There’s a study doing the rounds this week claiming that six out of ten Europeans support Chat Control 2.0 because they believe it will improve online safety. My first reaction, honestly, was a hollow laugh into my batch brew. Six out of ten. Right.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and call everyone who supports this proposal an idiot — that’s lazy thinking and it doesn’t help anyone. But I do think a lot of those six out of ten would have a very different opinion if the survey question wasn’t framed as something like “do you want children to be safe online?” Because of course you do. Everyone does. That’s not even a real question.

An Italian court just ruled that Netflix unlawfully increased its prices, and consumers could be looking at refunds of up to 500 euros. Netflix, predictably, said they’ll appeal. And somewhere in a boardroom, I imagine a very expensive suit nodded slowly and said “of course we will.”

The online discussion this sparked has been fascinating — and honestly, a bit cathartic. Because a lot of us have been quietly stewing about this for years.

There’s a particular kind of frustration that builds up slowly when you’re dealing with the modern web. You need to do something simple — resize a photo, strip some metadata, blur a face — and suddenly you’re being asked to sign up for a free trial, verify your email, and “unlock premium features” just to do what should take thirty seconds. It’s exhausting. And it’s gotten worse, not better.

So when I stumbled across a project this week — essentially Stirling-PDF but built for images — I found myself genuinely interested. The pitch is clean: one Docker container, browser-based, everything runs locally, your files never leave your machine. Thirty-plus tools covering the usual suspects like resize, crop, rotate, compress, and convert, but also some more interesting stuff like background removal, face and licence plate blurring, OCR, and object erasing. The developer is building it openly, asking for feedback, and has explicitly said they’re not interested in making it another “AI-wrapped gimmick or subscription trap.”