Qualcomm reveals it's not selling to Russia during Twitter spat

Chipmaker Qualcomm is the latest tech firm to stop doing business with Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. Unusually, it appears that the company's policy was disclosed in a Twitter exchange between Qualcomm's senior vice president for Government Affairs Nate Tibbits and Ukraine's Vice Prime Minister and Minister of …

[Mike 137]

Policy via social media: It's a thing now

I'm waiting for the declaration of nuclear war that's posted solely on facebook.

But seriously, diplomacy has become so casual and its communication so ephemeral, that, quite apart from hazards such as the above, to future cultures this will seem a historical dark age.

[Klimt's Beast Would]

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

I'm waiting for the declaration of nuclear war that's posted solely on facebook.

Which the other side won't get if facebook aka 'mutter' is already banned. The plus side is that we can blame the other side for not noticing we've started it.

[David 132]

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

The plus side is that we can blame the other side for not noticing we've started it.

I think that of all the things that could happen without you noticing, “a nuclear war” is probably not on the list.

“Oh, was there a nuclear war? Damn. Missed it. I don’t use Facebook. Next time, try my gmail.”

Or to misquote Carl Sandburg, “suppose they gave a war and nobody Retweet’ed it”.

[Neil Barnes]

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

I'm waiting for the declaration of nuclear war that's posted solely on facebook.

Have you read Neal Stephenson's The Fall?

[mark l 2]

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

Its probably quicker to get things done by posting on a public forum such as Twitter or Facebook. As big corporations are so afraid of any bad PR and the cancel culture that if they didn't respond positively they might find themselves on the end of a boycott campaign and their share prices start to tank as a result.

[Peter2]

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

I'm an amateur historian serious enough about my subject to belong to a couple of paid for very serious specialist professional historical bodies.

Honestly? I doubt that this is going to be a "historical dark age" due to things being posted on Twitter or Facebook. You do realise that serious organisations like the British Library, National Archives &c do back this stuff up for future generations, right?

I would suggest that on the contrary, the problem is going to be the complete opposite of the existing problem which is that content is on paper in archives. With paper, the problem is inaccessibility. To give some scope for the problem, back in "ye good olde days" where records were kept in paper, when occasionally mailbags were captured they were sent in so that contents could be exploited for intelligence windfalls.

You know what actually happened? Somebody in the civil service said "hell no" and threw them in a warehouse until they were old enough to go in the archives, where they have sat untouched as far back as ~1650 because nobody had the patience to read through christ knows how many billions of letters to find the important bits. Historians had the right to request them and go reading, but the same problem applied. This has been the case up until somebody funded a team from 2018 through to 2037 (presumably their timesystem runs on *nix...?) to open each individual letter, tag it with a reference and summary, scan it and tag it with appropriate keywords etc on a system for future researchers.

Now that's the problem with paper; it's inaccessible. Even centuries worth of dedicated researchers have barely made a dent in the existing archives simply because the information is near utterly inaccessible in paper form. And we've now got the added problem which is that people have stopped using pens, and read most text that's been typed on a computer. Kids today already have trouble with reading contemporary handwriting, let alone 300 year old scribbles with a bloody quill and realistically that's only going to get worse as the generations who have used pens slowly shuffle off this mortal coil.

Anyway, coming back to where I said the problem is going to be the complete opposite of the existing problem? In the future if you archived the entire internet then some poor bloody historian is going to have to search through literally tens of billions of irrelevant bits of dross on the net for practically any keyword they search for along with the useful nuggets of information. The problem is more likely to be a total information overload beyond any reasonable ability to process it than a lack of information preserved.

[Gene Cash]

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

Sounds like someone hasn't yet dealt with old tapes or CDROMs that won't read, or drives that no longer either have interface cards or OS drivers. Tried hooking up an ST506 or SCSI drive recently?

Then there's old proprietary stuff like memory sticks and CompactFlash cards. I had family photos on those that were a nightmare to recover.

Heck, how about old formats like Flash? I have a parody of Romeo & Juliet, plus some good Pokemon humor from Newgrounds that are Flash files, and trying to play them now is almost impossible.

There's old websites like suck.com (dark humor) and WebSnark (webcomic reviews/analysis) that are only partially on archive.org. Plus there's a ton of webcomics that have just vanished, and I sure can't remember the URLs.

Paper can be a lot more accessible than computer media. Yes, there's going to be a historical dark age.

[doublelayer]

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

Media is not the problem. You can replace the archives with archives on new media if you decide it's not good enough. The archivists know this already--if they decided to use a kind of tape, they kept the drives around to read it at least until having copied it onto the new kind. People who didn't intend on archiving their stuff didn't, but most of that would, if on paper, have been shredded and recycled by now anyway.

"Then there's old proprietary stuff like memory sticks and CompactFlash cards. I had family photos on those that were a nightmare to recover."

What was the problem? Because if it was that you didn't have any readers, that's a problem that can be fixed easily on Amazon. I've still got a CF reader here. I don't have any cards anymore and the reader runs on USB 1.1, but it's still available.

"Heck, how about old formats like Flash? [...] trying to play them now is almost impossible."

No, it's not. The flash player isn't installed by default anymore? Go download it manually. Or use an OS that didn't have it removed. We have converters for a lot of this stuff and virtual machines for the rest. I won't guarantee that every format can be converted, but if you're willing to do some work, you can tackle most of them.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

I think that was what librarians some years ago complained about, that funds are always almost nonexistent, that if they wanted to go digital, they would have to change infrastructure every few years to keep it functional, and that it was unlikely to be achievable.

[Peter2]

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

With respect, I think that you are drastically overestimating how much has survived from previous centuries.

You appear to be assuming that something like a majority of all paper communications from every source survives multiple centuries. This is very, very far from being the case. The substantial majority of all paper documents are destroyed within decades of creation, a miniscule percentage survives centuries and this is why diaries like the Samuel Pepys diaries have been so valuable, illustrating what a single person thought about contemporary events.; Fragmentary sets of letters become deeply important primary resources and are published by the tens of thousands.

Even if you assume that nothing but comments pages on El Reg, The Guardian, & The Daily Mail survive two centuries (and these are already being archived by just the UK national archives) then this contain thousands of times more data about what normal citizens thought about current events survive that was the case from two centuries ago and this would be enough in itself to prevent there being a "historical dark age".

If something like Facebook or Twitter gets archived? Obviously there are tons of dross, but it'll be historically invaluable for future historians wondering what the common people thought at the time. The loss of some data on random digital media is probably in fact not going to be a major loss, simply because statistically most of this sort of stuff is lost anyway.

And this ignores that a few archives will no doubt survive; they always do. Even if it's people passing down dads/grandads/etc collection of family history bits and some random files that nobody ever looked about because they didn't really give a rats ass but realise that it should be passed on, and besides it's only a few gig on a terrabyte drive now, and then an exabyte storage crystal (or whatever) in a centuries time, this being the then equivalent of small USB stick) and nobody can be bothered to sort out that random stuff that takes up practically no space.

Up until somebody does look in a few centuries and it turns out to contain an IMAP download copy of great, great great great great grandfathers email account back when, which contains plain text copies of most data inside of the messages as well as awful HTML formatting.

Hey presto, a huge quantity of data survives to be a goldmine for a historian in the far future.

[Alan Brown]

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

Things like aerial photographs are proving a goldmine already. I'm finding 1930s-50s ones to contain a wealth of information about local geography that wasn't even the subject of the photograph but appears in the background

There's a good industry of data migration now, so the older problems of "can't read this format/media" are becoming rarer

[Peter2]

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

And as a seperate point: Qualcomm is an American company. They are simply saying that they are following the law of the country (the USA) that they are based in.

You don't really need to announce that your complying with sanctions any more than you do a PR announcement stating that your not going to murder the last person that pissed you off.

[druck]

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

any more than you do a PR announcement stating that your not going to murder the last person that pissed you off.

Best to leave them guessing.

[David 132]

Re: Policy via social media: It's a thing now

"The following neighborhood residents will not be killed by me. Ned Flanders; Maude Flanders; Homer Simpson; Marge Simpson; Lisa Simpson; that little baby Simpson.

That is all."

[PriorKnowledge]

Vlad vs. Vlod

It might just become an epic rap battle of history before we all die

[IGotOut]

It's a disgrace that Oracle pulled out.

... They should actually be performing as many software "audits" as possible. That would financially cripple the economy far greater than any sanctions.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: It's a disgrace that Oracle pulled out.

War crimes