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Cloudflare is right. But, it's a pretty typical EU play. Protecting more established interests but kneecapping progress.

In this case, hitting a massive number of small sites, which aren't engaged in piracy, to protect a few large entities from some other small piracy sites. It's what's happening in both Italy and Spain.


> But, it's a pretty typical EU play. Protecting more established interests but kneecapping progress.

It's funny that as soon as anything European (not even related to EU one bit) is mentioned, people find a way of pinning it on the European Union. The article has literally nothing to do with EU, and everything to do with individual European countries, yet you somehow found a way of blaming EU for it :)

Sincerely, Spanish internet user who gets blocked from half the internet every time a semi-popular football match is played in this country.


I was actually like 30 years old when I realized "EU" meant "European Union" and wasn't a 2 letter abbreviation for the continent of Europe. In the US, we call states by their two letter abbreviations (IL, NY, CA, etc), often call countries by 2 letter abbreviations too (depends on the country, but JP, AR, CR come to mind as common examples), so it's a pretty natural assumption to think of 'EU' as 'all of the continent Europe, independent of whether they participate in the governing body known as the European Union'

If you substitute the GP for 'pretty typical European play' it makes plenty of sense.


Yeah, similarly, growing up as a European, I thought "America" was "the USA", but turns out it's the entire continent, and even "North America" isn't just the US, but the two neighbors too! I don't think it's too bad to be confused about something, we can't be expected to know it all, every time. We learn and move past it :)

> If you substitute the GP for 'pretty typical European play' it makes plenty of sense.

Not sure even this makes sense, it's not something that is happening Europe wide, and it seems like there is only two countries so far that been engaging in this, with another one thinking about it. For something to be a "pretty typical European play" I'd probably say it has to have happened more times than "twice".


> I thought "America" was "the USA"

It is, at least that's the most common definition.

If you want to refer to North and South America together, one generally says "the Americas".


I think that might be popular and common in the US, but outside the US and in the rest of the world, particularly in Ibero-America, "America" is the entire of South, Central and North America together. But again, what you say seem to be true inside the US, so understandable that many understand it as such.

I don't think anyone (outside the US at least) use "The Americas" in daily language, while "America" certainly is.


Here in Asia, most people with whom I talk are more likely to call the USA "America" rather than the "United States".

Probably because of its closer association with the adjective "American".

If someone with limited English asks where I'm from, they're more likely to understand if I say "America" than "United States". And no one has ever asked "oh but which country in America?".


> If someone with limited English asks where I'm from, they're more likely to understand if I say "America" than "United States". And no one has ever asked "oh but which country in America?".

That's interesting! In my experience, meeting people from the US outside of the US mostly, when you ask where they are from, they tend to always say the city or the state, but never actually specify either "United States" or "America". If you don't happen to know that that state/city is in the US, and they never specified the country, you're usually safe to assume they're from the US :)


> It's funny that as soon as anything European (not even related to EU one bit)

Living in the US, I've noticed many Americans don't really make distinctions like that. They see "EU" as a kind of shorthand for "Europe", or something along those lines. Even the fact that the UK is no longer in the EU doesn't affect this - it's still part of what Americans think of as "the EU".


Probably because most adults in the US grew up and were educated at a time when the EU was, comparative to today, insignificant in # of countries, population, GDP, and general importance, and so very little talked about in either news or text books compared to Europe as an economic and political block. And since Europe was abbreviated 'Eur' well, easy to see how dropping the 'r' hasn't resulted in universal US intuition that it's not the same thing. In general though it does seem pretty understandable to think something calling itself "The European Union" is comprised of just about all of Europe. Especially back with the expanded in '93 countries it was a little presumptuous at only a small fraction of the continent getting together and calling itself that? I do remember learning something about it in school at the time, under the EEC name.

Want to avoid confusion? Call it something like "United Nations", 'UN'. Confusion solved, Americans happy, call off the tariffs, peace, etc.


That's a lot of justification for what ultimately just amounts to ignorance of the outside world.

It's certainly not the case that "most adults in the US grew up and were educated at a time..." The EU exceeded $3 trillion in GDP by 1980. The original EU countries included Germany, France, and Italy, so were hardly insignificant.


You don't seem aware that the "EU", in 1980, didn't exist, nor did you do the sums on the ages of the population in school by the time it did exist to realize that yes, by typical textbook replacement timelines in schools, something like the existence of the EU is unlikely to have been in the textbooks during the school days of most people over the age of 30.


Hell, watch an American's face when you explain to them that "America" doesn't ONLY refer to the united states.

See the gears grind to a halt when they are reeducated on the concepts of "Central AMERICA" and "South AMERICA".


In the United States, "North America" and "South America" are generally treated as separate continents, so therefore as a whole are called "the Americas". This frees up the singular "America" to refer to the US without too much risk of ambiguity. My understanding is that in some places, especially non-English speaking, is that North and South America are treated as a single continent called "America", which adds ambiguity.

People often get confused by divisions like this because they feel like they should be real in an objective sense, but continents are almost entirely social constructs. (There is a North American tectonic plate, and that's real, but it doesn't quite line up with the continent)


Be that as it may, the thing that sounds odd (and a bit arrogant) to most "outsiders" is using the name of a whole continent for a single country and its citizens. I (from Europe) would definitely consider a Canadian, Mexican or Columbian citizen as an "American" too, not only a citizen of the United States. BTW, I'm really curious what Trump thinks the "America" in his "Gulf of America" stands for - the whole continent or only the US?


Okay, maybe arrogant, but still, it's the only country in the continent to contain the word America, no?


Trump's definitely referring to the United States with his pointless renaming attempt because it's singular and not plural, but I'd be careful accusing him of thinking about anything. I doubt he does that very often.

I guess the Organization of American States exists. But usually it's pretty unambiguous which sense is being used; like, I guess you could call Mark Carney an American head of government but it's basically just being obtuse, unless it was in the context of, say, a meeting of Carney with other heads of government in the hemisphere, and then it'd be unambiguous what was meant.

Even "United States of America" is not unambiguous in the most pathological case; Mexico is also a country consisting of united states existing in the Americas.


US education covers that much pretty well. Just not so much the geography of specific countries that belong to south america, europe, asia, and africa.


That would be the same grind to a halt you'd get on just about anyone's face when they have a random stranger try to explain something obvious in a rude and condescending way. The inside voice goes something like: "Do I walk by, is this person sane, or maybe say something equally condescending like 'Hey buddy, with the bombs we have it will be called whatever we want.'"


> Protecting more established interests but kneecapping progress.

I assume you must be American. I always find it funny that there is that US belief that Europe is "old-fashioned" with "old tech" and "old progress". I never encountered anyone yet to tell me what progress wasn't in Europe that was in the US.

I actually think this is a bit backward, with US lack of transportation funding, more people struggling with poverty, backward ecological measures, and missing health care with lower life expectancy.


I'm European too, while I second what you say, I also think that Europe is old: demographically, politically and we're very risk adverse.


Does not have anything to do with EU. But nice try.


But, it's a pretty typical EU play. Protecting more established interests but kneecapping progress.

You mean like that nasty EU law called the DMCA?

</s> (just in case)


> But, it's a pretty typical EU play. Protecting more established interests but kneecapping progress.

EU is literally about removing protections for established interests: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/facing-reality-in-the-e...


I don't even think that case was from Cloudflare hosting, just providing DDOS protection.

And it wasn't a Spanish government policy, but rather a single judge's order.


Via a proxy? Or some other kind of DDOS protection? If it's a proxy, that should be considered hosting.

Cloudflare does provide APIs to look up security threats by IP addresses that could help with DDOS, and I wouldn't consider that hosting: https://developers.cloudflare.com/api/resources/intel/subres...


This is like suggesting the policy of the United States is set by "just a panel of less than 10 judges" and not the Federal government. Not only is SCOTUS part of the US government, it may actually be the most powerful part of the Federal government


judges are giving orders based on the law/policy of the country. so if a judge gives a bad order, then the cause is a bad policy/law, and the fix is not to replace the judge, but to change the law.


"Major consequences M, because of an order by judge J" is not a situation which lasts...unless the government is relatively happy with M.


Apologies for the PDF link. The opinion is amusing, and has some benefits. If it's appealed and this decisions is upheld, the blast zone around the CFAA will be diminished.

The key point is rather simple.

> In doing so, we hold for the first time that, (a) by its text and purpose, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1030, does not turn these workplace-policy infractions into federal crimes, and (b) passwords that protect proprietary business information are not themselves trade secrets under federal or Pennsylvania law.

Footnote 2 is also amusing: "To the dismay of IT professionals everywhere, the document was titled "My Passwords.xlsx." App. 2770"


There are many people who die every year going into tunnels without knowing if the air is safe to breathe where they're exploring.

Do you think they'd be worried about radiation?


> Even small amounts over time (re: decades) will have adverse effects.

If the adverse effects happen decades after you'll statistically be deceased I'm not sure it's fair to say there's no safe level of exposure.

It's not at the expense of consumers and the environment. It could make much of what consumers buy prohibitively expensive, for potentially no benefit.


The pair of animations on the page are beautifully done, not just technically but aesthetically as well. If the rest of the book is like that I'll be getting a copy.


Prior to expiry would suggest the encryption is broken from the start.

Although I do disagree on the reasonable/unreasonable angle, because I don't tend to analogize the contents of your phone to the contents of your safe, but rather to the contents of your mind.


Well I get that a significant part of our lives is wrapped up in our phones nowadays, but I still try to preserve a safe haven between my ears...mostly...


The arguments are mostly that they dislike what can be accomplished via math. “The laws of mathematics are very commendable, but the only law that applies in Australia is the law of Australia” isn't exactly an 'argument' so much as an insistence.

The article does address the flaws in some of their arguments (encryption inconveniences law enforcement, think of the children) by pointing out that the average person and children are kept save from criminal elements by encryption.


You can make gun fairly easily with what can be accomplished with a CNC machine. It is still illegal.


> It is still illegal.

Not in the vast majority of the United States.


Where that is illegal they don't go making CNC machines illegal because of that.


Legislators are literally trying to restrict sales of machines that can be used to build firearms. I don't agree with this, but it's happening.

https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A2228


They're not making math illegal.


I'm actually very much in agreement with that point.

The world is what it is. A factual observation is just that! But I think it would be better said that while practicing mechanics one should not be trying to practice virtue.

A moral position will push out a factually accurate one if you aren't willing to ignore your views when assessing something.


Proportionate in war is not about going tit-for-tat.

> The principle of proportionality prohibits attacks against military objectives which are “expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated”.

The way it's worded is to prevent destroying civilian targets for no military gain.


Thats a very... charitable reading.


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