It’s not hard to mark things as defective, liquidated, etc. so those eBay sellers can face fraud charges. We shouldn’t be sending stuff to landfills just to save a few pennies in permanent marker.
There are people in jail for this right now who presumably don’t find it funny, and in this scenario the volume would be high enough that prosecutors would definitely be interested.
What’s been dismantled? The major impact of his recent work was helping elect Trump twice and get tech companies to drop anti-disinformation campaigns. The military-industrial complex not only isn’t dismantled, it’s growing!
Those aren’t loopholes and are widely known? I mean, they have an entire E2EE iCloud feature giving customers a choice between security and convenience:
RCS has never offered that security guarantee at the protocol level. Google has deployed a proprietary encryption layer on top but refuses to allow other clients access. This was rather famously part of the blue/green message divide which was in the news for years.
Similarly push notifications have had privacy recommendations for ages - that’s why apps like Signal give users the option to choose their level of risk exposure.
Okay, can you express the “legal and cooperation loopholes Apple has put behind those” clearly enough for me to understand what you mean? Are you alleging that iCloud E2EE is compromised? Are you saying that Apple promised RCS would do something more than the carriers designed it to do? It’s hard to assess vague, unsourced claims.
There obviously will be no sources. I’m telling you as someone who worked directly
On iMessage and Google messages.
Apple not only gives keys they often provide access with no legal requirement at all. They also DO NOT e2ee all sources they claim to depending on what regions the messages pass through to devices they end up at. There are also massive cooperation and caching going on of messaging and push notifications which access is provided to several governments. Aka as the Wyden leaks
He became well known for exposing surveillance but that instinct to portray himself as exposing government hypocrisy lead him to parrot Russian intelligence/Trump campaign attacks on Clinton and Biden long after he should have realized that the right posed a much greater threat to civil liberties and were feeding him information in service of their own campaigns, not transparency. It’s really undercut his earlier work.
Examining Glenn's work through an ideological lens leads to this kind of rhetoric. It's why he's so good at what he does. He's crossed ideological boundaries constantly in pursuit of the truth of a matter, and in defense of the public.
I think what they are saying is a common sentiment among people who don't belong in any of the major political camps. It's a common experience to take heat from all sides because, surprisingly, neither "side" in politics is perfect nor particularly virtuous.
But we're not criticizng him for not registering for the democratic national convention or the republican one or whatever you think "belonging to a political camp" even means (what does it mean, exactly?)
He's being crticized for repeating lies and refusing to post truths.
If only his ideology was "Republican America bad, Democrat America good", then he would not be aligned with foreign influence and wouldn't be spreading propaganda.
Uh, that’s how he likes to style himself but that’s more of an ideological stance than you’re complaining about. A true focus on truth and defense of the public would have included questions like “are the Russians totally unbiased in feeding me this information?” or “am I serving the public by refusing to admit I made a mistake and repeated untrue claims which were highly beneficial to the political party who amplified my claims?”
To anyone on Twitter in like 2016-2019, this is a rather funny sentiment to have about him. I can remember my respect for him dissolve day by day. I didn't even remember until now if he was pro- or anti- Trump, probably neither still. But I simply remember that he slowly turned into the worst caricature of a smug Twitter media guy. Just turned into "hot take" haver and seemed to lose his own plot.
If you know you know I guess, but even then, broken clocks and all that. There was a point where he was such a cool guy to me, and I grew up a little in a good way seeing him turn into whatever he did.
It may just be Twitter's fault at the end of the day too!
That’s my impression, too. Not hardcore MAGA so much as falling into the addiction of thinking he was smarter than “the establishment” about everything and taking contrarian stances to show they couldn’t boss him around. Twitter’s algorithm was like a drug for those guys because they’d give a radioactive hot take and get a bazillion notification pings.
This is the same "useful idiot" trap that Julian Assange fell into. It's a challenge to incorporate the lessons of people like these without falling into the opposite trap, that of cynical apathy.
Philosophically I want to agree with you more but Meta is the informational equivalent of RJ Reynolds. They’ve facilitated crime waves (remember all of the hand-wringing about shoplifting which died down when the government went after Facebook marketplace and Amazon?), supported genocide, and elevated some of the worst voices in the world. Giving them more money and social control is a risk which should be discussed.
I realize it makes you uncomfortable but the harms are done whether or not you ignore them. That’s the problem: people can exploit that desire to be fair, “neutral”, say it’s “just business”, etc. for years until the negative impacts on society are too hard to ignore. Think about how the fossil fuel industry managed to get people to talk like there was a debate with two sides deserving equal respect and parlay that into half a century of inaction after the scientific consensus correctly recognized that there was a real harm being done. We’re going to look back at the attention economy similarly.
I think you're misunderstanding or misrepresenting them. The fight to have the most jaded or pessimistic take, the hottest flame, the spiciest rant, it's all so predictable and it's just a bunch of the same people saying the same things and agreeing with each other for the nth time. It brings nothing new to the table, and the posts that actually respond to the new information get drowned out or worse downvoted for insufficient vitriol.
Perhaps–it’s hard to tell from a single sentence–but I would recommend reading more than the first comment of that thread. The person at the top exaggerated how much it’s not talking about the service or competing options, and the people talking about Facebook are raising what is a reasonable point about privacy and data mining.
Evil deserves to be called out as evil. Why should we constrain the discussion to anything else about them? The absolute best thing they can do for the world would be to disappear, as soon as possible.
The bigger story is the way tech companies sucked the oxygen out of journalism. This started with capturing a growing chunk of ad revenue but then became editorial control as everyone started picking headlines, writing styles, and publication schedules to please the tech companies which control whether they receive 80% of their traffic.
Everyone writes like Buzzfeed now because Twitter and Facebook made that the most profitable; Google/Twitter/Facebook need a constant stream of new links and incentivize publishing rapidly rather than in-depth; and Facebook severely damaged many outfits with the fraudulent pivot to video pretending they’d start paying more.
Many of the problems we see societally stem back to people not paying for media, leaving the information space dominated by the interest of advertisers and a few wealthy people who will pay to promote their viewpoints.
They helped monopolize the industry. Willingly destroying the utility of RSS for end users is a prime example.
> Google/Twitter/Facebook need a constant stream of new links
Yet people can't understand that "AI" is just a tool to rip off copyright. For almost _precisely_ this reason here.
> we see societally stem back to people not paying for media
The problem is there is not infinite bandwidth for media. If a free option exists people will gravitate towards it. The real problem is that media sales people and media editors are allowed to be in the same room. We used to understand the value of a "firewall" in this context.
It has nothing to do with the people. It has everything to do with those holding the profit motive. They'll willingly destroy useful things in order to tilt the field in their direction. Social problems rarely have a distributed social cause.
Like the good old days where most markets had multiple papers which had to keep readers subscribing, when broadcasters had to follow the Fairness Doctrine and had a push to more moderation because they couldn’t pick and choose their audience.
It was by no means perfect but I think it was better than now where people getting the illusion of information with little accountability for selection or accuracy.
As to the Iraq war, I will note that the media had extensive debates at the time. Ask anyone who was there and outside of a handful of hard-right outlets, the reporting noted that all of the justifications were unverifiable and coming from the same two governments, and plenty of people questioned that. Again, it wasn’t perfect but I think the answer to “the NYT should’ve fired Judith Miller sooner” is that the NYT should have more rather than less competition.
I think that’s why they are encouraging the mindset mentioned in your parent comment: it’s completely reversed the tech job market to have people thinking they have to accept whatever’s offered, allowing a reversal of the wages and benefits improvements which workers saw around the pandemic. It doesn’t even have to be truly caused by AI, just getting information workers to think they’re about to be replaced is worth billions to companies.
> If offering a tie in thing supposedly free of charge without warning that would end once it serves a party less profit purpose then yes
Claiming that you’re entitled to free R&D forever because someone once gave you something of value seems like a great way to ensure that nobody does that again. You got over a decade of development by a skilled team, it’s not exactly beyond the pale that the business climate has changed since then.
That’s not the intent. It could be a more defensible intent if it was paired with a Biden-style program to develop domestic manufacturing capabilities, but that never happened and if it did it would be targeted. Raising taxes on chocolate, vanilla, and coffee, for example, doesn’t affect China and doesn’t change the fact that those don’t grow well in the continental United States (and Hawaii / Puerto Rico don’t have the capacity).
What’s worse, this often raises domestic prices: unless we have robust competition, taxing imports just raises the ceiling for what an existing manufacturer can charge while the uncertainty discourages investment in new capacity: moving entire supply chains takes years and the tariffs changing frequently means that anyone financing it has to price in their competitive edge disappearing if the right cryptocurrency purchase gets the tariff rescinded.
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