Ugh, right? I've found the worst people for this are teachers. Try saying in school "2 + 2 = 5", they'll go crazy and just won't accept alternative opinions. One teacher tried to flunk me once just because I believe -1 * -1 = -1. Those snowflakes just keep saying "you're wrong" and "trust the mathematical establishment". Sheep!
A pile of papers and consensus among the academic elite and their funders is quite different than proofs in mathematics, which are self-evidently true, or logical inferences from axioms which one can choose to accept or not.
Doesn‘t that number alone arouse suspicion in you? I suggest you read the paper in question and ask yourself if their methods really measure what they claim.
The problem is, every data provider has to get on board first. For instance, the city you live in can verify if you're over eighteen. If their IT can handle setting the bit 'over eighteen' in the IRMA app, you can securely and verifiably show this bit of information, and only this piece of information, to the party asking to verify this information. They have to support IRMA too though.
But even then, if I'm under age and just borrow your phone...
Technology does not solve people problems. It only makes them worse/creates new ones in the process of (generally poorly) trying to partially solve them.
To shrink your existing windows partition, first disable swap on the partition you want to shrink, otherwise windows may not shrink it enough for what you want. Turn it on again after you're done.
If it's a choice between protesters getting tear gassed vs your shop and livelyhood being burnt down by rioters the gas is not that much of a price to pay
Even accepting this dichotomy at face value, rephrasing this a bit you could say it's a choice between bodily injury (to the protestors) or property damage. It's telling that in the US property "wins".
Property is acquired through the trade of one's resources, which are acquired through a time tradeoff in almost all cases.
The property vs. body isn't about valuing "things" more than people. It's about recognizing that the decision to destroy someone else's property is illegal, and that activity should be interrupted by the government. It is one of the few responsibilities a government should have. Underlying the property, real damage is being done to real humans by destroying their past and future bodies through the proxy of property and the tradeoff they would need to make to reacquire it.
It is about valuing things more than people. By saying that it's ok to respond to property damage with violence you are valuing property at at least the same, if not more, than people.
Yes. My point is that it took the equivalent of human life to acquire the property, so destroying someone else's private property is akin to destroying their life.
Obviously they're still alive so can spend time acquiring more, but let's not pretend property crime is priceless. That said, I don't advocate for violence and would prefer to see the legal system work the issues through.
This is a silly way to frame the issue. If you tell me "I have a baseball bat and I will use it to either hit a random person or smash the window of this car," I 'll choose the car. On the other hand, if a random person walks up to a car and starts smashing it, I don't have a problem with someone using force to stop that.
Because I value living in a society where people aren't free to victimize others more than I value that person being free from arrest or other violence.
From the article: "Although Tesla represents to customers "that its camera recordings cannot be linked to individuals and their vehicles," the Tesla system "was, in fact, capable of—and did—show the location of recordings, meaning anyone viewing the videos and images could determine exactly where the Tesla owner lived, i.e., who the Tesla owner was," the lawsuit said."
And that is exactly what people should remember vividly about this. Whatever a company tells you regarding privacy, it is almost always a big fat LIE. Yet somehow when one accuses companies like this of illegal data collection there's an army of Tesla defenders demanding proof. Well, here it is. Remember it, it will be viable as long as this company exists.
And this is why the GDPR is so wide. And really so many things can be PII. On individual level yes, location might not identify a person, but with enough data of it combined with other data it can.
Enforcement might be lacking, but at least the intent does make sense each time you hear about cases like this.
No, it's a 2001ish web page. Absent canvas and most dom manipulation, larger changes are delegated to serverside. A periodic `window.location.replace` gets a new page capable of handling the next n seconds.
Fwiw, present-day spec[1] says with location.replace "the current page will not be saved in session History". A puzzle.
Funny how the BBC keeps complaining about Musk's Twitter take over but refuses to cover the Twitter Files he's been releasing. Guess those government millions are put to good use.
The thing is that "the Twitter Files" just... broadly aren't interesting.
It's just a bunch of stuff that was already known or internal conversations that don't shift the needle one way or the other. "Social media company has discussion about how to apply moderation practices" isn't news unless you're looking to make a quick buck of pretending that it is. (Especially if you can frame it in such a way that whatever camp you belong to is being silenced and censored.) Neither are things like algorithmic deprioritization or shadowbanning. These are bog-standard moderation tools. It's well... not news. There's nothing to report there unless you want the report to be "social media company does what every other social media company does, more at 11".
Twitter has always been transparent about government requests, they literally have a site dedicated to listing that[0]. It used to be updated every year but ironically 2022 data isn't available because I guess Musk fired everyone involved with it/didn't think it is a priority to keep updated (ironic given the supposed claims of the Twitter Files.)
The closest thing I ever saw to something being interesting is that certain accounts have immunity against Twitters regular flagging system, instead being marked with "only let the higher-ups make decisions".
I think there's an interesting discussion to be had about how fame apparently gives you the option to break most rules on a social media site unless blowback becomes so significant that the upper management decided you're not worth the trouble, but that's not the discussion that's being held. (This is, if I had to guess, entirely because of the significant overlap between "famous person who thinks Twitter Files matter" and "famous person with immunity against the rules", but I admit that that is just a guess.)
> "Legal demands" include a combination of court orders and other formal demands to remove content, from both governmental entities and lawyers representing individuals.
I am very very much in doubt that it was publicly _known_ (not theorised) that the government was asking Twitter to delete _legal_ but _undesirable_ tweets!
When the government is suggesting Twitter to censor specific users/subjects/tweets, is that not close to (if not outright) violating the first amendment?
No? They just used the same reporting functionality everyone else had available from what I can tell. Twitter has, at least according to the transparency report also more often than not just straight up rejected the requests from the government (the last known report data shows that they only complied 40% of the time[0]). Twitter basically received a report, practically no different from if you or someone else clicked on the report button in their interface and then decided whether or not to act on it. There would be no consequences to saying "no", which again, according to their transparency report, they did more often than not.
So no, I don't consider that to be a free speech violation; nobody went to jail, nobody was threatened into being silenced by the government. By all metrics, that is not a free speech violation. Section 230 allows internet service providers (that's not just your ISP; anyone with an internet site that allows for user-generated content is an ISP for this law) to make their own decisions[1]. Twitter made their own decisions based on the information given.
If we're talking first amendment though, Twitter also had a rather notable history of butting in on lawsuits that actually would affect the government crossing a free speech boundary to give its own input on those cases, specifically to prevent the US right to free speech from being neutered[2]. (And with another great irony, Musk fired the person who was chiefly responsible for that because she also was the person that signed off on Trump getting suspended.)
EDIT: Also as for it being known - yeah it was. No social media site really hides this. Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, they all have openly discussed the fact that at some point, the government will just ask you to take stuff down. Each of those sites has their own limitations on what they allow. Reddit is for example rather compliant with those requests (since Reddits entire success is due to staying just below the surface of the attention of the news) while Facebook has been infamously flip-floppy with say, the Christchurch shooter video where they weren't sure on whether or not to comply with the request from the NZ government.
- No, the government and politicians don't use the same reporting functionality as us plebes, they e-mail Twitter Safety directly, as revealed by the Twitter Files.
- When the government (with their regulatory powers, monopoly on legitimate violence, etc) asks a private company to do something, the coercion is implicit. Just like if a heavily armed thug looms over you and asks, in a threatening tone of voice, for your wallet—the "or else" doesn't need to be aired out loud.
> They just used the same reporting functionality everyone else had available from what I can tell.
I think a major part of the Twitter files is exactly the fact that all of these social networks have close working relationships with tons of government and government funded agencies, where these groups can just send along lists of people and topics that they want removed on dubious grounds (this is not the same as things like getting a warrant or court order which I'm assuming the transparency report is about).
The recent release includes things like "true facts about covid vaccines that might cause hesitancy". You can have whatever opinion you want about what they should and shouldn't be platforming, but I for one agree that these organizations shouldn't be able to casually tap twitter/fb/etc on the shoulder and nix random legal speech.
Maybe you were in the loop about this. But I didn't know that US government officials, politicians, and law enforcement were pressuring Twitter to censor 1A-protected speech, in violation of the Constitution. I didn't know that Twitter was regularly complying with these blatantly illegal censorship requests. I didn't know that organizations like Hamilton 68 and the Global Engagement Center (goverent agency) were blatantly lying about random private citizens being foreign agitators, and that the media was breathlessly repeating these lies.
So maybe I'm just not in the loop, I don't know how to keep up with the latest techniques of our enlightened overlords. Which media sources should I be following, to correct this apparent deficiency?
That was something else; Twitter has a consent agreement with the FTC surrounding the privacy of its users (after they got hacked some time ago). Musk has been very negligent on actually making sure the paperwork is correct[0].
Congress requested for information on whether or not Twitter was properly following the consent decree when Musk gave Tabibi and the others access to the files. Twitter is legally required to assess the possible privacy impact of anything surrounding user data. That's all that was requested. They did not request Twitter to stop providing the journalists access, just that they had done the necessary precautions to avoid accidentally leaking out sensitive user information.
Tabibi of course screamed that he was being censored by the government. I leave you to your own conclusions there.
[0]: After the entire legal team resigned en-masse when they had to put their signatures down for something, presumably the new Twitter Blue. Musks current policy is that engineers are independently liable for FTC violations, which I'm pretty sure is not how it's supposed to work.
Musk did not give the BBC access to those files, so what is there for them to report? They've been reported by the journalists who were given exclusive access.
I've tried to follow every Twitter Files dump and honestly there really isn't anything there to cover. It's like ppointing at people doing their jobs and claiming "there's some seriously scurrious stuff going on over there!"
Just doing their jobs, censoring the legal speech of private citizens at the request of government, after government without a shred of evidence accuses the private citizens of being foreign agents
For decades, AT&T gave the government unlimited access to all its technology. The head of AT&T and Bell Labs would personally go to DC on a secret schedule and share technical documentation that let the NSA spy (illegally) on Americans (see Idea Factory for footnotes, etc). From what I read, Twitter pushed back against the government in a thoughtful way. If you have problems with what the government is doing, use these files to file a lawsuit. If you think the US government is going to change being heavy handed I think you'll be depressed at the outcome.
The first nationwide social graph was built at AT&T Labs, made of call detail records harvested (on mag tape and possibly even punched cards at the time) from storage all over the country. It was possibly the largest database at the time. Pre-RDBMSs.
> Funny how the BBC keeps complaining about Musk's Twitter take over but refuses to cover the Twitter Files he's been releasing. Guess those government millions are put to good use.
How would that work? How did Twitter spend millions on the UK Government and how would that result in the BBC not reporting on a Twitter related issue?
Somehow I already get bored by all the "here, I asked GPT about this" comments on HN. I don't really care what the computer thinks mate. Much more interested in what you think.
Though, thanks for acknowleding the use of AI here, one can never be sure nowadays :-)
You're absolutely right, but I felt like the axiom-approach by x-complexity was fascinating for breaking down the discussion, and I was positively surprised by how GPT4 approached it.
So I assume the author received consent from Scarlett Johansson. Well done, it must be hard to get a hold of her.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/s0md3v