Europe

Recently I have been using the Radio France app for iPhone and came across a set of three podcasts looking at Russia and its move towards digital sovereignty. This is a set of three podcasts looking at how Russia has tried to seperate itself from the internet, but especially from US influence.

Russia is not alone in trying to do this. Europe is making an effort, as is Asia, and Asia, and Australia. The problem, at this moment in time, is that if the US government catches a cold, to use a metaphor from last millenium, the world falls sick.

The default action for many is to think “I want to buy this book” and they automatically either buy a physical copy because they love physical books, or they buy an e-book. The default is almost always Kindle and Amazon because of its market dominance.

I was shopping for The Night Train to Lison and I found it for 6 CHF on the Google Play book store, around 8 CHF on the Apple Books store, 19 CHF with Payot, 20 with Buchhaus, or even more, and that’s when I find the book.

This morning I went for a run. During this run I listened to Systems Crash and the discussion about AI, about the US attitude, and the European/International attitude and it convinced me that I much prefer to use EU/International projects rather than American ones for a simple reason. Corporate Social Responsibility.

The US wants to move fast and break things, including the law, by hoovering data it has no moral rights to. In contrast, from what I gather, from glimpsing at the Elysée documents about Macron’s projects for AI there is a push for collaboration,for helping humanity and more.

A few weeks ago Facebook (I refuse to whitewash that company by calling it Meta) decided to blackmail European users. The deal was simple. We were coerced. “Accept to pay for Facebook or we will force you to see ads. This was a lose lose situation that the European Union is now fighting. Imagine being given this choice. If you pay you’re going to be rewarding a company that has abused us.

Yesterday Facebook, discguised as meta, and Meta, disguised as Instagram launched Threads. Threads is meant to be a twitter competitor. The paradox is that Facebook has always been a twitter competitor, and this has become more evident with every iteration of both social networks. It is paradoxical that Facebook would need threads, to compete with Twitter.

Not Available in Europe

Threads, at the time of writing this blog post is not available in Europe because it requires data, which brings it in breach of GDPR rules. The only European Country where threads is authorised is England.

Europe wants to bring back top predators like lynx, bears and wolves. In the US national parks brought back certain wild animals and it helped to control the population of elk and other herbivores, and to control the biosphere. 

The challenge, with Europe, is that it is tiny, compared to the wide open American spaces, and it’s densely populated. Wild animals can roam thousands of kilometres for food and more. Europe is thousands of kilometres wide, with plenty of people, especially in Northern Italy, Switzerland etc. To bring back wild animals is to bring them close to humans. 

COVID-19 rules, restrictions and regulations are dynamic and changing much like drone rules. In Europe before you fly you should visit the local flight rule maps, to see where current restrictions are.

Information ranges from “You need third party insurance with coverage for up to two million in damages” or “In a town you are allowed up to this altitude, outside of a town, to that altitude, and in these regions you have a military flight corridor, thus a flying ban.

European Identity will benefit greatly from free-roaming. Today roaming fees between European countries have been scrapped. This means that your mobile phone is the same whatever country you go to. It means that you will have the same access to minutes and data. When you travel you will no longer need to change app permissions to reduce data cost. It also means that your images keep backing up via your data plan.

The European Broadcasting union are providing live coverage of the Vancouver Olympic games to Eurovision member states. There are 6 live channels in Standard definition as well as a channel for certain events in high definition. Also available are the live broadcasts that members of the European broadcasting Union are making available to their home audiences. As a result you have a wealth of streams in a number of languages. Vancouver live is where you will find this content. I am mentioning this because a lot of blog space and articles are dedicated to covering how the United States are providing streamed content to that part of the world but without demonstrating that streaming also has a place in the European market.

Twitter are stopping all SMS for many territories due to cost. They don’t need to send sms. If they had an s60 application similar to that by Jaiku they would incur no extra costs. We would simply take advantage of our dataplans to download the messages at any time that the application is running. Worldwide we are going to find that there are a lot of dissapointed users. At the same time the centralised conversation that twitter managed to encourage will spread across a number of platforms. As a result twhirl is a good alternative whilst waiting for things to settle. If the companies can’t behave then we’ll rely on Air applications to aggregate and monitor what’s going on. I already watch seesmic, twitter, identi.ca and friendfeed with twhirl. All this to say something simple. If you want me to keep coming to your site provide me with the best user experience possible. If not then I’ll be as uncommitted as possible. So will everyone else