He said, addressing Russian leaders: “Don’t you have enough land? Eleven time zones and still not enough? Take care of better governing what is within your borders according to international law.”
I understand the sentiment, but I don’t like the pointless polemic. I mean, he’s the foreign minister, he very well knows that this stopped being a landgrab the moment the war wasn’t over within a week…
I’d say it’s more like your hairdresser tracking how long you are in their store and what haircut you get- but you do you!
I’m not married to the analogy, just totally flabbergasted that “Using your own software on your own computer when and how you see fit without being watched” appears to be a slightly controversial aspiration for no (to me) apparent reason. Evidently I’m missing something, not explaining myself very clearly or both.
I run all my games in Linux and everything but Steam goes via Lutris which I configured to, by default, launch them inside a Firejail sandbox with no network access (plus a bunch of other security related limitations) something which I can override for specific games if needed.
That sounds like a neat setup! And no messing around with firewall rules either. I’ll have to look into it.
That’s the thing, though. I respect the analogy, but the equivalent here would be if the game was also checking your drive for other games, for financial apps, scanning your browser’s cookies to see which sites you visit, etc.
If, while playing a singleplayer game, they’re recording what actions you take within that singleplayer game, it’s understandable some people wouldn’t even want that - but I also don’t see that as nearly so invasive as other data travesties. Worse, highlighting it here feels like a “cry wolf” situation where you’d desensitize people to the most harmful privacy breaches.
Again, I don’t doubt that you do not see it as an incredibly invasive thing. I’m lamenting that you (and many) don’t.
You’re doing something on your computer. Locally. In your own time. With a thing that is - ostensibly - yours. Why is it even remotely acceptable that some corporate entity is watching you over your shoulder while you do it? I’m running out of words to express how nuts this seems to me.
I’m sorry, but that’s a terrible analogy. In the gaming scenario, Ubisoft is collecting the data on their own product usage
Well, in the corporate software-as-a-service insane troll logic hellscape in which we live that could indeed make sense. Mind you, that’s not meant to be a rant against you but against the fact that this train of thought has indeed been completely normalized.
In the fantasy world of the past into which I’d like to go back to live happily it is precisely not Ubisoft’s product. It’s mine. I bought it - none of what I do with it is any of Ubisoft’s business. The business transaction has been concluded. If they want to know what I do with my game then they can ask me nicely about it. I’ll certainly not allow them to install a proverbial camera over the executable.
It’s not a good analogy, I agree, but I’m too angry to come up with a better one right now.
Nah a lot of people now think screen time is bad without evidence. Never would be allowed to get on a computer at 3-4.
You had your own computer before you could read…?
Based on the article text, it’s only citing things like how long you play. I thought most games collected telemetry like this?
A commonplace travesty is still a travesty and metadata is still data. If my hairdresser asked me “Hey, in addition to me cutting your hair and you giving me money I’d also like you to constantly keep me updated on your sleep schedule, your vacation plans, marital status changes and the myriad of other things that can be directly gleaned from aggregate timeline data - all the other hairdressers have started doing it as well!”, I’d likely look at them incredulously for a few seconds while silently imagining stabbing them with their own scissors.
Calling it “telemetry” has somehow normalized it over the past decades, I suppose? I just don’t understand how anyone could ever accept this as normal.
jesus I feel old, and I am only in my 30s. I remember not having apt. How young are linux users nowadays?
Well… how old were you when you got your first computer? That young.
In the age of distributed databases and the dark web and the block chain and federation surely we can figure out a way to archive media that doesn’t put people or organisations at risk of litigation
That limits and gatekeeps access to an enormous degree. The IA wants to be useful to everyone, not just the tiny fraction of the world population savvy enough to use the internet for more than opening a browser and a chat client.
don’t institutionalise the perpetration of rights violations?
Counterpoint: The perpetration of this kind of rights violation precisely needs to be normalized to the point of meaninglessness. Intellectual property can either go away top-down (which considering the way things went over the past century is never going to happen) or it can go away bottom up - it has to be flaunted and disregarded by everybody via continued large-scale disobedience.
Or, of course, it could just never go away.
I don’t know but that’s what the post you were replying to stated and you just ignored it.
I do tend to ignore posts that come without references or explanations, that’s true.
But that’s beside the point I was raising - I’ll rephrase: I find it hard to believe that there is anything two Middle European kids vacationing in Hawaii could ever do to even remotely approach any sane definition of ‘working without a permit’ to warrant immediate deportation. Whether they did or didn’t actually intend to defraud the Federal Government over 20$ in beach bar tip money taxes doesn’t really factor into that argument, does it?
It seems like themselves admitted that they intended to work?
In what capacity?
What’s that got to do with anything? What does account age have to do with anything or are you just unnecessarily flexing to make yourself feel special?
That’s like some 30 year old going up to a 13 year old and flexing because of where they are in life. It’s just…pointless.
Look at it this way: You just entered a clubhouse. Nobody there knows you. You have not yet put any time or work into maintaining the club or into establishing your credentials and social status among the members. After entering, you immediately make a controversial (and arguably badly-researched) statement.
Would you not expect to be much less likely to get away with a stunt like this than a long-established club member?
It seems like a bit of a stretch to frame two teenagers wishing to go island-hopping as part of their post-graduation world trip as “intending to work” 😜
Deportation appears to be about as appropriate here as sending the SWAT team after someone who dropped a candy wrapper.
I still don’t see the big deal, takes seconds to drag them into the bin and move on.
When you recall that, as a person who knows what a browser is, you’ll likely be in the global minority, you’ll realize it’s a tremendous deal.
And don’t even pretend that running an Android phone without a GooglePlay store is easy :P
There are far bigger problems that they should be going after - irreplaceable batteries, locked bootloader, lack of root access on a device you own would be three of the biggest ones.
You will find that all those issues, in the end, come down to the same anti-trust problem - single companies being allowed too much control and too much vertical integration. Regulating small issues away piecemeal is pointless when the question “Why should a single entity even be allowed to, at the same time, control OS development, browser development, package management gatekeeping and thousands of other different things?” looms in the background.
If users are too stupid/lazy to change defaults that’s on them.
Nothing of what’s written about in the article is “on the user”.
Japan’s antitrust watchdog has ordered Google to stop pressuring smartphone makers to promote its apps like Google Search and Chrome. (…) The recent order issued on Tuesday follows an investigation that began in October 2023. The JFTC found that Google required at least six Android phone makers to preinstall its search engine and Chrome browser, and show them on the home screen. These conditions were tied to licensing the Google Play Store, which is essential for selling Android phones in Japan. According to Nikkei Asia, around 80% of Android phones sold in Japan were affected.
Japan also said Google offered ad revenue-sharing deals to some manufacturers and telecom operators. In return, these companies agreed not to preinstall rival apps or search services. This, the watchdog said, reduced competition and limited user choice.
Global anti-trust efforts are simply not very strong and never have been. They make for boring political platforms and are constantly under attack by corporate actors.
Ideally no business should ever be allowed to grow to the point of being able to exert political influence at all let alone rival the power of small nations, but here we are.
Any rational enterprise will employ all and any anti-competitive practices that it can come up with - if it can get away with them. And the more influence the business exerts, the more it can get away with.
No country wants to become Libanon 2.0.
What does that mean?
I mean I 100% agree. I’m not justifying them in their perceived grievance, rather, I’m offering a mechanism in “how things come to pass”. My assessment is that if you can make the grievances minor/ absurd, you remove any leverage for the conman.
Sure! But, again, why let conmen walk around in the meantime? That seems like an entirely unnecessary and easy-to-tackle problem.
The investment in a social democracy/ social safety it ultimately what is safeguarding Europe, because it precludes the motivations/ grievances which create surface area for misinformation to operate on. Its not that it isn’t possible, it just has a much more difficult time taking hold.
The UK is a great example of this, where they seem religiously committed to austerity as the approach for addressing most issues; this gave rise to grievance politics because, well, austerity does hurt people; grievance politics gives misinformation something to operate on (its the continents fault); brexxit happens; life gets worse; misinformation gains an even further foothold because now its premise has been validated, and there is even more grievance to operate on.
Grievance is the scar tissue which misinformation operates upon. Misinformation is the bacteria which spread and cause death, but without the wound of grievance, there is nothing to do. Creates strong mechanisms for grievances to be addressed (engaged democratic processes; responsive governance).
Whatever actual or perceived grievances a person may have (even though merely being born in Europe already constitutes winning the global class lottery) - that only ever causes vulnurability. That person then turning to actively undermining democratic systems and the international community is something that only happens if some con artist uses that vulnurability to convince the person that it constitutes a solution to their problems.
Universal wealth and happiness are nice, but the immediate, separate and and more solveable issue is not continuing to give microphones and political offices to con artists. Letting folk get scammed out of their vote is just as detrimental to a healthy society as letting folk get scammed out of their life savings - if not more.
A hot potatoe that an autocratic regime living on borrowed time has to keep juggling out of self-preservation.
You’re styling it as “blow to pride”, but I’m quite certain that if that catastrophic drain on Russian resources and lives just… ended tomorrow without any tangible strategic gains (like a sustained destabilization of NATO) then people would literally start dying. Not the poor expendable footsoldiers, but people in charge. Can’t have that, so gotta keep expending that infantry.