At this point I think they could reasonably be considered combatants. After all they have done nothing to prevent murder of civilians even if they have had tools like second amendment exactly designed for this purpose. And no it's not massacre, it's justified death penalty for mass-murderers.
I'm also puzzled by the fact that EU is funding this. Usually states and state-like entities are exactly the ones who don't want people to use decentralized technologies, because they often make laws difficult or impossible to enforce.
In fact, wanting to circumvent laws is the only reason why people en mass would ever want to use decentralized technologies. I'm not necessarily always against this (there are some really stupid laws that should be broken), but I'm pretty annoyed by how people try to pretend that there is demand for these technologies for any other reason.
It gets filled with all kinds of content, of which racism and other far-right talk is merely the most visible part because it's in the spotlight. But it's not just far right that's getting "deplatformed". Even politically, there are plenty of leftist groups that were wiped out from e.g. Facebook during the recent purges. All those people also have to look for other platforms.
It puts companies on the spot to have internal tooling to deal with requests like this; which is not a bad thing. Nothing unethical about that; just the price of doing business.
The mindset change that needs to happen in our industry is that companies should build this into their products by default. "Download my data" should be a feature that is simply planned and built. Just like "permanently delete my data" is not optional either. It's not even that hard to build mostly. It's only hard if it catches you by surprise, which these days is poor planning more than anything else.
In Europe, and Germany especially, you can just expect people to do GDPR requests just because they can. We've had that happen right after GDPR became a thing. And you are legally required to be ready for that and respond in a timely fashion. If you want to do that manually, that's your problem. Small startups get a way with that. At some point it becomes annoying and you just fix it properly. Up to you when you do that.
Colorado has passed legislation around this, so we'll have a test case soon.
> The Guidance makes clear that employers must disclose compensation and employee benefits information in each job posting for (i) positions that are to be performed in Colorado, or (ii) remote positions that could be performed in Colorado.
My employer posts salary for all positions and for me its been net negative. I was always aware that my odds of getting more money are low, but now seeing how much (and little) others are compensated makes me feel worse about my job. It will be very nice when applying for jobs, but has created a lot of frustration for me.
I don't want to get into the rest of your argument, but just wanted to say that based on my reading of history, pretty much all of the borders on Earth "were a colonization project from the start".
Bigger picture, what's the endgame here? It seems a lot of institutions handling sensitive work are considering air-gapping some or all of their networks at this point. Maybe that's even what has to happen.
Is there a means of fending off these attacks on the political front? If this same level of espionage was happening in person, there would be a kinetic response but it seems everyone is happy to just turn the other cheek.
These attacks have a very real impact. Copying others homework is a tried and true way to get a technological edge and in practical terms, it means a lot of research and development money is effectively wasted as it doesn't generate any returns.
Mind, I don't think there should be a violent response, but it's odd that even the threat of sanctions isn't made whenever this happens.
