imanewsman

For some context, Bezos wrote this letter months after Amazon was awarded its infamous patent on one-click checkout. Amazon used the patent to sue Barnes & Noble and ultimately force it to add extra steps to the checkout on barnesandnoble.com. Bezos wrote this letter a few days after a scathing op-ed about the patent and the lawsuit came out in the NYT, but never chose to turn the patent over to the public domain. It's now been 20 years and the patent is expiring next month.

I wrote a bit yesterday about Cloudflare's previous stance on this issue, which has always been that the company does not think it's its place to pick and choose whom it does business with:

https://qz.com/1053689/cloudflare-is-the-one-tech-company-st...

So far, Cloudflare has not made a statement or confirmed in any way that it has dropped Daily Stormer or any other website based on its content. If it does, I expect the confirmation will first come from Cloudflare's official blog:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/

The action would represent a major philosophical shift in the company's approach to these kinds of issues, and all we have to go on so far is a screenshot of a non-descriptive email, posted on a Gab.ai account that _appears_ to be run by the editor of a neo-Nazi website.

https://gab.ai/AndrewAnglin

I'm not suggesting that Cloudflare has or hasn't done anything, just that we don't have a ton of information on this yet.

I don't think you're wrong, I just think you're splitting hairs. The order says the license is a contract that exists, sure. Contracts are enforceable.

In order to dismiss the motion, the court had to explain why the GNU GPL is an enforceable contract:

https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califo...

The defense argued that the license was not enforceable. In the order, the federal court laid out the reasons the license _is_ enforceable. Here's the order:

https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califo...

In 2014, Jon Stewart offered an interesting definition of clickbait:

"I scroll around, but when I look at the internet, I feel the same as when I’m walking through Coney Island. It’s like carnival barkers, and they all sit out there and go, 'Come on in here and see a three-legged man!' So you walk in and it’s a guy with a crutch."

The thing is, he was talking about BuzzFeed when he said that, and that is not what BuzzFeed does at all. BuzzFeed's editor wrote about the distinction here, and it's the most insightful article I've read on the topic:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/why-buzzfeed-doesnt-do-cli...

People tend to consider things like lists clickbait, even though those articles usually deliver exactly what the headline suggests. (If you click on "23 photos of kittens that are just too adorable," that is what you will get.) But because it's an article that was made specifically to get traffic, people incorrectly call it clickbait.

And it often goes even further than that. On Reddit and Hacker News, commenters constantly call articles clickbait. Sometimes it's true, and there's a sensational headline that leads to a bullshit story. But just as often, the story delivers on what the headline promises, but commenters call it clickbait because the headline is slightly hyperbolic, snappy, or just plain well-written.