Huawei phones automatically deleting videos of the protests?
twitter.com
twitter.com
What worries me is that the US itself will go in the same direction. The surveillance is already there, but it is not acted on for the most part in everyday life. But there may be a clock on how long that will last.
This specific phrasing jumped out to me because being against both censorship and cancellation should be a contradiction. Cancellation is an example of the exercising of free speech.
Should I not have the freedom to organize a protest of my local theater for hosting a controversial figure that I think is worthy of cancellation? Isn't that a very basic and fundamental example of free speech?
Comments like yours seems to reveal a lack of a consistent principle underlying your argument. Instead, you seem to be defining free speech as some narrow window of speech that you agree with and speech outside that isn't worth protecting. Ironically it ends up making your comment a good example of the exact thing you were decrying.
GP didn't mention free speach anywhere. Yet you still take the liberty of defining words they didn't use for them.
>Comments like yours seems to reveal a lack of a consistent principle underlying your argument
cancellation is a societal issue, free speech is a legal issue. GP didn't say "we should make cancellation illegal" they said cancellation, which "a significant proportion of our society has become totally OK with" combined with surveilance, will cause even more cancelation. That is bad. (And I agree, btw.)
You can have fair laws and still have an unfair population obsessed with censorship and cancellation. That's bad, but doesn't mean we should make it illegal. Complaining about societal failaings does not have to mean advocating for those people's views to be made illegal. That seems to be something that censorship and cancellation advocates can't seem to understand.
>Should I not have the freedom to organize a protest of my local theater for hosting a controversial figure that I think is worthy of cancellation?
You have complete freedom to do that, but it doesn't mean you should or shouldn't. That's what GP is saying. And cancellation can be over extremely petty or unfounded things. Obviously there is a line but people have taken a "cancel first, ask questions later" approach, and over increasingly petty reasons. One can advocate against that without being against free speech, which means that the government cannot make speech illegal.
Fair enough, but you should know that calling out cancelation as a growing flaw of society will often not be received as a neutral position. The people who complain the loudest about cancelation generally do not come from "either side". It ends up making your comment appear to have a specific political slant even if that wasn't intentional.
I just don’t necessarily think those cases should let the state prosecute you.
You might want to be sure you’re interpreting someone’s position in a way they would agree with before leveling something as grave as to assert their principals are inconsistent.
Free speech is generally a legal thing while one may expect social mores to correct for the things they find distasteful and be disappointed when they don’t. That is not a contradiction.
Do you not see any contradiction in this sentence?
Dishonest speech is still speech. If you support free speech, you support the ability for people to lie because often whether a person is lying or not is not black and white.
If a company employs someone who makes objectionable statements, how is it not free speech to call up that company and threaten a boycott unless they are fired? Boycotts are one of the more fundamental examples of free speech. How can you be against them but for free speech unless you have a very narrow definition of what speech qualifies as being worthy of protection?
Not at all.
By analogy, someone who is for the free market, must stand against both nationalization and monopolization.
Nationalization happens through regulation; monopolization happens through a lack of regulation.
So you can't say that someone who is "for the free market" is for or against "regulation" as a concept. Some regulation (anti-trust) is needed in order to make the market free. Other regulations (the kinds lobbyists push for) must be avoided in order to make the market free.
As nationalization is to censorship, monopolization is to cancellation. You get one from allowing some participants in the market to capture the market's regulators (moderators) and through them, direct top-down use-of-force to suppress those they don't like. You get the other by not regulating at all, and thereby not inhibiting private actors from either direct suppression of their peers — or, more insidiously, manipulating public opinion to cause aggregate bottom-up use-of-force ("mob justice") to be used to suppress their peers.
Governments have a monopoly on the use of force — i.e. a self-named vigilante is just someone committing criminal assault in the eyes of the law — because we as a society want the use of force to flow through checks and balances.
Insofar as speech can be used as violence to silence or terrorize groups (see: hate-speech laws in much of the world explicitly recognizing this), the act of silencing others through speech — cancellation — should also be considered a criminal vigilante act if not performed through societally-approved channels with checks and balances.
The lack of checks and balances for the "process" of cancellation, is how you get cyber-bullying witch-hunts and mis-aimed identity defacement (see: the Reddit Boston Marathon debacle.) We don't accept witch-hunts in the physical world; why should we accept them online?
Does this mean you would support legislation to outlaw hate speech? After all that works against tolerance of others and is often used "to smear and destroy someones life and silence dissent from your position" "for what many believe to be innocuous or good faith beliefs."
We are in a situation where we are seeing a strong increase in right extremist terrorism (just look at the last month) and it is by far the most prevelant terrorism in the US and many western countries, but somehow the discussion revolves around how the "poor" people who incite and support the violence are "being cancelled". That's intellectually dishonest.
The talk about "cancellation" is almost exclusively a deflection tactic used from one political direction, who have absolutely no problem to use cancellation themselves. Nobody complained about protestor being removed from Trump rallies, often violently, or let's look at the more recent blocking of left-wing twitter accounts by self proclaimed free-speech absolutist Elon Musk (https://theintercept.com/2022/11/29/elon-musk-twitter-andy-n...)
It isn't a contradiction. Think of it this way: government censorship is just when the government cancels you.
The issue with "cancellation" is that it's often a cudgel to suppress and punish expression some minority disagrees with, often to enforce some kind of orthodoxy. It might be someone expressing their narrow "free speech" rights, but in a way that's opposed to "free expression" or a "free exchange of ideas."
It stops being speech when action is levied against someone.
The problem with cancellation isn’t the debate, but losing your livelihood or worse.
It is most certainly not censorship when you consider the context - something these debates regularly leave out. Some views are widely considered to be abhorrent or dangerous. People are free to believe vaccine misinformation or glorify extremism. Society does not have an obligation to listen.
I don't think so.
What you should be allowed to do is to freely argue that the speaker you disagree with is wrong. That's free speech.
If you try to influence the theatre to not have the person speak at all, you are suppressing free speech.
Thankfully, this is your opinion, and not actually how courts and the legal system view the first amendment. The Supreme Court has ruled repeatedly that even full on boycott campaigns, which would generally be above the level of simple protest, to be protected speech when the boycott is political in nature and not just for economic gain. https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/987/boycotts
>What you should be allowed to do is to freely argue that the speaker you disagree with is wrong. That's free speech.
This is true. That is free speech.
>If you try to influence the theatre to not have the person speak at all, you are suppressing free speech.
No. This is also free speech. If you are simply protesting the action, you are informing the theater that as a prospective customer you are unhappy with their decision and makes you less likely to be their patron in the future. If you are going further and advocating that the theater be boycotted if they host this person, then you need to show that you are attempting social or political change - but from the premise of the discussion here, it is obvious that this is the intent.
Boycotts of businesses that were pro-British or selling British imported goods were a significant part of the early stages of the American Revolution - https://www.masshist.org/revolution/non_importation.php - so they have a long history of being an important tool in shaping America into what her (future and present) citizens wanted her to be.
The theater is not a public square. The controversial speaker has no first amendment right to say whatever they want in a private space. The theater has no right to force people to not have and share an opinion about who they host. I have every right to share my opinions about a person speaking somewhere, and my opinions about what I think that means about the location hosting them. The speaker (likely) has every right to say what they are saying in general, but not necessarily in any given private location.
Free speech is about preventing government censorship of speech, not private censorship.
I am not a fan of cancel culture in the way it’s practiced today (especially some of the Twitter driven campaigns), but it’s squarely free speech.
Absolutely not. This inverts the meaning of freedom of speech.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech
First sentence. Your definition jumped out to me because that is a position of pretty one-sided ideologues.
You are free to protest, but not free to "cancel" people. Precision here is very important.
https://www.newsweek.com/who-zhao-wei-mystery-surrounds-chin...
In China any friendliness towards Japan can lead to being “cancelled” but the way it happens isn’t through a local protest.
Perhaps it isn't about freedom of speech but centralization of power. Protest all you want, but if you advocate for the centralization of power in government or corporate hands then you shouldn't complain when you can't protest anymore without getting the same treatment Chinese protestors are receiving
If the context is a vacuum that might be fine, maybe.
In reality the US is hyper fragile intellectually and it has gotten drastically worse over the past 10-15 years. The way that fragility is being managed is through silencing and cancellation instead of through intellectual strengthening. Younger people in the US are entirely incapable of discussing difficult ideas emotionally, they're weak. Today the US would try to defeat the KKK via cancellation, which doesn't actually work; yesterday the KKK - which was a huge movement at one time, and has almost no power today - was defeated in the public square head-on, not by cowering or cancelling. The people that intellectually fought the KKK at the height of its power would ridicule today's incredible mental weakness; such weakness that someone as trivial as Trump has to be cancelled in order to deal with him. If people today weren't so intellectually weak, they could counter a Trump quite easily. Trump is absolutely nothing compared to what was dealt with in prior generations.
You defeat bad ideology through rigorous intellectual conflict in the public square. It's messy, difficult and it can be violent - so what. Anything else and the bad will fester under the rugs where it has been swept, and you risk it getting far worse. There are far worse things than Trump and they're barrelling toward the US right now (DeSantis), that wasn't stopped by silencing Trump; it only gets stopped through exactly what I said - you have to smash the ideas in the public square, your ideas have to win. Or else. The far right will eventually produce the next version of Nixon, and he'll wield far greater executive power compared to what Richard Nixon had. Trump isn't that, he's a carnival barker at best; a big part of the left is too irrational and obsessed to recognize the difference.
The US is lucky it was Trump. He's a de facto clown show. The US is increasingly close to being primed for real authoritarianism, the levers are there.
Rigorous intellectual debate has it's place. You have to definitively disprove something at the start. But at a certain point in time, giving them any more spotlight does more harm than good. There is a certain portion of the population that will be swayed into ridiculous viewpoints no matter how thoroughly they have been destroyed in a debate, no matter how much evidence has been piled in front of them. Rigorous debate of flat earthers rarely convinces the flat earthers they are wrong, and doing so in a public setting provides them more opportunity to spread their misinformation. We would gain nothing of import by putting a bunch of flat earther's on national television and debating them.
Nor would you gain anything by platforming a KKK member and debating them on stage today. There's no advantage to be earned by doing so. But, at the time, when they were at the height of their power and had many people believing in them? Certainly. They had a way to preach their message regardless, the reach to spread the information to a large audience. Being able to argue against them and destroy their message was important.
But cancelling them was also part of the process. Boycotts were a SIGNIFICANT part of the effort in defeating the clan. You can find many, many, many historical references to them. Here's a small sample: https://thecatholicnewsarchive.org/?a=d&d=TCT19221207-01.2.6... https://www.jstor.org/stable/27502105 https://academic.oup.com/chicago-scholarship-online/book/214... https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...
The American Unity League in particular spent a large amount of time and effort organizing boycotts and other methods of cancelling the KKK. It was important and it was effective.
edit: I would like to note that I do not believe that people should be cancelled simply for having differing viewpoints. I do think that we have white nationalists and others who should be cancelled for continually espousing racist hateful rhetoric and agitating for violence against others. I do not think that someone should be cancelled for stupid twitter jokes they made a decade ago when they were 20 and had yet to learn better, but now do.
I don’t see a way out honestly. The tools are too useful and too compelling. Any work done now on differential privacy, E2E, FHE, and other technologies can be easily reverted in a way that’s entirely transparent given the UX people expect. I feel that the rigorous maintenance of rights and freedoms as seen from a western liberal perspective is a very high energy state, and nature and human societies settle into lower energy states intrinsically.
doing it anonymously was always the traditional way to workaround this effect. eg women authors picked a pen name for themselves to appear as men.
Most people would agree free speech doesn’t mean a local restaurant has to serve you. But what about other businesses?
Can dentists refuse to treat you?
Can hospitals refuse to give you life saving treatments based on your political views? Many hospitals in the US are private businesses.
Most people agree that social networks can kick you out. But what about ISPs? Can they refuse your business?
And if ISPs can refuse your business, what about water or electricity companies?
Certainly freedom of speech means freedom from certain consequences. As codified in the First Amendment it means freedom from certain legal consequences. Of course freedom of speech is broader than 1A though.
Yes.
> Can hospitals refuse to give you life saving treatments based on your political views?
Ask a Catholic hospital to do an abortion.
> And if ISPs can refuse your business, what about water or electricity companies?
We have specific law for these sorts of scenarios. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_utility
And when utility companies try to stop servicing areas because of the profit loss, these local governments absolutely will fine the shit out of them for it.
That doesn't change your point, but that particular example isn't a good one.
A hospital that doesn’t take Medicare has no obligation to give you any treatments.
If you're a raging asshole, yes.
What do you think about the (former) NFL team owner whose voicemail containing racial slurs was leaked. It was not supposed to become public: should he not have faced any consequences for it on that basis? IIRC, he was forced to sell his franchise by the other teams.
Those are consequences, and I don't see how you can have some utopia where that isn't viable. Then you just live in a world where you are forced to listen to the broadcasted thoughts of idiots.
This replaced the previous standard of "clear and present danger."
But if consequences means there is a coordinated effort among major corporations to punish and prevent you from speaking by de-platforming you or anyone who gives you a platform--that isn't freedom of speech (regardless of whether its allowed under the 1st amendment or not).
US social media banned covid misinformation as defined by US health officials. Why is banning covid misinformation as defined by Chinese health officials any different? Shit, the Chinese policy isn't even that different than the US's view 18 months ago--US lockdown protestors were vilified.
There might be some difference between “consequences to the message” and “consequences to the speaker” but I’ve never seen anyone try to tell those apart.
For example, if I say something controversial to my SO at home it shouldn't cause me to get fired because Alexa overheard and its recording leaked?
I suspect there is a lot of nuance to both sides here. Like if the president of the US tells racist jokes to their lover in private, then public consequences after a tell-all book may be in order. (By public I mean people may chose to vote them out.)
> What worries me is that the US itself will go in the same direction. The surveillance is already there, but it is not acted on for the most part in everyday life. But there may be a clock on how long that will last.
Russia should have paid attention to how much more effective economic and asymmetric warfare is compared to kinetic warfare
I am 100% sure that Russian state-sponsored trolls are largely responsible for the current state of the "culture war".
Do you remember when Facebook reported how much Russian state actors had spent on disinformation spread on that platform during the Trump presidential campaign? It was of the order of $100,000. Pocket change, to turn the brains of an entire nation into argumentative mush.
The two are linked. Those who wish to see Western culture fail, just want us at each others' throats.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/3kvvz3/russian-facebook-trol...
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/the-conversatio...
That was just their advertising budget. It doesn't include their hundreds of thousands of sockpuppet accounts operated by their clickfarms.
* liquidate unions
* avoid environmental laws
* take advantage of cheap labor
Both parties fell over themselves in paving the way for US businesses to move the bulk of their manufacturing outside the country.
The Chinese millionaire kids who are buying houses for cash are a product of the distillation of thousands of once blue collar jobs that burned to move production overseas.
Any derision in the quality of Chinese made goods should be directed at the companies themselves. Those factories are built what they are told to build. That brand that was once a mark of quality that is now making a shoddy product is just extracting value. Your Macbook Pro and that power tool in name only are made in the same place.
Western governments encouraged it! “They’ll want to democratize!”
This is the end result.
Yes it is. Think advertising, marketing, and product placement. It's so pervasive you can't even see it.
> Yes it is. Think advertising, marketing, and product placement. It's so pervasive you can't even see it.
But that's not the state. That'd be much more frightening.
Just look at this: https://www.businessinsider.com/us-army-marketing-esports-co...
"After Congress withheld half of its ad budget due to an audit that revealed millions in spending that didn't deliver results, the Army dissolved its marketing division, relocated to Chicago, and revamped its approaches to data and events. Officials told Business Insider they planned to emphasize conferences like Comic-Con and esports festival Pax, saying gamers and programmers "make good soldiers.""
Whoops, got a little too exposed during the audit time to reset the paper trail.
If they do delete, then at least they only do that in China, and they treat other jurisdictions differently.
Correct, that twitter thread is only about Chinese people living in China.
"If they do have slave labor, then at least they only do that in China, and they treat other jurisdictions differently."
Good to know if that if something is bad, but doesn't affect you personally, it is suddenly no longer bad.
But to your point, China has more control over Apple than the US does over Huawei as iPhones are assembled there (with most components beinf made in Korea and Taiwan).
yeah, rhetorical question, but the issue here isn't necessarily adherence to local laws, but rather having some principled stance.
yeah, I'm hearing it, "principled stance"... one can dream
One of the main points is about this view that "companies must always make more short-term profit at any cost". Sinek says this is just a mind-virus that took hold after Milton Friedman started pushing it, and not only is it not actually true in any legal sense, it's a toxic philosophy that eats away at companies and slowly destroys them. He outlines how it's a big part of why Microsoft keeps losing out to Apple again and again.
(Another point it goes on about is how much more productive your workers are if you treat them like human beings)
So hopefully this book will keep getting more and more traction, and eventually we might not live in a toxic corporate dystopian hellscape
Wonder what pretext that one is going to slip back in again as.
Why is that? Culture, mores, and politics shape how power is used. What makes authoritarianism inevitable?
On one hand power begets power, on the other hand people are easily scared and readily convince themselves of the worst possible explanation.
The anti huawei thing only really kicked off when huawei started dominating key telecoms markets.
When they started kicking out huawei tech they also didn't discriminate between smart (where bugs could easily hide) and dumb tech like aerials (where they couldn't), suggesting that protectionism is at least as much a motive as national security.
The stage is already set. Just make sure your suitcase is packed. The craziness won't come from the government, it'll come from this culture's own inherently fascist tendencies
I agree. I don't know how the US can allow Apple products if they're willing to shut down Airdrop to suppress Chinese protests.
> They have no qualms silencing their own population and invest heavily in surveillance technology. Why would anyone want their equipment?
Yes, but enough about the US, we're talking about China.
On the other hand, many true stories also first circulate online in this format.
I know we're all expected to click through all links and make informed judgments, but like it or not, the title on HN is very powerful in guiding the conversation. Claims like this need an appropriate level of skepticism until corroborated...
I'm flagging this submission, I encourage everybody to do the same. A tweet suggesting that "some users report" some ambiguous behavior is not news. Perhaps some corroboration will emerge and this tweet will eventually be proven correct, but the onus of proof should always be on those who are making the exceptional claims.
CCP is ruthless and has been repeatedly shown to have no qualms oppressing and killing people and abusing technology in similar ways. So the data point is not far fetched.
It would be good to have this either confirmed or proven false. Until then I find it a perfectly valid discussion.
$0.02
It kind of is a single data point with a vague "users report"
Also, extraordinary claims like this still require more than vague anecdotal proof. If this is on device, can we see the request packet that caused the video to be deleted? Can we see the decompiled code that allows for such a thing to happen?
If this is true - it is a concerning but not surprising maneuver.
Here's a few choice quotes:
"And then came the laughable claim in Xi’s speech that China does not ‘carry aggressive or hegemonic traits in its genes’"
"The idea that Trump’s ‘China virus’ rhetoric is xenophobic is puzzling. "
I'm thinking of two huge examples from recent times:
* The widespread belief that people in China have social credit scores.
* The belief that zero-CoVID was fake, and that CoVID was actually spreading like crazy in China, but was somehow covered up.
These are claims that can be disproven just by knowing people in China and asking them about their lives. Given how many millions of Chinese people live abroad, how many expats live in China, and how many cross-border connections there are in general, it's crazy that so many people still believe the above theories.
There's very little knowledge about China among the Western public, and there's a strong tendency towards conspiratorial interpretations of everything regarding China.
This should be mostly rectified by asking a ramdon Huawei phone user in China.
With stories like these where I have known bias, I always come to the comments before reading the article.
If this is happening, I hope Apple says no to the CCP when they inevitably ask Apple to do the same.
Could Apple use that new CSAM-hash-comparison feature to accomplish something similar?
EDIT:
https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...
Nevermind - it looks to me like this mechanism is just for letting Apple know if they should pop open an encrypted image stored on their Cloud.
In the case of China, they should already be able to do that with impunity since they control the regional iCloud and keys
EDIT 2:
I'd also not be surprised if this was false however - I don't own a Huawei phone and I'm not located in China, so I can't verify this at all.
Apple will do whatever the CCP tells them to do because they are not willing to lose a market of a billion+ potential customers.
Companies have no problem being complicit in enabling authoritarianism as long as it's profitable.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2019/10/7/20903613/apple-hiding-tai...
> the White House deleted a social media post on COVID-19 vaccine donations that included Taiwan's flag. A spokesman for the White House National Security Council called the use of the flag "an honest mistake" by the team handling graphics and social media that should not be viewed as a shift in U.S. policy towards Taipei
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/taiwan-asks-us-no...
Emoji are governed by the Unicode Consortium, not the US government. In this case, the Taiwan flag is character number 1848, codes: U+1F1F9 U+1F1FC
[0] - https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-restricted-airdrop-cap...
Yes, that was why there was an uproar. If any hash is deemed bad, that could be of anything.
What’s even easier than that?
- Was this video taken within a geofenced area between these times?
- does audio contain any filtered words?https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/30/apple-limited-a-crucial-aird...
Only if the video is previously known, as far as I'm aware.
Apple gladly does whatever the CCP asks of them
EDIT:
Yeah looks to be on-device (page 4): https://www.apple.com/child-safety/pdf/CSAM_Detection_Techni...
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/14/apple-refuses-barr-request-t...
That includes dragnet surveillance from the federal government, where "0 to 499" FISA data requests yielded data from over 32,000 different accounts over just a 6 month long period.
Soon we'll have US police departments demanding that phone providers delete pictures of police brutality, or even traffic stops. See this story, where someone was live-streaming a traffic stop so there was no way seizing the phone would lose the data.[1]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/11/29/livestrea...
> These attacks and the surveillance they have uncovered--combined with the attempts over the past year to further limit free speech on the web--have led us to conclude that we should review the feasibility of our business operations in China.
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-chin...
I've started calling it the "little green man" in the device that only takes orders from the company - not from me.
It's insidious, it's harmful, and it's definitely not limited to Huawei or China - governments and corporations all over the "west" are playing with this power, and we're going to get burned.
Seems more sane than the average person from what I've seen.
No tethering by the vendor.
That is, bootloader locking and remote attestation should be forbidden by law.
I still think it’s too far, but we should control our own devices. We’ve lost that.
I’ve started running Linux as my daily driver.. it’s been great. Perfect? No. But pretty excellent.
No. He most definitely is not that.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
In China, we see this play out as government control. In the US, we see it play out as corporate profits under the guise of laissez faire governance (which then feeds back into political donations & lobbying, to allow more corporate profits).
A simple example right now: I can't use hardware I own if I want a static IP from Comcast. I literally have to rent a device from them. Is my hardware compatible? Sure is. Do they allow it? Nope.
Same problem is happening with "Rental features" that are built into devices. Bought that car but want to use the seat heater that's literally built in? Better have an account with BMW and pay 18/month. Why? Because BMW shoved their fucking little green man into the car, and it only respects them.
Using a phone? Even a phone that's working really hard to be open (like Librem)? You're loading a proprietary binary blob for the radio firmware. There's just no alternative at the moment. Who has control over that? No good way to know. Librem tries really hard to isolate that from the rest of your phone system, but that doesn't stop it from reporting your location any time the modem is on (even if you're not using it, or have asked it to be disconnected). At least librem provides a kill switch for it so you can ensure it's off, but it's annoying.
Using an Apple device? Apple owns that fucker through and through. They control the updates to the software, they report every app you use (for malware reasons, of course!!! /s), they capture all sorts of information about you - using their little green man.
And that's a company that actively works to market itself as privacy friendly - don't even get me started with Google and MS. They give you a little more control to wipe away their crap, but the defaults are pretty damn bad.
Basically - Control over the "owner/user" is still the desired state for these devices. In regressive regimes, that control is used to increase government power. In less regressive countries that control is used for rent-seeking behavior, which ends up increasing profit, which is used for lobbying, which creates incentives to allow continued rent-seeking behavior.
Without blaming this or that regime, fascist, communist or whatever, we need to recognise a new dimension in power, call it "techno-fascism" or whatever you like... that means it would be foolish to invest much trust in digital systems at this point in history. And that itself is a huge economic loss and bonfire of opportunity for us all.
I think the loss of freedoms Richard Stallman described were very much what was already happening around in with the Lisp environment. He was correct in saying this would be repeated as software ate the world.
So roughly the things he was right about were very hard to prevent. Which is partly why he was right.
His relevance now is because we too have shifted to mainframes, but we don't call it mainframe and dumb terminals anymore, we say 'cloud' and 'mobile'. We are rebuilding the future in effigy of our past because it's what we know. Stallman's critiques being relevant again are a testament to the cyclical nature of humanity, like bellbottoms, hightop fades, and vinyl records.
Now if you don't mind, I must iron these JNCO's, times-a-wasting!
(I think the reactions of ordinary people to Stallman's views are quite predictable, mention sex and they go bonkers. )
(I happen to agree with Stallman on his non-software views that I know about, so am a bit curious on what you disagree with)
Care to provide examples?
1. Tweets about Ukraine have radically decreased 2. Elon posts increase even when you don't follow him.
I'm not saying it's intentional. It just shows the power of algorithms. They dictate what is and what is not news. Even small tweaks matter.
Most people I follow have either stopped tweeting, or largely tweet about Elon. Even popular YouTubers I follow can’t shut up about twitter/Elon.
Maybe I’m providing your point by not seeing non-twitter tweets but it feels like Elon starved twitter of real discourse.
Now, most of these folks are non-mainstream street reporters, establishment-critical types and the like (who Musk has claims are "repressing" him). Most of these folks simply don't care about Elon and just want to geek out about electoral / activism. But I don't see almost any of their tweets in the timeline.
If I have to create a List to see all their updates, what's the point of a timeline? (note: when I tried to add a lot of people to a list, Twitter logged me out / locked my account until I did 2FA again - very antagonistic).
That's when I decided to leave and haven't gone back since. Mastodon is very quiet comparatively but doesn't smell of Musk.
I think this shows the power of fads, not algorithms.
I just wish someone would wade through all the crap he wrote and collect all the actually relevant stuff. All the other weird stuff just takes away from the core message of FOSS
I'm begrudgingly iPhone user. But I keep an exit plan and backups of all data. If only someone else made something that actually worked properly. For now I'm happy to use a West controlled company to run my personal infra. I suspect we're on a downward spiral though.
I'd rather they resurrected windows phone.
Huawei has been under extremely strict scrutiny for years (and even got hacked by the NSA, as Snowden's documents revealed), so the fact that nothing has ever stuck makes me think there really is nothing there.
As for this story, color me skeptical until some actual details come out.
If I were to guess (and hope) this is a case of being deleted from the cloud - something that's not uncommon in the west, the difference being that the western world uses it to enforce copyright.
What you're doing might seem innocuous. It might be innocuous at the time. But as the pieces fall into place, as it responds to pressures from the market and the state, it might transform into something else entirely.
Assuming this story is true, the tooling that was used here probably started it's life much like Dropbox. What more innocuous app is there then that?
I don't really have answers for how to respond to this information; it's something I'm still working on myself. But as a community and industry, we can't blink it.
While this potential is there for every paid job ever, software works invisibly, it's untraceable and ununderstandeable for the general population.
The profession would gain a lot from something like a code of conduct that everyone could make an oath to.
They have a word for this in non-American countries - "regulation".
If a civil engineer is approached to design a bridge in an unsafe manner, it is the expectation of society that they will refuse. If that bridge collapses, they're expected to take responsibility and to participate in an investigation to ensure this never happens again.
We should be thinking along these lines. I used to think I was just a hacker and that software engineer was just a job title. After reading this series of blog posts [1], my eyes were opened. Once I accepted I was some kind of engineer, I asked myself what that meant. What I realized was, an engineer has a responsibility to society, because they build the context society inhabits.
That's what separates them from a hacker or tinkerer, exploring in their garage for the joy of it. In your garage you can be an artist, accountable to no one. When you build the systems people rely on every day - you aren't a hacker anymore.
[1] https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/
Having spent a decade in engineering academia with a fair bit of time in companies, it's deeply troubling how little attention is paid to this sentiment.
In what way is this comparable to buying grapes?
Yes, Huawei can under their ToS delete various stuff from your (Huawei) cloud, if it contains sensitive content, but deleting from device, unlikely. Maybe don't upload sensitive videos to cloud next time?
They really achieved something rare with the phone. I hope the project continues and the next version is even better
To quote from Apple's article on racism [2], "With every breath we take, we must commit to being that change, and to creating a better, more just world for everyone." I guess according to Apple, Chinese people don't deserve any of what's written in their post.
[1]: https://qz.com/apple-airdrop-china-protest-tool-1849824435
AirDrop is now limited to 10 minutes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33778302 - Nov 2022 (692 comments)
, so https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33806401 is actually a dupe. I'm going to undo the change I just made and put everything back the way it originally was. It will take a few minutes. Sorry all!
--- original, now invalid comment: ---
This comment was originally posted in response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33803692 — hence the reference to "the bigger news". Since this topic deserves its own discussion, I've moved the comments about it to the thread that's actually about this. The other topic deserves its own discussion too.
This is what makes these machines so effective. This is what makes liberal western values vulnerable.
Apple doesn't care about it because their customers don't care about it. Stop buying and they start caring.
There needs to be a new model for public companies
Just to be clear, it's still possible to use AirDrop in China — the change was that you can't set your device to receive from 'Everyone' indefinitely. It's now limited to 10 minutes. I don't support this change, but we shouldn't conflate it with blocking AirDrop entirely, which would be much worse.
Still fine to be angry at Apple about it, though this feels like the way it should always have worked. Remember all the “Apple is terrible because people airdrop unwanted nudes” articles decrying the previous setting?
- was this change in response to the protests?
- was this change only for Chinese users?
The article you linked doesn't say anything about blocking. It just says that they changed the "Everyone" option to "Everyone up to 10 minutes." How is that blocking? Do you have any other source to support your assertion that they blocked it in China?
I’d argue a more effective route is to comply as minimally as possible while advocating for improvement in policy, law, and regulation. Practically speaking if apple were to self immolate on principle a more compliant competitor will fill their vacuum. How is that advancing any agenda?
I feel you can both comply with laws and regulations and take the stance they are wrong and publicly advocate to the extent you’re legally allowed for their reformation without moral hazard.
Let everyone be subject to the governing
authorities, for there is no authority
except that which God has established.
The authorities that exist have been
established by God. [Romans 13:1]
Pure conjecture on my part, but I wouldn't be surprised if China wanted them to block it entirely and Apple negotiated this compromise to try and appease officials while still allowing information sharing.
Your hyperbole is a massive exaggeration. They didn't "bend over backwards" to help China suppress freedom. They maintained as much usability as they could under almost certain direct legal pressure from the host country. If China says turn it off completely, that is what they would have to do if they want to operate in China. Apple must obey local laws.
Would the interests of freedom be served if Apple refused to obey local laws and there were no iPhones sold in China? Everyone running a Huawei phone. Would that advance the cause of freedom? Samsung, Google, everyone has to make these choices if they want to operate in China.
- "Inside Tim Cook’s Secret $275 Billion Deal with Chinese Authorities," Wayne Ma, Dec. 7, 2021, the Information.
- "Apple Reportedly Helped China Chipmaker YMTC Hire US Engineers, Apple Reportedly Helped China Chipmaker YMTC Hire US Engineers," Tom's Hardware
My reading too, fwiw. If so, rather well done on Apple's part.
This is obviously really bad but it doesn’t come close to what Huawei is doing.
Sometimes I find Apple's response to some of these issues cleverly passive-agressive. For example you can still use mass airdrop, you just have to keep enabling it. While, I assume, Google would simply have disabled the feature (does Android have a similar feature?). A related example is how they support you disabling face/finger authentication when you are afraid of the authorities.
N.B. This is not to defend or condemn Apple. They are simply a huge, largely incomprehensible steamship not deserving my adulation or scorn.
Anyone who claims they would act differently is either a fool or a liar.
Doubly so if the screen they're using to read this contains but a single IC made in China, while they let the self-righteously indignant stank of their own morality waft up into their nose.
I don’t think there’s an obviously correct choice, but it’s very easy to criticise not taking the hard line. It’s possible that’s the wrong thing for overall privacy.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/radius-report-news/id152474203...
This link is leading to nowhere: https://apps.apple.com/cn/app/radius-report-news/id152474203...
It's a private corporation, which are known for manufacturing sweet-smelling lies. I mean, a "new an improved" label on a package often literally means they're just giving you less product. If they'll be that blatant, there's no limit to how low they'll go.
Short-sighted Western economic policy has allowed China to grab companies like Apple by the balls, which means the Chinese government is the one Apple ultimately is accountable to (with varying amounts of smoke-and-mirrors to obscure it). Tim Cook knows who his boss is.
Why is this bigger news? Seems equivalent to me.
Is it because Huawei is already seen as an adversary while folks persist in seeing Apple as somehow more benign?
Apple however is two faced. Saying that they stand for bigger ideals but quietly supporting the communist party by disabling airdrop.
Edit: I know it’s more complicated than my comment indicates. But it’s still a weird response by Apple none the less.
Is it shitty and contrary to what they claim to support? Yeah. Does it merit this melodramatic response? Probably not.
I don't think there's anything melodramatic about calling Apple out on it.
It extends the shame and conversation instead of excusing it.