magicbyte

I already submitted a story to an article on the same topic published by the New York Times [1] which got flagged reasonably because I edited the HN title to be more provocative in order to point the discussion towards the issue of free speech. However, I would love to see a discussion here, which is why I am trying again with another source.

In my opinion, the law is problematic for several reasons:

Deciding whether an input to a discussion is legal is not always easy. There have been cases where legal decisions have been revised. Furthermore, the presumption of innocence is removed. As soon as a contribution is accused to violate any laws, it will be removed.

Before, regular courts without any other incentives than administering justice would have decided on this kind of issue. Obviously, this does not scale which is one of the main reasons for the introduction of this law. Still, we cannot simply outsource the decision on legal questions because the quality of the outcome cannot be guaranteed at all. There is a reason for judges requiring university education. What will now happen on social network sites is comparable to a black box without any insights on the internal process.

The high fines up to $57 million incentivize social network sites to rather delete content than keep it up. It is reasonable to assume that comments which are not subject to freedom of expression are only a subset of those being deleted because of this newly introduced bill. As a result, free speech is limited.

[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/30/business/germany-facebook...

Nothing is stopping me from hosting one but being able to use the custom sync server on my Android phone is essential to me. Setting up a sync server easily includes being able to use it easily in a sense of being able to enter its URL somewhere in the settings of the browser.

While I did not find any evidence that custom sync servers are supported on Chrome for Android, I have got the impression that the requirement of specifying the sync server URL as a command line argument for Chromium is a deliberate choice in order to decrease the usability of that option. Using a desktop environment, you need to edit the links to your browser application in order to specify a custom sync server. I guess the discussion on https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=181429 is what mainly caused my subjective sentiment.

More reasons for switching to Firefox include the ability to easily set up a self-hosted sync server allowing you to share your browser settings across several clients. While Chrome for Android does not support extensions, the mobile Firefox version does allow you to install ad blockers while being able to sync your mobile and desktop clients. AFAIK, Chrome for Android does not support a custom sync server at all.

I recently switched from Chromium to Firefox and am running Firefox on my Linux system as a different user than my main account for increased security. The only thing that bothers me is the missing magnification bubble which is used by Chrome for Android if it cannot reliably determine which link I clicked on.

If Chrome allowed to block ads on mobile devices and implemented a feature for easily setting up custom sync servers, I would happily switch back for security reasons.