It sets an absolutely obscene precedent that a government can globally restrict information. Even global terrible actors like Russia and China haven’t succeeded at that.

Yes, that precedent is 1000 orders of magnitude more harm than India losing access (which they won’t, because the entirety of Wikipedia is open source and would be mirrored in the country instantly. But even if they actually would, it is literally impossible to get anywhere near the harm of the precedent this sets).

Being available elsewhere is entirely irrelevant. Wikipedia must stand against totalitarian censorship to resemble a reputable organization.

Complying is unforgivable.

They not only can, trivially. They unconditionally must.

It is not possible to ever be a reputable organization ever again if you have to choose between censoring content globally for an authoritarian government and shutting down in that country, and censoring content globally is something they genuinely consider. Open, fact based information is their entire reason for existing.

No, I have no interest in digging through their history. But it’s less than trivial to do. Any random no name site can do it in 5 minutes with any source of the geo-mapping information, with virtually no knowledge required. It is not work.

GDPR can do literally nothing but block any site that doesn’t have finances under their jurisdiction, and they shouldn’t be able to. No one else will enforce their fines for them. It’s no different than Russia fining Google more money than exists. You can’t just magically rob someone because you’re a country.

Yes, they do. They’ve done it in the past.

It literally doesn’t matter what Indian courts rule. Being banned from India is orders and orders of magnitude more acceptable than blocking a single article anywhere else on the planet. It single handedly eliminates all of their credibility.

India isn’t capable of enforcing fines against an organization that doesn’t operate in their country and there’s no chance a US court will enforce such an unhinged judgement. They can’t be forced to pay.

They already have the capability to block content locally.

There isn’t a worse option than allowing a government to globally block an article.

You can’t give a deranged dictatorship global censorship authority.

That keeps the entire planet from access to information.

Everywhere else on the planet, in order for a device to be cleared for sale, that specific model undergoes heavy testing for regulatory compliance by a government agency.

“The specs said it was fine” is literally never going to be a valid legal defense, and making that argument will get you laughed out of court. Either it’s actually certified to be used as you’re allowing it to be used, or you get the hammer dropped on you, as you should.

The carrier doesn’t decide that.

I literally quoted the part that required carriers to block ineligible phones.

They should have just blocked India.

Censoring factual articles globally is an extremely bad precedent to set for yourself.

I did read the article. Checking is not and should not be their responsibility.

The only legitimate way to check is to do actual, intensive, independent testing of every device in question, specific to your country’s regulations. Spec sheets are not a valid approach to verifying that a device will work.

Regulatory compliance of hardware is not, and should not be, the responsibility of the service provider. It’s the responsibility of the manufacturer to have their hardware certified basically everywhere.

Frankly, the rules shouldn’t even allow providers to make that determination. They should either be certified to meet the requirements by an independent agency, or have providers be prohibited from allowing them.

Just days ahead of the shutdown, Australia’s media regulator ACMA finalised a new “direction” (basically a rule) that meant telecom companies had to refuse service to all phones that relied on 3G for making emergency calls.

The idea was to prevent people from mistakenly believing that phones were fully working, only to realise they were unable to make emergency calls when the crucial moment came.

Australians with older 4G phones may also be caught out because of the way the phones are configured.

It is up to the telcos to work out which phones are affected, notify the owners, block their phones, and help make other arrangements such as low- or no-cost replacement phones.

However, as Telstra and Optus noted during a Senate inquiry into the shutdown, telecom companies are unable to tell which individual devices suffer from this problem unless have they sold them.

I’m not saying it’s not partly on the providers, but validating that a bunch of obscure phones that aren’t sold in your country meet new regulatory requirements is not as easy as you’re making it out to be.

SteamOS is arch, so some of the derivatives are too.

Steam shouldn’t really care though.

Yes. Exactly identically to them spending money on DRM despite an obscenely strong body of work showing that DRM doesn’t serve any purpose in any context. It’s pure theater.

Human eyes are far better than cameras at real time adaptation to varied lighting conditions though.

It doesn’t meaningfully impact the rate of cheating at all. You’re making the deluded assumption that it does something despite a complete absence of evidence to support it. It’s a complete fabrication with no connection in any way to the real world.

It is not security. It does not in any way resemble security. It’s pure theater that catastrophically compromises the actual security of everything it touches.

That’s fine, and in principle I understand the threat, but I think there are plenty of security experts who choose to just use cloudflare because some of the services they provide genuinely require their scale and they have a pretty steady history of making very measured decisions about where they need to leverage their position to improve security.

There’s never been any indication that they’re collecting more than they need to or exploiting it beyond the scope of the service they provide, and several scenarios where they have refused to cooperate with governments trying to do invasive things. I absolutely think “moderately secure” still applies to traffic routed through cloudflare.

No, it doesn’t. Cheating is still incredibly common on games that install malware. If people care enough to cheat, they will cheat whether you have kernel access or not. It doesn’t make a dent. They use it for the exact same reason they use DRM. Because they can.

It also can’t possibly theoretically “reduce harm” when every single installation on every individual computer is many orders of magnitude more harm than all cheating in every game ever made.

The point is to not be compelled to a central service. Choosing a provider that does a better job is perfectly fine.