skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If these companies are "shutting you down" for your speech, it's the same sort of speech that would have gotten you shut down in the public square.

Have they shut down text messaging, phone calls, group messaging, all the encrypted messaging apps?

Do the tech companies control postal mail, letters to the editor, and printing presses?

Of course not. You are looking for others to give you a platform to reach a wide audience. There are many. But no platform requires people to publish you. You have lost being able to yell in a public square, temporarily, due to public safety, but you haven't lost the ability to transmit speech that would have been acceptable in the public square.

So so so tired of these false equivalencies, and an unwillingness to engage with the type of speech that results in this. Normal, political speech is just fine. Incitement to violence, no.

Hell, AWS still hosts the publication that posted Bezos' dick pics! These shutdowns are not some sort of political censorship, these shutdowns are the natural result of speech that societies have determined not to be free.
NYTimes seems to disagree:

https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/26/archives/worldwide-propag...
That protects against an attacker reading network traffic. It does not protect against an attacker that has the hashed password from the DB.

The only thing you need in order to authenticate at any given time is the hash of (hashed password + nonce). The latter you get for free, at any time, from the server, so you only need to know the hashed password -- not the password itself. Since the hashed password is directly stored in the DB, if you get your hands on that you can authenticate.
Have you ever been to /r/politics? It's a groupthink circle jerk. The difference, of course, is that /r/conservative is explicitly defined as a conservative community while /r/politics implies they are some sort of neutral community which they most certainly are not. At any rate, finding a diverse community of ideological people coming together to discuss politics with intellectual fervor is rather difficult these days. Part of the reason is the design of the software itself. HN does a better job of this than most because of very careful design choices and solid moderation. But if this could be accomplished for politics in general, I think it would be a good thing for society.
I moved 10 of my non-IT (male, age ~30-35) friends from FB Messenger group chat to Signal. None of them had any problems setting it up, none had any questions during the setup. I just invited them to the group after they created accounts (you can also use an invitation link) and the chat continued on Signal. No one has looked back at FB Messenger and we are not missing any functionality. I am slowly spreading in my circles and so far with only positive feedback.
this was such an exciting time. there was such hope for distributed, secure social protocols. for interoperability, intertwingularity. we'd seen rss become powerful & loved, innovation like Wave (totally excellent off the wall great leaps & bounds), Buzz, & others seed the idea that more was possible, that we could expand how sites & users worked together across the web in a secure fashion.

OpenSocial was to be totally next level modular web. being able to build composite sites, sites built of tech from all over. we could enhance our experience on a site in ways that no site operator had pre-determined. It was going to be a totally new freedom for users.

this was really the climax of so much of the aughts, such hope vested in it.

however development felt like it went really really slow. time kept ticking. the API centric days of the web kept seeming to grow further off all a while, while this set of protocols felt under-developed under-supported; using the reference stack was something I tried a couple of times & never quite latched on to. i don't think alternative stacks ever came about, even though I feel like this was a protocol-centric approach.

a lot of this reflects my own likely deeply embellished memory. OpenSocial felt like it represented a lot of hope for a web that could emerge, a culmination of a lot of what was happening on the web, in fancier form, distilled. and it feels like the turning point where that- to me- far better web failed to really materialize, failed to become a thing. there were still a couple more years of good API based systems being the norm/expectation, but the wind was running out of the sails, each fief of the web collapsing back in to it's own. Google Plus launched 2011, not long after OpenSocial was underway, and until it's demise it never shipped an API for writing a post. you had to use their client to do almost anything. this was a ghastly shocking turn, back then, something that was almost unbelievable. now a days, clients like Signal &al, this is de-jure, the norm. systems are only what they were designed for you the user to get.

i think of opensocial semi-regularly. at the time it felt like the first big ride out for the "open web", like the beginnings of a new frontier. it is with enormous & sadness & disappointment that i report, here, a decade latter, that it feels like the last & final ride out of the spirited, hopeful, connective open web, that things only ever got worse after.

one last little side note, one of the main people i associate with OpenSocial, Dave Recordon, was just named Biden White House's Director of Technology: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/21/01/06/2129251/open-source-...
It's not covert, but it's quite literally a propaganda machine.

The reason Radio Free Europe/Asia were founded was to broadcast the benefits of 'freedom' into communist-governed areas. You might think that we're qualitatively the good guys, and I'm all for freedom, but that's definitionally 'propaganda'.
Changed: My original title read:

Corporations withhold donations (ed:bribes) to Republicans over Capitol incursion
I don't like "nothing will happen" as a talking point. "Nothing will happen" because... they cornered the market. They're the only game in town. It's the only way for many people to contact their friends. It's not their fault Facebook is a scummy organization run by a sociopath, they don't really have any options. I don't like this implication that the public is to blame
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsVe-kF_w90
Come on, you threw out a baseless claim that didn't even survive a superficial level of scrutiny. Now you're just moving goal posts.
They all moved to whatsapp one time too, I don't think Signal is any more difficult right?
AWS can cut off service for copyright complaints. The company I work for gets complaints these all the time and our service time to remove the data/images is pretty small.

If the activity is illegal, AWS can cut off service.
Here are some interesting ones:

https://twitter.com/MonkeyWrenchATX/status/13162253889059266...

https://twitter.com/MonkeyWrenchATX/status/13089834842880450...

https://twitter.com/Windstalker361/status/129150221759012044...

https://twitter.com/ScothSenpai/status/1311436929351790592

I agree Parler is/was shit and yay for its death, but there IS a non-trivial amount of extremist stuff on Twitter as well and IMO letting this stuff persist just creates further division.
They also signed a multi-year deal with Pinterest which is a competitor to twitter. So that argument won’t get very far.
You can send a letter in the mail, can't you?
I read TFA and came back to upvote the post. Given that this is HN I expected to find some good discussion in the comments - and there is a bit, increasing over time - but there's just so much propaganda / outright stupid stuff here in the comments.

This article seems like it should be on HN, but the stuff in the comments made me want to flag it (I didn't). Fortunately it seems the good discussion is coming out on top over time, and the worst comments do get down voted & flagged pretty quickly. But, as you said, there is a lot of repetitive back-and-forth here which has already been done over the past few days.
This and other stories are in a book Sled Driver by Brian Shul. You can easily find copies around in the web.
Mastodon will let you turn off boosted posts on your home timeline. It will also not reorder anything, ever.
>If a totally unmoderated platform isn’t overrun with spam yet, that just means it isn’t popular enough for spammers to notice it.

This is my wish. For a social network that isn't popular enough for spammers to notice it. I'm a member of a few such websites, mainly related to music, and that suits me just fine. I have little reason for a massive town square like Facebook, etc. Little reason to be discoverable by anyone in the world. Scale is overrated.
Yup, my wife just move a large group of non-technicals from Facebook Messenger to Signal. No problems, thus far!
That's a fair point. However, it's a matter of how angry each side gets. There is some critical level of anger that provokes unrest and strong reaction.
It's not the usual way of things. They're not removing a few individually flagged post. FB is erasing massive numbers of communities, many just because they lean right. Reddit deleting over 2,000+ subreddits in the past year is just business as usual?

No, that's fucking targeted attacks against opinions they do not like. This is absolutely not business as usual. Everything about this is massive and it's morally reprehensible. It may not be illegal, but it's fucking wrong and insane.

It also shows that Big Tech is afraid. They're afraid and they're cowards. Regulating speech and language and blanket censorship are tools of authoritarians, not of people who believe in democracy and liberty.

Show me a single nation where censorship lead to a more free and open State.
> This is distinctly different than how iMessage and Telegram work because in both of those apps they store your private key.

Does anyone have a moment to explain this one to me? Seems to me you'd of course have to store your own key on the device. And if Apple is storing it themselves... that's news to me and pretty concerning.
Given that rdrand is so flakey across systems, is there a reason why systemd even bothers using it? The comments suggest it's only used to generate uuids, which makes me think it's not performance sensitive code. If that's the case why increase code complexity and expose yourself to hardware flakiness just to save a few miliseconds?
In my opinion, if they really cared about their stated goals, the EPA should have also rolled right-to-repair protections for the relevant equipment into emissions rules for car manufacturers. They should have mandated interchangeable parts, standard connections, and openly available documentation.

Recently I rebuilt a 1996 car. The previous owner had misplaced a fuel tank topper that contained valving for the emissions controls. The parts needed were simply not available for purchase from the manufacturer or the aftermarket. At the time I couldn't source a used fuel tank for the 96, but I was able to find a 1999 model year of the same car in a junkyard.

Between 1996 and 1999, the fuel vapor emissions controls went from "somewhat complicated" to "really complicated." In theory I should have been able to either hook up just the plumbing needed by the 96 system, or upgrade the whole car to the 99 system. However in practice I could do neither. The fittings had all changed. The charcoal canister was changed from round to square. (And really what is the point of installing either canister when both are probably "used up" at this point? Why can't I buy new canisters at the same stores where I can buy new air filters?)

But the biggest impediment was obtaining information on the two systems. The information in the service manual was perfunctory and nonspecific; multiple different systems had been used in different years and regions. The diagrams of internal valving on the tank toppers small enough that important connections (or lack of them) were obscured by smudges. I had more luck reading EPA whitepapers to at least get a theory of operation.

In the enthusiast community I can find information about how to put a cylinder head from one year of this car onto a block from another. I can even find information about what ports to block off or drill open to remount the cylinder head on BACKWARDS, if I'm so inclined. There's not a similar subcommunity for people trying to repair their emissions equipment.

A similar problem exists with safety equipment. Most enthusiasts of this car just delete their ABS, or they never service it. I want to rebuild mine (this just consists of replacing internal O-rings), but I can't find information or get parts except from overseas. In Europe and other countries that are not the USA, the manufacturer did service and rebuild these ABS units.
What I'm suggesting is the problem isn't repairability, its stuff breaking and getting tossed.

I don't care how manufacturers address this issue, but I do think it's clearly their responsibility to address it.

Also, any legislation should recognize that these devices aren't just physical devices that might need to have a screen replaces. A device which you can replace the screen on, but can't get secure software for is just as worthless as one you can upgrade but can't replace the screen on.
For the uninitiated

https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU

996 doesn’t sound bad at all if it’s my own Company and I’m not constantly worried about Cash flow or run rate. Maybe that’s why in the quotes they say stuff like “996 is a blessing” :P
Here in UK I believe criminal records have a time limit, after which your crime is expunged from the record at leadt as far as employers, etc are concerned. The length of the limit will depend on the crime and may not apply at all the very serious crimes. But it means that there's much much less active discrimination against ex-convicts than I hear about in th US.
That's some internet history right there. I actually used open social back in the days. Of course post Cambridge Analytica people now think that open systems and data portability are bad :(
I'm confused as to how some people here are simultaneously digging on Parler for speech they "allowed", and then also that "they weren't really free speech".

What is it you wanted them to do? I think it's pretty reasonable to not have "See me on Parler @ParlerLovesNaziPussy" as that content that Parler could not control outside of their platform.

Restricting usernames seems like a prudent move, even for a free speech platform.
> of course, there's a big difference between "this is the NYC skyline" and "this is the NYC skyline as viewed from the northeast corner of my apartment building".

Depending on the picture, you might still be able to go from one to the other even without the benefit of exact location information – in fact that's what I've been doing for old pictures in my photo library.

As my backlog is somewhat more than a decade, of course I don't remember where exactly each and every picture had been taken, but when geotagging them there's of course still the temptation to place the location marker as accurately as possible. Given a rough location from my memory, Google Earth, GeoSetter's field-of-view on a map/aerial photography display and occasionally a sun angle calculator I've been able to pinpoint the relatively exact location of quite a number of photos.
How are they an arbiter of truth? They host tens of thousands of sites that I'm sure they don't necessarily agree with but they're more than happy to take the money of. They singled this one out because they don't want the publicity of their platform being associated with a company that has no problem with users coordinating violent and deadly insurrections...
I'm with you for preventing companies from using their size to force very unfair contracts. But I have to say, in this situation, a fairer contract would probably still let Amazon drop Parler.

> Was Parler filled with hate and bullshit? From what I've seen, absolutely. But so is Twitter, and they're incoming, not outgoing.

From the sound of it, Parler was not responding well to requests for moderation and didn't show signs of improvement. Twitter might be better at it. And, for contracts, it shouldn't matter if one party lets some parties slide but is a stickler for others. The contract was the terms on paper, not "These terms or the most lax behaviors for any parties agreeing to the same terms."
> What are the best mitigations here, both technical and social? Vocally side with the popular issues, or try to stay completely out of them, to try to avoid becoming a target (e.g., social media presence)?

For now, don't attempt to overturn a fair democratic election and install an illegitimate government. Seems like a pretty easy thing to stay clear of.

I get the concern you're expressing, but not everything is a slippery slope. This went so far beyond a "popular social issue of the day", as you admitted in your comment. IMO it's worth saving this outrage & concern for if and when something that is more genuinely a popular social issue causes AWS to take down sites. There were surely lots candidates for that earlier this year with a lot of the other protests that went on, were there any instances of sites taken down then? (I'm genuinely asking btw, I didn't hear of any but if there were then I think that is a much more appropriate place to start this conversation from. Certainly people have been fired from their jobs due to cancel culture but I don't know of anyone being shut off of all tech platforms).
I think you have a more constrained view of what is contained within the word "ability" than I do.

The problem with the US is that the class interests of those whose consensus is important in lawmaking is aligned with the interests of the ultra-wealthy.

Nor do I buy into the mythos that "lawfulness" is something universally applied in the United States. Laws, procedure, delay always play a large part when the interests of people with large capital are threatened, but lawlessness is the norm in many relations that impact ordinary people, like that weird clocking in rule that your boss at your retail job has instituted that is actually illegal under labor law or when the Federal gov't decides they will no longer enforce redlining law by going undercover to investigate racial discrimination.
But that puts the burden on who defines hate. Similar to the issue with banning “hate speech”. Where’s the line?

We know the extremes, but the extremes aren’t the problem.

“Basketball is stupid” - hate speech targeting a minority demographic, thereby racist.

I wish the above was hyperbole, but there’s a non-zero group size of people in nearby college communities that would agree.
IF a company's terms of service refer (or intend to refer) to some kind of external standard (such as federal law) why should the company itself have the power to determine what does or doesn't meet that standard.

In the USA, there's a government body which can make a preliminary judgment on this, it's called the courts. Why shouldn't Amazon be compelled to get a preliminary opinion from a judge on whether this is illegal or not. Based on that decision they can preemptively remove the content and let the defendant "appeal" (probably incorrect legal term) the decision. If the court rules it's not illegal, then there should be no risk of legal liability to continuing to provide the service.

If things are parler are as bad as people are making it out to be (i haven't been following it closely) then this should be a trivial step that legitimizes the decision.
> Do you know how many of the people arrested in connection with the Capitol invasion were active users of Parler? Zero

Conspiracy theories aside Parler wasn’t removed in relation to involvement with the capital invasion. They got booted off for poor moderation - repeatedly not being willing to do anything about illegal/hate content and the increase in number of complaints.

I don’t think Amazon or Apple (and to a lesser extent Google) can be viewed as competitors to Parler in any material way.
That was the propaganda rationale used to justify opening up trade with China. The primary goals were to gain leverage over the Soviet Union and deescalate the Cold War.
> The answer is yes - yes it is too much to ask for

Mastodon exists. It is what you described. It is paid for either by generous individuals or by donations.
Have you been on /r/The_Donald at all? Or are you just making whatever you'd like up?
I see the following:

> We may terminate this Agreement for any reason by providing you at least 30 days’ advance notice.

and

> Either party may terminate this Agreement for cause if the other party is in material breach of this Agreement and the material breach remains uncured for a period of 30 days from receipt of notice by the other party.

The latter obviosuly applies here. Am I missing something?
I doubt you're actually having this problem, but if you are, you can add an issue to the corresponding Android/iOS repo.
The Facebook Oversight Board Should Review Trump’s Suspension
I can't speak for others but I marked "unsure", not because I'm "willing to accept Big Tech becoming the arbiter of truth" but because Big Tech is that arbiter already. Everything from who gets a blue check mark to how the algorithm sorts your feed creates and feeds your concerns and beliefs.

I honestly think this discussion "should they or shouldn't they ban x" is a poor framing of the discussion we should be having. It implies media companies can be unbiased. It implies there is some democracy implicit in social media. It implies that the right virtues can make social media work. I don't think any of those things are true and I don't think we should have a discussion that allows their presumption.

What people are doing on Twitter isn't new. What Twitter is doing isn't new. What people on Parler are doing isn't new. What Parler is doing isn't new. People who believe it is new simply have an incorrect understanding of history. They underestimate the gross bias in media historically. They underestimate the volume and extremity of seditious communication and activity. They underestimate the violence and frequency of political unrest.

If we want to have a real conversation about disassociating power and speech, disassociating money and speech, disassociating status quo and speech, I think that's a worthy conversation. The rest of this is red meat for slacktivist posters.
The US government isn't really THAT much different from Japan and all of Europe, Australia, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, etc... Even India and, theoretically, even Russia, too.

So, it's not surprising the average Chinese person has a decent understanding of how a basic democracy works.

In some ways, China is also not THAT much different, either. But it is more different than pretty much every other major economy in the world.

I mean, for one, it does not even put on a charade of being a democracy. It pretends to be communist (economically), but in a lot of ways it is more capitalist than a lot of the West. And the scale of the government is enormous. It's much more different, and there's really not much of a reason for many people in the US to have a decent idea of how it works.

China's government does not affect our daily lives that much - at least not yet. And Americans (like most people) are mostly concerned with themselves.
Oh great, that totally resolves the dystopian nightmare we might be heading for!