I have talked to some translators. I wanted to get Spanish subtitles on a few of our panels. It’s expensive, and I am still working out doing it for a couple of our most popular ones.
It’s also difficult for us to verify that the subtitles are accurate. I’ll have to run them through a google translate in reverse to make sure they aren’t fake or obscene.
From what I’ve heard about that potential Australian law, it is a rather complex issue, with both positive and negative aspects. On the one hand I do want to punish Google for basically stealing content and money from the journalists who do the hard work to create that content. On the other hand, the way in which the Australian law plans to do that does offer quite a few negative side effects, mostly due to representatives in government not understanding technology.
That being said, the video and petition are giving off some faint right-wing vibes with scaremongering about internet censorship and railing against the mainstream media.
That was my immediate impression too.
I should point out, not unjustified in our case, since we did have proposals that came within a hair’s breadth of becoming law, which would have meant mandatory internet filtering at the ISP and infrastructure level to ban sites that were either not classified, or refused classification, which would be then enforced on ISPs and citizens by the Federal police. And it came from our Left-wing party, not the Right.
We’re just a little touchy about even the suggestion of that type of internet regulation, because we came within a gnat’s dick of erecting the Great Firewall of Australia, and people tend to be very vocal about even the possibility of anything like that coming up again.
Ignore the Republican senators ranting about censorship. One very astute thing got pointed out at this panel that was obvious in retrospect.
Let’s say you have a newspaper. And you have a comments section on your articles. Google doesn’t like to let you put Google ads next to awful disgusting comments because advertisers don’t like being there. So you either have to not have comments, heavily moderate all comments, or put comments on a completely separate page with no advertisements. Otherwise, the Google ads that pay for you to eat will go away.
Meanwhile Google has YouTube with the world’s worst comments that they run ads next to no problem.
But there’s more. Here we see a situation where Google is holding newspapers responsible for content that is posted by their users. Meanwhile Google enjoys a legal policy that explicitly makes it not responsible, in the eyes of the law, for content posted on Google sites by its users.
Google hypocritically enforces a policy on others that it also argues should not be forced upon itself.
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RIP Google Trusted Contacts.
https://contacts.google.com/trustedcontacts/u/0/
Trusted contacts was an app that let you indicate certain people as very trusted and close contacts. It would allow sharing data with them and such, mostly them being able to see your recent location to find you. They have removed the app from the app stores and are killing it because they want you to just use the location sharing functionality of Google Maps.
I know people whose lives have been saved by this app. This is upsetting.
And then close it down 14 months later.
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Google VPN sounds like a great way for google to even better datamine the users who are via the use of VPNs harder for them to track/isolate/profile.
Actually a good call here. A better call would be to just end it permanently. It’s run its course.
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Google has completely revamped Google Pay. Seems like they are trying to go head to head with the Venmos of the world. As of right now the web app still seems to be the same. However on iOS they have two apps. “Google Pay” and “Google Pay (old app)” so you can still keep using the old one, for now.
EDIT: I tried to login to the new app, and was denied because I have an “enterprise” account, as it is with the FRC GSuite. The old app works, and has worked, for quite some time.
Yep this is definitely true for me.