https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PI...
The blackout was _not_ about preserving free speech, or any other moral high road. It was purely about control. Tech hadn’t yet cemented their position as a dominant player and didn’t want to cede the control they had.
Now that they’ve embedded themselves in the ruling class they don’t care as much because they already have control.
Is this parody?
Should we start against the trade unions and German barbarians next? (The latter to avenge Varus and recapture the Eagles.)
It's obvious, and common sense.
For better or worse, if you do business in <x> you follow <x>'s laws or GTFO.
That does rather imply that the laws are worthless. Obviously there is going to be someone who doesn't do business in France and operates a public DNS server that doesn't censor anything.
Regardless of that, I would challenge your premise. You can violate an unjust law and risk the consequences. And if you get the PR right, there may not even be any consequences:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...
But to your point, this is one of the reasons it's important to get these laws off the books and keep them off the books. Once you have the law, the government gets to choose the test case. You know perfectly well they'll be using it against dissidents and false positives tomorrow, but the test case is going to be some loathsome terrorists or a commercial piracy operation with no shades of grey, and then that's the case that sets the precedent.
They should never be allowed the opportunity.
and so when the rights holders notice enough people pirating using dns resolvers they can't force to do anything via the french courts, they'll probably just take it up with the french ISPs and ask for IP blocks of these resolvers. And I'd guess they may already be trying to IP block various piracy sites.
Will be interesting to see them play whack-a-mole. I wonder if at some point France will just start maintaining national blocklists, that if you want to run an ISP or reply to DNS queries from France, you are legally obligated to follow (or get blocked yourself); from the article, it sounds like the current law is significantly short of that so the whack-a-mole will continue.
Except when <x> is ruled by <y>, in which case you impose a small fine as to not upset <y>.
Tech is under corp in the chain or command, which in turn is under national law.
Gross lack of extra-technical nuance here.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...
Chinese state employees physically manage the computers. Apple abandoned the encryption technology it used elsewhere after China would not allow it. And the digital keys that unlock information on those computers are stored in the data centers they’re meant to secure.[1] Blum, Andrew, Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet. New York, Ecco, 2012. https://archive.org/details/unset0000unse_p9b6
You can buy an iPhone there today, and Apple has agreements with China to hand over user data and has done so in the past.
You and GP are both correct. Most Google services are not accessible in China but Google the company still has a significant presence there.
[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/icloud/en/gcbd...
The iPhone is losing its luster and competitors are coming with extremely competitive devices at much cheaper prices, even at the most premium end there is not much of an edge, the product has been perfectly commoditized. Pursuing luxury will inexorably make it a smaller and smaller share of the market every year passing. The iPad and the Mac are pretty small share of the revenue too, by pursuing luxury Apple has put itself into the same corner, repeating previous mistake Steve Jobs warned against in an interview (while working at Next).
I don't see how they reconciliate their need for growth without fucking over their users at some point on the privacy bullshit. It's not as if they don't have a long history of doing that. There is one thing that is clear about Apple as a company: it loves money much more than its customers; in a way that makes regular companies look like boy scouts...
Telegram did the same, btw.
/s
Fighting online piracy: First world, or even zeroth world problem.
It's not loke the pirates are saying "hmm, should I pay exorbitant rates for this or should I pirate it?"
The real competition is alternatives: "should I bother pirating this or just go do some other activity."
Bottom line: In most cases it's actually free marketing, and has a net positive effect for the copyright holders. The continual attempts to aggressively clamp down really says a lot about the mentality of the Big Market Forces, *iaa, *aa, and now MS and Elgoog. Even when it's good fertilizer for their perpetual evergreen money tree, they still flip out.