And what you don't understand is that cloud services come with a large amount of lock-in. If you are, for example, using AWS, you are locked into that (since your Terraform files or your deployment bash scripts are specific to EC2 or EKS). European governments were indifferent to that lock-in for years, since they considered the US a friendly country. Instead, China's governmental IT infrastructure was designed to avoid lock-in to US cloud services since day 1.

tl;dr: it's not the lack of EU cloud services, it's existing lock-in to US cloud services

*that is open-source and has reliable clean builds (sorry)

Interesting... what Gnutella P2P client do you recommend that are open-source and have reliable clean builds? Wireshare (formerly "Limewire Pirate Edition") or Frostwire?

How is this any different than people on here bragging about stealing movies, software, or games?

What's different is that those people aren't stupid enough to integrate all those pirated movies, software, or games into a product they sell (thus making the product a target for lawsuits), it's something they do privately in their homes (preferably behind a no-log VPN when doing it).

Nothing was taken, right? The original is still in place, right?

This argument is used to argue that copyright infringement (commonly referred to as "piracy") is a different kind of illegal act than stealing/theft, but still an illegal act. The whole "piracy is theft" slogan is a verbal sleight of hand intended to equate an illegal act that society perceives as a minor misdeed (copyright infringement/piracy) with an illegal act that society perceives as a major misdeed (theft). It's a verbal sleight of hand that some of us object to because it's disingenuous and factually wrong.

And the amount of money lost by the "FFmpeg developer" is exactly zero. Or, include all copyright notices and distribute under the LGPL as demanded. And the amount of money gained by the "FFmpeg developer" is exactly zero.

And what you people don't understand is that the FFmpeg developers aren't doing it for the money, they are doing it for the code. The currency that matters here isn't dollars or euros, but lines of code. Ffmpeg developers expect to be "paid" in lines of code by the Rockchip people, who are legally forced to contribute back any changes they've made to the code in source form. Changing the license to a permissive license prevents that. If the Rockchip people think this isn't serious, they should stop using ffmpeg and buy a proprietary codec pack to use in their products.

tl;dr: Copyright is what it is legally, it doesn't prescribe the terms under which the developer/creator has to permit redistribution of their work.

Out of curiosity, why is Shareaza a substandard Gnutella (G1) client? I understand that, for case of torrents, some clients can be faster because they attempt to "unchoke" seeders more often (Xunlei is guilty of this) or even send garbage data to seeders to cause the seeder's torrent client to "prefer" them (Aria2 is guilty of this, and I am not talking about minor protocol overhead, but a full 10~15KB/s of data sent to me, the seeder, sustained until they leave). But Gnutella is plain P2P, how a Gnutella client be "better", connect to the other peers "better"?

Why Limewire? Shareaza is right there on SourceForge and comes with pre-compiled clean binaries. No need to try and hack the original adware-laden LimeWire client or use some "Pirate Edition" compiled by who knows who. And yes, both Shareaza and Limewire connect to the same gnutella network.

Gaming GPUs are a special kind of category though, any performance upgrade matters only if there is bloated-enough graphics code to make it necessary. Gamers are increasingly pushing back against bloated graphics code yielding imperceptible visual improvements, so expect hardware vendors to push 5K and 6K as the next big thing.

You don't understand, Mr Devslash, 4K may be more than enough (it's "retina display" for viewing distances that allow you to see the whole screen), but if we don't go to 5K and 6K, how is Nvidia going to unload their RTX 60-series that are coming next year? Let alone the RTX 70-series coming the year after? Won't someone think of the economy? Stop "device hoarding"! https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/2...

Whose idea was to launch a stereoscopic 3D monitor without HDMI 3D support? With Nvidia 3D Vision officially discontinued (which means no more Nvidia 3D Vision-compatible monitors), the only remaining standard for stereoscopic 3D displays is HDMI 3D. Since this monitor doesn't have it, it's restricted to whatever handful of games Samsung supports with their own proprietary (aka soon-to-be-discontinued) software. That'll be $2000, thank you.

Note: I am fully aware that HDMI 3D is officially restricted to 720p60 or 1080p24 (though there is one Acer monitor that extends this to 1080p60), but I'd rather have some futureproofing than none at all.

Physically disabled the write pin on the UEFI flash memory chip, for example. Some vendors let you require a password to upgrade the firmware.

First of all, this won't prevent malware installation if the hardware shipment is intercepted, and not all consumer hardware has the features you described (computers and routers).

Yes, you can only buy devices that have those features that protect the UEFI (or not leave any electronic devices in your house) and only buy from physcial store shelves so there is no hardware shipment to intercept, but most people won't do that. My whole point was that just using a relatively obscure OS (which is the easy bit) isn't enough.

My guess is that some kind of warrant by a judge will be needed, but whether the target of the spying will be made aware that a warrant has been issued against them/their house or not, who knows.

Will the target of the spying be made aware that their home will be broken into by the police? If not, what if the house is alarmed (with battery and SIM backup, so cutting some wires won't help) and the alarm starts ringing when the police enters? Do they wake up to the sight of a bunch of burly police officers in their house?

The best government malware installs at the BIOS or UEFI level: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

From there, it can capture keylogs and also do who knows what else, and using a relatively obscure OS won't save you since SMM accesses the hardware directly. If the attacker has physical access to the hardware (or can intercept a hardware shipment on the way to your house), they can "upgrade" your device's UEFI to one that includes government malware. The NSA did it by intercepting shipments of servers and routers btw: https://www.businessinsider.co... (oh yeah, I forgot: they can infect your router too).

Let's not forget that Apple was there in the first round of AI agents (the symbolic ones, Siri was in part powered by Wolfram Alpha), so they have an insight or two about the true value the market assigns to those AI agents (and by extension, how much they should invest).