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Comment by musingsole | Hacker News Reader

Turning to IBM or Oracle for moral reasons is about the funniest thing I've read in a long time. One enabled the holocaust and the other made 90s-era Microsoft seem downright communist.

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I know Oracle has a bad rep and is generally perceived as a corporate monstrosity, but honestly what is actually so bad about their business model? Sure they make a ton of cash fleecing other enterprises but at least it doesn't seem like they're mistreating workers or tracking users. Honestly, it always seemed kind of old-fashioned but not necessarily bad compared to the 'new era' internet giants

Think pragmatically: who would we help by trying to "get back at" an abstract corporate entity for bad things "they" (not even the same people) may have done nearly 100 years ago?

What we're talking about with Amazon is taking steps to actually fight transgressions that are happening right now.

Amazon is doing some rather creepy stuff with the CIA [0]. Can you elaborate on what Oracle did that was so bad? Is charging for software and enforcing license terms somehow worse than what Amazon, Microsoft, Google, etc. are doing?

[0]https://www.theregister.com/2018/05/22/aclu_amazon_aws_rekog...

I don't really see how selling facial recognition tech is "rather creepy". Facial recognition has legitimate uses, and the CIA/FBI using it to track criminals seems to be a legitimate use case to me. The article you linked seems to be making a hypothetical leap to "well what if they choose to use it nefariously in the future??" And to their credit, Amazon at least seems to be interested in trying to limit its use to good causes: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/10/amazon-bans-police-use-of-fa...

And of course, Microsoft, Google, and others have their own facial recognition software and they all have large contracts with government entities, too. This article mentions the CIA using AWS, but the CIA also has multi-billion dollar contracts with GCP, Azure, and even IBM and Oracle: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/cia-awards-multib...

Yeah, that's all incredibly troubling to me. I'm shocked that so many people fail to see the parallels to historic misuse of technology by states, e.g., IBM and the holocaust as outlined above:

"Mankind barely noticed when the concept of massively organized information quietly emerged to become a means of social control, a weapon of war, and a roadmap for group destruction." [0]

Is it unreasonable to desire that your dollars don't go to organizations involved in war, oppression, corruption, etc.?

[0] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/bl...

There are legitimate use cases for technology like facial recognition, and I see nothing wrong with using it in that way. Of course society should be cautious about unwarranted uses of such technology. But decrying all uses of it, even legitimate ones, because of a hypothetical "what if someone in the future uses facial recognition to start another holocaust?" is just a slippery slope fallacy.

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