Buy European

Please keep signing the petition, to prevent games from being intentionally destroyed by publishers like what happened to The Crew.

You deserve to keep the games you bought with your hard-earned money.

Although social media are undeniably a very powerful tool in community building, we now feel the abuse of power and the tone of voice on X/Twitter, and the endless list of privacy concerns with Facebook far outweigh any benefits, and the ethical divide between those platforms and us has become too large.

Therefore, as of today, we will stop any active interaction on and through X/Twitter and Facebook.

This does not mean we fully turn our backs on social media. In the future, we might join other, more aligned, Social Media platforms such as Mastodon, Bluesky or Diaspora, but we have not yet decided on this.

Summary: The EuroPA consortium and the European Payments Initiative (EPI) have announced a major collaboration to connect mobile payment systems like MB Way (Portugal), Bizum (Spain), aBancomat Pay (Italy) and Wero across Europe. The aim is to accelerate the creation of a more integrated, efficient, and sovereign European payments market.

In practical terms, this means users will soon be able to make instant mobile transfers between countries — e.g., sending money from a Portuguese MB Way user to a Spanish Bizum user — seamlessly across borders.

The first phase will cover 15 European countries, representing 382+ million people (over 84% of the EU + Norway). The EPI is also behind Wero, a similar mobile payment scheme already supported by major banks like Deutsche Bank, ING, BNP Paribas, and BPCE.

The goal is to support all types of payments (person-to-person, online, and in-store) using existing infrastructures while enhancing interoperability.

A detailed study is underway and expected to conclude by the end of summer.

Why it matters: This could be a big step toward European digital sovereignty and a real alternative to US-dominated players like PayPal, Apple Pay, and Revolut.

This is in an Irish online news publication this evening.

Reminder for everyone to check your online presence and purchases

https://european-alternatives.eu/

https://www.goeuropean.org/

Image: Garden Gourmet Cheese & Ham-Style Crispy Twist package showing a vegetarian frozen food product in a clear plastic tray. The green and yellow branded packaging displays a golden-brown breaded cylindrical food item cut in half to reveal a cheese and ham-style filling inside. The package includes a pink "9/10 TASTERS LOVE IT" badge, "QUICK & DELICIOUS" label, and indicates the product is high in protein, a source of fiber, and made with wheat and 100% European soy protein. A Nutri-Score A rating and vegetarian symbol are visible, along with an expiration date of 29/07/2025.

I like that they state it on the package, makes me want to purchase their products more than alternatives with no origin specified for any ingredient.

"The eurozone economy is struggling to gain momentum. For six months now, growth has been minimal, with activity in the service sector stagnating and manufacturing output rising only moderately," Cyrus de la Rubia, chief economist at Hamburg Commercial Bank.

"In Germany, there are signs of a cautious improvement in the situation, but France continues to drag its feet".

The expansion in the 20-country currency area was centred on the manufacturing sector, where production increased for the fourth successive month, according to the survey.

I post this knowing the article naively hopeful but it's also food for thought. With the recent drama where Google stopped publishing device-specific AOSP code - thus making maintaining custom ROMs more difficult - what will more tech-knowledgeable people do if Android is enshittified further?

Will "phone ludditism" - switching to dumbphone with a simple OS like Mocor RTOS, S30+, ThreadX etc. be the answer for some of them? They're deGoogled out of the factory. I switched to a dumbphone as my main phone, but I still keep an Android smartphone at home for online banking. I also take the smartphone with me if I know I'll need a hotspot or a map. I use the smartphone like a PDA, or a terminal to the Android ecosystem.

It's also questionable whether "Europe is leading in the dumbphone sector". Sure we have HMD, Doro, Crosscall, Gigaset (sold to South Koreans), MaxKom or myPhone but there are so many other potentially bigger companies like TCL or Itel. One thing is for sure - in the dumbphone sector and considering how simple those devices are, Europe at least stands a fighting chance. Whether somebody will become a dumbphone martyr in order to exist in this Europe-friendly sector is another thing.

Example: https://eprel.ec.europa.eu/screen/product/smartphonestablets20231669/2322840

Avoid Paywall