jevoten
Could you elaborate on this?
And given the volume of posts censored and users banned by social media, where most public debate happens these days, most censorship is now by private companies.
> our censorship (if we're really going to call it that)
With the possible exception of spam filtering, yes, we should call it that. I'm sure I would agree with many of those censorship decisions, such as e.g. YCombinators decision to censor things harming intellectual curiosity, but just because we agree with some censorship, doesn't make it not censorship. It's important to keep language free of little lies like using milder terms when we want to present something in a better light, because these little lies add up and become habits of both speech and thought.
A small price compared to dying in war. I'm not saying it's the right choice, but if you have no attachment to your country and people beyond it being a comfortable place to live, that's the choice most will make.
That would mean cultivating the mentality that a country is more than just an economic platform, because that's not something anyone is willing to die for. It means cultivating the dreaded nationalism.
The problem is that, to get traffic to your site (i.e. have your speech heard), it doesn't help if you use these other ways to find websites. You need others to use these ways. And 99% of them won't. I'm all for advocating widespread change of these habits, but that's a society-wide effort, not something a single website can do, much less one de-listed by Google.
Which is exactly why people mock this being referred to as "safety". Keep in mind the group mocking this PR bubble-wrapping of AI is largely opposed to the media professionals writing panicked editorials about how they were able to trick an AI into saying racism is good.
I know why! Because then the surveillance, privacy infringement, and gross overreach are obvious and in your face, and the culprit is clear! But they want to keep it discreet, like it's just a happy accident that you have no privacy left.
How were pointers handled before?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_United_...?
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Eur... - The wiki states that because of the "as such" clause, the exclusion of software patents does not apply to software that does anything inventive or solves a technical problem. But those are already requirements of patentability for anything, software or not. In other words, this interpretation of "as such" renders that entire clause totally meaningless - it could be struck entirely from the law, and software would be no more or less patentable. Clearly such a reading is absurd, and only shows the willingness of courts to ignore law for business interests.
"this same expectation in the Apple ecosystem is why I've received single digit spam from their messaging services" implies it can be justified as an anti-spam measure that open services can't match. But I've received also single-digit spam (cumulative over multiple years, not per year) on the WhatsApp running on my rooted Android. Nor would this even hypothetically stop non-RCS spam.
In general, companies always have some convenient excuse to cover their user-hostile moves. HP bricked printers using 3rd party ink for "security". Uncritically believing them, or even inventing excuses for them, is defending them.
"if they don't want rooted phones to use their RCS gateway I don't think they should be forced to allow it" - so we've established these companies are actively hostile to your freedom to use your property as you wish. But you are willing to disregard any monopoly/market-power abuse concerns, and grant them the freedom that they deny you (you used "should", so I assume you're not giving a mere factual description of what you think the law is). Just like letting Bell charge extra for using competitor's equipment [1] has ill effects on the market (try selling a phone when all your customers will have to pay an extra monthly fee to Bell for using it) and was rightly banned, so does letting the Google/Apple duopoly control smartphone software. Saying they should be allowed to continue to abuse and expand their market power is a defense of these companies, or rather, is a defense specifically of their anti-competitive and user-hostile practices.
The difference between a "defense" that merely seeks to correct facts, and one that justifies behavior, can be subtle (e.g. "this is necessary to fight spam" vs. "this was done to fight spam" vs. "there was no other way to fight spam"), but I think your phrasing put you in the latter category.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_System#Nationwide_monopol...
Edit as reply: "I think" and "I believe" do not meaningfully change your position. "I think action X is justified because of Y" and "Action X is justified because of Y" only differ in implied certainty, not in quality.
You don't actually have that freedom - the DMCAs anti-circumvention provision robbed you of the right to unlock your own property. You are merely permitted by the manufacturer to root them, and sometimes, for a 3-year period, the copyright office will let you do it too [1].
The company you are defending, and others like it, use every legal, contractual, technical, and economic means to restrict what you may do, so they can sell it back to you, and so they can control which companies can do it, stopping competition before it can even start. The recent ban on open-source HDMI drivers is another such example [2].
[1] https://www.eff.org/is-it-illegal-to-unlock-a-phone
[2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hdmi-forum-to-amd-no...
On the other hand, if someone used a local bank in their country to transact with an entity in China, and China demanded their assets in that bank be seized because they defamed a revolutionary hero [1], I would expect that country to block that seizure, regardless of how the bank itself might feel. I.e. they would demand any seizures comply with their local laws, similar to how extraditions (are supposed to) work, and not let other countries essentially steal from their citizens. Or looking at it a bit different, a bank can't take from its customers on behalf of a foreign country, since locals laws, unless they explicitly allow that taking, would consider it theft.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-lawmaking-idUSKBN1H...
Edit as reply because "I'm posting too fast" (thanks HN for not telling when I can post again by the way):
> Discussion about the US dollar misses the point. They do it because they can
I'd argue it doesn't miss the point, but rather, hides the true cause - that as you say, they do it because they can (as quickly becomes obvious when no other currency has this viral jurisdictional effect).
But I'm curious if anyone has ever tried suing their bank, in a non-US court, alleging that their seizure of their assets was illegal under local law. I can understand a bank rolling over for the US government, but it would be interesting to see if and how their legal system would justify it. Especially for something that is not a crime in their country.
On the other hand, if they were paid in US dollars, but in cash, that wouldn't establish jurisdiction, nor could it be seized, if the transfer happened outside US territory?
I said "OSHA-like" - if the OSHA approach has not resulted in disregard of safety, why would it result in the disregard of discrimination and racism?
Ironic that the police can't be sued for failing to protect people, but companies can. This legal quagmire of having to take ill-defined "reasonable" steps to preemptively prevent racism, and the chilling effect it has on behavior as companies avoid anything that might look bad, to avoid legal peril, could be prevented with clear rules and an OSHA-like agency that informs companies of any rules they're breaking and monitors correction.
But I suspect the chilling effects are a feature, not a bug.
The election administrators are lying - most elections in the US were hand-counted until the 1970s or later [1], and France and many other countries hand-count to this day [2,3].
> Last year, for example, one county in Arizona estimated that counting all 105,000 ballots from the 2020 election would require at least 245 people working every day, including holidays, for almost three weeks.
This works out to each worker taking 23 minutes to count a single vote.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_the_Unite...
[2] https://apnews.com/article/covid-health-france-elections-eur...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_by_country
A blatant 1st amendment violation.