I'm not sure where the study is, but the BBC article links to what seems to be its publicity website . It's not presented very objectively, which isn't to say there's not something to the findings but it'd be helpful to have a presentation enshrouded in less marketing.

For me, one of the big things to take from this is that outdated colonialism, in ways that impose on and take advantage of its global territories, is still alive and well with France. Maybe I'm biased because I grew up in New Zealand in the 1980s when French agents committed a terrorist attack in response to anti-nuclear protests, then France doubled down on threatening to embargo NZ's exports to all of Europe after NZ arrested two French agents and tried to hold them to account.

I think this gets to the real issue, though. Individual fears about being advertised at are really only a minescule issue compared with the modern ability for certain corporations to provably influence whole populations in ways that aren't always obvious, because advertising can be so direct and personally targeted rather than where everyone can see and comment on it, and which were simply not possible until maybe they past decade. We're now all stuck living in this new world whether we choose to avoid the likes of Google or not.

Google doesn't care a jot if an individual resists its collection and collation of data. It knows that 99% of people won't, because most of us have more direct problems and concerns we're busy dealing with. Its business model relies on talking revenue in exchange for manipulating the remaining 99%. Presently it's being sold to whoever wants to pay for it, whether it's for commercial reasons or political reasons or some other reason.

I haven't been following the CDC or whatever wacky consequences might have come from Trump's political appointments, but most expert advice globally in the early stages was that there wasn't enough information about how the virus spread. Advice was urgently needed and the balance of probabilities at the time was, rightly based on existing knowledge, that cloth mask use by non experts was more likely to spread it through infecting hands from faces and so on. The advice wasn't just suggesting people about masks, though. Typical advice still included other recommendations like frequent hand washing and distancing, in part because on balance of probabilities they were most likely to prevent spread.

Since then there have been countless studies building on each other. There's now lots more data which now demonstrates that widespread use of masks DOES make a positive difference in preventing spread.

This is how science works. Just because something is more likely based on available information doesn't make it definitely correct. Once you have more data, though, it becomes possible to narrow things down into more accurate and reliable understandings.

I don't agree with ffkom's line here. NZ's borders are presently and very effectively shut for good strategic reason. It's nothing personal and recent history shows that NZ is definitely not isolationist. If a serious-enough disaster came along then I think potential help would be considered on balance, just as today's press conference confirmed that advice to evacuate took priority over Covid-19 level 2 and 3 restrictions. Also, all these countries send help because they also benefit - not just because of an agreement. U-SAR teams get major experience and training from travelling to and helping in real-time disaster zones which they could never get any other way.

That said, the USA of Feb 2011 still sent a disproportionate amount of help to Christchurch. From memory (I can't immediately find a reference) it also left behind a lot of valuable and expensive hardware for the benefit of NZ's local rescue services generally, I guess because it was inefficient to take it back. The USA is a big and diverse and polarised country which NZ doesn't always agree with and which might sometimes act very differently depending on whatever's happening internally at the time, but I think it's a fair call that on that occasion it really helped NZ.

Advertisers aren't going to pay for ads that are not targeted.

They're sort of targeted, though, in that they're targeted at a person who'd go out of their way to use something like Brave. I'd presume that Brave's own user-base is a reasonably predictable niche demographic, and it's probably at least as enticing for some advertisers as (for example) placing an ad in a magazine that covers some kind of specialist topic.

And maybe that's representative, in a way, of the bigger problem. I go out of my way to take various steps to not be overly tracked around the web. I'll tolerate a bit here and there if I can see good reasons for info to be held about me, but where possible I try to block the obvious wholesale tracking and collection of everything I do. In the overall scheme, though, companies like Google and Facebook that collate massive amounts of highly detailed data on billions of people don't care in the slightest that I take measures to hinder their efforts to profile me specifically. They don't care because they don't need me. They know that probably 99% of their users don't take these measures. Their business models, and the reason for most of their revenue relies on retaining influence over the behavior of that 99% rather than the 1% who are hanging out in this Slashdot discussion.

Being followed around and having data about me collated concerns and annoys me, but nowhere near as much as the concern of now having to live in a world where, increasingly, nearly everyone is having data collated about them on a massive scale... to the point that the whole population can be marketed at in very targeted ways and manipulated for commercial or political or whichever other agenda, to provably change behavior of large numbers of people in ways that have never really been possible up until now.

Of course I would. But that doesn't mean I like the idea of a world where people get mega-rich in questionably ethical ways, where they end up with so much money that they're capable of doing the kinds of things that governments normally do, and then society's priorities end up being shaped by the casual opinions of those benevolent multi-billionaires. They might or mightn't have welfare of the population in mind, and if they have a whim of incompetence without process to vet themselves against expertise then they might be just as likely to set priorities which end up harming everyone as helping everyone.

I appreciate much of what's come out of the Gates Foundation, and yet if it's genuinely good then so much of it is due to luck of money falling into the hands, for arguably dubious reasons, of someone who ended up eventually putting some of it into an optimal place.

I appreciate this, but given the choice between an IP68 rated phone and a repairable phone, what's going to result in most phones lasting longer? Do most iPhone users really need IP68 specs for day-to-day use, or is this mostly about marketers desperately trying to create new points of difference which they can dress up in a good enough commercial to convince customers to upgrade?

Someone who knows better could correct new if I'm wrong but firstly, a Minister in the Australian government has to declare that Slashdot would have to pay, which will likely happen for Facebook and Google but isn't likely to happen for Slashdot. Aside from that, though, it can probably only be applied to businesses which fall under Australia's jurisdiction. Facebook has a business presence in Australia, whereas Slashdot probably doesn't.

Google has most of my email on file for the last 15 years. It knows what I search for, and where I spend time on the web. To an extent it knows where I physically go in the world. If I followed my bank's recent advice then I'd be channeling many of my day to day retail payments, meaning data about real money spent, through Google's profile of stuff it knows about me... most of which it collects court they propose if influencing my behaviour to match what's wanted by whomever pays money to Google.

I haven't used Android TV apart from briefly in a shop. If Android TV works for you then use it, but all I really want in a smart TV is a clean interface and an ability to run about two specific apps. One thought when I went shopping was that if it was the same either way, I didn't see a compelling reason to provide yet another way for Google to collate data about yet another aspect of my life.

I don't think it's as simple as mainstream media not trying hard enough. They're not competing with a real media outlet. They're competing with a cesspool that substitutes journalism with dopamine fixes, taking eyeballs away from journalism and engaging them so much that they have little time for it, because it turns out many Facebook-addicted readers didn't really want to read journalism as much as they wanted to read anything... including unstructured conversations and opinions that were produced for free by other readers.

There's not much to like about the Murdoch press, but if you're going to root for something then maybe root for some of the smaller, more local, papers which compete with Murdoch?

We're in a world where subscriptions are drying up because they're competing with people giving away opinions for free, where classifieds have dried up because everyone's flocked to central sites like eBay, and where other advertising has dried up because it's all going to the global megacorporation portals that've sucked masses of people in for spending most of their eyeball time. Newspapers can put up a paywall but unless they have a massive globalesque readership or a very specific niche, it's difficult to compete with random people making crap up and saying it on the internet, unless you're willing to produce increasingly outrageous headlines.

It's not a perfect arrangement, but some of those smaller publications, which want to do real useful journalism, might even find an avenue to stay afloat and keep their journalism alive if the entities that have positioned themselves in front of the content they publish will pay something for them to produce and publish it.

An aspect which concerns me about stories like this one is that getting the world vaccinated is at least as important as getting a small handful of rich countries vaccinated. Otherwise Covid-19 is much more free to continue rapidly mutating to new strains in the rest of the world, which risk making existing jabs less effective or entirely obsolete. By all means people can enjoy their vaccine nationalism while it lasts, but the parallel call for a people's vaccine is for more reasons than just feeling sorry for poor countries.

Really? Surely this isn't a just problem of news media companies not learning to cope with the internet age, even though some surely could have done it better.

At the very least it's also a problem with a separate deeply-capitalist global mega-corporation building an addiction-driven portal that's designed to pull the dedicated attention of as many people as possible. It's built with algorithms which decide what people see based on what's most likely to keep their attention. That's frequently done by making people excited or angry, annotating the presentation of everything with other people's reactions and opinions as a priority, and isn't much concerned with making sure its users get to see accurate and objective news about the world around them. Facebook's aim is to be the thing through which its users see the world, and then make money from it. It becomes the place where people spend most of their time, and siphoning advertising revenue from others which used to get it, like news media, is a side effect of having all that attention.

If your point is that news media should have adapted to this and become an addiction-driven pile of crap before Facebook did, on the grounds that people care less about getting accurate news if they're addicted to something worse which uses up all their time, it undermines the whole point of being a news media organisation.

Facebook's problem here is that it thinks it's making a principled stand for some kind of capitalist philosophy, but it's not taking into account that Australia as a whole most likely doesn't really share that absolute capitalist philosophy. It's more interested in protecting its news media. And yeah, Murdoch has heaps to do with this but so do lots of other news outlets that compete with Murdoch, which are already out of business or struggling to survive in a world where Facebook sucks up and chooses the direction of everyone's attention.

That'll really depend on whether people find adequate alternative sources for their news.

I can't imagine Facebook winning from going nuclear, though. Australia's not another company. It's a country full of people who are very possibly more likely to rally together patriotically around this than to feel any sympathy for a global mega-corporation owned by a plastic 36 year worth $50 billion.

Facebook's business model relies on its users being addicted. There's a big risk that a lot of Australians, who previously couldn't have cared less about this argument, are going to get a reality shock that emphasises to them both just how much controlling influence a single mega-corporation has had over their daily lives, and also exactly why that's a bad thing.