The Internet has become popular enough that governments care about what happens on it. And it’s not just European countries, US states too (at least for age verification).

More specifically for your two points:

Encryption

It used to be that very little Internet traffic was encrypted, much less end-to-end encrypted. After 2013 (Snowden revelations), this changed, e.g. messengers started to E2EE, many more websites than previously started to use HTTPS. So all we are seeing now is the reaction to those positive changes…

Age verification

This has to do with mobile devices more than anything else. I think a lot of parents now just hand their children smartphones or tablets and may then be surprised that their children can then access things they don’t want their children to access. This was less of a thing in the desktop era because it was easier to see what children were doing online if it was happening on a huge computer in the living room…

Now personally I don’t think anyone (including young people) should ever be prohibited from watching or reading anything they actively want to see. For preventing young people from accidentally accessing porn, an “are you over 18” banner ought to be enough… I don’t think people who want to prevent that kind of access want anything legitimate. But you asked about why it’s happening now and not at another time and I think this is the answer.

Sidenote: I remember reading that when television was newly introduced in East Germany, it was still able to be somewhat critical of the regime; after some years, this stopped because a lot more citizens were able to watch it. The equivalent of that is currently happening to the Internet.

It doesn’t just need to pass the Council, but also the European Parliament, so there are still plenty of stages where it could fail.

Money isn’t green everywhere in the world. Where I live, 100 euro bills are green, but all other bills are completely different colors.

Me neither but that is because I live in a jurisdiction not mentioned in the article.

Roughly it’s probably: eastern Europe is poor because of its communist past, Portugal because of its remoteness and too hot climate?

Just wildly guessing, I don’t have a scientific explanation.

Why would it mean that? Not following your logic.

Was erwartest du von einer Welt, in der “Internetsucht” (ursprünglich ein Satirebegriff) immer wieder unironisch verwendet wird …

MS already doesn’t have a monopoly in any meaningful sense anymore.

• https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-202507 - in early 2009, almost 95% of web usage was from Windows, by now it is at around 28%, no longer even the most popular OS, which is now Android around 42%
• https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-202507 - even looking only at the desktop and ignoring the shift to mobile devices, Windows fell from ~95% to ~72% during the same time period, mostly losing to macOS but more recently also Linux

Windows isn’t the main way Microsoft makes money anymore anyway…

interesting question, https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/ lists “only” 14 currently, not sure which ones are meant in the article :/

On the other link aggregation website, there is a subreddit “PORTUGALCYKABLYAT” full of maps where Portugal has more statistical similarities to Eastern European countries than ones geographically closer to it. I can’t be bothered to check if we have a federated version of that yet.

Begrapscht ein Deutscher im Vollsuff beim Apres-Ski in Österreich, dann zählt das in die PKS in Deutschland nicht rein.

nein, das ist ja keine Kriminalität, die in Deutschland passiert ist, warum sollte sie also in einer deutschen Kriminalstatistik aufscheinen? Es ist allerdings Ausländerkriminalität in Österreich und könnte als solche hier auch statistisch erfasst werden. Alles andere hielte ich nicht für sinnvoll.

That is not excessively unusual; legal documents contain all kinds of vulgar things that people say to each other (maybe before or after a crime) all the time.

My favorite from my country is (translating approximately, original is in heavy dialect): “The statement ‘piss off, ya dogs, so I don’t hafta see ya anymore, and I’m shittin’ into your wage bags’ has the objective declaratory value of an immediate termination of employment.”

Sehe ich ähnlich. Militärdienst sollte eine Karriere sein, gerne sogar eine hochgradig attraktive, aber darin zu dienen, sollte keine Pflicht sein, nicht für irgendjemanden.

Gegen Ende hatte ich Android-Smartphones und einige Mitschüler hatten auch solche oder iPhones.

Mittlere 2000er bis frühe 2010er.

Das, was du beschreibst, halte ich eher für Mobbing in der Schule, für das die Technologie nur als Hilfsmittel dient. In positiven Onlinecommunities aktiv zu sein, kann eine Möglichkeit sein, Mobbing zu entkommen oder es zumindest besser zu ertragen.

Yes, I have been having trouble too over the last few days. Often I get “gateway timeout” errors and then it doesn’t load at all. Right now it is (obviously) working though.

Ich denke, gerade der Talking Point “Mobbing” ist vor allem deshalb Unfug, weil nach meiner Erfahrung IRL normalerweise deutlich mehr und auf ernstere Weise gemobbt wird als im Internet; für mich als Jugendlichen war das Internet jedenfalls eher eine Möglichkeit, Mobbing zu entkommen

I find this funny because I’ve been aware of, and even using, Linux for a lot longer than I have been using Lemmy (or Lemmy or even ActivityPub has even existed). Are many people really becoming more aware of Linux because they are moving from Reddit to Lemmy and then noticing people talking about Linux here?

mi kushas en lito en hotelo, bedaurinde mi akiris malvarmumon dum vojagho, do ne fartas tre bone, kvankam ghi jam plibonighas…

“… kaj skribas tiun chi tekston”, kaj mi supozas, ke vi fartas “bone”, ne “bene” (kvankam ja estas radiko BEN/)