The reason why Google Fiber rollout did not happen as expected, and Alphabet eventually got tired of the whole thing is exactly because of the corporations they are supposed to be fighting against. Redoubling efforts won't do much because ISPs already win this game. And they were forcing the end of net neutrality with this in mind.
Just search back and read Google's statements on why Fiber didn't go as planned. You'll see articles and comments about ISPs blocking and delaying as much as possible access to infrastructure to lay down cables and whatnot.
The game for Netflix and Google to play here, like it or not, is to wait for ISPs to get even more greedy, unpopular, start using net neutrality to their own benefit, burn the house down, and only then start offering alternatives at a bigger cost which will enable using some different tech like 5G or something else.

A sub billion fine on a case like this is insulting, useless, and only incentivizes other companies to follow similar non-existant security practices.
Lets remember this wasn't only a small leak, but one of the biggest multiple leaks where the company purposedly hid for years the whole thing, allowed for it to happen multiple times over, and was unapologetic the entire time.

I'm getting so fucking tired of immature ignorant whinning of dim prepotent politicians trying to vilify and polarize technologies they don't understand and trying to paint a black and white picture that only exists in their fantasy land... or more likely, don't exist at all because they never tried to understand the stuff they are talking about.
That is the true problem we have today. This sorta shit. If we had less shitheads berating against anonymity, privacy and encryption - and by now we had a very long time to understand it's not as one sided and clear as some moronic politicians will try to put it -, we'd be dealing with criminals who uses those to their advantage better today. Goddamn it feels like a virus spreading in governments and courts all around the world...

People have very short term memory, it's like this never happebed at all ever:
https://www.theverge.com/2016/...

While this might sound as a good thing to curb piracy and stop people from straight uploading copyrighted material, the consequences of a rulling like this have far reaching consequences that goes way beyond that.

It's a preliminary judgement that will most likely be appealed and end up reversed once judges understands the problems with this idea, which they most likely don't.

But if it doesn't get reversed, I fully predict YouTube and Google just ending service in Austria, because it's not feasible for the platform to work in any capacity with a ruling like that.
And it's fruitless, because unless the service is fully blocked by ISPs plus VPN services and other circunventing methods, people will keep using it. The loss is entirely on users and the country itself. Prossecuting cases coming from people living in other countries would need deals and hubris that would effectively make this an on paper decision that will never have any consequence.

There is no way for a social network platform to work at scale with potential liability for each and every single video uploaded to the platform. And this is something judges from all countries that work with these platforms should understand. It's a very simple concept that is very unfortunate to see judges in this day and age, no matter how old or disconnected from tech and Internet they are, not knowing about. It's a broad display of ignorance on how things in the Internet works that should put in question the ability of certain judges to accuratly access matters related to an entire class of cases.

YouTube already has the overzealous content ID system plus a whole ton of other custom algorithms and whatnot to detect copyright violations, and they have been tuned to a point where they constantly get false positives - a common complaint of content creators.

If that's not enough, and the platform becomes liable for a lawsuit everytime potential copyrighted content gets uploaded to the platform, it's just better to close doors. Because there isn't any viable way to comply with something like this other than algorithms, which are arguably incredibly advanced for what they do. It's like saying knife makers are now liable for every single murder commited with a knife.

People don't fully appreciate how hard it is to detect such a nebulous idea as "copyright infringement". Highly trained human specialists with extensive knowledge on the matter often cannot do this well enough, having to take it to courts and spend years to decide.

I'm no advocate for any of the crappier stuff social networks do, but what a judgement like this is asking for is fundamentally impossible. It's the same thing as telling these services they are forbidden from operating in the country, period.

Putting things in perspective, YouTube has over one billion users globally (can't account for Austrian users only because the service doesn't put up regional barriers unless explicitly asked to), statistics from 5 years ago points out that it has over 100 hours of video uploaded every minute (with more current non-official estimated projections putting that number up to the 500s), and the only way to be 100% sure that content being uploaded has no copyright infringements on it is by manually watching everything and doing some very extensive research which would most likely not cover every copyright infringement scenario possible.

With those types of numbers, it also isn't feasible in any way, shape or form to cover everything no matter how many people you have working 24/7 on reports, flagging, banning and whatnot because those also have to go through an evaluation process. And that's looking at it after the fact and relying on a flagging system. To completely avoid lawsuits YouTube would have to become a curation platform - videos published only after a process of analysis and approval.
Imagine submitting 500 hours of video uploaded every minute to an evaluation process for copyright infringement? Even with a large team of people working only on that, you'd end up with a century backlog in a month or something like that.

Scale is key here. With 500 hours of video being uploaded every minute, even if a small fraction of that is potential copyrighted material violation, YouTube would need to employ an entire country's worth of workers to go through an analysis process in a reasonably fast way. And all those workers would have to be proficient on investigating and judging copyright infringement cases.

So yeah, fat chance. The question here for Austria's judges is which is more important for your country: YouTube, social networks, and a huge part of the Internet as a whole - basically every service and portal that is big and has user generated content, or a super heavy handed copyright system? It's ok if you value the second more, but the consequences of that wouldn't be very good for your compatriots, your economy, and your position in tech and as a modern society.

Because this isn't about oooh, social networks are bad for you, I hate social networks anyways, YouTube only has trash videos, blah blah. A case like this would generate a precedent that would stop a whole ton of companies from operating in Austria. This is more about jobs, body of knowledge, businesses, partnerships and an entire economy getting killed. It's a full backtrack to the Internet of at least a couple of decades ago or more. Which you know, is something that some people might argue that should be done in a worldwide scale anyways... but not like this, not for this reason, and not by a single country. That would only put Austria on a similar level as countries like China, Iran, Syria, North Korea and some others. For an entirely different reason, but the results would ultimately be similar.

Lenovo = Motorola
TCL = Blackberry

It's not about people like you. It's about the aggregate data and what businesses have been doing with all that, plus the underground economy that came out of these sorts of deals.
Let go of the "I have nothing to hide" mentality and look at the bigger picture.

There's zero science in the current EPA, as well as most of Trump's administration. He cannot produce any real science because he has none. Or at most, he'll be giving a bunch of stuff that have some pretty curious links to coal corporations, produced in the late 70s or something.
And it'll either be blatant lies that wouldn't pass peer review, or just something vague like "more evidence is needed", which btw, we already have.
I needs no repeating, but there is OVERWHELMING evidence and consensus that climate change is man made by the entire scientific community. And this includes people who have been studying it for a good part of their lifetimes. It includes an incredibly substantial body of evidence from multiple perspectives. It comes from analysis with historical records, measurements taken from recent years, modeling and prediction, how the planet is already changing, and the relationship with all sorts of pollution that you can go out and see today.
I don't think deniers get how massive the body of evidence is. We even have researchers from a couple of decades ago hired by oil companies saying it was happening back then, only of course these companies chose to hide the research and exploit the information for themselves instead of releasing it in public.
"I doubt it" by brainless politicians and by the coal industry do not get a pass. I don't know what else is needed for deniers to get this, but I suspect it's gotten to such an extreme that they'd rather drown in a coastal city while shouting it's not happening rather than considering the idea that they might just have been wrong all this time. It doesn't take a whole lot to step out of your cult-like status and think a bit.
All the extreme weather events that are likely related to climate change happening several times a year and somehow it's still hard to believe. This sort of stubborness only ends in death. Asking to produce science will do nothing, because it was never backed by it. It will eventually get to a point where it's either them with their baseless claims or it's us paying the price for their ignorance.
The worst thing of it all is that even in the fictional scenario that they were right, there is simply no reason to be against the general measures against climate change. US is just like the anti-social entitled asshole idiot that behaves like a baby while the rest of the world is taking responsibility. Coal, oil and gas dependancy have always been a health hazard, it benefits no one to keep it, and even countries that were highly dependant on those are realizing after too long a time that it's simply not worth the damages it causes... you know, countries like China, famous for cities so heavily polluted during some days of the year with coal mines that people were simply collapsing and dying on the streets. Both China and India already have some generations condemned to live with lung related and respiratory diseases, why would anyone want to follow their past model?
Do people really want to get into scenarios like those, or go back to industrial revolution era pollution levels? Like, fortunately the global economy, scientific community, people who already accepted man made climate change as a reality, and people overall against Trump's EPA have enough power to continue the transition... coal dependancy will end whether politicians like it or not. But if it wasn't for that, de-regulation and climate change denial would logically end up resulting in pollution levels of the same scale of China and India.
And it's not like the US isn't already littered with superfund sites to show what happens when things like that gets ignored.
It's incredibly sad to see how entire groups of people cannot learn anything from history. Makes me think that in the end, our species will meet it's mass extinction event way sooner than other species because of our so called great "intelligence".

Humans are essencial to clean up robots' mess, until robots or routines around robots get to a point that they don't mess up anymore. Extremely simple fix for the example given which I'm sure is happening pretty soon: either make robots that won't drop anything, or make packaging that won't create a mess when dropped.
Great defense there Amazon.
It's not about whether humans will be needed or not... they always will. It's about scale and environment. Whether it's justified or not, the worry comes from replacing a hundred workers for one robot, one specialized worker and 99 unemployed people.
And sure, Amazon employs a huge number of people, but what are the hidden costs there? Smaller to medium businesses that closed doors because they couldn't compete. Multiple times more jobs in diverse areas extinguished. A monopoly that has taken opportunities from too many because of it's heavy handed practices.
I always hear this argument that robots are coming first for supposed cumbersome, burdensome, brainless and low paying repetitive jobs... but I think people underestimate how important those are to keep the wage gap from getting even bigger. And we already have lots of signs that those are not the only types of jobs robots will soon be taking over too.

...what I already knew: Amazon is no better than eBay when it comes to costumer responsibility practices.
Just recently I read a post about fake SD cards still being a thing on Amazon, and this has been going on for the better part of the last decade, so it's quite obvious that Amazon simply doesn't care anymore.
But I've stopped buying on Amazon anyways back since they adopted an extremely aggressive tactic of pre-charging some 120~150% import tax for people living in my country. Brazil does have a very pricy import tax, but it's definitely not as high as Amazon is charging, and the only reason why they'd do something like that would be if they just don't want to bother dealing with our market anymore.
But that's fine... it forced me to look for alternatives, and I'm glad I did.

I don't wanna contribute to fuck all. Keeping my egotistical Personal Computer, thank you.

Sure, removing devices with fake FCC and other logos, fine.
Stop selling devices in which Kodi can be installed? So... all PCs, all Android smartphones, all Android devices, all devboards, several smart TVs.... at the very least FCC is describing there basically all possible set top Android devices.
I'm not sure if they are going for completely different things there just to bunch crap together, or if they just fundamentally don't know what they are asking for, but it doesn't really matter. If Amazon stops selling those people will just go to eBay or Aliexpress. Or, you know, just repurpose devices. Which btw, wouldn't be such a bad thing, but not because FCC is asking for it.
Plus, it's always good to note that Kodi has jackshit to do with this. They app functionality is literally a media player for TV, which is not illegal and is no justification for stopping sales of devices. Plugins might enable piracy, but so do most OSs and Internet connected devices.

As someone who lives in a country where electronics have import taxes that are 100% and up, you really have no idea what you are asking for, and all the things you listed that it would be good for really are just fantasies. That's not how it works.

I don't wanna sound racist or anything, but unfortunately I think China will have a very long way 'till it gets even close to western countries on this matter, which is still not ideal.
Setting US aside, let's consider some european countries and whatnot. There are very few countries that are really getting there, but still not quite.

Currently, China as a society has evolved at unprecedented speeds in comparison to the history of evolution of other societies.

I still remember a time when China was mostly rural, exporting mostly primary resources, and didn't have much in the way of technology to talk about. This was the case not that long ago. If you are too young to remember this, probably your parents will know.
Over just a few decades, less than a lifetime, China went rushing through industrial revolution, raising extremely modern metropolis in cities formerly pretty run down and primitive, and now the country is activelly participating at the forefront of technology and research in some areas.

Some people might not realize this, but it's because lots of people don't really know China. There are cities there that are basically on par with Japan in terms of technology, public transportation, technology in common spaces and whatnot. There are research areas like biomedicine and genetics that China is arguably ahead. Read some of the recent news... China just launched a communication probe in space to aid a mission that will be launched still this year to explore the dark side of the moon.

It's crazy how fast it has evolved. It almost doesn't make sense when you think about the comparison on how technology evolves versus societies.

But all that has a huge side effect. China did not evolve uniformly, these transformations had and still has huge costs, and of course things are not that simple.
It became a country of enormous contrasts. You have cities that look like Tokyo or modern european capitals, while you have towns in the countryside with people starving and living a life of subsistence. You have billionaires and huge investment groups that are among the richest in the world while you have multitude of workers slaving away to a state they prefer suicide instead of living like that. Most of western societies also have huge wage gaps and inequalities, but it kinda pales in comparison to China when looking at extremes.

Sexism can't be seen and treated in isolation, and people should not have some fantasy that it's gonna be solved anytime soon there because there are major shifts yet to happen before it even starts being addressed.

Remember people, China is a country where not that long ago, baby boys were hugely favored over baby girls. And this is a cultural phenomena that endured over decades.
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
https://www.nytimes.com/2009/0...
This is a huge problem that cannot be solved in few years time, and it has massive cultural effects. Because it effectively created an artificial distortion... there are way more men than women in China when compared to proportions of other countries.
It's not only China too, it's just something that happens a lot in poor countries or developing countries all over the world.
https://www.npr.org/sections/g...
http://www.ibtimes.com/deadly-...
Even though some of these countries don't necessarily have a majority of people of faith in patriarcal religions and systems, it's just a matter of favoring boys because of base manual labor necessities and a prejudiced view that comes with it. The concept also became ingrained in culture, so up to this decade the tendency still remains.

The result of this is basically years of neglect, years of women not having the same rights as men, years of barring from education, a complete unbalance when it comes to administrative and leadership positions, and all that has a cumulative effect that cannot be solved so easily.

This isn't even to mention how before solving sexism problems, China would first need to change the governmental system, first have true workers' rights and welfare, and a democracy.
How could women in China ever hope to get equal salary and rights in workplace when they have a communist government bordering on totalitarianism that is composed almost exclusively of men? It doesn't make any sense. I'm not trying to diminish the importance of the fight against sexism, but it shouldn't even be on the charts for chinese people... there is just a whole laundry list of problems before even getting there.

If you read a bit about the feminist movement in China and the years they conquered some rights, you quickly realize how much more they have to fight over.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Most of the rights women in modern western societies conquered in up to or more than a century ago, chinese women got recently... between 20 to less than 10 years ago.

This is why when you see chinese tradeshows and some weird ads coming from south korean companies they can be extremely cringeworthy and sexist... it's because put simply, countries like China and South Korea are still going through the Mad Men era - the american 60s.
But it's not only that... it's that plus the fast societal shift that left huge holes behind.

So, I have a really hard time thinking that following western society movements and activism will work well for a country like China. Arguably, it doesn't work very well even for western countries. The changes needed have to go much deeper, because the problems are structural.
In part, this also serves for western countries I guess. The only way women will truly guarantee equal rights and non-symbolic changes is by having more women in politics, in top positions, and in places where they can make actionable changes. And those positions also cannot be symbolic - they have to be substancial and sustained.

Because it's just the way people work. They will always prioritize what is closer to them. Sexism will never be solved by men in power. The fight is still valuable to a point becase I guess it kinda holds back things from getting even worse. But it does not solve the problem.

And the only way to guarantee more rights for women working in STEM areas is by having significant number of women working in STEM so they can get together and make pressure for change. But how are you gonna make any effective pressure for change when all politicians are males? Chicken and egg situation, I know, but unfortunately it's just the way it seems to be. Minorities are always at the risk of being trampled, something that has been made extremely clear these days.

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