This is not a question of a foreign country being different. This is a question of a foreign company forcing us to slowly give up the very things we consider to make us human -- our freedoms -- in exchange for a couple extra bucks. The fact that companies are willing to do it is pathetic. And I'm glad that people are finally waking up to this.
Hong Kong is literally protesting to have the right to a trail by jury! How anyone in The West could not take their side is baffling to me. I wish I was a gamer so I could boycott Blizzard. But I am a basketball player, and I'll make sure to tell everyone I can to boycott the NBA until they make this right.
The protesters are not wrong. The CCP is antithetical to our way of life in The West. Apologist companies to The CCP -- in my view -- are a direct threat to my freedom as a human being.
“We are strongly dissatisfied and we oppose Silver’s claim to support Morey’s right of free expression. We believe that any speech that challenges national sovereignty and social stability is not within the scope of freedom of speech,” CCTV said in its statement in Chinese, which was translated by CNBC“
This is not just wrong, it’s so wrong it’s not even remotely compatible with how we define freedom. To see this in writing is just disturbing and sad that after all these decades of lip service on moderation and opening up and being a global participant, China is basically no different than it was under Mao.
But, yes, something fucky is going on with their account management system, which is actively blocking people from disabling their accounts (via blocking account verification attempts, I believe).
This is very much not true. For one, there's rampant consumer capitalism, very little social net, no tens of millions starving to death, and something like 10-100x more personal income.
I don't know if you have family that grew up under Mao or not that you can go check with, but, this is a really, really false statement to make.
I'm not saying it's all peachy now, just that it is a far cry from Mao.
I do agree that CCP's statement there about freedom of speech is ridiculous to say about something spoken in the US.
Is this a list of four different differences? Under Mao, when tens of millions of people starved to death, how much of a social net was there?
Under Mao, despite an ostensibly strong social net, many still starved to death. I intentionally listed those two together because Mao time was not so great for many.
If you look at free speech in Europe for example, in eg Germany there are laws against hate speech or defamation of individual people (quite differentiated, an opinion is ok and true facts are ok, but invented facts are not). One of the targets is Nazi propaganda, and in general the support is good.
Still, the goal is similar, social stability, peace and protection of minorities. People do not get disappeared, but they do get sued.
Let’s not act as if that’s an unimaginable term.
Despite the kind of hand-wringing about this that folks such as yourself routinely engage in over this subject, German society has somehow managed to survive and thrive despite this relatively minor limitation on their freedom of speech. They even have some hateful racist shitbags gaining seats in the Bundestag.
Most countries: Has a fairly clear legal definition of hate speech, in statute or precedent.
The judge explicitly asked his defence to explore freedom of expression. He chose not to. The rest of his "defence" was laughable and easily disproved lies. The judge pointed out his failure to explore freedom of expression in his summing up. Short of using neon, how much more clearly could the judge have telegraphed it? The conviction was therefore on pure technical breach of the law with no mitigation.
Markus Meechan was left looking like a complete moron who threw away his opportunity of defence. In addition to being a bottom feeding racist. Oh, and a scammer as he crowdsourced a load of money for the defence he didn't bother offering.
> In addition to being a bottom feeding racist.
It surely was a dog whistle all along. A pug whistle to be exact. I am not sure what to say to this.
> a load of money
deserved in my opinion and he is not the one looking like an idiot coming out of this story.
Admittedly, some jokes live only from the reaction.
Reading the judgement took my opinion from surprise at an apparently ridiculous verdict, to one that was entirely fitting.
>> a load of money > deserved in my opinion
For what? A defence he did not use after encouragement?
I watched the actual video in question, and with regards to the judgement, I disagree that it was menacing, anti-semitic, or racist.
The video, if anything, is anti-racist and anti-anti-semitic. It's certainly not threatening to anyone of reasonable mind, unless one considers the pug to be a danger to the Jewish community.
It's not painting Nazi atrocities as a positive thing, it's making clear that it's literally the most horrendous thing possible.
The judge takes issue with some things having a different impact when part of a joke.
>"You accepted that the phrase “* the *” was anti-Semitic though not, you said, when used as part of a joke."
It isn't anti-Semitic in context. Did you watch the video?
He had a defence. He chose not to use it, despite the judge explicitly encouraging him to. So after the judge points to the exit, he faces the other way and sulks.
He deserved conviction. Except we're not nearly done.
(From memory) His tale of the joke intended solely for his girlfriend was completely shredded as a pack of lies in court. His girlfriend didn't even subscribe to his channel, or know of his joke. The judge had a better awareness of how Youtube worked than the guy with the channel. In context the "private joke" was for mass distribution and nothing to do with his girlfriend.
Now he deserves prosecution for perjury. Moronic and obvious perjury, but perjury nonetheless. So bad I was laughing while reading the judgement. I think perjury carries the lengthier maximum sentence. We're still not done.
> It isn't anti-Semitic in context. Did you watch the video?
[Yes I did. The judge very clearly states the conviction is on the simple breach of the law. Context and mitigating circumstance is irrelevant as Meecham chose not to use the freedom of expression defence. Thus "in-context" does not matter at all.
So forget the pug. Forget the joke, the context, the way he made it totally not funny unless you're seven. It's obviously anti-semitic, but not especially harmful. Meecham accepts it's anti-semitic. It's not threatening compared to a march with dozens of thugs chanting the exact same phrases, into the faces of actual people. The law must cater for both ends of the threat scale being videoed and distributed. Clearly it is reasonable for there to be some offence, and some chance of mitigation for the lesser or technical breaches and parody or humour.
Repeating a phrase he accepts as racist, over and over, to clips of Hitler, jews and for some reason Buddha (IIRC, it's been a while), is clearly anti-semitic in context. Clearly it's not threatening on the scale of possibility of people using the same phrase and actions in a different context. Just a feeble joke, but accepted as anti-semitic by Meecham in court nonetheless. Still, he's not on trial for how funny he is or isn't either.
This is all 99.9% pointless discussion. None of this section is relevant as it's mitigation that the defendant chose not to use. Were he not a complete moron he would have most likely been reasonably acquitted for freedom of expression.]
He was offered an out by the judge in the context of the legal system. Then ignored it.
Reading the full judgement warmed my heart and restored a little faith in British justice.
OK, he's a moron as well as a convicted criminal, and clearly shown to be a perjurer. End of. I wonder what happened to the thousands he crowdsourced for his defence, but no-defence-offered really.
Is that the judgment? If so, when you say "He had a defence. He chose not to use it, despite the judge explicitly encouraging him to", are you referring to this part?
> I should note that although I invited both legal representatives to make legal submissions during the trial about the law on freedom of expression, that was done only to a very limited extent. In the absence of focused submissions on that topic by either the Crown or the defence, all I can say is that, while that right is very important, in all modern democratic countries the law necessarily places some limits on that right.
The next paragraph is relevant to the context, as he makes clear that in the absence of those explorations, the conviction rests solely on the narrow fact of whether the law was breached or not. i.e. without any mitigation taken into account:
“This trial, unusual though some aspects have been, was therefore concerned, ultimately, only with the narrow fact-based question of whether the Crown has proved beyond reasonable doubt that your using a public communications network on one day to post the video onto your video channel, constituted an offence contrary to section 127(1)(a) of the Communications Act 2003. I found it proved on the evidence that it was. My finding establishes only your guilt of this offence. It establishes nothing else and sets no precedent.
Because local prejudice can provide bias, jurors can be influenced by a lawyer's courtroom performance, most juries aren't actually a random sample of the population, long trials usually create hasty verdicts, most jurors don’t have a background in law, and jurors do not need to reason their decision.
Not to say that there aren't pro's to trial-by-jury, but not every Westerner is convinced that trial-by-jury is better than many of the alternatives, and that doesn't make a Westerner any less of a "Westerner."
Nullification is rare and unfortunately that line of defense largely failed during the drug war. But I think that's largely because the government was able to successfully make it a racial issue. It's not always easy to take advantage of deep social divisions for all kinds of policies, and that's why dictators don't like juries.
Kind of like guns. How useful are they against tyranny really? Useful enough that tyrants try to take them away, and that's all I need to know.
Is that actually the case? A dictator should have little problem punishing jurors for bad judgments, incentivizing them to fall in line like judges. But in (western) democracies, dictators seem to arise from demagogues / populists winning elections. Such a zealous fan base will be reflected in the jury.
I don't disagree with your post at all, but I wanted to note that it's important to remember that companies aren't people, they're machines generally designed to maximize profit. Morals don't apply to them - only the law, and money does.
Personally I've boycotted Blizzard in response, and I hope more people do.
One might suggest that encouraging freedom / democracy is in the long run health of all for-profit companies. I haven't seen any boards or shareholder activists argue against this yet.
That is "technically correct" but meaningless in practice. It's like saying that people are just a collection of molecules. While technically not wrong, humans are of course more than the sum of its parts. The collection of molecules, arranged in a certain way, exhibits emergent behaviour; it will seek food or have intelligent thoughts, which molecules individually can't be said to do.
Likewise, companies as institutions are more than the sum of their people, and will display behaviour that cannot be fully explained by looking at their people individually, and this has very much real consequences. Like a nation is more than a collection of people, and this fact has consequences on the real world.
Each company has different behaviors, some broadly can be assumed, like, a company won’t usually want to deliberately destroy or bankrupt itself (there have been exceptions to this!). Others will contribute greatly to social or environmental programs that directly hurt short term profits. how they get to those decisions is complex and requires strategy, execution, leadership, etc. Not something so 19th century as “profit maximization”
My original post was to state that’s it is false to suggest that a company is always a profit-maximizing amoral machine. People aren’t machines and The emergent behavior of any given corporation rarely is “Profit maximization”. It is sort of like saying the emergent behavior of a sports team is “point maximization”. It is meaningless and not true.
What's with the apologist mindset there?
If you can't hold a group of people accountable for ethical conduct, from whence comes the idea that singular actors should be regulatable by traditional justice systems?
Corporations were intended to distribute risk to enable collective groups to attempt something which none individually could have hoped to do without a significant chance of losing everything.
They were not intended as a bulwark through which to engage in ethically dubious behavior in search of profit. Profit is not a right. Merely a happy byproduct of a job well done.
Ethical behavior, and actually performing a valuable service for the society hosting the corporation is the primary goal. Not profit generation.
The sheer bullheaded insistence that profit is the be all end all of human activity needs to die.
WE have thrown it away already, China is just trying to speed things up.
I've thought quite a bit about this, and my conclusion is that everything is cyclical and has a rise and fall because it only takes a few generations to unlearn hard-fought lessons. Only this time around technology is going to enable a level of control that has never been achieved before. I can only hope that technology will also allow the escape of that same level of control.
A perfect example is how larger and larger swathes of the populace is ok hampering free speech in the name of empathy. They don't fully understand the implications, and there will be generations that will be forced to relearn those lessons, and it won't be a cheap lesson.
Thank you again for recommending it, I really enjoyed the insights it had. I found the idea that democracies tend to end up dictatorships/authoritarianism to be extremely fascinating.
And the observation that market driven economies have happened in the past helped me realize current times are not nearly as unique as I believed.
I'm not generally interested in history, but this particular topic interests me due to the changes I've seen in just my lifetime.
https://github.com/hongkonggong/beyond-lennon-walls/issues/2...
> E. Access to Your Account and Content
> We reserve the right to take steps we believe are reasonably necessary or appropriate to enforce and/or verify compliance with any part of this Agreement. You acknowledge and agree that we may, without liability to you, access, use, preserve and/or disclose your Account information and Content to law enforcement authorities, government officials, and/or a third party, as we believe is reasonably necessary or appropriate, if legally required to do so or if we have a good faith belief that such access, use, disclosure, or preservation is reasonably necessary to: (a) comply with legal process or request; (b) enforce this Agreement, including investigation of any potential violation thereof; (c) detect, prevent or otherwise address security, fraud or technical issues; or (d) protect the rights, property or safety of GCBD, its users, Apple, a third party, or the public as required or permitted by applicable law. You understand and agree that Apple and GCBD will have access to all data that you store on this service, including the right to share, exchange and disclose all user data, including Content, to and between each other under applicable law.
They sleep at night with the sad belief that because they hand it over to the Chinese and don't do it themselves it's all fine...
Apple is compromising the freedom of Chinese residents in China.
While I don't really support Apple's action it's easy to see why the first issue should be Blizzard's blame while the second issue is China's blame.
Apple can chose to operate in China and backdoor iCloud there or they can chose not to operate in China at all. It's hard for me to see how either choice will substantially affect people's liberties in China, it's not like apple products are in any way vital to the surveillance state.
On the other hand more and more companies retaliating (out of a desire to curry economic favor with China) against people who exercise their freedom of speech in non-authoritarian countries would seem to affect people's liberties to me.
https://www.apple.com/customer-letter/
Tim Cook defied the US goverment over the exact same issue, and even said:
"Compromising the security of our personal information can ultimately put our personal safety at risk. That is why encryption has become so important to all of us."
So to me, seeing him allow Chinese authorities access to that same data in China in the name of sales is incredibly hypocritical.
It's hard to see this account (jbang5) as anything but an internet troll who, if not literally on the payroll from the Chinese government, is still a useful idiot for their cause.
What I usually do, to counter this trolling tactic, is to provide them with the source that they were asking for, and then I call them an idiot for not being aware of such an obvious fact.
Because, by definition, they are uninformed about the matter, as they didn't know about the source and had to ask for it. So I just make fun of them for not knowing about it, and rub it in their face when I provide the information that they asked for and didn't know about.
If you have to ask for sources on the matter, you are by definition "ignorant" on the matter.
Based off of this web comic: http://wondermark.com/c/2014-09-19-1062sea.png
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=china+icloud+encryption+keys
You could also look at some of the other links already posted to this thread in response to similar queries from you and others, like this one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21207931) and this one (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21208376).
Tianhe-2 Supercomputer @ 33.86 petaflops (quadrillion flops)
=33 860 000 000 000 000 keys per second (33.86 quadrilion)
3.386e16 * 31556952 seconds in a year 2255 possible keys
2^255 / 1.0685184e24
=1.0685184e24 keys per year (~1 septillion, 1 yottaflop)
=5.4183479e52 years
Needless to say, that's a long fucking time. Yes, cracking an access password would be much less time-consuming and so would finding and using non-brute force attack methods to guess or steal the key but for your basic claim that "Yes", China has cracked strong encryption, I just don't see where you get that idea from.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...
Chinese government nationalized the data centers six months later, gaining access to all the encryption keys and user iCloud data at rest. Apple complied:
https://mashable.com/article/china-government-apple-icloud-d...
They allow a Chinese company to manage iCloud data.
Although I think they have regretted that decision.
Google, on the other hand, walked away from China and it's business as usual for them.
This has also created a market for very cheap uncertified Android phones+ accompanying malware.
Google famously pulled out of China rather than censor, but that was just a PR move because they already were failing in China. I'd argue that censorship is an altogether different situation anyway.
Apple removing iCloud from China helps literally nobody. Chinese users don't have an alternative that isn't subject to the same Chinese laws. Any user that wishes to resort to less-than-legal alternatives can do so whether or not Apple provides iCloud services.
Ultimately this boils down to "should the Chinese court systems be able to decide when to hand data over to the Chinese government", because that's the effect of using a Chinese partner company to manage the iCloud data. For everyone else it's "should the US court systems be able to decide" instead, which honestly isn't all that much better.
https://www.apple.com/customer-letter/
Tim Cook even said: "Compromising the security of our personal information can ultimately put our personal safety at risk."
And yet, here he is in China compromising personal data, all to make a buck.
Doesn't seem that heartwarming at all, just gross.
I've bought game merch and London Spitfire (Overwatch League) merch, I've bought the OWL Pass thingy, I've cheered bits. And I bought the game at launch (no pre-order).
I've played a lot for a casual player, and I've watched even more. It's the only esport that I've enjoyed watching.
Only once did I ever buy Loot Boxes.
That purchase of Loot Boxes was because they brought out a new event that I loved, for free, and it seemed like a cheap but quantifiable way of showing support for what they were doing. I didn't need any of the skins.
I felt the way they've done Loot Boxes is "Loot Boxes Done Right".
So this feels like a real kick in the balls.
The home stand games for OWL will be brutal. Fan signs are already a bit rough on old Blizz on occasions. I'd give it three matches before a "FREE HONG KONG" sign makes it onto broadcast and there's a massive shitshow.
* - I suppose there’s a little less content. And old sets are ridiculously expensive for stupid skin packs. But the idea itself is neat.
The issue isn't that countries can influence each other (and each other's populations and companies), it's how they are using that power that matters.
Or is Europe somehow more special than China?
Most articles I've read on it state the user must be in Europe and taking a product/service delivered to Europe. A US tourist buying something in a store when they arrive in Europe has GDPR protection, a French tourist visiting the US (or even at home in France but buying something online to be delivered to a friend in the US) is not.
It made me sad to have to throw all that away yesterday.
But the conversations we're having as a result of this is great. The mainstream media is talking about it. Congress is talking about it. We're going to have to ask ourselves: can we really let China have this much influence? Is it really worth it? (Remember: this is what Europe is asking about Silicon Valley with things like GDPR, and it's working out quite well for them.)
Banning someone from Hearthstone GM doesn't matter. But we are heading down a path where we decide what our values are, and they're looking pretty good.