Huawei phones automatically deleting videos of the protests? | Hacker News Reader

Huawei phones automatically deleting videos of the protests?

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743 pointsqwertyuiop_512 comments

And people wonder why the US has blocked Huawei infrastructure in the US. They have no qualms silencing their own population and invest heavily in surveillance technology. Why would anyone want their equipment?

What worries me is that the US itself will go in the same direction. The surveillance is already there, but it is not acted on for the most part in everyday life. But there may be a clock on how long that will last.

Huawei just follows the law in China, just like Apple follows the same law but perhaps with some more delay.

maybe the law is wrong?

yeah, rhetorical question, but the issue here isn't necessarily adherence to local laws, but rather having some principled stance.

yeah, I'm hearing it, "principled stance"... one can dream

Apple has shareholders. It is eternally bound by the idiotic rules of capitalism, which demand higher returns every year. Principles will not matter until we force the system itself to change.

I recently read an interesting book that's picking up traction among managerial types, called "The Infinite Game" by Sinek

One of the main points is about this view that "companies must always make more short-term profit at any cost". Sinek says this is just a mind-virus that took hold after Milton Friedman started pushing it, and not only is it not actually true in any legal sense, it's a toxic philosophy that eats away at companies and slowly destroys them. He outlines how it's a big part of why Microsoft keeps losing out to Apple again and again.

(Another point it goes on about is how much more productive your workers are if you treat them like human beings)

So hopefully this book will keep getting more and more traction, and eventually we might not live in a toxic corporate dystopian hellscape

Correct, but Apple follows US law first and Chinese law second. And Huawei follows Chinese law first and US law second. For example the US could block Apple from selling iPhones in china. If they didn't listen the US government could (theoretically) have the board arrested. Same story with China and Huawei. What this means is that China could tell Huawei to shut down their infrastructure in the US. Wether they would actualy be able to do so is unknown, but that that isn't a risk that makes sense to take.

But to your point, China has more control over Apple than the US does over Huawei as iPhones are assembled there (with most components beinf made in Korea and Taiwan).

I also read that iPhones are quickly growing in market share in China as Chinese people see them as more luxurious than their domestic brands. Which raises the question, how does iMessage, the App Store, data collection and western app policy stuff work on Chinese iPhones? There has to be some collusion/government pressure on Apple to regulate their Chinese App Store the same way Huawei is forced to regulate its domestic app store.

It's no longer just about luxury. Apple has won over the CCP with their China/Taiwan-first outsourcing practices -- not to mention $270+B invested to train young, unskilled laborers from rural China and prop up China's domestic chip business -- and now some Chinese even consider Apple as their own.

iCloud has a China region operated by a Chinese company.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208351

There is no first or second tier with law the local law prevails however bad it may be.

>The surveillance is already there, but it is not acted on for the most part in everyday life. But there may be a clock on how long that will last.

Yes it is. Think advertising, marketing, and product placement. It's so pervasive you can't even see it.

>> The surveillance is already there, but it is not acted on for the most part in everyday life. But there may be a clock on how long that will last.

> Yes it is. Think advertising, marketing, and product placement. It's so pervasive you can't even see it.

But that's not the state. That'd be much more frightening.

The majority of large institutions are effectively captured by the state, and to a large extent the converse is true as well. Despotic actions (censorship, surveillance, etc) performed on behalf of the state by megacorps cannot be meaningfully distinguished by despotic actions performed by the state itself under the current legal regime.

A state has at least some illusion of citizen control, while a private company much less. Yes the state _could_ regulate it, but that's already working over chinese whispers (no pun intended)

Yes it is? I mean, I consider the military part of "the state" and the various branches participate in advertising, marketing, and product placement.

Just look at this: https://www.businessinsider.com/us-army-marketing-esports-co...

"After Congress withheld half of its ad budget due to an audit that revealed millions in spending that didn't deliver results, the Army dissolved its marketing division, relocated to Chicago, and revamped its approaches to data and events. Officials told Business Insider they planned to emphasize conferences like Comic-Con and esports festival Pax, saying gamers and programmers "make good soldiers.""

Whoops, got a little too exposed during the audit time to reset the paper trail.

Yep, The United States Military has been working with Hollywood and video game producers to produce propaganda for 3 decades now.

https://mronline.org/2022/08/06/how-the-pentagon-dictates-ho...

Wow, that link was a fascinating read

Advertisers, marketers, and product placers for the most part aren't armed with the tools nor legal authority to implement capital punishment.

The thing I'm starting to get increasingly scared about is what these US companies will do with the data that's already there. A significant proportion of our society has become totally OK with censorship, cancellation, and ostracizing of those who they politically disagree with. One could easily imagine a situation where this intensifies and suddenly political ideologues are analyzing all the voice recordings Alexa ever made in order to out political enemies. Keeping all this data around, in my view, means it will inevitably get misused over a long time scale.

What does any of that have to do with this story about Huawei and China?

I was responding to the parent comment?

> What worries me is that the US itself will go in the same direction. The surveillance is already there, but it is not acted on for the most part in everyday life. But there may be a clock on how long that will last.

Unless laws are changes, the US Government cannot demand anything from private industry.

Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences of said speech when the majority of the public thinks you’re a raging asshole.

Freedom of speech in private should mean free from consequences.

A public street or a tv interview isn't in privste.

Depends on how private. Speech is communication, which almost always necessitates more than one person, and the other people are perfectly within their own rights to provide some consequences to the speech they hear in private.

I disagree, because this mindset leads to what happened under Mao where anything against the party was punishable and family members would turn you in.

What? No. That's the government acting in response to speech, not other people expressing themselves.

Your argument forgets that it's also free speech to react to something objectionable. If the government forced me to do business with you without my consent, that would be compelled association, which is more similar to how Mao's government behaved in the 50s.

Umm no. Unless you’re in a looked soundproof room talking to yourself speech is a social activity and no one gets to dictate how others interpret and react to your speech.

Note that this mindset leads to what happened under Mao with children ratting out parents etc.

Should it? If I say something to someone in private that causes them to think I'm a raging asshole, should they not be free to share it with others, and should that not have consequences for me?

Under the SS kids would eat out their parents. Remember that you have to assume true speech could also be punished if you normalize the behavior.

Do you mean "free from public consequences"?

For example, if I say something controversial to my SO at home it shouldn't cause me to get fired because Alexa overheard and its recording leaked?

I suspect there is a lot of nuance to both sides here. Like if the president of the US tells racist jokes to their lover in private, then public consequences after a tell-all book may be in order. (By public I mean people may chose to vote them out.)

Can we stop with this stupidity please?

What if yer dog gets mad at you yelling at the television and bites you, that was a consequence, right? so ha! I've totally proven how silly you are for thinking that you should be able to make a statement to yourself about muhammed without actors in the middle east calling for your death!

----

When people talk about consequences for saying stupid things, this is exactly what they're talking about. Embarrassment for saying completely assinine things, not losing your ability to support yourself because you made a stupid joke when you were 14.

If you can't understand the difference between the two, that's a you problem.

You can apologize for making a stupid joke when you were 14, and you won't lose the ability to support yourself. People like Brendan Eich doubled down on being assholes, saying essentially that they would donate to campaigns to retroactively make gay marriage illegal again. Now he's a crypto grifter.

I've seen a story of a man losing his business because his daughter made a stupid joke.

You can bury your head in the sand and pretend this sort of damage isn't happening regularly, but the rest of us choose not to.

If you've seen it, you can point us to it instead of claiming the rest of us are burying our heads in the sand.

I raised my head up high and actively looked for the story by Googling "lost business daughter joke" and came up empty.

I said YOU are burying your head in the sand, I made no comment about others.

Stand on your own two feet.

I get that you said that. Did you get that I specifically searched for this case and came up empty? I am not intentionally hiding from this story. If it exists, show me.

Is this the search version of "pics or it didn't happen"?

See, you scare me. Should private speech in the home have consequences? Speech that not only did you not mean to make public, but you didn't even realize could possibly become public? That's the road to hell for our society.

What even is a “private speech”? Are you worried Alexa is listening to you as you rant to yourself?

It's not a private speech, smartass. It's private speech. As in speech that is private. As in, when you're in the privacy of your own home, and you're expressing yourself to yourself or others, that would be private speech. Speech that is not directed to a public audience. Even when you talk to yourself in your mind, that is your own private speech.

Nope, once you involve others, you involve consequences, as it is now their free speech (and free association) that often generates those consequences.

> Are you worried Alexa is listening to you as you rant to yourself?

Well, I mean, quite literally, it is. It's always listening to you, and that's how it knows when you say "Alexa". And IIUC all these audio recordings are sent right to AWS and stored indefinitely.

"Alexa, would you like to hear my racist tirade?

Haha, I can't imagine that this happens often. But that being said, there are documented instances of Alexa picking up sensitive conversations on accident, for example in this WaPo article where it was observed picking up sensitive information:

"There were even sensitive conversations that somehow triggered Alexa’s “wake word” to start recording, including my family discussing medication and a friend conducting a business deal."

https://archive.ph/c7G1c

That’s not a free speech or “cancelling” problem. That’s a privacy problem.

> Should private speech in the home have consequences? Speech that not only did you not mean to make public, but you didn't even realize could possibly become public?

What do you think about the (former) NFL team owner whose voicemail containing racial slurs was leaked. It was not supposed to become public: should he not have faced any consequences for it on that basis? IIRC, he was forced to sell his franchise by the other teams.

You're talking about the former owner of the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers, Donald Sterling. Not an NFL owner.

Thank you, I was recalling off the top of my head and mixed up the leagues.

Something similar happened with the Carolina Panthers in the NFL. The owner sold the team because of allegations that he was saying racist and sexist things, although there was no recording of him AFAIK. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/18/facing-misconduct-investigat...

It's an interesting case, for sure. I'm not familiar with the specifics, but I think a key variable is how exactly the conversation was leaked.

If the receiver of the voicemail leaked it, that's a consequence that the owner should have been prepared for - that sort of thing happens all the time, like with Alec Baldwin.

If it was the phone company that leaked it, then I think that is a different story. Abusing data from a platform advertised as private, perpetrated by someone who does not even know the people in question, is wrong. Nobody is prepared for the consequences of petabytes of conversation data to be analyzed by random people they don't even know. This is the situation I'm more concerned about.

I always found the people who say “Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences” are the authoritarian assholes, but that may just be me.

I'm just tired of bullies claiming to be victims. It's such bullshit.

Same

A current standard for free speech within the United States is the legal standard of "imminent lawless action."

This replaced the previous standard of "clear and present danger."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action

And just try saying it about all sorts of other freedoms and see how chilling it sounds: "freedom of the press is not freedom from consequences."

Damn I think you just changed my opinion.

Explain what about that is chilling. If I make false and defamatory statements in a newspaper (person xyz is a criminal who stole money, committed crimes against children, whatever), if it is not true you can be sued. Is that wrong, you have hurt their public character? But it's nontrivial to get a conviction, there seems to be a reasonable balance. If you say "Elon Musk person is a horrible leader, scares me, makes bad choices, kills baby bunny rabbits for fun" he likely won't win a suit - but it would be costly to defend yourself.

> And just try saying it about all sorts of other freedoms and see how chilling it sounds: "freedom of the press is not freedom from consequences."

That is literally true.

News organizations are sued all the time for libel or slander, sometimes for good reason.

Hell, Fox had to backtrack on some of their voting machine coverage, recently, for precisely this reason.

In fact, this is generally true for all freedoms.

Honestly, I challenge you to name just one other human right where you believe there is no legal or social restriction on how you can exercise that right.

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Why exactly? You _are_ free from consequences .. from the government. But how would you expect to be free from consequences when you offend millions of people using the Internet? Why should I not be able to ban people from my forum if I and most of my users don't like them and they are dragging down the quality of the forum?

Those are consequences, and I don't see how you can have some utopia where that isn't viable. Then you just live in a world where you are forced to listen to the broadcasted thoughts of idiots.

Doesn’t this beg the question of what exactly “consequences” means?

Most people would agree free speech doesn’t mean a local restaurant has to serve you. But what about other businesses?

Can dentists refuse to treat you?

Can hospitals refuse to give you life saving treatments based on your political views? Many hospitals in the US are private businesses.

Most people agree that social networks can kick you out. But what about ISPs? Can they refuse your business?

And if ISPs can refuse your business, what about water or electricity companies?

Certainly freedom of speech means freedom from certain consequences. As codified in the First Amendment it means freedom from certain legal consequences. Of course freedom of speech is broader than 1A though.

> Can dentists refuse to treat you?

Yes.

> Can hospitals refuse to give you life saving treatments based on your political views?

Ask a Catholic hospital to do an abortion.

> And if ISPs can refuse your business, what about water or electricity companies?

We have specific law for these sorts of scenarios. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_utility

I wouldn’t consider Catholic hospitals abortions to be the same situation. They don’t give abortions to anyone. That’s not the same as refusing a particular patient because they don’t like things that patient has said in the past.

But there have been CVS/Walgreens pharmacists who refuse to offer birth control or the morning after pill.

Still, that’s not refusing service to a particular customer based on that customer’s speech. I believe that pharmacist would refuse any customer. My question is about a pharmacy which would refuse e.g. Alex Jones because of things he’s said in the past.

But they treat pregnant women, and somethings things go wrong. Very wrong.

The procedures to deal with incomplete miscarriages are the same as for abortion. Delaying such procedures can have horrible consequences. Some Catholic hospitals have played this game, delaying and delaying until sepsis or some other condition becomes life threatening. If they wait too long, the pregnant woman may die.

I agree that abortion is sometimes necessary but that’s not really what I’m asking. Since we are talking about cancel culture I am asking what the spectrum of consequences should be for unpopular speech. One potential consequence could be that a hospital refuses to treat someone who has said something unpopular. For example Alex Jones has a heart attack, should a hospital deny him because of who he is? Note that my question is also not about what the law says, but what it should be.

My question is, should a hospital be able to deny treatment to a person based on that person’s previous speech? Is potentially being denied at the emergency room just another “consequence” of saying unpopular things? What if the hospital is privately owned, and the potential patient has slandered the owner or doctor in the past?

I agree with your point, but want to point out that in the US utility companies are regulated by local government and they cannot refuse service. Not only can they not refuse service, they MUST service all areas, even if it's at a loss (not profitable).

And when utility companies try to stop servicing areas because of the profit loss, these local governments absolutely will fine the shit out of them for it.

That doesn't change your point, but that particular example isn't a good one.

Sorry, I should have been more clear. My questions aren’t about what the law is, they’re about what the law should be. Some people may believe that ISPs shouldn’t be required to service everyone.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/los-angeles-shut-off-water-powe...

Water and power shut off to houses having parties during lockdown. Certainly a form of protest, and assembly, and yet here we are.

A declared state of emergency has legal effects like this.

We've long accepted limits on assembly; pretty much any building you enter other than a private home will have a "maximum capacity x people, by order of the fire marshal" placard somewhere.

It was clear overreach. I believe anyone reasonable saw it as overreach at the time.

Using Covid as an excuse for emergency executive powers was a failing of state and local governments across the US.

While las Angeles was cutting power to houses, my kids were in private school in person building life skills. So many of their peers are socially stunted. It’s sad.

Again, "police shut down rager" was a thing long before COVID. Especially if you live in a college town.

The article even indicates this action took place under "the city's party house ordinance, which became law in 2018".

Hospitals are covered under EMTALA so if it’s truly emergency and they accept Medicare, they are legally forced to.

A hospital that doesn’t take Medicare has no obligation to give you any treatments.

Fair enough, I’ll take your word on what the law says.

What if I live in an area where there’s only one hospital and it doesn’t take Medicare, do I just need to watch what I say so I don’t piss them off and they deny me life saving treatment? Even if that may happen to be legal, is that what the law should be?

> Can dentists refuse to treat you?

If you're a raging asshole, yes.

I guess so. But what if the dentist simply doesn’t like your politics? (Interpret this however you like: Democrat/Republican, pro/anti union, pro/anti Ukrainian sovereignty, etc. Suffice it to say, he doesn’t like something you wrote on Facebook.)

And what if that dentist is the only one within 50 miles? Even if it happens to be legal for the dentist to deny you, should it be?

Aside from the narrow question here, my broader point is that “consequences for your actions” is the whole question we should be discussing and I don’t think the term “cancel culture” is that helpful in actually exploring that issue.

Depends on what you mean by consequences. If the consequence is people thinking you are a raging asshole sure. If it's people strongly disagreeing with you, sure.

But if consequences means there is a coordinated effort among major corporations to punish and prevent you from speaking by de-platforming you or anyone who gives you a platform--that isn't freedom of speech (regardless of whether its allowed under the 1st amendment or not).

US social media banned covid misinformation as defined by US health officials. Why is banning covid misinformation as defined by Chinese health officials any different? Shit, the Chinese policy isn't even that different than the US's view 18 months ago--US lockdown protestors were vilified.

Freedom of speech has to mean freedom from consequences; consequences are the only thing you can be free from.

There might be some difference between “consequences to the message” and “consequences to the speaker” but I’ve never seen anyone try to tell those apart.

Then right to free speech only protects you from government consequences.

Yes, I think that's the right way to put it. The xkcd comic people link doesn't say that though…

>A significant proportion of our society has become totally OK with censorship, cancellation

This specific phrasing jumped out to me because being against both censorship and cancellation should be a contradiction. Cancellation is an example of the exercising of free speech.

Should I not have the freedom to organize a protest of my local theater for hosting a controversial figure that I think is worthy of cancellation? Isn't that a very basic and fundamental example of free speech?

Comments like yours seems to reveal a lack of a consistent principle underlying your argument. Instead, you seem to be defining free speech as some narrow window of speech that you agree with and speech outside that isn't worth protecting. Ironically it ends up making your comment a good example of the exact thing you were decrying.

You're reading too much into my comment. I specifically tried to stay neutral because this sort of tactical escalation could come from either side. In no way am I attempting to "define free speech as some narrow window of speech that I agree with". I'm specifically talking about people using seemingly private data to comb over people's private statements, which is a bad thing regardless of the content of those private statements.

>You're reading too much into my comment. I specifically tried to stay neutral because this sort of tactical escalation could come from either side.

Fair enough, but you should know that calling out cancelation as a growing flaw of society will often not be received as a neutral position. The people who complain the loudest about cancelation generally do not come from "either side". It ends up making your comment appear to have a specific political slant even if that wasn't intentional.

"One side often uses a particular tactic against their enemies (cancellation). You criticizing it makes you sound biased".

No. The only one here who comes off as biased is you.

>Fair enough, but you should know that calling out cancelation as a growing flaw of society will often not be received as a neutral position

Unfortunately, to those who view the world through the warped prism of partisanship, there are no neutral positions. Everything is tribal - Red or Blue. Statements aren't ever read with an open mind about what is actually being discussed, but rather scrutinized for indications about whether the author is on one team or the other, so they can be either supported or attacked.

>It ends up making your comment appear to have a specific political slant even if that wasn't intentional.

To tribalists, everything has a political slant.

>> The people who complain the loudest about cancelation generally do not come from "either side".

Look you aren't wrong exactly but for those of us who grew up being incredibly left aligned and still are on a majority of things like myself expressing concerns about cancellation will make others put us in the out group.

Genuinely though I am concerned about it because I think it has a tendency to encourage people to think about others one dimensionally. One of my friends has told another one of my friends that they are a bad person for not cutting someone out of their life because that person voted for the LNP (the major Australian conservative party). This is trying to guilt and shame someone into "cancelling" someone else on a micro scale and it freaks me the fuck out. I genuinely don't think this would have happened if cancel culture wasn't such a thing.

>> It ends up making your comment appear to have a specific political slant even if that wasn't intentional.

This kind of thing also worries me, the idea that viewing a single thing as a flaw culturally speaking is enough to put someone on a specific political slant. To me it feels somewhat prejudicial. I am not going to pretend I've not been guilty of it, because I absolutely have... just it feels to me like everyone is very quick to take positions on a particular thing as evidence as a side in an all encompassing culture war and I hate it

Not to jump into US political discussion, but the phrase you call out is what was typically called a dog whistle a few years ago.

I can support the concept of free speech without cheering on everything someone might utter with their speech. I support free speech but I’m against dishonesty and calling someone’s employer to fire them because you disagree with them.

I just don’t necessarily think those cases should let the state prosecute you.

You might want to be sure you’re interpreting someone’s position in a way they would agree with before leveling something as grave as to assert their principals are inconsistent.

Free speech is generally a legal thing while one may expect social mores to correct for the things they find distasteful and be disappointed when they don’t. That is not a contradiction.

> I support free speech but I’m against dishonesty and calling someone’s employer to fire them because you disagree with them.

Do you not see any contradiction in this sentence?

Dishonest speech is still speech. If you support free speech, you support the ability for people to lie because often whether a person is lying or not is not black and white.

If a company employs someone who makes objectionable statements, how is it not free speech to call up that company and threaten a boycott unless they are fired? Boycotts are one of the more fundamental examples of free speech. How can you be against them but for free speech unless you have a very narrow definition of what speech qualifies as being worthy of protection?

Don't your statements also have contradictions? I am not condoning one viewpoint or another, but this is not black and white.

The definition of freedom of speech: the right to express any opinions without censorship or restraint.

Is it right that your free speech supersedes the free speech of others to the point where you actively fight against their free speech and which means the speech of others isn't really free then, is it?

It seems you’re suggesting that by exercising disagreement we would be limiting the free speech of those we disagree with. Freedom of speech is not freedom of consequences. Others have the freedom of speech to speak against your freedom of speech. Only the government is disallowed in interfering.

I wouldn't call disagreement the same as trying to get someone fired because you disagree with them.

> Freedom of speech is not freedom of consequences.

Again, the definition of freedom of speech is "the right to express any opinions without censorship or restraint". It's not really free speech if you have to worry about being censored or consequences. It may be reprehensible speech that you are against but using freedom of speech as a weapon to punish others does not foster an environment where freedom of speech exists.

I personally think we should be able to have academic discussions with people that we disagree with and not try to further worsen this divisive and polarized world that we are trending towards by attacking them instead of their opinions. Shouting the opposing side down so that they cannot speak does nothing but make the situation worse. You might feel like you win a short term win by deplatforming someone but it causes further radicalization. It doesn't matter what side of the spectrum you are on you will not convince the other side without actually engaging in good faith discussions.

> I wouldn't call disagreement the same as trying to get someone fired because you disagree with them.

> > Freedom of speech is not freedom of consequences.

> Again, the definition of freedom of speech is "the right to express any opinions without censorship or restraint". It's not really free speech if you have to worry about being censored or consequences.

That's a very absolutist way of seeing free speech. I also don't believe anyone practices this view of free speech in practice. If you have children, are they allowed to say anything without consequences? What would you do with a guest at your house who repeatedly insulted you? I also would like to know what you think about spam filters, or moderation here on HN is that not cancellation?

As a side note there was an interesting post from a twitter discussion a number of weeks ago. The main gist of the discussion was that moderation is hardly ever about "cancelling" some sort of free speech, but about increasing SNR. Harassment, racism etc. decrease SNR and make people leave your platform.

No, it is not. You have the freedom to rebuttal, but not the one to insist of speakers to be silence or removed. Look up the definition of freedom of speech on wikipedia, it is in the first sentence.

This is not absolutist at all, this is a very basic rule for civilized discourse. You are correct that people occasionally do not adhere to these principles.

In the US, that definition has only ever applied to the government. And it should only ever apply to the government.

> Shouting the opposing side down so that they cannot speak does nothing but make the situation worse. You might feel like you win a short term win by deplatforming someone but it causes further radicalization. It doesn't matter what side of the spectrum you are on you will not convince the other side without actually engaging in good faith discussions.

Are you suggesting we moderate and apply a little restraint to someone's speech because of the consequences of radicalizing someone?

> Are you suggesting we moderate and apply a little restraint to someone's speech because of the consequences of radicalizing someone?

Yes. Why not try to engage them in a discussion to try to convince them? If you truly believe in your viewpoint and want it to prevail, don't you think engaging with them and convincing them of your viewpoint would be better for whatever you believe in in the long run than simply muting the opposing viewpoint?

Freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences from that speech. You can say whatever you want, but that doesn’t mean I have to let you sit at my bar.

Right, you can. And you should be able to do that. You are just not adhering to freedom of speech in that moment. You leverage rights to your property or similar rights.

>Don't your statements also have contradictions?

I don't know, do they? I can't really address a comment like this without you being more specific.

>Is it right that your free speech supersedes the free speech of others to the point where you actively fight against their free speech and which means the speech of others isn't really free then, is it?

Sure, this is a fine principled stance to take. However, if this is a principled stand rather than one based off situational politics, doesn't that apply to other forms of speech which are used to stifle speech of others?

Hate speech is one example. The people who advocate against cancel culture generally aren't in favor of more restrictions on hate speech.

Money in politics is another. If political advertising is protected speech, doesn't a billionaire having the ability to outbid me for all ad inventory in the lead up to an election stifle my ability to freely voice my beliefs? Either the billionaire's ads aren't free speech or they are free speech and are being used to drown out the free speech of others.

> I don't know, do they? I can't really address a comment like this without you being more specific.

I tried to convey that by pointing out that you are exercising free speech to eliminate someone else's free speech. That seems contradictory to an environment where free speech exists.

> Sure, this is a fine principled stance to take. However, if this is a principled stand rather than one based off situational politics, doesn't that apply to other forms of speech which are used to stifle speech of others?

> Hate speech is one example. The people who advocate against cancel culture generally aren't in favor of more restrictions on hate speech.

It seems a little disingenuous to just lump everyone that doesn't think cancel culture in together with those that like hate speech. I don't support hate speech.

> Money in politics is another. If political advertising is protected speech, doesn't a billionaire having the ability to outbid me for all ad inventory in the lead up to an election stifle my ability to freely voice my beliefs? Either the billionaire's ads aren't free speech or they are free speech and are being used to drown out the free speech of others.

I don't know the answers to this, it does not seem black and white and seems like a more complex scenario but an ad market does not seem like it is exactly similar to a free public forum. But yes, it seems bad if that's what you are asking me.

The problem with fighting hate speech is that it does not work and the likelihood of severe abuse is high. You could declare anything as hate, especially in modern culture.

Apart from that money in politics is also a problem. A very complicated one that also is not helped at all with additional hate speech legislation. On the contrary.

At that point it gets kinda weird IMHO. Especially on HN many believe that work and personal life are two different things. Cancellation in that form makes a bridge between the two I personally dislike and I see no reason to pressure an employer to dismiss a potentially good/productive employee because of his personal life/beliefs.

I doubt many that got cancelled in that way suddenly saw the errors in their ways. It seems much more likely to make them even more extreme in their beliefs and even more against others so it seems petty and counterproductive.

I agree with free speech and oppose censorship, but I also promote tolerance of those we disagree with and a certain degree of latitude in putting up with things others say without jumping on them immediately for things I disagree with or endless protests for what many believe to be innocuous or good faith beliefs. Cancellation is usually not just protest, it is warfare by any means to smear and destroy someones life and silence dissent from your position. It is dirty tricks instead of intellectual dialogue.

>I agree with free speech and oppose censorship, but I also promote tolerance of those we disagree with

Does this mean you would support legislation to outlaw hate speech? After all that works against tolerance of others and is often used "to smear and destroy someones life and silence dissent from your position" "for what many believe to be innocuous or good faith beliefs."

How do you get him supporting legislating to outlaw hate speech from him saying he wants to promote tolerance?

Tolerance is something every human possesses and should exercise, it's not something that can be legislated. An intolerant person will use their free speech to attack, malign and try to get you fired (which is fair). A tolerant person will let you speak your mind even if they disagree. In no point is there the need for hate speech legislation if you have true free speech.

Because both hate speech and cancellation are forms of speech that can be used to suppress the speech of others. I assumed their opposition to cancellation was more than just a distaste for it, hence the jump to legislation.

I do not support legislation outlawing cancellation.

Is hate speech not essentially the ultimate form of calling to cancel someone?

We are in a situation where we are seeing a strong increase in right extremist terrorism (just look at the last month) and it is by far the most prevelant terrorism in the US and many western countries, but somehow the discussion revolves around how the "poor" people who incite and support the violence are "being cancelled". That's intellectually dishonest.

The talk about "cancellation" is almost exclusively a deflection tactic used from one political direction, who have absolutely no problem to use cancellation themselves. Nobody complained about protestor being removed from Trump rallies, often violently, or let's look at the more recent blocking of left-wing twitter accounts by self proclaimed free-speech absolutist Elon Musk (https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...)

Isn't cancellation just censorship by a mob? If i understand my terms correctly (I very well might not), cancellation causes people to be deplatformed which seems a lot like censorship. I guess cancellation can be considered free speech, but that doesn't mean it's not censorship.

Cancellation and censorship mean a lot of different things in different contexts. For example, OJ Simpson has largely been cancelled. But it doesn't feel like censorship per se -- for example you can still purchase writing by him or find video of him. If he's not on Tic Tok or YouTube, I don't think they'd block him. Yet, I don't think Disney is going to make a movie starring him.

Cancellation is the consequences of speech. Period.

It is most certainly not censorship when you consider the context - something these debates regularly leave out. Some views are widely considered to be abhorrent or dangerous. People are free to believe vaccine misinformation or glorify extremism. Society does not have an obligation to listen.

The question under discussion is what those consequences should be. In some countries the consequence for certain kinds of speech is capital punishment by the State. Most Americans would be horrified if the US government did this. To be clear, the fact that this happens to be constitutionally protected is irrelevant because the question is what should be illegal not what is illegal.

> Some views are widely considered to be abhorrent or dangerous.

I also think pointing to “society” isn’t that useful since it’s a moving target. “Society” isn’t one thing. Things that are acceptable in one place are not in another.

In some places advocating for equality for LGBT people is considered an affront to society. Dangerous even. The question is, what should be the worst consequence of having unpopular viewpoints?

But this has no protections under the law. If your public support of say pro-life/choice means you can no longer get a job, that's a problem.

> Cancellation is the consequences of speech. Period.

This... isn't true though. It can be and often is, but it isn't just that. People accused of certain types of crimes, or accused of having done something racist/sexist privately are often cancelled or close to it, even without being convicted. And I completely understand where that impulse comes from too, as much as possible I think we should "listen and believe"... but that we should also maybe take that with a bit of "trust but verify" and not immediately have movements to deplatform people for things we didn't witness them do ourselves/have really solid evidence for

The complaints about “cancellation” are complaints about others speaking up.

I am not a fan of cancel culture in the way it’s practiced today (especially some of the Twitter driven campaigns), but it’s squarely free speech.

> Should I not have the freedom to organize a protest of my local theater for hosting a controversial figure that I think is worthy of cancellation? Isn't that a very basic and fundamental example of free speech?

Perhaps it isn't about freedom of speech but centralization of power. Protest all you want, but if you advocate for the centralization of power in government or corporate hands then you shouldn't complain when you can't protest anymore without getting the same treatment Chinese protestors are receiving

Cancellation is using speech and other means to limit someone else's ability to speak. When you demand that your local theatre forbid someone from speaking, rather then just choosing to not attend and listen to it, that's yes, technically, using your right of free speech. It's what you're using it for that is the difference. In one case, to get your message heard, in the other, to prevent someone from doing that. In essence using free speech to stop free speech.

It’s not a contradiction, there is political cancellation which has happened to celebrities in China. Look up Zhao Wei. This is the type of thing GP refers to.

https://www.newsweek.com/who-zhao-wei-mystery-surrounds-chin...

In China any friendliness towards Japan can lead to being “cancelled” but the way it happens isn’t through a local protest.

> This specific phrasing jumped out to me because being against both censorship and cancellation should be a contradiction. Cancellation is an example of the exercising of free speech.

It isn't a contradiction. Think of it this way: government censorship is just when the government cancels you.

The issue with "cancellation" is that it's often a cudgel to suppress and punish expression some minority disagrees with, often to enforce some kind of orthodoxy. It might be someone expressing their narrow "free speech" rights, but in a way that's opposed to "free expression" or a "free exchange of ideas."

>you seem to be defining free speech

GP didn't mention free speach anywhere. Yet you still take the liberty of defining words they didn't use for them.

>Comments like yours seems to reveal a lack of a consistent principle underlying your argument

cancellation is a societal issue, free speech is a legal issue. GP didn't say "we should make cancellation illegal" they said cancellation, which "a significant proportion of our society has become totally OK with" combined with surveilance, will cause even more cancelation. That is bad. (And I agree, btw.)

You can have fair laws and still have an unfair population obsessed with censorship and cancellation. That's bad, but doesn't mean we should make it illegal. Complaining about societal failaings does not have to mean advocating for those people's views to be made illegal. That seems to be something that censorship and cancellation advocates can't seem to understand.

>Should I not have the freedom to organize a protest of my local theater for hosting a controversial figure that I think is worthy of cancellation?

You have complete freedom to do that, but it doesn't mean you should or shouldn't. That's what GP is saying. And cancellation can be over extremely petty or unfounded things. Obviously there is a line but people have taken a "cancel first, ask questions later" approach, and over increasingly petty reasons. One can advocate against that without being against free speech, which means that the government cannot make speech illegal.

You are only focusing on half of the passage I quoted. They also voiced opposition to censorship. I wasn't calling out their opposition to cancellation. I was saying those two views shouldn't coexist because being against cancellation is a form of censorship.

Being against cancellation and specifically, cancel culture, is not a form a censorship. At no point did that person suggest that people participating in cancel culture be prevented from doing so or that their ideas be shouted down. Funny enough, that same courtesy is usually not applied by the proponents of cancel culture.

So, if people go out and protest outside a theater that's cancellation and it's good? But someone makes a post online saying they don't like it that's censorship and it's bad?

>They also voiced opposition to censorship.

And? Censorship does not imply government censorship.[0] censorship here is simply the result of a successful cancellation.

>being against cancellation is a form of censorship

No. That would only be if GP advocated for it being illegal. GP is saying "don't do that" not "this should be illegal" or even "you should be fired and excluded for thinking that." The fact that you think being against cancellation is a form of censorship is deeply worrying.

[0]https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censorship

>the institution, system, or practice of censoring

>Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are "offensive," happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal political or moral values on others. Censorship can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure groups.

Censorship isn't cancellation, at least as far as the two terms are popularly used. Censorship involves being prevented from publicly speaking or promulgating one's views. Cancellation is shaming, social ostracization, or mass repudiation. There's some overlap in that a party with the power to censor you can use that power when cancelling you. But you can censor someone without cancelling them and cancel someone without censoring them.

I do agree with you that being against cancellation isn't necessarily pro censorship either.

>Censorship does not imply government censorship.

...

>>being against cancellation is a form of censorship

>No. That would only be if GP advocated for it being illegal. GP is saying "don't do that" not "this should be illegal"

How are those two comments not in direct conflict with each other? If censorship is not a legal matter, GP arguing that people shouldn't cancel people is a form of censorship even if they don't argue for legal repercussions.

>GP arguing that people shouldn't cancel people is a form of censorship even if they don't argue for legal repercussions.

When I wrote "GP is saying 'don't do that'" I meant entreaty, as in a request to stop canceling people, or as you put it "calling out cancelation as a growing flaw of society."

>Don't

>a command or entreaty not to do something

What that is is a discussion of ethics. GP is offering their values, along with their reasoning:

>One could easily imagine a situation where this intensifies and suddenly political ideologues are analyzing all the voice recordings Alexa ever made in order to out political enemies. Keeping all this data around, in my view, means it will inevitably get misused over a long time scale.

None of this has stopped anyone from doing anything. It isn't censorship. The goal of a discussion is for both sides to hear each other and hopefully come to a more accurate conclusion. The fact that you keep conflating having and discussing different opinions with censorship is incredible.

>cancel culture

>the practice or tendency of engaging in mass canceling (see cancel entry 1 sense 1e) as a way of expressing disapproval and exerting social pressure[0]

>censor

>to examine in order to suppress (see suppress sense 2) or delete anything considered objectionable[1]

GP being against cancel culture and saying cancel culture is worrysome does not amount to censorship

[0]https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cancel%20culture [1]https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/censoring

The definition you cite specifically calls cancelling "a way of expressing disapproval".

Cancellation is a group of people saying "don't do that" regarding something they find objectionable.

GP is saying "don't do that" in regard to cancelling.

GP wants those people to stop voicing their disapproval. That is effectively censorship of those people's speech.

Cancellation is not the same as simply voicing disapproval. Cancellation is closely intertwined with mob mentality and identity politics.

And telling people that mob mentality is bad, is not censorship. Telling people to self correct is different from telling a platform to correct people

>Telling people to self correct is different from telling a platform to correct people

How are they different?

You telling me not do to something would cause me to self censor.

Me telling a theater to not host an event with a controversial figure would cause the theater to self censor.

Either way there is some external force that is pressuring for a change in expression. That is true regardless of whether they are motivated by mob mentality, identity politics, or anything else. I don't know why the motivation for the speech should even matter unless you are arguing that some speech shouldn't be protected based on the motivation behind the speech.

>You telling me not do to something would cause me to self censor.

Would it? If you don't agree, you should not listen. According to your view, if I told you to stop commenting on HN you would stop? I'm not forcing you to do anything.

>Me telling a theater to not host an event with a controversial figure would cause the theater to self censor.

The theater is not the one being censored here but the one censoring. When you do it to yourself, you are both the censor and being censored.

>Either way there is some external force that is pressuring for a change in expression. That is true regardless of whether they are motivated by mob mentality, identity politics, or anything else.

Me telling you my opionin is not an external force that is pressuring for a change in expression. Or, it is, but only in the hope that you yourself change your mind. I can't force you to do anything. This is known as a discussion:

>the activity in which people talk about something and tell each other their ideas or opinions[0]

>I don't know why the motivation for the speech should even matter unless you are arguing that some speech shouldn't be protected based on the motivation behind the speech.

Back to the "shouldn't be protected" argument? We aren't talking about a matter of law but of right and wrong. The law provides us a space to discuss what that means for ourselves. If people use that power to shut others down that's wrong but the most we can do is point out to those people that they are wrong.

[0]https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/discu...

Personally I would consider neither of those examples as censorship. Unless the theater in your second example was the only theater in the world. When I said platform, I probably should have clarified that I meant "big platform".

There is still a difference though. With self correction, you make the choice. With platform censorship, the platform makes the choice for you. There may be an external force in both cases, but in the former case you can still choose to ignore it.

"and exerting social pressure" is key here. Are you being intentionaly ignorant? First being against cancelation is censorship, now cancelation is just voicing an opinion? All while quoting half a definition that I just cited out of context.

I left off "exerting social pressure" because I felt it was redundant to "expressing disapproval". What do you think those terms mean and how are they different? Let's go back to the example I mentioned in my first comment about protesting a theater for hosting a controversial personality. That protest would be me "expressing disapproval", "exerting social pressure", and exercising my free speech. I don't know how or why you are separating that one action into distinct categories of speech.

>I left off "exerting social pressure" because I felt it was redundant to "expressing disapproval".

It isn't the same at all. It is "a way of [a] expressing disapproval and [b] exerting social pressure. One can express disapproval without the express intent of exerting social pressure. That is, the outcome may exert social pressure but the point is to have your voice be heard, not shut the other person down.

>Let's go back to the example I mentioned in my first comment.

Ok:

>Should I not have the freedom to organize a protest of my local theater for hosting a controversial figure that I think is worthy of cancellation?

>You have complete freedom to do that, but it doesn't mean you should or shouldn't. That's what GP is saying. And cancellation can be over extremely petty or unfounded things. Obviously there is a line but people have taken a "cancel first, ask questions later" approach, and over increasingly petty reasons. One can advocate against that without being against free speech, which means that the government cannot make speech illegal.

Well, what is the purpose of the protest? If it is to make your disaproval known, then it is not an attempt of cancelation. If, as you have clarified, you intent is to exert social pressure to scilence them, then you are trying to both cancel and censor them.

In any case, that doesn't make disagreement of opinions in general censorship, as you have claimed:

>GP arguing that people shouldn't cancel people is a form of censorship

Are we both censoring each other now? Or are we having a discusion?

>I don't know how or why you are separating that one action into distinct categories of speech.

exercising my free speech: (almost) any speech falls under this category.

expressing disapproval: GP expressing disaproval of cancel culture

exerting social pressure: When as a part of "mass canceling" an atempt is made to censor someone.

To recap:

1. Having an opinion is not censorship.

2. acknowlegment of freedom of speech legaly is not the same as an endorcment of said speech.

3. Being against what people do is not a demand that their free speech be taken away legaly.

Therefore:

"Comments like yours seems to reveal a lack of a consistent principle underlying your argument. Instead, you seem to be defining free speech as some narrow window of speech that you agree with and speech outside that isn't worth protecting."

Is wrong.

4. Exterting social pressure isn't always a bad thing and is some times needed. When it is simply used as a weapon to shut down non-dangerous people you disagree with it has usualy gone too far.

These can all be true at the same time

>One can express disapproval without the express intent of exerting social pressure. That is, the outcome may exert social pressure but the point is to have your voice be heard, not shut the other person down.

What does "have your voice heard" mean? Who is hearing your voice? How does hearing that voice impact that person or group? Isn't there an implicit social pressure on that person to change after hearing voices of disapproval.

Just think of it on a small scale interpersonal level. Imagine your significant other comes to you and says "I'm thinking of painting the bedroom blue". How do you respond voicing your disapproval of the idea without them taking it as social pressure to not do it? Any objection to the color choice will be viewed as pressure to not make that choice. You can't separate the disapproval from the social pressure because the disapproval is inherently a form of the social pressure.

The same is true for protests. People don't protest just to make their disapproval known. They protest to motivate change. People aren't in the streets of Iran and China at the moment because they want strangers to know they disapprove of their government actions. They are doing it to motivate change from their government.

>"have your voice heard" mean? Who is hearing your voice?

It means for those involved to know about it.

>How does hearing that voice impact that person or group? Isn't there an implicit social pressure on that person to change after hearing voices of disapproval

They are impacted only (or mainly) in the sense that you have given them new information. Think about an argument you had with a colleague: were you trying to pressure them, or were you having a discusion? There may be some element of presure involved, but was that your goal? If you always act that way you will not work well with others, even if it works temporarily.

>How do you respond voicing your disapproval of the idea without them taking it as social pressure to not do it?

My aim certainly would not be to pressure them. I also wouldn't immediately disaprove but initiate a discusion as this is the first time it is brought up. But this is also not the social pressure that is involved in canceling. If I were to say "the wall will be red or we break up" that would be a manipulative and an abusive relationship certainly. Me being honest about how I feel about the color and discussing possible options would be best. But I would certainly try to limit any compelling attitude in order to maintain a healthy relationship.

>People don't protest just to make their disapproval known.

True, and there are also awareness marches and awareness days, which are meant strictly to bring awareness.

>People aren't in the streets of Iran and China at the moment because they want strangers to know they disapprove of their government actions.

Actualy, in china there are two elements, one of which is to let other citizens (and the world) know that they disapprove. But yes the main reason is to affect some change. I didn't say that every action which attempts to change something is canceling. Those two examples (which are ironicaly protests against censorship) are not about censoring the government so the terminology of canceling doesn't really make sense. But if you like we can still use it. Say the protesters are trying to cancel the government, what of it? I didn't say that you can't do it, all I said was that it is on a different level, which is true:

>Exterting social pressure isn't always a bad thing and is some times needed. When it is simply used as a weapon to shut down non-dangerous people you disagree with it has usually gone too far.

>My aim certainly would not be to pressure them. I also wouldn't immediately disaprove but initiate a discusion as this is the first time it is brought up. But this is also not the social pressure that is involved in canceling. If I were to say "the wall will be red or we break up" that would be a manipulative and an abusive relationship certainly. Me being honest about how I feel about the color and discussing possible options would be best. But I would certainly try to limit any compelling attitude in order to maintain a healthy relationship.

This specifically gave me a theory that might explain our disagreement. You seem to be thinking of this from the perspective of the speaker. I am thinking of it from the perspective of the person who must hear the speech. Reverse this hypothetical for example. Imagine you suggest a color to paint a room and your spouse mentions they hate that color. I assume you are a normal caring person and you would simply pick a different color. It shouldn't even be much of a conversation. If someone you care about objects strongly to something, you automatically feel a pressure to listen because you care about them. It doesn't even matter what they intended by their comment.

Maybe I’m only expanding this analogy beyond interpersonal relationships because I had a couple beers with dinner, but your logic there seems consistent. I get the impression that you think social pressure originates with the speaker. That it primarily is something that is intentional. However, I think its origin is right in the name. It is dictated by how society receives your speech. I don't think any of us have complete control over the social pressure of our speech and in turn any speech can induce social pressure. Meanwhile, you seem to suggest that it can be separated from speech by simply not intending to induce that pressure. That allows you to say “cancelling people is bad” with no ulterior motives to stop people from doing it. I don't think that is how society accepts speech. Society hears "something is bad" as an implicit request not to do said thing. It is motivated by practically the opposite reason as your spouse. Society doesn't care about your opinion at all so the only interpretation of you sharing your opinion is that it is an attempt to impact society in some way.

Basically, you think speech is primarily a method to say something while I am thinking of it as primarily a way to be heard.

>I don't think any of us have complete control over the social pressure of our speech and in turn any speech can induce social pressure. Meanwhile, you seem to suggest that it can be separated from speech by simply not intending to induce that pressure. That allows you to say “cancelling people is bad” with no ulterior motives to stop people from doing it. I don't think that is how society accepts speech. Society hears "something is bad" as an implicit request not to do said thing.

A few points here. Again, “cancelling people is bad” is a bit simplistic; "cancel culture is bad" is more accurate, or “cancelling people is generaly bad." That aside, while there are inevitably many effects of a given action, and two actions may overlap in their effects, they will not necessarily do so to the same degree. That is, I am not saying that the intent realy matters per se from an evaluatory standpoint of its effect but rather it serves as a potent indicator of the degree of effect. All this is to say that while there may always be an implicit social pressure involved with all speech, it is generaly at a tolerable (and if not then inevitable) degree. While mass cancelation is a method of exerting social pressure, and while as you say both regular speech and cancelation result in some amount of social pressure, the social pressure exerted by cancelation is to a much higher degee, and the reason is that it is intended and therefore amplified, rather than minified as would be in a productive discussion.

I'm not going to argue with anything you said here, but to repeat myself, you are still only looking at half the picture. When I said this:

> That allows you to say “cancelling people is bad” with no ulterior motives to stop people from doing it. I don't think that is how society accepts speech. Society hears "something is bad" as an implicit request not to do said thing.

I wasn't simply trying to echo your argument. I was explaining why I see hypocrisy in the argument that is against both cancel culture and censorship. Both are forms of speech. Voicing disapproval of cancel culture is received as trying to advocate against cancel culture. That might not be your intent, but it is how it is received. Pressuring someone to not exercise speech is a form of censorship which creates hypocrisy when combined with a stated disapproval of censorship.

>Voicing disapproval of cancel culture is received as trying to advocate against cancel culture. That might not be your intent, but it is how it is received.

As I said:

>All this is to say that while there may always be an implicit social pressure involved with all speech, it is generaly at a tolerable (and if not then inevitable) degree. While mass cancelation is a method of exerting social pressure, and while as you say both regular speech and cancelation result in some amount of social pressure, the social pressure exerted by cancelation is to a much higher degee, and the reason is that it is intended and therefore amplified, rather than minified as would be in a productive discussion.

Therefore there is no hypocrisy, because the degree is much lower and from a moral evaluatory stanpoint of intention one aims to maximize and the other to minimize. To say all disagreements and expressed moral convictions are censorship is to remove censorship as a meaningful word. Therefore we must in order to have this word in to a case of above average pressure.

Except that cancellation is often accomplished via censorship. I do not consider voicing opposition as "cancellation".

> Cancellation is an example of the exercising of free speech.

If the context is a vacuum that might be fine, maybe.

In reality the US is hyper fragile intellectually and it has gotten drastically worse over the past 10-15 years. The way that fragility is being managed is through silencing and cancellation instead of through intellectual strengthening. Younger people in the US are entirely incapable of discussing difficult ideas emotionally, they're weak. Today the US would try to defeat the KKK via cancellation, which doesn't actually work; yesterday the KKK - which was a huge movement at one time, and has almost no power today - was defeated in the public square head-on, not by cowering or cancelling. The people that intellectually fought the KKK at the height of its power would ridicule today's incredible mental weakness; such weakness that someone as trivial as Trump has to be cancelled in order to deal with him. If people today weren't so intellectually weak, they could counter a Trump quite easily. Trump is absolutely nothing compared to what was dealt with in prior generations.

You defeat bad ideology through rigorous intellectual conflict in the public square. It's messy, difficult and it can be violent - so what. Anything else and the bad will fester under the rugs where it has been swept, and you risk it getting far worse. There are far worse things than Trump and they're barrelling toward the US right now (DeSantis), that wasn't stopped by silencing Trump; it only gets stopped through exactly what I said - you have to smash the ideas in the public square, your ideas have to win. Or else. The far right will eventually produce the next version of Nixon, and he'll wield far greater executive power compared to what Richard Nixon had. Trump isn't that, he's a carnival barker at best; a big part of the left is too irrational and obsessed to recognize the difference.

The US is lucky it was Trump. He's a de facto clown show. The US is increasingly close to being primed for real authoritarianism, the levers are there.

Yes, you're absolutely right. Jonathan Haidt touched on this quite a bit in "The Coddling of the American Mind". Unfortunately I see no possible way to reverse the situation. People simply aren't used to hardship anymore, you can easily live a life of pure comfort. The advances in digital technology only intensify this phenomenon. Short of major economic collapse, I'd expect humanity to become increasingly soft and squishy, to the point of essentially becoming another form of cattle.

I would agree that the US today is far less equipped to deal with rigorous debate of ideology. I don't agree that cancellation was not part of how the KKK was defeated, or that it is not an appropriate tool to have in the toolbox.

Rigorous intellectual debate has it's place. You have to definitively disprove something at the start. But at a certain point in time, giving them any more spotlight does more harm than good. There is a certain portion of the population that will be swayed into ridiculous viewpoints no matter how thoroughly they have been destroyed in a debate, no matter how much evidence has been piled in front of them. Rigorous debate of flat earthers rarely convinces the flat earthers they are wrong, and doing so in a public setting provides them more opportunity to spread their misinformation. We would gain nothing of import by putting a bunch of flat earther's on national television and debating them.

Nor would you gain anything by platforming a KKK member and debating them on stage today. There's no advantage to be earned by doing so. But, at the time, when they were at the height of their power and had many people believing in them? Certainly. They had a way to preach their message regardless, the reach to spread the information to a large audience. Being able to argue against them and destroy their message was important.

But cancelling them was also part of the process. Boycotts were a SIGNIFICANT part of the effort in defeating the clan. You can find many, many, many historical references to them. Here's a small sample: https://thecatholicnewsarchive.org/?a=d&d=TCT19221207-01.2.6... https://www.jstor.org/stable/27502105 https://academic.oup.com/chicago-scholarship-online/book/214... https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

The American Unity League in particular spent a large amount of time and effort organizing boycotts and other methods of cancelling the KKK. It was important and it was effective.

edit: I would like to note that I do not believe that people should be cancelled simply for having differing viewpoints. I do think that we have white nationalists and others who should be cancelled for continually espousing racist hateful rhetoric and agitating for violence against others. I do not think that someone should be cancelled for stupid twitter jokes they made a decade ago when they were 20 and had yet to learn better, but now do.

> being against both censorship and cancellation should be a contradiction

Not at all.

By analogy, someone who is for the free market, must stand against both nationalization and monopolization.

Nationalization happens through regulation; monopolization happens through a lack of regulation.

So you can't say that someone who is "for the free market" is for or against "regulation" as a concept. Some regulation (anti-trust) is needed in order to make the market free. Other regulations (the kinds lobbyists push for) must be avoided in order to make the market free.

As nationalization is to censorship, monopolization is to cancellation. You get one from allowing some participants in the market to capture the market's regulators (moderators) and through them, direct top-down use-of-force to suppress those they don't like. You get the other by not regulating at all, and thereby not inhibiting private actors from either direct suppression of their peers — or, more insidiously, manipulating public opinion to cause aggregate bottom-up use-of-force ("mob justice") to be used to suppress their peers.

Governments have a monopoly on the use of force — i.e. a self-named vigilante is just someone committing criminal assault in the eyes of the law — because we as a society want the use of force to flow through checks and balances.

Insofar as speech can be used as violence to silence or terrorize groups (see: hate-speech laws in much of the world explicitly recognizing this), the act of silencing others through speech — cancellation — should also be considered a criminal vigilante act if not performed through societally-approved channels with checks and balances.

The lack of checks and balances for the "process" of cancellation, is how you get cyber-bullying witch-hunts and mis-aimed identity defacement (see: the Reddit Boston Marathon debacle.) We don't accept witch-hunts in the physical world; why should we accept them online?

Cancellation is freedom of association, not free speech. As for which is more fundamental under tension…

>Should I not have the freedom to organize a protest of my local theater for hosting a controversial figure that I think is worthy of cancellation? Isn't that a very basic and fundamental example of free speech?

I don't think so.

What you should be allowed to do is to freely argue that the speaker you disagree with is wrong. That's free speech.

If you try to influence the theatre to not have the person speak at all, you are suppressing free speech.

>I don't think so.

Thankfully, this is your opinion, and not actually how courts and the legal system view the first amendment. The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that even full on boycott campaigns, which would generally be above the level of simple protest, to be protected speech when the boycott is political in nature and not just for economic gain. https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/987/boycotts

>What you should be allowed to do is to freely argue that the speaker you disagree with is wrong. That's free speech.

This is true. That is free speech.

>If you try to influence the theatre to not have the person speak at all, you are suppressing free speech.

No. This is also free speech. If you are simply protesting the action, you are informing the theater that as a prospective customer you are unhappy with their decision and makes you less likely to be their patron in the future. If you are going further and advocating that the theater be boycotted if they host this person, then you need to show that you are attempting social or political change - but from the premise of the discussion here, it is obvious that this is the intent.

Boycotts of businesses that were pro-British or selling British imported goods were a significant part of the early stages of the American Revolution - https://www.masshist.org/revolution/non_importation.php - so they have a long history of being an important tool in shaping America into what her (future and present) citizens wanted her to be.

The theater is not a public square. The controversial speaker has no first amendment right to say whatever they want in a private space. The theater has no right to force people to not have and share an opinion about who they host. I have every right to share my opinions about a person speaking somewhere, and my opinions about what I think that means about the location hosting them. The speaker (likely) has every right to say what they are saying in general, but not necessarily in any given private location.

Free speech is about preventing government censorship of speech, not private censorship.

>>If you try to influence the theatre to not have the person speak at all, you are suppressing free speech.

>No. This is also free speech.

But it is also a threat. Should threats be covered under free speech? That seems tricky, and certainly undemocratic.

If you are a random patron telling the theatre you don't like it they might ignore you, but if you are the owner of the popcorn factory, you suddenly get to decide who speaks and who doesn't.

When does a threat cross the line to becoming suppression of someone's rights? Only if it comes from the government? Only when the person with the gun actually pulls the trigger but not when says "if you speak I will shoot?"

Free speech is not an easy topic, certainly not today when anyone has free access to mass media as well. I think the founding fathers would have phrased things very differently if they had known about Radio, TV and the internet.

> This specific phrasing jumped out to me because being against both censorship and cancellation should be a contradiction. Cancellation is an example of the exercising of free speech

It stops being speech when action is levied against someone.

The problem with cancellation isn’t the debate, but losing your livelihood or worse.

> Cancellation is an example of the exercising of free speech.

Absolutely not. This inverts the meaning of freedom of speech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech

First sentence. Your definition jumped out to me because that is a position of pretty one-sided ideologues.

You are free to protest, but not free to "cancel" people. Precision here is very important.

I am specifically worried about the extensiveness of the surveillance and control estate globally should western liberal values lose influence and autocratic control is grandfathered access to these tools of mass oppression. I think the discussion of the present can digress into relevant but distracting political debate, but it’s impossible to assert regardless of your political bent that these tools could be extraordinarily harmful in the hands of some future society.

I don’t see a way out honestly. The tools are too useful and too compelling. Any work done now on differential privacy, E2E, FHE, and other technologies can be easily reverted in a way that’s entirely transparent given the UX people expect. I feel that the rigorous maintenance of rights and freedoms as seen from a western liberal perspective is a very high energy state, and nature and human societies settle into lower energy states intrinsically.

I don’t understand the inclusion of cancellation in this argument. How is cancellation different from boycotting, a right long upheld by the Supreme Court with direct legal ties to freedom of speech?

Cancellation is different in that it attempts to "boycott" an individual for holding non-majority views. If you can no longer get a job because you are vocally pro-choice for example, that's a problem. The state should protect someone's right to express their beliefs. This means that you will have pro-life / pro-choice people at the same company, and that needs to be ok. If it's not, it has a chilling effect on freedom of speech.

"Boycotting", "cancelling", both seem to be democracy in action. And non-majority views is too ambiguous a definition. This would put vegans on the same side of the scale as extreme race purists.

But that's just it. The law needs to be able to distinguish and provide proper protections. I do not think the public at large should be making that distinction because it turns on mob rule.

expressing beliefs has the risk of others updating theirs regarding whether they want to have you in their community or not.

doing it anonymously was always the traditional way to workaround this effect. eg women authors picked a pen name for themselves to appear as men.

> And people wonder why the US has blocked Huawei infrastructure in the US.

I agree. I don't know how the US can allow Apple products if they're willing to shut down Airdrop to suppress Chinese protests.

> They have no qualms silencing their own population and invest heavily in surveillance technology. Why would anyone want their equipment?

Yes, but enough about the US, we're talking about China.

I read some of the threads about the Airdrop changes, and some people argue it actually increases security (for reasons that are above my technical understanding). The fast track to release in China was odd, but I don't think it's super cut and dry that it was at request of Chinese authorities.

If this really were the reason Huawei would never have been allowed to operate in the US to begin with and Apple would be banned too - for breaking airdrop on behalf of the CCP.

The anti huawei thing only really kicked off when huawei started dominating key telecoms markets.

When they started kicking out huawei tech they also didn't discriminate between smart (where bugs could easily hide) and dumb tech like aerials (where they couldn't), suggesting that protectionism is at least as much a motive as national security.

at least the US has woken up to some degree. Humans are funny in how imagery impacts response to things. China has done trillions in damage to the US economy the past few decades but it wasn't tangible so we did nothing. They've killed far more people then 9/11 via shipping synthetic opioid precursors to Mexico but the response is non-existent. IP theft allowed them to undercut US businesses and destroy them but it's so abstract people don't get worked up into a frenzy over it compared to if they'd literally dropped a bomb on the same business

Russia should have paid attention to how much more effective economic and asymmetric warfare is compared to kinetic warfare

I mean, US businesses willingly shipped their operations to China so it’s not really correct to lay all the blame on them. We could have kept our operations here but US business people wanted increased profits so they dismantled our industrial base and paid China to build up theirs.

The 80s and 90s had businesses gushing at the opportunities to

* liquidate unions

* avoid environmental laws

* take advantage of cheap labor

Both parties fell over themselves in paving the way for US businesses to move the bulk of their manufacturing outside the country.

The Chinese millionaire kids who are buying houses for cash are a product of the distillation of thousands of once blue collar jobs that burned to move production overseas.

Any derision in the quality of Chinese made goods should be directed at the companies themselves. Those factories are built what they are told to build. That brand that was once a mark of quality that is now making a shoddy product is just extracting value. Your Macbook Pro and that power tool in name only are made in the same place.

Many businesses had little choice. Their competition went to China and now could out price them while making a profit.

not sure you can say this when corporate raiders and hostile takeovers were the primary cause of all of this. Big difference between 'US business' and Wall Street

> Big difference between 'US business' and Wall Street

This depends on how you and I are using the terms. If you realize that I am using those terms somewhat synonymously, then what I said makes sense. You can disagree with the way I am using the words, but you can at least understand why I would make the claims that I did if that's how I am using those words.

I could have said "big business" which is closer to meaning "wall street" but this is semantic shorthand, and some misunderstandings may happen.

> US businesses willingly shipped their operations to China

Western governments encouraged it! “They’ll want to democratize!”

To be fair, China did democratize, compared with Mao's era.

Oh come on. Corporate America was hell-bent on killing unions and offshoring everything during the 90s. Mainstream politician were very supportive.

This is the end result.

>Russia should have paid attention to how much more effective economic and asymmetric warfare is compared to kinetic warfare

I am 100% sure that Russian state-sponsored trolls are largely responsible for the current state of the "culture war".

Do you remember when Facebook reported how much Russian state actors had spent on disinformation spread on that platform during the Trump presidential campaign? It was of the order of $100,000. Pocket change, to turn the brains of an entire nation into argumentative mush.

I don't. If it's virtually impossible to distinguish a Russian troll farm page from a traditional conservative/radical leftist from a home grown, private individual, then there is no problem. The impact Russian troll farms have had on the US social fabric is widely overestimated, the real harm to the social fabric is increased politicization.

>Russian troll farms .... increased politicization.

The two are linked. Those who wish to see Western culture fail, just want us at each others' throats.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3kvvz3/russian-facebook-trol...

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/the-conversatio...

>It was of the order of $100,000

That was just their advertising budget. It doesn't include their hundreds of thousands of sockpuppet accounts operated by their clickfarms.

The narrative about Russia using FB to influence elections was pushed by the Clinton campaign. No one wanted to cover it was $100K as that compromised the narrative. They pushed that propaganda for 4 years, denying the election. Then, it became virtually illegal to talk about illegitime elections.

That’s $100k for ads. I remember seeing one of the anti-Clinton image memes in one of the Senate reports on the SandersForPresident forum. Makes me sick that Russian manipulators were there, too.

$100K ads is nothing. It is an ad budget that will get exhausted in few days with broad targeting parameters. The entire issue was a nothing burger, fabricated by one side to push their agenda.

> What worries me is that the US itself will go in the same direction. Like how a year ago, Apple was going to enable 'client side' CSAM scanning of your devices photos, etc, until enough people got really mad that they put it on a hold?

Wonder what pretext that one is going to slip back in again as.

I figure that was just cover for complying with some government mandate about deleting unacceptable material--I suspect China. They knew they couldn't hide it forever so they came up with a cover story instead.

The stage is already set. Just make sure your suitcase is packed. The craziness won't come from the government, it'll come from this culture's own inherently fascist tendencies

I have a Huawei phone. I live in the Netherlands and the phone was bought here. The videos are not deleted from my device.

If they do delete, then at least they only do that in China, and they treat other jurisdictions differently.

If they do delete, then at least they only do that in China, and they treat other jurisdictions differently.

"If they do have slave labor, then at least they only do that in China, and they treat other jurisdictions differently."

Good to know if that if something is bad, but doesn't affect you personally, it is suddenly no longer bad.

There's a huge difference between "I condemn this practice because I consider it bad anywhere" vs "they are a threat to our country".

>The videos are not deleted from my device.

Correct, that twitter thread is only about Chinese people living in China.

The fact they can should be the worry.

I think technically all the cloud sync picture/file platforms (Onedrive, iCloud, gDrive, Dropbox, etc) can do that, can't they? How I understand it, if I (or the platform owner) delete something from one of the synced devices, it should be deleted from all the synced devices.

>there may be a clock on how long that will last

Why is that? Culture, mores, and politics shape how power is used. What makes authoritarianism inevitable?

On one hand power begets power, on the other hand people are easily scared and readily convince themselves of the worst possible explanation.

They have surveillance communism, we have surveillance capitalism.

I'm amazed by how HN just takes every piece of data at face value and starts reacting to it like it's gospel. News story after news story. This place is no different than Twitter, Youtube comments, etc. It's very sad to watch.

Agreed - I think there should be a huge asterisk over the source of data. Twitter reports are not inherently accurate - they need 3rd party verification.

If this is true - it is a concerning but not surprising maneuver.

Well, although I tend to agree with the point you are making, in this case it is not completely out of the blue, single data point..

CCP is ruthless and has been repeatedly shown to have no qualms oppressing and killing people and abusing technology in similar ways. So the data point is not far fetched.

It would be good to have this either confirmed or proven false. Until then I find it a perfectly valid discussion.

$0.02

> in this case it is not completely out of the blue, single data point..

It kind of is a single data point with a vague "users report"

Also, extraordinary claims like this still require more than vague anecdotal proof. If this is on device, can we see the request packet that caused the video to be deleted? Can we see the decompiled code that allows for such a thing to happen?

Yeah, this is bonkers. At one time I thought the collective HN BS detector was calibrated a bit better, but the willingness to accept this tweet at face value is troublesome. This is similar to the debacle recently where Apple was supposedly scanning for QR codes and opening canary URLs clandestinely, which turned out to be simple user error.

I'm flagging this submission, I encourage everybody to do the same. A tweet suggesting that "some users report" some ambiguous behavior is not news. Perhaps some corroboration will emerge and this tweet will eventually be proven correct, but the onus of proof should always be on those who are making the exceptional claims.

Right, and the tweet even has the disclaimer "Not sure if it’s from the cloud or device level". If it's deleted from the cloud, which I consider more likely, it has nothing to do with Huawei phones.

I’m glad someone said it. One random chap on twitter is hardly a reliable source.

Humans are stupid, buddy, it doesn't matter what forum you're on. Same dumb meat sacks, same heuristics, bias, emotions. We're even dumber in groups. Thinking you're smarter than the rest is proof that you're not.

Fact is this could be very well be real in today China, a country known for her extrem level of censorship.

I agree that it would be good to have more than one source for this story, and some independent confirmation. It's true that often these things turn out quite differently than was initially reported, and of course the correction never gets the same coverage.

On the other hand, many true stories also first circulate online in this format.

@dang is there any way the title could be a bit more clear that this is not a settled matter of fact? As it stands now, the submission's title summarizes the tweet and presents it as truth without any caveats, but in fact the tweet itself is simply hearsay ("Chinese social media users report" etc).

I know we're all expected to click through all links and make informed judgments, but like it or not, the title on HN is very powerful in guiding the conversation. Claims like this need an appropriate level of skepticism until corroborated...

I did that the way we usually do, by adding a question mark to the title.

Oh I must have missed it, thanks very much!

BTW, thanks for your relentless work here — much appreciated.

Wether or not they can actually do this is debatable, but I wouldn't be surprised they did this if they could. I don't immediately accept it, but in terms of technology it seems plausible.

We are all here reading the comments. There is always at least one comment investigating or questioning the authenticity. I love HN because of that discourse.

With stories like these where I have known bias, I always come to the comments before reading the article.

This could be mostly rectified by having a free press in China. Another way to say it - the sole entity that could solve the problem of needing to rely on random internet claims about things happening in China is the Chinese government.

On the other hand, a lot of claims about China that are very easy to disprove - even with limited media freedom - are still widely believed in the West.

I'm thinking of two huge examples from recent times:

* The widespread belief that people in China have social credit scores.

* The belief that zero-CoVID was fake, and that CoVID was actually spreading like crazy in China, but was somehow covered up.

These are claims that can be disproven just by knowing people in China and asking them about their lives. Given how many millions of Chinese people live abroad, how many expats live in China, and how many cross-border connections there are in general, it's crazy that so many people still believe the above theories.

There's very little knowledge about China among the Western public, and there's a strong tendency towards conspiratorial interpretations of everything regarding China.

> This could be mostly rectified by having a free press in China

This should be mostly rectified by asking a ramdon Huawei phone user in China.

The reason this gets accepted is that we see no reason to think it's false. It's quite consistent with previous Chinese behavior.

The author of the tweet is entirely aware she is spreading unproven rumors, just glancing through her articles she's penned it's mostly propaganda pieces meant to support more aggression towards China (note: she does not live in China).

Here's a few choice quotes:

"And then came the laughable claim in Xi’s speech that China does not ‘carry aggressive or hegemonic traits in its genes’"

"The idea that Trump’s ‘China virus’ rhetoric is xenophobic is puzzling. "

It's hard to know for sure if this is real, but I wouldn't be surprised.

If this is happening, I hope Apple says no to the CCP when they inevitably ask Apple to do the same.

Could Apple use that new CSAM-hash-comparison feature to accomplish something similar?

EDIT:

https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...

Nevermind - it looks to me like this mechanism is just for letting Apple know if they should pop open an encrypted image stored on their Cloud.

In the case of China, they should already be able to do that with impunity since they control the regional iCloud and keys

EDIT 2:

I'd also not be surprised if this was false however - I don't own a Huawei phone and I'm not located in China, so I can't verify this at all.

Apple doesn't own or operate iCloud in China. They have no say in the matter.

Maybe I'm confused but the new CSAM-hash-comparison thing runs on-device, right? Or no

EDIT:

Yeah looks to be on-device (page 4): https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...

That is irrelevant when it comes to iCloud China. iCloud in China is owned and operated by the government of Guizhou. They own the building, the servers, and the private keys.

I'm aware of iCloud in China.

If a user chooses not to use cloud, could this mechanism still allow protestors sharing videos to be identified?

EDIT: Or is this mechanism only for giving Apple the green light to pop open images already stored on the cloud (in which case you're right, the whole conversation is irrelevant)

EDIT2:

looks like this is just for giving apple the green light to open up uploaded images - which is irrelevant in China because they can already do that

I would presume on-device software updates come from the same mechanism.

The CSAM hash utility was to pop open images in an encrypted iCloud, or witch china (nor the US) have today.

There’s no reason that the tech couldn’t be used on non-iCloud images in china. But by that logic, they could just force-ably upload images in china and forget the whole hashing nonsense.

> If this is happening, I hope Apple says no to the CCP when they inevitably ask Apple to do the same

Apple gladly does whatever the CCP asks of them

The same Apple that censors the Taiwan flag emoji[1]?

Apple will do whatever the CCP tells them to do because they are not willing to lose a market of a billion+ potential customers.

Companies have no problem being complicit in enabling authoritarianism as long as it's profitable.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/7/20903613/apple-hiding-tai...

Not just losing the market but losing access to their network of fabricators and suppliers that make the iphone possible at Apple's healthy (to say the least) margins

To be fair, not even the US govt recognizes the Taiwan flag. One could say that Apple it's following US guidance on this.

> the White House deleted a social media post on COVID-19 vaccine donations that included Taiwan's flag. A spokesman for the White House National Security Council called the use of the flag "an honest mistake" by the team handling graphics and social media that should not be viewed as a shift in U.S. policy towards Taipei

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/taiwan-asks-us-no...

This is an really wide stretch considering that I can type the Taiwan flag emoji in the US and any country that isn't China or claimed by China.

> One could say that Apple it's following US guidance on this.

Emoji are governed by the Unicode Consortium, not the US government. In this case, the Taiwan flag is character number 1848, codes: U+1F1F9 U+1F1FC

Unicode doesn't have the flag of Taiwan, it has a way of encoding "tw" in the context of an ISO county code.

I pulled the above from the Unicode Consoritum's specs.

Which parts? Maybe they do mention it along with other flags in examples, as far as I know any actual official specifications are intentionally coy on the matter.

I.e. the Unicode consortium explicitly didn't want to get into the mess of deciding whether Palestine, Taiwan etc. are "real countries", or need to release updates if one country annexed another etc.

So the official standards for the regional indicator symbols[2] just provide a way to encode two-letter ISO country codes, leaving it the implementation's and ISO's problem to map that to political entities.

1. https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#Flags

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regional_indicator_symbol

You are describing how flag emoji work.

No company operating in China uses the Taiwanese flag in its products.

My point exactly. Expecting Apple to operate differently is wishful thinking, at best, or outright naivety.

Which is why even morally reprehensible companies like Microsoft, Google and Facebook balked at this censorship and ceased business relations with China. Apple is the last man standing, ironically preaching their independence and dedication to the end-user.

They didnt cease business voluntarily, they were kicked out or banned.

Because they wouldn't comply with CCCP requirements. They chose being kicked out rather than compliance.

> Could Apple use that new CSAM-hash-comparison feature to accomplish something similar?

Only if the video is previously known, as far as I'm aware.

Why would Apple say no? They just proved they'll likely say yes by removing airdrop in China, at request of the CCP government, because protesters were using it to pass along info bypassing the internet so it couldn't be censored.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/30/apple-limited-a-crucial-aird...

That article doesn’t say they removed it.

“Could Apple use that new CSAM-hash-comparison feature to accomplish something similar?”

Yes, that was why there was an uproar. If any hash is deemed bad, that could be of anything.

Apple already applied a change in how AirDrop works in China[0]. It's fair enough to assume that they won't say "no" to the CCP.

[0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-restricted-airdrop-cap...

https://www.macrumors.com/2022/11/10/airdrop-10-minute-limit...

AAPL will do what it's told by the government so the shareholders keep their money.

Apple often says no to the US Government, something Huawei cannot do by law.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/14/apple-refuses-barr-request-t...

And the US government can say "no" right back to Apple since iPhone-unlocking tools are/have been readily available and purchased in droves by American law-enforcement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grayshift

Big difference.

What does that have to do with my statement ?

It illustrates that your consent is worthless where protecting personal privacy is concerned.

What does my consent have to do with anything? The difference between commanding private industry to do something and hacking them yourself is the difference between free and unfree societies. Why you are trying to blur the line I don't know.

Apple can try to say no because the US government asks them to do illegal things that violate the US constitution. That's not the case in China.

So yours is a pure defense of Huawei, because they country the operate in has no civil liberty protections, they aren't at fault for helping authoritarians build a surveillance state and spy on others?

I mean, I guess so. That doesn't mean Huawei isn't harming the safety and security of millions while Apple is just your standard monopolist.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/12/14/huawei-surve...

Can't be that often considering Apple says yes to the government tens of thousands a time a year[1].

That includes dragnet surveillance from the federal government, where "0 to 499" FISA data requests yielded data from over 32,000 different accounts over just a 6 month long period.

[1] https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html

Let’s take a few steps back…

What’s even easier than that?

- Was this video taken within a geofenced area between these times?

    - does audio contain any filtered words?

I would not be surprised if this turned out to be yet another of those unverifiable China stories that pop up all the time, but later turn out to be wrong.

Does anyone know how it works between Chinese and US Apple IDs? For example if I FaceTime someone in China or use iMessage with them, is that protected from the Chinese government? Is there any info on this?

I'm skeptical videos are being deleted from the device by Huawei, which the title suggests, until actually proven. More likely is a cloud file storage provider is automatically deleting videos from a server based on some hash/identifier. Similar to how Google/Dropbox can flag copyrighted media.

Yeah sounds like quite a feat for on device.

Apple's "child sexual abuse image" monitoring proposal would do the same thing. Easy enough to implement at the device level--the authorities provide a list of forbidden hashes, any matching file goes away.

Apple's CSAM detection is based on known image's hash. Removing their own shoot images is very different task. How to detect? Maybe just based on geolocation?

It gets shared, the authorities notice, they ban it. Same as the CSAM stuff.

Wow.

Soon we'll have US police departments demanding that phone providers delete pictures of police brutality, or even traffic stops. See this story, where someone was live-streaming a traffic stop so there was no way seizing the phone would lose the data.[1]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/29/livestrea...

We already have police in the US do that. Your link shows how they’ll use brute force to stop the evidence from being gathered. They’ll also play copyrighted music in the background so automatic copyright enforcement will delete an uploaded video.

They can demand it all they want. The difference is that US law gives companies the legal right to say "no" when it comes to suppressing speech critical of the government.

Amazing so many people are quick to compare this story to Apple or Google in the US. Huawei is functionally a part of the Chinese government.

Most people are comparing this story to Apple's behavior in China. Google doesn't operate any substantial services in China due to data privacy concerns iirc.

These decisions always boil down to business, even if there's some philosophical disagreements as a part of the broader context. Google pushed back against the CCP, but ended up following the law to the minimum extent they had to. It wasn't until the Chinese military hacked Google and stole their IP that they threatened to leave the market. Regulators called their bluff as they started blocking Google services in China. When they pulled out, it was clear they weren't going to be able to operate a profitable business there.

> These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China.

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-chin...

The US police have no right to delete someone else's video.

Perhaps now it’s clear why people are against Apple scanning our photos under the pretext of looking for child porn…

I don't agree with Richard Stallman's political or social views but he was right all along when it came to being wary of software not having the user's best interests in mind.

Richard Stallman had extreme Cassandra Complex. Virtually everything he wrote 30 years ago came true (or will soon), but no one believed him.

the problem is he also have so f**g wrong opinions about so much s*t, but yes when it come to software he was right all the way, that make follow him a mental gymnastics marathon.

I haven't followed him for over 15 years when he started branching out from software into other things. What crazy has he accumulated since?

Spoken like a person who has never attempted to give Richard Stallman a parrot.

I just googled that reference. Weugh.

The whole rider is pretty nutty. Even on fairly mundane requirements he manages to sound a bit crazy. "I absolutely refuse to have a break in the middle of my speech. Once I start, I will go straight through." Presumably at some point he said he didn't want to take a break but someone stuck a break in the agenda anyway and he decided to declare his intention to throw a fit if that ever happens again. It reads a little like "100 ways in which RMS cannot handle the unexpected."

I'm hoping to see a GPL revival with a shift back from MIT/BSD. But one can hope.

Big corps won't let that happen. They make too much from MIT/BSD.

Look at FAANG and other companies' policy towards the GPL and their abuse of BSD, and I think it is pretty clear what's up.

Do you have any links about their BSD abuse? I would like to read more.

> their abuse of BSD

It's perfect by legitimate to prefer copyleft, but I struggle to take seriously the idea that a license can be abused by following its terms, particularly when the reason people put stuff under permissive licenses is to let anyone do whatever they want with it without giving back.

How is a totalitarian state's actions are related with MIT/BSD anyway? It is absurd to think that states care about software licenses.

> he also have so f*g wrong opinions about so much s*t

Care to provide examples?

Struggled to parse this, but why would it be a problem that he was wrong about things outside his speciality? A professor of astrophysics being "wrong" about his opinions on whether eating meat is ethical says very little about how right he is on exoplanet mass distributions.

(I happen to agree with Stallman on his non-software views that I know about, so am a bit curious on what you disagree with)

Hence the fitting subredddit https://old.reddit.com/r/StallmanWasRight

The Cassandra point is interesting.

I think the loss of freedoms Richard Stallman described were very much what was already happening around in with the Lisp environment. He was correct in saying this would be repeated as software ate the world.

So roughly the things he was right about were very hard to prevent. Which is partly why he was right.

Stallman came up in the time of mainframes and dumb terminals; so he had mainframe concerns and mainframe critiques.

His relevance now is because we too have shifted to mainframes, but we don't call it mainframe and dumb terminals anymore, we say 'cloud' and 'mobile'. We are rebuilding the future in effigy of our past because it's what we know. Stallman's critiques being relevant again are a testament to the cyclical nature of humanity, like bellbottoms, hightop fades, and vinyl records.

Now if you don't mind, I must iron these JNCO's, times-a-wasting!

I'm not very familiar with the Lisp environment but what Stallman always argued was the logical conclusion of the current (at the time state) of software freedom and redistribution. Nothing being codified was ripe for abuse and misuse, but because the general community consisted of altruistic "doo-gooders" that reality always seemed very far away.

There should be an adage, an internet one at least, along the lines of - The older one gets, the more one agrees with Stallman.

Going one step further I will add: the older one gets the more one becomes like Stallman, lol.

(I think the reactions of ordinary people to Stallman's views are quite predictable, mention sex and they go bonkers. )

My sentiments entirely. I think he's batshit crazy in a lot of ways - but one thing he got dead right was that letting companies put chips inside of devices that don't obey the device owner but the still obey the company is a damned terrible idea for freedom.

I've started calling it the "little green man" in the device that only takes orders from the company - not from me.

It's insidious, it's harmful, and it's definitely not limited to Huawei or China - governments and corporations all over the "west" are playing with this power, and we're going to get burned.

This is why we should demand that after we buy a product, it should be possible to fully use and repair it without contacting the vendor ever again.

No tethering by the vendor.

I'd go further and say that, for general purpose computing devices, it should be possible to fully use, repair and repurpose it without contacting the vendor ever again.

That is, bootloader locking and remote attestation should be forbidden by law.

Mobile phones and similar should be included here.

Librem 5 and Pinephone are already like this.

Can you give some examples or links to governments outside of China doing this? What sort of products are they trying to infiltrate?

"Smart TVs" come to mind, though this is corporate rather than government. For example there's talk of them having an embedded 5G modem so that they're able to phone home even if you've blocked them from your network, or never connected them to your network in the first place.

Hey, have you ever thought of why even the $149 Black Friday loss-leader no-name-brand TVs all have Amazon Fire, Roku, or are now "Smart" in some way?

Certainly isn't because they need to incentivise you to connect it to the internet so it acts as a Nielsen-esq measurement device of all media you view on the screen via digital fingerprints that exist in all commercial media and advertisements. [1][2]

[1] https://www.ispot.tv/ [2] https://www.samba.tv/

I don't think one needs to point to specific governments or their actions, and it would indeed be wrong to. The very fact that Pegasus and similar malwares are openly allowed operate as businesses, that smartphone cyber-security is essentially a lost cause, that companies like Huawei were able to ship devices with such deeply embedded flaws, and that harms are visited upon even serving political leaders shows that there's an epic power struggle which is out of control at every level.

Without blaming this or that regime, fascist, communist or whatever, we need to recognise a new dimension in power, call it "techno-fascism" or whatever you like... that means it would be foolish to invest much trust in digital systems at this point in history. And that itself is a huge economic loss and bonfire of opportunity for us all.

In both cases - I think the problem is that a device continues to listen to the manufacturer over the owner.

In China, we see this play out as government control. In the US, we see it play out as corporate profits under the guise of laissez faire governance (which then feeds back into political donations & lobbying, to allow more corporate profits).

A simple example right now: I can't use hardware I own if I want a static IP from Comcast. I literally have to rent a device from them. Is my hardware compatible? Sure is. Do they allow it? Nope.

Same problem is happening with "Rental features" that are built into devices. Bought that car but want to use the seat heater that's literally built in? Better have an account with BMW and pay 18/month. Why? Because BMW shoved their fucking little green man into the car, and it only respects them.

Using a phone? Even a phone that's working really hard to be open (like Librem)? You're loading a proprietary binary blob for the radio firmware. There's just no alternative at the moment. Who has control over that? No good way to know. Librem tries really hard to isolate that from the rest of your phone system, but that doesn't stop it from reporting your location any time the modem is on (even if you're not using it, or have asked it to be disconnected). At least librem provides a kill switch for it so you can ensure it's off, but it's annoying.

Using an Apple device? Apple owns that fucker through and through. They control the updates to the software, they report every app you use (for malware reasons, of course!!! /s), they capture all sorts of information about you - using their little green man.

And that's a company that actively works to market itself as privacy friendly - don't even get me started with Google and MS. They give you a little more control to wipe away their crap, but the defaults are pretty damn bad.

Basically - Control over the "owner/user" is still the desired state for these devices. In regressive regimes, that control is used to increase government power. In less regressive countries that control is used for rent-seeking behavior, which ends up increasing profit, which is used for lobbying, which creates incentives to allow continued rent-seeking behavior.

In what ways is he crazy?

Seems more sane than the average person from what I've seen.

They don't mean it, it's a pre-emptive cancel-disclaimer. What's really meant here is "There are some easy low hanging fruit shots to take at this guy, but with this comment we remove those from the table."

Pretty much this - he made some bad remarks around Epstein, and he's genuinely more stubborn than is reasonable in a lot of cases (compromising is required to be effective in politics - and he won't compromise). Which is both admirable and batshit crazy.

But I'm not interested in having "that discussion" again with regards to RMS, I'd rather just focus on the spots he got right, and it's hard to argue he was wrong about free software, and the user hostility of these systems (although I still disagree with some of his hardline stances there, but it's more about quibbling with the details then a hard disagreement).

> But I'm not interested in having "that discussion" again with regards to RMS

Fascinating how nobody wants to talk about all of RMS's numerous problems, but only after they've declared that he's a poor victim of cancel/woke culture.

If you don't want to "have that discussion again"....why did you comment in the first place? This is like hearing a topic mentioned in a room you're walking past, running in, stating a position, and then running out of the room with your fingers in your ears, shouting "LALALALALALALALALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU"

Because this discussion isn't fucking about those topics. I'm not here to defend him at all on that front. I'm here to say that he has things that are correct to say about other fucking subjects.

Read the fucking room.

No one is an angel - no one is a demon. Which one is RMS? Don't really fucking care for the context of this conversation. This conversation is about how I happen to think his opinion about free software is - if not correct - at least way more prescient than many others.

Does that imply I have some opinion about his "victim of cancel/woke culture" bullshit? You have no fucking clue. Because I'm not talking about woke culture right now, I'm talking about software.

> My sentiments entirely. I think he's batshit crazy in a lot of ways... - horsawlarway

> If you don't want to "have that discussion again"....why did you comment in the first place? - KennyBlanken

> Because this discussion isn't fucking about those topics. I'm not here to defend him at all on that front. I'm here to say that he has things that are correct to say about other fucking subjects. Read the fucking room. -horsawlarway

___

@horsawlarway...

If you don't want to discuss it, don't fucking make shitty comments about another human being. Then you won't be called out on your shitty statements about another human being.

You don't want to discuss this, because your position is undefendable; you have none.

You shouldn't disparage people. It's not nice asshole.

As a reminder that without context discussion is null, I found your patient-if-exasperated explanation to be sublime. Thanks for that.

TIL all the following is "low hanging fruit":

Claiming that he had never worked with women on projects; a woman was a co-author to a book he wrote about GCC, and GCC had a number of women code contributors, and one had maintained the test suite for 6 years at the time he made the comment.

Comments legitimizing/defending sex with underage people especially when he tends to make it a hill to die on or only backs down in an extremely petulant manner (ie 'sorry you were offended by my comments')

A long history of defending child pornography.

Likening people with downs syndrome to "pets" and asserting that they should not be born.

Ditto for being such a prolific serial sexual harasser that women newly hired into his building at MIT were advised to stock their offices with a number of houseplants, as they're apparently a sort of "RMS Kryptonite".

Ditto for keeping a mattress (no sheets) in his office and routinely having half-naked piles of people on it.

Ditto for multiple incidents of telling women substantially younger than him that he'd kill himself if they didn't date or have sex with him.

Ditto for passing out extremely creepy "pleasure cards" to women.

Ditto for repeatedly using virginity jokes in his talks, in one case singling out a 15 year old girl in the audience, repeatedly. (See defense of child sex above)

This is an ad-hominem logic fallacy. He can be the creepiest fucker around and still be dead right about this specific subject.

Trying to point the discussion at his morals is literally a failing on your part in terms of this discussion - you're not adding anything of value to the discussion.

If you want to have this discussion (and it's fine if you do) - go do it when the topic is sexual abuse, or women's rights, or progressive policy. I probably agree with you on all the above in that discussion - but this discussion isn't that discussion.

This discussion is Huawei abusing the little green man in the phones that their customers "own" to serve the needs of China's government. A topic where I think Stallman happens to have a history of being correct.

What? The question was "In what ways is he crazy", and your parent comment is a perfectly ok response to that question. At no point has anyone said, "he is crazy/has said or done these bad things and therefore he is wrong about this subject".

I agree, but sadly, we inevitably end up with folks who are here to point fingers and call for heads when his name comes up. And while I think there's a very valid criticism of him as a person in that context, I find that context tends to drown out the actual conversation if you're not particularly careful to avoid it.

I think the basic "how is he crazy" question was fine, and I happily answered it within the context of the discussion (he doesn't compromise easily. I see it as the same flaw in Bernie Sanders, with mostly the same results - lack of effective action because working with others always requires compromise. Basically - he's difficult to work with to his own detriment.).

But I think the pointed focus on his sexual behavior is pretty off-topic. Further - I think it's clear that most of the folks making those comments aren't here to talk about his opinion on software - they're here to delegitimize him because they have a personal grievance (real or perceived) with him outside the context of the discussion. There's certainly space for that discussion - but go start a new thread for it.

----

so... long story short. "he is crazy" is both true in the context of this discussion, and an attempt to immunize the conversation from the irrelevant aspects of his social life.

Although given the thread afterwards... I'd say the result was bad reaction to the vaccine. But who knows - it may have been even worse without it...

Some unsubstantiated rumors and some normative statements (how are you so sure its wrong to defend child pornography?)...

I don't know if you are really curious, but this article pretty much summarizes why people might think he was/is crazy: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/09/richard-stallman...

I'm aware of the kind of things stated in the article, I'm more wanting to know whether those are the main reasons (based on a reply above it seems not) and why people think the indicate crazy (his statements about 14 year olds match my experience just fine).

Just look at his political ramblings

https://stallman.org/glossary.html

He gave a talk at northeastern (acm) in 1999? He’s a very much hard core open source… (thanks for the correction: free software) I think he told someone if their job didn’t include makeing the source code open they should quit. It’s not Linux it’s gnu/Linux..

I still think it’s too far, but we should control our own devices. We’ve lost that.

I’ve started running Linux as my daily driver.. it’s been great. Perfect? No. But pretty excellent.

> [RMS is] a very much hard core open source

No. He most definitely is not that.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

People are just noticing how their Twitter timeline changes rapidly.

1. Tweets about Ukraine have radically decreased 2. Elon posts increase even when you don't follow him.

I'm not saying it's intentional. It just shows the power of algorithms. They dictate what is and what is not news. Even small tweaks matter.

I suspect that twitter mostly slowing Elon is a function of twitter being used mostly to discuss twitter and Elon now.

Most people I follow have either stopped tweeting, or largely tweet about Elon. Even popular YouTubers I follow can’t shut up about twitter/Elon.

Maybe I’m providing your point by not seeing non-twitter tweets but it feels like Elon starved twitter of real discourse.

There are lots of people I follow - if I go to their Tweets/Replies "wall" I can see their posts. But they don't show up at all on my timeline (either home or latest tweets).

Now, most of these folks are non-mainstream street reporters, establishment-critical types and the like (who Musk has claims are "repressing" him). Most of these folks simply don't care about Elon and just want to geek out about electoral / activism. But I don't see almost any of their tweets in the timeline.

If I have to create a List to see all their updates, what's the point of a timeline? (note: when I tried to add a lot of people to a list, Twitter logged me out / locked my account until I did 2FA again - very antagonistic).

That's when I decided to leave and haven't gone back since. Mastodon is very quiet comparatively but doesn't smell of Musk.

HN feels like every page has multiple elon/twitter stories now. Threads unrelated to elon or twitter, like this one-- have posts like yours.

I think this shows the power of fads, not algorithms.

RMS foresaw all of this crap happening. This is why his message is probably going to outlive us.

I just wish someone would wade through all the crap he wrote and collect all the actually relevant stuff. All the other weird stuff just takes away from the core message of FOSS

tl;dr: non-free software harms your freedom one way or another. Use and support free software as much as you can and even more.

I was speaking to someone at the weekend extolling the virtues of Huawei phones and how cheap they were and "I'm never paying for an iPhone or drinking the kool aid". I pointed out the history and security concerns and was greeted with a pfft and told I was paranoid.

I'm begrudgingly iPhone user. But I keep an exit plan and backups of all data. If only someone else made something that actually worked properly. For now I'm happy to use a West controlled company to run my personal infra. I suspect we're on a downward spiral though.

If you have a iPhone in China you'll find that Apple crippled the air drop functionality that protestors rely upon to communicate. I don't see this action and that one as having much daylight between them frankly.

Completely missed that. What a cluster of assholes. Guess I should start thinking about the inevitable exodus. The CSAM scanning thing was the first strike off.

I'm not a fan of Apple's bowing to China on things like this either but "Limiting AirDrop from 'Everyone' to 10 minutes before you have to turn it on again" and "Deleting pictures from user's phones" are quite different.

You can back up your data from Huawei phones, too. Apple had plans to scan the photos on your phone and automatically report you to the police if the algorithm thinks something is off. I wouldn't trust them at all.

I haven't ever heard of any concrete security issues with Huawei phones.

Huawei has been under extremely strict scrutiny for years (and even got hacked by the NSA, as Snowden's documents revealed), so the fact that nothing has ever stuck makes me think there really is nothing there.

As for this story, color me skeptical until some actual details come out.

There was actually some truth to this around 2014-2015, before the major clampdowns.

Maybe the truth is somewhere in the middle between the extremes you posed? Both vendors only lease your device to you; it's ultimately under their control. There's a big open android world in between the Apple and Huawei ecosystems.

The whole android experience is a minefield though. It's like having a needy psychopath in your pocket that after 18 months disowns you.

I'd rather they resurrected windows phone.

Did you know that Windows tracks everything you do? Do you expect it would be different on a phone? Consider using GNU/Linux instead (on smartphones too).

Firstly, yes I do know that. Windows Phone was before Satya and the telemetry ramp up and was a quite marvellous platform compared to the alternatives on the market. Unfortunately they fucked it up switching from CE to NT and burned all the developers in the process.

Would it be different? No. Should it be different? Yes. They had a unique market position and squandered it. Microsoft had the whole world as its oyster and chose the bad path every time.

As for GNU/Linux on phones, only when they make a usable non Android distribution which AFAIK does not exist. Until then I'm going to have to sell a piece of my soul to the devil (Apple) who actually spend enough time making something fit for purpose to make it usable without incurring a major societal disadvantage.

> usable non Android distribution which AFAIK does not exist.

It depends on your own definition of usable. I'm using my Pinephone as a daily driver.

Username checks out. That is to say, I too use Linux full time on laptop / will ignore games just because I'd have to reboot into Windows or fiddle with WINE / advocate for free software free society / use F-Droid instead of the Play Store... and yet for me, a Linux phone just wouldn't cut it. I'm already feeling impaired with blocking Google Play Services on Android, various apps don't run and sometimes I pretty much need them. So I will tend to say you're the outlier here and this is not a good definition of a daily driver for virtually everyone, though ideally you wouldn't have to be an outlier because I fully agree with your ideals.

Wow, this sounds like a very concrete reason to not buy any Chinese electronics as long as the CCP is in power. I assumed Chinese electronics was likely to spy on you, but there was some uncertainty in whether it actually happened. If this is true, then for pure self-protection individuals, companies, and governments pretty much need avoid any Chinese electronics with a network connection.

Good luck finding electronics that don’t touch the Chinese supply chain

It is never too late to start. Regardless of the CCP, we’ve witnessed the over reliance on a singular country for hardware and its supply chain impacts. It is time to diversify.

Here it is: https://puri.sm/products/librem-5-usa

That was easier than expected

While it wouldn't surprise me if such a thing was actually the case, I want more evidence other than a Tik-Tok tier Tweet, otherwise this is just another inflammatory political Tweet rumor.

Wanted to post this to HN last night but there were absolutely no alternative sources confirming this. Are there any now ?

Huawei is not different from Apple, Google, etc. No company really standing up for democracy. Companies defend their business and profits. And the idea "If you are not a customer, you are a product". it is totally innocent. EVERYTHING for any company is a product. Customers are products, employees are products, freedom, democracy. Anything is for sale if it makes a profit.

The big question is if this was deleted from the device, or from the cloud. Cloud censorship is well known, where apps like WeChat are known to censor and put you on a list.

If I were to guess (and hope) this is a case of being deleted from the cloud - something that's not uncommon in the west, the difference being that the western world uses it to enforce copyright.

Is there a video file I can test? I have Xiaomi phone.

Same with OnePlus.

I would guess even if xiaomi would do the same, it would still be china devices only i suppose. Those that don't even have Google Play Store certification

Are non-techy Chinese nationals on to this shit/have sources to flash non-State beholden Android OS's on the theme like GrapheneOS etc?

Reminder that as a technologist, everything you do is political. You are building the context inside of which society exists. You are building the canals along which power flows.

What you're doing might seem innocuous. It might be innocuous at the time. But as the pieces fall into place, as it responds to pressures from the market and the state, it might transform into something else entirely.

Assuming this story is true, the tooling that was used here probably started it's life much like Dropbox. What more innocuous app is there then that?

I don't really have answers for how to respond to this information; it's something I'm still working on myself. But as a community and industry, we can't blink it.

Absolutely this. Society, and the industry itself views software engineers still as highly paid blue collar workers doing menial plumbing tasks. In reality they are writing the words on the pages of social engineering. It can be a washing machine firmware programmed to ignore circumstances that could save shelf live of the device, networking firmware giving access to manufacturer that could be backdoored, game development where other parts of the software siphon data to advertisers, all realms of software has the potential to be a tool of adversaries.

While this potential is there for every paid job ever, software works invisibly, it's untraceable and ununderstandeable for the general population.

The profession would gain a lot from something like a code of conduct that everyone could make an oath to.

> The profession would gain a lot from something like a code of conduct that everyone could make an oath to.

They have a word for this in non-American countries - "regulation".

There are regulations we should adopt, but what GP proposed is a bottom-up rather than a top-down approach like regulation. For instance, we could, as software professionals, take an oath not to write malware or spyware ("malware with a budget"), and at the same time, take an oath to invest time in the security of a piece of software.

If a civil engineer is approached to design a bridge in an unsafe manner, it is the expectation of society that they will refuse. If that bridge collapses, they're expected to take responsibility and to participate in an investigation to ensure this never happens again.

We should be thinking along these lines. I used to think I was just a hacker and that software engineer was just a job title. After reading this series of blog posts [1], my eyes were opened. Once I accepted I was some kind of engineer, I asked myself what that meant. What I realized was, an engineer has a responsibility to society, because they build the context society inhabits.

That's what separates them from a hacker or tinkerer, exploring in their garage for the joy of it. In your garage you can be an artist, accountable to no one. When you build the systems people rely on every day - you aren't a hacker anymore.

[1] https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/

This doesn’t actually tell us anything though. In this view buying grapes at the market is a political act.

How so? I'm suggesting that when you build infrastructure that profoundly effects society, it cannot be said to be apolitical or value neutral.

In what way is this comparable to buying grapes?

"Whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science." - Paul Goodman

Having spent a decade in engineering academia with a fair bit of time in companies, it's deeply troubling how little attention is paid to this sentiment.

Where it gets really dystopian is: How do we know the tweet is real?

For those who do not have a twitter account: https://nitter.net/msmelchen/status/1597807914395500545

[citation needed], there's no evidence the phone has deleted the video (unless there's something in the text of the video that indicates as such)

Highly unlikely based on how Huawei phones work, some random twitter threat should clarify where were these videos excactly stores, what app is supposedly deleting them.

Yes, Huawei can under their ToS delete various stuff from your (Huawei) cloud, if it contains sensitive content, but deleting from device, unlikely. Maybe don't upload sensitive videos to cloud next time?

From a tech standpoint, how would this be accomplished? Using AI to detect "protest videos" and purge them from devices? Or maybe tracing the source of widely shared videos then going into the devices and purge? Obviously scanning all phone would be an impractical albeit impressive task.

SELECT FROM user_videos WHERE time = "when the protest happened" AND exif_location = "where the protest happened"

Pathetic. How did they organize the Tiananmen square protests without those shiny Huawei phones? This demonstrates an insecurity of the regime.

Pretty sure this isn't new thing, I remember hearing about this ~2 years ago when first COVID lockdowns started.

The revolution will not be televised.

Does this confirm that Huawei phones come with some sort of spyware?

Every consumer device comes with spyware. You mean Chinese spyware as opposed to Western?

Yes

What spyware does the Librem 5 USA come with?

It's possible that there is some firmware on some impossible-to-replace hardware bits that that phones home. They removed everything they possibly could that does that, and it's amazing how far they went, even running the binary blobs they couldn't remove on isolated processors iirc in order to keep them islolated from the rest of the phone

They really achieved something rare with the phone. I hope the project continues and the next version is even better

Claims random Twitter thread...

Google for Huawei Nortel spying

The bigger news to me was that Apple blocked AirDrop in China - specifically to limit dissent and for preventing people from organizing [1]. A company that misses no chance to showcase its liberal credentials, bending over backwards for perhaps the most dictatorial government in the world to suppress the most basic of freedoms.

To quote from Apple's article on racism [2], "With every breath we take, we must commit to being that change, and to creating a better, more just world for everyone." I guess according to Apple, Chinese people don't deserve any of what's written in their post.

[1]: https://qz.com/apple-airdrop-china-protest-tool-1849824435

[2]: https://www.apple.com/speaking-up-on-racism/

This is a form of whataboutism and distracts from this particular article. The Apple AirDrop change has its own thread with meaningful discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33778302

It's not 'whataboutism'. Two tech companies are adding comparable restrictions on their technologies to humor the political interests of a government.

a) Not comparable restrictions in the slightest.

b) Timeline doesn't match up that Apple did this in response to protests.

"Whataboutism" is when somebody or something else is brought up as a defense. It's common in HN threads about the Chinese Communist Party, but the grandparent doesn't seem like it. It reads more like, "Here's another company helping the CCP!"

It extends the shame and conversation instead of excusing it.

The definition of this term is a bit broader, from the British dictionary:

> the technique or practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counter-accusation or raising a different issue.

Article criticizes company A, and then a different issue about a different company is raised as a way to somehow minimize the original company A offense.

It’s basically saying, “if you think Huawei is bad, what about Apple?”

I dunno if, “use Apple AirDrop” is a “most basic freedom”.

Is it shitty and contrary to what they claim to support? Yeah. Does it merit this melodramatic response? Probably not.

The issue here is not "using Apple AirDrop", it's "hindering attempts to organize political resistance".

I don't think there's anything melodramatic about calling Apple out on it.

I think pretending AirDrop is the only way people can coordinate is weird.

What alternatives check off the following boxes?

* Can't be blocked or monitored by state-controlled Internet

* Is widely installed throughout the population already

* Existence of which is not evidence of anti-government organizing.

That's what made AirDrop sharing so powerful for protestors. They all already had it, having it is not suspicious, and using it doesn't rely on government internet filters allowing it.

Paper?

Protests have been around for far longer than AirDrop has existed. It seems AirDrop was being used to share posters and slogans and perhaps some basic information, not as some kind of instant messaging app. If Chinese iPhone users are anything like American iPhone users, I'd guess that most wouldn't want to receive a ton of iPhone notifications for unsolicited content.

I don't think anyone's claimed that was the case.

Apple isn't removing the only way to coordinate, but they are removing a mechanism which has reportedly been used by Chinese dissidents.

they aren't removing, they are limiting to 10mins.

Always-on is qualitatively different from "only on for 10 minutes".

Yes, until every spark of freedom has been irreversibly extinguished, we are blameless for helping in that process.

This sucks, but as a decision maker who cares about privacy, and who believes your product on the whole improves users’ privacy: would you rather keep a hard line and lose market share, or give in on select things so that you can maintain and grow market share.

I don’t think there’s an obviously correct choice, but it’s very easy to criticise not taking the hard line. It’s possible that’s the wrong thing for overall privacy.

> Apple blocked AirDrop in China

Just to be clear, it's still possible to use AirDrop in China — the change was that you can't set your device to receive from 'Everyone' indefinitely. It's now limited to 10 minutes. I don't support this change, but we shouldn't conflate it with blocking AirDrop entirely, which would be much worse.

Nevertheless,

- was this change in response to the protests?

- was this change only for Chinese users?

I'm sure it was in response to the protests. Apple said it's rolling out worldwide, but starting in China.

I've received random dick picks often enough on airdrop that I have turned it to contacts only, and so has every female friend of mine that I know of.

The primary usecase of allowing everyone to send at all times seems like mass organization

The timeline doesn't match up with it being in response to the protests.

Apple needs time to design, implement and test changes even small ones.

Yes, but they’re sure ;)

Despite your snark and the downvotes, I am still sure. It's a tiny change in the grand scheme, and it's pretty conveniently being rolled out in China first.

And the fact that the timelines mean Apple must have retroactively pushed code into the past. . . That doesn’t bother you at all?

Judging by the bugginess of recent iOS releases, I'm not sure they take too much time for testing.

This change landed in iOS 16 which launched a few months ago so was not rushed for these protests.

More precisely, 16.1, a month before the protests. Suspicious that it was China-only.

Also: why don't give users both options? Is up to the user to decide which to use. Make it 10 minutes the default but leave the unlimited option available.

That's not how apple works - they always pick one option(or a very small set of options) and basically tell the users these are the best options, if you don't like it you're welcome to leave.

This would mostly make sense for hardware options, but less so in this specific case of a software feature that previously was available.

Do They have access to who enables this setting frequently? If so, it does not seem harmless.

It's debatable that it is totally harmless if the measure was taken in response to the protests. It could prevent the free-flow of otherwise censored information that could be relevant to keeping protesters safe.

That distinction seems hugely important. This actually seems like a very reasonable feature change, even outside of China. The ability for the internet to overreact never ceases to amaze me.

I support this change. It's a simple but significant improvement to the basic usability of AirDrop. It's conceivable that Apple came up with this simple usability improvement, publicly announced it, then rolled it out deliberately to hamper the efforts of protesters in China, but I think it's more likely to be a coincidence.

How is it an improvement if it prevents users from doing what the service has allowed since day one? This is even worse than their disable-wifi setting, which (when toggled from the Control Center) only disables wifi until the end of the day. You have to go to the Settings app to disable wifi (and perhaps also Bluetooth?) permanently.

But the AirDrop change makes it even worse. There is nowhere you can go to make this setting stick. There is no reason to remove this option.

I’m not saying there aren’t use cases for both options (permanently opening AirDrop to everyone and opening AirDrop to everyone for 10 minutes). I’m just saying that the temporary option is a huge usability improvement and a very reasonable default.

And I think the exact same thing about the Wi-Fi setting. On the rare occasions that I want to turn Wi-Fi off I usually add a reminder to turn it back on when I get home.

Yes it’s very odd that people keep characterizing this as “blocking Airdrop in China”. Is it really that hard to understand the actual change?

Still fine to be angry at Apple about it, though this feels like the way it should always have worked. Remember all the “Apple is terrible because people airdrop unwanted nudes” articles decrying the previous setting?

> The bigger news to me was that Apple blocked AirDrop in China

The article you linked doesn't say anything about blocking. It just says that they changed the "Everyone" option to "Everyone up to 10 minutes." How is that blocking? Do you have any other source to support your assertion that they blocked it in China?

Because you can no longer keep it on everyone 24x7 to anonymously airdrop protest information without fear of being caught or tracked. You also can't use it to adhoc communicate when the internet is shut off. It's effectively blocked and rendered useless for those reasons.

You are underestimating how severely it cripples it for sharing of protest material, especially between people who may not formally know each other. It is a fatal blow, make no mistake.

It's situations like this that show the truthfulness of these statements and the organizations that make them. Un this instance, it shows that Apple is only using privacy as an excuse to achieve whatever ends they're aiming for.

Like any other commercial entity in the west, and especially in the US, it's a machine for making money. All other values are subjugated to that purpose. As long as some other value isn't hurting the bottom line, it'll be tolerated. Once it does, all those other values go out the window.

This is what makes these machines so effective. This is what makes liberal western values vulnerable.

Then why did they pull Twitter ads? Surely they're losing sales from that?

They could also be losing sales for having ads on Twitter.

Are there people who actually won’t buy an iPhone if they advertise on Twitter? That sounds so absurd, but I guess we’re talking about Twitter users

That’s a very limited point of view. Think of brand management. What if suddenly people start seeing tweets from very problematic people, and Apple ads next to that?

And imagine if that makes the news cycle after that?

Conversely, how effective are Apple advertisements on twitter anyway? At least half of the install base is probably already tweeting from an iPhone.

Apple was the largest ad-buyer on Twitter. Up until recently of course.

Biggest problem that my friends in marketing/sales explained to me - if there’s no proper conversion from ads to sales, huge problem with bots AND negative targeted ads, then it’s not worth it. Honestly, I have close to 0 knowledge in terms of marketing and advertisement, so mostly rely on others’ opinions and tactics.

"Brand safety". Apple cultivates their image and don't want it damaged. Twitter isn't valuable enough as an advertising space to take a risk for. That is, they pulled twitter ads because they think advertising on Twitter isn't worth the price and might reduce the value of their brand.

I think this is correct but I also think that means the US public has strange, contradictory values.

In what way contradictory?

How is it contradictory? You’re free to say what you want to. I’m free to go somewhere I can’t hear you if I want to.

The fact that Apple is more than willing to work with a violent repressive dictatorship is cool, but we won't advertise on Twitter because they are evil...

Brand protection isn’t a value judgement about the service. It’s the recognition that ad dollars are poorly spent if your ads end up next to damaging content.

That said, of course the us population has contradictory positions. It’s hundreds of millions of people.

We denounce dictators and oppression and champion human rights and democracy. Companies that work with oppressive rulers have tarnished brand names. For example: software companies that worked with the Saudis or CBP and ICE. Apple has determined that Twitter could cause brand reputation damage because Twitter is accused of having disinformation or hate speech on it.

On the other hand, Apple works cooperatively with the Chinese government to suppress human rights. The update to air drop and the separate icloud and app store as well as appearing to work closely with the CCP does not seem to be pro human rights.

So I think it's contradictory that there is no brand reputational damage for cooperation with a government accused of violations of human rights but there is for allowing Twitter on the App Store ostensibly because it is a threat to democracy. Maybe that changes as a result of people pointing this logic out, but I won't hold my breath. I don't think it's nuanced, I think it's straightforward. You can't be a champion of global human rights except where it is inconvenient. Or maybe the human rights and pro democracy stuff is all BS.

How does shameless hypocrisy help their brand-image?

It does not, but the calculation is that any loss in value of brand is sufficiently offset by profits in the Chinese market.

Assuming any of the claims are even true.

Their customers are hypocrites too.

I think it should be noted that "brand safety" is entirely theoretical. It doesn't necessarily mean that anything actually happens. What it means is that certain people in Apple's marketing department believe that their ads being pictured next to things that they think people might not approve of might harm their image and possibly lead to a loss in sales. There is no proof that this will actually happen though. For all we know, the only solid reason is that their trendy cocktail party friends won't approve of them if their ads are next to something they don't like.

You can "lose sales" and save money by spending less on marketing at the same time.

Twitter Ads really have low value and always did. The investments, relative to other social channels, are low and the ROAS is terrible. Brands were just there because they felt they had to cover the bases, not because they were truly having any impact.

Twitter has been dead on that front forever and El Musky is definitely not helping things.

Seems like Musk is focussed on cost reduction. Which might actually save a lot more than the ad losses. Or might not.

“Engagement” and “page views” and blah blah don’t pay the dividends, leftovers after expenses are paid do.

Advertising losses are not Musk's only financial concern.

FTC, EU commission and EU member states are all circling as a result of them losing trust in the companies ability to enforce previous agreements. And it's a legitimate concern since all of those employees responsible for this are all gone.

To add some context to this, I met a woman a few years back who worked in marketing for Kingsford Charcoal. Kingsford had something like 94% USA marketshare at the time, but they still spent millions on marketing. They already dominated their space, and I could totally see Kingsford blowing six or seven figures USD on Twitter advertising, just in case.

An aside, but if you like grilling with charcoal, chunk "natural" charcoal produces a hotter fire than briquettes like Kingsford.

Apple have issued guidance that they can’t make enough iphone 14s to meet demand. They likely don’t need to advertise on Twitter right now anyway and this way they get free PR advertising from news orgs covering the Twitter story instead.

If the marketing works, reducing it reduces their pricing power.

Lots of ways of doing that without raising list price (removing promos/discounts, keeping the price higher longer).

And an iPhone 14 ad still spills into other iPhone and apple product sales.

a) Widespread reports from the advertising industry that the Twitter ad engine is falling apart. ROAS and engagement have significantly dropped whilst inauthentic bot requests have significantly increased. And some are seeing data inconsistencies in the dashboard and so they are unable to effectively audit campaigns. So for many it is simply not worth the effort compared to investing in other channels.

b) Larger ad buyers depend on account managers being there to assist with getting the most out of the platform and helping to understand changes. They are all gone.

c) It is a proven fact that brand association matters. If your ad is next to CSAM people will remember that and de-value your brand. Given Musk has fired the entire Brand Safety team, hollowed out the Content Moderation team, empowered ultra-right-wing people like Andy Ngo to make moderation decisions and is now sole arbiter for all decisions companies are simply believing it is too risky to stay. And advertising groups like Omnicom, WPP, Publicis etc agree ranking the platform as "high-risk".

d) Apple wanted to send a message to Musk that this direction Twitter is going on is not going to end well. There is a risk, albeit small, that they can be held legally responsible for the behaviour of the applications on their store. Allowing apps that take no responsibility for content moderation is untenable for them.

> Then why did they pull Twitter ads? Surely they're losing sales from that?

Probably not really? Compared to Google, Facebook, and even traditional TV, Twitter is a drop in the advertising bucket.

What you say is true but did you didn't follow the logic all the way.

Apple doesn't care about it because their customers don't care about it. Stop buying and they start caring.

"Pecunia non olet".

The money is real, but the other important aspect is that any government can compel these companies to restrict free speech. One of the governments is the board of directors of the company itself. Unless you truly own your phone, the speech/software allowed on it is determined by the government. If you have complete control of the software running on it such as FOSS, then you own/control the phone. Otherwise you are basically renting a device that is controlled by government.

Google left China in 2010 and hasn't really gone back, other than some hardware manufacturing there. Bing on the other hand is available and fully complies with Chinese censorship.

Google was still collaborating with the CCP until early 2019.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

Did Google actually talk to the CCP about launching this, or was this just Google wondering how easy it would be to sell out on their values and reclaim all that revenue they gave away to Baido? My understanding was that this was more of the latter. Unsettling that they would even consider this, but still better than basically every other large tech firm.

Dragonfly was a prototype that never even left the design stage. How could they have been collaborating with the CCP with something that wasn't even released?

Until public companies aren't legally mandated to make money or get sued by shareholders, this will keep happening.

There needs to be a new model for public companies

>A company that misses no chance to showcase its liberal credentials, bending over backwards for perhaps the most dictatorial government in the world to suppress the most basic of freedoms.

Anyone who claims they would act differently is either a fool or a liar.

Doubly so if the screen they're using to read this contains but a single IC made in China, while they let the self-righteously indignant stank of their own morality waft up into their nose.

I built an iOS app for location-based sharing that that nobody uses lol. But it works in China too. So if anyone knows anyone over there, send them this:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/radius-report-news/id152474203...

Is it only available in the US? Can’t open it in the uk store.

Looks like this app is only available in the US and Canada app stores.

This link is leading to nowhere: https://apps.apple.com/cn/app/radius-report-news/id152474203...

Discussed 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33778302

As far as I’m aware Apple didn’t block access. They limited it to 10 minutes at a time. You can re-enable it manually every 10 mins.

This is obviously really bad but it doesn’t come close to what Huawei is doing.

Are they not bound by the local law and regulation as any corporation or individual is regardless of their moral point of view? You could argue they could be principled and withdraw from China because of policies they disagree with but are compelled to comply with. But given the economic structure of electronics manufacturing in todays world that seems like a suicidal task.

I’d argue a more effective route is to comply as minimally as possible while advocating for improvement in policy, law, and regulation. Practically speaking if apple were to self immolate on principle a more compliant competitor will fill their vacuum. How is that advancing any agenda?

I feel you can both comply with laws and regulations and take the stance they are wrong and publicly advocate to the extent you’re legally allowed for their reformation without moral hazard.

I agree with your stance. Lawlessness is rarely a convincing argument. There is also a moral basis for respecting the local laws and regulations; the debate over whether to follow so-called immoral laws is a complicated one, but the biblical stance is credible in the hearts of many people:

  Let everyone be subject to the governing
  authorities, for there is no authority
  except that which God has established.
  The authorities that exist have been
  established by God. [Romans 13:1]

This doesn't mean one should necessarily treat the law of the land as perfectly moral (eg MLK Jr), but lawfulness and a respect for order will serve to elevate arguments against the established practices. I believe that Apple has more influence in China when the Chinese authorities view their company as respectful and cooperative.

I think more than that they can’t operate in China against the law. The Chinese police have way more guns than the Genius Bar employees and have built more effective prisons - whether god sanctioned them or not. No company can operate outside the law of the land without being a criminal enterprise, and that’s not a great way to sell iPhones.

> I guess according to Apple, Chinese people don't deserve any of what's written in their post.

Sometimes I find Apple's response to some of these issues cleverly passive-agressive. For example you can still use mass airdrop, you just have to keep enabling it. While, I assume, Google would simply have disabled the feature (does Android have a similar feature?). A related example is how they support you disabling face/finger authentication when you are afraid of the authorities.

N.B. This is not to defend or condemn Apple. They are simply a huge, largely incomprehensible steamship not deserving my adulation or scorn.

Apple did not block AirDrop in China. Apple made it harder to fingerprint protestors who forgot to turn off "Everyone" sharing.

> The bigger news to me was that Apple blocked AirDrop in China

Why is this bigger news? Seems equivalent to me.

Is it because Huawei is already seen as an adversary while folks persist in seeing Apple as somehow more benign?

To me I read this as Huawei is already a “state controlled” entity. So this is egregious but expected by them.

Apple however is two faced. Saying that they stand for bigger ideals but quietly supporting the communist party by disabling airdrop.

Edit: I know it’s more complicated than my comment indicates. But it’s still a weird response by Apple none the less.

Eh, it's only weird if you ever thought Apple wasn't two-faced, and nothing about their behaviour has ever suggested that to me. I've not once seen them make a business decision that was in line with some expressed set of ethics while damaging them financially, which to me is a key litmus test of whether a company actually lives by their stated values. Anything else is just lip service.

> The bigger news to me was that Apple blocked AirDrop in China - specifically to limit dissent and for preventing people from organizing [1]. A company that misses no chance to showcase its liberal credentials, bending over backwards for perhaps the most dictatorial government in the world to suppress the most basic of freedoms.

It's a private corporation, which are known for manufacturing sweet-smelling lies. I mean, a "new an improved" label on a package often literally means they're just giving you less product. If they'll be that blatant, there's no limit to how low they'll go.

Short-sighted Western economic policy has allowed China to grab companies like Apple by the balls, which means the Chinese government is the one Apple ultimately is accountable to (with varying amounts of smoke-and-mirrors to obscure it). Tim Cook knows who his boss is.

Now that you know that Airdrop is not in fact blocked in China, has your opinion changed?

> Now that you know that Airdrop is not in fact blocked in China, has your opinion changed?

No, because it's a general statement that you can't trust marketing.

Also, looking around at sibling comments because you provided no source, it looks like you're splitting hairs. It may not be blocked, just crippled specifically in China in a way that thwarts how the protesters used it: https://twitter.com/tibor/status/1597296268275240960, https://www.macworld.com/article/1377200/apple-to-limit-aird...:

> By default, AirDrop is set to allow incoming connection requests from Contacts Only, but that setting can be changed to Everyone–popular among protesters and teens alike. Starting with iOS 16.1.1, users in China will find that the “Everyone” option has changed to “Everyone for 10 minutes.” Apple won’t admit why this change is being made in China, but the peer-to-peer nature of AirDrop has made it popular for spreading anti-government protest material, and hopping into your settings every 10 minutes to re-enable the ability to receive AirDrop from strangers makes it a lot less useful for that.

Framing an action that thwarts censorship circumvention as preventing "spam and abuse" is exactly the kind of sweet-smelling lie I was talking about.

$2+T market cap or karma? Why not both.

False. It can't be left open to Everyone for more than 10 minutes at a time. Frankly, from a security perspective cutting this off after a few minutes is preferable. You can turn it back on for another 10 minutes.

Pure conjecture on my part, but I wouldn't be surprised if China wanted them to block it entirely and Apple negotiated this compromise to try and appease officials while still allowing information sharing.

Your hyperbole is a massive exaggeration. They didn't "bend over backwards" to help China suppress freedom. They maintained as much usability as they could under almost certain direct legal pressure from the host country. If China says turn it off completely, that is what they would have to do if they want to operate in China. Apple must obey local laws.

Would the interests of freedom be served if Apple refused to obey local laws and there were no iPhones sold in China? Everyone running a Huawei phone. Would that advance the cause of freedom? Samsung, Google, everyone has to make these choices if they want to operate in China.

> I wouldn't be surprised if China wanted them to block it entirely and Apple negotiated this compromise to try and appease officials while still allowing information sharing.

My reading too, fwiw. If so, rather well done on Apple's part.

Samsung mostly pulled out of China back in 2019 -- except their NAND factory in Xi`an -- and Google opted out years ago. Apple went the other way -- Tim Apple went all-in in China with $270+B investment to train their young, unskilled, slave-wage laborers from rural China and, as recent as last month, made huge efforts to prop up China's domestic tech/chip industry (eg, YMTC).

- "Inside Tim Cook’s Secret $275 Billion Deal with Chinese Authorities," Wayne Ma, Dec. 7, 2021, the Information.

- "Apple Reportedly Helped China Chipmaker YMTC Hire US Engineers, Apple Reportedly Helped China Chipmaker YMTC Hire US Engineers," Tom's Hardware

Edit: argh - this story already had a major HN thread:

AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33778302 - Nov 2022 (692 comments)

, so https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33806401 is actually a dupe. I'm going to undo the change I just made and put everything back the way it originally was. It will take a few minutes. Sorry all!

--- original, now invalid comment: ---

This comment was originally posted in response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33803692 — hence the reference to "the bigger news". Since this topic deserves its own discussion, I've moved the comments about it to the thread that's actually about this. The other topic deserves its own discussion too.

Since Apple did not in fact “block AirDrop in China” this whole thing just feels like flame bait.

I haven't dived into the details but I assume there's a legitimate debate about why they did whatever they did.

From a moderation point of view, the issues are simply that (1) the Airdrop story is off topic in this thread, and (2) it already had a massive thread on HN.

It is kind of expected they would follow the rules and regulations of a country they are selling in. I would expect Tim Cook to be fired by the board if Apple was banned from the largest consumer market in the world.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com