This isn't really surprising from the UK. If you go back 15-20 years, taxing a vehicle to drive on public roads used to involve displaying a "Tax Disc" in your windscreen, on the off-side of the vehicle.
They abolished this system in 2014 [1] because they'd long since reached saturation of permanent Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) readers [2] from >11000 cameras on UK roads, and scanning over 50 million vehicles per day.
It's also common to have 'Average Speed' systems on major roads and even country roads where the accident rate exceeds a threshold defined by the local councils. Those will issue you a Penalty Charge Notice (PCN) and points on your licence for a moving violation if you exceed the speed limit. Beyond the 'Average Speed' infrastructure is a giant number of fixed cameras which measure speed and capture imagery of your vehicle, number plate, and the driver and automatically issue the PCN for speeding, and mobile vans operated by the authorities and deployed anywhere they consider a "hotspot".
All of this costs you money immediately to pay the PCN, costs you money over time because insurers hike their rates, and after 2-4 violations in 36 months, can result in you losing your ability to drive and trigger an extended "retake driving test" (after your disqualification period).
This is much more draconian than the United States where in many states a moving violation (like a speeding infraction) will only be processed by a policeman pulling you over for a chat.
Yes. Now tell me how I can determine the stir/shaken attestation level of a given incoming call to my iPhone before I answer it.
(The answer in my experience is: you can’t, and next, nobody knows what the different attestation levels mean, and many legit calls still come in without any attestation)
It’s like if browsers only told you that https was enabled after you POSTed your credit card number to the remote site.
And it does work, despite what people will say. My carrier blocks outbound phone calls from caller IDs of number we don't own. The next step will be to for carriers to start refusing calls that don't pass attestation.
My carrier is GoogleFi, and I still get several phone calls a day with my cellphone's area code as the incoming number. (At least, it makes it easier to ignore those calls. I really wish I could program my phone to automatically reject any calls from that area code if it's not in my phone book.)
The US telecoms industry has supposedly been "fighting phone spam" for well over a decade. I can tell you it's simply not working.
The system will die, if not from the abuse than from rejection by individuals, businesses, and organisations. And I suspect we'll never again have a single universally-accessible voice comms system again.
Email has similarly been slowly dying for similar reasons.
A fair number of sites hosted and operated outside the European Union reacted to GDPR by instituting blocks of EU users, many returning HTTP 451. Regardless of whether you believe GDPR is a good idea or not (that's beyond the scope of this comment), the disparity in statutory and regulatory approaches plus widely varying (often poor) levels of 'plain language' clarity in obligations, and inconsistent enforcement, it all leads to entirely understandable decisions like this and more of a divided internet.
Thank you to those who have tirelessly run these online communities for decades, I'm sorry we can't collectively elect lawmakers who are more educated about the real challenges online, and thoughtful on real ways to solve them.
China or Russia also have "interesting" data protection / "let's protect children" laws. Some of they also formulated in same way as GDPR so VPN doesn't help. Why should they be ignored? (other than "but it's DIFFERENT thing, EU is good ones")
For me, Firefox and without iCloud Private Relay engaged, Maxmind is within about 2km and doesn't get the city correct (but we're right on a border), and IPinfo is about 15km as the crow flies (and gets the city entirely wrong).
For cloud-like provisioning experiences and paying by the hour you can use DigitalOcean, Vultr, or alternatives.
Deploying GPUs? Something like CoreWeave may be optimal.
Want inexpensive costs for dedicated hosts? Hetzner, OVH.
There are many, many advantages to using AWS but equally many alternatives that are viable and which aren’t “doing it yourself” in a hardware and network sense.
None of this is to say DIY is a terrible choice either and everyone’s got an opportunity to consider time (initial setup; ongoing maint), costs, and also expertise and ability to do a good job.
Linode is a good small cloud too in my experience. Personally, I would steer clear of Hetzner and OVH, but that still leaves various low-cost small clouds on the table. In my experience, Hetzner disables accounts without warning if you run at 100% for too long. OVH is good for alpha software that is okay with a week-long unannounced downtime and full data loss.
Due to inflation, the cost equation is rapidly changing to where lowering cloud expenses is vital.
I have been using OVH since 2005. Still waiting to loose my data.
Uptime wise I had 2 outages last December with one of my server with them (electrical issue). Prior to that I don’t even remember, maybe in 2018 or something. Thankfully I had no server in Strasbourg, I saw pictures of their containers datacenter there and decided to choose Roubaix.
OVH is great if you need a lot of bandwidth. Servers price are no longer as competitive as before.
I’m hoping that they finally execute an M4 Extreme, oriented towards Mac Pro. There was rumor they’d do this in M2 era but it didn’t come to pass unfortunately.
Be aware that discussing anything in the CM5 Forward Guidance document is tricky, the document still says -
"This whitepaper is restricted and covered by the Raspberry Pi Ltd non-disclosure agreement (NDA). It should not be copied, shared, or duplicated without permission."
They abolished this system in 2014 [1] because they'd long since reached saturation of permanent Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) readers [2] from >11000 cameras on UK roads, and scanning over 50 million vehicles per day.
It's also common to have 'Average Speed' systems on major roads and even country roads where the accident rate exceeds a threshold defined by the local councils. Those will issue you a Penalty Charge Notice (PCN) and points on your licence for a moving violation if you exceed the speed limit. Beyond the 'Average Speed' infrastructure is a giant number of fixed cameras which measure speed and capture imagery of your vehicle, number plate, and the driver and automatically issue the PCN for speeding, and mobile vans operated by the authorities and deployed anywhere they consider a "hotspot".
All of this costs you money immediately to pay the PCN, costs you money over time because insurers hike their rates, and after 2-4 violations in 36 months, can result in you losing your ability to drive and trigger an extended "retake driving test" (after your disqualification period).
This is much more draconian than the United States where in many states a moving violation (like a speeding infraction) will only be processed by a policeman pulling you over for a chat.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/vehicle-tax-changes
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...