So why couldn't the EU fund the development of a Signal fork that doesn't need phone numbers?
166 karma · joined February 10, 2020
.bh, .dk, and .pn have similar arrangements, but this is the only one which isn't a redirect or server page.
If they have observed proper precautions, the psychological issues are the only factor that remains. Those are solved by growing a thicker skin.
> And what about if your business is online? Most states require that your public business filing include your real name.
If so, they should vote with their feet and observe proper precautions, such as incorporating in a jurisdiction with strong privacy laws, or not incorporating at all (Bitcoin). Examples of the former include New Mexico, Wyoming, Nevada, Seychelles, British Virgin Islands, and more.
> Your glib solutions betray your lack of experience with the problem.
No, your glib solutions betray your lack of experience with the problem. Censorship is never an answer as it is, unto itself, a moral failure.
If you want to accomplish something, try to decrease their profitability. For example, write a bot that responds to scam emails, tries to get them off script, and spend a lot of their time.
If 90% of their time is spent on your bots, that's profits down by 90%. If they have a profit margin of 50%, then they will be making a loss with your actions.
Disclaimer: I have never used Hetzner's services nor can I vouch for them.
>Ah, so a question: if your decision-making abilities have been shown to be impaired once, would giving veto powers on any large-scale decision to people you have previously appointed, be an acceptable solution for society?
Think of the way many pundits describe the White working class. It's not just with regret, but with outright disdain: these people are repulsive.
Someone with a car could be characterized as low status or poor, but few would argue he or she is somehow subhuman.
Against this backdrop, "free college" seems like a no-brainer: you need a car for the utilitarian purposes of moving around, but without a college education your life simply lacks value. It isn't that you might die if you don't have an education, but that you're not alive unless you have one.
It's supported behavior to downvote comments based on disagreement[0][1], so it seems like the system is working as it should.
But what if the mind is reporting on reality correctly, and the signals it's sending are correct, it's just that we do not like them very much?
Can a signal be entirely correct, but destructive? If so, it just seems like a special case of the expression "the truth hurts". It's not my mind which is defect by informing me of the present state of affairs, it's the present state of affairs which are regrettable.
If that's a correct characterization, is depression really a mental illness? If people perceive their lives to be dreadful, whereas in reality their lives are dreadful, where does the misconception come in?
All those are illegal online too. But if I go to the pub and discuss some harassment with my friends that I'm going to do later, the pub clearly isn't held liable for this. Why? Because even if he owns it, the pub owner has no responsibility for what is said inside of the tavern walls.
So, what is taking place on these forums is rarely illegal.
> The question at this point is whether we put laws in place such that individuals can seek cost-effective justice, or whether we wait until so many people get burned that they start clamoring for the government to step on the Internet with jackboots.
And then they move to mailing lists, or FMS. Then what? You going to shut down Tor as well?
My opinion is this: people should grow thicker skin. Those who fail to do so pose a threat to society, insofar as they call for further censorship. Therefore, anyone who is harmed by these people can post-hoc be considered to have deserved it.
It used to be the case that people were recommended to not use their real name on the Internet for basic safety reasons. Now they are encouraged to do so, and whoever doesn't is branded a 'troll'. Who is really at fault here?
To be clear here, I tried to do this, and all it earned me was ostracism. It is not a virtuous act at all, despite what some may like to give you the impression of.
In Finland, Internet access is considered to be a human right, and it's not feasible to do a lot of things otherwise, such as banking errands. Considering Facebook == the Internet to many people, I don't see why the same rules can't apply there.
If you disagree, please let me know and I'll take a look at them.
To elaborate on my comment, which I think is neither insubstantive nor flamebait: It's absurd to suggest that users are not to blame here. On one hand, they complain about it, but on the other hand, they obviously use the app, or else they wouldn't bother maintaining it. Being subject to all of this tracking nonsense is what within economics is known as a 'revealed preference'. In other words, it is the case that the users chose this future, or as the meme goes, this is the future you chose.
In practice, you see this as well. There's a lot of people posting on the Internet about how they're going to do this and that, but in practice most of them are just blowing off steam.
I get why a site like Facebook which wants to have community standards would like to enforce it, but it should be up to the proprietor.
If so, then it's quite apparent ex-facto why they want to move to Facebook - if people are not willing to go through that hoop to join in, then why would they want them?
I haven't heard it used that way. Wikipedia, abbreviated:
> Radicalization is a process by which an individual comes to adopt increasingly radical political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations that reject or undermine the status quo or contemporary ideas and expressions of the nation.
As in, adopting extreme views. And that raises the question: if you have 100'000 people and tell them all to go read Mein Kampf, then some of them will undeniably go, "yeah that Hitler guy seems like a pretty smart fellow". What is the solution? It can't be to say that extremist speech should be banned. If so, we have to burn most of Western philosophy.
And it seems like "it is morally justifiable to use violence to achieve political means" is just another political belief, correlating strongly with the strength of your political views. So all you are saying is that some political views should be banned. I don't like this.
> And that the management is shockingly hands-off about letting them do it and have been for years now?
The management did nothing wrong. Each site has a different vibe. In the case of imageboards, it's usually 'anything which isn't explicitly prohibited by law'. It's worth noting that 4chan bans the behavior which you describe.
Even if they didn't, it raises an important question: where should the line be drawn?
It seems easy to think of 4chan or 8chan as a discrete entity, which should be shut down. But say that we had some physical entity, like a pub, which for some reason attracted an extremely racist clientele who liked to go have a few drinks and then beat up the immigrants.
Should the pub be held liable for this? What about serverless mailing lists, where I manually put everyone on the list in the "reply to" field, or Usenet? Should that be 'shut down' too?
The thing I don't like about this is that both counterparties are willing. If you're spamming someone, you have person A who sends to person B, but person B doesn't want to hear from person A.
With an imageboard, you have person A who sends to B, C, and D, but B, C, and D all want to hear from A. Should they be stopped in this endeavor?
I have no idea which specific genes are involved or by what pathways, but neither do I know which genes control height and that still seems readily apparent.
Here is the Wikipedia article on the proposed gene ("VMAT2"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_gene
Here is an article on phys.org which describes my idea: https://phys.org/news/2011-01-religiosity-gene-dominate-soci...
You can stay away from Facebook and then feel really smug ten years from now when it eventually collapses. But until then, you'd have missed out on a lot of important things. The only winning move is to realize that you do not have a choice, and that the terms of service are just an illusion.
For the record, I think Facebook's existence is regrettable. But the notion that you have any ability, choice, freedom, right, or opportunity to opt out from it is laughable.
As for the idea of the social contract, I think you are actually spot on:
> Social contract arguments typically posit that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority [...] in exchange for protection of their remaining rights or maintenance of the social order.
Individuals have:
[?] consented explicitly
[x] consented tacitly
[x] to surrender some of their freedoms
[x] to submit to the authority [Facebook]
[ ] in exchange for protection of their remaining rights
[x] in exchange for maintenance of the social order
In fact, it could even be argued that this de-facto state of affair ought to be made de-jure. Certainly, it is the case already today that many of my local government agencies are more active on Twitter or Facebook than they are over phone or e-mail. In fact, they rarely use e-mail for regulatory reasons. If someone is suicidal, has an extreme drinking problem, or holds extremist political beliefs, we consider this a transgression and rightfully lock them up/commit them to involuntary psychiatric care. Why is this not the case for all self-harmful behaviors?
Considering many employers etc. already want it, it doesn't seem far-fetched to consider people hermits for refusing to participate, just as we consider an individual defect for not owning a smartphone.
In America, people have a long and proud tradition of coming up with Byzantine workarounds for laws. In Europe, not so much.
I can't prove a negative, but you can prove a positive.
2. There isn't one. If I say something, there are some insane people who will hear it, and some of them might kill someone. Too bad, but it doesn't make me a terrorist.
3. Facebook and Google are natural monopolies, and they should be regulated like telecom carriers.
That people get radicalized going there seems like a poor argument. If I understand you correctly, the principle is the following:
1. Someone holds acceptable views.
2. They visit 8chan.
3. They now hold abhorrent views.
Why should 8chan be blamed for this, or rather, what did they do wrong here? Don't you agree that people have the right to hold opinions without interference, and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers?
Academia is a fraud, but to the extent that it produces useful employees it is at least socially justifiable.