As I understand things, the ship was boarded by a variety of authorities from various countries. But the Chinese government would only let Swedish police board the ship, not Swedish prosecutors. The Chinese may have let other Swedish authorities board the ship, but if so those authorities have no crime-fighting function.

Although I live in Sweden, I have no particular interest in this matter, and have not read any more about it than the headlines in newspapers. I may therefore be wrong.

If this applies to all manufacturers of communications equipment, I can't see how Indonesia would avoid collapsing back to the stone age, communication wise. If this law applies to eg Samsung also (I see no reason to believe it doesn't) then also Samsung devices would be made illegal, unless Samsung can find some way of making 40% of the phone in Indonesia. Soon no modern communication devices would be legal, because no manufacturer can find a reasonable way to make 40% of the devices in Indonesia. So the only thing remaining is to use paper and pencil, but would that be legal if all the pens/pencils and paper are made outside Indonesia?

On another level, what would happen if all countries applied similar standards? Either the only countries that would have some modern communication devices would be the very large economies, and none other, or all countries would have their "own" version of everything, in which the required share of components/whatever are made locally. But they would only sell in very small numbers, because they would be prohibitively expensive....

When Sweden filed a European Arrest Warrant (ie wanted him kicked out of the UK into Sweden) against JA it was so he could be questioned by Swedish police in Sweden. He was never expected, at that time, to appear in court.

JA offered the Swedish police to question him in the UK. This is apparently something the Swedish police have done before, enough that there are established routines to follow. What makes this case surprising is that the Swedish police (or possibly the prosecutor) insisted that JA return to Sweden for questioning.

"He was accused of rape in Sweden.": true.

"They could not prosecute him because he fled the country before he could be charged.": not quite true.

My memory of the events is that JS was first accused of rape, by having two supposed victims talk to the police about this. The police committed a grave mistake (by Swedish standards) when they questioned the supposed victims over the phone: the rules are very clear that rape victims are to be interviewed at the police station and the interview is to be recorded.

For some reason, when the charges against JA were brought up, the prosecutor thought it wise to inform JA by holding a press conference, so that JA found out about the charges by reading/hearing about them in the news.

JA was then taken into police custody (voluntarily or otherwise, I can't remember). He was then questioned, and let go. Between one and ten days later (my memory of the timeline is fading), JAs Swedish lawyer asked the police if he was free to leave the country. The lawyer was told that JA was free to leave the country, since the charges had been withdrawn.

JA then travelled to the UK. By this time, another prosecutor had decided to reopen the case. A very interesting detail here is that this new prosecutor (who has the initials MN) belongs the the same political party as one of JAs supposed victims. When this new prosecutor reopened the case, she wanted JA questioned a second time. JA was willing to be interrogated either by the British police, in the presence of Swedish police, or over internet. Neither option was acceptable to the Swedish prosecutor, for reasons that have either never been made public or that I have forgotten.

JA refused to return to Sweden, citing the possibility he would be extradited to the USA.

I can't see this timeline as JA "fleeing" anything in Sweden: he has given the Swedish authorities the possibility of questioning him, but for some reason they wanted to question him in Sweden, nowhere else would do.



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Apparently questioning a suspect when the suspect is in another country is not uncommon, although the proceedings are complicated by the fact that the "host" country is the one asking the questions, even if the questions are decided upon by the country wanting to question the suspect. The second Swedish prosecutor refused this, for whatever reason she had.

I may be wrong, but as I understand matters, China considers anyone born to a Chinese parent to be a Chinese citizen. Thus, if either of your parents are Chinese, so are you.


And apparently China also refuses to let people resign their Chinese citizenship, so in time everybody on the planet will be Chinese...

I would guess that the appeal of Spotify is that you only have to stream the audio, not the video as well. If you have a data cap on your internet/mobile plan this could be significant for you. Personally, I prefer using my library of mp3's that I have built up over the years: it requires no internet connection at all, and the songs on it can't be revoked. What little music I do stream I stream from Youtube, since I don't have any data caps to worry about.

I tend to completely disregard any kind of anti-piracy messages, no matter what the message says.

It's not that I feel entitled to whatever it is I am pirating, it's that sometimes it's the only way to go: I wouldn't mind paying a reasonable amount of money for the things I want, but a vast majority of it is simply not available in any format other than pirated files! Being a man who now is over 50 years old, I find most of today's music boring, and I wouldn't buy it for any price. But I listen to a lot of music from the time span between the 1960's and the 1990's. From time to time I try finding it to buy, but I mostly fail. It is so bad that I have almost given up on most of it. And if the copyright owners are not making their product (music, film or other) available on the market, I don't feel bad if I pirate it.



And to make matters worse, in Sweden (where I live) there is a fee imposed on _all_ forms of digital media storage, to compensate for what little legal copying takes place: if I buy a legitimate copy of a CD I am allowed to make a small number of copies for friends. So there is a fee on blank CDs. But the same fee also applies to:
- USB memory sticks
- hard disk drives
- SSD drives
- SD cards
- CF cards
- recordable DVDs
- mobile phones

You might notice that some of these items (mostly SD and CF cards) are rather unlikely to be used to copy music. In my specific case, all my digital camers have used CF cards to store the pictures on. So when I buy any CF card to use it for my own photography, I have to pay a fee to composers, musicians, artists and others for copying that doesn't happen. If I have to pay money to composers, musicians, artists and others in order to take photographs, I don't feel bad at all for pirating their work.

And the same applies when I make back-up copies of my own work: I have to pay money to composers, musicians, artists and others in order to buy disk drives to store _my own_ work on...

Unfortunately, I think circumventing any law like that would be extremely simple: stop selling the licence you want to revoke six months before you revoke it. Then, when the time comes to revoke the licence, you can claim that the licence has no value, because it is not being sold any more.

I live in Sweden, so I might have a bit more insight in the subject than others.

Firstly, unions in Sweden hold much more power than they seem to do in other countries. The reason for this is simple: most of the unions live in a symbiotic relationship with the Social democratic party. And this party has been in power for well over half the time since the 1920's. The unions (both each individual union and the Trade Union Central) give money to the Social democratic party, and in return the unions get the laws they want. It benefits both sides of the unionparty symbiosis. But rarely (if ever) benefits anybody outside this symbiosis.

Secondly, I am not sure that this particular conflict is about the actual terms of employment of the workers. Very often the unions in Sweden will go on strike (or use some other weapon) just to force companies to sign a collective bargaining agreement, even if _all_ the affected employees are against it. For the union, it is often simply a power move: they hold power over a company and can use that power some time in the future. There may be an economic aspect to it as well, in that the union may be able to extract money from companies that sign collective bargaining agreements.

My attitude is that whether you are using Excel as a database or to do maths on many numbers, Excel is not the right tool. I don't think it was ever meant to be used as a database, those functions were added because people were using it as a database. But that doesn't make it a good choice for database work. As for number-crunching it is not the right tool for another reason: you are mixing the data to be crunched with the instructions on how to crunch the numbers. I don't think that is a good solution.

That's pretty much my stance as well: I don't need more than the car radio to entertain me if it has a Bluetooth connection to my mobile phone. That way I can keep a library of good music on my phone and play it through the car radio when I am on the road. And the few times I use Google maps to find my way somewhere, the voice instructions also come over the car radio, with the music turned off temporarily.

As an added bonus, any phone calls happen over the car radio as well, and I don't have to touch the phone at all.

Dihydrogen monoxide is a dangerous chemical, you don't even have to inhale it: stick your head into a bucket of the stuff, and within 10 minutes you will have permanent brain damage, and after 20 minutes you will be dead!

Anybody concerned about the chemical can read more about it here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdhmo.org%2Ffacts.html

When companies grow large enough, they have offices in very many countries. These countries then have something to say about the things said companies do. And if they grow large enough, the companies can have an influence on countries they don't have offices in. These countries would likely want to have something to say when said companies do something.

Sometimes the exact traffic is not as important as the sites visited, and that is harder to hide from any ISP-equipment. The obvious non-political thing would be when an internet connection that has never before visited the website of an abortion clinic (or several abortion clinics) starts doing just that. And if you can get a list of all websites visited by this particular user (or at least by someone using the same connection) you may be able to start drawing far more conclusions, potentially learning things about the person/-s that that person would rather have private.

And then there is also something called SNDL: Store Now, Decrypt Later. If you can work out which ISP customers are high-value targets (high-ranking politicians, military staff and so on), you might be able to make yourself a complete copy of all of their internet traffic. You may not be able to decrypt any of it today, but you could choose to keep it just in case quantum computers can take care of the decryption for you, some time in the near future. And if not quantum computers, then some other discovery/invention that could help in decrypting the data you have stored about the person.

Since it is an app on your phone, it could (at least potentially) get access to everything on your phone.

I have neither installed not used the TikTik app, but I assume it asks for various permissions while getting installed. If these permissions are used for legitimate purposes, the app should not be a threat. But if the permissions are used for nefarious purposes, the app is a problem, the severity of which depends on whose phone it is installed on.

To complicate matters, TikTok is a Chinese company (or at least the owners are), which makes it subject to the whims of the CCP, who have previously made it obvious that they will stop at nothing to get what they want (eg the Tian nan men massacre). If I were some high-ranking official in any organisation, I would assume that the CCP will want to eavesdrop on me: they might not get anything useful, but why miss the possibility?