gbelote

My impression from the page is that they send you a code specific to a threat (or whatever they end up calling them) when it happens, then you make a decision to add it to your site or not. Rather than dropping in a code and letting them add banners and blackouts whenever they please.

Link to kickstarter page: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1331941187/the-tube-open...

I'm getting a "503 Over Quota" error :P

Edit: Not anymore!

I don't identify as an absolutist and I agree it's not a black-and-white situation. It sucks for the reasons you mention.

But even if it's their legal obligation to follow, I still believe it's morally wrong for them to do so. Their position isn't so weak that they're powerless. As a business their incentives may be really strong, but I don't believe that absolves them of the moral component. Just because taking a hard stance is hard doesn't mean it's OK not to take it. But it is understandable, certainly for a complex, multifaceted organization.

And I agree, it's not just about Google. I think everyone shares at least some responsibility, from the government to the businesses to the citizens. But just because it's practical for Google to censor doesn't mean they are no longer morally responsible for taking part in censorship.

Hopefully Google will at least be active in fighting the laws and maybe that is their full intention.

I believe Google has a moral responsibility to fight censorship. I understand your stance, and it makes sense under the assumption that Google should do what's best for themselves (and shareholders), but that's wrong. Following local law doesn't absolve them of that evil.

Edit: In response to having a better idea, Google isn't a powerless agent in this situation. They can take a hard stance without being completely cut out of that country. It may suck short-term, but it creates a better Internet long-term and that matters for them.

That's a good point. I was thinking about it as a direct replacement of SO, but like you said it doesn't have to be. Good luck!

I believe that's part of the motivation behind bounties: if I've invested a lot of time and accumulated karma, I can spend that karma to improve the quality/speed of answering my question.

Re: TwoToReal. It's an interesting idea, although it seems like it adds burden to the answerer. One quality I like of SO is that it encourages people to ask better questions (keep concise, provide relevant details, etc), but in a system where I'd be getting real-time help I might become lazier about posting my question. "I have a problem with node.js" rather than "I'm getting this output when trying to use node in this way".

What a beautiful landing page. I like how there's a silent video demoing the product. So much better than a few screenshots.

I don't disagree with OP's point, but I don't think he does a good job at making it. He name-drops several popular startups that were bought out then implies they wouldn't be bought if they were making more money.

Etherpad, for example, charged for it's product. You could use it for free, but if you wanted private pads and custom domains/urls you could upgrade to Pro. I don't see how "doesn't have a business model" applies to that.

That surprised me too. When trying myself I wasn't able to reach that method. I could be "doing it wrong", it could be no longer active, or may not work with an account tied to gmail. Has anyone else been able to do it?

One thing to watch out for is JavaScript performance on the iPhone, it's abysmal. This makes it hard to do physics games, but not necessarily a show-stopper. For instance, you could probably make a good Scrabble-like game in HTML5.

Was the Italian protest something voted for by the community?

Sweet.

How do you actually use it? I'm staring at a blank canvas.

Thoughtful post on a complex topic.

I think free EC2 + Tor is a net good thing, but it won't surprise me if it gets abused and disallowed by Amazon. With the rising threat of censorship it Tor and hidden services more important.

It's a shame that abusive Tor behavior (spamming, bandwidth hogging, ) can't be easily dealt with without violating anonymity or giving too much censorship power. Or, like what Slashdot did, block whole exit nodes.

Just got the same response. Bummer :P

Short answer is: It depends. Why would you want to release as a private beta?

You probably want users to be able to freely refer your product to friends. You probably want people to be able to discover, sign up, and try your product in one sitting. You probably don't want potential users to lose enthusiasm while they wait for a beta invite. You probably won't have crushing server traffic. If you do, you probably won't regret letting so many people use your product at once.

While you may be right in that the system won't be fixed, the correct response is to not get worked up about it and sit around waiting for the system to fail. It's not like government will disband and people will look around and say "Ok, that didn't work. Anyone have any other ideas?"

Keep getting worked up, and keep making noise about it. More people need to care more.

Just sent an email to info-en-o@wikimedia.org:

  Dear Wikipedia,
 
  I admire your stance last month against the Italian wiretapping
  law when you shut down the Italian Wikipedia.
  
  I encourage you to please consider a similar protest against the
  SOPA legislation which threatens many websites, including
  Wikipedia. I believe raising awareness will do a lot of good,
  and Wikipedia has tremendous reach.
  
  https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/10/sopa-hollywood-finally-gets-chance-break-Internet
  
  Thanks for your time!
  Greg

I have low expectations, but if anyone else is interested you're welcome to copy/paste my email.

EDIT: formatting

Can we lobby Wikipedia to send a similar message? Does that make practical sense?

So? Not being the first to make this kind of app doesn't dimish the coolness of what these guys built.

> So if Groupon stopped giving cash up front they shouldn't lose any customers they need, right?

That's not strong supporting evidence. Cash up front is one of the incentives that Groupon uses to acquire customers. Dropping it would certainly lose at least a few customers. They have a shit-ton of customers, doing many things would lose them customers. But it's not the core value proposition of Groupon.

Now if Groupon stopped advertising your business and discount to their enormous email list and only gave you cash advance in exchange for future revenue and they don't lose much business, then it starts looking more like what the OP claims.

That's a good point, but I don't think that'll be a significant psychological effect in practice. Terminating less popular services (like Buzz) early in his reign doesn't make me doubt their ability to follow through with products like Google Voice or Chrome PCs. I think it's more likely to have an opposite effect: it shows good judgement.

Things may change and a formally-promising product may start looking grim. At that point this decision may make that product's future seem more uncertain, but I'd expect uncertainty to be dominated more by the product's poor performance/grimness.

Makes sense. I don't personally mind this, but it's not something that I expected (to me, "personal app store" implies privacy). It's probably worth making this more clear on your landing page.

Also: there's no security/privacy on the URLs. For example, anyone is able to see mine:

http://appquu.com/10/

Very cool. Like how lightweight it is, sending me an SMS is slick.

Kind of wish you suggested more than just 4 apps, it'd be fun to browse a bunch and really take this for a spin.

Minor feedback: your "30 second video" is 55 seconds :)

There's a recent Railscast about this: http://railscasts.com/episodes/296-mercury-editor

Looks very slick!

I'm not sure I understand the benefit of it being easier for more people to run man-in-the-middle attacks on the network. I doubt the government would rely on such a network for sensitive information, so it'd probably end up being citizens spying on other citizens (or worse, e.g. phishing).

Could be skewing: a small group of couples may spend much more.

It may also be a better option for developers who are in less control of their language/platform.

Large companies/teams come to mind, who want to avoid individuals using languages unfamiliar to the rest of the group (making it harder for others to maintain). The "compiles to readable java code" may be what convinces someone who would otherwise be against something like Scala.

Not saying it's 100% rational, that I agree with the position, or is a large market, but I can imagine it applying to certain groups. There's a certain comfort in knowing that at the end of the day you still have Java code.

For JavaScript I use console.log and "debugger". If you're unfamiliar, including a "debugger;" expression will pause execution and open a debugger (but only if one is available). Very lightweight and handy. This works on Chrome, Firefox, and likely others. Further, you can conditionalize it with if statements.