what do you expect, when the tagline at the end of the page says "In crypto we trust."?
Honestly, it's a bit sad. There are many great people on that list, but some seem a bit random and some are just straight up cryptobros, which makes the whole thing a joke, unfortunately
They warm up things that a) I don't want to put in a kettle and b) don't want to put in a dedicated pot to put on the stove.
Like the remainder of the soup i made yesterday that I've put in a china bowl in the fridge. I was able to eat warm soup out of that bowl without requiring to make any other dishes dirty. Pretty convenient if you ask me.
Bonus: you can take a cherry tomato or a single grape and make a small plasma arc in the microwave. Pretty cool trick to impress and scare people at house parties.
the issue were the 100s of tracking cookies and that websites would use dark patterns or simply not offer a "no to all" button at all (which is against the law, btw.)
Most websites do. not. need. cookies.
It's all about tracking and surveillance to show you different prices on airbnb and booking.com to maximise their profits.
I think that most websites need cookies. I have a website with short stories. It lets you set font size and dark/bright theme, nothing special. Do I want to store your settings on server? No, why should I waste my resources? Just store it in your browser! Cookies are perfect for that. Do I know your settings? No, I don't, I don't care. I set a cookie, JS reads it and changes something on client. No tracking at all. Cookies are perfect for that. People just abuse them like everything else, that's the problem, not cookies.
And BTW because I don't care about your cookies, I don't need to bother you with cookie banner. It's that easy.
Also, if I would implement user management for whatever reason, I would NOT NEED to show the banner also. ONLY if I shared the info with third side. The rules are simple yet the ways people bend them are very creative.
A cookie is something that is sent to the server, by design - that's their whole point! So if the only part of your code that needs them lives on the client, cookies are the wrong mechanism for that - use localStorage instead.
You do not need cookies for either of these. CSS can follow browser preferences, and browsers can change font sizes with zoom.
I am not sure these cookies are covered by the regulations. No personal so not covered by GDPR. They might be covered by the ePrivacy directive (the "cookie law").
Unfortunately, because these types of preferences (font size, dark/light mode theme) are "non-essential", you are required to inform users about them using a cookie banner, per EU ePrivacy directive (the one that predates the GDPR). So if you don't use a cookie banner in this case, you are not in compliance.
That's not true. You can use those cookies, you just need to explain them somewhere on the site. No opt in required.
I talked with our then national information law official (funny fact, same person is currently president of our country), rule of thumb is if you're not using your users' personal data to pay for other people's services (e.g Google analytics) or putting actual personal data in them, you're generally fine without the banner.
Further, if you're a small shop or individual acting in good faith and somehow still violated the law, they will issue a warning first so you can fix the issue. Only the blatant violations by people who should've known better will get a fine instantly (that is the practice here, anyway, I assumed that was the agreement between EU information officers)
All websites need cookies, at least for functionality and for analytics. We aren't living in the mid-1990s when websites were being operated for free by university departments or major megacorps in a closed system. The cookie law screwed all the small businesses and individuals who needed to be able to earn money to run their websites. It crippled everyone but big megacorps, who just pay the fines and go ahead with violating everyone's privacy.
Functional cookies are fine. Even analytics is fine if you're using your own (though said own analytics must also company with GDPR personal data retention rules).
What is not fine is giving away your users' personal data to pay for your analytics bill.
The implementors of the banners did it in the most annoying way, so most users will just accept all instead of rejecting all (because the button to reject all was hidden or not there at all), check steam store for example their banner is non intrusive and you can clearly reject or accept all in one click.
The law wasn't poorly written, most websites just don't follow the law. Yes, they're doing illegal things, but it turns out enforcement is weak so the lawbreaking is so ubiquitous that people think it's the fault of the law itself.
> [...] most websites just don't follow the law. Yes, they're doing illegal things, but it turns out enforcement is weak so the lawbreaking is so ubiquitous [...]
I just checked the major institutional EU websites listed here[0], and every single one (e.g., [1][2][3]) had a different annoying massive cookie banner. In fact, I was impressed I couldn't find a single EU government website without a massive cookie banner.
I don't know if it is due to the law enforcement being so weak (or if the law itself is at fault or whatever else). But it seems like something is not right (either with your argument or EU), given the EU government itself engages in this "lawbreaking" (as defined by you) on every single one of their own major institutional websites.
The potential reason you brought up of "law enforcement is just weak" just seems like the biggest EU regulatory environment roast possible (which is why I don't believe it to be the real reason), given that not only they fail to enforce it against third parties (which would be at least somewhat understandable), but they cannot even enforce it on any of their own first party websites (aka they don't even try following their own rules themselves).
What do you mean? The original post mention 1000 cookies and no button to reject them. The sites you mention do have only two buttons (accept/reject). So they are following the law and not engaging in dark patterns.
That is unfortunate, EU could well present itself as an example of how things can be done right. Unfortunately incompetence and/or indifference, plus lack of IT talent willing to work for the public sector is also a thing in politics. It's an opportunity lost for sure.
> Attempts at "compliance" made the web browsing experience worse.
Malicious compliance made the web browsing experience worse. That and deliberately not complying by as much as sites thought they could get away with, which is increasing as it becomes more obvious enforcement just isn't there.
Because the issue is due to a failure in the law. The failure of not enforcing the "do not track" setting from browsers that would avoid the need for these annoying pop-ups in the first place.
So far so good - and I say this as one voting remain. The only gripe I have is that our domestic doomers were even more stupid than the EU ones. Ours were the progenitors of many of EU dumb ideas. So even outside EU, we in the UK not only did not repeal the utterly imbecilic laws we inherited. No - we added even more stupid laws. Consequence being people are put in jail for writing stuff on the Internet. I hope someone puts in jail the lawmakers that voted for these laws. To the cheering of and with public support, it must be said. It was not without consent, it was not only bi-party, but omni-party consent.
I think a lot of Brexiteers don't entirely understand why the EU was a problem.
The only thing they saw was the EU migrant crisis and the UK not having total control over its own borders. Things I don't care about[0]. The actual problem with the EU is only tangentially related to that concern, and it's the fact that the EU is a democratically unresponsive accountability sink. When a politician wants to do something unpopular, they get the EU to do it, so they can pretend like they're powerless against it. See also: the 10,000 attempts to reintroduce Chat Control.
The easiest way to fix this would be a new EU treaty that makes the EU directly elected. But that would also mean federalizing the EU, because all the features that make the EU undemocratic are the same features that protect the EU from doing an end run around member states. The alternative would be for EU member states' voters to deliberately sacrifice their local votes in order to vote in people who promise to appoint specific people at the EU level. That's what happened in America with its Senate, and why it moved to direct election of Senators, because people were being voted in as Governor just to get Senators elected.
A lot of times we talk about political issues on a partisanship spectrum - i.e. "partisan" vs "bi-partisan" or "non-partisan" issues. The reality is that, in WEIRD[1] countries, most parties have a common goal of "keep the state thriving". The primary disagreement between them is how to go about doing such a thing and what moral lines[2] shall be crossed to do so. That's where you get shit like America's culture war. The people who live in the country and are subject to its laws are far less hospitable to the kinds of horrifying decisions politicians make on a daily basis, mainly because they'll be at the business end of them. This creates a dynamic of "anti-partisanship" where the people broadly support things that the political class broadly opposes.
For example, DMCA 1201. The people did not want this, the EFF successfully fought a prior version of it off in Congress, then Congress went to the WTO and begged them to handcuff America to it anyway. The people would like to see it reformed or repealed; that's where you get the "right-to-repair" movement. But the political class needs DMCA 1201 to be there. They need a thriving cultural industry to engage in cultural hegemony, and a technology sector that can be made to shut off the enemy's tanks. The kinds of artistic and technological megaprojects the state demands require a brutal and extractive intellectual property[3] regime in order to be economically sustainable. So IP is a bi-partisan concern, while Right-to-Repair is an anti-partisan concern.
In terms of WEIRD countries, the UK is probably one of the WEIRDest, and thus a progenitor of a lot of stupid bullshit legislation. If they had not left the EU, the Online Safety Act would have been the EU Online Safety Directive.
[0] To be clear, my opinion regarding migration is that the only valid reason to refuse entry to a country is for a specific security reason. Otherwise, we should hand out visas like candy, for the sake of freedom. Immigration restrictions are really just emigration restrictions with extra steps.
[2] All states are fundamentally "criminals with crowns". Their economies are rapine. When they run out of shit to steal all the gangsters turn on each other and you get a failed state.
[3] In the Doctorowian sense: "any law that grants the ability to dictate the conduct of your competitors". This actually extends back far further than copyright, patent, or trademark law does. Those are the modern capitalist versions of a far older feudalist practice of the state handing out monopolies to favored lords.
They are banned here in Australia, unfortunately it has created a huge black market for these things.
Almost every neighborhood now has a cigarette store that also sells gifts and US chocolates that are basically just fronts for this stuff. Black market vapes and cigarettes. Even the police in many parts here don't really enforce this stuff.
What I find even crazier than the batteries being disposed is that some of these have some decent processor tech in them. Like this one that has a 48Mhz ARM processor in. https://ripitapart.com/category/disposable-vape-hacks/
There is a massive gulf between "be recyclable" and actually being recycled.
Depending on energy and cost intensive recycling, which can only ever capture a percentage of the waste, is silly. This kind of thing needs to be stopped at the source.
Manufacturers should be required to actually take back anything with that logo. You can buy so much stuff that becomes a serious problem to dispose of and that stupid logo is all that's required of the manufacturer. Cost of disposal would then get added to the price of the object, as it should to begin with!
Everything with a sealed, soldered battery makes me furious on this front. Every item with a battery that recharges through the device instead of having a battery door like a Game Boy is on a timer, and for no good reason other than planned obsolescence.
All of the disposables I've seen have USB ports for charging because they come with more juice than battery power sufficient to vape it all. You will have to recharge multiple times for one disposable. I'm not in the UK, but I have seen something of a shift to separating the battery component from the vape tank such that you can just buy a new disposable tank and reuse the batteries. Maybe something like that might work in the UK grey areas.
They are illegal in Australia, but they are all over the ground. Littered like cigarette butts. Only now instead of just being plastic and some slightly toxic substances. It's a whole e-waste package.
Honestly, it's a bit sad. There are many great people on that list, but some seem a bit random and some are just straight up cryptobros, which makes the whole thing a joke, unfortunately