Since I didn't see it explicitly mentioned I'd like to register my displeasure with a) the disdainful attitude these US companies have towards EU privacy law, which amounts to b) pushing the US law (lack thereof, really, when it comes to privacy) unto us.

If this was only about collecting profiles for on-line advertising, something like do-not-track might be good enough. However, the underlying general issue is privacy in a world where collecting, combining and looking up information on an individual has been - and continues to be - completely transformed by technology, hence something along the lines of a blanket ban on collecting and using information that *might* be personally identifiable is needed. This would then have narrow exceptions, most importantly allowing collection and use with consent (= opt-in) with the provision for opt-out later (= the right to be forgotten i.e. having the data relating to you deleted, or, failing that due to technical or legal reasons, only used as strictly necessary for those technical or legal reasons).

A bottom-line hurting fine would seem deserved and necessary or else the essential take home message is that EU competition law and the authorities enforcing it need not be taken seriously.

> "may appear extremely rich or altogether distasteful to some"

Something sort of akin to a wee bit of not totally unlike that, yes.

Currently it would seem that on-line advertising is in for a rough ride. End-users can effectively filter it out and increasingly do, for perfectly good reasons (such as privacy concerns, avoiding annoyance, faster load times, ...). If this means the demise of advertising in general down the line, it might be just as well: advertising is commercial propaganda, where the punter pays for being manipulated and misinformed (as a part of the price of a product or service). Also, it is worth noting that such propaganda undermines the premise of well-informed parties on the 'free market' i.e. in its current form advertising or marketing in general amounts to a serious systemic problem in a market economy.

A related thought: How do you trust a professional propagandist to give you accurate information when buying the services of the same or contemplating doing that?

A revenue-friendly alternative

... to a tax holiday would be raising the tax rate and announcing this well ahead of the change taking effect :).

A good start would be legislation making it a serious criminal offense to collect, keep, release, receive, process or otherwise use any data where there is any possibility that the data could be connected to a person, living or dead, unless:

1) The data is strictly needed to provide a product or service requested by the aforementioned person, and

2) The aforementioned person has given explicit, informed consent to the aforementioned use, and

3) The consent mentioned in 2) can be withdrawn at any time with the effect that the aforementioned data is kept and used only as strictly necessary for technical reasons or to fulfill a legal obligation.

(There would need to be exceptions for things like government records (tax, court / criminal, ...), credit information and such of course ... 'technical reasons' above is intended to include backup tapes and such ... )

I'd rather not have Google collecting a profile on my web searches, page visits and whatnot. Hence I'd rather avoid being constantly logged on to a Google account (which the app store requires) which (greatly) facilitates their data collection. I'm even more reluctant to give Google the opportunity to tie my real world identity to such a profile. Hence the change to conveniently get apps from Amazon and even (maybe) to buy some as well as other content is welcome; I don't think I would have ever bought anything from Google Play, as that would have meant giving out my credit card information (i.e. my real world identity).

'Modern UI' ... I guess that makes the current one 'Retro'.

The point of outsourcing pretty much: get <something> without having to care / being responsible as to how <something> is produced.

Summary: bitch, moan, whine, whine.

So they intercept the HTTP requests (replies?) and add (substract) their own stuff (headers at least)? (If so one wonders to what end and with what excuse.)

The *really* worrying aspect of ACTA is that what amounts to legislation can so effectively pushed by a handful of US trade associations, in secrecy and under false pretenses.

Humbug. Strict opt-in. A summary execution for violations.

How about VMs?

What effect will this have on running Windows 8 on a VM BTW? That is, do VM providers have to get a key from Microsoft (who would thereby be in a position to screw them)?

Condemning a bomb threat goes without saying ,hence, having followed the antics of TTVK I would not put it beyond them to fabricate something like this (mind you, I'm not saying they did that, just that I wouldn't be surprised *at all* if this somehow turned out to be the case).

Another co-incidence: the sites of the plaintiff(s) in the Finnish case have been off-line since Elisa implemented their block (apparently forced upon them by the court decision which they have appealed).

Sounds like an invitation for Russian hackers and whathaveyou with the net effect of making the information available to world+dog (for a small fee, perhaps). The nasty thing is that once something has been leaked it stays leaked, forever. Hence I'd much rather have these systems strictly isolated. Having a standard format for the info would make sense though so that the same could be, say, burned to a CD (*), sent as a registered, signed-for letter, added to the database and the CD dropped to the shredder when done. This on a per-patient basis when requested by the patient in writing.

(*) encrypted with the public key of the receiving GP / hospital / ...

Surprised that they would do what they can to hamper an investigation, destroy evidence, ... not really. A bit surprised that they might have got caught doing it ... yes. (Would be rather suprised if the officials can make the allegations stick though, unless they just sacrifice a pawn.).

Well, sure, the underlying human / civil rights are the really important stuff, but right now and likely moreso in the foreseeable future the Internet will be an essential facilitator of these, so ensuring access as was done with the phone system in the US (and more recently with the Internet in Finland (*)) would seem like a good idea. Also, for the same reason cutting someone off from the Internet for a offense as petty as file sharing for personal purposes is patently disproportional.

(*) Not exactly as a 'human right', merely as a right to have a connection in any part of the country for a not-inflated-as-much-as-to-void-the-provision-in-practice price.

I suspect the root cause of Paypal (Ebay) being like this is their main criteria of hiring the people that actually process the disputes is the lowest possible pay and the job description is essentially to process the maximum amount of complaints /hour. Be that as may, what they do about items claimed counterfeit varies.

Personally I bought a a lens filter from an Ebay seller, paid with Paypal. The description was that of a known brand-name item. What arrived was obviously a counterfeit: besides being shoddily made in general, the text on the flip side of the box had the description of another kind of a filter and the EAN code did not map to the item.

Contacting the seller got me the suggestion of returning the item for a refund after which I sent an email to Ebay expaining the issue with a photo of the flip side of the box to Ebay. Ebay instructed me to return the filter to the seller for a refund at which point the only practical option was writing that off as a loss: any sort of tracked delivery would have cost maybe half of the price of the filter and besides I did not want it getting back into circulation, also might be an offense to send something over when you believe it is a fake.

Am I the only one ...

... who expected something steamier based on 'horny beast' ? :)

WOT?

Is it just me or does this seem kinda reasonable? Pay for it and get to play it on two consoles at any one time (as opposed to, say, OEM Windows which is supposedly to be used with only the one PC it came with).

I suppose the natural progression of things would be 1) management promising/insisting on a speedy release of a (n all) new, great product. This results in 2) getting out something so-so at best ( 2a) late, more or less). Then 3) much effort goes into fixing this which results on a strain on R&D which 4) guarantees similar or worse results with the next generation product (if any).

It is interesting to see if (when) various services (skype, gmail, facebook, twitter, ...) able to map an IP to the real-identity of a user start to sell this info to each other and 3rd parties.

The concept of privacy is remarkably different in the US vs. the EU.

Disabing 3rd party cookies should prevent this sort of thing (?).