We already had this situation back during the Cold War, where a lot of high-quality science was being published only in Russian-language journals of the Soviet Union. Western academics started up a number of journals that printed only English versions of articles from top-tier Soviet journals, translated by those few Western scholars who could read Russian. These journals were phenomenally successful and their content widely cited. (Many of these journals are still around today, though now it's almost always the original Russian authors who provide translations of their own articles. Russian universities often require doctoral candidates to publish in Russian journals, so the translation journals are a way of bringing their work to a somewhat wider audience.)

No, it won't, because the e-mail clients most commonly used by businesses (whatever Outlook variant is bundled with Office 365 or Microsoft 365 or whatever they're calling it these days) is incapable of top-posting. That is, there is no way of turning of the default bottom-posting behaviour; the best you can do is to copy and paste the original message into a text editor, manually trim it and add quote characters, and then copy and paste that back into the e-mail client. Nobody is going to do that. Unfortunately, many companies mandate the use of Outlook, to the point of configuring their servers (or whatever cloud service Microsoft sells) to not expose the standard IMAP or SMTP protocols for use by alternative clients.

So when will the millions of videos on Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok etc. be deleted, where people appear that have not consented?

Perhaps they will be. The way laws are enforced generally requires corrective action to be taken against violators one at a time, and often only at the instigation of an aggrieved party. The fact that the courts aren't able to simultaneously take action against all the other sites you mention isn't necessarily an argument against the law in question. If you agree with the law in principle, and are a resident of the Netherlands whose likeness appears in a Facebook video without your consent, then feel free to get in touch with the Dutch authorities and maybe they'll go after Facebook next.

I can think of a use case: someone has a web page open on their phone, and someone else who is with them wants to visit the same website on their own phone. Taking a picture of the QR code may be faster and less error-prone than dictating the URL, or sending the URL via e-mail or instant message.

What makes you think that CoPilot is trained so indiscriminately? The need to curate, filter, and reduce bias in training data is well known in other applications of machine learning, such as natural language processing. (Researchers figured this out as soon as they saw people prompting their language models to emit hate speech and other forms of abuse.) I rather suspect that Microsoft is aware of this issue and has taken steps to weed out, or at least assign a lower weighting to, undesirable training data. As a first step, they could probably exclude repositories that see very little community activity (in terms of cloning, forking, commits, pull requests, etc.). For many languages they could probably automatically check out and try to compile the code, or run it through a static analysis tool. Projects that don't compile, or that generate too many warnings, might also be excluded from the training set.

There's the Purism Librem 5, a Linux-based privacy-focused smartphone. It's not part of the Apple or Android ecosystems so don't expect it to run the usual proprietary apps. But it is probably worth looking into if keeping data out of the manufacturer's hands is important to you.

Airbnb has been testing the tech in Australia since October 2021 and says it's seen a 35% drop in unauthorized parties

And what's the corresponding figure for the drop in legitimate bookings because the system misidentified perfectly innocent bookings as party bookings?

I meant that the situation for tech workers in Europe and America isn't any better than it is in Russia vis-a-vis ownership of their work.

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that in Russia you get to retain ownership of work for hire. If that's what you're after, then there's probably nowhere on earth you'll be satisfied.

Well, anything you produce on the employer's dime is the employer's. That's been pretty much true since, well, forever.

It's been true as long as we've had employment, but that hasn't been the dominant mode of production "forever".

I mean,imagine how crazy the world would be if your car was owned by the people that made it

I'm not talking about who owns a product, but rather who benefits from the labour involved in its production. (But to the extent that ownership is relevant, you ought to know that auto workers and tech workers produce very different kinds of products. One is a physical good which is actually sold to a customer who owns and uses it as he or she sees fit. Software is an intangible work which is licensed and not sold; ownership remains with the copyright holder, and there are all sorts of legal and contractual restrictions on use.) Anyway, since I am not arguing for a world in which the producers of cars (or even software) retain ownership of it, there's no need for me to rebut further.

At the same time, you're free to do whatever the hell you want. If you wrote on your own time something your employer finds useful but refuses to pay you for it, you're free to not continue working on it on your own time.

Not always, but generally yes. But then again, the same is true in Russia. I don't think independent software developers are what the OP had in mind when they said "tech workers".

If you think things are terrible in Europe and North America, maybe you want to talk to the conscripted soldiers fighting there, where they were basically forced from doing what they were doing to fighting with poor equipment and basically no supplies.

Yes, the conscripted soldiers fighting in Ukraine (including those who may have previously been tech workers) are much worse off than the tech workers in Europe and North America. That doesn't mean that we should refrain from calling out systematic economic inequality and exploitation elsewhere and from supporting efforts to do away with it. This is something I've been doing for the past 25 years, and I'm not about to stop just because the authoritarian du jour decided to invade his neighbour.

I had many colleagues who were from Russia. I asked several about whether they would consider returning to Russia and using their talents to improve things in Russia. They basically all said the same thing, "if you create anything of value in Russia, it will be stolen from you and you will have nothing. It's better in Europe or America."

Last I checked, tech workers in Europe and America sign away the rights to anything of value they produce to their employers. They may be better paid than their Russian counterparts, but both qualitatively and quantitatively speaking, they don't own and benefit from their work in the same way that their employers do.

Russia doesn't have those same powerful, long-standing institutions, even the church was weakened by repression during the USSR.

Given the Russian Orthodox Church's enthusiastic support for the authoritarian regimes that preceded and followed the Soviet Union, I'm not altogether sure that the repression was a bad thing. The Church has no interest in improving the political or economic condition of the Russian people; it cares only about maintaining its own power and authority.

Usenet never really went away; though it's not as active as it once was, the number of people using it as a discussion forum (as opposed to a file-sharing service) has been fairly stable over the past few years, and many groups are still going strong. The management board for the Big-8 hierarchy, which administers the network's oldest newsgroups, had been dormant for several years, but in 2020 a new team (including me) was appointed and has been very active in restoring and modernizing the shared infrastructure (documentation, moderation software, etc.) and in engaging in public outreach efforts to revitalize Usenet. You might have read about this all here on Slashdot except that the story we submitted, based on our press release never made it out of the firehose.

...as long as this textbook is used.