tripu

Aparently,

> "by the end of [2022], 79 Polish administrative units still declared themselves so-called 'LGBT-free zones'. [...] LGBTI rights defenders faced ongoing criminal and civil proceedings. [...] In January, during court proceedings brought by one activist who had been arbitrarily detained for 24 hours after the so-called Rainbow Night protest in 2020, the police officer who arrested him admitted: 'We were instructed to stop all persons displaying the colours of LGBT, regardless of how they behaved'".

> Given how abortion is basically killing innocent human beings - is a huge step towards freedom

I don't think that condemning a fetus with terrible congenital defects to be born against the will of its parents is a step towards freedom.

> I love how you mention Spain time and again. I can only assume you come from there, and if that's the case, I highly applaud your patriotism.

I don't know whether you're being honest, or sarcastic. In any case: I tongue-in-cheek "defended" Spain above just because @Radim said to me: "coming from a Spaniard? go fuck yourself" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37914718 ), which I found baffling, irrelevant, and very nasty.

I am against all patriotism and nationalism. I am not "proud" or "ashamed" of privileges or defects that I got by chance, or traits over which I bear no responsibility or I can't control.

Assume I'm from North Korea. Or from Vanuatu. Let's discuss ideas, not individuals, please!

That is still compatible with a dispassionate evaluation of the democratic quality of its political system.

Again, I'm not necessarily defending my sources here. But I'm not automatically discounting them, either.

The Economist classifies Hungary as a flawed democracy due to a very poor mark in "political participation", "functioning of government" and "civil liberties". Those sections look at measures such as "voter participation/turn-out for national elections", "the degree to which the judiciary is independent of government influence", "the degree to which citizens are treated equally under the law", "how pervasive is corruption", "is there an effective system of checks and balances on the exercise of government authority", etc.

Freedom House ranks Hungary poorly in aspects such as "are safeguards against official corruption strong and effective", "are there free and independent media", "is there freedom for nongovernmental organizations, particularly those that are engaged in human rights– and governance-related work", "is there an independent judiciary", etc.

If you have reports that put Hungary at the top on rankings of democratic health, freedom, civil rights, etc — please share them, and we can evaluate their merits. Otherwise, these reports are the most comprehensive I know of, so I have to use those.

I used these reports, which I already knew before writing this post:

• Both Poland and Hungary are classified as “flawed democracies” by The Economist. Only 24 countries are considered to be “full democracies” (and this is irrelevant, but Spain happens to be among them). https://pages.eiu.com/rs/753-RIQ-438/images/DI-final-version...

• On a scale of 0–100 on political freedom, Freedom House gives Poland 81 points and Hungary 66 points. (This is irrelevant, but Spain gets 90 points.) https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores?sort...

• The UN's Human Development Index ranks Poland #34 and Hungary #46. (This is irrelevant, but Spain ranks #27.) https://hdr.undp.org/system/files/documents/global-report-do...

• Amnesty International on Poland: “Access to abortion was further limited. Criminal charges were used to curtail freedom of expression. The authorities continued to erode the independence of the judiciary. Freedom of peaceful assembly was restricted. Violations of LGBTI rights persisted.” https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/europe-and-central-asia/...

• Amnesty International on Hungary: “Discrimination against LGBTI and Roma people persisted. Women’s sexual and reproductive rights suffered significant rollback. Teachers were denied the right to strike. Pushbacks of refugees and migrants continued in violation of EU law. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Hungary had violated the ban on collective expulsions. Other judgments from the Court were not fully implemented. […] The European Parliament declared in September that Hungary could not be considered a full democracy.” https://www.amnesty.org/en/location/europe-and-central-asia/...

You are right, thank you! I just fixed that.

> Coming from a Spaniard? Go fuck yourself.

I was already fixing the error, and writing in my head the kind answer above. I hadn't seen this nasty comment.

Why the ad hominem?

I'm ranking governments — not individuals — according to international reports I've seen. Those classifications are debatable, of course. There might be bias, or nuances I'm missing. But why do you presume malice on my part?

How on Earth is it relevant that I'm a Spaniard?

I stand by what I wrote, although it could be argued in less stringent terms.

Yes, I know SSH tunnelling and compiling your own Android are tall orders for the average user. Here I'm just hinting at some examples that are well-known among us geeks, but there are easier to use alternatives to all that. I suspect Protonmail is as easy to use as GMail. VPNs are so easy to use nowadays. The UX on Signal isn't particularly challenging to the average user of WhatsApp.

There is a lot we techies can do to educate normies and respectfully push them in the right direction, but we keep on neglecting that responsibility under the excuses of bad usability, lack of features, or convenience for users.

On an earlier draft I also had a sentence like: “a big effort in usability and outreach is needed”. Definitely so.

My point is not that we can get all EU citizens to switch to SSH tunnelling and Purism, but that we IT professionals should spend more time and effort educating a fraction of the population to move the deal in the right direction and avert catastrophe.

Thoughts?

I do want to pay.

I mean it.

Please take my money.

Not to minimise the seriousness of cyber-flashing, but sharing with the world intimate/sensitive data/media without the consent of the other party is reprehensible (too). I don't think that “but what they did was 10× worse!” makes this site defensible. I surely hope there are better strategies to deal with unsolicited naked pics.

I am amazed that there's so much hypocrisy around different categories of violence in fiction. It's even worse than other manifestations of hypocrisy, because this one seems completely invisible to people — I don't recall having seen this discussed anywhere until I read your comment today.

Case in point: when https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Serbian_Film came out, there was so much talk about it being immoral and/or illegal, and so many (eventually successful) calls to boycott, censor and ban. I have not watched the film, and I do not think I'll ever watch it, because judging by what I read about it, it seems utterly disgusting and horrifying. Disgusting to the level of scenes depicting the raping of a newborn, and the most imaginative mix of necrophilia, torture, rape, and gore. I think I could not stand it, and if I forced myself to watch it, I suspect I'd have nightmares (literally). So what follows is by no means a defence of this particular work, nor an endorsement of gloating over the most extreme and shocking forms of violence an artist/performer can conceive.

At the same time, there are so many depictions of violence in mainstream film, games, TV and literature. By far, most of that violence is done to male characters (and incidentally, also by male characters). That violence is usually not sexual in nature.

As Vladimir Nabokov put it, art has to be transgressive and shocking.

One more idea to consider: violence (as most things) comes in gradations. Murder > torture > punch > pinch. Rape > harassment. Actual violence > threat of violence. Violence to several people > violence to one. Sadistic violence > plain violence > violence as self-defence > physically restraining an aggressor. Violence committed taking advantage of physical superiority > violence among equals. Etc. There is no gradation, however, contingent on the sex of the victim nor on the sex of the perpetrator: violence towards men ≡ violence towards women.

Why then, it is so controversial to depict rape or sexual abuse, but so commonplace to rejoice in depictions of murder, torture and physical aggression?

Think of other popular messaging systems that claim to offer some kind of E2EE, but are proprietary software: WhatsApp, Skype, FB Messenger, Viber, Threema, Line…

Distrust by default!

I am always amazed when folks even consider the alleged support for strong E2E encryption in those apps… the value of those claims is exactly zero.

GitHub project: https://github.com/tripu/faker.js

Updated npm package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/phaker

https://github.com/gnab/remark/pull/398#issuecomment-2693399...

But, come on — this initiative sounds a lot like:

“Drat! We want people who, on their own volition, decided to go for an expensive, unaccountable, closed, locked system to be able to install and use our apps freely! Isn't that fair? I can has freedom?”.

Read that naïve section “our vision”. A vision is something novel. Free software is 35+ years old. And there are open distribution platforms already. Reinventing the wheel.

  // We have a viz with 50 items; let's assign colours to those items:
  import { palette } from 'supers';
  const colours = new palette(50);
  for (let i = 0; i < 50; i ++)
    chart[i].css('color', '#' + colours.get(i, true));

Documentation: https://github.com/tripu/superscript/blob/master/.github/REA...

…with a couple caveats regarding accessibility: the default font is way, way too small, and some colours don't have enough contrast (eg, the “visited link”). Also, a tiny bit more of formatting would make comments more readable while keeping them sober and focused (eg, blockquotes, monospaced inlines, true hyperlinks).

Rubber ducks don't ask questions.

Compare with criticism: https://medium.com/@indica/in-the-nytimes-only-white-leaders...

Yes, it isn't absolutely clear what is "good advice". Yes, it might misfire and prevent useful content from being disseminated. Yes, the WHO is far from perfect. And yet, if I were the owner of YouTube, I would have to reduce the liability of having physical harm, or even human deaths, being attributed to content served by my product — regardless of how tenuous the connection between content and action would be, and how many disclaimers and waivers surround such content.

Collectively, it's a disgrace if all digital media adopt this strategy, because we would be closing the most effective channels by which independent researchers, whistle-blowers, cutting-edge laboratories, etc can communicate with the masses. At the individual company level, limiting potential damage is the rational thing to do. There is no easy answer, I suspect.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/64930929-tripu?utf8=%E...

That is opt-out!

Seriously, why is The Next Web routinely reporting in favour of Facebook?

So what? I hate WhatsApp hoaxes as much as the next person, but compromising privacy is no solution to that. There is crap and misinformation in other media, too (mail, IM apps, blogs, comments), and that does not justify invasions of privacy.

Is Facebook (or Apple, or Google, or Telegram) going to determine what qualifies as “fake news”, “political propaganda”, and “misinformation”? God help us.

The way forward is to denounce always stupid chains, to demand sources and URLs for everything, and to educate newbies. Not surveillance.

This falsely “balanced” paragraph in the article is very dishonest.

As much as I decry patronising calls to make tech more "inclusive" and "nice", I must admit that people like Linus are a great argument in favour of that...

I wrote that article a few days before the fake referendum. In no way was I defending violent repression by the police. I had no idea that we would witness what finally happened on 1 October.

> The act of hosting a vote does not physically harm anyone.

Not directly, no. But I still think that not every conceivable question should be submitted to the people expecting the answer to be binding (my points #1, #2 and #4). If this were posed as a "poll" (even an "official", "institutional" one), most people in Spain would not have an issue with it. The "legally binding" part is what's troubling.

That being said, and in the light of what finally happened on 1 October, perhaps you are right: the Spanish government could have let the whole farce play, then ignore the "results" and prosecute those responsible for it.