We spent today doing an audit by revisiting recent issues reported to [email protected], which had already identified and acted on the content in question. We also took the opportunity to explain how Element and Matrix fit together, what decentralisation is, and the steps we take to mitigate abuse on the servers we run.

As a result, it looks like the app has just been reinstated while I was typing this message: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=im.vector.app.

Thanks everyone for your patience and support while we sorted this out (and huge thanks to the overall Element team who spent their Saturdays on the audit).

I don't see how that makes Element responsible for matrix.org content. Thunderbird offers getting an email address via gandi.net in their new account page. Does that mean that Mozilla is suddenly responsible for all emails (like spam) coming out of gandi?

However, the non-profit Foundation (https://matrix.org/foundation) was set up in 2018 with myself and Amandine deliberately in a minority control position (2 of 5 directors, called Guardians) specifically to address this concern - to protect Matrix from Element’s commercial activity, in case we ever went rogue.

As it happens, The Foundation farms out hosting and admin of the matrix.org homeserver to Element (which makes sense, given the Foundation doesn’t have employees and Element was already running the server), but if Element ever went evil, i am very confident that the Foundation Guardians would kick in and make a course correction.

You're suggesting the challenge was created by Google and that so and so managed to navigate it successfully by obeying Google.

But we don't even know what the issue was. And if the issue isn't available to the general public through transparency or something like an FOIA request what is really being celebrated is the power of a corporation to control free speech over a protocol intended to wrest control of free speech back into the hands of people in the first place.

Limiting access to information such that it cannot be independently verified is far more sinister and nefarious — not to mention consitutionally unsound — than the threat of the bad actor sharing the info in the first place.

In the wake of the temporary Parler shutdown all of us need to be paying close attention to how we receive information. These things cannot be left up to anecdotal stories which delve into little to no detail.

https://wiki.debian.org/Mobile/Nokia_N9

I loved the N900 to, of course, but as a phone the N9 running MeeGo v1.2 Harmattan was superior day to day (for me anyway).

Did the VP offer any explanation as to why you had not received any communcation from Google?

This kind of language is very wishy-washy and leaves everything to the imagination. 9/10 times the issue is terrorism or CP. So which of the two was it? And why aren't you comfortable enough to share that reason with your prospective users?

Anyway, Matrix.org is hosted by a foundation with an independent board. You can ask them if you want but given your post you already know full well why they are not sharing. No one is going to do a press release to say they were involuntary hosting CP or helping terrorists. What good would come out of it?

This is what truly destroyed the open, federated web: humans being disgusting animals.

CP should be removed at the source, by doing everything we can to take care of kids and preventing abuse and related photography. And CP trading rings should be busted.

But individual pedophiles should be helped with their mental health issues before they act and become pederasts. The subject is so toxic that nobody dares go to a therapist with their issues. There was a recent documentary about it: https://www.idfa.nl/en/film/bb3cd43c-169a-48db-9fd6-e4cbae0d...

Coming back to crypto. Who cares if the images are shared using crypto or on paper or on usb sticks? Once you find a pederast, law enforcement should convince (without torture or similar tricks, offering therapy and help will probably be more effective) them to help expose their network. Same with any activity that is using encrypted communications: https://edri.org/files/encryption/workarounds_edriposition_2...

This phrasing suggests it was probably not even illegal to publish.

What if this content had been something that Google finds politically or commercially disfavorable to its interests, rather than something we would all think is intolerable? What if it _is_ like that?

Oh, wait. We’re still a decade away from that particular dystopia, so I’ll guess kiddie porn or actual planning of terrorist attacks.

It seems you guess wrong. The Element guy did not mention any illegality, which is what makes me suspicious.

I expect we'll never get a useful explanation from Google for why this incident happened -- abuse teams, like fraud teams, are worried about the bad guys using the explanations to tune their tactics and so tend to never explain anything.

But the details of how Google screwed up here also don't matter. A sudden Friday night suspension of a popular, legitimate app is insane! That possibility shouldn't be in the flowchart.

I get that for malware/spam/etc., it's important to immediately suspend, but I don't understand why Google doesn't take more seriously the very negative harm caused by doing that to a legitimate app. Some notice and appeal opportunity should be required before suspending a popular app by a legitimate publisher.

I'm upset, and a bit scared, but I can't say I'm surprised. This sort of random/erroneous/arbitrary punishment without explanation happens all the time with Google and other major tech companies. And every app developer I've met has experienced _significant_ disruption to their app publishing efforts due arbitrary/random rejections by an Apple app store reviewer, and this has been the case for years, so we can pretty confident that the vendors won't improve unless they are forced to do so.

There needs to be regulatory oversight of the Google/Apple app stores and the negative consequences for everyone else of their error-prone and ruthless enforcement processes.

The regularity oversight needs to address a different aspect: google is world-wide de-facto monopoly for people not owning an iPhone. At least for the most part of the freer world, China is different story.

Until Google is broken up or fair competition is not achieved, content regulation does not help. As a European I want to care about US regulation as much as about US tax laws: not at all. The US is not the world-regulator. We elect governments in Europe that have no power to do anything in this sector. I don't say Google should be forbidden in Europe, we are not China. But competition and more choice for users needs to be guaranteed by effective legislation, in practice that against Google and Apple.

I guess that's sarcasm? I can't even eat a sandwich outside without fearing that it will be considered a picnic and get me arrested.

They didn't "screw up". Or rather, that's not the main problem. The problem is that Google has the power to block the main channel of distribution of a piece of software.

Now, it's true that you can "just" get Element elsewhere, but the effective user lock-in into a single-corporation-controlled download hub ("app store") - that's the problem. And Google has gotten that quite right... for itself.

Now I may disagree with parts those precepts in stronger or weaker forms, but it is disingenuous to claim that the client application is exactly as legitimate as a web browser just because the client application is legally but not functionally separate from the federated network.

Huh? The AOL you're thinking of included an enormous cross-section of the population, with no controls on who could talk to who. If the Internet is unsafe, then so is AOL, because they're the same thing.

The irony in this case is that the speech that is attempted to be censored isn't even illegal. (at least in the U.S., where our liberal, cherished "anything goes" approach is enshrined in the Constitution.)

This simply argues that they’re special-casing against non-established systems — if you applied it uniformly, you’d trivially lose things you obviously want to keep.

That is, this is a stupid operation that is at best sponsored by “think of the children!” Mothers Against Everything foundation.

To go from that narrow assertion to "ban email apps and probably the Internet itself" is fallacious reasoning at its finest.

There's no rebuttal by refuting any of the premises or finding logical flaws, just straight to the end of the world as we know it.

You didn’t argue this, and I’m not clear that matrix or similar technology makes any direct, intended or significant effort to do so beyond the much broader, all-encompassing goal of “let nothing be unavailable”. But if true, I might be more inclined to agree with you.

What you did argue is that

    a key use case for federated messaging platforms is to evade censorship

But we also know that illegal activity is a key use case of the internet, of email, of encryption and a wide variety of other decentralized and federated technologies. This is hardly a good justification because you’ll ban all sorts of good things.

The only thing that protects your argument against everything else is that you arbitrarily limit it to non-established technologies — in the name of all that is good and wholesome, you would kill anything like the internet, email, etc, that is not itself the existing technologies.

A web browser is only more legitimate because the internet is more broadly used. Which isn’t much of a case for legitimacy.

The above are use daily for extremist content, CP, circumventing numerous national laws in numerous places...

Hard to draw the line.

If you run a monolithic, centralized service specifically designed to avoid censorship, and you don't moderate what users do on your service, and some of those users hurt people with your service, then you should expect your service will be shut down as Parler was.

And if you do the same thing, but separate the front end from the back end, and have different entities run them to provide legal separation, while practically and functionally the result is identical to that of the monolithic centralized service and your system is used to hurt people, then you should also expect that whatever components can be deplatformed will be deplatformed.

Emails are always coming up in court cases etc. as people regularly use them to organise or discuss criminal acts, and it is sometimes used with E2E encryption so nobody can intercept and police the contents. I'm not convinced you've drawn a clear line. When is a protocol client responsible for the content shared or accessed with it, and when is a client not responsible for it.

It's amazing to see how far we've fallen - to be at ease with the idea that there can be no such thing as a private conversation, and therefore that any private conversation is by definition illegal.

Any crime should require an actual victim. Which means there is evidence of it happening. You don't need a permanent record of everyone's conversations to uncover such crimes, police just need to do the job which we pay them for, which is to investigate.

CP and terrorism are both disgusting, horrible things, but even those are not worth losing all our basic human freedoms over, or we won't be left with a lifestyle worth defending.

For some people (although maybe comparatively few) it's primarily about building a more robust Internet that works also if centralized service(s) disappear

Why would we accept this? We don't even accept the situation in which Google is _able_ to censor anything for the general public.

There are big players with clout that take issue to instability such as this. How can I rely on my company using Element when it gets pulled? Not cool Google...

To the element team, reach out to me if you can't get the support you are looking for.

The Matrix team is doing a LOT of cool stuff. :)

If you want to go cheaper and have only 300-400 Mbps of bandwidth, I've heard lots of good things about this provider:

https://contabo.com/en/vps/

Note that many significant improvements have landed very recently, for instance the chain cover stuff which significantly improves handling of rooms with frequent membership changes (such as the aforementioned bridged IRC rooms).

That said, this isn't an average but a spot value. It frequently falls below 8% (though typically stays above 5%). Note that this is a cheap and relatively weak VPS.

I'm not saying Matrix is terribly lightweight. I'm saying you can easily run a small personal instance on a cheap machine without any performance problems.

The fact that we can now run it on a VPS is an improvement, but it is still orders of magnitude heavier than equivalent non-decentralized systems.

If Google were to "ban" slack from their store, their browsers, etc. then you would be quite in trouble.

But with matrix, just pick a different client and move on.

When you have 100,000+ employees, it's not trivial to just switch up communication platforms.

MDM infra is big bu$ine$$, but DPCs are quite simple to write.

(Psst. They also let you read CPU usage on Android 7+ (sadly not per task, but at least with per-core granularity). The catch? Installing a DPC requires a factory reset. xD)

Some will, some might run a more open org, with a lot of rather independent contractors, focusing on providing services on standard platforms (email, chat, wiki, bugtracker etc).

That should be yelled at every FOSS evangelist, those people who claim everywhere that no one needs Windows, because Linux has everything Windows has, just better, etc.

We FOSS developers are free to do what we want. Most of us develope mainly for pleasure, not to ease the workload of some corporate helpdesk.

I'll go even further and claim that "user choice" is code for, "warning: nobody in this space is competent enough in UI/UX to derive pleasure from working on it." In fact in mastodon's design, it's not even code-- the "choice" of servers by topic is literally a limitation imposed on the user before even signing up. So the very first part of the UX has a circular dependency-- choose a server to try out the service and discover which server most suits your interests. It'd be like Google redesigning search so that you have to type subreddit-style topic into the URL before searching.

Additionally, this "choice" meme seems to conveniently disappear for software that has a thoughtful UI. I don't see anyone talking about the downside of Krita not having multiple other half-baked UI's than very impressive one it ships with.

Click on "Assemble GPlay Debug version" (or "Assemble FDroid Debug version" if you don't have Google Play Services), then click on "Artifacts" and then choose your apk from there.

FluffyChat would be the main contender.

In the explanation to a company I see nothing wrong. In the tendency to make employees agree to arbitrary ToSes, I see massive liability that should be dealt with using a massive class action lawsuit against some behemoth.

I actually think federated protocols are a get out of jail card for employers since making your job related to owning a car is reasonable, to owning a specific brand of car is not.

We have a new corporate policy that removes your access to anything related to O365 by Date. The only way to remediate this issue is to install InTune and the corresponding corporate security office's profile so it can enforce our policy on the device. If you qualify for our corporate device program, we will cover the cost of the device and data plan.

Sincerely, CTO

Honestly, it's very common at the largest public corporations and most corporate r&d groups in the US. It's not like we don't already do black box development or have strict vpn only enforcement rules. I wonder how risk assessment sees these kind of federated protocols because in theory you are right about it reducing liability if they run the system.

Maybe places like google are different, I would not know but I’d be surprised to learn that there’s any publicly traded company that does not exercise total control of their machines.

But why? Matrix is tiny and no threat to Google services.

I'd personally expect three letter agencies to be involved here. The US government has been aggressively going after encrypted communication for years, with extreme tactics like personal intimidation and secret courts. Read this story about a secure email provider if you doubt it. [1]

This doesn't work so well with EU based companies, even though they have been pushing EU governments to do the same. (There recently was a leak that the encryption ban currently discussed in the EU parliament has some roots in Five Eyes efforts and that governments were pressured by the US to support it. Published by FAZ or Sueddeutsche, I'm trying to find the article...)

I also doubt that iMessage and What's App gaining "backdoors" to their encryption is purely motivated by user experience.

At a time where a lot of people want to switch communication platforms, nipping any such efforts early might well be viewed as important.

"Abusive content" is a convenient excuse that can be arbitrarily applied.

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/how-the-...

There is an absolutely unprecedented shift going on as we speak, one of those groundswell events that have the potential to shift usage habits of hundreds of millions of people.

We got a taste just recently with the shift away from WhatsApp based on a TOS update. Imagine arguing last year that ten million users would jump ship based on a TOS change?

Matrix, and services of its ilk, are absolutely an existential threat to Google in the next 20 years.

Don’t forget that Google has all the threat intel you could possibly imagine from their existing analytics platforms. They will see the shift coming before anyone.

I can absolutely see them acting now to try to disrupt the initial rumblings of a seismic event that has the potential to go totally viral and popular sentiment shifts against megacorps.

Killing them gets exponentially harder over the next 6 months if there were a successful campaign across the internet to switch to these services, and 2021 is very close to seeing a very significant grassroots campaign like that truly take off. Certainly the time has never been better and the populace never been more primed to make the move out of the walled gardens.

How is Matrix a threat to Google?

In their world view, every single minute per day spent looking at screens that don’t have Google ad targeting is a minute that a competitor is stealing value from Google.

A matrix user identity will eventually compete with a google account.

When google accounts are considered as important as myspace accounts, then much of their surveillance loses relevance.

Conjecture on my part: it's a threat to the ad spend Google gets from Facebook.

https://www.fastcompany.com/4032442/its-still-pi-day-so-we-d...

And yet...

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/technology/google-faceboo...

An NSL would be handled a lot differently than removing an app from a single app store for sexual content. Every indication so far points to it being a mistake by Google.

From less than a week ago: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/01/googles-bots-decide-...

But if you always discount such events as coincidences, you risk remaining blind to emerging patterns.

You can view child porn on Chrome, or receive it by email, or download it by Torrent. Yet I don't see anyone banning web browsers, email clients, and Bittorrent client.

The point is that this is well explained by something other than conspiracy.

Ideally you could set up reproducible builds and make sure that the version in the default F-Droid repo stays up-to-date, but reproducible builds may not be practical for you right now (I'm not sure). Barring that, as you mentioned in the blog post, setting up your own F-Droid repo with self-signed APKs is a good option.

I haven't yet played with Matrix nearly as much as I would like, but I love the vision. Thanks for your efforts!

Also nice plug for F-Droid; they're doing good work as well.

That's great to hear as well.

What's more, this incident is evidence that we need more decentralization, not less. In instances where decentralization is either already working or is up for consideration, we should encourage it, not try to eradicate it.

"Publishing signed binaries from elsewhere (e.g. the upstream developer) is now possible after verifying that they match ones built using a recipe. Publishing only takes place if there is a proper match."

https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/96l0at/sync_for_re...

https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/6dwv1f/boost_for_r...

https://old.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/5fqrr8/now_for_red...

?

1. I install synapse (a matrix server) on my own machine. I install Element on my own phone. I connect one to another, and via the server to other servers.

2. I install a client that connects to reddit. Same reddit as everyone else. Same reddit as the reddit website.

There is a rather significant difference, isn't there?

EDIT addressing the 'hate speech' part, you are correct. If one reddit client is banned, all should be banned. But that is not true for communication apps, like Element.

Except of course Google's own applications. Gmail, Hangouts/Meet/whatever-it-currently-is, Chrome.

Luckily it's not possible to display illegal content with Google's own apps /s

I remember when my nephew got groomed on Google Plus, I was way to naive to think that this would not be occurring in Google's walled gardens. But in there, it turned out to be quasi-public.

Perhaps one day they will make this argument to justify having to spy on everything you do with their software.

That is genuinely horrifying and I'm so sorry for him and your family.

And what about Chrome or Web Browser? Or they going to have built in Filter for website? Although without the reach of Google Search Engine having a filter or not makes no difference anyway.

But it is great they are doing it, the more the better. People were extremely supportive on HN not long ago about banning speeches they dont like on Internet. Hopefully they finally learned something here. They opened the Pandora Box and there is nothing anyone could do until the Pendulum swing to its limit before swinging back.

For all the chaos, the Internet continues to be surprisingly consistent with one set of rules for BigTech and friends and another set of rules for the rest.

EDIT: this ties in to the conversation I had on different platform recently, that it's getting arduous to make people understand that an app is not necessarily the same as the system behind it. Choosing an email client used to be a thing (Thunderbird, The Bat!, Outlook Express, mutt, etc; to name some across contrasting needs) not even too long ago. I despise that we came to a world where even the tech moderation fails to understand an app != protocol.

That is also why I was rather sad when Microsoft announced that they won't develop their own browser engines any more. I disliked IE as much as anybody else, but what I did like was the competition. With Edge switching to Blink, essentially becoming yet another partially-degooged Chrome, part of that competition is gone.

Now it sends half of your data to Google and the other half to Microsoft. That's an improvement, they decentralized spyware.

Which prompts the question, who is responsible for all this vitriol? What people or corporations are driving us further and further into these two filter bubbles?

Oh no.

edit That didn't take long.

I'm a massively left leaning libertarian, if it weren't for its consistently proven failures in practice I would be a commy.

But here I am, over the years of commenting online I've been labeled a trump supporter, a Republican, alt right, white, male privileged, white privileged, racist, pseudo intellectual, biggoted, transphobic, and a Nazi.

How is a pro-business ideology remotely justifying government intervention in the practice and moderation decisions of a private company? Wouldn't the rectification involve the government specifically dictating their business behaviour?

Libertarians seek to maximize autonomy and political freedom, emphasizing free association, freedom of choice, individualism and voluntary association. Libertarians share a skepticism of authority and state power, but some of them diverge on the scope of their opposition to existing economic and political systems.

If you want to get specific on the economic front I diverge a bit and fall somewhere along the mutualism line of things where I'm more interested in a pragmatic free market socialism. Basically just do what you feel like but don't be a prick about it, and yes, we'll organise some free healthcare and education.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutualism_(economic_theory)

"Do what you want" in the free market is exactly this behavior.

They're monopolies. They are the market.

There is nothing free about a moderated market.

Robin hood investors disliked a move by management and voted with their feet to place one star reviews.

Google removed them all.

You can but ma private companies if you want but you're only pointing out how monopolistic these platforms are. Good luck with antitrust Google. You gonna get fucked over a barrel. People are waking up.

They divide themselves on left-libertarians and right-libertarians. What you're thinking about is right-libertarians, so anarcho-capitalists, minarchists etc.

It's definitely not Google style.

But I hope Matrix will get more promotion in result.

There are people here who work on mobile applications. If they depend on Google and Apple delivering their app to their clients, it's still unacceptable that they can potentially put you out of business, just like that. I already saw a couple of people here that claimed it happened to them too. Without any reason, without the ability to appeal, nothing.

The default matrix.org servers are federated.

In terms of what the default Element install presents to the user upon launch in its GUI, I think it does offer the 'official' matrix.org servers as a place to create an account and sign in, start browsing 'rooms'.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7vq4k/thousands-of-users-un...

IOW, even though they say they don't want to control your conversation, they do want you in their hands.

Can you run it? Sure. Should you?

Please excuse me for being direct, I do not accept your defeatist attitude on this one. You won’t have stickers, such a shame, but you would have the ability to create your own signal service

But it doesn't. There are options. If I had to choose, I would rather invest this time and money to collaborate on the existing protocols that do have the goal of being fully open. Matrix and XMPP can do the things that I want and there are plenty of people working on them to overcome the present issues and challenges for mass adoption.

Why should I swim upstream by myself if there is no special reward for this kind of effort?

I know you are a nerd but your users are not.

However, my mother does use Element to talk with me and it wasn't that hard to help her download an app, tell her where to put the username and what is the name of the matrix server and quickly she was on her way to start a call and setup a room with the rest of the family where I share the pictures of her grandkids.

My users may not be nerds, but they are not stupid. They can learn.

Like nearly everything, "secure" is a spectrum and not binary. On that spectrum, Signal is overwhelmingly more secure than most messenger apps people actually use.

To me, Ricochet is the most secure instant messaging app for desktop. It would be even better were it to use Onion v3, and if it were available on Android, but then again, I do not really consider my phone secure by default with all the Google crapware. I disabled the default Google keyboard and downloaded one that does not require Internet connection and that is not related to Google in any way. It is so silly that I cannot even delete any apps that came with my phone. So they say its storage capacity is 32 GB. Half of that is spent on crap that came with the phone, splendid. In any case, I am going off-topic here so... :)

what is the actual state of matrix e2ee today? (or is that question silly because it depends what the individual matrix clients chooses to implement).

I'm extremely excited about having a federated e2ee messenger, however as a "Lawful-Intercept" realist, I don't have a lot of hope that it will not get forced to comply with current EU regulation proposals, that prevents Matrix from fulfilling its promise as fully e2ee. (e.g. the future that we're heading to in the EU is the same as 5/9-eye countries: there will be a "legal" way of encryption and another one that is illegal, all depending if access can be given to 3rd parties / LE...)

[1] (Sad) state of E2EE in Matrix clients (from 2018): https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/9avyen/sad_state_o...

Why do you say there will be, as if the future is predetermined? Perhaps we should re-evaluate that and help prevent it from happening instead of complacently stating something as if it is a foregone conclusion?

Your words matter here. The way you are using them is helping materialize the future you do not want.

With Matrix you have the choice to use whatever server or client you like, which makes it difficult to censor.

But given E2E and the Sealed Sender[0] functionality, they could only suppress messages based on the recipient's user ID, not based upon message content or the sender's ID. This all or nothing approach is a rather ineffective method of censoring – it basically just amounts to banning a user account. I wouldn't even call it censoring in the first place as that term, at least to me, refers to a more selective and refined approach.

> (And they do, for example you can "delete" your messages that are stored on other clients.)

This has nothing to do with censoring and nothing to do with Signal controlling "both server and clients". The Signal developers simply extended the protocol to include "delete" requests for previously sent messages. The client app still needs to implement the actual deletion, though. You could easily compile the Signal app yourself with that functionality removed and then nothing would get deleted from your message history anymore.

I mean, sure, 99% of users are not going to do this. But this is no different in the case of Matrix, where most people just download the default apps like Element from the app store.

So I don't even understand what your statement

> they control […] clients

is supposed to mean. Yes, they write the source code. So? Someone has to produce and maintain the source code and whoever does it will obviously be in a position of power. Producers are always going to decide what they produce. Consumers don't get a say in this – unless they become producers themselves (and in case of open-source software) adapt the product to their needs. Again, this is nothing new and is the case with Matrix, too.

[0]: https://signal.org/blog/sealed-sender/

To put it in terms of your logic: it that were case, it means Signal is not secure.

It seems this always requires the /sarcasm tag. =)

Pattle also appears to have been removed. Ditto and FluffyChat at the moment appear to still be up on the store though. For those unaware, these are all Matrix clients.

> Morning all. We've had contact from Google confirming that the suspension is due to abusive content somewhere on Matrix; we're working with them to explain how Element works and get the situation resolved.

If Matrix only facilitated private communications then they could probably tell Google to piss off but they became a social network when they included public chatrooms.

If that were true, web browsers would be in trouble.

Incidentally I was always kinda surprised that the upgrade nag links in Riot Android redirected to Play store instead of f-droid

In the meantime, what is the explanation for the F-Droid version lagging behind?

The Matrix developers could, however, set up their own F-Droid repository and publish their own (automated) builds there.

If your going to argue with a straight face the this new situation is the same as Parler, your putting Element side by side with some very bad company.

Just go reread what gp wrote. He basically said the exact opposite of this. You are putting words in his mouth and interpereting his comment in the least charitable way possible.

They are in the same boat as parler in the sense that another communication platform not owned by a big corp is being targeted and removed.

Matrix likely will come back for some of the reasons you mention . But fact is google and apple arbitrarily without warning or notice remove apps from their store. The stores should be considered utility like electricity google should not able to refuse service randomly.

Parler is owned by the Mercer family, of Renaissance Technologies fame, one of the most successful hedge funds in existence. They are personally worth tens of billions of dollars.

Also just cause they worth billions means they will back parler with billions. Parler itself is pretty small fish financially speaking

A large portion of these protests were planned on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/01/13/faceboo...

...should they be removed and silenced because of it? Or should all of these gigantic tech companies with the checkbooks to provide exhaustive moderation enjoy their 230 powers while denying the right to all of the little guys?

Parlor and Gab are fairly harrowing examples of what happens when censorship occurs. People leave platforms with diverse views and head to echo chambers. Those folks end up having stronger, more radical opinions because they were forced into a corner.

No one has ever given me any compelling reason for censorship. Hate is defeated in the open, it is fairly impossible to deal with in private channels. Censors also cannot censor everything, so content always slips through the cracks.

Did not know this, you have a source for this?

Because no one attacked or stormed the capitol during those protests.

???

However, when looking on a bigger picture of the recent takedowns and trying to make sense of it, it does indeed seem to be connected. The only conclusion that seems rational to me is as follows:

Everyone tries to push their burden of moderation on people below them, because no one can actually keep up with it. And if the moderation is not enforced, they risk being taken down by someone above them. That would explain why everyone is so trigger happy when it comes to censorship. When the WallStreetBets people were taken down by Facebook and Discord, they didn't ban the individuals who were actually violating the policy, but the entire community.

It's also worth to note, that the takedowns can be enforced selectively, as we see here - Google obviously won't take down their own browser or email client, that also allows to access abusive content - assuming that's what Element was taken down for. It's probably selectively enforced on the social media too, but I'm out of the loop on what actually goes on there, so to be fair, I cannot prove it.

If this is actually what is happening, the only solution as far as I see it, is to extend the First Amendment to social media. Another solution could be to convince the people and the media to stop pressuring companies into deplatforming other people, but that's in my opinion definitely not going to happen. So it's either applying the protections of 1A to the internet or the censorship will get worse and worse.

Indeed, people made that point, but I don't see how this is a useful distinction. Parler (the app) that Google and Apple removed is also just a client, that facilitates access to Parler (the social media website) that can be accessed via other means, e.g. a web browser. And Google and Apple didn't really have any problems with the app itself, which has no content on its own; they wanted different moderation policies on the website. As they have no direct control over the website, they acted against the client app; it was Amazon that took down the website.

One difference might be that Elements and Matrix have different developers and Parler (the app) and Parler (the social media website) have the same owner. But again, this is not a meaningful difference; e.g. if Google and Apple had problem with content on Reddit (the website), surely they would remove both Reddit (the app) and all 3rd party clients, Apollo, Boost, Sync, etc, at least those that fail to actively censor the objectionable parts of the website in the app.

So Apple/Google saw Parler (the website) as having dangerous content and took it out on Parler (the app). If they are justified in that; it is not a big stretch that they saw Matrix (protocol) as having dangerous content and took it out on Element (app), and presumably other clients. I don't think whether it is decentralized or not matters from an app store policy point of view.

Two companies having the say on which programs almost everyone can run on their mobile devices, especially on the iOS side, is a huge problem, that becomes increasingly evident as they start to flex their muscles.

That’s a big “if” though. The “abusive content” angle is just a working theory. It could just as easily be Goodge taking a dislike to a website link offering donations outside of the Play store (or something equally mundane).

The problem is, until Google respond, we have no idea why the takedown happened.

And here lies the real problem: without Google being transparent about their takedowns it leaves app developers in a difficult position where they can’t really support their uses.

The one slight good thing from all this is that at least with Android you can side load apps (which is more than can be said for iOS).

And just to be clear, I'm not saying that the accusations of censorship and calls for regulations are dishonest on our part. I really do believe that what they are doing is censorship and they need to be regulated.

> Morning all. We've had contact from Google confirming that the suspension is due to abusive content somewhere on Matrix; we're working with them to explain how Element works and get the situation resolved.

https://twitter.com/element_hq/status/1355465650114846720

There's a much simpler explanation: Google wants as much of your communication as possible to go through them or their partners, so they can monetise it. People using Parler or Matrix don't leak any information to Big Tech, so commercially it makes sense to deter people from using apps like that, and they'll use whatever excuse they can get away with.

To support my explanation, see for example this:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/25/21532883/paypal-cuts-tie...

PayPal terminated Epik's account, because they refused to kick out Gab. I believe there were a couple more cases where the money people pressured companies to do things like that. My memory is getting blurry with this though, so I can't point you to the articles.

And that leads me to something even more important. Gab was not only kicked out off their domain registrar, but the owner's family was blacklisted by Visa. So the social media is actually the least of my concerns right now, the most urgent thing at the moment is regulating the banks, so they can't terminate your account for no reason. Because they will come after your money at some point. And good luck paying in cash in a middle of pandemic.

The first amendment works now by having clear boundaries between private and public spaces. Public spaces have clear first amendment protections. I can hold a sign on a publicly owned sidewalk (well, public right of way) begging for money or praising 'bong hits for Jesus'. But private spaces do not. I can't do the same thing on your living room. This allows folks to exercise their freedom of association, which is a pretty big part of the first amendment.

Where and how do you draw the line between public and private spaces then in an online context? Should the government be required to host unmoderated and uncensored discussion boards? And how do you keep the unregulated public spaces useful when such spaces are easily overrun by trolls and spammers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pruneyard_Shopping_Center_v._R...

As to how you would implement it, Poland recently had a proposal that if you were banned from a social media website, you can appeal via the government in a certain period of time.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25736155

I'm not a lawyer, so I might be saying a bunch of nonsense here, but you could categorize the social media into topical (eg. HN is about technology) or "general purpose", off-topic services (Facebook, Youtube). Or just do it by the size of user base. Facebook has like a 2 or 3 billion users, let's not pretend it's the same as a comment section on your blog.

It's just to throw some ideas around, because again, not a lawyer, so I can't come up with a robust policy on the spot and take care of every potential loophole.

I would love this, personally.

Element is a chat client. It's an empty piece of software for use with your own choice of server. Element is to a chat server, as Thunderbird is to an email server. It's basically a glorified IRC client. It contains no content of its own.

Parler was basically a curated, centrally run, Facebook-message-board-replacement for neonazis, antisemites, qanon conspiracy theorists, and the lunatic fringe of the alt-right.

Any browser that allows accessing these PWAs will be banned from the app/play store. Let's not kid ourselves this isn't what's coming next.

But on the bright side, I think if it was Mozilla with 90% of the browser market and not Google, this would've happened already.

You can find my complaints in your inbox. It's good to know Google is taking action - will send the same complaints to them in the future since that seems to get more of a response from the devs.

If you don't have anything to contribute other than a sarcastic comment that misses the point of my statement then consider not contributing at all.

Sure, they built the phones, doesn't mean we can't demand more rights than they decide it's profitable to give us (or put another way, just because the king's ancestors founded the country doesn't mean we shouldn't demand freedom and democracy).

As Cory Doctorow recently explained[1]:

>> It's how we got Gateway, Dell, Compaq and all of the other PC vendors that might have sold you that IBM PC clone in 1984 running an operating system that IBM hadn't made, on phone lines that had been broken up from AT&T.

>> And so it felt in those days like maybe we'd found some kind of perfect market, a market where you could make your products with low capital, just with the sweat of your own mind, by writing code. That you could access the global audience of everyone who might want to run that code over a low cost universal network. And that that audience could switch to your product at a very low cost, because you could always write the code that it would take to to port the old data formats and to connect the old services to your new product. It was a market where the best ideas would turn into companies that would find customers and change the world.

>> as these companies acquired new monopolies, they diverted their monopoly rents to foreclosing on competitive compatibility.

When talking about monopoly, people tend to focus on price, but modern tech monopolies don't need to use traditional form of rent seeking. Exploitative prices don't make sense when the monopolist undermines the entire market with "free services". Instead, tech monopolies are about control of what is allowed to participate in the market.

[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/rc3-11337-what_the_cyberoptimists_got...

The difference is that Microsoft attempted to use its operating system monopoly to win the browser wars. Bundling Internet Explorer with Windows made it difficult for other browsers to compete on an even playing field.

Apple doesn't have an operating system monopoly on the desktop or mobile. MacOS and iOS have a smaller userbase than both of their main competitors. It doesn't have an app store monopoly either.

I don't have an iphone, but don't you have to jailbreak it to install any software not blessed by Apple? That sounds like a monopoly to me.

Agreed, but then Apple/Google and the fans of their walled gardens will argue that without this heavy censorship, grandma will install some malware on her phone that will empty her bank account or that their kids will install some malware that will spy on them (other than the social media apps that already do that).

There is an entire population of humans that hypes companies, franchises, celebrities, etc. and treats them like a member of their own family. With a fondness. And a desire to defend their selection.

There's a technical means to lock down grandma and the kids. Fans are quick to dismiss it and shift the conversation back to why their choice is great.

No, we can't solve the problem that way: the very same problem wound remain: EU and 5/9 Eyes want e2ee backdoored or gone. If you start legislating which apps are allowed, you're putting yourself even more at mercy of gov regulation.

And the regulation would be blanket, with little to no way of sorting things out through unofficial channels as it can be done with Google. It'd be "backdoor or jail", not even sideloading apps to help you.

And in America at least it's almost certainly unconstitutional.

- The FirefoxOS team.

- The Jolia team.

- The UbuntuPhone team.

- ...

Most people need things just work.

Much like Ubuntu made desktop Linux a viable prospect for many people, after being enabled by Debian, I could see a future libre smartphone being enabled by the work done on PinePhone.

They're great for developers, but they've been unable to provide a usable and simple alternative for most people. Imo, partly because a lack of incentives since developers tend to create for themselves. Partly due to fragmentation leading to projects moving in every direction at the same time, which does not lead to a consistent or simple user experience.

For you and me maybe. But don't expect other people to have your standard of software choices etc.

Well sure, it's supported on X, Y and Z!

- Oh but I'm on distro A.

Oh sorry, that's not supported. But here's a post by some guy on some forum who says he made it work by doing a bunch of complicated things no one understands.

This is obviously quite doable with basically any distro.

Some might want a full mail client and possibly a printer configured and that's about it.

But I can't really imagine phones going away that fast---what, we all get some Uber regulated neural thing? I think the tech companies are too unpopular for that---and so I think PinePhone can catch up. Plus, the Duopoly is way more annoying for regular users than Windows ever was.

Since PinePhone became available, Linux distributions made huge leaps forward - Debian/Mobian especially.

https://jolla.com/sailfishx/

And there are community maintained builds for the PinePhone and many other devices.

They are there already. Matrix, XMPP, email, activitypub based systems, (secure) scuttlebutt, IPFS, and so on.

This is more a people and their conformist attitude problem, like "eh, my friends use X, I'm too lazy to convince them otherwise", "but everyone is on Y, I'm not willing to be the odd one out on Z", and so on.

Most decentralized platforms (mastodon, IPFS, XMPP, Matrix...) have mechanisms to block and defederate unwanted accounts/contents/servers: racism and hate speech, CP, spam, malware

Many people don't want government-driven censorship but are very happy with community-driven policies and guidelines.

Communities censor in benign ways all the time. Most successful online forums regularly remove posts that are spam, self-promoting, or flamebait. They also remove contributions that are off-topic: completely harmless posts that just don't happen to be what the community wants to focus on. Celebrity gossip on a tech site, say.

Some places are more wild-west than others and that's fine. The point is that while the word "censorship" has a negative ring to it, most censorship is mundane and unobjectionable.

It's not okay (in USA culture) for the government to set community standards, not because standards are bad, but because the organization that controls guns and prisons is already terrifying enough without it being able to control speech too.

Google and Apple (and Facebook and Twitter) are in an in-between space. Their platforms are much too large to be a "community" in the traditional sense, but as private organizations they're still obligated to moderate. And when they get it wrong, the results can be devastating to the individuals affected, both in false-positive cases like this one, and false-negative cases where their cold machinery fails to protect victims of real harassment.

With more, smaller networks, there's no such tension. You can visit a network that lets you post all the hate speech you want. I can visit one that blacklists yours and every one like yours. And neither of us has to give two bits how odious we find each other's spaces.

If we continue to go down this path then soon enough we will be taking away the phone and mail service of whatever group of people are out of power.

That says a lot...

not saying i agree with the decision here, but hn is sometimes so quick to blame google.

what surprised me though, is that you guys are aware of abusive content on the network and even put a "moderation" guide in place. so much good faith in people here...

> However, we abhor abuse, and on the default matrix.org server (...) we have a fairly strict terms of use (...) which we proactively enforce.

These two sentences are contradictory. Either you are a road or a road restaurant. You can't have it both ways.

The second sentence is about matrix.org

In e-mail terms: - Element is like a mail client - matrix.org is like a given community of mailing lists

In IRC terms: - Element is like an IRC client - matrix.org is like an IRC server/network e.g. Freenode.

Each server has the freedom to enforce its own policy. Given that the matrix.org server is a kind of a public face for the protocol, it makes sense that its policies are more mainstream.

There is nothing in the protocol itself (nor in the official Element clients) enforcing any kind of content policy.