Those are all controlled by companies in and subject to the demands of the USA, which has been proving for many years that they cannot be trusted.

Also, all common names with any of those prefixes have been registered a long time ago.

There are other Android stores. Amazon ran one for the longest time. Many brands have their own app stores as well.

It's the app publishers defaulting to Google that's the biggest issue.

At least WhatsApp has an official APK download, most apps don't.

That said, Google will still let you update apps without being signed in. Hold the Play Store icon to open the quick action menu. From there you can go to "my apps" and update all of the apps on your phone, bypassing the login prompt. Not great, but a workaround that should do the trick while Aurora finds another way to hack their way into the Play Store APIs.

It highly depends. Everything from "monarchy" to "indirect democracy".

Even the Americans don't elect their president directly, they have a special council inbetween to distribute more power to the sparsely populated states.

Russia is a direct democracy (the people do directly elect their leader) but also the example of why technicalities like that make no difference in how fair politics are.

Who, in Europe, even knew they were getting a de facto president who they could not choose? This is meant to be a rationalised organisation with lofty egalitarian ideals, and yet it has to struggle to compete against descents into chaos and corruption in USA and Russia.

Currently, the EU is in a de facto war with Russia, in a trade war with the USA and China, and previous colonies don't seem to care too much for the West either.

The USA would like to see nothing more than an explosive end to the EU and the Russians have been trying to kill any united front against their invasion plans for longer than the EU has been around.

Every major world power has the money and motive to spread misinformation about the EU. They're influencing extremist European parties to repeat their talking points so they can point at a source on the "inside" as well.

The more people think the EU is some kind of awful oppressive regime, the more power the other world powers will gain over Europeans.

Colonies would be more than happy right?

The proof-of-work approach is much better privacy-wise than what the usual CAPTCHA services are doing.

My ungrounded speakers have a tendency to pop and make noise when they come out of sleep (sleep? on a speaker? fuck you logitec) and every time these "simple" CAPTCHAs come up, even if I pass without solving their logic puzzles, I hear the speakers activate as the Javascript on the page is figuring out what kind of audio setup I have by playing a silent sound file.

The default Anubis config isn't really a problem for any devices I've tried, but the FFMPEG Anubis setup is quite extreme. I seem to be served the extra-difficult Javascript challenge, as well as a high-difficulty challenge, that takes even powerful computers quite a long time to complete.

Could just be countermeasures to the hug of death every website gets when they get linked on HN, though, but someone would need to set up auto-scaling for that.

Damn, I've never seen Anubis set up that aggressively, I wonder what kind of attack their web servers must be under to set their bot filters up this strictly.

Wero also isn't implemented EU-wide either, so it's still possible as long as the banks play ball.

UK politics has been quite isolationist, though, so I doubt the banks will see much in interoperating with the rest of Europe.

Wero is a payment provider technology, a money wallet, and a bank account integration technology under one single marketing name.

On the payment provider technology side, you're right, but the wallet feature uses phone numbers (and I think email addresses) so you can send each other money without sharing your IBAN (which is slightly longer and probably not in your contacts).

FYI this comment was dead, not flagged. I wonder if you're hellbanned or if it was a keyword trigger

Does that matter? I don't care of Apple's thread scheduler is faster or slower than Windows' or if their throttling algorithm behaves differently, I just want to see how it performs in a given task.

We fixed the hole in the ozone layer. All the countries came together, worked together, and fixed the problem threatening to doom us all with skin cancer and worse. Humanity can come together.

Unfortunately, the threat of total annihilation of human civilisation is currently not outweighing the short-term profit incentives of those in power, and they've turned the issue into fuel for their culture war so I doubt we'll find a real solution before the current generation of politicians is dead.

IIRC, the Montreal protocol only worked because it could be solved with existing technology, quickly, with almost no economic cost and happened in a totally different era of global politics.

Climate change has... well... none of that. Not only that, but by the time it gets bad enough to convince people, it may be literally impossible to stop.

It's grim to think about, but if the nuke is falling it's too late to build an iron dome. We have several nuclear bombs dangling above us. We know they're there - permafrost, AMOC, ocean life collapse - just not exactly where, and we're blinding swinging a knife on a stick while actively yelling for a longer stick and telling the research committees not to tell them if they're getting close.