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Adblock Plus Blocked From Attending Online Ad Industry's Big Annual Conference (arstechnica.co.uk)
An anonymous reader writes: Adblock Plus has been uninvited to the upcoming IAB Leadership Summit and is having its registration fee refunded. The company was informed of the cancellation in an email with little explanation. A company blog post reads in part: "Unfortunately, the top brass at the US IAB don't want us coming to their Leadership Summit next week in Palm Desert, California. We attended last year, and we signed up again for their 2016 meeting including paying the hefty entrance fee. We were fully confirmed and they even listed us on their website as a participant. Then this week we got one of those sudden emails that land in your inbox innocently, then floor you with something weird, unbelievable or ridiculous when you click on them. This one came from an unfamiliar IAB address, and it informed us that our registration for the summit was canceled and our fee refunded."
Yes, I would expect that the Nazi Party would disinvite the Anti-Defamation League.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Discussion within the open source community often isn't any better. It's routine to see people censored or banned merely for having the "wrong" point of view.
Go to Hacker News and say something that isn't glowingly positive about Rust or Firefox. Pointing out legitimate and real problems with those flawed products is a guaranteed way to get your account downmodded to death.
Go to the Ruby subreddit over at Reddit, and point out how Ruby's performance is kind of shitty. Or go to the Perl 6 subreddit, and ask why they haven't produced anything useful after 15 years of trying. Again, your account will suffer downmodding, and you may very well be banned from the subreddits in question.
Ask about using a non-systemd init system on the mailing lists of the major Linux distros that have switched to systemd. You'll probably be mislabeled a "troll" and banned.
Ask a question about computer programming over at Stack Overflow. Chances are some mod will come and rewrite your question to ask something you didn't have a question about, and another mod will rewrite any helpful answers to be unhelpful, if not outright wrong.
Open source projects and communities are just as willing to shut out anybody with a viewpoint or opinion that the project or community disagrees with. They're not inherently any better, and often are far worse.