HN user
I thought The Guardian was against fascism, yet here they are pushing for corporations to act like the police. Or even more like the police, beyond keeping IP logs, message histories, transaction histories, and employing 15,000 workers to monitor their users.
It's also sad that pretty much any sort of defense is illegal in Toronto
Could you elaborate on this?
Does it in fact "rely" on it, or does that merely expand its scope? Even if its claims of what is "derivative" were diminished to exclude linking/API calls, the GPL would survive, albeit as slightly less viral.
Being mad about this is like being mad the thief who stole your belongings then pawned them. The crime was spying on you in the first place. Automakers should not have any data, to share or sell or give to law enforcement with a subpoena.
Yes it is a broad thing, and yes government and private censorship are not the same, but they are both censorship, at least according to the wikipedia and ACLU definitions [1,2].
And given the volume of posts censored and users banned by social media, where most public debate happens these days, most censorship is now by private companies.
Thank you for the clarification.
our censorship (if we're really going to call it that)
With the possible exception of spam filtering, yes, we should call it that. I'm sure I would agree with many of those censorship decisions, such as e.g. YCombinators decision to censor things harming intellectual curiosity, but just because we agree with some censorship, doesn't make it not censorship. It's important to keep language free of little lies like using milder terms when we want to present something in a better light, because these little lies add up and become habits of both speech and thought.
Title is misleading - users can pick additional filters, but can't opt out of any of Bluesky's own censorship without going to a third-party server entirely.
Charge $100 more for a ticket to get a slightly better sandwich, then claim the consumer chose the worse sandwich.
People are perhaps not so enthusiastic about giving away their countries just so multinational companies with no loyalty to them don't leave. On the other hand, China, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea all manage to have highly-successful tech industries (tech, not ads and social media) with near-zero immigration.
You can also create violent and copyrighted images in MS Paint. Why should our tools police us? And what is the alternative - teach AI to perform a fair-use test on any output that touches copyrighted material?
Will you move your whole social life with you
A small price compared to dying in war. I'm not saying it's the right choice, but if you have no attachment to your country and people beyond it being a comfortable place to live, that's the choice most will make.
Point taken. But what about in Germany over Canada? Or Italy? Or Spain, or Australia, or the US, or New Zealand, or UK, or Iceland, or Taiwan, or Japan or... there are lots of mostly free countries (so long as you don't engage in the growing category of hate-speech) one can run to, once freed from the concepts of homeland and nation.
cultivating the mentality that lying in the trenches for your country/culture/values might be necessary.
That would mean cultivating the mentality that a country is more than just an economic platform, because that's not something anyone is willing to die for. It means cultivating the dreaded nationalism.
There's other ways to find websites, like HN and word-of-mouth;
The problem is that, to get traffic to your site (i.e. have your speech heard), it doesn't help if you use these other ways to find websites. You need others to use these ways. And 99% of them won't. I'm all for advocating widespread change of these habits, but that's a society-wide effort, not something a single website can do, much less one de-listed by Google.
The mistake is they got caught. It will be more subtle next time.
Easy way to bypass the 4th amendment - force private business to pre-emptively surveil everyone.
hilarious because unlike the social media case, I dont think these faux pauxs have important real world consequences
Which is exactly why people mock this being referred to as "safety". Keep in mind the group mocking this PR bubble-wrapping of AI is largely opposed to the media professionals writing panicked editorials about how they were able to trick an AI into saying racism is good.
I have an idea - why doesn't Nevada install a bug on every minor's device, achieving the same effect, without Facebook's cooperation?
I know why! Because then the surveillance, privacy infringement, and gross overreach are obvious and in your face, and the culprit is clear! But they want to keep it discreet, like it's just a happy accident that you have no privacy left.
Putting aside how easy it is to compensate for this (e.g. report gunshots per area under surveillance), I'm curious how much crime estimates based on ShotSpotter or general policing differ from the frequency with which dead bodies are produced by an area. This latter measure mostly immune to overpolicing bias.
The way C handles pointers, for example, was a brilliant innovation;
How were pointers handled before?
Hilariously, legally, software seems to be unpatentable in both the US [1] and EU [2]. Yet those laws are routinely ignored, and we continue to be plagued by software patents.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_United_...?
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Eur... - The wiki states that because of the "as such" clause, the exclusion of software patents does not apply to software that does anything inventive or solves a technical problem. But those are already requirements of patentability for anything, software or not. In other words, this interpretation of "as such" renders that entire clause totally meaningless - it could be struck entirely from the law, and software would be no more or less patentable. Clearly such a reading is absurd, and only shows the willingness of courts to ignore law for business interests.
Let me describe exactly how you are defending them then, if you really think you aren't:
"this same expectation in the Apple ecosystem is why I've received single digit spam from their messaging services" implies it can be justified as an anti-spam measure that open services can't match. But I've received also single-digit spam (cumulative over multiple years, not per year) on the WhatsApp running on my rooted Android. Nor would this even hypothetically stop non-RCS spam.
In general, companies always have some convenient excuse to cover their user-hostile moves. HP bricked printers using 3rd party ink for "security". Uncritically believing them, or even inventing excuses for them, is defending them.
"if they don't want rooted phones to use their RCS gateway I don't think they should be forced to allow it" - so we've established these companies are actively hostile to your freedom to use your property as you wish. But you are willing to disregard any monopoly/market-power abuse concerns, and grant them the freedom that they deny you (you used "should", so I assume you're not giving a mere factual description of what you think the law is). Just like letting Bell charge extra for using competitor's equipment [1] has ill effects on the market (try selling a phone when all your customers will have to pay an extra monthly fee to Bell for using it) and was rightly banned, so does letting the Google/Apple duopoly control smartphone software. Saying they should be allowed to continue to abuse and expand their market power is a defense of these companies, or rather, is a defense specifically of their anti-competitive and user-hostile practices.
The difference between a "defense" that merely seeks to correct facts, and one that justifies behavior, can be subtle (e.g. "this is necessary to fight spam" vs. "this was done to fight spam" vs. "there was no other way to fight spam"), but I think your phrasing put you in the latter category.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System#Nationwide_monopol...
Edit as reply: "I think" and "I believe" do not meaningfully change your position. "I think action X is justified because of Y" and "Action X is justified because of Y" only differ in implied certainty, not in quality.
Sounds like anti-competitive fraud, or at the very minimum, false advertising.
Freedom to root/jailbreak one's phone
You don't actually have that freedom - the DMCAs anti-circumvention provision robbed you of the right to unlock your own property. You are merely permitted by the manufacturer to root them, and sometimes, for a 3-year period, the copyright office will let you do it too [1].
The company you are defending, and others like it, use every legal, contractual, technical, and economic means to restrict what you may do, so they can sell it back to you, and so they can control which companies can do it, stopping competition before it can even start. The recent ban on open-source HDMI drivers is another such example [2].
[1] https://www.eff.org/is-it-illegal-to-unlock-a-phone
[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hdmi-forum-to-amd-no...
But that's because they're doing business with banks that want to remain friendly with the US, not because they're doing business specifically in US dollars. If they got paid in Turkish liras, but through a bank under US influence, those liras would also get seized, wouldn't they?
On the other hand, if someone used a local bank in their country to transact with an entity in China, and China demanded their assets in that bank be seized because they defamed a revolutionary hero [1], I would expect that country to block that seizure, regardless of how the bank itself might feel. I.e. they would demand any seizures comply with their local laws, similar to how extraditions (are supposed to) work, and not let other countries essentially steal from their citizens. Or looking at it a bit different, a bank can't take from its customers on behalf of a foreign country, since locals laws, unless they explicitly allow that taking, would consider it theft.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-lawmaking-idUSKBN1H...
Edit as reply because "I'm posting too fast" (thanks HN for not telling when I can post again by the way):
Discussion about the US dollar misses the point. They do it because they can
I'd argue it doesn't miss the point, but rather, hides the true cause - that as you say, they do it because they can (as quickly becomes obvious when no other currency has this viral jurisdictional effect).
But I'm curious if anyone has ever tried suing their bank, in a non-US court, alleging that their seizure of their assets was illegal under local law. I can understand a bank rolling over for the US government, but it would be interesting to see if and how their legal system would justify it. Especially for something that is not a crime in their country.
How is "Because the NSO group handles dollars" related to "the court could order any assets the US can get their hands on seized"? Presumably, if they were getting paid in bars of gold, the US could seize those too, if they could get their hands on them, no?
On the other hand, if they were paid in US dollars, but in cash, that wouldn't establish jurisdiction, nor could it be seized, if the transfer happened outside US territory?
Is the alternative "as a company, we don't care what happens to you" any better?
I said "OSHA-like" - if the OSHA approach has not resulted in disregard of safety, why would it result in the disregard of discrimination and racism?
[Tesla] failed to protect [Black workers] from racism
Ironic that the police can't be sued for failing to protect people, but companies can. This legal quagmire of having to take ill-defined "reasonable" steps to preemptively prevent racism, and the chilling effect it has on behavior as companies avoid anything that might look bad, to avoid legal peril, could be prevented with clear rules and an OSHA-like agency that informs companies of any rules they're breaking and monitors correction.
But I suspect the chilling effects are a feature, not a bug.
Though they were relatively small in number that day, they’re part of a nationwide movement to eliminate voting technology and instead hand count every ballot — an option election administrators say is simply not feasible.
The election administrators are lying - most elections in the US were hand-counted until the 1970s or later [1], and France and many other countries hand-count to this day [2,3].
Last year, for example, one county in Arizona estimated that counting all 105,000 ballots from the 2020 election would require at least 245 people working every day, including holidays, for almost three weeks.
This works out to each worker taking 23 minutes to count a single vote.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_the_Unite...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/covid-health-france-elections-eur...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_by_country
the Justice Department had prohibited Apple and Google from discussing the technique.
A blatant 1st amendment violation.