661–670 of 680 posts
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I was thinking about getting in to the car market but all these pesky requirements that I sell a car with airbags and seatbelts and fuel efficiency compliance are just there to protect existing incumbents.
Airbags and seat belts were installed in cars long before they were required by regulators. The same goes for improvements in fuel efficiency. This all is driven by competing companies trying to make a profit.
I hope we get a LOT more of this. If the EU wants to pass laws that say every company around the world (almost all of which have ZERO democratic representation in EU government) has to fully comply or face huge fines that will drive them out of business, let’s see how they feel when all those companies just shrug and turn their back on the market. I know the GDPR fans here will just say “good, we’re better off withou…
Hello Ryan (I like your business advice newsletter), honest question: In the USA we have FICA laws that can fine foreign banks, in foreign countries, not here, for most of a year’s income if they make a single error in reporting financial,records of US citizens. Most banks in foreign countries simply refuse US citizens as customers. How ae laws like FICA OK but not GPDR?
Are you thinking of FATCA? I’m not an expert, but from what I can tell, I’m not a fan. I think telling US citizens that they have to report is fine, asking foreign banks to report is fine, and requiring foreign banks that also have a US presence to comply is fine.
But if FATCA applies to some small community bank in Japan, then that’s ridiculous.
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> https://eu.usatoday.com/ is fantastic, loads instantly, no clutter, smooth experience, I love it. I am willing to believe it to be someones idea of sarcasm, lets strip our website of all the "goodies", give viewers poorer experience and watch the cries!!1 Except its actually better, and I wouldnt be surprised if it vanishes really quickly once they realize it backfired by reminding users how fast and clean web once…
Sure, it's great until the whole thing is shut down because there's no funding.
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This is, I think, a great illustration of the problems with a lot of economic reasoning. Sure, maybe that's exactly what would happen, but changing one variable in a toy model is not proof that it will. There are successful news sites that do just fine without becoming relentless clickbait optimization mills - and in fact, those are exactly the sites I tend to read. Two examples, so we're talking about something spec…
> it trains people into a way of thinking that blinds them to options. It's also a dilemma of sorts. If you stop running ads, then there is one less outlet for them, which means rates for all the other outlets are likely to grow. If enough people do it, the few players left will make very good business. Would you rather move out, risking your livelihood on experimental business models, or stay in with the devil you k…
What you mean is running 3rd party ads via ad networks.
It's perfectly feasible to show an image that links to some advertiser's site for a negotiated fee. This is the equivalent of a paper magazine with advertisements. Not renting out injection points to executing whatever foreign code on their visitor's devices.
My ad blocker won't even block it (well not by default, and only as long as you play nice, it's not like online advertising has any goodwill left over, or ever acted to deserve it).
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That looks fantastic, I would actually read USA Today if this lean site sticks around. If they want to monetize, publishers should control their own generic ad inventory (like they used to in old pre internet days) and ask for opt-in if you want customization. Easy on paper but hard in reality.
How exactly would one expect this to stick around with no way to monetize it?
Just because it's been useful doesn't give it some unqualified right to exist.
Alternatively there's this: https://eu.usatoday.com/ No ads, no tracking, no cookies, not even Javascript. Just plain HTML+CSS and JPEG images. The whole front page is around 650 KByte, and by far most of this is in the image files. As a result the page looks very clean and loads very fast. This is what all news web sites should look like, not just for EU readers (although I fear that this is just a temporary solutio…
And how can be a business sustainable in this way?
You sound like the other people complaining "you know how much money I have to spend on lawyers to ignore this law??".
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Everything's fine if they add generic, non-targeted ads that are completely under control of the news publisher, hosted on their servers, don't track users, don't use cookies. Just like print media and TV does since forever.
The problem is that those ads could not be pay-per-click because you need cookies, javascripts and other tricks to combat clickfraud and impression spam. If that USA Today site sticks around and adds advertising, it will presumably be low quality inventory like the internet used to be flooded with - casinos, punch the monkey etc.
The shitty early-web ads were already a result of shady 3rd-party ad networks selling private data.
Does a paper magazine need to run unsavoury ads? Because they don't have pay-per-click. They don't even record impressions, they have to negotiate the deal beforehand with the advertiser.
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Bear in mind GDPR seems to have become some sort of totemic issue for the small minority of people in Europe who are true-blue died in the wool ideological supporters of the EU project. They are flooding GDPR discussions with these sorts of views. A good give away is they say "speaking as a European" or use the term "EU citizen" (there is no such thing, the EU as an institution does not have citizens or issue passpor…
EU citizenship was introduced as part of the Maastricht treaty in 1992. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_of_the_European_...
They don't exist. The EU loves to dress itself in the clothes of nation states, that which it so desires to become, but ultimately the concept of "citizenship" in the EU sense has nothing to do with the normal concept of citizenship.
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It really annoys me how many self-styled "Europeans" on HN feel free to speak for an entire continent. Firstly, the EU is not the same thing as Europe. Yes EU officials and supporters love to use the word "Europe" when they mean EU - I find it nasty and manipulative. Secondly, I'm from an EU country, now live in Europe but not in the EU, and I think GDPR is absurd. A great example of the general malaise and decline o…
> It really annoys me how many self-styled "Europeans" on HN feel free to speak for an entire continent. > As I have pointed out elsewhere, GDPR is not even remotely an important topic to people in the EU. Just pointing out the irony... I can't speak on behalf of anyone except myself, but I can confirm that, while it's not the #1 thing people are concerned about, people do worry about privacy. Especially in Germany a…
I am referring to opinion polls. By pointing out what opinion polls say, I am not "speaking for all of Europe". That would be me giving my personal opinion as if it was commonplace or standard in Europe.
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In practice fining companies for getting hacked just boils down to a tax, as no company wants to be hacked, and the primary bottleneck to making software more secure is crap tools, crap platforms, poor training and inability to hire people who deeply understand security. Hacking is not a problem you can solve by passing a regulation that says "don't get hacked".
You say that, but what are the attack vectors in these high-profile breaches? - Unpatched, publicly documented vulnerabilities. - Unauthenticated S3 buckets. - Unencrypted laptops. - Default passwords. This isn't subtle crypto weaknesses or attack vectors missed in the security assessment of protocol designs. It's carelessness. It's stuff that any high school kid who's good with computers will tell you about, let alo…
People who think defending networks is merely a matter of choosing not to get hacked have clearly never tried to do it.