"Security by design" and "lawful access by design" are mutually exclusive concepts.

Completely agree, the walled garden is the main reason I use an iPhone too. It gives me some comfort believing that my privacy is respected and that malicious apps are much rarer for the apps in the app store. I am still cautious, but it's nice to know Apple is doing something to help and, in a way, demonstrating to the market that privacy and security are still important to some.

I don't think piracy really costs anyone anything, at least not much, because most pirates would probably not purchase the products even if they were unable to pirate them.

You do, however, make the important point that this rabbit hole will probably go much deeper than expected once the precedent is set.

No.

Sure, some of that is a mistake, however it is largely because the definition of news as defined by this proposed legislation is extremely broad, and intentionally so as it was defined by News Corp who are largely behind the drafting of this bill and wanted to make it as difficult as possible to turn down their kind offer of accepting large amounts of money for advertising their content.

See: https://twitter.com/BernardKeane/status/1362194435530842114?s=20

If we apply your logic more generally and globally, the internet becomes nonviable. Why should we make only links to news profitable and not links to articles and artworks, and everything else?

It's an all or nothing game. The world needs indexing services to find the content. We cannot set a precedent where anyone is forced to pay to link to something on the internet. If you don't want your site to be listed by a search engine, there is already a well-defined method of opting out of indexing.

Because this proposed legislation doesn't allow them to pull these sites from the index. It requires Google and Facebook, specifically, to link to the news and to pay for the privilege. It's a mandatory donation from Google and Facebook to the media. Read the proposed legislation, it's quite shocking.

The news gives consent by not setting a flag within their website that opts out of being crawled by Google (and/or other crawlers) - a right they have always had, since the beginning of web crawlers, long before Google came to be.

They know full well that they can opt-out, but they don't want to opt-out, as I suspect you know. They don't want to opt-out because they benefit considerably by being listed by Google, and they have in-fact pushed as a part of this proposed legislation a requirement that Google continues to list their news as well as forcing Google to pay for it. That was added quite deliberately to stop a situation where Google might have said "ok, it's not worth it for us anymore, so we'll just stop linking to Australian news if we can't link to it without incurring fiscal penalties."

You're not fooling anyone.

In response:
a) it became a monopoly because it was better (gave the consumer what they want) than the other search engines in the early days. Even now, perhaps the second-best search engine largely relies on Google's kindness to facilitate their results. Google didn't force anyone to use their services.

b) In this case it is the Aus. government that is abusing the situation. They're saying to Google that you MUST link to the news content and that because you link to it (as we require you to), you must pay for it as well. You are not free to negotiate a fair price for this content which takes into consideration the traffic that you drive to their site, you must accept whatever price they (or we, the govt.) set. On top of that, the govt. is saying that Google must give the media companies a technical brief explaining the internal functions of their search algorithm so that the media companies can exploit it, and further that they must provide these companies with 21 days advance notice to any changes to the algorithm. Google are not abusing the relationship here, but someone might be abusing their close relationship with the Liberal Party to push this agenda - hint, not Google.

c) Google must be aware that if they accept these ridiculous terms in Australia then they'll have to do it for every other country in the world, every other news media outlet in the world, and then all the scammers who will set themselves up as media companies to get in on the action as well. It would make their business model untenable, so they're prepared to walk from a very small market (relatively speaking) rather than set a business-destroying precedent.

p.s. I'm no fan of Google. In most cases I take a stand against them, but in this matter it is our government being completely unreasonable and I can't help but be concerned about the power the media holds over the government to have pushed this agenda so far.

That's where you're wrong. In the first example, I simply skip over it and onto the next thing that matches my search terms. I'm not going to be drawn in by some bullshit click-bait headline and visit your site without a good reason to believe it has what I seek.

If Google did what you propose, the newspaper's click count would go way down and you would no longer be able to find their content on the first page of Google's results. Shortly afterwards, the newspaper goes out of business entirely.

If Google stop showing large summaries for all search results to try and make it fairer, then Google would collapse. The large summary of relevant content is what made Google the dominant search engine in the first place - they gave the consumer what the consumer wanted.

In short, click-bait is incompatible with the modern internet user. We've been conned by so much bullshit before that we've become immune to it.

"Microsoft is on a mission to get developers to love using Windows over macOS and Linux."

Well, they should start at the bottom and work their way up. Just yesterday my Windows box failed to wake from sleep; then, after a forced reboot, parts of my profile were borked.

I'm not going to love their OS until I can use it for extended periods without it making me cringe. Focus on stability MS, then focus on making it do what I want, when I want, without getting in my way. Then make all parts of it fast and responsive. Once those things are sorted out, maybe I won't hate myself whenever I use your unreliable, slow and distracting operating system, and I might be give some consideration to developing primarily on it.

Who told you that she's not the Queen of Australia? They were having you on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchy_of_Australia

You missed OpenSolaris, perhaps their biggest fuck up of all. Disappointingly, all of this was totally foreseeable before the acquisition. IBM would have been a much better home for Sun.

192 bit keys are also defined.

Yahweh? Is that you?

I knew it wasn't the drugs!

-- Claude Vorilhon