Hans-Christoph Steiner @eighthave@librem.one
Joined Aug 2019
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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Yay for the #EU putting a #deposit on plastic bottles so that good solutions like reusable #glass are less artificially disadvantaged. Of course, #plastic #recycling is total bullshit, that's not the reason why this deposit scheme makes sense.
Now there is now a book about how large corporations used plastic to drive a disposable culture. Nice to see that the author also calls out corporations by name: #CocaCola #Pepsico #Nestle
https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/10/10/1746232/how-plastic-goods-took-over-the-world-creating-a-throwaway-culture
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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F-Droid contributors have already translated the English post into Bahasa Indonesian, Português do Brasil, Українська and 繁體中文. If you wanted to distribute the link and language was a barrier, maybe now you can do it in your native one. Feel free to help with translations if your locale does not have one yet: https://hosted.weblate.org/projects/f-droid/
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Hans-Christoph Steiner
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O Google nunca se quer vendeu um dos seus produtos bons (ex: Google Pixels, ou Chromecasts) no Brasil, mas está pronto para nos utilizar como cobaia para saber como uma sociedade como a nossa aceitará o bloqueio de instalação de software livre.
Envie uma mensagem pros seus deputados.
https://f-droid.org/pt_BR/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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Hans-Christoph Steiner
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The #European #standards being developed to allow compliance with the Cyber Resilience Act have unusually high participation from #OpenSource community members. As a result many of the draft standards are being developed in markdown and are available for public review in ETSI's Gitlab instance. You will find links next to each standard on this page:
https://www.stan4cra.eu/etsi-tc-cyber
Positive contributions are actively invited. I'm vice-chair of the committee hosting the work and I approve this message 🙂
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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Formal court orders? Subpoenas? Vague emails from law enforcement? Pings from regulatory bodies you never knew even existed? Oh, they all spell one thing: government requests!
Yes, #FDroid legal series continues, episode four.
What to do or not do when authorities come knocking: https://f-droid.org/2025/10/07/when-authorities-come-knocking-how-to-handle-requests-for-information.html
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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Interesting developments regarding the EU chat control proposal. I'm seeing posts preemptively celebrating that Germany will block it, but I'm not sure what that is based on. It's clear that we need to keep the pressure up.
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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@eighthave Yes, it was formed by Chris Simmonds and others following a talk last year at LPC. We wrote about the talk here: https://lwn.net/Articles/992992/
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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We did it: 🇩🇪Germany will OPPOSE Chat Control! 🥳
Thanks everyone for writing to the ministers. 🫶
#ChatControl will not get a majority in the EU Council - at least for now.
Anyone know anything about this new "AOSP Devs" group? It seems like it is trying to be like a community for free software devs to work on AOSP (e.g. outside of #Google
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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I know some of us are really angered by #Meta's decision to stop running political, electoral and social issue ads in the EU.
I understand this will force many civil society orgs to painfully disentangle their own #campaigning from #Meta platforms.
But in my books it's a win-win: CSOs win because they finally break free from an abusive relationship, and society wins because less of our political debates and election campaigns are run on toxic #BigTech platforms.
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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I've been an Android developer for … *checks calendar* … more than 15 years. It was a nice enough platform and the developer community is awesome.
But with Google's planned changes to turn Android into yet another walled garden, I'm seriously considering doing something else 😞
A key problem in the debate around #Israel/#Palestine is that it is framed as two sides of one coin: either you support Israel otherwise you support Palestine. I support none of those in power there, #Netanyahu, #Hamas, Palestinian Authority, the Israeli regime, etc. are all corrupt, brutal and lead to suffering for the vast majority of the people they claim to represent. Only those in power benefit currently. I support good governance for all the people who live there.
If we want to make this #EU #BrainGain permanent, and make real research centers, we'll have to do more than just be less bad than Trump. Academic culture everywhere in Europe is very conservative and hierarchical. Researchers massed in the #US because academia there are more focused on the work, and less about who is who, and who has which title. Austrian Academy of Sciences celebrates "Thanks to Trump we are seeing this brain gain" rather than "our great universities"
https://www.politico.eu/article/european-research-council-funding-us-researchers-relocation-europe/
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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Broken links aside (fix incoming), #FDroid raises the case against the #Google developer forced registration once again.
We'll skip the small talk, go read, and better yet, spread this wide and far: https://f-droid.org/2025/09/29/google-developer-registration-decree.html so people are made aware and actions can be taken and #Android is kept truly open!
#EU citizens support actions against #BigTech. About 90% of those polled support them. So #Apple really don't not care about #democracy. Mmmm too much sweet monopoly profits 🤑
https://www.politico.eu/article/europeans-agree-eu-should-enforce-rules-big-tech-says-poll/
#BigTech #EU #EuropeanCommission #DMA #DigitalMarketsAct #DigitalSovereignity
Wow is #Apple shameless in their attacks on the #DigitalMarketsAct! Yes, the #DMA affects them in ways they don't like, that's why we have the it! Then they do all this crap instead of earnestly engaging with the #EU democratic process. And now they are lobbying to have this very popular law repealed. This just reconfirms how much the world needs to break the #BigTech monopolies. They have more money than sense and are resorting to despotic tactics to protect profits.
Big companies making money from #porn are complaining that they have to implement age restrictions. They are a $73 billion industry built on the internet and software. They can easily fund the creation of privacy preserving age verification systems on their sites. It is not that hard. I think they actually don't care about the privacy of their users. The websites should do the age verification, then access methods like VPNs are irrelevant.
https://www.politico.eu/article/porn-industry-austrian-marcello-bravo-tech-rules-eu-policy/
Hans-Christoph Steiner
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"In #Canada, #Brazil, #Colombia, #Indonesia and #Australia and beyond, tech giants like #Google and #Meta have deployed aggressive #lobbying strategies to derail or weaken legislation aimed at regulating digital platforms — often through opaque influence networks and #disinformation campaigns. The biggest casualty? The public’s right to reliable information."
New reporting out by Reporters Without Borders together with 17 news outlets:
Joined Aug 2019
