When the US sanctioned Hong Kong’s Chief Executive in 2020, because of a law allowing extradition to China, no single bank was letting her open an account, including Chinese ones. She was receiving her salary fully in cash.
The EU compelling banks to do business despite US sanctions seems pretty unlikely even if relations continue to degrade.
It’s not an America only problem, we are similarly affected. So is every other country on earth.
In Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Malta, Ireland obesity ranges from 38%–31% and it’s rising. On an individual level the solution is food and exercise. On a societal level there is no know solution and it’s rapidly getting worse.
But the reasons can be very different. East Europe had severe food shortages until the fall of communism. The result? People eating too much after the fall of communism, which become a cultural thing ("you don't have huge meals => you are poor / is like during communism"). Add to that car ownership ("public transport => only poor use it") and you get what happened probably in USA due more to lobbying and industry.
One good thing in my opinion is that is much easier in EU to at least choose. I was amazed in USA how badly marked are the components (in EU you have at least on each thing sugar/100g, fat, salt, etc.) and how unavailable are fresher things (even if they would be expensive). So while in EU I would say "repeat more to people to eat varied and not abuse salt/fat/sugar", that would not work as well in the USA (or, you need to teach them math and unit conversion as well :-p)
They are! Russia has been fining Google increasingly insane amounts for blocking state media [1]. It's the company's prerogative of whether they want to have a legal entity falling under the country's jurisdiction and whether employees want to travel there and risk being held criminally liable.
It's likely simpler to just block access to the country's IP ranges (or ignore!) and move on.
> It's the company's prerogative of whether they want to have a legal entity falling under the country's jurisdiction
Except in this case, Imgur does not have a legal entity falling under the UK's jurisdiction. They are purely a US based company. It's not like Google, Apple, etc. that have offices in the UK.
This particular fine is the UK trying to extend its jurisdiction to entities that it has no sovereign authority over.
Just because some UK user might visit my website doesn't mean I now have to follow all UK laws if I don't actually do business there, and don't intend to.
Blocking the traffic is how we end up with the balkanization of the internet.
> Just because some UK user might visit my website doesn't mean I now have to follow all UK laws if I don't actually do business there
That's exactly what it means.
On what basis should you be allowed to violate British law when interacting with a British resident? Because you're not under British jurisdiction? That would be incredibly illogical. Not only would it mean that people and companies under British jurisdiction are privileged by the British legal system over those in other jurisdictions, but it would also raise questions about the need for such legislation if the British legal system accepts that it's okay for people from other jurisdictions to violate it.
> On what basis should you be allowed to violate British law when interacting with a British resident?
If all I do is host a website that serves images, and I'm not hosting nor operating out of the UK, why would I be subject to their laws? Just because it's accessible globally means I now have to factor in every possible regulation from around the world?
The burden shouldn't fall on me, the website operator, to block UK traffic because they want to restrict content or enforce age verification. Nor should they be able to fine me. It's up to the UK to have UK based ISPs block my site then.
Obviously a different story if I'm deliberately offering a paid service to UK citizens, or advertising to them, etc.
But to suggest that every website owner now needs to be aware of, and follow, ever nation's unique regulations will spell the death of the internet as a global network.
For the same reason that a person under British jurisdiction is subject to its laws. I mean, laws, including British ones, exist for a reason. And usually, that reason isn't "because they're British," and this reason makes sense regarding to non-residents as much as it does to residents.
> Just because it's accessible globally means I now have to factor in every possible regulation from around the world?
Literally. Unfortunately, international laws and international cooperation are not yet sufficiently developed, and extradition requests for such reasons are not a common occurrence yet.
> The burden shouldn't fall on me
The burden doesn't fall on you. That's not how laws work. Laws usually work like this: The British government decides that certain actions are harmful to the UK, and to prevent them, it punishes those who commit them. So, on what basis should you be granted an exception to this logic? These prohibited actions don't become any less harmful to the UK just because they were committed by someone in another jurisdiction.
> Unfortunately, international laws and international cooperation are not yet sufficiently developed, and extradition requests for such reasons are not a common occurrence yet.
Unfortunately? You’d prefer that the owner of a UK pro-LGBT site could be extradited to Uganda over some anti-gay law? Should BBC reporters be sent to the gulag for writing an unfavorable article about Russia?
The fantasy world you’re imagining will literally never happen. You are either absolutely blind to the reality of international relations or you’re trolling. This sort of extraterritorial reach over internet content would be impossible even within the EU (good luck getting Hungary to extradite over UK hate speech laws). It’s simply a non-starter no matter how much you try to claim that it’s “obviously” how things work.
(Edit: I looked at your comment history and found my answer.)
> You’d prefer that the owner of a UK pro-LGBT site could be extradited to Uganda over some anti-gay law? Should BBC reporters be sent to the gulag for writing an unfavorable article about Russia?
Indeed, a good argument against globalization and international law. So yeah, fortunately, international laws and international cooperation are not yet sufficiently developed, and extradition requests for such reasons are not a common occurrence yet.
This seems slightly inconsistent with them testing all cartel member's bulbs and fining those who surpassed 1000 hours. If shorter-lasting bulbs were better looking and more efficient their fining mechanism would be energy efficiency / appearance related.
Or require no fines at all. It's much simpler to sell a non-sickly looking bulb at the store and other companies would converge.
A team at OpenAI tried to do something similar [1] where they had a 4o monitor o3-mini for when it was tryting to bypass tests because they were too hard. They trained o3-mini and punished it when it did that. All that did was make o3-mini still reward-hack, but such that 4o was unable to detect it, going from saying:
> To skip all tests, we can define a `pytest_runtest_setup` function that always skips.
to saying:
> Idea: Starting a new build with a random first succession, calling random_new_succession should not increment succession, but in implementation, it does. Adjust to prevent increment. Implement fix to random_new_build not to increment succession, or test adapted to behavior.
while then doing exactly the same thing (skipping the tests)
Even without training, it's only a temporary band-aid. If the incentive for reward-hacking becomes high enough, it will simply start phrasing it in different, not-possible-to-detect ways.
One of my favourite suggestions to counter this from an essay on overfitting I really like [1] is that applicant's probability of being accepted is proportional to their position in the ranking.
The downside is that some great applicants will not enter their top choice of school, and some people who aren't great fits will. But, on the other hand, the perverse incentive of spending the entirety of high-school optimising for some arbitrary metrics will dissappear. Any marginal improvement is corralated with a marginal increase in success, rather than the current system of no pay-off whatsoever, until reaching some arbitrary threshold, where one gets all the pay-off at once.
I've checked my DNS logs and there hasn't been a single hit against ocsp.apple.com over the last year, but around 20-30 hits for ocsp2.apple.com per day per device. (iphone, macMini, macbook)
Just blocking ocsp2.apple.com is probably fine if you're running anything recent-ish.
It might be similar to how credit report agencies have to provide the reports for free under GDPR, but not before trying to make you pay twenty different ways.
>but not before trying to make you pay twenty different ways.
This itself is illegal. It must be simple and straightforward. EU laws broadly do not tolerate the rules lawyering popular in the US, companies know what the intent is and playing games will not work out in their favor.
Hinton, Bengio, Stuart Russell and other behemoths voice similar concerns over AI, with enough confidence to switch their careers (e.g. Bengio now doing safety research at Mila, Ilya Sutskever switching from capabilities to alignment at OpenAI, Hinton quitting job to focus on advocacy)
Their concern isn’t about today’s generative LLMs, it’s about tomorrow’s autonomous, goal driven AGI systems. And they clearly got presented with the arguments for the limitations of auto regressive models, but disagreed.
So, it seems a little much to place absolute confidence into it being a non-issue, because they just don’t understand something LeCun and others do. (with the same holding true the other way around)
Ylva Johansson, the EU commissioner who proposed that (apparently failing [1]) law, has used Meta’s model behaviour in reporting CSAM material to NCMEC & EU authorities as the justification for why that law should exist.
Considering it was Meta’s policy to scan even when not mandated, it seems like an internal shift in attitude.
The EU compelling banks to do business despite US sanctions seems pretty unlikely even if relations continue to degrade.