Why don’t you have sympathy for the author? Regardless of how you feel about the flagrant breach of contract, the fact that he needs the money to pay the cost of his cancer treatment certainly elicits sympathy from me.
2,057 karma · joined September 20, 2013
All the while, Section 230 is being held hostage even though it has absolutely nothing to do with the content moderation these companies currently perform. Few in elected office seem to have much regard for the 1st Amendment. At this point there's clear bipartisan support for curtailing the Section 230 protections that make these discussions possible.
Charles Koch deserves to die and I will celebrate when he does. I hope future generations will piss on his grave.
Regardless of whether COVID-19 resolves quickly or not, further declines in marriage rates are all but guaranteed.
Wealth and income inequality has gotten so bad in the US that it is now possible to make a compelling argument for progressive policies and a robust welfare state on the basis of goals previously considered conservative (goals like encouraging procreation and family cohesion). Individuals correctly identify the costs of marriage and having children and choose rationally to avoid incurring those costs, or are simply unable to incur those costs in the case of homeownership. As rents and other costs of living exacerbated by having a family continue to balloon, it's only a matter of time until the upper middle class begins to suffer the same effects.
A progressive think tank called People's Policy Project has thought up the Family Fun Pack (https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/projects/family-fun-pac...) to address exactly these problems, though currently its support among elected politicians is mostly nonexistent.
You using the Irish as an example is totally bizarre to me because they barely get along with the English (who are mostly also white and Christian). The Troubles were not that long ago and represent a level of political violence between different cultural groups that the US hasn't seen in a very long time.
Google doesn't just control the operating system or the OEMs. Their agreements with OEMs benefit their own applications over the competition's, effectively allowing Google to leverage its power as a platform to benefit its apps developed for its platform. We've seen the exact same dynamic play out with Amazon and its products. It's only this year that Apple has allowed third party apps to serve as replacements for its default web browser and other apps on iOS. This particular kind of anticompetitive behavior definitely meets the standard of negatively affecting consumers because of the extent to which it intentionally limits the end-user's ability to choose the competition.
It's wild to me that this is even a question. A lawsuit like this a couple weeks before the election from a DOJ which might not exist in 4 months is nakedly political. Why is anyone taking this seriously?
If the court were a strictly rational, non-ideological body, politicians wouldn't fight over appointments the way they do.
Add this incident to the rapidly growing body of evidence proving every privacy advocate's arguments against centralized systems. Some time soon I hope the tech community finds its way back to federated/p2p modes of distribution and communication so we can make this kind of censorship -- and the companies which enforce it -- a thing of the past.
What good is the legislation when it get cuts to ribbons in the courts? Look at what happened to the ACA and the individual mandate. Even modest progressive legislation can barely survive the current court, so I'm not sure your proposed solution works.
"interpreting the law as written" is a farce. The court is a minoritarian conservative bulwark that can rule however it wants with no accountability. The law is what they want it to be. Always has been.
Second, concerning a VPN being tapped by US law enforcement agencies, I think depending on the country in which it's being operated, that is more or less likely. These companies' entire businesses rely on the perception of security, so government interception of their communications would be an existential threat to them. I think it's also likely that interception (and crucially, use of intercepted materials as evidence in criminal prosecution) would probably get out sooner or later, just as it has in the above story. The idea that federal law enforcement has access to everyone's communications everywhere all the time probably overstates their capabilities.
As I understand it, there still remains a pretty big difference between the government's active/targeted vs passive/dragnet surveillance. A VPN is probably still useful for defending against the latter.