What’s the situation for tech workers from Europe who want to go to the US solely for touristic purposes? There have been plenty of horror stories about people who were accused of plotting to work in the US from their laptop on false pretence of being on vacation.
> There have been plenty of horror stories about people who were accused of plotting to work in the US from their laptop on false pretence of being on vacation.
EN> They base their accusation on the fact that she also gives online language courses to Americans and wants to meet some of her students for coffee in New York.
To me, that is good police work. I see it quite a lot when I am travelling: People (visibly foreign) giving language lessons by video chat or phone call. Obviously, they don't have a work visa to do it, nor will they be paying local taxes on those wages. I have even asked people about it. Each time, they casually reply: "Yeah, I always work a little when I travel to make more money." The shock never wears off for me -- that people can casually break the law in a foreign country when it is convenient for them. It would have been better for that (Swiss?) person to apply for a regular tourist visa at the US embassy in Switzerland, make clear her job and her intention not to work while on holiday. She made too many assumptions when using the ESTA. There are so many stories online about people writing dumb things on social media then experiencing "friction" at the US border. The ESTA application even specifically warns about it. Again, my sympathy is low.
IMO the implementation is crucial. If everything is locally on the device and I can confirm digitally that I'm older than 18 BUT NOTHING ELSE is leaked, like the German eID supports (I think).
Because that's debating the mechanics of it rather than the need or the ethics. Nobody gives a shit about the mechanics because if there's a debate about the mechanics that means the discussions about the need and the ethics have already happened. Yet those discussions are in fact still going with few in favour of the ethics or need for these systems. The mechanics are the final step after everything else has been settled.
A trusted source once told me that Mac OS 10 system libraries contain a bunch of shims so that Adobe apps may continue to misuse them the way they did in Mac OS 9. Now that they have a tight grip over the app ecosystem, they don’t even bother to help a major OSS framework that powers thousands of apps make the transition.
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