Calling Big Tech’s bluff

The national governments are finally beginning to call Big Tech’s bluff to withdraw their services if they can’t keep freeloading on other people’s content:

Australia’s treasurer has advised the tech giants to accept that their platforms will have to start paying for content, amid threats from Facebook and Google to limit services in the country if such a policy is enacted.

Canberra is finalizing legislation that would require the internet behemoths to obtain licenses to use content created by Australian news outlets. Both companies have warned that they would retaliate over the revenue-sharing scheme, with Google saying last week that it would remove its search engine from Australia, and Facebook declaring that it would strip news from the feeds of all Australian users.

On Sunday, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg pushed back on the ultimatums, signaling that the Australian government wouldn’t reverse course. “My view is that it is inevitable that the digital giants will be paying for original content,” he said, suggesting that Australia was leading the way in what would soon become a worldwide norm. He also admonished Facebook and Google for their hostility towards the proposed regulation, describing their threats to pull out of Australia as a “big disservice.” 

Google has been particularly unreceptive to the proposed legislation. Earlier this month, it was revealed that the Silicon Valley giant has been experimenting with blacklisting some Australian news sites from its search results, apparently as a future strategy to avoid having to pay for hosting the content. The move shocked Australian media outlets, which accused Google of carrying out a flagrant show of force to stop the revenue-sharing code from becoming law. 

As China and Russia have both demonstrated, a nation is much better off banning the predatory global tech corporations than accommodating them. 

Biden voters reconsider Biden

 A woman learns, with horror, that she voted for the man whose policies are going to have a negative impact on her family’s lifestyle, as her husband works in the oil industry.

Jeremy just called and yelled at me. He said that everyone on the job site are freaking out thinking they are going to lose their jobs. He’s blaming me for voting for Biden. You know I hated the way Trump acted. Is it true that Jeremy could lose his job?

Ok, first I’m sorry Jeremy is likely losing his job. I’m going to be honest with you though, YOU voted for this. I didn’t and neither did Jeremy, but we will be suffering…. I always knew people would regret voting for Biden, I didn’t think it would be Day 1. Biden probably won’t hurt your feelings as much as Trump, but he will take you husband’s job.

In fairness, Biden didn’t actually win the election, so she’s not genuinely culpable for the loss of her husband’s job. But it is a salient lesson. Fake elections have consequences.

Britain reconsiders Biden

Our British Brethren already miss President Trump:

As one Conservative MP admitted last week, the trade deal that was being negotiated between the UK and the US while Trump was in office is now in trouble. ‘The steam has gone out of it,’ he said.

As I pointed out in these pages recently, the Biden team includes people who are deeply hostile to Great Britain and believe – incorrectly – that Brexit in some way abandons our commitment to the Good Friday Agreement.

It isn’t just the Democrat Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi who takes this ignorant, anti-British view. Senator Chuck Schumer will shortly be the majority leader in the new Democrat-run Senate.

Last year, Schumer gave a speech for Sinn Fein, alongside Gerry Adams and others, in which he declared that while ‘the road to Irish unity’ is ‘long and winding’ it is ‘now more within reach today than at any time’.

Sinn Fein was delighted to re-post that speech in the past few days, along with a message from Schumer to the Irish republicans: ‘I wish you the best in your critical efforts to build support for a truly united Ireland.’ The terrorists and former terrorists who run Sinn Fein are thrilled by such talk. After years of pro-terrorist sentiment being anathema in Washington, it appears that it is back at the heart of American politics.

This is bad for America – and bad for Britain, too.

With people such as Schumer at the top table, our nation is at a tricky juncture.

Remember, these people are dedicated to the break-up of our country – to the secession of Northern Ireland from the rest of the United Kingdom.

It’s also amazing to see that the Irish are more concerned about the British presence in Northern Ireland than the African presence in Ireland.

Disney bans Peter Pan

 Because raciss. I doubt they’ll be showing The Song of the South anytime soon:

Generations of children have been charmed by the magical tale of the boy who never grew up, but Peter Pan is now on a list of banned movies.

Bosses at Disney have blocked anyone under the age of seven from watching the 1953 animated classic on its streaming service over concerns that it portrays racial stereotypes, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Three other long-standing family favourites – The Aristocats, Swiss Family Robinson and Dumbo – have also been removed from children’s accounts for breaching ‘content advisories’ that were recently put in place.

I simply cannot wait to go into competition with the Devil Mouse. It’s Under-7s today, everyone tomorrow.

The Ride, She Never Ends

D-Live has doubled-down and banned Big Bear. How fortunate that the Patreon lawsuit has already been successfully concluded…. In answer to the obvious question, yes, UATV will have streaming in the future. We will not answer any questions as to when. When it is ready, we will let everyone know.

If you’re not yet on Unauthorized, well, you know what to do. The cult of free is over. Keep in mind that under the present regime, Big Tech is going to be banning everyone to the right of Hillary Clinton. In related news, Parler is learning why cloud technology is not an option.

When Amazon Web Services informed Parler that it was terminating its hosting deal, the social platform initially maintained that it would be back online in a week. It appears to have secured DNS hosting from Epik (the Sammamish, WA-company that hosts sites like 8chan, the Daily Stormer, Gab and Stormfront who have been dropped from other providers and recently lost its relationship with PayPal because of that).

But a later statement indicated that other providers are not willing to host the platform and as a result, the service may not return: “most people with enough servers to host us have shut their doors to us,” a statement to the Parler user base read and the company’s legal team suggested in court might not return without access to AWS.

Even if the social network finds a hosting provider, setting up all the different services it needs could be prohibitively slow, or even impossible. For all the talk of hybrid and edge computing, hyperscale cloud still has some hard to beat advantages for organizations with small infrastructure teams and not much capital expenditure budget who need to build large services quickly.

Needless to say, we’re not relying on the cloud for anything, not even brand new projects that are not even remotely political. In not-entirely-unrelated-news, MeWe is not a viable Facebook-alternative.

Less crazy than it sounds

Rest assured that I don’t expect anyone who isn’t already familiar with this sort of thing to believe it in any way, shape or form. And at this point, you shouldn’t. I highly recommend not taking any of this seriously at the moment, but simply adding it to your general knowledge base in much the same way as you happen to be familiar with The Lord of the Rings or Watership Down. Think of it as a metaphor, or, if you prefer, a palindrome. But in light of all of the post-election anomalies, it might serve you well as a useful conceptual reference point for interpreting events in the future that you happen to find inexplicable.

In 1871 a sedious act was performed by the Government.  A coup was made to rewrite the constitution and put WE THE PEOPLE in all capitals, under a new corporate contract transferring the United States of America into the new Corporation of the United States of America which transferred  the power of We The People and the constitution over to the new corporation. When they did that, it placed the citizens in the United States as property of the Corporation which was centered in Washington D.C..  This action made Washington D.C.  a FOREIGN ENTITY on American soil of sovereign states. It was established through a loan from the Vatican when D.C. was transferred into a city-state, and this corporate entity then ruled over the people. Citizens rights were taken from them in this process. No one realized this.

When they did the broker deal to get the loan from the Vatican, they did so via the Bank of London. At that time, they transferred all the property in D.C. Columbia over to the Corporate entity of D.C. a foreign corporation.

The forming of this corporation in D.C. is of major importance to understand, for when President Trump signed an executive order in 2018 on Election Interference/Fraud for entities both foreign and domestic, it outlined how assetts would be seized.  The President and the people knew and had the proof that a coup transpired out of the Corporation of the United States of America along with other foreign nations and was ignored by the Corporation in D.C.. They continued with their illegal steal, and the military is now in the process of seizing the assets of this foreign  country  known as THE CORPORATION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.  It appears that President Trump’s executive order was actually directed at the Washington D.C. corporate swamp/cabal all along.  D.C. is now walled in and filled with military guard.

Never forget that things are seldom as they appear at any given moment. This is true of absolutely everything, from a simple running play in an NFL game to international conflicts. 

Testing… testing

China is obviously encouraged by the news of the Biden administration:

Taiwan recorded no fewer than 13 incursions by Chinese military planes into its air defense identification zone (ADIZ) in a single day Saturday (Jan. 23), the most of any such incidents within one day so far this year.

According to CNA, one Y-8 anti-submarine aircraft, four J-16 fighter jets and eight H-6K bombers ventured into Taiwan’s ADIZ during the day.

Earlier, the Liberty Times reported that Taiwan’s Air Force scrambled a total of 26 jets between 10 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. to counter seven incursions, which all occurred in the southwest corner of the ADIZ, the Liberty Times reported.

My impression is that China is simply waiting for the US military to be committed to war with Iran before it strikes. Although I expect if there is another eight years of institutional rot, as there was under Obama, that might be sufficient so that a distraction is not even necessary. 

Don’t forget that Taiwan now has its first female president, Tsai Ing-wen.

Mailvox: Let down by the Alpha

 A Voxiversity viewer correctly picks up on one source of the American people’s very understandable disappointment in President Trump:

I was watching the Alpha SSH video a couple of weeks ago. – When you explained how one of the obligations of Alpha status is that non-Alphas will expect the Alpha to stand up for them I thought, “Hmmmm, so, if Trump isn’t seen to be actively and openly fighting The Steal, people who were his supporters will turn on him?”

I’ve read a lot of comments over the last few days and that seems to be what has happened with some readers. 

Am I correctly understanding what I am seeing?

Yes, precisely. It has been 48 hours and more since President Trump left the White House for Florida. People quite rightly feel abandoned, confused, let down, and even betrayed by him. This is entirely normal SSH behavior, and I expect it will eventually turn to anger and contempt if President Trump continues to remain silent or to speak in irrelevant platitudes when he appears in public.

As for me, I have not given up hope. What part of “The Ride Never Ends” don’t you understand?

Apple gets them again

I don’t use Apple products. I had a //e, an original Macintosh, and a Macintosh SE, but I haven’t used one since. So this just news of another charger change just amuses me:

Apple is planning to release a new thinner and lighter MacBook Air that will launch in the second half of this year or early next year, according to Bloomberg.

The report said Apple will plan to market the device as a higher-end version of the current MacBook Air, which Apple released in November with its new M1 processor. That device was among three new Apple computers to make the switch away from Intel chips.

Apple’s Mac revenue was up 28{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} year over year, when the company reported its fiscal fourth-quarter earnings in October. That boost was helped by millions of people forced to work from home because of Covid.

The new MacBook Air will include Apple’s magnetic charging system called MagSafe, according to the report. MagSafe was used in Apple laptops for years before it was removed over two years ago in place of newer USB-C charging. But, it’s convenient because it allows the charger to pop out easily and helps prevent the laptop from being dragged off a surface if someone pulls the cord or trips on it. MagSafe is also used in the latest iPhone 12 phones, though it has a different design and relies on a magnetic puck accessory that wirelessly charges the phones.

Pro tip: if you keep buying from them, they’ll keep doing this to you.