fixermark

The source you've linked to doesn't mention a stabbing, and nothing I've been able to dig up suggests there was a stabbing in the Köthen death. Death from heart condition was unrelated to the injuries sustained from a fall the victim suffered scuffling with the 18-year-old (which, yes, smells fishy, but I think you're casting aspersions on an unrelated coroner who was looking at a woman with a crushed ribcage because of possible malpractice on a local-to-you coroner's part, which is... Well, this is the sort of misinformation-spreading and stereotyping, and the harm it causes, that we're discussing in this thread).

Are you conflating the facts from two situations? Media coverage of the Köthen protests suggests there was a stabbing incident in Chemnitz close in time to Köthen.

All of that having been said: I think your point that Germany has laws discouraging you from casting aspersions on groups due to individual actions of the groups, and America has far fewer such restrictions, stands. Except... Germany's homicide rate is lower than the US. So Germany's clearly doing something right relative to its neighbor 'cross the pond (of course, it may not be this---but given that Germany had to deal with actual Nazis and the US has not yet had that challenge, I'm not in the habit of gainsaying Germany's strategy here regarding laissez-faire freedom of speech).

Not necessarily. Google doesn't derive advertising (or any other data beyond broad bytecounts, for that matter) from the cloud-customer data stored in their cloud storage infrastructure.

Unfortunately, since Fiber didn't take off, they didn't spend ten years optimizing your network latency. ;)

Probably worth noting: this project appears aligned with Google's Cloud and mobile initiatives. It's unproven, but it's originating from spaces where Google's products have stuck around.

True, but the only PC you're going to build out that competes with the price of a Chromecast Ultra is a Raspberry Pi retro box.

It'd be useful for game developers also.

Bungie had to build an infrastructure to push analytics from Halo into their system so they could get "heatmaps" of where players were in a multiplayer map. This fed back into their design process and was used to tweak maps after release.

Building something like that might be easier if all the state is living in a cloud server "right next to" the analytics pipeline, with no need to push state over the external connection. It could, hypothetically, even be built as a library Google supports directly.

I'm concerned about how this will work for game libraries.

If I buy a console and maintain the hardware, I can still play all the cartridge / CD games I bought for it forever, indefinitely. The hardware target does not change.

Google has a track record with their cloud infrastructure (such as App Engine) of requiring developers to keep updated as the engine changes. Will they attempt a similar model with the system against which Stadia games are built? And if a given developer doesn't want to invest the roll-forward effort (or dies out), does Google maintain an older version of their infrastructure indefinitely to run no-longer-updated-by-developer games, or do they pull those games from their offering to free up resources to run newer and more popular games?

This seems a bad investment for a gamer who is interested in returning to a beloved treasure 5-10 years out. Even my old Steam purchases can be re-installed and run on my own new hardware.

Probably a subscription service like Google's other media-content-house offerings (Play Music and YouTube).

We are talking about Australia. They already essentially have a political committee that decides whether any given videogame is acceptable for import.

Chicago's murder rate has been falling. https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/chicago-murder-rate-nation...

True; CP is a bad analogy and I'm retracting it.

The US bar is very high to curtailing speech as a government action, and it's worth noting that the story we're commenting on is about an Australian telco taking private action. I actually don't know the law in the US around what would happen if, for example, Verizon decided to IP-blackhole 4chan of its own initiative (in general, Americans would probably rake it over the coals for diminishing consumer choice at the very least). It'd be a hell of a show if they tried, and I don't see it coming.

The example you brought up is also from the US and, I hate to say it, was probably treated differently because the US is just desensitized to the amount of violence in its culture these days. The baseball shooting was tragic, but none of the injuries were even as permanent as the ones Gabby Giffords suffered. But the New Zealand shooting was in a country far less tolerant of such intra-civil violence, and Australia already has speech constraints relative to the US (contrast their attitude on videogames to that of the US).

(... but to turn the conversation around: do you think there should have been a conversation about online radicalization after the 2017 shooting? Maybe there should have been. What do you think should have been done differently?)

I think you're reversing causality. Wouldn't higher rates of gun-related homicide induce a locale to enact stricter gun laws? And if those gun laws are only partially effective because the problem they're trying to control is systemic and national, you'd end up with the situation you're observing: places with few gun crimes have few laws because they've not been induced to enact them, and places with more gun crime have more laws (but continue to have more gun crime because places with fewer gun laws facilitate unregulated gun markets and transportation costs within the US are extremely low).

The rest of your comments are basically an angry anti-leftist rant that I'm not interested in engaging in. I have Facebook for dealing with political rants, thank you. ;)

Free will is a fascinating hypothesis that is only partially explanatory of observed human behavior. ;)

To be less glib: in the US the bar is very high, but we do, in fact, have some things that we've removed from the "free will" discussion. Child pornography is the obvious example.

It's unlikely that making it hard to reach 8chan / 4chan etc. would impact those shootings, no. But it may very well have had impact on the New Zealand shooting. And the Pittsburgh shooting.

In the US, the bar would be pretty high for government action based on this reasoning; a direct link would have to be proven, and either an imminent threat of harm be demonstrated or the media in question be demonstrated to have nothing but illegal activities occuring with it. I don't think 4/8chan raise to this high bar. Other nations? Bar not so high.

In general, yes. SESTA/FOSTA nudged the definition of the safe harbor away from content that facilitated sex trafficking. This has no bearing on whether, say, iTunes is still safe in sharing the subversive, anti-government music of Creedence Clearwater Revival. ;)

In general, a formal action by the US government would involve a high-bar "prove harm or imminent risk of harm" test.

... but action of private enterprises to cease to do business with an organization (such as telcos black-holing an IP address in their routing fabric) are another matter, unless regulation states otherwise.

You're broadening the discussion from freedom of speech to freedom in general, and I don't think the conversation is particularly valuable over-broad. In terms of homicides, looking at London's rate relative to, say, major cities in the US, I strongly suspect the 2nd Amendment in the US plays a lot more role than the 1st. Comparing London to, say, Chicago, it seems that the freedom to run around with untracked firearms isn't doing the US any favors. Maybe it's the cultural difference, but I don't see London's rate as "epic" given that they're a city of 8 million souls and US cities with smaller populations have more murders.

But freedom of speech and freedom to be armed are different freedoms.

And that's sort of the thing about these bans. They aren't about expunging content from the Internet---that's basically impossible---they're about increasing the activation energy of seeking it out (and, perhaps, making the behavior of the devices used to seek it out different enough from "common traffic" that it's a lot easier for state intelligence agencies to zero in on the participants).

I take it you're contradicting the coroner's report that Heather Heyer died of a blunt-force chest injury? Given that the driver of the car was convicted in her murder, you may want to walk that back.

Because people vulnerable to radicalization view public websites. The solution of "let it happen in the open" doesn't appear to be working in practice. Underground sites are harder for those unaware of the topic to find (and for policing what goes on on those sites, the US has the FBI and the CIA).

The white nationalist rally in Charlottesville was the sort of fascist rally that other countries would categorically refuse a permit to. The US does not, in general, refuse permits under the assumption that a group (even a group with a violent ideology) will turn from a peaceable demonstration to a violent riot. Federal, state, and local law is heavily bent toward assumption of good faith.

Charlottesville had several injuries and one death.

In point of fact, US law defined (via the DMCA "Safe Harbor" clause) most communications-media products (fora, video sharing sites, music repositories, etc.) as pipes for this reason. "They're pipes" is how the US regulates them.

Remember when commenting on Hacker News: it's an international community.

Australia doesn't protect freedom of expression in the same way the US does. Indeed, there's a decent chunk of the world that's perfectly rational and sees our relatively laissez-faire attitude on some Bill of Rights content as dangerous to a survivable society.

Unfortunately, it has become more than roleplaying several too many times to accept that excuse, and the chan owners and mods have made it pretty clear they don't consider regulation of the public squares they serve into existence to be their responsibility.

I think we're about to learn that the 'net may also interpret incitement to violence risk as damage and route around it.

Agreed. It's a longsword where a scalpel is wanted. This is the risk of network-level censorship: too much restriction.

... on the other hand, it puts pressure on Liveleak to take initiative to clean its house, and the only tool the telcos have here is a longsword.

Good point; I had forgotten his INTERPOL arrest call. But it's still worth observing that the US didn't invest in a Seal Team deployment to take down an INTERPOL fugitive.

The growing white supremacist threat is indicated by the rise in hate crimes in the United States.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/13/us/hate-crimes-fbi-2017.h...

It's definitely a thing. It simply goes by less-sexy names of "incitement" or "agitation."

But by those monikers, it's not only a recognized process, it's a legal issue with ramifications.

Osama bin Laden never killed anyone. His words were enough to justify his execution by the military of a foreign nation because he engaged in incitement.

Inconveniently, it might need to be a federal issue, as communication of disease does not respect state boundaries.

Interesting to me personally because I'd never heard before that HSV-1 reactivation was stress-linked.