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.

I really don't think Facebook is going to come out of this looking good. Certainly not in Australia.

Facebook didn't just nuke news publisher pages. It also wiped out Australian government pages, including health agencies, in the middle of a pandemic. If anything, this is clearly demonstrating to the average Facebook-addicted Australian, who previously didn't know and didn't care about any of this, just how much power and influence Facebook has over their daily lives, and also exactly why this is a very bad thing.

Australians are as patriotically reactive as people in any other country. Its current crop of politicians are elected because they're good at rallying Australians around exactly this kind of common enemy with an us-against-them mentality, and Australian media will definitely be helping.

Australia has new laws that require payment simply for linking to an article. That's what this whole thing is about.

More deeply I think it's really about the disintegration of reliable independent journalism and news media as a viable business model. It seems a real problem because although most people think that's an important industry to have, nobody's really figured out how to do it well in modern times with so much advertising and subscription revenue having been siphoned away.

There are at least a couple of sides to this, though. One side is the lack of money to fund good journalism. Especially local journalism like on the scale of maybe a state or a city or even smaller than that, where good news would previously have been produced by lots of smaller journalism outlets but they've been dying from a diminishing business model. There's some reasoning that much of the revenue which used to go to that media is now going to certain global mega-corporations, and pulling some money back from a handful of those corporations might help to foster a viable business model again for local journalism if it's done well enough.

Another side, however, is that even with good journalism, media publishers often no longer have strong editorial control over how people see their content. There's hardly such a thing any more as a newspaper dividing news into international, national and local news and advertising giving some content giant headlines and photographs with other stuff a small column, separating editorials and opinion columns to their own area. Social media in particular has made itself people's primary portal which decides how readers see and interact with all content available. It uses algorithms to decide what's important, often making everything look the same in that portal, and morphing readers' impressions completely.

To get news through a service like Facebook is to have Facebook's algorithm's decide what's important based on what your friends are doing or based on what it thinks will make you engage most. Then you'll see a headline with a generic context, surrounded by people's reactions and comments from random annoyed people on the internet. Once you've waded through all that, you have an option of clicking through to read a story's content on the source website, but many people will never get that far despite lots of engagement about it on Facebook. And sure, we can individually choose not to use social media to get our news, but most people won't do that by themselves so it ends up having a big effect on how society as a whole learns about and reacts to current events. I don't know how this second problem can really be solved.

If they were double-dipping, is there some reason why it'd be considered unfair? If someone's paying the news outlet directly, then that's up to them in order to be allowed to read content of an article. Part of the logic behind all of this, though, is that social media corps like Facebook are still selling advertising off the back of content produced by others.

That's why a corporation like Facebook typically encourages the spreading of references to media reports amongst all its other content. Even when its users rarely click through to read the full content of something, it benefits financially from the engagement it gets by pushing someone else's headlines and someone else's photographs into the faces of all its users.

I can sympathise with that. I try to be careful on posting about myself and I take a few measures to hinder Facebook's ability to vacuum up data about me, but I often still get caught up in discussions and arguments in public places on Facebook around things I care about.

Yesterday I finally disabled my Facebook account, though, and I guess I see how long it lasts. I've been annoyed for some time at how Facebook promotes ignorant conversation and reactions over informed discussion, but yesterday's trigger was that I'm overly sick of Facebook taking everything I do in every technically public forum and actively broadcasting it in front of everyone I know... as if it's everyone's business to see and be provoked by everything I say and do everywhere, even if they wouldn't have cared otherwise. Social media completely screws up normal interaction.

I agree but just to go on a tangent and comment more about cultural differences and ID requirements in the EU, would it also be correct to say that ID cards are quite widespread in many countries there? (Informal Wikipedia ref: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... ) This is important because it means that when people want to exercise their right to vote, they're likely to have ID. Sometimes people point to the EU for justification of requiring ID for voting elsewhere, but I'm not sure that really makes sense unless you also advocate the state ensuring ID documentation is widely available to all society. I'm in New Zealand which does not require ID to vote at a polling booth. It's justified on the grounds that while there are occasional incidents, there's no evidence of significant fraud to any extent likely to have influenced an outcome. There have been occasional calls for ID requirements here to vote, but so far it's been resisted and for reasons which are probably also relevant in much of the US. ID requirements in places like here and probably much of the US tend to discriminate against disenfranchised people. Privileged people have things like drivers' licences and passports which they can easily produce on a whim. Less privileged people might have no reliable ID whatsoever, despite having a fundamental right to vote. Merely getting ID can be a complicated and lengthy process which requires some existing form of ID to begin with. It might be virtually impossible for someone who's functionally illiterate or who simply isn't experienced with how the bureaucracy works.

Do you happen to have a reference handy? I'm in NZ and I don't recall that happening (which doesn't mean it didn't happen), although I have found a case where rodents chewed through something and temporarily cut off about 1000 households' broadband. https://www.stuff.co.nz/nation...