
Google Employees Uncover Ongoing Work on Censored China Search - jbegley
https://theintercept.com/2019/03/04/google-ongoing-project-dragonfly/
======
o10449366
Google execs know that as long as they have the best benefits in the industry
and keep their workers cushy they'll also have complete control over them.
This is because when you're at the top of the food chain, very few people are
actually willing to put their money where their mouth is and take meaningful
action. It's deliciously hypocritical to see Google workers here (and HN
posters in general) lament Facebook workers for being morally corrupt when
they continue to enable and find excuses for Google and are guilty of the same
thing.

Google _will_ move forward with expansion into China. Anyone who doesn't
believe that is frankly naive. The further censorship of the Chinese populace
will be 100% in the name of greed and profit. But why should Googlers care?
After all, those free meals, pools, video game rooms, and gyms aren't going to
pay for themselves.

~~~
math_and_stuff
Pushback from employees, human rights groups, and congress has already
significantly set back the project. The fight has to continue, but I don't
understand your defeatism.

Source: I publicly resigned from Google over dragonfly and dedicated months of
my life and income to fighting it.

~~~
sytelus
I admire you courage but have you considered the possibility that you might be
wrong on this? Probability that China would change anything because of lack of
Google products is about zero. In fact, not having Google benefits them even
more because now there is no one reviewing of any censorship rules. If Google
is there (1) they can _minimize_ censorship as much as possible by pushing
back frequently (2) people in China benefits from access to much better search
and subsequently gets better educated over time.

Consider the fact that vast majority of search queries will not be affected by
the censorship. Your actions are depriving billion+ people from these queries.
Think of all the things kids could have found out about science and western
literature by better search that they currently aren't.

Finally, I would to leave a note on cultural aspects. Being in western world,
we _assume_ that every culture in the world wants democracy. We firmly believe
that every culture resents censorship. From my contact with many asian folks,
I have changed my assumptions and such belief. Chinese culture is
fundamentally different. Government is not looked at some agency that people
_allowed_ to govern but rather an agency that is charted to protect culture
even if it is at the expense of individualism. My theory is that even if
Chinese government was toppled, the replacement would still have same
characteristics because that is the expectation that people have from their
government.

~~~
fireattack
>(2) people in China benefits from access to much better search and
subsequently gets better educated over time.

This is the point I rarely heard here, or any Western communities.

As a Chinese, I was genuinely baffled when I first heard that there are people
actually boycotting the re-entry of Google in China, instead of celebrating
this milestone. I thought we can finally have a usable search engine.

I guess we get in the way of ideality. Oh well.

~~~
vore
The Chinese government is uninterested in letting Western companies compete on
the same ground as Chinese companies (e.g. any company with a significant
market share in China vs their foreign counterparts doing business).

Entering China at the cost of 1) having to hand over personal information
wholesale to the Chinese government in compliance with "local laws" (remember
not to look at Xinjiang!) and 2) being forced into a losing position against
local competitors like Baidu anyway is neither ethically great nor financially
prudent.

In any case, Google is acting only in the interest of profit (as a for profit
company beholden to shareholders), and painting it as some kind of great
privilege for China to be receiving is big-headed on Google's part and a
saccharine narrative justifying a purely business decision to make more money.

~~~
fireattack
Agreed with you. I'm not delusional to think Google's attempt of entry is "for
Chinese people", just that practically it will help. And most importantly, it
won't do more harm (some other people in this thread mentioned that it may
help them to "export" censorship tool to other countries, which is a valid
point.)

On the other hand, I don't feel Google's departure from China in 2010 was
_purely_ based on ideals either.

------
whoisjuan
I find kind of hypocrite to reject the idea of a company working in a product
that serves the Chinese market (which, btw, is ultra protectionist), while
actively consuming goods that are manufactured in China.

I'm not saying that people don't have the right to morally object something
like this project, but it's kind of baffling that many are loudly voicing
their concerns and demonizing any company that is attempting to do something
in China, while looking the other way when tweeting from their Chinese made
iPhones, and writing dissenting articles in their Chinese made computers.

People should try to find better ways to calibrate their moral compass and
focus their activism into more important and threatening issues. There are
liberties that are being violated right here, right now.

If you think you can't work at Google because they are building a product for
China, it would be pretty hard to work for any company in America, given how
everything in this country is piggybacked on Chinese made goods.

~~~
jayd16
While its not necessarily my opinion, the issue is not about working in/with
China, its about building a censored search engine.

~~~
chivas
Why do you think censored search engine is bad? All other search engine in
China have same censorship but worse quality. Why it's bad to have another
censored search engine with higher quality?

Or do you want to say you can't have better search engine until the whole
censorship is overhauled? If that's the case, why not first stop use oil from
Middle East until the war is complete ended there?

~~~
NoodleIncident
The argument is that Google shouldn't build a censored search engine for one
authoritarian state, because once it's built, it's easier for other states to
ask for the same treatment. China's existing censored search engines are
confined to that country, and I would also oppose any adoption of those
services in the US.

(As a side note: Is it wrong of me to be suspicious of comments on HN that are
enthusiastically pro-China because they have English grammar errors in every
sentence? Maybe, but I'm going to do that anyway.)

~~~
yorwba
> Is it wrong of me to be suspicious of comments on HN that are
> enthusiastically pro-China because they have English grammar errors in every
> sentence? Maybe, but I'm going to do that anyway.

I think it's wrong of you to label someone as "enthusiastically pro-China" for
thinking that having access to a censored version of Google would improve the
state of the Chinese search engine market (without using VPNs, anyway). That's
more of an anti-China position.

If you ignore comments by Chinese people on China (presumably because you
suspect them of being government shills?) you're just discounting the opinion
of those with actual first-hand experience and an incentive to see things
improve.

~~~
stochastic_monk
It's also worth considering that besides this thread, the only other post from
that account was "Wow, GTA V IRL.". I think it's reasonable to be suspicious
of the veracity of the account.

------
supernova87a
Google invited these long-term problems onto itself (and so did many other
startups) by marketing a culture aside from their technology that got people
to join them. "Do good" they said, which invited people to judge them and
decide to work there based on whether they continued doing good.

Compare to other companies that were not so "hot" that just promised some less
fulfilling employment, but no strong moral or global cause.

Now it has come back to bite them in an employee culture that feels the need
to talk about politics at work, invite college-level-immature debate in
internal forums, redirect the business with non-business-related concerns --
especially chasing each year's latest fad of social concern.

They now feel the pressure to become a more grown up company, one that has to
stomach having customers who hold the same ideals as they do. But every
business has to blind itself sometimes to customers who use your product in
ways you didn't intend or choose to. That's the cost of being a public
company.

I'm exhausted even just watching Google have to tune its morals for the new
political flavor of each season. I say, all for the better, for it to act like
a normal business.

~~~
geofft
A counterpoint: Google believed they could attract better engineers (which can
be explained either as genuinely more skilled people, who have more ability to
choose where they work, or simply more passionate people) with the "Don't be
evil" policy. Oracle existed all along. Google wanted to not be Oracle.

Now, Google has decided they want contracts like they're Oracle _and_ they
want staff like they're not Oracle. They can't have it both ways. It's not so
much that Oracle is a more grown-up company because it learned to pursue
profits and not good - it's just that it's easier to survive that way. (Hence
the appearance that Oracle is a "normal" business; it's an easier way to run a
business, is all, so more businesses do that.)

Nobody forced Google to be a public company. Nobody forced Google to grow as
big as it did. Nobody forced Google to talk to China. They brought this on
themselves, and they should have known that they couldn't do this and still
remain Google.

~~~
scarmig
> Nobody forced Google to be a public company

This is the relevant part.

As soon as you're public, it inevitably introduces strong pressures to pursue
profit no matter its cost, as it decouples the negative social externalities
corporate actions can cause from the profit made from those actions.

~~~
kortilla
No it doesn’t. There is no threat to google given that the majority voting
control is held amongst the founders. Same for Facebook. There is no risk of a
hostile takeover or being voted out by public shareholders.

~~~
scarmig
Shareholders have plenty of ways of impacting corporate direction that fall
far short of hostile takeovers. E.g. lawsuits; the very fact that a public
company has to provide more information about its finances. There's a reason
Ruth Porat was brought on after IPO and not before.

------
robbrit
I think what will end up happening is Google employees will just self-sort
until there aren't enough people left in the company to oppose projects like
this. People who are strongly opposed on moral grounds will leave, further
strengthening management's choices. While Google is probably sad to see them
go, it would be even sadder to continue missing out on the world's largest
market. I doubt the employee protests will win out here in the long run.

~~~
yorwba
For that reason, Googlers who oppose these kinds of projects should
enthusiastically sign up to work on them, so they can have a chance at
influencing the outcome. It may feel like the morally superior choice to avoid
getting involved, but it just means that the dirty work is done by someone who
doesn't care.

For the same reason, I don't think creating a censored search engine for the
Chinese market is bad in itself. If you accept that the Chinese government
isn't going to change its mind on censorship any time soon, you can still try
to do your best within that constraint, e.g. by finding a site with the
censored content that's not on the blacklist yet.

~~~
fucking_tragedy
This is blind optimism in the face of hard facts.

If Google wants to play in China, they will have to bend to the whims of the
CCP. No amount of employee foot-dragging will change that fact.

> _For the same reason, I don 't think creating a censored search engine for
> the Chinese market is bad in itself._

This is one the arguments that got trotted out by Google employees last time
Dragonfly made headlines. The CCP is putting people in concentration camps[1].
Dragonfly would help them do that better.

[1] [https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-
report/muslims-...](https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-
report/muslims-camps-china/)

~~~
yorwba
They will have to bend, no doubt, but if they bend even slightly less than
everyone else, that's still a win.

~~~
fucking_tragedy
No, it's not. "Everyone else is doing it" is not an excuse to help put people
in camps.

~~~
yorwba
It is if you doing it puts fewer people in camps than the alternative.

~~~
fucking_tragedy
The entire point of entering the Chinese market is to make money. Google will
make more money doing what the CCP asks well and without question. Putting
less people in camps and playing games with the CCP means less money or even
losing the Chinese market.

------
fabianhjr
> We think we have an open society because we can criticize our government,
> but the company we work for has far more impact on our lives, and if you
> criticize them publicly they will fire you. The private sphere is still run
> like a dictatorship, by thousands of petty tyrants. Source:
> [https://twitter.com/existentialcoms/status/10515474130836520...](https://twitter.com/existentialcoms/status/1051547413083652096)

In this particular case, Google and other top tech companies tend not to fire
employees for being too critical but still lack any sort of democratic control
by their stakeholders (workers, community, etc). More on the matter: <
[https://newsyndicalist.org/2017/09/30/union-cooperative-
stra...](https://newsyndicalist.org/2017/09/30/union-cooperative-strategy-
david-oconnell/) >

------
lnyng
While it seems like people don't like the idea of this censored search engine
called Dragonfly, I wonder what people think about Microsoft's Bing. Bing is
definitely running a censored version in China, or it will not survive the
government regulation.

Is Bing less bad than Dragonfly in terms of censorship? or is it also bad but
engineers in Microsoft care little about that?

~~~
perfmode
Google is the one that matters. Priorities.

Given infinite time and resources, by all means: pursue infinite objectives.

Given finite resources, sort in impact-priority order.

search engines aren’t like weeds

------
geuszb
> [Sundar Pichai views] the censorship as a worthwhile trade-off to gain
> access to the country’s more than 800 million internet users

Citation needed.

Alternatively, Google's mission of "organizing the world's information" isn't
quite complete if it continues not serving China.

Alternatively still, the real danger is not lost opportunity, but the
emergence of a strong Chinese ecosystem (from network equipment all the way up
to search and apps) that will steamroll Google's current Android-based hold
onto the developing world.

Which would you rather believe, the CEO as a sellout who would do anything for
a buck, or as a purist on a principled quest to be as useful as possible to
mankind, or as a strategic leader aware of the risk of letting competition
grow unchallenged?

Believe what you want about it, but neither is "news", just opinion.

~~~
throwaway6834
Sundar has as much vision as a blindfolded mole. He is after the money, plain
and simple.

Source: work at google, for ~8 years

~~~
elchupanebre
Second that. I worked for 5 years there including directly with Sengupta (in
charge of Dragonfly) and in passing with Pichai. Pichai was a politician who
saw his mission in finding a balance between power groups, nothing more.

------
contingencies
Objective observation: What do you call censorship in other countries? Legal
obligations. What is the algorithmic effect of pushing something below the
first fold? The same, but global. It is nonsensical to be outraged at one and
calm regarding the other. The system powering the other has always been
closed, deniable, safely distant from a legal perspective... and wields far
more power globally than any government, answering to nobody.

Here in China, Baidu really is terrible ... a censored Google would be useful,
but one may argue it sets a poor precedent. Unfortunately, AFAIK national
censorship rules are an existing feature of all major search engines...

------
hrdwdmrbl
Love it when Americans make decisions for Chinese people and presume to know
what they'd want. Maybe try asking them what they want. Or even just think
about what you'd want if you lived in China. Living in China, you know your
search engine will be censored. But still, wouldn't you want the best censored
search engine that you can get?

~~~
ppseafield
> Love it when Americans make decisions for Chinese people and presume to know
> what they'd want.

This is a discussion about Google (an American company) employees talking
about one of Google's projects (as directed by the American company's
leadership), but it happens to be about a product for another country.

> Living in China, you know your search engine will be censored. But still,
> wouldn't you want the best censored search engine that you can get?

As many folks in China use VPNs to get around the Great Firewall, it seems
like they would like an uncensored internet.

~~~
hrdwdmrbl
Oh certainly I think they're like an uncensored internet but unfortunately
Google is not going to cause that to happen. Even with an uncensored Google
you still wouldn't be able to access the links. It should also be said that
while many Chinese do have VPN they are often pretty bad (SLOW!) and often
break. They are also only used by more sophisticated users or enthusiastic
users. Most people are too lazy to bother, cost is a consideration or they are
not technical enough. I do give shout-out to Google for Outline VPN though.
That is them actually doing something that is changing the game

------
g9yuayon
Just because you don't like be censored, you'd rather deprive _every_
Chinese's access to information of much much better quality. Yes, a few
percent of searches will be censored, but the other 90+% of them are still
miles better than Baidu's. Yet the righteous Google employees rather let
people die of misinformation provided by
Baidu([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wei_Zexi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Wei_Zexi)).
They'd rather see event like this happen everyday in China:
[https://www.ft.com/content/9be0b974-10e9-11e6-bb40-c30e3bfcf...](https://www.ft.com/content/9be0b974-10e9-11e6-bb40-c30e3bfcf63b).
They'd rather let ordinary people comb through pages of thinly disguised ads
to get to truly useful pages. They'd rather let good people be bombarded with
false information by Baidu. They'd rather deny billions of people's access to
vast number of educational videos on Youtube. Yeah, right, this is some
people's version of justice.

Yup, political ideal certainly is more important than the quality life of
billions of real, ordinary people.

What a bunch of hypocrites.

~~~
curt15
>but the other 90+% of them are still miles better than Baidu's

And you know this how, given that google hasn't operated in china for the last
ten years?

~~~
g9yuayon
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/16/google-...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/10/16/google-
really-is-trying-build-censored-chinese-search-engine-its-ceo-
confirms/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.cab0c09d7760)

Okay, let's say you don't trust Google's number, then think about this: how
many web pages are about politics that are sensitive to Chinese government,
and how many web pages are about our everyday life?

Edit: oh you mean quality of Google search compared with Baidu's? Well, for
one, Google does not use paid listing, and there are numerous reports that
compare Google and Baidu's search quality.

------
echan00
Maybe this isn't what people want to hear, but there is no reason why Google
should not work on some version of their search for China. Google is a huge
company (one of the biggest in the world), and they need to diversify their
risk by having such an endeavor in their pocket. It DOES NOT mean they need to
release it, and it does not mean that even if they do, the version will look
like the one they are working on right now.

------
ProAm
Why would they? Google fears China is going to create their own version of
Google and will lose access to the country and possibly more of Asia. They are
going to try very hard to keep their foot in the door there.

~~~
topspin
> Why would they?

Morals, perhaps.

~~~
ProAm
Money will always trump morals with companies. It's not ideal but the truth.

~~~
abakker
If corporations are people, then laws are corporation's moral compass. The
solution would likely be to produce regulations to provide a moral compass to
corporations so that they are required to exhibit the behavior we would like
them to have. Corporations are legal automatons, and need to be treated as
such.

This doesn't necessarily mean we need more rules - we could easily improve
regulation by creating rules with fewer, broader commands. Certainly, this
would create some inefficiency, but it would be inefficiency on the commercial
side, rather than the legislative one. (i.e. simpler, broader laws make
certain commercial activities illegal when there might be nuanced reasons that
they should be allowed, vs detailed and exhaustive regulations create more
corporate opportunity but also more loopholes and regulatory surface area.)

~~~
nostrademons
This is pretty challenging for a multinational corporation operating in a
globalized world.

The issue here is that Google is trying to produce a product that conforms to
Chinese _laws_ for doing business in China. These laws are deeply offensive
and immoral to many people in Google's largely-American workforce.

Trying to create a moral compass that multinational corporations can live by
requires creating laws that apply to everyone on earth. Personally, I think
that's a great idea. Then the hard work is in finding a set of global laws
that everyone can agree on, and _that 's_ the sticking point, because peoples'
moral sensibilities on earth are largely contradictory.

Americans would be quick to say "Well, we should all operate under democracy -
let the people decide what these laws should be", not realizing that if we
actually did world democracy 1-person-1-vote style, the legal framework they
would live under would likely be some weird amalgamation of the Chinese &
Indian political systems, because close to 50% of the population lives in
those countries. America would get about 5% of the vote, so it's a good bet
that our wishes would be ignored. Personally, though I love the _idea_ of
world government in theory, I didn't sign up for those conditions. Given the
general resistance to globalization by populist bodies in basically every
nation on earth, most other people didn't either.

~~~
NoodleIncident
American companies have to follow American laws. If those laws are
incompatible with China's then too bad, those companies can't make money in
those exact ways. There's no need to fearmonger about a non-existant world
government.

~~~
nostrademons
That gets complicated too. The way multinationals are usually setup -
particularly with incompatible jurisdictions like US + China - is for a new
company to be formed in the country they want to do business in, but with
shares wholly owned by the parent. (In the case of China, they often need to
partner with a domestic Chinese company that owns some of the shares - this is
a sticking point in US/China trade relations, because it's commonly a front
for industrial espionage.) Google China is not an American company; it is a
Chinese company, headquartered in Beijing, that is partially owned by Google,
which itself is owned by Alphabet.

If you want to block cross-border capital flows, you're looking at _a lot_ of
collateral damage. Apple, Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Nike, McDonald's, KFC, Altria
(Phillip Morris), and many others would lose > 50% of their revenue if they
could not do business through international subsidiaries that operate
according to the laws of the country that they do business in. That's a lot of
American jobs lost and a lot of underfunded pension plans.

The problem with a lot of "too bad - just close the borders and have American
companies build things in America for Americans" is that it ignores that the
1950s utopia they want to go back to was itself built on globalization.
America was the engine of the Marshall Plan, and basically rebuilt the world
after WW2. That allowed Americans of the 50s-80s to enjoy standards of living
well above what the domestic economy would support. If we actually wanted to
shut ourselves off from the world, the resulting economy would likely look a
lot more like the America of the 1850s (before steamships made crossing the
ocean a routine occurrence) or the North Korea/Cuba/Iran of today (as examples
of other countries that have isolated themselves from the world economy).

------
CKN23-ARIN
If Google didn't use a monorepo, it would have been much harder for these
employees to keep tabs on Dragonfly-related code.

~~~
ehsankia
I personally find it a bit suspicious that every single piece of information
we have on Dragonfly has come from The Intercept, which probably got it all
from a single source. And yet everyone in these threads take all this info as
fact. Clearly if it was so open, we'd have a lot more sources here.

I also don't feel right making judgement on a project when I've only heard one
side of the story, from a source which is clearly biased against it.

~~~
0xfffafaCrash
The Intercept is an obvious choice to leak this sort of information,
especially given their reputation for having the backs of their sources (with
one notable failure -- the NSA leak where they published raw documents leading
inadvertently to an identification of the source due to printer stenography)
and focus on tech/surveillance issues. The previous stories re: Dragonfly were
widely corroborated by many involved at Google since the story broke and
reputable sources like the NYT had significant corroborating coverage. I don't
see why it's suspicious or indicative that it's coming from a single source
just because the Intercept is breaking more of these stories. Anyone familiar
with what's been leaked and any interest in publishing an update on this story
would have little reason to send it elsewhere instead.

------
kpmcc
Seems more like a hydra than a Dragonfly at this point.

------
zachguo
Dragonfly will fail anyway even if it enters China. Google won't be allowed to
do any social, payment or map related business. By offering a search product
alone, there's no way Dragonfly can compete with existing eco-system, at best,
it can only achieve a market share as much as DuckDuckGo obtained in US. And
internet landscape in China is way more mobile-centric, and iterates faster
than US already. Not sure how a crippled Google can fit in. It makes more
sense for Google to focus more on GCP in China. No need to deal with all those
political stuff.

------
Chico11Kidlet
Did the Author ever determine if the source images came from Drone-based WAMI
or Satellite-based WAMI as originally reported? The original article in the
intercept noted that the Google e-mails they had obtained showed that it was
Satellite-based WAMI - which would sort of be a big deal..... AKA - who needs
solar powered High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) drone planes, blimps or
aerostats to deploy Wide Area Persistent Surveillance when you can just put
WAMI on Micro-sats that never come down and never blink?

------
snazzycalynx
Did the Author ever determine if the source images came from Drone-based WAMI
or Satellite-based WAMI as originally reported? The original article in the
intercept noted that the Google e-mails they had obtained showed that it was
Satellite-based WAMI - which would sort of be a big deal..... AKA - who needs
solar powered High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) drone planes, blimps or
aerostats to deploy Wide Area Persistent Surveillance when you can just put
WAMI on Micro-sats that never come down and never blink?

------
est
AdSense China grew 60% last year.

Yeah Google is making a profit in China. which need some kind of tool to
support it. Maybe harvest list of content you are not allowed to advertise
with?

~~~
cromwellian
AFAIK, That's Chinese companies using AdSense to advertise in Western markets,
it's not "AdSense in China". I've never seen a single Chinese website using
AdSense.

~~~
est
Maybe the "Chinese-feeling-friendly" ads is a growing requirement in Western
markets. No chinese wish to see their country is a shithole from AdSense.

------
testcross
I wonder how people working for the dragonfly project are feeling. It looks
like the rest of the company hate what they are doing. But if they support
censorship, they might not care what other people are thinking.

~~~
olalonde
A lot of people support the dragonfly project, you just don't hear about them
on HN (namely, almost every Chinese people I've talked to).

------
jaimex2
Eh, if they ever release it we know Google being Google will just shut it down
a few years later like every other new Google product they have released.

------
rodneyzeng
This means Google has not realized the situation when the bottom line of
Chinese government is touched. They will learn this lesson from China.

------
sevilo
What a joke, Google as a company (and its employees) are massive hypocrites
who criticizes China for its censorship and silencing speeches and free
thoughts, then they themselves silence and punish employees for not aligning
with THEIR opinion and political views on things. Let's not forget the time
Google fired the employee for having a different view on diversity.

------
snek
I miss Larry :(

------
savgeborn
I don't even care what other Googlers are doing but it's the best time to
deliver performance when Google is in turnmoil, I'll be securing trust of
stakeholders and promotion.

I'll work overtime and crank more code, while others try to debate their moral
stance

Always think about how you can benefit from a particular scenario

------
mruts
I don’t think I would want to develop a censored search engine (though I’d
certainly reconsider for enough money), nor do I think it’s “right” (whatever
that means), but I still think that in the intetests of its shareholders, it
has a moral and fiscal obligation to make as much money as possible, in
perpuitity. I think this implies that Google should go into China. It’s
unlikely that Google would make less net profit after entering China, the
blowback isn’t impacting financials, and therefore, it’s probably the right
decision to move into China.

Personally, I think censorship ( _all_ censorship, not just political) is
wrong, but if I was the CEO of Google I would be forced to either resign or go
into China. And since I follow the money, I probably wouldn’t resign.

~~~
ionised
> it has a moral and fiscal obligation to make as much money as possible, in
> perpuitity.

This is simply untrue.

Also a 'moral obligation to make as much money as possible' is fucking
hilarious.

~~~
mruts
How’s that? And what is untrue about the obligations to its shareholders? Not
maximizing shareholder value is illegal.

~~~
CharlesColeman
> How’s that?

Someone already explained much of it to you 13 hours ago, in a reply to
another comment of yours expressing the similar ideas:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19308149](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19308149)

