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Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by analognoise on Tuesday May 01, 2018 @05:08PM (#16971665)
How is it moral for Amazon to shirk their fiduciary duty to shareholders for the sake of a political battle it isn't theirs to wage?

I counter it would be more immoral to put, say, the retirement funds of firefighters and teachers arty risk to achieve what is the responsibility of, say, the State Department?

Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by tanderson92 on Tuesday May 01, 2018 @05:16PM (#16971742)
There is no fiduciary duty to shareholders of a public company. This is known as the shareholder value myth -- myth because it is false.
Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by jessaustin on Tuesday May 01, 2018 @05:30PM (#16971881)
Yeah if this were the case the private jet market would crater.
Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by adventured on Tuesday May 01, 2018 @06:34PM (#16972358)
Berkshire Hathaway could have never existed if it were actually a legal requirement. For decades they've constantly passed on doing things that could have easily juiced shareholder value, including hostile actions in regards to takeovers. It's why nearly all of their acquisitions come to them instead: an extraordinary reputation.

Further, the fiduciary myth is silly as a premise upon any inspection: legally who gets to decide what's the one right ideal path for optimizing shareholder value, such that if you don't follow The One True Path then you're failing shareholders. Any other path than the single best one, would be inherently defined as failing the fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value (which is another way of saying: legally it's an impossible concept to implement; and logically it's stupid, it falls down instantly, no person could know the maximization path at all times). It doesn't pass even a minute of rational intellectual scrutiny.

Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by tanderson92 on Tuesday May 01, 2018 @07:53PM (#16972856)
Fiduciaries are allowed to differ in their advice and action taken in that role. I know what you're saying but it's a bit subtler than that.
Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by andrepd on Tuesday May 01, 2018 @10:28PM (#16973596)
To put it bluntly: fuck the shareholders. The question being asked shouldn't be "are the capital owners getting paid", but "is this company improving lives and delivering benefit". It's after all, what they're here for, not just to make money. No matter how much money I can make selling heroin, they're not gonna let me because, you guessed it, I'm doing damage by doing it.
Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by TeMPOraL on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @01:11AM (#16974214)
What about countless of other, not censored, services delivered from the same network? Do they not "improve lives" and "deliver benefit"? Collateral freedom is akin to placing your guerilla command center in a hospital, in a gamble that the other side will leave you alone instead of risking extra harm to innocent civilians. In this case, the hospital decided to disallow guerillas to use it as cover.
Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by nasredin on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @05:53AM (#16975429)
This is either the worst possible example or the best.

Russia BTW bombs civilian targets like hospitals and they killed their own bank sites when they tried to block Telegram recently.

Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by TeMPOraL on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @06:36AM (#16975633)
Which teaches you about effectiveness of "collateral freedom" against states that Just Don't Care.
Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by analognoise on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @10:21AM (#16977113)
This.

People don't realize doing stuff like this is just going to make lives worse once these regimes block Amazon/Google/whatever.

Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by Dylan16807 on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @07:10AM (#16975792)
In theory, in some case, it could be like that.

In this case it's just like being in a city. They're not trying to take advantage of any particularly sensitive institution.

Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by TeMPOraL on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @07:17AM (#16975826)
> They're not trying to take advantage of any particularly sensitive institution.

They are. Amazon. And previously, Google.

The worst-case consequence is not people losing access to Amazon store, but losing access to anything that's powered by Amazon cloud. People operating all kinds of services hosted on Amazon servers are the patients and hospital staff from my example.

Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by Dylan16807 on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @07:28AM (#16975885)
Amazon servers are an entire city. There is a vast gulf between the equivalent of "being in a city that has a hospital" and the equivalent of "locating a base inside a hospital".
Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by TeMPOraL on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @07:46AM (#16975996)
Then it's even worse, because the picture you're trying to paint implies that it's either leave guerillas alone, or nuke the entire city.

A ban of a cloud service affects everything else that depends on it. The more popular a service, the more damage. That's the point of "collateral freedom".

(Note the name of the term. It's no accident. It comes from "collateral damage".)

Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by Dylan16807 on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @07:49AM (#16976009)
Block the road, not nuke the city.

But if they were going to nuke the city? Fuck them, don't negotiate, it is absolutely not the fault of any group that is merely located somewhere inside the city.

Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by TeMPOraL on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @07:54AM (#16976050)
I feel we're talking past each other because of a spatial analogy.

My point is - by employing domain fronting against censorship, you bet that the adversary will not ban the service you're using as a front. But they very well might just do that. At this point, everyone else using the service suffers. So that service, by refusing to be used as a domain front, is not just protecting its own interest - it's protecting interests of all the others who depend on it. You, on the other hand, are unilaterally putting those other people at risk. This does not make you a hero, it makes you a villain (even if a lesser one).

Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by Dylan16807 on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @08:00AM (#16976093)
"Putting them at risk" not by doing anything to them, but by being near them.

The domain fronting could be set up in a way that doesn't spoof domains, and the risks would be exactly the same. The spoofing is a red herring. The issue is the mere idea that a censor would be unable to tell what domain a connection is for. The actual thing that puts people at risk is ridiculous to attack on a moral basis. It's the same as just existing in a crowd. Not grabbing someone to be your shield.

Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by zzzcpan on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @08:07AM (#16976128)
In other words it's Amazon and Google who are willingly help censors to avoid a bit of collateral damage during strikes.

It's like helping Assad to find targets where people with opposing views live.

Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by zzzcpan on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @07:59AM (#16976089)
The mistake here is that they are not guerrillas and are not hurting anyone. It's censors that do. It's collateral damage only from the point of view of censors.
Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by stale2002 on Tuesday May 01, 2018 @07:56PM (#16972872)
I don't know, was it moral for IBM to work with the Nazis to build their concentration camp databases? (yes, this happened)

I mean, that made the shareholders money, right?

Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by nasredin on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @06:02AM (#16975466)
They sold them mechanical calculators (?) IIRC.

"Databases" is maybe not the right word?

Not a historian.

Re:Amazon threatens to suspend Signal's AWS account over cen... by computerfriend on Wednesday May 02, 2018 @07:54AM (#16976049)
It was their punchcard technology, which is more akin to databases than calculators.