Sure haven't expected to see Pilot Brothers there, never realized that those even had an international release outside of the former Soviet countries in the first place.
One reason why I personally never bothered is the licensing of some of its important parts, which is a choice of either GPL or commercial. Which is fair, but too bothersome for some use-cases (e.g. mobile apps which are inherently GPL-unfriendly). Electron and the likes are typically MIT/BSD/etc licensed.
Depends on the country. Many countries don't have fair use laws; thus, fan fiction is technically illegal there. In practice though you're not likely to be sued unless you're making a significant amount of money or damaging the brand value somehow.
In my experience, Galaxy works no better than a web app, unfortunately. Similarly laggy and lacks the snappiness you'd normally associate with a native app.
The latest population census in Russia was executed so horribly that demographics experts still rely on the 2010 and earlier ones to figure out the approximate population number (the difference between estimations is in ~10 million range). Of course the whole war, relocation, and undocumented immigration things aren't making things any easier.
Much easier to calculate population numbers in countries with a population register, but those are usually smaller countries like those in the Nordics. I don't think censuses are even held around here...?
Those rely on a strong centralized government that can somehow penalize people for not keeping records up to date. Not necessarily by direct checks, but maybe via inconveniences caused by inaccuracies. They are probably using other data (aggregate statistics from health system, tax records, social services) to conduct cross checks.
A few years back in Austria there was a small scandal as a newly introduced government app to notify about changing residence was used by a member of parliament to declare they moved into the Parliament.
>In the Swedish coastal city of Helsingborg, for example, a one-year project is testing how various public services would function in the scenario of a digital blackout
Russia has been doing these blackout exercises for many years now all across the country, forcing major services to make serious changes to their infrastructure. I assume similar things happen regularly in Iran and China. Europe is incredibly late to the game, and doing random experiments in small towns is not even nearly enough. Weaning off government services is also not enough, physical networks have to be prepared for it, commercial services have to follow, and the general populace has to be incentivized to use them. Otherwise, the damage from a blackout will still be unsustainable. It doesn't sound democratic, but this should be treated as a matter of national security. That is, if self-reliance is an actual goal - waiting for things to possibly blow over is still an option, but this is one of those matters where I believe half-measures are worse than both of the extremes.
The main vulnerability of the Western world isn't technical, it's that we voluntarily surrendered our communication and social fabrics to advertising-driven businesses that will happily host and promote anything as long as it generates engagement. This makes it trivial for foreign agents to sway public opinion where as back in the day influencing media required actual capital and connections.
Unfortunately, a lot of our own people (and especially politicians) make money out of this situation so there's very little incentive to change this. Just look at the reaction every time regulations designed to curtail Big Tech ad-driven monopolies (EU DMA, GDPR, etc) are discussed. Our greed is what makes us vulnerable.
Who is the "we" that you think surrendered control here? Freedom of the press necessitates that anyone can publish freely even if what they publish is foreign propaganda.
I wasn't talking about press, I was talking about how ad-driven social media became effectively the only communication tool and we still refuse to enact/enforce effective regulation to curb its hegemony.
It became the primary communication tool because that is what people chose to use when presented with the alternatives. If you want to force people to use different channels then that is a violation of freedom of the press.
Again I am not talking about press. I am talking about communication tools.
Yes the free market has decided that these tools are the "best" option as long as the negative externalities (such as exposure to malicious actors - foreign or otherwise) are not being priced in. We need adequate regulation to price in such externalities.
For that matter, press and conventional media is subject to many regulations that don't apply to social media. Conventional media wouldn't get away with even a sliver of what social media is allowed to get away with time and time again.
I am still not sure why you keep going on about press. I did not refer to press in my comment and I make no opinion on it here.
I am referring to the fact that back in the day communication used to be mediated by domestic, neutral carriers who got paid to carry communication neutrally regardless of source or content.
Nowadays, communication is primarily mediated by a handful of foreign companies that prioritize advertising revenue at all costs and will choose which media to carry and promote based on expected ad revenue. They are effectively acting as pseudo-press without the checks & balances and oversight that actual press is subject to.
> Please give an example of something social media gets away with that any other media would be punished for.
When’s the last time you saw an obvious scam advertised in a conventional print newspaper or magazine? Now check Facebook or YouTube ads. If such an ad made it through any reputable magazine heads will be rolling and they’d expose themselves to lawsuits, but social media keeps getting a pass.
Now, let’s say you’re a foreign threat actor and want to sway public opinion. You can’t just get in touch with the NYT/etc and ask them nicely. You’d need to buy and cultivate such influence over time and do so covertly because their people would get in trouble if there’s an obvious paper/money trail.
With Facebook? Create a page, make your propaganda video “engaging”, boost it with bot farms for the initial push and then Facebook will happily keep hosting and promoting your propaganda as long as its advertising revenue outweighs the costs of hosting it. That’s orders of magnitude cheaper than buying influence with traditional media.
You have to be joking. Print magazines have always been plastered with shitty scam ads for MLM pyramid schemes, bullshit weight loss treatments, psychic readings, and every other get rich quick scheme and ripoff known to man. And, of course, there were no adblockers. Were you not alive before the internet? You think they weren't full of foreign propaganda too? I'd like to introduce you to my friend AIPAC...
According to Reporters without Frontiers, the US ranks 57th out of 180 countries on press freedom. It's really not the model we should all be aspiring to.
These things are not an inevitable consequence of freedom of the press. Commercially-influenced legislation like the Communications Decency Act, which largely absolves platforms for the content of the material they publish, have pushed us in this direction. One could certainly imagine legislation which puts society's interests first to improve the situation.
The real problem is the almost total capture of the political process by money, which weaponizes the legislative branch against common citizens in the interests of corporate owners.
Being subject to the topic promotion and suppression technologies [1] and bizarre political whims of billionaire media owners is an unusual definition of "freedom."
All media is subject to the whims of its owners. That's freedom of the press. The only other option is that the government tells the owners what they can and can't publish.
Another option is that the government limits the power individuals can have. How many people control, say, 80% of the media? Do you need more than one hand to count them?
How do you define "control" here? Social media, which everyone here is complaining about, is by far the most open and democratic form of mass media that has ever existed.
I’d argue that social media stopped being democratic as it introduced algorithmic content selection. But today perhaps a bigger problem is bot farms shaping public opinion.
Bots don't count as people. They're not represented demographically. They also don't have voting rights. Yet they're spreading propaganda to influence how people vote. So one could argue social media is rather anti democratoc.
Social media, which everyone here is complaining about, is by far the most open and democratic form of mass media that has ever existed.
It would be if it were actually social - if the messages people saw were written by authors those people were interested in because of some kind of social relationship. But of course that's not really the case.
One problem here IMHO is that the meaning of terms like "press" and "media" has shifted significantly with modern Internet trends. Freedom of the press used to be an extension of freedom of speech. The principle was essentially the same but it acknowledged that some speech is organised and published to a wider audience. Neither has ever enjoyed absolute protection in law anywhere that I'm aware of because obviously they can come into conflict with other rights and freedoms we also think are important. But they have been traditionally regarded as the norm in Western society - something to be protected and not to be interfered with lightly.
But with freedom must come responsibility. The traditional press has always had the tabloids and the broadsheets or some similar distinction between highbrow and lowbrow content. But for the most part even the tabloids respected certain standards. What you published might be your spin but you honestly believed the facts in your piece were essentially true. If you made a mistake then you also published a retraction. If someone said they were speaking off the record then you didn't reveal the identity of your source. You didn't disclose things that were prohibited by a court order to protect someone involved in a trial from prejudice or from the trial itself collapsing. Sometimes the press crossed a line and sometimes it paid a very heavy price for it but mostly these "rules" were followed.
In the modern world of social media there are individuals with much larger audiences than any newspaper still in print but who don't necessarily respect those traditional standards at all and who can cause serious harm as a direct result. I don't see why there is any ethical or legal argument for giving them the same latitude that has been given to traditional media if they aren't keeping up their side of the traditional bargain in return. We have long had laws in areas like defamation and national security that do limit the freedom to say unfair or harmful things. Maybe it's time we applied the same standards to wilful misinformation where someone with a large audience makes claims that are clearly and objectively false that then lead to serious harm.
"All over the world, wherever there are capitalists, freedom of the press means freedom to buy up newspapers, to buy writers, to bribe, buy and fake "public opinion" for the benefit of the bourgeoisie." - Vladimir Lenin
Yes, Vladimir Lenin is likely one of the most appropriate people to quote on the question of freedom. Maybe only his successor Joseph Stalin is better in that regard.
You probably want to start testing with a small blast-radius though and expand the radius after fixing the obvious things. Doing country or EU wide testing would likely be quite noisy, because there will be plenty of issues of various sizes and it will be disruptive while not providing as much more information as the disruption would cost. Fixing smaller things first and then expanding to larger scale testing to catch the remaining or larger scale issues seems like the better approach to me, but that depends possibly on how time critical being prepared for such events is.
If the Us imposes sanctions such as "no more login to any Google/Apple/Microsoft/... accounts from EU citizens until they give Greenland".
Many European companies would stop to a halt as they can't access any documents they have "on the cloud" or maybe can't even access their own phone or computer.
I think this particular scenario is far fetched as that would be economic suicide for the US, an empire-ending decision. And while not everyone has backups, many/most of the important companies do so they would eventually recover.
> Many European companies would stop to a halt as they can't access any documents they have "on the cloud" or maybe can't even access their own phone or computer.
I hate that "Nobody got fired for choosing IBM" is a thing and that the people suggesting that we have good enough FOSS options when things were being planned out were probably given a dismissive look by the business people who were promised the sky by MS salesmen.
At least that's how I imagine it probably looked, given my own past experience of suggesting PostgreSQL and in the end the project going with Oracle (it's okay when it works, but for those particular projects PostgreSQL would have worked better, given the issues I've seen in the following years). It's the same non-utilitarian / cargo-cult thinking that leads to other solutions like SQLite not being picked when the workload would actually better be suited for it than a "serious" RDBMS with a network in the middle.
Apply the same to server OSes (Windows vs Linux distros and even DEB based distros vs RPM RHEL-compatibles), MS Office vs LibreOffice when you don't even need advanced features and stuff like Slack/Teams vs self-hosting Mattermost or Zulip or whatever. It's not even jumping on untested software, but fairly boring and okay packages (with their limitations known that are objectively often NOT dealbreakers) and not making yourself vendor-locked (hostage).
I guess I could also make the more realpolitik take - use MS, use Oracle, use whatever is the path of least resistance BUT ONLY if you're not making yourself 100% reliant on it. If Microsoft or Google decides they hate you tomorrow, you should still have a business continuity plan. If systems have standby nodes, why not have a basic alternative standby system, or the ability to stand up a Nextcloud instance when needed for example (or the knowledge and training on how to do that)? If people had govt. services before computers being widespread and you can have people processing a bunch of paper forms, then surely if push comes to shove it'd be possible to standup a basic replacement for whatever gets borked while ignoring all of the accidental complexity (even if it'd mean e-mailing PDFs for a while). Unless someone builds their national tax system or ID system on a foreign cloud, then they are absolutely fucked.
I don't think it's easy to replace ENTRA feature-wise with European provider.
Or github if you're using a bit more than self-hosted gitlab can provide.
It's not always about the location, it's usually about features (how it integrates into other hardware/software) rarely prices.
For example, can you suggest firewalls for offices that aren't either American or Israeli? We'd need something to replace Palo Alto, Bluecoat, Fortigate and Juniper. Also it'd be good to replace Cisco VPNs to be honest.
But it kind of must be feature parity, because (European) regulators hold our balls over hot coals.
> Agricultural surpluses were skimmed by the church and the feudal lords
It's honestly amazing how this was the norm for so much of our history, given how much it demotivates the villages from growing more produce, which in turn means the lords can't get any more of it either (unless they wage constant wars against their peers, which they naturally did).
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