NYT Worries Big Brother Is Not Watching You | Hacker News Reader

NYT Worries Big Brother Is Not Watching You

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48 pointsMrRadar11 comments

We've always been heading towards this showdown of individual free speech versus nanny state authoritarianism. What's truly unfortunate is that we spent two decades detouring through centralized webapps. This has made the authoritarians (both political and corporate) accustomed to having concentrated power, made it so the few apps that do take users' security seriously are seen as aberrations, given crazy extermist political movements a head start due to centrally stoked "engagement" metrics, and normalized everpresent meddling/surveillance in our personal lives. Now we're left fighting an uphill battle after the sheer majority of the population has been conditioned to expect that the computer they're carrying around in their pocket doesn't actually represent them.

I use signal as my primary sms app, for both encrypted and regular text convos. My primary gripe is people who use it to occasionally buy cocaine, amusingly obvious because of the notification you'd get (at least in the past) when a contact in your phone created an account, and it's like 3 am on a saturday. (Ironically it's 3am on a Saturday right now for me.) Ive had more than a few missed communications because they were sent over signal to someone who either subsequently deleted the app, or, thinking of it not as an all purpose messenger, infrequently opened the app and did not see my message til weeks later.

Does Signal still work as an SMS app? It stopped recently for me, supposedly because SMS fallback is insecure

they are removing it, yes. (Announced in October that it'll be phased out "over the next few months", no idea what exact dates that means and if its the same ones for all users)

The NYT essay this article is about: https://archive.is/ZEtfL

The first yellow flag here is that someone has a beef with a newspaper for publishing an opinion piece. That's what the op ed section is for.

It has more to do with that the opinion is so over the top and faulty. Read the commentary if you really aren't sure what's faulty with Reid Blackman's "opinion piece."

A lot of times, these types is articles or Op-Eds are advertisements or marketing for the author. They put up an unpopular opinion for feelings, and that incites emotions, and hence gets shared. And they might net some publicity or extra book sales from it.

Based on this author’s background, I would easily lean towards that conclusion .

You don’t think a newspaper can attempt to guide public opinion by limiting the scope of the discourse that occurs within their opinion section? I would argue that NYT has a clear ideological perspective which can be easily inferred from their editorial section. What’s wrong with disagreeing with this perspective and trying to point out its limitations?

I think it's up to an educated populace to be able to dismantle bad arguments, or ideas that clash with liberal freedoms, without ironically saying "this shouldn't have been published".

You can never make the NYT happy about tech.

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