FileMakerFeller

rob53 said:

It's sad when a country can't come up with their own products and needs to degrade foreign-owned companies by restricting their use. Come on Australia, provide a competitor instead of trying to break up a good company. 

If you can't beat them, destroy them--is the motto of way too many countries.

How about, instead, we encourage the corporations to obey the laws of the countries they operate in? Especially when a lengthy and thorough analysis has been conducted showing

1. how the laws are being circumvented
2. how the social policies driving those laws are being affected
3. the potential long-term consequences of allowing the status quo to continue

Nothing about this is clear-cut, neither the government nor the corporations are acting selflessly, and nobody expects an optimal outcome. But at least in this case there has been work done to clearly identify the issues to be redressed, with long-term scope. That's worth respecting.

It sounds like Musk's admission that he doesn't have financing secured could be used by Twitter to declare that Musk has breached the conditions of the deal and should pay the penalty specified by the contract. I doubt Twitter's shareholders would be negatively affected by that.

DAalseth said:

Before we get all bent out of shape, let’s remember this is Bloom(a Chinese spy-chip in every server)berg. I wouldn’t trust them with a weather report if they had an open window next to them. 

Agreed, but this looks to be an opinion piece about possible strategic moves rather than an unsubstantiated (and un-retracted) story about a supposedly factual manufacturing issue.

entropys said:

badmonk said:

India seems more problematic than other countries in working with manufacturers…intrusive, meddlesome and way too bureaucratic.

It doesn’t matter the political or economic philosophy underpinning the organisation of government, it is the size. Let government do too. Many things, hand over too much responsibility to government, and you end up with all sorts of boondoggles, ear marking and overt oppression, even down to consumer choices, all designed to line the pockets of the political class and their friends.
let government  be responsible for too much, and you get Big Brother.

Let government be responsible for too little and you get incidents like the Union Carbide disaster in the 1980s, or this more recent one. It is a difficult and never-ending process to find the right balance. My own preference is to follow the path that leads to increased safety.

I think there's some confusion here over terminology. "Crypto" is now colloquially used to mean "cryptocurrency" rather than the original "cryptography."

Cryptography allows for the keeping of secrets by using mathematics to interpose a very hard problem between the information and those who wish to read it. There is a key which will more or less instantly solve the problem, allowing for secrets to be efficiently transferred between parties in plain view. This is what allows people to access their banking, medical, legal and other private information over the public internet with an acceptable level of risk.

Cryptocurrencies rely on cryptography to write transactions to a "distributed ledger" - multiple copies of the same document that get updated in near real time as soon as someone correctly guesses a very large random number and passes that key to the rest of the network. A certain number of transactions get written to this ledger after each successful guess, a calculation generates a number that represents the contents of the entire ledger (the "hash") and that number gets appended to the ledger, then the whole process starts again. It is computationally intensive work and since only the first correct guess is accepted there is a huge amount of wasted effort. But anyone can verify that the ledger has not been tampered with at any point, so as long as the majority of participants agree that all transactions are true the ledger (known as a "blockchain") is accepted as a valid representation of all transactions that have occurred. Note that this means a cabal of participants can set themselves up as a majority and thus determine "truth" for all participants.

NFTs are unique tokens that represent a transaction stored in the ledger. The terms of the transaction may be recorded in the ledger or, more commonly, as a separate document (that can, but is not necessarily, be hashed and included in the ledger entry). These terms optionally include details of access to some piece of digital media, and from my limited research it appears that rarely is "ownership" (in the colloquial sense) of that media included. Buying a NFT means asserting your identity as one of the parties to the transaction recorded in the ledger. That is all it gives, and while that is verifiably unique it's really hard to see it as valuable - any value is stored in the terms of the transaction; if the hash of those terms is not stored in the transaction (and remember, it doesn't have to be!) then it's just a promise from some random entity on the internet.

I believe NFTs started out as a workaround to the unchangeability of the blockchain. Once a transaction is written it cannot be modified without the permission of the majority of participants, which is hugely beneficial but sometimes a real pain. Abstracting a transaction into an entity in and of itself allows for a change to be made to the market reality without changing the original transaction, and since the change is itself another transaction recorded publicly the theoretical underpinnings of the system are upheld. Except, if another transaction is being written to the ledger anyway, why does anyone need this new process? My guess is that someone wanted to quickly solve a problem, didn't think through the consequences and their solution ended up being exploited.


As for Apple's policies... I fear this application of the company's power. In this case it's being used for a clear public good - cryptocurrencies, and especially NFTs, are just another mechanism for scammers to exploit the unwary. I don't believe the company is acting in accordance with its own rules, although I accept that's a matter of how you classify the transactions occurring within the app. If people are buying "virtual goods" then Apple's entitled to its commission, I just don't see how that's a logical description of what's happening. At the end of the day, it's the details of the argument rather than the nature of the participants that should be used to judge - and in this case I think Apple is in the wrong, even though in practical terms the outcome is an overall win for society.