but the uk government really doesn't give a shit about anyone other than themselves
That is missing the point somewhat. Secret services want to watch over absolutely everything - because they can. Their governments seem to have largely abdicated control, not least because then the decisions on what to spy on and what to ignore could then be held against the politicians responsible. GCHQ seem to consider any inland NGO and most foreign countries to be targets but a lot of that is absence external of controls.

The E German Stasi *owned* the country, and had leading figures in all three W German agencies. A significant proportion of that country's budget was spent on the Stasi. Did it help them when Gorbachov decided not to stand in the way of reunification?

The U.S. are gathering more and more data, hell - they even knew about the 9.11 group ahead of time (and had been warned by the Germans) but did it help?

Look at Tunisia a couple of weeks ago, GCHQ were so busy spying on AI that they missed the big one. As if AI are going to mount an attack of that kind.

But are you in college?
My college time is a while ago now but I remember virtually all of the females marrying during those years, mostly other students but sometimes boyfriends from before they even started there. Those who did not were usually not interested for some reason or other. Most of those relationships were still holding up at the 25th year meetup we had.

The rest of us males were fishing outside that pool.

I had a case a bit like this recently.
I started getting mails from a cellphone company (the one I actually use myself) which had nothing to do with me. Then I started getting bills emailed. The bills had the cellphone number and a postal address, I looked it up and rang their land line. It turned out I knew the person involved - he has the same name as me and works for the same company so we sometimes get each others mails at work. He had made a mistake when he supplied an email address. It took a couple of months to fix it. I would get an email and forward it to his address, he would complain to the cellphone company, I would complain to the cellphone company. Eventually he sent me a mail saying they had managed to send a bill to him rather than me.

If a Tripadvisor app got installed that way, I would have thought that its requirements had been reduced to the rights it already had.

That could end up being the lesser evil, and would end up making a hell of a statement.
Of course the consequences with countries like China or Russia would have to be thunk through - they would be encouraged to pass similar laws so as to get Google out of their countries.

The balkanisation of the Internet.

So far.
They are probably watching this rather closely.

Alas, while the Chinese rulers are pragmatic enough to accept things they don't really like but can't control, the French rulers are idiots who believe nothing is beyond their power, because, after all, they're French....

The U.S. authorities have a history of this type of behaviour. Just think of the case Microsoft is currently fighting, the one where they do not want to give the U.S access to emails being held in the E.U. (Ireland), or the case where some NYC judge imposed a massive fine - and confiscation of assets - on the Iran for some terrorist attack they patently had nothing to do with.
The U.S. mostly try to be a "force for good", but accept no outside authority in the many cases where they failed - often maliciously.

For the record, I am not particularly happy with the "right to be forgotten".

Giving him a particularly tough sentence for something he was not even charged with should be enough to get the judge disbarred and the verdict automatically overturned. Won't happen though.

to the Nazi's battle to burn as much "degenerate art" as they could find

The "degenerate art" removed from the museums headed in all sorts of directions,

• Sold on the international markets to raise money for the Reich
• vanished into private hands - Cornelius Gurlitt's collection resurfaced as recently as three years ago
• vanished into private hands and then was destroyed in allied bombing raids
• destroyed by the Nazis

Hitler used to use Baedeker travel guides as a guide to what should be destroyed, although a famous library in the Netherlands was bombed at the start of the war "just because". After the Allies (ok, the British) destroyed a few German cultural spots of neglible military value, the Luftwaffe was sent to destroy highlights selected from Baedeker such as Coventry Cathedral.
There were two Warsaw uprisings, the Jewish one and then later - with the Soviets approaching - the Polish one. As revenge for the second one, buildings were blown up in the order of their ranking in the Warsaw Baedeker - best to worst. The Soviets ceased their advance and waited for the Nazis to suppress the uprising before resuming operations. That is one of the factors behind the Polish attitude to Russia, Katyn being another big one.

With ISIS (I thought it was ISIL) now starting to operate in Saudi Arabia, I wonder if Islamic sites are in danger. One would think not but I had not expected the recent suicide bombings either.

Should I file a bug report?
Who approved this "article"?

Airstrip One.

The previous Tory leader - can't remember his name just now but he was a minister in the coalition government - absolutely loathed the EU to the extent that he apparently asked the Dubya administration if there was some way of joining the Mexico-US-Canada trading block. No.

One major reason for the split was that IBM insisted on programming OS/2 in assembler - over Gates' objections - locking them onto the 386 platform.
At least that is the way I remember it.

I can only imagine he was happy with '95 (why?) until he was forced to go to XP.
As to Vista, I last set up a machine under XP half a year before 7 came out. Why would anyone (who had a choice) be "forced" to use Vista?

What is meant by the U.S. government made the same mistakes in Iraq as it did in Iran.? The U.S. has not invaded Iran any time recently.

Just how the weapons became ubiquitous is also not touched on in this summary: Saddam Hussein had an armory. The U.S. forces took that armory. Then they carried on towards Baghdad, towards the major prize and *glory* (cue exciting music). One undefended armory.

One thing that totally stank is that the whole thing was then lost in U.S. party politics. The Republicans lied about having lied and all their supporters started claiming black was white and that the weapons of mass destruction had really existed. We are getting the same kind of crud now from the St Petersburg Propagandazentral with respect to the Ukraine.

Another thing that stank was the sacking of pretty much all Baath party members. Being a party member was a requirement for many kinds of job, sacking all these people created a large pool of disaffected people. This was known at the time but the idiots in charge "knew better". I found it difficult to believe that so much stupidity was not malicious.

The South rises again!
Wanna go to war on this?
The right of a legislature to be utterly corrupt. Canada could probably be persuaded to join.