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May I suggest a book called Countdown to Zero Day by Kim Zetter?

Its main focus is to talk about Stuxnet, but it goes into quite some details to put that attack into context. Under the deal that the US pulled out of, IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) had the authority to walk into any space in Iran under any suspicion that they might be building a nuclear bomb there, overwriting any local law that might prohibit them from doing so. That deal is still in place, because other seven signatories weren't stupid enough to pull out of that agreement (including Iran).

Ain't gonna touch on your 1st and last points because I don't know enough about that.

Regarding your second point, of course they're gonna abstract it. There's no way in hell people would trust it if it were labeled as Facebook Libra. The only way for it to get any momentum is by people being tricked into thinking it's some sort of an independent entity that happens to be supported by Facebook and others.

I don't buy it, and neither should anyone else. Even if they make just 5% of the profit that Libra generates... somehow, that's still 5% more than Facebook would receive otherwise. It ain't even released yet, and I already know that I'll go out of my way to avoid ever touching it. I assume most of HN readers will do the same.

Conspiracy theory time: Facebook knows they can't do this legally across the world. They're announcing it beforehand in an attempt to get permissions in like 10 jurisdictions tops, with a soft deadline that's going to be used as an excuse to get those permissions as soon as they can (or, at least, faster than they would otherwise).

For the other 200ish jurisdictions, they won't bother. Why act proactively when they can launch a currency, hope that it catches on, and then act re-actively once other jurisdictions with less power catch on to what's happening. Western governments will get what they want before the projects kicks off, and everyone else... well, who gives a shit about everyone else? Certainly not Facebook's shareholders.

Not about Liu, but written by another frustrated writer that couldn't answer middle-school questions about her own poems: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/standardized-tests-are-so-bad...

You're absolutely right. I've seen memes about the "fashtag", including the ones that do their best to attach it some meaning, but that meaning was so stupid that I didn't even bother remembering it. It's a dogwhistle for the sake of dogwhistles.

I feel like you're being downvoted for the first sentence, so let me try to elaborate on your point. That's the entire deal of fascists: take something that has no negative connotation and give it one. It's how they make their way to the public space.

It started with swastikas, but there are other, way more recent examples: Pepe started as a meme, "kek" started as a meme. They didn't stop there, of course, they have a bunch of failed examples: they've tried to own rainbow flags ("each race in its own space"), OK emoji ("it's okay to be white"), the term antifa (appropriated to some imaginary paramilitary group instead of an actual definition of anti-fascists), and even the fucking # (this one is especially dumb).

An OK emoji on its own doesn't mean anything. NZ shooter showing the OK sign in court does: https://i2-prod.mirror.co.uk/incoming/article14142992.ece/AL...

So, when you look at the example of someone using these signs, you need to search through their history to see the context. They know their views are unacceptable by the general public, their entire deal is to be on the brick of plausible deniability and then laugh at people who call them out. That's why "everyone's a nazi" is a meme. They want the term "nazi" gone. It's not difficult to see why, since "nazi" was always an insult to fascists. Their attempt at appropriation of the term "antifa" is them trying to do the same for the complete opposite. It's also why they tend to have more profiles: one pretty obviously fascist, and multiple profiles in which they pretend that they're someone else (women, people of color, LGBT+ etc.) while spewing fascist talking points and retaining plausible deniability.

Outright banning just the symbols goes in their favor. In their recent crackdown, YouTube decided to remove almost every video showing swastikas. Of course, you'll rarely see a fascist openly using swastikas. It's those debunking them, laughing at them, and looking at their history that had their videos removed, while they go on and on with "YouTube is leftist and no leftist content ever gets removed".

I wouldn't call it bad, but I would call it incredibly expensive if you're using non-English alphabet.

Try filling out all the characters available within a single message, then replace one of them with something unusual (let's say "ć" for example). What used to fit into a single SMS will now be three.

Maybe because that's not the only thing it does? It is what Google likes to pretend that AMP is all about, but you're also handing over the control of your traffic directly to Google, and being awarded with the SEO boost.

That's significantly different than debloating your website and remaining in control of the traffic, but you don't receive the SEO boost as a consequence. Even if you make your website faster than it would be if you were using AMP (which is not that difficult to achieve), you're still being punished for not giving control to Google.

I've been a happy user of this product for about half of its lifetime (in the middle of my 2nd yearly subscription).

If I were to build one, it would be quite similar: intuitive design, some GTD support, Markdown support. It has all the features that I need, and the developer is easy to reach when there's a problem (I've been mentioned in a few changelogs). I appreciate the openness of the developer about the features he's gonna build next. I'd prefer it to be open source, but I understand that financing an open source project wouldn't be as easy from the business perspective. $50/year (IIRC) is really, really worth it for me.

EDIT: Here's a link to a note that I've made when I was looking for a new note-taking solution: https://community.inkdrop.app/note/f607a6970af9e4b40795ec5be...

They kinda are over at Twitter: https://twitter.com/gaywonk/status/1136056663927087105

They've demonetized Crowder.

> Update on our continued review–we have suspended this channel’s monetization. We came to this decision because a pattern of egregious actions has harmed the broader community and is against our YouTube Partner Program policies.

Then they've made some additional confusion by talking about how they'll remonetize him when he removes shirts from the shop (they've presented it as the only requirement to reinstate monetization). At the end, they've doubled down on the first thing they've said:

> Again, this channel is demonetized due to continued egregious actions that have harmed the broader community. To be reinstated, he will need to address all of the issues with his channel.

Here, try this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8beSkkKJ_0

No comments, likes, dislikes, and no recommendations on the sidebar. It can still be viewed if you accept the risk, and can be found using the search bar or by scrolling through the channel.

There's no such thing as unbiased journalism.

"I came up with this strawman that people close to the situation didn't think of (probably because it isn't even close to being true), so I'm going to hold on my own strawman argument even though I have absolutely nothing to base it on."

There, fixed that for you.

Could it be that you're misinterpreting facts? No, it must be that those who have access to first- and second-hand accounts that are wrong. Not you, a person pulling out a hypothesis based off of less info nor any contact with any of the parties in the story.

That's because you don't understand what "opinions" are (at least, in this context).

News stories should be brief and answer "5W" questions (who, what, when, where, why). As such, they're supposed to be based on the facts alone, and others should draw their own conclusions from them.

Opinions, on the other hand, are used to put the news stories into context. Journalists are supposed to have more background to the stories than you could learn from just reading the facts (since they're the ones that wrote them). That background can be used to help you interpret those facts.

In this case, an incident happened. BBC put out an opinion piece to tell you why you should care about that incident before they had enough facts to answer all five of those questions. A news story links to that opinion so that they could help you with placing those answers into context.

Send it to Troy Hunt: https://www.troyhunt.com/contact/

He's behind Have I Been Pwned, and Firefox Monitor is an alternative interface for it. I believe he verifies the breaches by contacting a few people in a new breach that have already signed up for HIBP notifications.

Has a recycling program =/= everyone who ever purchased an iPhone is using that recycling program.

7.8 million "Apple devices"[0] in 2018 is a lot, but an average iPhone is far more likely to end up on a landfill. If it were easy to extract the battery, that wouldn't be such a problem.

[0] They group them all together and I can't find any other metric: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/04/apple-expands-global-...

This doesn't make sense when you use the term "for a day". One day isn't long enough to change anyone's habits.

But it's not like it would make more sense if the term was longer. The whole reason the Internet was created was to be the network that could survive a nuclear war. It'll always be there. People communicated via the Internet way before reddit and others, and would continue doing so if they were to disappear.

"Imagine living without the Internet" is a useless imagination. It's a thing of the past with no way of reappearing. If your ISP were to go down, I assume you'd just switch to mobile data. Assuming you're using two different companies, it would take quite a catastrophe for both of them to be down at the same time, at which point your survival instinct would kick in, not a desire to make meaningful relationships offline.

> ...less damaging to society?

Sorry for the nitpick, but this part really irks me. It could only be true if you define "society" as "people in the US".

American ISPs target American citizens. Google targets pretty much everyone who uses the Internet, regardless of their country. Of course, it's understandable that the US justice system only targets people in the US, so I'm only being nitpicky because you've used the term "society" there. American ISPs, regardless of how shitty they might be, will never be more damaging to the society than a company that impacts the whole world.

Having capability =/= using those capabilities.

Google Home/HomePod/Alexa have spying as their primary purpose. It's literally everything they're good for. Take that away and they're useless.

Phones can spy on you if you keep everything turned on, which I don't. As it's in their interest in it to make as much profit off of me as possible, it's also in their interest to oblige by my preferences. If I found out that they don't respect my choices, they'd lose me as a customer for life. 30% they earn from all of my app store purchases isn't a lot, but it's bigger than zero.

I wouldn't be defending them if YouTube refused to work with a "strange" user agent, but that's not what happened. Judging by the screenshots, YouTube still worked, it just refused to use a new design. The old design is still perfectly functional.

Chromium-based Edge is not stable. It's a new thing that I don't expect website owners to test against. The error message showed that the new design is tested against the latest version of Edge. Complete rewrite of Edge still hasn't replaced the old Edge.

Also, no, the web is not a standard. There's no fixed set of things that a browser should implement and call it a day. It's constantly-evolving depending on the needs of the owners of the website. It's why nobody dares to create a browser from scratch nowadays.

> Just look at YouTube denying Chromium-based Edge the new redesigned experience for absolutely zero reason.

The reason is almost certainly a new user agent (compared to non-Chromium Edge) that YouTube didn't expect. Chromium-based Edge is still not stable, and therefore, not properly supported by YouTube.

I don't have time to test this, but I'm willing to bet that you'd get the same result by using any indie browser that happens to send a user agent that YouTube doesn't recognize.

Not quite. He shared some blocklists that had a disproportionate amount of trans women during Gamergate. The grudge remained, his Mastodon account received a lot of reports, and the admin of the instance he chose decided that he doesn't want to deal with that drama. Wil fully acknowledged that, and decided to stop using social media altogether.

Also, there's no such thing as "not liberal enough". People on the far left aren't liberal — they don't believe in capitalism in the first place. Liberals are more center-left according to US standards, and center-right according to European standards. Further to the left are socialists, communists, and anarchists, not "super-liberals".

> This is not the duty of client applications.

It might become their duty. Since Gab's apps are banned, and those apps would be used to access Gab's servers, I could see Apple/Google blocking Mastodon apps as well.

App creators might be forced to ban Gab in order to avoid getting banned from the app stores.

> Now I wonder if mastodon client app developers will start filtering the allowed servers users can put in...

That's precisely what Mastodon's creator suggested earlier today: https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/102184195834215862

Of course, he has no authority over mobile apps, so it remains up to app creators to decide. I believe there are three apps that share the majority of users (Fedilab, Tusky, Mast). Most popular instances will probably stop federating with them as soon as they can.

EDIT: Fedilab's creator already expressed that he'll do so to avoid the chance of being banned from the app store.

> but don't try to pretend that there are not large amounts of people that for whatever reason don't.

Oh, I know precisely the reason: there's no viable alternative in place.

It might surprise you to learn that other countries were in that same situation and aren't anymore. When there's something more efficient, reliable, and cheaper to use, people tend to prefer that.

But of course, you'd first have to step outside of the US to see what a viable alternative even looks like. Judging by your first and last sentence, I'm willing to bet you haven't.

So the solution is to still build a tunnel... but smaller... and move hundreds of people through it really fast in separate, quite heavy vehicles with no possible way of escaping the tunnel when something goes wrong? And something will go wrong.

I'm rooting for Elon with all my heart to cut down the costs of digging tunnels, but everything else about this is just ludicrous.

Musk seems to really dislike the idea of public transport. There's an appeal in moving a large number of people from one side of the city to the other really fast, but with their cars!?

The amount of trouble people in the US are willing to through to avoid the solution every other developed country enjoys is really mind-blowing to me. Dig a tunnel, put some rails in it, and add some sort of a vehicle on top of those rails. Splitting up a cart to individual vehicles seems wasteful, impractical, and guaranteed to move less people. A perfect example of a "gadgetbahn": completely useless 10-15 years down the road, but it wastes city's money that could have been used for actual, viable alternatives that are in use everywhere else. But hey, at least it's unique.

Excellent way of shifting the goalpost away from your stance on the Booking.com case. :)

Displaying the same ad to everyone doesn't have privacy consequences. It's why billboards aren't privacy issues, nor are the TV ads, nor ads in a magazine. Ad networks are a privacy issue, self-hosted ads are not.

They didn't sell the space to Booking.com. They've promoted one another in their user bases: Firefox showed a message about Booking, Booking showed a message about Firefox. There was no money involved.

I'm not gonna defend their action to do so because I disagree with it too, but if you wanna feel outraged about it, at least get the facts right. John Gruber should do the same.

This is precisely why I added that note in my first comment. I'm talking about general trends as a response to this:

> What does it matter? Is there a US cultural/social nuance that I'm missing?

I'm not familiar enough with Google's specific practices to reach a conclusion about that.