Posts by schultzter

Google gets the green light to flood US Gmail inboxes with political spam

Re: Spam

One person's spam is another person's valuable information or delightful entertainment. Unless it's malicious criminal deception it's really up to each user what they want to filter.

Google account != Gmail

They don't make it obvious but you can create a Google account for all their other services without having a Gmail account.

Google snubs South Korea's app store payments law

Re: Real world?

Indirectly YES.

Succesful shops move to more desirable locations where the rent is higher.

If you have less revenue you move to a location with lower rent.

As for payment systems it wouldn't surprise me to find out a mall operator who provides basic infrastructure like heat, lighting, etc. also provides data networking and payment processing and requires them to be offered - even if you tell customers you prefer cash or e-transfer. The payment processors contract with the mall probably stipulates some kind of exclusivity to the extent it's legally allowed.

Canada wants Big Tech to share its riches with news publishers

Which lesson were learned from the past?

The Australian law was great for the politicians, it let them claim a David v. Goliath victory over US mega-corps, regardless of the actual results.

So did the Canadian politicians learn that they can win a few votes by appearing to wrangle some foreign tech companies into submission?

Or did they learn that the law needs to ensure Facebook doesn't become the gatekeeper of what news is shared; and Google has to support actual journalism and journalists - not just shareholders; and the definition of news outlet needs to be objective and subject to oversight?

Re: Who gets to choose which newspapers?

I believe they had some pencilled in some basic criteria, like minimum staff size and regular publication and minimum scope (i.e.: a company's press releases did not qualify as news but two guys blogging about community events could qualify).

EU law threatening 'commercially painful changes' for tech out tonight

If only

> the ability to send messages to users of an entirely different messaging platform.

GTalk?!

Enough said.

Australia will force social networks to identify trolls, so they can be sued for defamation

Re: Another go at Juice Media

I was going to say the same thing. I wish The Register, off all news outlets, would stop repeating the claim that Australia won when they really just handed over the golden goose on a silver platter!

Australian regulator finds Google dominates adtech, seeks powerup to fight back

Re: Break Google up.

I've tried alternatives to Google but the tight integration between services is what makes Google's so awesome (like Apple if they're your thing). If Google were split up others would rush in and we would be back in the same place again!

Google opens Workspace to anyone with a Google account, but you'll need to cough up for the good stuff

Re: paid GSuite accounts as second class

I had the same issue, went back to a consumer account.

My understanding is consumer accounts now have access to business features so I doubt they'll doing much work to provide business accounts with consumer features.

Resistance is futile!

Report commissioned by Google says Google isn't to blame for the death of print news

FAIL - News Media Bargaining Code

FB got exactly what they wanted.

G for exactly what they wanted.

And for both it was legitimised and enshrined in law.

Re: News Media Bargaining Code

Ha!

FB got exactly what they wanted and made a token contribution to their hand picked winners.

G didn't send a penny down under, it all went to the shareholders in NYC. In exchange G is hosting the content so yet another way for them to slurp your data - without you even visiting a G domain!

Proposed collective action aims to take Apple to task over its 30% App Store cut on behalf of 20 million Brits

Re: Competition is the answer.

Only if you're a first time buyer. Once you're in an ecosystem it's prohibitively expensive to get out. It would be impossible for me to switch now and repurchase all the apps and media on my current phone, and my family member's devices, and the ancillary devices we have in the house.

WhatsApp: Share your data with Facebook, or we'll make our own app useless to you

I blame Google for this mess!

If they had just stuck with GTalk and kept it on jabber/XMPP and the servers open we could be living a messaging nirvana! They could have added SMS/MMS, GPhotos chat, GDocs comments, and what not to the steam. Third parties could have built their own clients and Google would have been shielded for monopoly accusations.

But instead here we are bickering over which messenger to use if we want to stay friends!

Irish privacy watchdog sticks GDPR probe into Facebook after that online giveaway of 533 million profiles

Re: Googlified

It's more convoluted than that. They need to maintain parental consent and can't advertise to kids under the age of 13. So kids are expensive and un-profitable! Something similar exists in most countries so they leave it as an exercise to the reader to infer how & why the question is being asked that way they avoid stating it explicitly and constraining themselves to it.

End-to-end encryption? In Android's default messaging app? Don't worry, nobody else noticed either

Re: Hey remember Hangouts?

Ahhhhh, Hangouts!

Remember Google Talk?

If Google had kept using an open protocol and rolled in SMS, Photos, and Docs messages they could have had the killer messenger that actually purple wanted to use for real reasons!

No desktop SMS

I've tried Signal a few times but it always comes up short. There's no Chromebook client (even though it's just an Electron app) and SMS from the desktop isn't supported. Ultimately my contacts are using SMS or Messenger (which I can do from Insta now and soon WhatsApp) so the argument for Signal is limited.

Apple-Google COVID-19 virus contact-tracing API to bar location-tracking access

Re: I hoped for a second

Yes, they can separate their app stores by country, or at least what you see available to you according to your region and the region(s) specified in the app. There are a number of factors they take into account when automagically filtering apps.