rndgermandude

>simply stop using Google products

Google squashed most of the competition in a lot of sectors, and the few remaining competitors aren't any better often.

Aside, even if you do not actively use google, google will still be in your life, by tracking and selling you. Already there is realistically no way to entirely "ungooglify" your life as long as you live and partake in some modern western society.

And soon it seems, you will be using a Google browser because you have to, because your bank or employer website or whatever will require their web "attestation" DRM, and will not accept your Firefox, Brave, Chromium, Vivaldi, Opera or whatever attestation.

And if you're hoping for other attestation vendors... Try streaming anything that needs a subscription without using Google's widevine DRM. You will be surprised on how few options there are, not just in implementations but in streaming services that support anything besides Google's widevine.

Google and probably Microsoft and Apple will be big enough browser vendors to be widely supported "attested environments" and attestation providers. Everybody else will bite the dust on that front.

E.g. "x% of websites do not accept Firefox's attestation" will drive more users away from Firefox, and that in turn will lead to even fewer websites supporting Firefox attestation because why spend the dev resources to support it with that measly market share when people can just use one of the big browsers?!

And google knows this very well, from the "works best/only in Chrome" to widevine. They were even able to make MS abandon their browser engine and jump on the google engine train, after all.

This to me is very clearly an antitrust issue that needs antitrust suits and regulation.

Why would it be abuse if you just asked for the data to be deleted? As long as you do not misrepresent things and do so politely, of course.

If Disney wants to spent time and money and reputation to figure out if they legally need to delete the data they collected about you and only do so when that's the case, then that's their choice. Same as it was their choice to collect data in the first place.

If they instead want to be nice and consumer-orientated, as they like their public image to suggest, or at least save some bucks, then they will hit the delete button. They gotta have such button by now anyway for legal requests from Californians.

Farmers have to put in constant work to generate revenue. "IP" revenue too often entails create-once-earn-forever. However, "IP" often has a higher upfront investment attached to it, and often is not (as) "scalable", unlike farming.

What I am trying to say is that both things are very different in details where it matters, so I think this is a rather flawed analogy.

Maybe a closer analogy would be landowners who rent out land. Should a person who bought land 10 years ago be able to generate revenue from renting it to a farmer?

Exif itself defines three main times: DateTime, DateTimeOriginal, DateTimeDigitized. To add insult to injury, each has an additional SubsecTime*

Then you have in the GPS tags: GPSTimeStamp, GPSDateStamp

And those are just the common tags...

Next question is, what format do these tags use. DateTime, while it's supposed to be "YYYY:MM:DD HH:MM:SS", is generally a free-for-all in practice when it comes to the order of the date components, the format of the components, or what separator to use.

I've seen software write DateTimes e.g. like "1-12-23/1:13pm" instead of "2013:01:12 13:13:00". Whether it was actually M-DD-YY or D-MM-YY, etc in this case is more of guesswork when all the values are below 12 :P

And if I remember correctly there was one piece of software which wrote UTF-16-BE strings instead of the mandated ASCII.

As others have mentioned, the time range of when the data was scraped seems to be end of 2021 to start of 2022, maybe into mid 2022. If correct, that was certainly before Elon Musk took over, probably even before he made his initial offer.

The problem with that is that the skipped data will still be present and therefore easy to recover if you know what you're looking for. That may "leak" seconds worth of video (and audio) the user may have thought was removed. And those seconds may contain something sensitive, e.g. a pan over some confidential information on some paper or screen, or genitals, or whatever.

In my German circles, that spot has been covered by whatsapp for a long while now. It never has been instagram or anything else really. For me it went from studivz (long defunct German "facebook" for university students, didn't last long), via facebook (for a short while, and due to lack of alternatives) straight to whatsapp, and has stayed there ever since, with the exception of some photography interested people sharing larger sets of photos on flickr at times, and some dating/sexting happening on snap (but most of that still was/is on whatsapp). Instagram was always understood as a place where you go if you want to see celebs, influencers and the "wannabes".

Granted, I am a bit older, a millennial (as much as it hurts me to admit) and an older one at that, but I regularly take the tram in my city at times when all the teenagers are going to school or coming from school, and you can see a damn lot of whatsapp on all those phone screens, a lot of tiktok, and a good amount of discord.

It sure can be a problem when people initialize stuff with nonsense to avoid running into nullable warnings. However, accidentally running into null pointer exceptions is still worse than people deliberately footgunning themselves with bad workarounds.

I feel C#'s nullable has helped me personally to avoid a lot of potential bugs and also changed the way I write code in a lot of places - like creating `bool Try...(..., out var)` style APIs instead of "old school" returns-null/throws style stuff, which I think make a lot of code cleaner and more easy to read.

Sometimes nullable can get a little messy and annoying, especially when retrofitting old code to make use of it without breaking existing APIs, and all in all the way C# does it is a clear net win in my opinion.

I am not trying to comment on anything else here, but this:

>>Minimum< 40 hour work week. 100% office work.

Those are the norm for most fulltime people in most jobs. You know that, right? Right?

No, I didn't say that. And there it really becomes tricky, If they try to unilaterally change terms of the contract, they cannot do that. However, at the same time an employee is not entitled to dictate the direction of a company. I am pretty sure a lot of the "perks" that might go away in favor or "hardcore mode" weren't contractually guaranteed. The terms of the employment contract wouldn't have changed then. If they muddle around e.g. with pay or work hours that would be quite different.

I don't really see the "constructive dismissal" argument either that others brought up, as that would require the employer deliberately creating a hostile work environment. Just saying "we're going into hardcore mode" and taking away some perks that weren't guaranteed wouldn't yet fulfill that. There might be of course other shit that twitter/Musk pulled/pulls that may legally satisfy a constructive dismissal. The email, in my laypersons view, wouldn't be enough.

However there is a strong point about the "missed the email" argument, and the non-affirmative nature of the "resignations" it creates. I think that's a rather strong point in favor of the employees. But then again, never underestimate courts ability to render "surprising" rulings.

My guess is though that twitter would not just "dismiss" everybody who did not respond. At the very least HR would get in touch with those people anyway, at which point employees can say "oh wait, what email?". I'd think the email is just meant as a pre-filter to save time by filtering out what people you do not need to talk to because they want to stay anyway.

I wonder if this legally really is the case. Twitter seems to have asked "Do you still want to work here", giving an option to affirm. They didn't say "you have to go", they said "you may go if you do not like the new direction of the company, please tell us which one it is".

I'd be rather careful with that, and not just proclaim these people were terminated. I see a rather good chance court could rule very differently.

Artists - just like inventors etc - should be compensated for their work, but in my humble opinion not in what has become now essentially perpetuity.

So, an artist eeking out a living on something they worked hard on and released a month ago or two years ago gets sympathy from me. An artist who released a thing 20 years ago and still wants to eek out a living off that, such an artist doesn't really have my sympathy. The great-grandchildren who want to get paid for something an ancestor released 120 years ago[0]? Hell no, go do something yourself to make money.

If you're Lars Ulrich in 2000 and sue Napster over songs you released 10-20 years ago, while sitting on a net worth of maybe around 100-200M USD (now 350M), then my sympathy is with the pirates.

This doesn't touch the issue of how a lot of artists are not making much money, not because of pirates but because of predatory music labels and publishing houses.

It also ignores the problems with the "lost sales" theory. A lot of the pirates would have never paid for stuff they downloaded in the first place. And a lot of pirates started paying after pirating some stuff. E.g. I remember discovering a lot of artists from songs I illegally copied on LAN parties back in the day[1], usually artists too small to be on a lot of rotation on radio and MTV (yes, MTV used to have music, crazy) which I probably would have never known about otherwise. And I gave lots of money to these artists, buying their CDs, going to their concerts when possible, and so on. In the same vein, I discovered artists on whatcd and similar pirate places later on.

And doesn't touch on the "please take my money" issue... There are a lot of things that are out of print, etc, that you cannot pay for. E.g. large companies holding licenses to content may even take works out of print deliberately in tax avoiding schemes - I am not a Hollywood accountant, but from my limited understanding they can declare a loss when doing so which is worth a lot more in tax reduction than keeping a title in print.

And it also doesn't even touch humanity's need to preserve important cultural artifacts for the future.

[0] Remember, up to artists death + 70 years copyright term. While this exact scenario has probably not happened yet, as these rules are too new, you get a glimpse of what will happen in the future when you look about all the legal fighting still happening over Sherlock Holmes - a figure and body of worked created mostly before copyright law even existed.

[1] Yes, I am old. If you have no idea what a LAN party is, it's basically a bunch of people actually meeting in some venue with their computers, wire everything together into a temporary LAN, to play games and swap files, which back in the day really was the only sane way to do mulitplayer and filesharing stuff as internet speeds were so limited, and internet was usually very expensive, often still paying by the minute.

Distribution can be figured out, same as it was for fossil fuels and as it was/will be for electric energy. It would be a chicken and egg problem, for sure, however hydrogen has some big pros over electric, in that you can fuel up quite rapidly and get longer ranges, and doesn't have the harmful emissions of fossil fuel (how to produce the hydrogen in the first place is another issue, but the same is true for EV "fuel"). So I can see there could be a market for it as well as political will, if they can figure out the production side at a competitive price point. However, that's a big if.

I can see it entering special markets first, like long haul trucking, and become more widespread from that. Time will tell if that actually will happen.