DigitalDilemma

But what real-world significance does this have?

None - I don’t know of anyone that parses release names. Versions, yes, absolutely, but silly version release names?

I came into the comments to see what other reason there was, but it seems it’s a non-story.

Before this year, the thought of an entirely arbitrary block to things like American cloud services by America to its European allies would have seemed extremely unlikely. It would make no sense, the damage to America and it’s GDP would far outweigh any any political benefit.

All of those reasons still hold true, but I absolutely assure you, European governments and companies all over have that possibility firmly in their risk portfolio now. America tells microsoft to immediately not only stop selling products in Europe, but disable those already in use? Ditto Google. Ditto Apple. Ditto all the hundreds of IT hardware producers that are American. Want to cripple a foreign government that uses MS Office? Remotely disable it. job done. Sure, it would be illegal, but America’s government has no respect for law.

(Even before this, several European governments were using open source (Germany, France, Austria, Portugal - there’s a list but this is less about idealism and more about protecting themselves from the unpredictable as well as not trusting America with their data any more. Every thing like this can only be seen as non Americans distancing themselves from America every way they can, and with good reason.)

That’s exactly my point.

The legislation, from the start, should have upheld the do not track and similar settings in browsers. Require websites to check and honour those flags.

Instead, we get some half-arsed requirement to add cookie banners to every website under some vague threat of prosecution (which never seems to happen unless you’re a social media giant) that inconveniences every single user, and often more than once.

This here, now, is a tiny bandage on a gaping wound caused by not doing what was required in the first place.

Another layer of annoying on a massively stupid piece of legislation that has made the internet immeasurably worse for everyone.

These preferences should be settable in the browser, transferred during http* connection and honoured by every single website you use.

Any changes that marketeers come up with should be ratified in the same way that changes to internet protocols are, and if the browser doesn’t support them yet, they are assumed “do not”.

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I’m not American, but CVE’s absolutely form the cornerstone of IT security, and are the trusted keystone of industry security globally.

Already done, along with a bunch of other stuff including cloudflare WAF and rate limiting rules.

I am still annoyed that it took me over a day’ of my life to finally (so far) restrict these things. And several other days to offload the problem to Cloudflare pages for sites that I previous self hosted but my rural link couldn’t support.

this advice is just for “unintentional” DDoS attacks, not intentionally malicious ones.

And I don’t think these high volume AI scrapes are unintentional DDOS attacks. I consider them entirely intentional. Not deliberrately malicious, but negligent to the point of criminality. (Especially in requesting the same pages again so frequently, and all of them ignoring robots.txt)

Surprised at the level of negativity here. Having had my sites repeatedly DDOSed offline by Claudebot and others scraping the same damned thing over and over again, thousands of times a second, I welcome any measures to help.

Fuck this project, but… their source code can be free and open source even if they distribute binaries which aren’t.

An example of how this didn’t work for one project. (From memory, and it was a long time ago - 2005/2008 ish)

Xchat was once the best IRC client for Windows (after Mirc). It was free software, but the developer started charging for the Windows builds of it. Linux binaries were still free, but he claimed that it was time consuming to build on Windows and etc etc (A bit rich considering it was mostly his code - and there were suspicions he made it deliberately so)

Some people were pretty pissed off about this, especially as it used some other code that was foss and it was felt against the spirit.

Anyway, it was cloned into Hexchat which is fully free on all platforms and apparently not so difficult to build binaries after all.

15 years later to today, Hexchat is thriving and Xchat has been completely dead for 15 years.