Per the articles comments she takes the exact right approach to media owning “I don’t get involved”, hire good responsible editor, give enough resources to do even deep investigative stuff and leave journalists to do their job. Subscriptions follow from good credible journalism then.
Provide umbrella of “you can’t threaten the editor with firing or lawsuit”, since she won’t fire the editor and the company has enough resourcing to fight of law suits with good legal team.
Not like Mathias and Moritz Döpfner weren’t already a problem. So it isn’t much extra to add Thiel. The editorial line won’t change, since Döpfner have similar opinions to Thiel themselves.
Politicos problem isn’t Thiel investing in Axrl Springer media, it is them being part of Axel Springer media in the first place.
How can we actually use it?
We don’t.
I was being sarcastic.
The small problem of it not actually being intelligent and thus not being rationally reliable. Gonna fix it on the next release for sure. ;)
No bravery by James Blunt, so I can play it at endless loop at world leaders.
Statistical photography aka computational photography aka supersampling. Statistically bin together number of smaller pixels to cut the amount of noise to create picture of a lower resolution than sensor level, but better quality.
I would also add that isn’t empty talk like “Well he said it once, non biggie”. That statement by POTUS itself drove the national policy other countries. When POTUS says “other nations you are with us or are our enemies”, that matters.
That is a signal the reverberates around with “do we dare to anger USA on this one”. The Afghan war partisipants list is long and contains some not so obvious participants often doing rather small token participations. Which I think is exactly “Well we have to show we are with USA”.
For example here in Finland in the after action report of Finnish participation in Afghanistan tells the reason wasn’t building peace, it wasn’t even combat experience. It was “coalition and alliance building” aka showing USA “we are with them”.
In the after action study one of the interviewed decision makers literally directly quoted:
Yhdysvallat sanoi 9/11 jälkeen: olette joko meidän kanssa tai meitä vastaan.”
United States said after 9/11: You are either with us or against us.
Right above explaining how it was 20 year long very unpopular operation caused losses and achieved nothing in Afghanistan, but hey the Finnish NATO application will go through with flying colors.
The whole time the media blitz was about “Helping and building peace in Afghanistan”. When in reality we went in because USA publicly extorted pretty all of west to show colors.
This isn’t only in Finland in other European after action reports have shown similar “We went in, because Bush publicly demanded show of loyalty”.
Since he was an idiot and gave a no reservations or conditions bid for the company. At way overpriced at that. The existing biard and owners must have been fainting from shock and glee.
No one sane ever gives no reservations and conditions bid. That is insanely stupid thing to do.
Twitter didn’t make Elon buy Twitter. Elon did that to himself. Under normal bid, absolutely he could back out by arguing one of the conditions his lawyers would have put in.
Either his lawyers were highly incompetent, he didn’t use them or he ignored their advice that it would be highly unusual and monumentally stupid to issue such bid while waiving ones right to have terms and conditions included. Well negotiate in terms and conditions. Since obviously otherside might refuse to accept the buying contract, if they don’t like the terms and conditions.
In this case all the judge did was looked at the bid contract and went “Mister Musk, you signed bid to buy with no terms and conditions. So you have to honor the bid.”
It will at minimum be a fight. It won’t just sail through. Also whole governments being against means one of them might challenge the law in to European Court of Justice. Since as nation-states also often have, EU itself has charter of rights part in the fundamental EU treaties. It also has normal limit and share of powers. EU Council and Parliament aren’t all powerfull. ECJ can rule a directive or regulation to be against the core treaties like Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.
Said charter does include in it right to privacy (which explicitly mentions right to privacy in ones communications) and protection of personal data. Obviously none of these are absolute, but it means such wide tampering as making encryption illegal might very well be deemed to wide a breach of right to private communications.
Oh and those who might worry they wouldn’t dare at ECJ… ECJ has twice struck down the data protection agreement negotiated by EU with USA over “USA privacy laws are simply incompatible, no good enough assurances can be given by USA as long as USA has as powerful spying power laws as it has”. Each time against great consternation and frankly humiliating black eye to the Commission at the time.
ECJ doesn’t mess around and doesn’t really care their ruling being mighty politically inconvenient and/or expensive to EU or it’s memberstates. They are also known for their stance that privacy is a corner stone civil right (as stated in the charter and human rights conventions also, their legal basis) and take it very seriously as key part of democracy and protection of democracy. Without free and private communications and expression there can be no free political discussion, without free political discussion there can be no democracy.
As I remember at the moment partly Von Der Leyen, the current Commission president. She is a German Christian democrat and apparently bit with capital C. Meaning she has bit of a moral panic streak on her of the “won’t you think of the children” variety. As I understand this current proposal is very much driven by her.
However her driving it doesn’t mean it sail through to pass as legislation. Some whole memberstate governments are against the encryption busting idea.
Also I would add, not like this is unanimously supported in EU among memberstates. So this isn’t a done deal, this is a legislative proposal. Ofcourse everyone should activate and campaign on this, but its not like this is “Privacy activists vs all of EU and all the member state governments” situation. Some official government positions on this one are “this should not pass like it is, breaking the encryption is bad idea”.
Wouldn’t be first time EU commission proposal falls. Plus as you said ECJ would most likely rule it as being against the Charter of Rights of European Union as too wide breach of right to privacy.
Like the one recent CEO saying the quiet part aloud by saying government should promote higher unemployment, since in the high employment environment employees aren’t desperate and have more demands costing him money. That employees arent feeling enough pain and despair in economy.
Well PESCO did get created. Denmark dropped their opt out from CSDP. Stuff like this moves slowly, specially upon there not being single hegemonic leader saying “We do this” and everyone else answering “Yes boss”. EU is herding catch and it makes everything move slowly.
third option is he sets up some kind of foundation or trust arrangement and testaments his shares to that trust, which is then run by board of trustees as per trust charter. Usually meaning “well board of trustees is entrusted to see to the continued profitable management of the company by selecting suitable new management as comes necessary” combined with possible whatever extra instructions there is as to how to and underwhat principles the company is to be run.
Be it either private trust to benefit the descendants/described beneficiaries or a charitable trust with funds to be used for charitable causes.
Family trusts aren’t that unheard of to exactly avoid the splintering of the ownership and thus risk take over bit by bit.
At some point you really do just have enough money.
Well there is people to whom no amount of money is enough money. Not that it is at that point about, what you can do with that money. Rather by then the amount of money is a leader board and score board all to it’s own. The desire to be Forbes number 1 and then to be forbes number 1 with ever increasing lead to the number 2.
However all indications are, Gabe Newell isn’t one of those people. He would have had plenty of opportunities to cash out and then do some other business dealings to get ever bigger score card number. Don’t really know exactly what else it would tell of him or his character, but the one thing we can pretty confidently tell is “it seems he isn’t about just singularly amassing ever growing pile of wealth as large as possible”. He would have had plenty opportunity to enrich himself way more aggressively and he didn’t.
When Gabe Newell at some point leaves Valve, the company will change, no matter if it stays private or goes public.
Depends how that happens. Since frankly I think people think “the way Gabe Newell leaves ownership of Valve is by him eventually dying”. Since he has never shown any indication to sell. He has offered shares to employees as part of compensation packages, but as I understand even then he has controlling share.
So ofcourse the most simplest way is “Gabe dies and has done no special arrangement”… shares go to inheritance to his family. So his wife and children. Which might mean nothing changes or everything changes. Maybe he has given private last wishes, maybe not. However they get to decide. They might decide to keep the company as is. Since given they are inheritors of Gabes fortune, not like they would be immediately hurting for cash.
Second option is… Gabe does actual official arrangements. This isn’t unheard of in case of big private family or personal companies or holdings. For example he might put his shares in a foundation or trust with legally binding last wishes unlike non legally binding personal last wishes. Then what happens is whatever the trust charter is. Given example of say some European industrialist foundadtions like Bosch, instructions are left to run the company as commercial business by board of managers to best benefit of the company finances. However the one option the holders don’t have is “sell the company”, since the shares are hold up in the foundation/trust with instructions “never sell”. Company is to be run profitable enterprise as his and best ability of managers and then… the trust gets the profits and uses them for it’s purposes. It might be a private family trust, where upon the money is then shared to Gabes descendants, but don’t really have say in “we want to cash out, just lump sell our shares”. It could also be as in case of Bosch, that it is charitable foundation. After which all of the business profits of the Bosch conglomerate end up financing various charities, foundations, clinics and so on run by the Bosch stifftung.
It will change no doubt, since well Gabe isn’t there anymore with his personal personality and well each person has their own personality and influence. However it might not change as much as people think, if say his heirs decide to keep running the company based on same base ethos and principles as Gabe did.
That or everything might change. Two days after he dies, his estate sells Valve to Electronic Arts.
Well the thing is … yes Valve has shareholding investors… Only one that matter as far as anyone knows is Gabe Newell. Given it’s private corp, they don’t have to publicly tell what his exact ownership is and I think it is known it isn’t anymore 100% unlike at some point. However all “as far as we know” indications are, Gabe Newell maintains 50%+ controlling shareholding. Rest of the shareholders as people understand are employees and ex employees, who got private shares as part of compensation packages.
We don’t have actual look at the books, but Valve people have on multiple occasion said “Valve doesn’t have external investors”. Given it was public official comments by official people, I would think they wouldn’t lie about it. So there is no external VCs or share external investor investors.
Gabe pretty much has probably pretty universal control only limited by business regulation and maybe whatever clauses the corporate charter has. However since he was at one point sole owner, I doubt it contains anything too much curtailing him. Since the way any other people have gotten shares is by Gabe agreeing to give them or sell them to people in the first place.
As far as I understand at no point has Valve been cash strapped such as to need to ask for external investors. Since it is company founded by two early ex-Microsoft people who had made decently money at Microsoft already before Founding Valve. Gabe ended as sole owner as the other founding owner decided to leave the business and Gabe bought him out.
However I would note… France has rule about no crosses or cross wearing in schools. So it isn’t like Islam is being singled out. Well this specific rule is about them, but France has very wide rule of “no religious clothing, items or symbols” in school and they don’t much pick sides. Jewish kids… No kippas, Protestants and Catholics, no crosses, Muslims, no head scrafs, no face veils, no religious robes. Sikhs, no turbans.
So it isn’t xenophobic, since the local majority religion is also under rules of “no religious symbols wearing”.
What one can say is, that it is highly anti-religious. However that isn’t same thing as xenophobic or say specifically antisemitic or islamophobic. Islamophobic would be “Muslim girls aren’t allowed to wear scarfs, but it’s okay for catholic girls to wear crosses”.
French government “doesn’t like” the local traditional majority religion either.
One absolutely can argue about “is it too much restriction of religious liberty in general”, however one can’t argue “well but this is about jews or muslims”. It isn’t. This specific rule about abayas is mostly a technocratic decision based on wider political decision of “we have principle of no religious displays in school”. It was decided “oh yeah, we missed this one religious clothing wearing/display. Add it to the long list of specified banned religious displays of all kinds”.
I’m sure, if member of the church of the flying spaghetti monster tried to walk to French school with colander on their head, the courts would rule "no colander hats either, that is religious display also. You can go join the Jewish and Sikhs on the club house of “France banned our religious hat” club.
Seems like a huge headache with stolen/lost phones, wonder how they handle revokation…
Right maybe should have clarified that. The authentication is facilitated by the trusted middle party aka phone company.
When you log in using this service, you tell using service your phone number. Well their contacted authentication handler (usually one of the phone operators), they forward the request to your operator, who knows to forward it to the phone (as I understand as a network service SMS, like how operators settings updates also get send to the SIM and phone), this service message is handed by the phone cellular interface to the SIM. SIM applet notices “oh this is authentication request”. It displays the session ID of authentication (generated at the original authentication session and displayed there also) and then asks to enter security code to approve (or decline the request)
As such revocation is two fold. First your operator will list the certificate/key invalid. Secondly, since operator is handling the message passing anyway, they know to refuse to send the authentication requests in the first place to the compromised SIM. since as the SIM, that also defines where to send the requests. It is both the independent crypto validation, but also the cell network subscriber identity. Compromised sim stops getting any requests, since it is shutout from cellular connection. Can’t make calls, can’t send and receive texts, since the sim isn’t anymore tied to valid subscriber contact.
Plus with crypto system there is always the option of official public revocation server. Which kind of system is what the national ID smart card system uses. Anyone accepting identifying by those signatures gets told “the official key/certificate/revocation server is this one. Regularly check it for listed revocations by the root trust authority”
Is it April fools? please still be April’s fools, checks calendar, dammit, not April’s fools still. It’s actually news.