Hacker News

It was one journalist and the local MP for Tottenham posting, on social media, calls to disable Blackberry Messenger, not some formal government white, or even green, paper. It certainly was not a sitting government official (Sébastien Lecornu) calling several ISPs together and asking them to get ready to do this and to keep the plans secret.

The journalist was Mike Butcher. Both xe and at least one other journalist, Paul Lewis of The Graduian, had been watching the BBM traffic. Butcher pointed out that the authorities had seemingly missed people coördinating riot activity there, posted on Twitter about it, and later retracted xyr post.

* https://www.theguardian.com/uk/blog/2011/aug/08/london-riots...

The MP for Tottenham was David Lammy.

At the time all the kids were on BBM and the businesses had moved to iOS.

~20% in France, by one estimate (https://browsec.com/en/blog/vpn-usage-statistics)

Blocking popular websites is certainly going to boost this number, dramatically.

> VPNs may be used by what, 0.1% of all users?

Probably, since not many of us in Europe don't have lots of use cases for them, yet.

But things like our (Spain's) "internet shall not be 100% available during La Liga football matches" or our neighbors thinking of blocking DNS to stop political activism, surely will continue to make this number raise, albeit slowly.

Can I change the DNS on my iPhone? I know how to do that with a computer but not iPhones. Androids are probably easier to set up.

People socializing at all inherently encourages instability for the government.

Instability isn’t a bad thing through, that’s what drives progress.

Want more stability? Shut down medias for a year before any elections to "smooth" the public debate.

For more on the algorithm not being good

https://www.panamericandispatch.org/p/meta-ignores-brazilian...

Wait till you read some of the far left or right newspapers and leaflets in France. Why aren't those being banned?

Both Melenchon and Le Pen have promised to increase spending and reduce taxes. That type of promise is a great vote winner, and people believe it. In 2022 Pecrese advocated reducing spending in 2022 and couldn't even manage 5% of the vote.

Macron couldn't even increase retirement age to 65 because France doesn't want it.

Next time will likely be a choice of two parties who both said retirement age will be reduced to 60.

It's because Canada and Denmark are less socialist than france. But generally speaking, what we are seeing is the end of socialism in the EU.

Yet again, socialism has failed to work, and it will always fail. When it fails, there are riots and violence.

We are seeing that EU companies are moving outside the EU, one recent example is that Volvo Cars are firing 2500 workers, and the EU laws and regulations will make this pattern repeat itself.

In the end, either EU will have to embrace capitalism, or it will break apart when nationalist parties promise that they have the easy solution, and do their own thing. I think actually breaking apart EU would be the best option.

I dont know the solution. But I think Shannon is being brushed under the carpet. Noise levels and random outcomes speak for themselves.