masayoshis_son

It's difficult to imagine Huawei allowing themselves to be forced out of the lucrative international market for mobile devices, especially as they are bound to remain a strong player within China, where Google is irrelevant. Instead, they will now be more inclined to invest in freeing themselves from Google's stranglehold, and be more brazen about as they have not much to lose. In particular, I wonder will this affect Huawei's membership in the "Open Handset Alliance," [1] which (ironically and contrary to its name) is about constraining how its members can release Android devices in exchange for Google's blessing.

Other Chinese manufacturers also seem to have got the message and are pushing with initiatives like the "Global Developer Service Alliance," [2] an app distribution mechanism independent of the Play Store. Although it's too early to say if anything comes out of it this time (similar attemps have failed before), one way or another this will lead to more competition in the long run, which is a welcome development for all the users, regardless if they ever entertained the thought of purchasing a Huawei device.

Separately, the literal reading of Google's statement is also that side-loading Google Apps on top of AOSP or LineageOS should be expected to cease working anytime. So far they have been allowing a way out on a per-device, per-account basis, [3] so it's interesting to see whether they'll be willing to close that loophole now, although it seems to be hardly in Google's interest and contrary to the very purpose of Android.

1. http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/oha_members.html 2. https://www.gdsa.com/en 3. https://lineageos.org/Google-Play-Certification/

Good point. I somehow assumed EC citizens would be exempt from such laws but that doesn't necessarily seem to be the case even now [1], and must have been very different before the 1992 Maastricht treaty indeed.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizenship_of_the_European_Un...

It puzzles me why he never became a citizen. He moved to the UK in 1966, that's 54 years now, and it was even before they joined the EEC sometime in the 1970s.

Death rates will be lower than in Hubei if not a lot of people become infected at the same time elsewhere but is this really a safe assumption to make, given what we already know about the disease's high infectivity?

Since deaths are trailing the onset of symptoms by as much as 20 days, what we are seeing now are the outcomes of people who became sick in the end of January.

Even a death rate of "just" 1% (as you quoted) is still 10-20 times that of a particularly bad flu (0.1-0.2%), so by no means the two are equivalent.

Situation will become clearer as more data is available in the next couple of weeks but that is no reason to ignore what we know thus far. It's not about panic or overreaction but making an informed choice, for example for those of us who have scheduled travel to the region, and need to decide whether or not to postpone it.

These comments from Marc Lipsitch (Harvard epidemiologist) are quite informative: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1228373884027592704.html

The Big Mac Index is catchy but not particularly informative. I've found this crowdsourced comparison to provide much more insight: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/

Iosevka is actually a number of different fonts in one, depending on the variant chosen: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/be5invis/Iosevka/master/im...

The conclusions are of little informational value as the same is going to apply to practically any pathogen-borne disease (unless a vast group of the elderly had the chance to acquire prior immunity, as is the case with some strains of flu being similar to those from the past, in which case younger people are at a relative disadvantage).

What is more important to realize about the virus is that (1) a death rate of 2% (20 times that of flu) would still be considerable given its relatively high infectivity rate and long incubation period, and that (2) the fact that 20% of the cases require hospitalization would put a significant strain on even the best healthcare systems should it become widespread.

Separately, any data-based inferences are only as good as the underlying data, and there have been some doubts as to the completeness and veracity of data available. Even the WHO chief has effectively spoken to that effect.

That's what I've been thinking as well. Creating "shell companies" (aka "Special Purpose Entities/Vehicles") is not illegal per se.

Perhaps he violated the terms and conditions of his contract with ARIN and should have had the assignments cancelled but where does the criminality come in?

The writing is quite confusing in trying to explain things but the gist of it appears to be that the person in question (1) applied for IP addresses through numerous companies created just for this purpose in order to bypass ARIN's restriction on the number of addresses it was willing to allocate to a single entity, and (2) made the obtained IP address ranges available to serve as VPN endpoints, so that "huge amount of traffic—some of it illicit or criminal—passed through its computer servers but wasn't traceable to the true originators."

He did keep track though of which VPN operator used which range at any given time, so perhaps the "true originators" could be traceable after all, assuming the VPN owners were willing to co-operate. In any case, he is only being prosecuted for (1), and the immediate reason for this is that a couple of US politicians were hacked with attacks originating from these addresses.

>> You could just watch French TV [...]

> It’s still much tougher to come by that one might think.

You could try Arte: https://www.arte.tv/

It's a joint French-German project based on public TV programming from both countries, approximately half of the content is in French.

I only search YouTube with Google video search as YouTube's built-in search always seems to be delivering much less relevant results for me.

Google Search seems to ignore the user's preferred language choice from the HTTP Accept-Language header and (for a not logged-in user) default to whatever can be inferred from the IP address/location but at least this behavior can be overriden.

It's not a paywall, just poor design: if you're outside the US, you might get redirected to a local version of that website, where the page doesn't exist. The workaround is apparently to add ?IR=C to the URL.