GDPR for lazy people: Block all European users with Cloudflare Workers

Ok, then live in the past I guess? Both content quality and quantity has vastly increased over the past 2 decades to meet the modern demands of billions of people who are now online. This is fact, the world has moved on. Either way you are not the arbiter of what is valuable content or not for someone else. People choose for themselves.

Yes, publishers are businesses. They must make money to create commercial content. This doesn't mean there isn't free content available, and in fact there's more of it than ever before due to the trivial costs of publishing media, but the rest of the stuff has to be paid for somehow.

As stated, consumers do not like to pay (often due to bad value assessment and inability). Ads are much more granular, passive, and equally accessible whether you're a billionaire or a 3rd-world farmer. This also doesn't mean subscriptions and other patronage options don't exist, there are millions examples of those as well.

Does the implementation of advertising online suck? Yes. It's slow, frustrating, privacy invasive and filled with fraud, but you're talking to one of the few people who has pushed for regulation for the last 5 years. It's not a new complaint and it'll take time to change a 12-figure global industry.

However if you think the world hasn't benefited from the commercialization of the internet, with education, entertainment, and information creating progress in every corner of the world, than you are most definitely not in the majority. You're actually in such a minority that it's basically considered the same as any other conspiracy group and largely irrelevant in any serious economic, societal, political or business discussion.

I recommend revising your perspective and acknowledging the differences between advertising as a concept vs the implementation, and especially the progress that it has brought that has led to the world that you seem to take for granted today.

And then there's this: "In 1990, Oracle laid off 10% (about 400 people) of its work force because of accounting errors.[53] This crisis came about because of Oracle's "up-front" marketing strategy, in which sales people urged potential customers to buy the largest possible amount of software all at once. The sales people then booked the value of future license sales in the current quarter, thereby increasing their bonuses.[54] This became a problem when the future sales subsequently failed to materialize. Oracle eventually had to restate its earnings twice, and also settled (out of court) class-action lawsuits arising from its having overstated its earnings. Ellison stated in 1992 that Oracle had made "an incredible business mistake."[53]"

So Oracle isn't a particularly good example of a well run business with good internal processes (I also wouldn't put them in a list of ethically run companies either)

> The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released its annual Point in Time count Wednesday, a report that showed nearly 554,000 homeless people across the country during local tallies conducted in January. That figure is up nearly 1 percent from 2016.

> Of that total, 193,000 people had no access to nightly shelter and instead were staying in vehicles, tents, the streets and other places considered uninhabitable. The unsheltered figure is up by more than 9 percent compared to two years ago.

While the UK was counting

> The study, by housing charity Shelter, found that 307,000, or one in every 200, people are now either sleeping rough or in temporary accommodation.

Temporary accommodation includes bed&breakfast, staying with friends, emergency shelters. There are about 5000 people sleeping rough in the UK at the moment in a population of about 60million.

And then look at the countries who have worse homelessness than the US.

Nigeria, South Africa, Russia, Indonesia, China, Haiti, Venezuela, India, Zimbabwe, Honduras, Ukraine.

Sorry but this comment has been driving me crazy. The GBDR about 100 pages? Obamacare is 20,000.

This law may be a lot of things. It may have a huge impact. It may require companies to do things hugely differently. It may require a huge amount of work for some. It could do a huge amount of good or bad.

But, it is NOT a huge law.

Any server you curl is processing your personal data by addressing the HTTP response to your IP address. Curl itself arguably fails "privacy by design" test in that there is no Tor, etc. enabled by default, although I admit that's a stretch. The entire HTTP protocol design of obtaining documents by interacting directly with their publishers is similarly careless from a privacy perspective.

>"all networked software is illegal"

It's not always illegal. It's illegal by default, and up to you to demonstrate that it falls within one of the defined exceptions.

>"destroy the energy industry"

I'm quite happy that only serious and well-capitalized entities can surmount the regulatory hurdles to running a smoke-billowing power plant. I'm not happy that we're doing the same things to websites.