> It has been pointed out to us that since we have our servers in the US, we are under US jurisdiction. We do not believe this to be the case. We do not have a legal presence in the US, no company incorporated in the US, no staff in the US, and no one in the US with login access to any servers located in the US. Even if a US court were to serve us with a court order, subpoena or other instruction to hand over user data, Australian communications and privacy law explicitly forbids us from doing so.
They can say what they like, and I am a customer, but in hand-wavey generalization terms one should be aware that Australian law enforcement has excessively broad access to telecommunications data on request and a long history of doing the bidding of the United States. Carriers are forced to retain your data for 2 years.
Under TIA Act provisions (such as s180), an authorised officer of a criminal law‑enforcement agency can authorise access to prospective telecommunications data [metadata only; not whole messages] if satisfied it is reasonably necessary for investigating an offence punishable by at least three years’ imprisonment. (In other words, ~any time they want)
Example: the data‑retention regime’s records were being accessed over 350,000 times a year by at least 87 different agencies, including non‑traditional bodies such as local councils and the RSPCA [pet cruelty nonprofit].
Given Australia's population is only 28M, that means roughly 1 in every 80 people gets communications metadata pulled by their own government annually.
Yep, I am a fastmail user, born and live in Oz. I just assumed that this data would be collected either on this side or via the US servers. Also, we are still a part of the 5 eyes alliance.
In addition to what the sibling comments say, this also puts Fastmail at risk of having their US based service suspended while they attempt to resist government overreach (were they to attempt to do so) which is really not a lot better for their users.
https://listenbrainz.org/ is an open source scrobbler, with the advantage that it leverages the musicbrainz database and connects listens to artist and track IDs instead of names, avoiding duplicate confusion. You can keep last.fm and submit to both of you like.
> Not sure how much difference this makes over the long run
I tune in all fourths as well. For me it has made a huge difference since I made the jump some years ago. Putting voicings, patterns, etc., into muscular memory is faster and a lot less work. For my purposes, it makes the instrument more intuitive with a better ear-hand connection. Even very advanced players trip on the G-B strings oddity (with things like playing a fast, angular melody on different string sets, without preparation, for example).
It's really nice to play a scale, come to the octave, slide, and keep on playing the same shape across the higher strings. It's made the fretboard feel a lot more transparent to me.
Actually most if not all of those verb endings are used colloquially (the most important exception would be the second person plural, which is only used in some regions of Portugal).
2nd person singular is also never really used correctly, and even 1st person plural is sometimes replaced by 3rd person singular e.g. "a gente vai" instead of "nós vamos"
> It has been pointed out to us that since we have our servers in the US, we are under US jurisdiction. We do not believe this to be the case. We do not have a legal presence in the US, no company incorporated in the US, no staff in the US, and no one in the US with login access to any servers located in the US. Even if a US court were to serve us with a court order, subpoena or other instruction to hand over user data, Australian communications and privacy law explicitly forbids us from doing so.
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