8 ms·

Stalin's daughter on her life in Wisconsin (2010)

128 points by gruseom 8y ago

rendall 8y ago
"451: Unavailable due to legal reasons "We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact hostmaster@madison.com or call 800-362-8333."
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jordigh 8y ago
  I always read that "we really need your personal data for no good reason but the EU won't let us, god bless America!" It really should be a 500 error, not a 400. Edit: Listen, USA, it's not so difficult, and we all really need to stop siphoning off everyone's data like it's no big deal, laws or not. I wrote some stuff for the GDPR, just had to remove some emails from our database, and honestly, we shouldn't have been collecting them in the first place and neither should you. This surveillance capitalism we're all building is not a good thing and you should not be complicit in it.
  - kasey_junk 8y ago
    Or possibly your foreign laws have made it impossible for us to determine if we are in compliance & it’s not worth it to figure out for a hyper local publication whose income comes from local ads.
    - mindslight 8y ago
      That's an utterly disingenuous argument. The EU made an attempt at formally codifying a very basic boundary that most everybody intuitively understands - everybody except for the creepy advertising-surveillance industry which remains willfully ignorant. The answer is simple: don't surveil your users! Kind of sad to see 451 being used simply to throw a hissy fit, continuing to pretend that the surveillance is intrinsic - rather than deliberately set up to abuse visitors. But alas I guess this balkanization is just the next step on the path where users move away from http altogether.
      - Permit 8y ago
        > That's an utterly disingenuous argument. > The EU made an attempt at formally codifying a very basic boundary that most everybody intuitively understands - everybody except for the advertising-surveillance industry which remains willfully ignorant What is disingenuous is that you have tried reduced this argument down to "Everyone agrees with GDPR except for advertisers". Please recognize that plenty of HN users do not agree with GDPR.
        mindslight 8y ago
        Yes, plenty of HN users work for the surveillance industry. You reduced the argument to being about support of the GDPR itself. I'm not in love with the specifics of the GDPR, just like I'm not in love with the concept of "sex offenders" needing to remain a certain distance away from schools. But they both exist in service of very straightforward boundaries.
      - tfehring 8y ago
        It’s totally possible that the site complies with all GDPR requirements but that it still makes business sense for it to block EU users. Verifying that they’re compliant would probably rack up sizeable legal fees, which could be far higher than the revenue they could expect to receive from readers in the EU.
        analog31 8y ago
        Indeed, I subscribe to that newspaper, and they are not exactly swimming in money. If it's anything like electronic products, getting certified for export to the EU is an expensive proposition, and certainly not a DIY project.
        DanBC 8y ago
        They don't offer their product in any of the EU languages (other than English, which is their first language), and they don't offer product in Euro. That means they're not targetting EU citizens, and can ignore GDPR.
  - arketyp 8y ago
    I read it "We don't want to be dragged into anything and your region is hardly a customer anyway."
  - baddox 8y ago
    Or alternatively, they’re saying that the legislation is so confusing that figuring out how to abide by it is not worth the risk and cost.
    - paulmd 8y ago
      "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." It's not exactly complicated. Either get rid of their tracking cookies (why does a news website need tracking cookies to view an article?), or get consent before they use them. People don't want to stop tracking their users and so they feign like it's some insanely complex law. It's not complex at all, it's just one that made the thing you used to do illegal, and you need to stop doing it, or get consent before you do it. If maintaining a persistent session is somehow in the user's interest (say, maintaining an account at a store or online forum or something) then that's a legitimate-business-use exception. If it's for tracking/advertising/etc, then ask for consent, or presumptively don't do it. It's really not complex at all, unless you're being aggressively ignorant about it.
      - baddox 8y ago
        I am no expert, but I highly doubt it is really that simple, especially if the webmasters are particularly risk-averse. And why wouldn’t they be, if Europe is a relatively small portion of their user base? Why pay for an hour of a lawyer’s time, or even an hour of an employee’s time, to attempt to read and evaluate the laws?
        DanBC 8y ago
        It doesn't seem too complicated. Recital 23: > In order to determine whether such a controller or processor is offering goods or services to data subjects who are in the Union, it should be ascertained whether it is apparent that the controller or processor envisages offering services to data subjects in one or more Member States in the Union. 3Whereas the mere accessibility of the controller’s, processor’s or an intermediary’s website in the Union, of an email address or of other contact details, or the use of a language generally used in the third country where the controller is established, is insufficient to ascertain such intention, factors such as the use of a language or a currency generally used in one or more Member States with the possibility of ordering goods and services in that other language, or the mentioning of customers or users who are in the Union, may make it apparent that the controller envisages offering goods or services to data subjects in the Union. If this local newspaper isn't offering translations in French or German, and isn't offering subscriptions in Euro or GBP, then they're not ofering services to Europe.
  - TaylorAlexander 8y ago
    It’s somewhat tricky. I operate a discourse instance. I have absolutely no desire to collect any personal information on my users(it is a free website and I am an anarchist), but I also live in the US and haven’t looked in to GDPR. The website is a hobby. I pay for the severs myself and do not display ads or use any tracking. I don’t intend to violate GDPR but I don’t know what it’s impkications are. For now I continue to make the site available for all, but if I felt there were legal implications to including Europe, I’d have to decide whether to block that region or do my due diligence. I’d want to include Europe given the subject of my site, but it’s something I haven’t looked in to yet. I do sometimes view sites that make a big deal out of it as whining, but I admit that I’m not familiar with what compliance requires.
    - oh_sigh 8y ago
      GDPR only matters if your business is based in Europe, or targets European consumers in some substantial way. If you run a Madison, WI local newspaper, you don't need to choose between blocking EU users and following GDPR. You just ignore it and nothing will happen.
      - checkyoursudo 8y ago
        To me this seems like the reasonable answer. I guess I don't understand why this Madison website would even care about EU users or GDPR and why it would bother blocking visits it thinks are from the EU? Because they don't want to get bogged down in EU law? I've had clients with real cross/inter/multi-jurisdictional issues. This would not be one of them.
        oh_sigh 8y ago
        Right - my point is that a lot of non-EU businesses over-reacted based on a poor understanding of the GDPR. Maybe their CIO read a blog post about American company X closing themselves to European customers, because they truly did attempt to market to Europeans and didn't think complying was worth it, and said 'Well, it ain't to hard to geo-block the EU' and went for it.
    - 8y ago
  - Permit 8y ago
    > Edit: Listen, USA, it's not such a big deal, and y'all really need to stop siphoning off everyone's data like it's no big deal, laws or not. I wrote some stuff for the GDPR, just had to remove some emails from our database, and honestly, we shouldn't have been collecting them in the first place and neither should you. This surveillance capitalism we're all building is not a good thing and you should not be complicit in it. This is incredibly patronizing. If I build a website in Canada, host it in Canada and primarily target it toward Canadians, don't complain when I have zero interest in learning about EU laws. I don't want to put a cookie popup on my website. I don't want to research GDPR. I don't want to worry about EU copyright law. I just want to build a website for my users.
    - DanBC 8y ago
      > If I build a website in Canada, host it in Canada and primarily target it toward Canadians, don't complain when I have zero interest in learning about EU laws. You don't need to learn about EU laws, your product isn't covered by GDPR and all that will happen if your product somehow does fall under GDPR AND if it's non-compliant is that a bureaucrat will write a letter to you to either asking for more information or explaining how it's not compliant with suggestions about how to bring it back into compliance.
      - umanwizard 8y ago
        You may be right, but you're missing the point. The hypothetical Canadian webmaster probably hasn't seen this comment. If they have, they don't know you, and have no reason to trust your judgment about EU law. They could research it themselves, but that takes time. Most likely they have literally no idea what GDPR says, and don't care. So they just block the tiny proportion of EU visitors. Which is a completely rational -- it solves their problem at no cost to them.
  - aristophenes 8y ago
    How familiar are you with internet laws in Malaysia? Because that is probably about how relevant EU laws are for a publisher for a small city in Wisconsin, normally. Until they make the front page of hacker news, that is. Whoever maintains their site is probably very confused at the moment, unless they are a HN reader themselves.
  - legitster 8y ago
    "It is so simple! They just need to not have any cookies, advertisements, trackers, A/B testing, email signups, or javascript!" In your view of the internet, how does a site like this exist?
    - Joe-Z 8y ago
      You do realize that static web-sites is what the internet was built on, right? It does work! And frankly, it‘s very well suited if all you want to do is display an article. Maybe i was woooshed here, not sure.
      - legitster 8y ago
        That argument seems to me akin to insisting the internet remain a platform for hobbyists and non-profit organizations. How does this site stay running and pay employees in this purer internet?
        Joe-Z 8y ago
        By enabling people to subscribe to their content if they deem it worthy. Maybe have a free section where you serve static sites and for your more "in-depth" articles or whatever you make it subscriber-exclusive. I didn't want to argue we should revert to the internet of the 90's, but saying "how could you ever put anything on the web without cookies, tracking, data gathering?!" seems disingenuous when the internet was literally built without that. EDIT: Oh, I get it now. We just had different interpretations of what "exist" meant :) For me it was just "a site on the internet that can be reached by other people", for you it was more about the economic viablity. Fair point.
  - mynameishere 8y ago
    it's not so difficult Neither is being raped. Very easy. How about your bureaucrats oppress you and otherwise fuck off? How about that?
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  The web we can all look forward to I am sure. Once we start to divide it, the division will continue. Our ability to read stories of real people will be limited by our own attempts to protect the people. I don’t know where this will lead, but it seems something is lost.
  - OpenBSD-supreme 8y ago
    Tor, I2P, Freenet, GNUnet, RetroShare, etc, will be the internet of the future. It won't be as normie friendly as in no streams no games no instagram, and it will better because of it!
- cft 8y ago
  It is due to you who downvoted the parent post that I stopped contribution to NH after earning 5000 karma since 2011. The readers now don't argue, they just downvote if they don't like. Very different from YCombinator's early days.
  - interfixus 8y ago
    You are completely right. And it's a vicious circle which, alas, I recognize myself getting sucked into time and time again: Certain opinions and certain mindsets are practiacally guranteed to garner silent downvotes en masse if posted here. So we learn self-censor and shut up. And then occasionally some commenter says something just too outrageous, and we fall into the selfsame trap, clicking the downbutton because it's free, whereas an actual comment will most likely score minus-points until it greys out. Flagging and downvoting probably ought to carry some karma-cost.
  - dang 8y ago
    The downvoters of that post have been community members for years. I think it's more that this subject is off-topic and has come up so many times that it is now tedious (even though the underlying concern is unfortunately real).
    - cft 8y ago
      Bye. PS. You should raise the downvote karma threshold perhaps.
ams6110 8y ago
Wayback Machine copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20190310050003/https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/doug_moe/lana-about-svetlana-stalin-s-daughter-on-her-life-in/article_85ebc5d0-4978-11df-b181-001cc4c002e0.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190310050003/https://madison.c...
- mirimir 8y ago
  That doesn't work either. Paywall.
  - y4mi 8y ago
    It worked for me. Though it wasn't very interesting tbh
  - Krasnol 8y ago
    https://outline.com/BNU45U https://outline.com/BNU45U I wrapped that into outline. Last paragraph was missing though: "Wherever I go," she said, "here, or Switzerland, or India, or wherever. Australia. Some island. I always will be a political prisoner of my father's name."
- FabHK 8y ago
  Thanks. The original is blocked from GDPR countries.
jowdones 8y ago
I've been reading recently books on the former Soviet Union. "Beria, my Father" by Sergo Beria, "Krushcev" by William Taubman, "Conversations with Molotov" by Feliks Ciuev... Then tried "Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva" by Rosemary Sullivan but could't finish it. Compared with the 'bad guys' her biography is just dull.
- wetpaws 8y ago
  She had an autobiography. "20 letters to a friend" or something like this, I liked reading it a lot just because of how short and personal it was.
  - master-lincoln 8y ago
    Apparently this was read out in some radio program and is now available for listening at https://archive.org/details/20LettersToaFriend https://archive.org/details/20LettersToaFriend edit: nevermind, seems to be an excerpt only. Recorded by BBC in 2017 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01dd3t9 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01dd3t9
narrator 8y ago
Has anyone read Montefiore's Young Stalin and Court of the Red Tzar? Those books were an absolutely wild ride. Stalin really comes across as one of the more unusual characters of history. No one in his native Georgia liked him, so they were happy to dish dirt on his youth and give the full story free of obvious glorification. I think the most unusual characteristics of his story was that everyone tried to control him. First, the priests at the seminary by disciplining him, then his father, who wanted him to be a shoe cobbler, then the czars by putting him in prison and exiling him, then his fellow party members by trying to out politic him, and absolutely nothing worked on him. The guy did not budge an inch from his mission or ever got discouraged no matter what happened. The guy, like a serial killer, was completely emotionally unmoved and undeterred by any obstacle or opinion of anyone. They put him in prison, he started taking control of the prison. They sent him to Siberia he came back and dove right back into revolution after always seeming to father an illegitimate child while in exile. He remembered everyone who he ever met and punished them or rewarded them later accordingly. He seemingly did everything for the sole purpose of global Marxist revolution and he got rid of anyone, or group of people or thing that got in his way. He wasn't even vulnerable to flattery. He was just dead set and committed to his goal of global marxist revolution and brutal vengeance against all his enemies who tried to keep him from achieving that.
- simula67 8y ago
  > I think the most unusual characteristics of his story was that everyone tried to control him. First, the priests at the seminary by disciplining him Priests tried to control him ? He entered the school voluntarily. They did not lock him up. He left of his own accord and priests encouraged him to return. I don't think that was 'trying to control him' > He seemingly did everything for the sole purpose of global Marxist revolution Stalin's policy was 'Socialism in one country'. Apart from some modest actions like supporting the Spanish communists in the Spanish Civil War etc, he did not work that hard to advance the Marxist revolution abroad.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - 8y ago
fergie 8y ago
451: Unavailable due to legal reasons We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact hostmaster@madison.com or call 800-362-8333.
- raverbashing 8y ago
  Maybe someone should do an extension to rename those "errors" "Unavailable due to failure to understand the rules" or "Unavailable because abusing our visitors information is forbidden"
  - Buge 8y ago
    It costs money to hire lawyers to understand the laws and ensure compliance. Maybe they ran the numbers and it wasn't worth it to hire the lawyers.
    - atoav 8y ago
      If you don’t collect too much data beeing GDPR compliant is not hard at all. If you don’t know what data you collect becausae of all that reliance on third part extensions or if you heavily collect data and don’t want to break the law, this gets a harder topic. Beeing an European it was quite interesting to see how little many web developers know about their dependencies and extensions. Most I know thought they can solve GDPR problems by install yet another wordpress addon they didn’t program.
      - TomMarius 8y ago
        You shouldn't bellitle them. A person doing a small business should not be required to understand GDPR nor technicalities of WP plugins. We should strive for simple to understand policies and technologies, just as the others are trying e.g. to make better furniture for us IT people. Making a website absolutely should not require computer science and law degrees.
aquarin 8y ago
EU citizens cannot access this site. So, use the Wayback Machine copy. Apparently, comments like this are buried down and repeated.
- Evidlo 8y ago
  Why is that? GDPR reasons?
  - vages 8y ago
    Yup. Happens every now and then.
  - dgl 8y ago
    Yes, “451: Unavailable due to legal reasons” and then some details about the GDPR (but not saying why). My guess is a local news outlet that’s big enough to know about the legal requirements but doesn’t actually see any value in doing the compliance work.
Koshkin 8y ago
His granddaughter: https://nypost.com/2016/03/17/stalin-granddaughter-is-an-all-american-badass/ https://nypost.com/2016/03/17/stalin-granddaughter-is-an-all...
- microcolonel 8y ago
  How very NY Post of them to whittle Stalin down to "man of steel" who vaguely led a "brutal regime". Yes, Mao Zedong: man of books, who notably disrupted the production of food. By any measure, she lives an ordinary life; why dig this up if they don't hold some secret admiration for the first contractor to the architect of the most devastating and heinous genocide in human history? I mean, maybe it's just a morbid fascination, but I find it kinda suspect.
  - apostacy 8y ago
    I do think that history isn't nearly as hard on him as it should be. He is easily as bad as Pol Pot or Hitler. But my college roommate got the symbol of Stalin's state tattooed on him because he said it was cool and ironic. This disgusted our friend who's parent's escaped communist Poland, but nobody really cared. Of course, if he had got a swastika tattoo he would have essentially written himself out of society, however you are permitted to express admiration of communism without really getting in trouble.
    - opnitro 8y ago
      Yet this critique of ideological association never seems to come into play regarding the US's genocides in south America, or Britian's starvation of India.
      - Koshkin 8y ago
        Well, anti-communism had nothing to do with those. Just as it hadn’t with the genocide of some Germanic tribes comitted by Caesar, for example.
    - Koshkin 8y ago
jfk13 8y ago
And for a little background, even though Svetlana is a relatively minor character in it, don't miss The Death of Stalin - surely one of the best black comedies of recent years. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4686844/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4686844/

128 points by gruseom 8y ago

"451: Unavailable due to legal reasons "We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact hostmaster@madison.com or call 800-362-8333."

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jordigh 8y ago
I always read that "we really need your personal data for no good reason but the EU won't let us, god bless America!" It really should be a 500 error, not a 400. Edit: Listen, USA, it's not so difficult, and we all really need to stop siphoning off everyone's data like it's no big deal, laws or not. I wrote some stuff for the GDPR, just had to remove some emails from our database, and honestly, we shouldn't have been collecting them in the first place and neither should you. This surveillance capitalism we're all building is not a good thing and you should not be complicit in it.
- kasey_junk 8y ago
  Or possibly your foreign laws have made it impossible for us to determine if we are in compliance & it’s not worth it to figure out for a hyper local publication whose income comes from local ads.
  - mindslight 8y ago
    That's an utterly disingenuous argument. The EU made an attempt at formally codifying a very basic boundary that most everybody intuitively understands - everybody except for the creepy advertising-surveillance industry which remains willfully ignorant. The answer is simple: don't surveil your users! Kind of sad to see 451 being used simply to throw a hissy fit, continuing to pretend that the surveillance is intrinsic - rather than deliberately set up to abuse visitors. But alas I guess this balkanization is just the next step on the path where users move away from http altogether.
    - Permit 8y ago
      > That's an utterly disingenuous argument. > The EU made an attempt at formally codifying a very basic boundary that most everybody intuitively understands - everybody except for the advertising-surveillance industry which remains willfully ignorant What is disingenuous is that you have tried reduced this argument down to "Everyone agrees with GDPR except for advertisers". Please recognize that plenty of HN users do not agree with GDPR.
      - mindslight 8y ago
        Yes, plenty of HN users work for the surveillance industry. You reduced the argument to being about support of the GDPR itself. I'm not in love with the specifics of the GDPR, just like I'm not in love with the concept of "sex offenders" needing to remain a certain distance away from schools. But they both exist in service of very straightforward boundaries.
    - tfehring 8y ago
      It’s totally possible that the site complies with all GDPR requirements but that it still makes business sense for it to block EU users. Verifying that they’re compliant would probably rack up sizeable legal fees, which could be far higher than the revenue they could expect to receive from readers in the EU.
      - analog31 8y ago
        Indeed, I subscribe to that newspaper, and they are not exactly swimming in money. If it's anything like electronic products, getting certified for export to the EU is an expensive proposition, and certainly not a DIY project.
        DanBC 8y ago
        They don't offer their product in any of the EU languages (other than English, which is their first language), and they don't offer product in Euro. That means they're not targetting EU citizens, and can ignore GDPR.
- arketyp 8y ago
  I read it "We don't want to be dragged into anything and your region is hardly a customer anyway."
- baddox 8y ago
  Or alternatively, they’re saying that the legislation is so confusing that figuring out how to abide by it is not worth the risk and cost.
  - paulmd 8y ago
    "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." It's not exactly complicated. Either get rid of their tracking cookies (why does a news website need tracking cookies to view an article?), or get consent before they use them. People don't want to stop tracking their users and so they feign like it's some insanely complex law. It's not complex at all, it's just one that made the thing you used to do illegal, and you need to stop doing it, or get consent before you do it. If maintaining a persistent session is somehow in the user's interest (say, maintaining an account at a store or online forum or something) then that's a legitimate-business-use exception. If it's for tracking/advertising/etc, then ask for consent, or presumptively don't do it. It's really not complex at all, unless you're being aggressively ignorant about it.
    - baddox 8y ago
      I am no expert, but I highly doubt it is really that simple, especially if the webmasters are particularly risk-averse. And why wouldn’t they be, if Europe is a relatively small portion of their user base? Why pay for an hour of a lawyer’s time, or even an hour of an employee’s time, to attempt to read and evaluate the laws?
      - DanBC 8y ago
        It doesn't seem too complicated. Recital 23: > In order to determine whether such a controller or processor is offering goods or services to data subjects who are in the Union, it should be ascertained whether it is apparent that the controller or processor envisages offering services to data subjects in one or more Member States in the Union. 3Whereas the mere accessibility of the controller’s, processor’s or an intermediary’s website in the Union, of an email address or of other contact details, or the use of a language generally used in the third country where the controller is established, is insufficient to ascertain such intention, factors such as the use of a language or a currency generally used in one or more Member States with the possibility of ordering goods and services in that other language, or the mentioning of customers or users who are in the Union, may make it apparent that the controller envisages offering goods or services to data subjects in the Union. If this local newspaper isn't offering translations in French or German, and isn't offering subscriptions in Euro or GBP, then they're not ofering services to Europe.
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  It’s somewhat tricky. I operate a discourse instance. I have absolutely no desire to collect any personal information on my users(it is a free website and I am an anarchist), but I also live in the US and haven’t looked in to GDPR. The website is a hobby. I pay for the severs myself and do not display ads or use any tracking. I don’t intend to violate GDPR but I don’t know what it’s impkications are. For now I continue to make the site available for all, but if I felt there were legal implications to including Europe, I’d have to decide whether to block that region or do my due diligence. I’d want to include Europe given the subject of my site, but it’s something I haven’t looked in to yet. I do sometimes view sites that make a big deal out of it as whining, but I admit that I’m not familiar with what compliance requires.
  - oh_sigh 8y ago
    GDPR only matters if your business is based in Europe, or targets European consumers in some substantial way. If you run a Madison, WI local newspaper, you don't need to choose between blocking EU users and following GDPR. You just ignore it and nothing will happen.
    - checkyoursudo 8y ago
      To me this seems like the reasonable answer. I guess I don't understand why this Madison website would even care about EU users or GDPR and why it would bother blocking visits it thinks are from the EU? Because they don't want to get bogged down in EU law? I've had clients with real cross/inter/multi-jurisdictional issues. This would not be one of them.
      - oh_sigh 8y ago
        Right - my point is that a lot of non-EU businesses over-reacted based on a poor understanding of the GDPR. Maybe their CIO read a blog post about American company X closing themselves to European customers, because they truly did attempt to market to Europeans and didn't think complying was worth it, and said 'Well, it ain't to hard to geo-block the EU' and went for it.
  - 8y ago
- Permit 8y ago
  > Edit: Listen, USA, it's not such a big deal, and y'all really need to stop siphoning off everyone's data like it's no big deal, laws or not. I wrote some stuff for the GDPR, just had to remove some emails from our database, and honestly, we shouldn't have been collecting them in the first place and neither should you. This surveillance capitalism we're all building is not a good thing and you should not be complicit in it. This is incredibly patronizing. If I build a website in Canada, host it in Canada and primarily target it toward Canadians, don't complain when I have zero interest in learning about EU laws. I don't want to put a cookie popup on my website. I don't want to research GDPR. I don't want to worry about EU copyright law. I just want to build a website for my users.
  - DanBC 8y ago
    > If I build a website in Canada, host it in Canada and primarily target it toward Canadians, don't complain when I have zero interest in learning about EU laws. You don't need to learn about EU laws, your product isn't covered by GDPR and all that will happen if your product somehow does fall under GDPR AND if it's non-compliant is that a bureaucrat will write a letter to you to either asking for more information or explaining how it's not compliant with suggestions about how to bring it back into compliance.
    - umanwizard 8y ago
      You may be right, but you're missing the point. The hypothetical Canadian webmaster probably hasn't seen this comment. If they have, they don't know you, and have no reason to trust your judgment about EU law. They could research it themselves, but that takes time. Most likely they have literally no idea what GDPR says, and don't care. So they just block the tiny proportion of EU visitors. Which is a completely rational -- it solves their problem at no cost to them.
- aristophenes 8y ago
  How familiar are you with internet laws in Malaysia? Because that is probably about how relevant EU laws are for a publisher for a small city in Wisconsin, normally. Until they make the front page of hacker news, that is. Whoever maintains their site is probably very confused at the moment, unless they are a HN reader themselves.
- legitster 8y ago
  "It is so simple! They just need to not have any cookies, advertisements, trackers, A/B testing, email signups, or javascript!" In your view of the internet, how does a site like this exist?
  - Joe-Z 8y ago
    You do realize that static web-sites is what the internet was built on, right? It does work! And frankly, it‘s very well suited if all you want to do is display an article. Maybe i was woooshed here, not sure.
    - legitster 8y ago
      That argument seems to me akin to insisting the internet remain a platform for hobbyists and non-profit organizations. How does this site stay running and pay employees in this purer internet?
      - Joe-Z 8y ago
        By enabling people to subscribe to their content if they deem it worthy. Maybe have a free section where you serve static sites and for your more "in-depth" articles or whatever you make it subscriber-exclusive. I didn't want to argue we should revert to the internet of the 90's, but saying "how could you ever put anything on the web without cookies, tracking, data gathering?!" seems disingenuous when the internet was literally built without that. EDIT: Oh, I get it now. We just had different interpretations of what "exist" meant :) For me it was just "a site on the internet that can be reached by other people", for you it was more about the economic viablity. Fair point.
- mynameishere 8y ago
  it's not so difficult Neither is being raped. Very easy. How about your bureaucrats oppress you and otherwise fuck off? How about that?
TaylorAlexander 8y ago
The web we can all look forward to I am sure. Once we start to divide it, the division will continue. Our ability to read stories of real people will be limited by our own attempts to protect the people. I don’t know where this will lead, but it seems something is lost.
- OpenBSD-supreme 8y ago
  Tor, I2P, Freenet, GNUnet, RetroShare, etc, will be the internet of the future. It won't be as normie friendly as in no streams no games no instagram, and it will better because of it!
cft 8y ago
It is due to you who downvoted the parent post that I stopped contribution to NH after earning 5000 karma since 2011. The readers now don't argue, they just downvote if they don't like. Very different from YCombinator's early days.
- interfixus 8y ago
  You are completely right. And it's a vicious circle which, alas, I recognize myself getting sucked into time and time again: Certain opinions and certain mindsets are practiacally guranteed to garner silent downvotes en masse if posted here. So we learn self-censor and shut up. And then occasionally some commenter says something just too outrageous, and we fall into the selfsame trap, clicking the downbutton because it's free, whereas an actual comment will most likely score minus-points until it greys out. Flagging and downvoting probably ought to carry some karma-cost.
- dang 8y ago
  The downvoters of that post have been community members for years. I think it's more that this subject is off-topic and has come up so many times that it is now tedious (even though the underlying concern is unfortunately real).
  - cft 8y ago
    Bye. PS. You should raise the downvote karma threshold perhaps.

ams6110 8y ago

Wayback Machine copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20190310050003/https://madison.com/wsj/news/local/doug_moe/lana-about-svetlana-stalin-s-daughter-on-her-life-in/article_85ebc5d0-4978-11df-b181-001cc4c002e0.html https://web.archive.org/web/20190310050003/https://madison.c...

mirimir 8y ago
That doesn't work either. Paywall.
- y4mi 8y ago
  It worked for me. Though it wasn't very interesting tbh
- Krasnol 8y ago
  https://outline.com/BNU45U https://outline.com/BNU45U I wrapped that into outline. Last paragraph was missing though: "Wherever I go," she said, "here, or Switzerland, or India, or wherever. Australia. Some island. I always will be a political prisoner of my father's name."
FabHK 8y ago
Thanks. The original is blocked from GDPR countries.

jowdones 8y ago

I've been reading recently books on the former Soviet Union. "Beria, my Father" by Sergo Beria, "Krushcev" by William Taubman, "Conversations with Molotov" by Feliks Ciuev... Then tried "Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva" by Rosemary Sullivan but could't finish it. Compared with the 'bad guys' her biography is just dull.

wetpaws 8y ago
She had an autobiography. "20 letters to a friend" or something like this, I liked reading it a lot just because of how short and personal it was.
- master-lincoln 8y ago
  Apparently this was read out in some radio program and is now available for listening at https://archive.org/details/20LettersToaFriend https://archive.org/details/20LettersToaFriend edit: nevermind, seems to be an excerpt only. Recorded by BBC in 2017 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01dd3t9 https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01dd3t9

narrator 8y ago

Has anyone read Montefiore's Young Stalin and Court of the Red Tzar? Those books were an absolutely wild ride. Stalin really comes across as one of the more unusual characters of history. No one in his native Georgia liked him, so they were happy to dish dirt on his youth and give the full story free of obvious glorification. I think the most unusual characteristics of his story was that everyone tried to control him. First, the priests at the seminary by disciplining him, then his father, who wanted him to be a shoe cobbler, then the czars by putting him in prison and exiling him, then his fellow party members by trying to out politic him, and absolutely nothing worked on him. The guy did not budge an inch from his mission or ever got discouraged no matter what happened. The guy, like a serial killer, was completely emotionally unmoved and undeterred by any obstacle or opinion of anyone. They put him in prison, he started taking control of the prison. They sent him to Siberia he came back and dove right back into revolution after always seeming to father an illegitimate child while in exile. He remembered everyone who he ever met and punished them or rewarded them later accordingly. He seemingly did everything for the sole purpose of global Marxist revolution and he got rid of anyone, or group of people or thing that got in his way. He wasn't even vulnerable to flattery. He was just dead set and committed to his goal of global marxist revolution and brutal vengeance against all his enemies who tried to keep him from achieving that.

simula67 8y ago
> I think the most unusual characteristics of his story was that everyone tried to control him. First, the priests at the seminary by disciplining him Priests tried to control him ? He entered the school voluntarily. They did not lock him up. He left of his own accord and priests encouraged him to return. I don't think that was 'trying to control him' > He seemingly did everything for the sole purpose of global Marxist revolution Stalin's policy was 'Socialism in one country'. Apart from some modest actions like supporting the Spanish communists in the Spanish Civil War etc, he did not work that hard to advance the Marxist revolution abroad.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- 8y ago

fergie 8y ago

451: Unavailable due to legal reasons We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact hostmaster@madison.com or call 800-362-8333.

raverbashing 8y ago
Maybe someone should do an extension to rename those "errors" "Unavailable due to failure to understand the rules" or "Unavailable because abusing our visitors information is forbidden"
- Buge 8y ago
  It costs money to hire lawyers to understand the laws and ensure compliance. Maybe they ran the numbers and it wasn't worth it to hire the lawyers.
  - atoav 8y ago
    If you don’t collect too much data beeing GDPR compliant is not hard at all. If you don’t know what data you collect becausae of all that reliance on third part extensions or if you heavily collect data and don’t want to break the law, this gets a harder topic. Beeing an European it was quite interesting to see how little many web developers know about their dependencies and extensions. Most I know thought they can solve GDPR problems by install yet another wordpress addon they didn’t program.
    - TomMarius 8y ago
      You shouldn't bellitle them. A person doing a small business should not be required to understand GDPR nor technicalities of WP plugins. We should strive for simple to understand policies and technologies, just as the others are trying e.g. to make better furniture for us IT people. Making a website absolutely should not require computer science and law degrees.

aquarin 8y ago

EU citizens cannot access this site. So, use the Wayback Machine copy. Apparently, comments like this are buried down and repeated.

Evidlo 8y ago
Why is that? GDPR reasons?
- vages 8y ago
  Yup. Happens every now and then.
- dgl 8y ago
  Yes, “451: Unavailable due to legal reasons” and then some details about the GDPR (but not saying why). My guess is a local news outlet that’s big enough to know about the legal requirements but doesn’t actually see any value in doing the compliance work.

Koshkin 8y ago

His granddaughter: https://nypost.com/2016/03/17/stalin-granddaughter-is-an-all-american-badass/ https://nypost.com/2016/03/17/stalin-granddaughter-is-an-all...

microcolonel 8y ago
How very NY Post of them to whittle Stalin down to "man of steel" who vaguely led a "brutal regime". Yes, Mao Zedong: man of books, who notably disrupted the production of food. By any measure, she lives an ordinary life; why dig this up if they don't hold some secret admiration for the first contractor to the architect of the most devastating and heinous genocide in human history? I mean, maybe it's just a morbid fascination, but I find it kinda suspect.
- apostacy 8y ago
  I do think that history isn't nearly as hard on him as it should be. He is easily as bad as Pol Pot or Hitler. But my college roommate got the symbol of Stalin's state tattooed on him because he said it was cool and ironic. This disgusted our friend who's parent's escaped communist Poland, but nobody really cared. Of course, if he had got a swastika tattoo he would have essentially written himself out of society, however you are permitted to express admiration of communism without really getting in trouble.
  - opnitro 8y ago
    Yet this critique of ideological association never seems to come into play regarding the US's genocides in south America, or Britian's starvation of India.
    - Koshkin 8y ago
      Well, anti-communism had nothing to do with those. Just as it hadn’t with the genocide of some Germanic tribes comitted by Caesar, for example.
  - Koshkin 8y ago

jfk13 8y ago

And for a little background, even though Svetlana is a relatively minor character in it, don't miss The Death of Stalin - surely one of the best black comedies of recent years. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4686844/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4686844/