favour of subjective or "lived" realities. We can in part thank postmodernism for escaping academic containment, but I think that's only part of the slide. Whatever the cause, I think it behooves all of us to attempt to steer into objectivism as frequently and clearly as possible. Depending on the metric, Western society has arguably never been this polarised. If we can't agree on the definition of words, we aren't even speaking the same language anymore. Our North Star needs to be shared language so at the very least we can have valid arguments with each other. That is how we progress.
I agree. Games feel like they're designed by committee now (very much likes movies, in fact). I recall SkillUp's criticism of Veilguard's writing as, "every interaction feels like HR is in the room." This nails so many design choices today. Safe and vanilla is boring. There are of course people who believe that nothing should ever be remotely challenging or offensive to anyone ever, but I just don't think they represent the majority of gamers. Attempting to please them at the expense of the much larger player-base is clearly not working.
Howard has reportedly been championing procedurally generated content for years or perhaps decades. We saw echoes of this in Starfield. The result is quite expected: boring and vanilla. Especially when contrasted with Bethesda's previously great storytelling with intricate characters and hand-crafted experiences. We see once again with Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 how important that is. Yes, it's time consuming and expensive, but it's clearly loved by customers and critics.
Compounding this was Starfield's mediocre writing. It took a clear and obvious dive from previous games. It felt incredibly safe. I wouldn't be surprised if some of it was AI generated.
I'll preface this by saying I am/was a Reddit user since its first year operating in 2005/2006.
The notion that reality is entirely subjective is relatively new and I believe has led to a myriad of consequences across society from social media to journalism to politics. Even if we will never arrive at a future in which we can all acknowledge what a spade is, we should absolutely continue to strive for that. Common understanding is the bedrock of liberal societies. We need it for science and democracy to function.
The "Redditquette" the user above explained was the notion that disagreement isn't invalid. By this I am referring to the philosophical distinction between valid and invalid arguments. For example:
This argument is silly and easily disproved, but valid. Flat Earthers often make valid but easily disproved arguments, and there is much to gain in the world by people having valid discussions with one another. Especially from a curious and open position.
On the other hand, invalid arguments are those in whose conclusion is not proven by its premises. That is, even if all the premises are true, the conclusion could still be false. For example:
The argument tells us that being friendly is one way to make friends, but is that the only way? And does having a lot of friends necessarily mean that you are very friendly? Although Alana might be very friendly, the author hasn’t proven that she is. There is nothing to gain by engaging with this, other than to potentially educate someone about valid and invalid arguments. However this rarely works out well over the internet. This is an opinion masquerading as reason or fact. Trolling uses some variation of this.
Reddiquette was intended to encourage healthy discussion without immediately devolving into insults and death threats. It actually worked really fucking well, for many years. In the early days, the administrators would enforce Rediquette, as crazy as that sounds. They would give out warnings for people downvoting earnest comments and submissions. Some of the better moderated subreddits still maintain a shadow of this, but they don't have the tools to see who is up/downvoting what.
Unfortunately there is some game theory in this. If the rules are "downvote what you don't like," then both sides of any debate must use this rule, or their comments will be permanently hidden, and their ideas will never propagate. The evidence is that this rule is quite devastating for online discourse, and I miss old Reddit.
I have whiplash. You've gone from an implied "that's not happening" to "okay so it's happening, and here's why it's a good thing!" Why feign ignorance if you knew that I was correct?
I don't believe any government has the right to restrict which books and news sites I should be allowed to access. I think I am the best person to decide which knowledge I should have access to.