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Comment by floatingatoll | Hacker News Reader

The article that Bloomberg refused to publish, that was later published at NYT, is here (no prior discussion at HN):

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/world/asia/wang-jianlin-a...

Thank you for the link. I find things like this fascinating. I really wonder what life is like for the super-rich and politically connected. It must be a different world. I think the NYT piece does a fair job of not making unfounded and sensationalist claims, instead just pointing out connections.

I do wonder what went into Bloomberg not publishing it. This is what I bristle at: China being able to exert influence about what is and isn't published, what movies are and aren't made and so on.

It's even more problematic when China doesn't even need to exert that influence directly but instead rely on self-censorship from companies hoping to do business in China. Particularly news organization should never compromise themselves that way in the hopes of pleasing China (or at least not angering it). I hope Bloomberg didn't do this.

>I do wonder what went into Bloomberg not publishing it.

China kicks people out that criticize the government. We saw it recently with the WSJ, WaPo, and NYT reporters recently. If Bloomberg wanted to continue operating in China, it had to pull back on critical reporting. It is an offensive calculation, but very clear what happened.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3075647/ch...

To be fair, the US government does engage in similar things. The DoD lending equipment for film only if the script is favorable enough.

Fortunately you can still release/publish films in the US that are critical of the DoD (provided you don’t use classified material to do so, such as in the case of Collateral Murder, because then, legal or not, they will do their best to torture you to death).

Laura Poitras, for example, is still basically free, having released the film about Snowden.

I am not so sure that is the same thing as revoking a business license for saying something the government doesn’t like published.

Calling that "similar" is absolutely ridiculous. Propaganda is much less bad than wholesale banning unflattering speech.

It's similar in the same way giving people stuff if they do what you want is similar to breaking their knees when they don't.

non-paywall link:

http://archive.is/npL70

Off-topic, but I decided to finally make that free account NYT insists on, and NYT returns the error "Please enter a valid email address." It's a @fastmail.com address with no weird characters. Anyone else had that trouble before? Even more interesting is that just changing the domain to a personal one that uses one of the new gTLDs makes it work. I would have maybe expected the opposite to happen. Are they blacklisting Fastmail?

probably, and mailinator

I have had my personal domain (that I manage through Fastmail) that I use almost solely for mail rejected by Carmax before. Emails sent from them just fine, just couldn't use it to sign up.

It'd be strange for them (or a third-party customer management service) bother blacklisting Fastmail – isn't Fastmail a paid service (i.e. less likely to be used by freeloaders, or by people making throwaway accounts)?

In any case, no matter how much they want to squeeze money out of new users, the NYT has more incentive to not have a super strict blacklist, or overly onerous sign-up process. Signup numbers are still metrics that a company vice president/middle manager can brag about, and NYT's initiative of mandating free registration seems much too new (e.g. as a comparison, they had totally free access for more then a decade, then a leaky paywall for several additional years) for them to already have hard enforcement policies in place.

> It'd be strange for them (or a third-party customer management service) bother blacklisting Fastmail

If it's not a blacklist, I think it'd be even stranger for it to be a whitelist, precisely for the reasons you mentioned. mzkply's comment makes me think that it might have to do with Fastmail's email aliases, which is the closest thing they have that's like Mailinator (an email provider that is frequently blacklisted for signups), but I don't think it's similar enough that this makes sense.

I agree with everything you said about NYT's incentives, but that leaves the question raised by this experience.

I opened up a chat with NYT to ask about it, but I was left waiting for an agent there for an hour before I decided to just close the chat.

Safeway.com won’t let me use an email address @pobox.com. I have no earthly idea why and their support is untrained to discuss it, but they have server-side tests that are rejecting it.

I had the same issue yesterday signing up in the McDonald's app. Please don't judge.

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