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Cake day: February 18th, 2024

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  • It sets an absolutely obscene precedent that a government can globally restrict information. Even global terrible actors like Russia and China haven’t succeeded at that.

    Yes, that precedent is 1000 orders of magnitude more harm than India losing access (which they won’t, because the entirety of Wikipedia is open source and would be mirrored in the country instantly. But even if they actually would, it is literally impossible to get anywhere near the harm of the precedent this sets).



  • They not only can, trivially. They unconditionally must.

    It is not possible to ever be a reputable organization ever again if you have to choose between censoring content globally for an authoritarian government and shutting down in that country, and censoring content globally is something they genuinely consider. Open, fact based information is their entire reason for existing.


  • No, I have no interest in digging through their history. But it’s less than trivial to do. Any random no name site can do it in 5 minutes with any source of the geo-mapping information, with virtually no knowledge required. It is not work.

    GDPR can do literally nothing but block any site that doesn’t have finances under their jurisdiction, and they shouldn’t be able to. No one else will enforce their fines for them. It’s no different than Russia fining Google more money than exists. You can’t just magically rob someone because you’re a country.


  • Yes, they do. They’ve done it in the past.

    It literally doesn’t matter what Indian courts rule. Being banned from India is orders and orders of magnitude more acceptable than blocking a single article anywhere else on the planet. It single handedly eliminates all of their credibility.

    India isn’t capable of enforcing fines against an organization that doesn’t operate in their country and there’s no chance a US court will enforce such an unhinged judgement. They can’t be forced to pay.









  • Just days ahead of the shutdown, Australia’s media regulator ACMA finalised a new “direction” (basically a rule) that meant telecom companies had to refuse service to all phones that relied on 3G for making emergency calls.

    The idea was to prevent people from mistakenly believing that phones were fully working, only to realise they were unable to make emergency calls when the crucial moment came.

    Australians with older 4G phones may also be caught out because of the way the phones are configured.

    It is up to the telcos to work out which phones are affected, notify the owners, block their phones, and help make other arrangements such as low- or no-cost replacement phones.

    However, as Telstra and Optus noted during a Senate inquiry into the shutdown, telecom companies are unable to tell which individual devices suffer from this problem unless have they sold them.

    I’m not saying it’s not partly on the providers, but validating that a bunch of obscure phones that aren’t sold in your country meet new regulatory requirements is not as easy as you’re making it out to be.