it would take a major extermination event to 'destroy all humans'.
We ARE in the middle of a major extermination event. But I'm pretty sure we'll live through it as a species though.
To destroy all humans, it just needs one guy to launch an attack that causes retaliation. One of a very narrow group of guys, but they all seem to be batshit crazy to some extent.
a truly 'open-source' internet would be packet travel over wi-fi without ever hitting telco infrastructure
That's not the definition of open-source, but I get what you're saying. I think you mean "indie" or distributed.
how far could one relay a packet from their own wi-fi router just bouncing from wifi network to wifi network? Starting in NYC as an example, how far could one daisy-chain WAN jumping? To New Jersey? Florida? California (lol)?
Assuming everyone all ran the same friendly software on their cell phones and wifi routers, you could get to the edge of town. You would be stopped once you hit a rural environment. In NYC, that would include Jersey, but not Florida.
And yeah, it's slow and laggy with minimal throughput. But it's pretty awesome in a pinch. But of course not everyone would play along. MANETS aren't really a replacement for Internet infrastructure, but they're really interesting for that last-mile. If you have enough people that let neighbors mooch off your land-line or cell service, I think it'd be a viable.
I understand the concern. That we'll lose vital information about a real-world real-time test environment lasting billions of years and the origins of life and abiogenesis are hella interesting and we want to study pristine environments prior to fucking shit up and making a mess.
But once a place is established as being sterile, can we please make an effort to establish an ecosystem off-world? We're one crazy motherfucker away from a civilization ending event, possibly a human-extinction event, and we might not get another chance to spread life across the solar system. And we ARE currently in another mass extinction event. We, collectively, as in all known life-forms. It's like banking a backup. Roaches on Earth might one day evolve another race that can launch rockets, but if there's TWO or more sets of roaches, the odds of building up a civilization are that much better. How about a dead man's switch? Send up a sealed box of dormant extreamophiles wrapped in thermite. If we don't send a signal or recover it in 100 years, it opens up.
And what is it going to take to convince people that a planet is sterile? There's no lush jungles around the canals on Mars and there's no moon-men eating cheese. At what point is it fair game to try and seed planets?
Old news and it's not PGP and S/MIME, but the mail clients that can use them: Thunderbird and Apple Mail and Outlook. Probably also affects clients using GPG. Or any other encryption scheme.
PGP is not broken. GPG is not broken. S/MIME is not broken. The flaw is in how mail clients display email. Admittedly, a lot of them have the same issue.
Wow, you've really got a hate-boner for anyone standing next to hackers.
How many of these anonymous coward posts are yours?
Today it might just be changing grades, tomorrow might be stealing bitcoins.
Pft, the slippery slope argument? Really?
And is that path MORE or LESS likely to happen if felonies are actually pushed onto this kid?
If it's a serious crime, we send those people to jail. You know, FELONS. If he spends time around criminals, I guarentee you he'll learn things and network with narfarious people. Prison is a great place to learn the trade. Think of it like a criminal convention. Unless you put them all in solitary, but that's torture. So he comes out of prison, or if he simply has felony charges stick to him and he's now a ex-convicted felon for the rest of this life.... now what? What's he going to do with his life? What are his options? In theory, after he's rehabilitated, he's a model citizen. And yet we never forget about felons, and it's always a checkbox on hiring forms.
He should be punished, and I think we agree he shouldn't face jail time, but I'd say he doesn't need to be a felon and to that extent I don't think he should be convicted of the felonies brought against him. And considering this is going to juvie, he probably won't. Unless the prosecutor was sure that's how it would go down, charging him with 14 felonies was an overreaction.
Yep, that's a pretty shitty scientific-journalism article. Go isn't solved, AI players now beat human players. Throwing out a definition of "navigation" like anyone doesn't know what it is. Claiming we know how brains navigate. And I really almost missed the link to the ACTUAL paper at the bottom.
But the paper? The paper doesn't jump out as immediate shit. For example, apparently we DO know how mammalian brains navigate:
[AI fails] to rival the proficiency of mammalian spatial behaviour, which is underpinned by grid cells in the entorhinal cortex (Hafting, T., Fyhn, M., Molden, S., Moser, M.-B. & Moser, E. I. Microstructure of a spatial map in the entorhinal cortex. Nature 436, 801–806 (2005).)
huh.
And then these people tried to mimic that. "Here we set out to leverage the computational functions of grid cells to develop a deep reinforcement learning agent with mammal-like navigational abilities". It's not that AI developed this, the researchers specifically developed AI to have it. The research is real. It's kinda interesting. It's nothing ground-breaking (and actually seems kinda.... college-student level... but I dunno) but is another incremental improvement in the field of study.
The fuckwit journalist who butchered it (that's DIANA GITIG - 5/11/2018, 5:15 AM btw) needs to stop with the hype bullshit. It diminishes arstechnica as a trash rag that can't even report on pop science.
8 hours work, 8 hours recreation, 8 hours rest. My grandfather bled for this so Mr. Project Manager can go fuck himself for his overtime. May they have a better time than we did with our labor-owner relations. The pinkertons, the homestead strike, the Colorado Labor Wars, company script, blacklists, strikebreakers, infiltrators, massacre. Least we forget.
So first off, yeah, overall this is a good thing. I don't think the kid deserved to be charged at all and it was a case of grossly mishandling private information, what little there was. The FOIA content itself really ought to be public anyway.
But this is a real kick in the pants for the rule of law. It's "high profile", so the cops won't touch it? It means you really need to go to the press and get people angry about issues and get them to mail officials. Bitching and moaning and mob rule is the new rule. Old rule? Have we regressed to criminality being determined by popularity? On the other hand, a lot of tech laws are shit. So in that sense, the undermining of the rule of law is a good thing.
Just another shade in the eternal endless grey that is tech-legal.
No, it actually is a pretty specific letter to Moxie, the guy who makes Signal, because they read his post explaining how he was going to thwart repressive regimes. They literally mailed him by name:
Subject: Notification of potential account suspension regarding AWS Service Terms
Moxie,
Yesterday, AWS became aware of your Github and Hacker News/ycombinator posts describing how Signal plans to make its traffic look like traffic from another site, (popularly known as “domain fronting”) by using a domain owned by Amazon —Souq.com. You do not have permission from Amazon to use Souq.com for any purpose. Any use of Souq.com or any other domain to masquerade as another entity without express permission of the domain owner is in clear violation of the AWS Service Terms (Amazon CloudFront, Sec. 2.1: “You must own or have all necessary rights to use any domain name or SSL certificate that you use in conjunction with Amazon CloudFront”). It is also a violation of our Acceptable Use Policy by falsifying the origin of traffic and the unauthorized use of a domain.
We are happy for you to use AWS Services, but you must comply with our Service Terms. We will immediately suspend your use of CloudFront if you use third-party domains without their permission to masquerade as that third party.
So while that sounded like a good defense of Amazon, you're just bullshitting from the cuff without knowing what you're talking about. Hey, I get it. You're debating and arguing for your side. But the situation isn't like you think. Amazon trying to shut them down, for profit, is not fine.
You’re claiming that a complete layoff will raise value
COULD raise value. And more precisly to the point that the argument "The company should do X, to raise value" could be used to JUSTIFY said bat-shit-crazy-idiotic plan that has no basis in reality. AND THAT IS BULLSHIT. You are AGREEING with me that this is bullshit, and that help support my point: "When the scope of possible actions that can be justified by "I was doing it for the shareholders" is THAT broad, it's a meaningless statement. Simply bullshit." If you ever hear anyone claim that they HAD to do something "because we're compelled to make profit" it's is UTTER BULLSHIT.
Domain fronting is just as useful to malware authors,
Yes. Agreed. AND it's useful to people thwarting tyrannical fascist government. But Amazon didn't send letters to I_R_MALWARE inc. it sent it to the people making Signal.
Facebook can shut these things down for a number of reasons.
But what was the impact? Did the people use it? Did they like it? What did they use it for? Has anyone simply asked these people their thoughts and views of the program?
I know actually talking to the poor people of Myanmar isn't the most popular thing. But it'd be insightful and... hey, it'd be easy... if they had Internet access....
I'd also like to know how much it cost, how much Facebook got paid in advertising, and what all they gained from it. Apparently not enough, but come on, if this is a social experiement, turn it into social SCIENCE by publishing the results.
Your argument has zero basis in reality. Firing all the employees doesn’t provide value to shareholders,
It literally stops the company from spending cash. If income keeps coming in, that would result in more profit, and larger dividends. You know, if the company does that. Companies quite often get a stock bump when they have layoffs. This is.... business 101. Come on. It's also an extreme. Of course the company would then fold. Really crash and burn. Duh. It's an example of the COMPLETE BULLSHIT that can be justified via the "I'm compelled to maximize profits" line. If you balked at that, YES THAT IS MY POINT!
But hey, in some scenarios, yeah, firing everyone and closing up shop IS INDEED the best course of action. For society and for the owners. If you didn't consider this scenario either... then business really isn't for you.
oh, and... sorry. I should have said "The CEO of google or any shareholder could argue for X therefore maximizing value to the shareholders." The person using the argument doesn't really matter. The argument is bullshit.
I'm "demanding they do my bidding".... in exchange for my money. They need to stop being dicks or they'll lose me as a customer. If you're saying I've no right to choose where I shop, then who is the tyrant? (And I don't have any amazon stock)
Hold up... If you despite Amazon so much, why are you defending them as being powerless to help thwart dictators when they're specifically performing an action which aids said dictators?
Evelyn Beatrice Hall, paraphrasing Voltaire, "I might not agree with what you have to say but I will defend, to the death, your right to say it".
You know? I've never really been part of a group where the morally right thing to do is the minority opinion. I've been in groups of assholes before, sure, but I was always an outsider. Republicans have a bunch of shitty views, but they at least have an argument about why they're good ideas. They might even be right about some of them. I hung out with some racists, but it was a small group and they had internalized that they couldn't openly talk about it. This though? There's a whole movement of... "punch the NAZIs and silence them". People here with little green dots are saying some... really bullshit crap. Slashdot, reddit, acadamia, I just kind of expected these places to be a little more... enlightened.
unlimited free speech
I'm no extreamist. We had a problem with lynch mobs and calls to violence is tantamount to organizing a murder. That's wrong and trying to do so should land you in jail. Likewise, inciting panic can do real harm. (But this bullshit about equating hurt feelings with physical harm is a joke). And I'm down with limitiations and compulsions when it comes to commercial speech. Advertisiments. If you're paid to say it, you can't blatently lie. I wish politicians would charge lobbyists with lying to them under some truth in advertising law. And there are plenty of places where people just don't want to hear it and will throw you out. Noise ordinances in residental areas, businesses kicking people out, you can't just say whatever you want at my kids birthday party.
Arguing for unlimited free speech is like arguing for free gasoline and matches for everyone
Except for the part where giving people gasoline and matches cost money while RESTRICTING free speech costs money.
SUPRESSING free speech is like compressing those explosives and wrapping them in shrapnel.
"Free speech" is just a hypocritical cover.
Yeah, I imagine all those NAZIs would support censorship, suppression, and having a bunch of brownshirtspunch-up anyone trying to step out of line the moment it benefited them. Hypocrites through and through. Because they're assholes, morally corrupt, and generally evil people. And I do not agree with what they have to say. Suppressing free speech is an evil thing to do that tears apart society. It's morally bankrupt and right up their alley. Now... consider for a moment that you're acting like a NAZI....
Oh, the ol' "I'm legally compelled to be an asshole in the name of profits" argument. Ha. Sure.
Ok, the CEO of google could fire EVERYBODY eliminate all that cost, maximizing cash on hand therefore maximizing value to the shareholders.
He could take on a massive loan and hire a shit-ton of scientists to do basic research that will probably never pay out and if it did would take decades to capitalize on but would give them a cutting edge therefore maximizing value to the shareholders.
He could piss away a bunch of money on hookers and blow telling the shareholders to piss the fuck off because he's been maximizing value to the shareholders.
He could dodge as many taxes as possible in the most blatent of illegal ways as that brings in more money to the company therefore maximizing value to the shareholders.
He could pay every single penny of every questionable bullshit tax and fee and even overpay just to cover edge cases so that there was zero liability and risk of retaliation therefore maximizing value to the shareholders.
And everything in between.
When the scope of possible actions that can be justified by "I was doing it for the shareholders" is THAT broad, it's a meaningless statement. Simply bullshit.
Cloud provider’s goal is to connect to the most customers in the most markets and the most countries possible, while turning the highest profits possible. They can do neither when a government orders all traffic to them blocked.The internet isn’t magic sauce; it’s a telecom network that crosses national borders — and can be cut off at them.
But AMAZON isn't getting blocked. They're specifically TOO BIG TO BLOCK. Not without pissing off their citizens and shifting their country back towards an undeveloped mess. Amazon is going out of their way to stop letting a little guy hide behind them. An asshole move in my opinion.
And doing that for profit reinforces the idea that Amazon is a souless megacorporation that's bad for society and reminds me I need to start shopping elsewhere. Is that maximixzing value to shareholders in the long run?
Seriously, what is an internet retailer supposed to do?
Simply..... NOT make this change? Keep operating as they were before? Continue supporting the means by which Signal bypassed the bans of these dictators. You know what DOES bring down dictators? Dissidents and uprisings. Signal is a tool to protect these dissidents and taking steps to thwart it is tantamount to supporting fascism. Power to the people and all that.
More like Amazon and Google are yielding to pressure from Egypt, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) (or from one of their friends) that don't like when people bypass their bans, which itself is pretty fascist when they dictate how you can use the Internet.
What makes something fascist? I don't know anymore. It used to be relatively simple.
Yeah, I get that. Some asshat called me a fascist and assumed I agreed with NAZIs because I had the audacity to defend free speech. But that sort of hyperbole has always been around. It's bullshit and has always been bullshit. It's a cheap and easy low-effort insult by pseudo intellectuals who can't stop their rage-boner against Hitler. Tribalism through and through. They simply hate the other side enough to hate anyone near them as well.
There's a bunch of little things that taste like fascism, but I think it boils down to trying control what people do. If they're free to make their own decisions without being forced, compelled, threatened, or encouraged than it's not fascist. And yeah, that's a sliding scale. If China instituted fines for muslims instead of outright confiscating their prayer mats that'd be a step away from fascism... but it's still pretty fascist. If NY added a sugary-drink-tax to try and make people be less fat... that's a little fascist.
A handful of shitty countries are trying to control how people use the Internet. That's fascist. They're pressuring these companies (or their political allies, like the USA govt) to put a stop to the workaround. These companies are yielding, or helping out, probably just because it helps make them a buck as well. That's aiding fascists.
Maybe that's reading into it though. Maybe they really just want to control the internet a little more and make it a little more regulated (which WILL help them profit). That's a slight amount of... controlling others. Forcing Internet services to have a more truthful identification. Imagine if slashdot suddenly forced you to stop using "GLMDesigns" or being an anonymous coward and enforced "real names only". In the name of stopping shitposting. That's control. Regulation. And it's a little fascist.
Amazon and Google are banning probably to improve their tracking and their own bottom line. Fine.
Why is that fine? You've already established that there are legitimate uses for this. A corporations putting an end to this for their own profit.... is not fine.
Can we have some balance in reporting and mention the dark underbelly of domain fronting?
Oh sure. I get that. Call it like it is "Domain spoofing".
But this? "Signal used the system to provide service in Egypt, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where it's officially banned. It got around filters by making traffic appear to come from a huge platform, since countries weren't willing to ban the entirety of a site like Google to shut down Signal." This is a legitimate good use-case. Power to the people and all that noise.
I'm not so great at identifying this sort of gag, so help me out here.
neither cis nor hetero people are oppressed enough for the terms to be damaging.
I mean... that's got to be a joke. Right?
It's straight-up victim worshiping. "Only people belonging to an oppressed group are allowed to consider themselves insulted. If you're not oppressed, you can't be damaged."
If they tell you they're in a marginalized group.... Even if they ARE in that marginalized group... Isn't that the definition of "Playing the race card"?
(Although, this whole issue might be restricted to.... weird stack exchange sites. Apparently there's an "interpersonal skills" site? Yeah, they keep making new ones. Maybe this shit comes up more there? Oh, but no, the article is specifically talking about Stack Overflow. shrug)
If there's complaints about identity politics on a site where none of those identities are known, I'd almost call that a baseline for perfect. As in, a percentage of people ARE delusional and have some victim-hood complex and if you do a thing and X% complain, you have to compare that against the percentage of people who will complain about anything. It's a small percentage hopefully. Hey man, some people have gone through some shit and it affects them. You don't know their history. But I'd be interested in seeing the demographic breakdown of who is complaining about this stuff. It says a lot more about society than it does about stack overflow....And yeah, if 100% of some demographic always complains about being marginalized, no matter what, it makes those complaints meaningless. That sucks.
executive vice president of culture and experience at Stack Overflow
uh huh. Man that sounds like a bullshit title. Well, as a primarily crowdsourcing site, that's actually right up Stack Overflow's alley. But... they made a position for this? They literally hired a guy to say these words. What else do you think he was going to say? You know how business people talk a lot about "best practices", ie, doing what everyone else does? "reaching out" is the current established best practice.
[SO is a] hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders
Yeah, I'd have to agree in part. It comes from being down in the trenches on the front line of customer service. And that's what it is, don't bullshit yourself. You're working a help-desk, for free, for magical internet points. And you're damn right I covet those magical points. I lie awake at night scheming how to get more. Respect and acknowledgement of my peers is right up there on Maslow's heirarchy of needs. Anyway, dealing with clueless idiots who don't even know how to ask a question about what they don't know is a pain in the ass and the typical stance is going to be "too broad, closed", and when they do ask a decent question about why they're fucking it up, it's going to be "don't do it that way, do it this way" and they're not going to like it. It's hard being ignorant. You have to work at fixing that. But there really should be a constant reminder to the contributors of SO that... you know... go easy on the idiots. You were an idiot when you started too.
women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups
Full stop. WHAT? How exactly does that happen when the grand sum of identiy on SO is a username? Sweet jesus, no one even KNOWS if you're a woman, person of color, from a marginalized group, or a fucking DOG. Unless you tell them. In which case you've made an effort to play the race card, marginalized card, dog card. And that's a dick move. Because it shouldn't fucking MATTER.
. . . Wait, through this entire thing he never comments on just exactly HOW this would be happening. Just "they report it as such".....damn dude, if anything that's a rough sociology lesson that... certain groups complain more than others.
"Now, that's not because most Stack Overflow contributors are hostile jerks. The majority of them are generous and kind. Sure, a few are... just generous, I guess?
Bingo. He nailed that one. You know how people get PAID to work help-desk and put up with people's bullshit? You're not doing that here. You are depended upon people's generosity. You just kinda have to hope they're not assholes. Because you're not paying them to not be assholes. You want to enforce kindness? Fuck you, pay me.
where it’s practically impossible to find a single slur – our community takes them down in minutes. We don’t tolerate our female users being called “sweetie” or getting hit on. But we weren’t listening. Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us.
hmmm, he's repeated that a lot. Remember that, just because they tell you something doesn't mean it always reflects reality. There are people out there that will ALWAYS comment that they feel marginalized because they have a victum complex. Not many. But anything as big as SO will attract the long-tail of crazy. At this scale you have to look at percentages as a sociological construct. Assuming the rate of batshit insane in society is 3%, if less than 3% of the user-base are complaining about something, hey, you're beating the curve, congrats.
Users aren’t “too lazy” to search; searching takes less work than posting. (No solution suggested, he's just stating it makes him sad)
Haha, wut? Dude, no, you don't get it. Some people SUCK at readi
Slashdot Mirror
it would take a major extermination event to 'destroy all humans'.
We ARE in the middle of a major extermination event. But I'm pretty sure we'll live through it as a species though.
To destroy all humans, it just needs one guy to launch an attack that causes retaliation. One of a very narrow group of guys, but they all seem to be batshit crazy to some extent.
Sure, but "US" in this case includes all the animals, insects, plants, and fungus.
If your red dots swirls for more than 200 years, consult a cosmologist.
Multi-hop Mobil ad-hoc networks. Like BATMAN or Netsukuku.
a truly 'open-source' internet would be packet travel over wi-fi without ever hitting telco infrastructure
That's not the definition of open-source, but I get what you're saying. I think you mean "indie" or distributed.
how far could one relay a packet from their own wi-fi router just bouncing from wifi network to wifi network? Starting in NYC as an example, how far could one daisy-chain WAN jumping? To New Jersey? Florida? California (lol)?
Assuming everyone all ran the same friendly software on their cell phones and wifi routers, you could get to the edge of town. You would be stopped once you hit a rural environment. In NYC, that would include Jersey, but not Florida.
And yeah, it's slow and laggy with minimal throughput. But it's pretty awesome in a pinch. But of course not everyone would play along. MANETS aren't really a replacement for Internet infrastructure, but they're really interesting for that last-mile. If you have enough people that let neighbors mooch off your land-line or cell service, I think it'd be a viable.
I get plenty of outdoor air breathing in all those wonderful car exhaust fumes on the way home from work.
I understand the concern. That we'll lose vital information about a real-world real-time test environment lasting billions of years and the origins of life and abiogenesis are hella interesting and we want to study pristine environments prior to fucking shit up and making a mess.
But once a place is established as being sterile, can we please make an effort to establish an ecosystem off-world? We're one crazy motherfucker away from a civilization ending event, possibly a human-extinction event, and we might not get another chance to spread life across the solar system. And we ARE currently in another mass extinction event. We, collectively, as in all known life-forms. It's like banking a backup. Roaches on Earth might one day evolve another race that can launch rockets, but if there's TWO or more sets of roaches, the odds of building up a civilization are that much better. How about a dead man's switch? Send up a sealed box of dormant extreamophiles wrapped in thermite. If we don't send a signal or recover it in 100 years, it opens up.
And what is it going to take to convince people that a planet is sterile? There's no lush jungles around the canals on Mars and there's no moon-men eating cheese. At what point is it fair game to try and seed planets?
People rarely think about the long-term goals.
Old news and it's not PGP and S/MIME, but the mail clients that can use them: Thunderbird and Apple Mail and Outlook. Probably also affects clients using GPG. Or any other encryption scheme.
PGP is not broken. GPG is not broken. S/MIME is not broken. The flaw is in how mail clients display email. Admittedly, a lot of them have the same issue.
Wow, you've really got a hate-boner for anyone standing next to hackers.
How many of these anonymous coward posts are yours?
Today it might just be changing grades, tomorrow might be stealing bitcoins.
Pft, the slippery slope argument? Really?
And is that path MORE or LESS likely to happen if felonies are actually pushed onto this kid?
If it's a serious crime, we send those people to jail. You know, FELONS. If he spends time around criminals, I guarentee you he'll learn things and network with narfarious people. Prison is a great place to learn the trade. Think of it like a criminal convention. Unless you put them all in solitary, but that's torture. So he comes out of prison, or if he simply has felony charges stick to him and he's now a ex-convicted felon for the rest of this life.... now what? What's he going to do with his life? What are his options? In theory, after he's rehabilitated, he's a model citizen. And yet we never forget about felons, and it's always a checkbox on hiring forms.
He should be punished, and I think we agree he shouldn't face jail time, but I'd say he doesn't need to be a felon and to that extent I don't think he should be convicted of the felonies brought against him. And considering this is going to juvie, he probably won't. Unless the prosecutor was sure that's how it would go down, charging him with 14 felonies was an overreaction.
Yep, that's a pretty shitty scientific-journalism article. Go isn't solved, AI players now beat human players. Throwing out a definition of "navigation" like anyone doesn't know what it is. Claiming we know how brains navigate. And I really almost missed the link to the ACTUAL paper at the bottom.
But the paper? The paper doesn't jump out as immediate shit. For example, apparently we DO know how mammalian brains navigate:
[AI fails] to rival the proficiency of mammalian spatial behaviour, which is underpinned by grid cells in the entorhinal cortex (Hafting, T., Fyhn, M., Molden, S., Moser, M.-B. & Moser, E. I. Microstructure of a spatial map in the entorhinal cortex. Nature 436, 801–806 (2005).)
huh.
And then these people tried to mimic that. "Here we set out to leverage the computational functions of grid cells to develop a deep reinforcement learning agent with mammal-like navigational abilities". It's not that AI developed this, the researchers specifically developed AI to have it. The research is real. It's kinda interesting. It's nothing ground-breaking (and actually seems kinda.... college-student level... but I dunno) but is another incremental improvement in the field of study.
The fuckwit journalist who butchered it (that's DIANA GITIG - 5/11/2018, 5:15 AM btw) needs to stop with the hype bullshit. It diminishes arstechnica as a trash rag that can't even report on pop science.
8 hours work, 8 hours recreation, 8 hours rest. My grandfather bled for this so Mr. Project Manager can go fuck himself for his overtime. May they have a better time than we did with our labor-owner relations. The pinkertons, the homestead strike, the Colorado Labor Wars, company script, blacklists, strikebreakers, infiltrators, massacre. Least we forget.
So first off, yeah, overall this is a good thing. I don't think the kid deserved to be charged at all and it was a case of grossly mishandling private information, what little there was. The FOIA content itself really ought to be public anyway.
But this is a real kick in the pants for the rule of law. It's "high profile", so the cops won't touch it? It means you really need to go to the press and get people angry about issues and get them to mail officials. Bitching and moaning and mob rule is the new rule. Old rule? Have we regressed to criminality being determined by popularity? On the other hand, a lot of tech laws are shit. So in that sense, the undermining of the rule of law is a good thing.
Just another shade in the eternal endless grey that is tech-legal.
No, it actually is a pretty specific letter to Moxie, the guy who makes Signal, because they read his post explaining how he was going to thwart repressive regimes. They literally mailed him by name:
Subject: Notification of potential account suspension regarding AWS Service Terms
Moxie,
Yesterday, AWS became aware of your Github and Hacker News/ycombinator posts describing how Signal plans to make its traffic look like traffic from another site, (popularly known as “domain fronting”) by using a domain owned by Amazon —Souq.com. You do not have permission from Amazon to use Souq.com for any purpose. Any use of Souq.com or any other domain to masquerade as another entity without express permission of the domain owner is in clear violation of the AWS Service Terms (Amazon CloudFront, Sec. 2.1: “You must own or have all necessary rights to use any domain name or SSL certificate that you use in conjunction with Amazon CloudFront”). It is also a violation of our Acceptable Use Policy by falsifying the origin of traffic and the unauthorized use of a domain.
We are happy for you to use AWS Services, but you must comply with our Service Terms. We will immediately suspend your use of CloudFront if you use third-party domains without their permission to masquerade as that third party.
So while that sounded like a good defense of Amazon, you're just bullshitting from the cuff without knowing what you're talking about. Hey, I get it. You're debating and arguing for your side. But the situation isn't like you think. Amazon trying to shut them down, for profit, is not fine.
You’re claiming that a complete layoff will raise value
COULD raise value. And more precisly to the point that the argument "The company should do X, to raise value" could be used to JUSTIFY said bat-shit-crazy-idiotic plan that has no basis in reality. AND THAT IS BULLSHIT. You are AGREEING with me that this is bullshit, and that help support my point: "When the scope of possible actions that can be justified by "I was doing it for the shareholders" is THAT broad, it's a meaningless statement. Simply bullshit." If you ever hear anyone claim that they HAD to do something "because we're compelled to make profit" it's is UTTER BULLSHIT.
Domain fronting is just as useful to malware authors,
Yes. Agreed. AND it's useful to people thwarting tyrannical fascist government. But Amazon didn't send letters to I_R_MALWARE inc. it sent it to the people making Signal.
Facebook can shut these things down for a number of reasons.
But what was the impact? Did the people use it? Did they like it? What did they use it for? Has anyone simply asked these people their thoughts and views of the program?
I know actually talking to the poor people of Myanmar isn't the most popular thing. But it'd be insightful and... hey, it'd be easy... if they had Internet access....
I'd also like to know how much it cost, how much Facebook got paid in advertising, and what all they gained from it. Apparently not enough, but come on, if this is a social experiement, turn it into social SCIENCE by publishing the results.
Your argument has zero basis in reality. Firing all the employees doesn’t provide value to shareholders,
It literally stops the company from spending cash. If income keeps coming in, that would result in more profit, and larger dividends. You know, if the company does that. Companies quite often get a stock bump when they have layoffs. This is.... business 101. Come on. It's also an extreme. Of course the company would then fold. Really crash and burn. Duh. It's an example of the COMPLETE BULLSHIT that can be justified via the "I'm compelled to maximize profits" line. If you balked at that, YES THAT IS MY POINT!
But hey, in some scenarios, yeah, firing everyone and closing up shop IS INDEED the best course of action. For society and for the owners. If you didn't consider this scenario either... then business really isn't for you.
oh, and... sorry. I should have said "The CEO of google or any shareholder could argue for X therefore maximizing value to the shareholders." The person using the argument doesn't really matter. The argument is bullshit.
I'm "demanding they do my bidding".... in exchange for my money. They need to stop being dicks or they'll lose me as a customer. If you're saying I've no right to choose where I shop, then who is the tyrant? (And I don't have any amazon stock)
Hold up... If you despite Amazon so much, why are you defending them as being powerless to help thwart dictators when they're specifically performing an action which aids said dictators?
Evelyn Beatrice Hall, paraphrasing Voltaire, "I might not agree with what you have to say but I will defend, to the death, your right to say it".
You know? I've never really been part of a group where the morally right thing to do is the minority opinion. I've been in groups of assholes before, sure, but I was always an outsider. Republicans have a bunch of shitty views, but they at least have an argument about why they're good ideas. They might even be right about some of them. I hung out with some racists, but it was a small group and they had internalized that they couldn't openly talk about it. This though? There's a whole movement of... "punch the NAZIs and silence them". People here with little green dots are saying some... really bullshit crap. Slashdot, reddit, acadamia, I just kind of expected these places to be a little more... enlightened.
unlimited free speech
I'm no extreamist. We had a problem with lynch mobs and calls to violence is tantamount to organizing a murder. That's wrong and trying to do so should land you in jail. Likewise, inciting panic can do real harm. (But this bullshit about equating hurt feelings with physical harm is a joke). And I'm down with limitiations and compulsions when it comes to commercial speech. Advertisiments. If you're paid to say it, you can't blatently lie. I wish politicians would charge lobbyists with lying to them under some truth in advertising law. And there are plenty of places where people just don't want to hear it and will throw you out. Noise ordinances in residental areas, businesses kicking people out, you can't just say whatever you want at my kids birthday party.
Arguing for unlimited free speech is like arguing for free gasoline and matches for everyone
Except for the part where giving people gasoline and matches cost money while RESTRICTING free speech costs money.
SUPRESSING free speech is like compressing those explosives and wrapping them in shrapnel.
"Free speech" is just a hypocritical cover.
Yeah, I imagine all those NAZIs would support censorship, suppression, and having a bunch of brownshirts punch-up anyone trying to step out of line the moment it benefited them. Hypocrites through and through. Because they're assholes, morally corrupt, and generally evil people. And I do not agree with what they have to say. Suppressing free speech is an evil thing to do that tears apart society. It's morally bankrupt and right up their alley. Now... consider for a moment that you're acting like a NAZI....
Oh, the ol' "I'm legally compelled to be an asshole in the name of profits" argument. Ha. Sure.
Ok, the CEO of google could fire EVERYBODY eliminate all that cost, maximizing cash on hand therefore maximizing value to the shareholders.
He could take on a massive loan and hire a shit-ton of scientists to do basic research that will probably never pay out and if it did would take decades to capitalize on but would give them a cutting edge therefore maximizing value to the shareholders.
He could piss away a bunch of money on hookers and blow telling the shareholders to piss the fuck off because he's been maximizing value to the shareholders.
He could dodge as many taxes as possible in the most blatent of illegal ways as that brings in more money to the company therefore maximizing value to the shareholders.
He could pay every single penny of every questionable bullshit tax and fee and even overpay just to cover edge cases so that there was zero liability and risk of retaliation therefore maximizing value to the shareholders.
And everything in between.
When the scope of possible actions that can be justified by "I was doing it for the shareholders" is THAT broad, it's a meaningless statement. Simply bullshit.
Cloud provider’s goal is to connect to the most customers in the most markets and the most countries possible, while turning the highest profits possible. They can do neither when a government orders all traffic to them blocked.The internet isn’t magic sauce; it’s a telecom network that crosses national borders — and can be cut off at them.
But AMAZON isn't getting blocked. They're specifically TOO BIG TO BLOCK. Not without pissing off their citizens and shifting their country back towards an undeveloped mess. Amazon is going out of their way to stop letting a little guy hide behind them. An asshole move in my opinion.
And doing that for profit reinforces the idea that Amazon is a souless megacorporation that's bad for society and reminds me I need to start shopping elsewhere. Is that maximixzing value to shareholders in the long run?
Seriously, what is an internet retailer supposed to do?
Simply..... NOT make this change? Keep operating as they were before? Continue supporting the means by which Signal bypassed the bans of these dictators. You know what DOES bring down dictators? Dissidents and uprisings. Signal is a tool to protect these dissidents and taking steps to thwart it is tantamount to supporting fascism. Power to the people and all that.
I use Brave or Firefox, use DuckDuckGo unitl and unless I'm forced to go to Google. I've reduced my use of gmail. (Using protonmail)
DuckDuckGo sounds good, but MAAAAAN does it's founder have a history. I use startpage or "Ixquick". You know, until it fails me.
How's protonmail been treating you?
More like Amazon and Google are yielding to pressure from Egypt, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) (or from one of their friends) that don't like when people bypass their bans, which itself is pretty fascist when they dictate how you can use the Internet.
What makes something fascist? I don't know anymore. It used to be relatively simple.
Yeah, I get that. Some asshat called me a fascist and assumed I agreed with NAZIs because I had the audacity to defend free speech. But that sort of hyperbole has always been around. It's bullshit and has always been bullshit. It's a cheap and easy low-effort insult by pseudo intellectuals who can't stop their rage-boner against Hitler. Tribalism through and through. They simply hate the other side enough to hate anyone near them as well.
There's a bunch of little things that taste like fascism, but I think it boils down to trying control what people do. If they're free to make their own decisions without being forced, compelled, threatened, or encouraged than it's not fascist. And yeah, that's a sliding scale. If China instituted fines for muslims instead of outright confiscating their prayer mats that'd be a step away from fascism... but it's still pretty fascist. If NY added a sugary-drink-tax to try and make people be less fat... that's a little fascist.
A handful of shitty countries are trying to control how people use the Internet. That's fascist. They're pressuring these companies (or their political allies, like the USA govt) to put a stop to the workaround. These companies are yielding, or helping out, probably just because it helps make them a buck as well. That's aiding fascists.
Maybe that's reading into it though. Maybe they really just want to control the internet a little more and make it a little more regulated (which WILL help them profit). That's a slight amount of... controlling others. Forcing Internet services to have a more truthful identification. Imagine if slashdot suddenly forced you to stop using "GLMDesigns" or being an anonymous coward and enforced "real names only". In the name of stopping shitposting. That's control. Regulation. And it's a little fascist.
So, what the fuk is fascism.
Authority enforcing unity through the threat of capital punishment. "Do things our way and conform or we'll chop you down to size".
Amazon and Google are banning probably to improve their tracking and their own bottom line. Fine.
Why is that fine? You've already established that there are legitimate uses for this. A corporations putting an end to this for their own profit.... is not fine.
Can we have some balance in reporting and mention the dark underbelly of domain fronting?
Oh sure. I get that. Call it like it is "Domain spoofing".
But this? "Signal used the system to provide service in Egypt, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where it's officially banned. It got around filters by making traffic appear to come from a huge platform, since countries weren't willing to ban the entirety of a site like Google to shut down Signal." This is a legitimate good use-case. Power to the people and all that noise.
This is a joke account right?
I'm not so great at identifying this sort of gag, so help me out here.
neither cis nor hetero people are oppressed enough for the terms to be damaging.
I mean... that's got to be a joke. Right?
It's straight-up victim worshiping. "Only people belonging to an oppressed group are allowed to consider themselves insulted. If you're not oppressed, you can't be damaged."
Read the article, Paul is specifically talking about Stack Overflow, not stack exchange or any of the newer sites.
If they tell you they're in a marginalized group.... Even if they ARE in that marginalized group... Isn't that the definition of "Playing the race card"?
(Although, this whole issue might be restricted to.... weird stack exchange sites. Apparently there's an "interpersonal skills" site? Yeah, they keep making new ones. Maybe this shit comes up more there? Oh, but no, the article is specifically talking about Stack Overflow. shrug)
If there's complaints about identity politics on a site where none of those identities are known, I'd almost call that a baseline for perfect. As in, a percentage of people ARE delusional and have some victim-hood complex and if you do a thing and X% complain, you have to compare that against the percentage of people who will complain about anything. It's a small percentage hopefully. Hey man, some people have gone through some shit and it affects them. You don't know their history. But I'd be interested in seeing the demographic breakdown of who is complaining about this stuff. It says a lot more about society than it does about stack overflow. ...And yeah, if 100% of some demographic always complains about being marginalized, no matter what, it makes those complaints meaningless. That sucks.
executive vice president of culture and experience at Stack Overflow
uh huh. Man that sounds like a bullshit title. Well, as a primarily crowdsourcing site, that's actually right up Stack Overflow's alley. But... they made a position for this? They literally hired a guy to say these words. What else do you think he was going to say? You know how business people talk a lot about "best practices", ie, doing what everyone else does? "reaching out" is the current established best practice.
[SO is a] hostile or elitist place, especially newer coders
Yeah, I'd have to agree in part. It comes from being down in the trenches on the front line of customer service. And that's what it is, don't bullshit yourself. You're working a help-desk, for free, for magical internet points. And you're damn right I covet those magical points. I lie awake at night scheming how to get more. Respect and acknowledgement of my peers is right up there on Maslow's heirarchy of needs. Anyway, dealing with clueless idiots who don't even know how to ask a question about what they don't know is a pain in the ass and the typical stance is going to be "too broad, closed", and when they do ask a decent question about why they're fucking it up, it's going to be "don't do it that way, do it this way" and they're not going to like it. It's hard being ignorant. You have to work at fixing that. But there really should be a constant reminder to the contributors of SO that... you know... go easy on the idiots. You were an idiot when you started too.
women, people of color, and others in marginalized groups
Full stop. WHAT? How exactly does that happen when the grand sum of identiy on SO is a username? Sweet jesus, no one even KNOWS if you're a woman, person of color, from a marginalized group, or a fucking DOG. Unless you tell them. In which case you've made an effort to play the race card, marginalized card, dog card. And that's a dick move. Because it shouldn't fucking MATTER.
. . . Wait, through this entire thing he never comments on just exactly HOW this would be happening. Just "they report it as such". ....damn dude, if anything that's a rough sociology lesson that... certain groups complain more than others.
"Now, that's not because most Stack Overflow contributors are hostile jerks. The majority of them are generous and kind. Sure, a few are... just generous, I guess?
Bingo. He nailed that one. You know how people get PAID to work help-desk and put up with people's bullshit? You're not doing that here. You are depended upon people's generosity. You just kinda have to hope they're not assholes. Because you're not paying them to not be assholes. You want to enforce kindness? Fuck you, pay me.
where it’s practically impossible to find a single slur – our community takes them down in minutes. We don’t tolerate our female users being called “sweetie” or getting hit on. But we weren’t listening. Many people, especially those in marginalized groups do feel less welcome. We know because they tell us.
hmmm, he's repeated that a lot. Remember that, just because they tell you something doesn't mean it always reflects reality. There are people out there that will ALWAYS comment that they feel marginalized because they have a victum complex. Not many. But anything as big as SO will attract the long-tail of crazy. At this scale you have to look at percentages as a sociological construct. Assuming the rate of batshit insane in society is 3%, if less than 3% of the user-base are complaining about something, hey, you're beating the curve, congrats.
Users aren’t “too lazy” to search; searching takes less work than posting. (No solution suggested, he's just stating it makes him sad)
Haha, wut? Dude, no, you don't get it. Some people SUCK at readi