Posts by veti

Universal basic income is a great idea, which is also why it won't happen

Re: A shorter term problem

Then in so far as those jobs still need to be done, people will need to be paid (or otherwise rewarded) more for doing them.

I see that as a feature, not a bug.

Spammers. Bloggers who live on ad revenue. Those... people who post reheated political talking points on every forum on the internet, including this one. Ambulance chasers. Reality TV producers. Reality TV "stars". Professional celebrities. Journalists who write about celebrities. Paparazzi. Daytime TV presenters. The Shopping Channel. Advertising salespeople. Telesales drones. Cabinet ministers. A significant percentage of all civil servants.

All in all, there are probably hundreds of thousands of people in the UK who turn up every morning to do a solid, professional, arduous, and often unrewarding and unsung, job that only has the effect of making the whole country a shittier place. Think Nathan Barley.

The "growth of employment" is not something we should be celebrating.

You, Google. Get in here and explain all this personal data slurping – Missouri AG subpoena

"Investigative subpoena"?

Sounds to me very like legalese for "fishing trip".

The A-G doesn't even mention the statutes that he thinks Google may be violating, he just waves his hands and talks some generic bullshit he's read about big data. I'm pretty sure "being big data" is not a crime, even in Missouri.

Don't get me wrong, I have no doubt that Google unfairly manipulates its search results (and has done so these 10 years or more, basically ever since the launch of Google Books). But if I were making this kind of complaint about it, I'd be a lot more specific about it.

Munich council: To hell with Linux, we're going full Windows in 2020

I can believe 800 programs.

Munich is a big place. I don't know what the specific responsibilities of its city government are, but I wouldn't be surprised if they include everything from policing to water quality to arts galleries to education to public transport, public health, parks, sports, dog registration, air quality, tourism, rubbish collection, libraries, cemeteries, city planning, housing, social services, animal welfare, food safety, roads and signposting, traffic management, taxis, land registration, civil defence, elections, and probably at least as many more things I haven't thought of. To say nothing of "reporting on all of the above to state and federal gov't".

Not having worked in any of those areas, I'm not remotely qualified to know what systems they may involve. But I would guess each of the above departments uses at least 2-3 separate databases that are developed specifically for Windows, and simply not supported on any other platform. Plus a dozen more applications I can barely even imagine.

This is what open-source zealots too often fail to account for. The world is complicated. Millions of developer-years have gone into building the systems that maintain everything around us. You can't redo all that just by waving your hands and saying "all you have to do is this" - somebody actually needs to put in several metric fucktonnes of work to make it so.

Now Munich has said, they're not going to be the ones to pay for that effort. And I don't blame them.

Brit cops slammed for failing to give answers on digital device data slurpage

Re: "10 said it would require a manual search to get it."

Let's suppose, for the sake of argument, there's a table called something like "seized_property".

Now, what are the odds that table has checkboxes like "electronic_item"? "digital_item"? "social_media_enabled"? (And if it has, how likely is it that that information is correctly entered and audited?)

More likely it just has, at best, a drop-down-selected field that can hold values such as "Mobile Phone" - without differentiating between smart and dumb phones, or carphones, or feature phones.

At worst, it may even be entered as free text, in which case... good luck with that query.

UK.gov: IT contracts should be no more than 7 years. (Not 18, Fujitsu)

One supplier = one throat to choke and no ability to deflect attention elsewhere.

Doesn't happen anyway in the public sector, because the dynamic whereby politicians have to identify with and champion their pet projects makes them, basically, hostages to their own contracts.

Re: Missing the point

Backbench MPs get, IIRC, £74,000 a year, plus the kind of pension arrangements most of us can only dream of. If they don't want to put up with a few years of "reduced employability" (seriously? exactly how many MPs do you think are remotely qualified to work in the IT industry anyway?), then tough titty.

Alexa, please cause the cops to raid my home

So much that I have a cynical suspicion that they get the stories by reading them here.

Well, where do you expect them to get tech stories from? Journalists aren't prophets, you know, they don't have angels coming down on a daily basis to tell them what's up - they read the news same as the rest of us, and decide what to follow up.

Boffins: We can identify you by your typing, and we're gonna sell the tech to biz, govt – yay!

Re: A few comments...

"The T9 predictive text system of 1998" was better than my brand new Android... (Windows Phone was even better. But never mind.)

Time to give Swype a try, I think.

I don't begrudge anyone developing this technology, nor yet selling it to anyone who's curious enough to buy it. Just so long as they don't try to stop others from taking their own countermeasures, as proposed in the first post...

To most people it doesn't matter - it's really not that big a deal if $COMPANY can identify who's using their app. But there are those who do care, and those people shouldn't have their options shut off.

US government seizes Texas gun mass murder to demand backdoors

Uh-huh

"it's going to cost a great deal of time and money, and in some cases it costs us lives."

[Citation needed]. Name these "some cases". Who, specifically, has died because the FBI couldn't decrypt someone's phone?

US domestic, er, foreign spying bill progresses through Congress

Stop talking about "citizens"

Look: any politician who pretends that it's in any way possible to allow powers to be used only against foreigners, not against citizens - is just grandstanding. What they're proposing is unconstitutional in its own right. So saith the 14th amendment.

Either the snooping is legal, or it's not. "Legal, but only against non-citizens" is an idea that is inherently incompatible with American law.

So please stop talking about how these things can be/have been done to citizens. It's a red herring. The question is whether they should be done to anyone.

Better filters won't cure this: YouTube's kids nightmare

Re: People seem to think this is a unexpected consequence of YT's ad model.

A lot of this material involves characters who are definitely protected by copyright rights that are, as a rule, quite brutally enforced. Some of the more popular ones include: Spiderman, Paw Patrol, Elsa (Frozen, i.e. Disney), Cars (Disney again).

But it's whack-a-mole for them. Even Disney's lawyer team can't cope with the sheer rate at which this crap floods onto YouTube. There are lots of "Elsa" videos that really are fair use, so you can't just ban them all.

So I don't think this is the answer at all. If that particular mechanism were going to work, it would have been triggered already.

Re: Wow..

You can't "take the producers to task". In the first case, you can't find the buggers - if you try to email them, it's vanishingly unlikely your email will be read by a human. In the second place, the producers (in so far as there are humans behind the whole thing) are mostly unaware of what's going on. Most of this stuff is algorithmically generated, not creative.

It's not that they have to be weird, just that there's nothing stopping them from being weird.

The article explains this pretty well. First, assume that the production is automated. (There are quite a lot of indicators that this is the case.) Then, remember that trolls are a thing, and some get popular.

Now, your automated algorithm is set to work out "what's popular" and "how to get onto the most popular 'videos like this' lists". When an intentionally produced troll video gets enough views, it becomes as a valid input to the algorithm. And to get onto the lists, it dresses itself up as a kids' video - and the damage is done, without any malicious human intervention at all.

UK's surveillance regime challenged in landmark European court hearing

Re: So (according to the IPA) it's legal to slurp as Snowden let everyone know it's happengin?

Not... quite.

According to the tribunal's ruling, the Tempora program could be legal, in principle, if the government fessed up to it. (Because it's important that the rules governing these things be public, that's why.) But since they hadn't fessed up to it, at the time the ruling was delivered, it couldn't be ruled legal - only "potentially legal".

Got that?

But Snowden didn't make it legal - only HMG could do that. I haven't been able to find out when, if ever, HMG has officially confirmed the program's existence.

Microsoft goes to bat for Dreamers: Windows giant sues Uncle Sam to block staff deportations

Re: Optional

It's easy (so easy) to rail against the Trump, but he's really not to blame for this. The A-Gs of several states were already in the process of taking legal action against DACA, and most informed opinion said that it had basically no defense.

I'm not completely heartless, but I do believe in rules. And if the rules are stupid and heartless (which they are, completely guilty on both counts), the correct answer is to f---ing fix them. Not for a president to unilaterally declare that he's going to ignore them. That's - just wrong. It's unstable, doesn't fix the underlying issue (which is why the next idiot can reverse it); it ignores the constitution; it brings the law into disrepute; it sets a terrible precedent; and worst of all it lets Congress off the hook - giving them the freedom to squander their time on meaningless symbolic wankery, which pretty much sums up everything they've done this century.

Because Microsoft has no employees outside the USA?

Let them be deported. Microsoft can show its support by continuing to employ them in whatever country they're deported to.

Deport the people, deport their jobs. It's only fair. And it would also help to make Trump look like a cupid stunt, which is always a plus.

Londoners: Ready to swap your GP for an NHS vid doc app?

Re: Can't come soon enough

So you're not ill enough to bother then.

Fallacy of the excluded middle. "Being ill" isn't a binary thing.

Obviously there are people who are perfectly well, and don't need to see a doctor. And there are people who are really ill, and do.

But there's a huge swathe of people who are pretty much OK, but they have a persistent headache, or a cough that just won't go away even after three weeks, or a pain in the back that they can work through but it doesn't seem to be getting better, or... whatever. And they could take it to a doctor, but it doesn't quite seem worth it, not yet anyway.

Donald, YOU'RE FIRED: Rogue Twitter worker quits, deletes President Trump's account

Re: Liberals' level of hate just got upped a notch

What hate? *This* is mirth.

It's not as if we're laughing at someone running over Trump's cat, or driving a truck into one of those atrocious buildings of his. "11 minutes without a Twitter account" is not an injury, merely an insult. You, and the twat-in-chief, should learn the difference.

Re: @AC

I just wonder when he found out it was his last day.

So, tell us again how tech giants are more important than US govt...

Re: What do they think "publishing" is?

Tell that to, e.g., Charles Dickens...

Publishers take as much of the profit as they can get away with. Quite a lot of the time, that's "everything".

What do they think "publishing" is?

It's interesting how Twitter, Facebook and Google think they're not "publishers", because their content is "user-generated"...

(Which is itself a patently false claim if we're talking about their newsfeeds.)

What do they think "publishing" is?

Hint: it means taking someone else's content and identifying those people who want (/will pay) to consume it, and giving those people the means to do so. That's what publishers do, it's what they've always done, it's the only thing they do.

Re: Your opinion is is nice to see ...

Ask yourself: if no-one is dumb enough to fall for scams, then why are the scammers still doing it?

Remember how naive you were when you first went to college? Now, consider how many people are in their first year at college right now.

Then think, those people are by definition already above-average in terms of education.

Maybe you don't know anyone who'd fall for it (although I'd question that assumption, too). But the set of "people you know" is limited by the neighbourhood you live in, the people you talk to at work, the forums you hang out on online - all of which are selected by you based on your own preferences, status and interests. That's how bubbles are formed.

Because lawyers are so good at being transparent and honest and authoritative?

Zuck in particular is rumoured to have political ambitions himself. If nothing else, it would be a useful training experience for him.

US says it's identified six Russian officials as DNC hack suspects

Re: Incident response firm Mandiant ..

@Tom Paine: I think you underestimate both Putin's trolls and their software.

A draft US law to secure election computers that isn't braindead. Well, I'm stunned! I gotta lie down

Re: A burst of common sense from two common sense people

It took three (R) senators to stop Trumpcare - Collins, Murkowski and McCain. (Plus every single one of the (D)s. Let's not forget, they actually turned up to vote. Go them.)

And strangely enough, all three of them are now widely reviled in their party for it. Search for any of these names on breitbart.com, and you'll see no shortage of people clamouring that they need to be imminently deselected, or worse.

But you're right, it's a welcome reminder that not all politicians are the same, some are almost human. We do ourselves no favours when we damn them all and ignore the differences - Trump proves that...

Facebook and pals to US Senate's Russia probe: Pleeease don't pass a law on political web ads

Re: Personally

Blah first amendment yada yada... Certainly not going to happen in the USA.

But it's probably a non-starter in the UK too. Think what it means. If I want to put up a poster in the window of my own house, expressing my support for some candidate or cause, are you willing to call the cops to make me take it down?

How about if I want to take out an ad in my local paper, for the same purpose? You want to ban that?

Whether the answer is "yes" or "no", the same followup question applies: how do you draw the line? How to define which ads are acceptable, and which not? Is there someone who's tasked with deciding what qualifies as "political", or "advertising" for that matter, and what's just personal expression? Does the ban apply only to certain media, or only if you spend more than $something, or... how should it work exactly?

I know, I know - details. But these details are pretty important. Get it wrong, and you'll have created exactly the kind of oppressive police state we spend all our time fretting about.

I think the UK's best defence against political ads of the sort that turn the USA into such a hellhole is the much-reviled BBC. (Which is one of the main reasons why it's so reviled. Rupert Murdoch(1) knows he's never going to get big bucks from political parties, as long as he has to compete with a medium that doesn't take that sort of money at all.)

(1) Included for illustrative purposes only. Other media owners available. Some assembly required, void where prohibited etc.

Fine, OK, no backdoors, says Deputy AG. Just keep PLAINTEXT copies of everyone's messages

Let's look at that quote again:

"I simply maintain that companies should retain the capability to provide the government unencrypted copies of communications and data stored on devices, when a court orders them to do so."

I don't see any demand there to store the plaintext. Merely "the capability" to produce plaintext on demand. I.e. the encryption key.

A lot depends on what he means by "companies". If he's talking about ISPs or hosting companies, then - yes, he's an idiot and we've made only slight progress. But if he simply means that if an employee of "XYZ Inc", acting in their official capacity and using company channels, sends an encrypted email, then a court should be able to demand a decrypted version from the company - that doesn't seem unreasonable to me.

Manafort, Stone, Trump, Papadopoulos, Kushner, Mueller, Russia: All the tech angles in one place

Re: Confused

No, "THOSE Republicans" are not "the 'good ones'", except compared with Trump, next to whom Richard Nixon, Warren Harding - heck, even Andrew frickin' Jackson looks good in comparison.

The "other side" dropped their investigation into Trump when it became clear he was going to be their party's nominee, like it or not. By then Fusion had done enough research to think that it was on to something, and was understandably eager to find a new buyer for it. Which they did.

But the dossier is a sideshow. Nobody cares about the dossier. It's not the basis of the current investigation, nor is it remotely relevant to any of the charges yet laid. If Mueller wants to investigate it, I guess he will - but so far, at least, we have no reason to believe he's taken it even slightly seriously.

Big John, I think you're getting your FBI directors mixed up.

Mueller stepped down as director in 2013, some 3 years before the Washington Free Beacon commissioned "this laughable dossier".

When it was passed to the FBI - by a Republican senator - what do you suggest they should have done with it? Ignored it? Buried it? Laughed at it? No, they did their job, which was to investigate - without, be it noted, publicising the fact that they were doing so.

And now a totally different FBI head is conducting an examination into Trump. To call it "endless" seems a bit premature, when the Whitewater investigation went on for more than 4 years, and the Benghazi attacks were investigated by five separate House committees over 2 years. Mueller has already acquired more indictments, with less resources and in a quarter of the time, than all of those committees put together.

Given that the indictments so far handed down include charges of "lying to the FBI about meetings with known Russian agents" and "acting on behalf of Russian-affiliated Ukrainian politicians", it also seems a bit - well, not to put too fine a point on it, false - to claim that it's "abandoned any Russia angle completely".

Please rephrase to clarify - exactly what the heck point you're trying to make.

Re: Confused

No, you don't really have that straight.

First paragraph: yep, that looks about right.

Second paragraph is where it starts to fall down. "No details of the information passed (if any)" - actually, some of those details have come to light, and others will likely follow. "No further wrong-doing" - yeah, actually quite a lot of that is alleged. Just not yet at the stage of indictment, because the investigation is ongoing.

Third paragraph: you neglect to mention that the "other side" took up the idea of paying the former MI6 officer from a conservative website. When Trump looked set to become the Republican nominee, the former sponsors promptly dropped the project, and its erstwhile subcontractors looked around for a new client, and found - the DNC. Note that, assuming this account is wholly accurate, it doesn't imply that either the author of the dossier or the DNC did anything wrong.

(Nor did the original conservative website, for that matter. Researching your opponents is a totally valid thing to do. What matters is whose help you accept in doing it, and on what terms.)

Fourth paragraph: now I'm not even sure what you're talking about. By "miniscule payment", do you mean the small amounts of advertising spending that have been identified by both Facebook and Twitter as definitely paid for by Russians? Or do you include the battalion of full-time Russian trolls that have been employed to pollute virtually every online forum for the last 4-5 years? Because that spend probably dwarfs what the Clinton and Trump campaigns spent put together.

Fifth paragraph is just plain whataboutism - the fallacious argument that there's no point punishing one crime while worse things are going on. Newsflash, these things are not unconnected. Nobody is going to do anything (positive) about health care, rural poverty or the prison population as long as Trump is in the White House.

Oh wait - Harvey Weinstein? Sorry, now I know you're trolling. As you were then.

To be fair to Barnaby Joyce, his situation isn't unusual.

Under current New Zealand law, every Australian citizen has the right to live, work, own property and vote in New Zealand without a work permit or any other special paperwork. In other words, they have all the rights and privileges that New Zealand citizens have.

And the Australian constitution says that one can't be an MP if one "is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or a citizen of a foreign power".

So if being an NZ citizen is enough to disqualify you, then so is "having the rights or privileges" of an NZ citizen. Which means that every Australian citizen needs to be disqualified.

Re: Um, pardon?

Yeah, but Trump has been "pretty much admitting guilt" to lots of things for years now, and it hasn't greatly harmed him yet.

He could pardon all three of these guys right here and now, that would remove the FBI's leverage over them. Then he could pre-emptively pardon - basically, everyone who was ever involved in his campaign. Then he could pardon himself - yes, that's a thing, he can pardon anyone for anything right up to the moment he gets impeached, which won't happen because it would mean the entire Republican party admitting the guy who looked and talked and acted like a crook, but they backed anyway - really was a crook.

Is the FCC purposefully screwing up US school broadband projects?

Re: It's called Class Warfare

How exactly is fast broadband to schools going to make the working classes "intelligent and uppity"?

Is there any reason to believe that broadband access leads to better educational outcomes? A quick Google tells me, surprisingly few people have even tried to answer that question; and among those who have, there's no real consensus as to the answer.

Lots of people like the idea of IT in schools. The pupils love it, because new toys. Computer providers love it, because new customers. Legislators love it, because it's a lot cheaper than raising teachers' pay or improving their training. Employers love it, because free training. But does it, y'know, work?

If you try asking that, you're just spoiling the party.

F-35s grounded by spares shortage

Re: Let's make planes that can't fly......

Oh no, incompetence on this scale is a natural product of nurturing a for-profit defense industry.

When the US entered World War 2, its armed forces were tiny, and their technology was nothing to brag about either. But with a couple of years of dedicated development, they had planes and tanks that could match or beat both Japanese and German forces.

That's how you win a war: you don't develop all the weaponry in advance, you wait until you know who you're fighting before you decide what you need to beat them.

But none of that is compatible with the military-industrial complex.

New toys are always more exciting than repaired ones

So to get this straight: the planes are intended to be grounded for 2-3 months every time they need a new part? And that is the target that we can't even get close to meeting? (And let's not even mention "shipping the damn' thing to Turkey, of all places, and back").

Good grief, it starts to make the MiG-35 look attractive...

The EU is sooo 2016. We're all about the US now, say Brit scaleups

Re: Hmm

"Trump has put us to the front..."

In all seriousness, I would advocate cutting off all connection with America - total embargo on all trade, flights, exchange of currency, boot all citizens out of the country - if the alternative was signing a trade deal with Trump.

There simply isn't a spoon long enough.

Particularly since that same US is currently going through one of its periodic bouts of isolationism, and "buy American" is now official government policy at many levels. So all foreigners are handicapped before they even begin.

Could you pick a worse time to try to enter the US market?

What employs half a million people, just did $44bn in sales, and rhymes with Azerbaijan?

I don't know

Since when does Amazon rhyme with Azerbaijan?

Whois? No, Whowas: Incoming Euro privacy rules torpedo domain registration system

"Whois" is already basically worthless

... to anyone but a lawyer, anyway, given the nonexistent quality control/fact checking of the data.

If you actually want to know who a domain belongs to - then you're dependent on whoever registered it having acted in good faith and entered truthful information. Often, they do. But sometimes, particularly when they have something nefarious in mind - they don't. They'll enter the data of a personal or political or business enemy, or a nonexistent person.

And there's pretty much nothing to prevent this, apart from the minimal amount of effort it takes to do.

If you're an IP lawyer, who wants to cover your arse by writing to a domain owner asking for permission to rip off their content - then that doesn't matter. You can write, and when they don't respond within a reasonable time, you can say you've done your due diligence. It's meaningless, but you've done it. Go you.

But if you're absolutely anyone else, just trying to find out who owns domain.com - it's useless.

Fake-news-monetizing machine Facebook lectures hacks on how not to write fake news that made it millions

Re: Good idea

@Big John: It's true that there is good writing, but that's not the most important point of journalism. The most important role traditional journalists used to play was not in writing the news, but curating it. Reporting the things (they judged) their readers needed or wanted to know, and not wasting their time with everything else.

Facebook and Google are both trying to do that now, and Facebook is closer to succeeding than Google. There are still major issues with the online model (most problematically: newsfeeds "customised" to the user means that you will never know what "news" someone else has or hasn't been exposed to), but it's currently the only plausible place to insert some kind of firewall between the user and the deluge of clickbait.

@Ledswinger: To be fair, the Economist offers me a digital subscription for £240 for one year. And that drops considerably further if I'm willing to pay for 3 years up front.

But then, their paywall is trivial to circumvent anyway.

The Independent is a sad case. It used to be my daily paper of choice, back in the days when I had such a thing. Now it still has some great writers, but the editorial team has been allowed to co-opt the whole thing into... not exactly an ideological mouthpiece, more like an apologetic (in the old sense of the word) propaganda rag for the metropolitan elite. Almost every story is shamelessly spun toward that single axis. So shamelessly that it's actually intrusive, now.

The Guardian is not bad, for news. (It's often better at covering my home country's news than the native press.) The BBC is OK, although the obsession with video gets more irritating every week - there's less and less actual content shown on the home page. The Telegraph's paywall seems to me to be mostly for clickbait - if you don't want to read those articles, most of the actual news is outside it.

Good idea

No, seriously.

Nobody can regulate the press. It's some combination of illegal, politically suicidal and logically impossible.

But there's nothing to stop someone like Facebook from creating a code of conduct for publishers, and then sanctioning those who refuse to follow it by cutting their audience.

Will they be perfect? Of course not. (What is? Seriously. If your objection is "I don't want Facebook making that decision", then who do you want making it? "Informed and educated readers" is no answer; that's like saying "if we lived in a perfect world we wouldn't need this shit", which is true of everything and helpful to nothing.)

If there's any way of dragging journalism back out from the abyss of clickbait and trolling that it's fallen into, it's going to be something like this. Something that goes straight to their bottom line.

Australia Bureau of Statistics may wind back internet usage data collection

That would be "policy-based evidence".

Double standard, or just saving effort?

Is this the same government that requires its ISPs to store all their users' complete internet histories for 2 years? Why, I believe it is. And the government itself can't even afford to store a few statistics?

I guess if you can trawl through everyone's internet histories, then a separate survey of internet usage becomes redundant...?

There's a battle on over two US spying laws: One allows snooping on citizens – one bans it

Correct.

It's not just that it's a foot in the door. The US constitution itself recognises that - except for a few extremely specific, limited purposes - it's inherently unjust to treat "citizens" any differently from "non-citizens".

The 14th amendment says "No state shall... deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." And the Supreme Court says (historically, at least) that this provision also binds the federal government.

I've always thought this is the provision that's meant to discourage the citizenry from fascism. If there is anything that an American agent, on American soil, can lawfully do to an illegal immigrant or a foreign spy, then they can also do it to a born citizen.

After all - in practice, exactly how are they supposed to tell the difference anyway?

Let's make the coppers wear cameras! That'll make the ba... Oh. No sodding difference

Re: Rational vs irrational behaviour

Thank you for a note of reason.

Policing is hard. Most mistakes are honest ones. Sure there will be exceptions, and they'll get all the attention - but to mistake the exceptions for the rule is one of the basic fallacies.

Google faces $10k-a-day fines if it defies court order to hand over folks' private overseas email

Re: The real story...

It's probable - no, make that certain - that MS has an actual written policy that states exactly how long emails will be retained on a dormant account. Doing something like that outside of that policy may lay them open to whole new kinds of legal trouble.

Re: Why not make it a fair bet ...

There is such a thing as "making an honest mistake".

Note, I'm not saying that's what this case is - I know nothing about it. Just that the "trying to pull a fast one" conclusion does not follow.

In general, it's not a good idea to punish people for making honest mistakes. It's a way to get a workforce that is increasingly both demoralised and unscrupulous.

Facebook, Google and pals may be hit with TV political ads rules

The law doesn't say anything about mentioning candidates or parties. Just that you have to say who paid for the ad.

Really, I don't see why that requirement shouldn't apply to all ads, political or not.

Of course all it means in practice is that the sneakier politicians, i.e. most of them, set up more-or-less-arms-length shell companies whose purpose is to pay for ads on their behalf, with names like "Americans for Motherhood & Apple Pie" - but even that gives you somewhere to start looking.

Re: Just wondering

Depends on the laws of those countries.

It's fair enough for the US government to pass laws about what goes on in the USA. What goes on in, say, Egypt - is for the Egyptian government to worry/make laws about.