skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The parent said they were too powerful and needed to be brought to heel; not that they were monopolies which needed to be broken up. I think this point has a lot of merit.

Circa 2017, liberals were arguing adamantly that Russia tampered with the presidential election by exploiting the curation algorithms that these companies employ--if we can believe that these algorithms are powerful enough that they can swing an election, why should we entrust that power to a handful of companies with tightly aligned interests (irrespective of whether or not they can secure their algorithms from outside tampering)? Why should we be content with this kind of hyper corporate oligarchy? To own the cons?

Note that "breaking the companies up" isn't the only way to bring them to heel. With respect to social networks, one interesting approach would be to decouple one's social network from the specific platform through which one accesses their social network by requiring social media companies to use open protocols that upstarts can equally implement. This would increase competition, including allowing non-ad-based platforms (with all of the inherent ethical issues associated with that business model) to compete with these companies. It would also prevent these companies from shutting down alternative interfaces that circumvent their tracking. Most importantly, the competition would weaken them to the point that they're still profitable but not a threat to our democracy.

I haven't considered this possibility well enough to say with any confidence that it's a particularly good solution, but it seems interesting and appealing from this distance.
you lost me on the last part there, you can't have it both ways. if they don't want to do business with you they don't have to point blank (barring any outstanding contracts which can be settled).

as a business you choose to take risks relying on other vendors. we're all dependent on any business and they could drop us at any time, but that's the risk we take for convenience or what not. we make the calculation the risk is low.

if you know there's a growing base of extremism on your site and you have a precedent like gab, why wouldn't you potentially prepare for it?
This complaint seems to include a ton of things like:

- AWS was especially mean to us

- AWS is hypocritical, look how bad twitter is

- We were singled out for political reasons

- This will kill us

All of which might be true, but none of which is illegal. The main (only?) real legal complaint here seems to amount to "AWS banned us to prop up Twitter in an anticompetitive way that's illegal under antitrust laws." That seems incredibly weak to anyone who's been following this story at all.

The charitable interpretation of AWS's actions would be that they banned Parler for refusing to moderate effectively. The less charitable version is that AWS doesn't care about Parler, but caved to public and internal pressure to ban them. In no reasonable interpretation did AWS do it because they just love Twitter so much. I don't see this suit going anywhere.
You didn’t read before posting did you?

They make the case that Amazon is because they provide hosting for Parlers larger competitors.
Antitrust laws are broader than that. A company can be guilty of anti-competitive behavior even if that company is not a direct competitor of the parties affected.
> May I ask where you live? Maybe the US?

How'd you guess? :)
Of course I reported them. Nothing happened. Twitter was totally supportive of everything that happened in June. They even put up billboards bragging about how their platform helped protests grow. During a pandemic.
I wasn't the one that made the claim it was actively removed.
Had they been given 30 days, they probably could have moved to Oracle or even had setup their own servers.
Here's a good idea: Poland's "freedom of speech" bill.

https://polandin.com/51388314/justice-minister-announces-onl...

Under its provisions, social media services will not be allowed to remove content or block accounts if the content on them does not break Polish law. In the event of removal or blockage, a complaint can be sent to the platform, which will have 24 hours to consider it. Within 48 hours of the decision, the user will be able to file a petition to the court for the return of access. The court will consider complaints within seven days of receipt and the entire process is to be electronic.
That is not the only thing "AntiCompetitve" means, Favoring One customer over all other customers can also be Anti-Competitive under US Law, Parler does not have to compete with Amazon for them to be acting in an Anti-Competitive manner
How many protesters arrested in the 2020 Summer protests had a twitter account?
> Basically, I'm asking how you can realistically "self host" without going through a private corporation that might decide to cut you off at some level in the stack?

You can’t, and that is the problem with allowing Big Tech to be the arbiter of truth.
Firstly, it was but (apart from being discussion of the phrase rather than actually planning to kill him) it was swiftly taken down .

Secondly, at risk of stating the obvious: Parler has self-selected its audience to consist of proportionally many more extremists, they still exist on twitter but not even close to as prevalently on Parler (not least because many extremists on Twitter are going to be on the left, where the dialogue is harder to police because it's much less obvious where the violence starts)
Here's the question I struggle with: How do you set "goals" when you don't know what you want? I have been stymied by this time and time again. If you don't know what you want to accomplish, how do you set any "goals"?
Of course hah... what kind of question is this? If a human doesn't use one of the internet-interfacing devices like a smartphone, laptop, etc they can't use the internet. Thus they are not using the internet and have "quit" the internet.
> it was largely done on Facebook

That could be true, I don't know, but Parler was certainly hosting some violent real-time threats:
https://twitter.com/slpng_giants/status/1347190280492089344
As long as Parler is free to use any other provider, or to host their own servers, I see no problem. I was not popular when I said that bakers may refuse (gay) clients, I will not be popular when I say that Amazon may refuse to host Parler.
experienced data engineers should graduate to data architects/ML engineers and this way they can get on par with SWE, pls correct me if I am wrong.
why would i want to look at other peoples private YT videos?
Maybe or maybe not but nonetheless something need to be done to fix this silencing issue.
The policy means nothing if it isn't applied and a lot of what happened on Wednesday (and way worse) was planned in the open on Parler. Parler's moderation also principally consisted from what I've heard of community 'jury of peers' where a reported post was shown to ~5 other users who decided if it was a violation which is incredibly insufficient and basically guarantees the policy will not be enforced.
Mr Greenwald is an activist.
It doesnt work as well as targeted ads. Why would hundreds of billions in ad spend willingly choose a lesser option?
Yes, with caveats. Parler weren't the martyrs of free speech they to paint themselves as, given the platform was actually pretty restricted with what kind of speech was tolerated and you could argue many of the things hosted there weren't free speech and they didn't do their due diligence to moderate their platform.

However, just as it happened with WikiLeaks, it just sets an ugly precedent and it shows to which extent all of the internet's content is effectively beholden to just a few entities. If they want you out, there's little you can do about it, no ifs or buts.
For what, two more weeks? And that head is only 1/3 of the gov. FAANG is siding with the other two.
So, Parler perjured themselves in the linked complaint when they stated that every example cited by amazon was removed?
Yeah definitely, but Amazon can always say "Go host on GCP". Then Google Cloud can say "Go host on Azure". Then Microsoft says "Go host on Digital Ocean", and repeat until you run out of hosts.

Is it like a game of hot potato where the last hosting company has to host them? Because it seems there are alternatives to each individually, and it's only when they all say no that there are issues for Parler. And to me that feels like a Parler problem, not an AWS problem.
Ah, so we're back to "The bakery did nothing wrong."
>Just because they're 4 different companies doesn't negate the fact they control over 80% to 90% of the American market for hosting, non-SMS text communication and mobile access.

Citation please.
I suppose we are at a huge impasse as a society then. Because someone like me holds the opinion of non-experts as having zero value. I will not respect and do not want any policy being set by people with your attitude. I will continue to follow the science, and if I feel that people like you who ignore it are threatening my life, then I will do everything I can to stay far away from you and keep you far away from me.

I'd be totally for splitting society into those who respect science and experts, and those who don't. I have no desire to live in your world.
That's very insightful, thank you!
I just want to say, I called this years ago:

https://battlepenguin.com/politics/the-new-era-of-corporate-...

They came for Alex Jones and I said nothing
Because I didn't believe in gay frogs[1]

They came for Daily Stormer and I said nothing
Because I knew nothing about Daily Stormer and believed everything the media I said about them because their site was gone

They came for ever heterodox opinion on Reddit and I said nothing
Because I believed those opinions were wrong
and Reddit was within their rights as a private company to ban them

Then I had a heterodox opinion and lost my Google account, my Facebook account, my phone numbers I ported to Twilio because I thought that was safe, and all means of communicating with friends whose phone numbers I did not get.

And there was no one left to give a shit.

It's really your fault you know.

[1]: https://news.berkeley.edu/2010/03/01/frogs/
ISPs should be a public utility. They would need to have a guarantee of protection from revocation of service due to speech as they will be a public entity at that point.
There is a difference between "Quarantine when you cross a border" and "Shut down all commerce and tell people they can't leave their homes for months on end"
It is working well in my opinion. I would rather live in a world where billionaires are happy to dissolve a corrupt and disgusting politician than other way around.
Coinbase Breaks Down Amid Bitcoin Market Crash, Users Face Delay in Execution
"Coinbase has faltered over 7 times in the past couple of months out of which 4 came this months alone and we are only 11 days into the month and all these during the peak trading hours leading many traders to incur losses as well. The US-based crypto platform has filed for its IPO which might take place in the coming months, however, its continuous technical snags and failure to handle heavy loads has made many questions whether the idea for the IPO was pre-mature."

See ...

https://coingape.com/coinbase-breaks-down-amid-bitcoin-marke...
This is a Cloudflare community post from November 2018. The user was directed to file a complaint and the thread was closed.

This is not a post about recent events.
I've had a good experience with flagging bad posts and users: about 3/4 of the time the accounts I report get suspended. I only go after the really nasty accounts, though.
I've started seeing that. There have been quite a lot of posts in the past two days that have been egregious (holocaust denial, threats, positive suicidal ideation, conspiracy theories).

They are all deleted quickly and flagged, but just yesterday I flagged 15 different posts from 3 different accounts that posted those sorts of messages or comments.
I've enjoyed reading Ben's content, as I slowly work towards building a computer of my own.

I managed to get an Arduino to drive a Z80, handling I/O and RAM access. The next step is the tricky one - working out how to design a board and wire everything up standalone. Still I'm in no particular rush, there are many single-board Z80 systems out there and mine will be nothing special if/when I actually get the design completed and assembled.
Well, sure, but they aren't usually presented as the default path for development, but rather as an option for per-instance customization.

But if you understood my point about developing new functionality this way, why the non sequitur regarding content?

Y'know what? Nevermind. We're on the same page now.
I bet they also have Facebook accounts though. I bet they even have Gmail. They might even have Amazon and Ebay accounts.
we already knew it didn’t work considering Putin imprisoned the richest man in russia and nationalized his oil company.

don’t think the US acrually expected the oligarchs to overthrow china as they are in bed with the ccp.
Ah, of course you're right. I added that line as a bit of an afterthought and meant for it to be atomic, but of course it isn't. Unthinking parallelism is pitch black, and you are likely to be eaten by a grue.
You are twisting words. Zuckerberg said he had no knowledge of a tool called that but couldn't say for sure that it didn't exist since he doesn't always know the names of all the internal tools they have. The CEO of my company doesn't know the internal names for tons of stuff we do, this isn't surprising. Also it's not proven to exist.
> In general people should be aware of the risks of offsourcing to the cloud... especially when your business model is odious and immoral.

I could imagine a future where religion makes a massive resurgence and homosexuality is deemed "odious and immoral". So then Grindr and friends should all be able to be kicked off of their cloud hosting and forced to self-host... right?
No. Leftists love the argument of "they are private companies, they have the right to refuse customers". But Google and Apple are monopolies.

And AWS may not be a monopoly, but we know very well that if Parler moves to another big Cloud provider they will also cut them off. Sure, they can host their own servers. But it's anti-competitive practice, all the modern devops tooling that facilitates the work of engineers is based on knowing that you will use a cloud platform like AWS.

This debate is pretty puerile anyway, anyone with a brain knows that the gradually worsening censorship of Western countries is wrong and that it's becoming more and more totalitarian day by day.
If they're doing illegal things, an American court should decide that and shut them down with criminal charges. Otherwise, they shouldn't be shutdown. That's how it works in all democracies I know of.

Where are US opposition groups supposed to host their content now? Russia or China, the same way groups in those countries host their content in the US?
The story does confirm he wasn't there though, not sure if he had been released by then:

> Tarrio does not appear to have been present during the insurrection.
> If you’re a business, do you really want to be on a provider that can pull your card with little to no notice?

Yes, I do, because otherwise I'm gonna be on a blacklisted IP range because every spammer in the world signed up for the "you've got 30 days to do whatever you like every time you create a new account with a stolen credit card" hosting provider.
That's state only; in total it's ~20%.

That still hugely misses the point, because sentences are not equal. Violent offenders serve on average 4.7 years while drug offenders serve under 2 years.

~40% of people who are sent to state prison are sent with drugs as the most serious charge.

https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/tssp16.pdf
,, Some decentralized networks try to solve this problem with cryptocurrency schemes, but this means that anyone who wants to try out the network has to put their credit card information into a sketchy website and transfer money to a sketchy offshore bank account and do other sketchy cryptocurrency stuff.’’

This info looks outdated. Is Square really a sketchy website?

Bitcoin needs 10-15 more years to be adopted, but it will make content delivery for money easier after it’s adopted. Right now its adoption rate is too small to build a social network on top of it.
> "Doing so is the equivalent of pulling the plug on a hospital patient on life support. It will kill Parler’s business — at the very time it is set to skyrocket."

While I get what they're trying to say, this is a really odd metaphor for them to use.
At the end of the day, Biden is not the Democratic party as Trump is not the Republican party. He'll do what he wants and congress will do what they want and hopefully if any of it is too awful they'll stop each other and if they don't stop each other hopefully they'll get voted out sooner rather than later.
Do you know what a ISP is? Did you know that AT&T has a TOS?
> This mainly applies to US carriers (in the US and Latam), and there certainly are exceptions in Europe where EVERY cell phone is unlocked from day one, regardless of your contractual status.

I had no idea this was still a thing, it’s horrible. What mechanism is creating the current situation?
Phones are all unlocked here in New Zealand.
Things have changed in the last few days. I think what we're seeing is a form of information warfare specifically designed to trigger a strong response in people, either positive or negative.

Additional interesting things: the DOSing of Tor v3, suppression of all Trumpian sites, the blackout of Pakistan, the massive volatility of monero.
Asteroid Impact and Deflection Assessment
The fact that Gajim is the best desktop XMPP client says more about how bad desktop XMPP clients are than how good gajim is. Dino is just very recently getting good enough to use, but it seems like it will be too little, too late.

And that's without talking about the elephant in the room of iOS. 5 years ago my workplace moved from XMPP to mattermost. There was a list of features desired by people; 7/8 could have been solved by updating ejabberd and telling people to switch clients, but iOS support meant switching away.
Competent censorship does not cut the tongue. It limits and controls the communication. Twitter service is close to a public utility at this point, capability of any one ideological group to control it should be limited.
I feel like a piece is missing in the current Internet infrastructure although I have no idea what it is.

Consider this, WhatsApp stories are not much different than personal blog but putting up stories takes few clicks while self hosting is whole new endeavor. Ideally everyone should own a blog/self host. This would solve the issues with centralization.

The problem is hosting a blog and discovering it is still not as easy as creating WhatsApp/Insta stories. Nor the users are ready to pay the price for running that blog. Centralized services solve all these problems. If some platform ever solves issues with self hosting and makes it easy to self host for minimal cost, I think we will have changed the face of Internet forever.

tl;dr We haven't achieved the required level of software/hardware abstraction for everyone to self host
A person with so much to live for and so much to accomplish; I don't believe he took his own life.
I've been on the internet since it started and every forum I've been on has removed users and or posts for a wide range of reasons. Including just being rude, as hackernews does. So I don't really see this as any kind of "free fall". It is just the usual way of things.
A large part of Trump's message is that the election results are fraudulent, despite having no evidence to support that claim. Instead, he writes on social media to incite violence at our nation's capitol building... Now we are at risk of overturning an election based on a mere accusation - aren't we past the point where our president is willing to have a rational argument?
Glenn is either terrible at research or lying. https://twitter.com/azforeman/status/1348648808390008832?s=2...

Google “baked alaska parler”. It’s literally on the first page of results.
Sure, it is possible to find hols and abuse any platform. I am not good at writing, and I always hated the minimum pages limit on essays at schools, but now I think these limits are necessary to enforce thinking and providing more details into your argument. Twitter discourages that. High profile individuals can easily manipulate people and markets by saying a few words and leaving a lot of room for interpretation like Elon Musk recently suggesting that everyone should be using Signal without giving any context and specifying what that Signal was and caused an unrelated to the Signal chat app stock to jump 1000%.
There's an interesting problem here, though, which is why the US federal government is structured as it is: there are fewer people in, say, Utah than in California. And generally people in California may have different interests than those in Utah. But as citizens of the US, Utah(ians?) deserve representation at the national level, which they just wouldn't have in a first-past-the-post popular vote. A direct popular vote would always give the advantage to candidates who represent coastal and urban interests because that's where people are overwhelmingly concentrated, and this would leave rural voters disenfranchised.

It might be interesting to re-evaluate whether representation by geography still makes sense. I'm more partial to the parliamentary approach, where parties get representation proportional to votes cast for them, so this way there could be a "rural interests party" which rural voters could vote for and receive representation proportional to their population. This might also do an end-run around the mind-bogglingly corrupt practice of gerrymandering?
Whatever metric you need to hit to be linked to a group of people who rioted in the capitol building of a superpower state I presume.
ACLU has never let their personal political views affect their principles. As an example, ACLU defended Rush Limbaugh [1] when the state seized his medical records in a drug probe.

[1] https://www.foxnews.com/story/aclu-comes-to-rush-limbaughs-d...
he has always been like this. if it wasn't for Snowden choosing him because he liked his politics, nobody would care what Greenwald has to say.
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Either Greenwald is correct, or he isn't. His opinion on non-factual things should have no bearing on that.
Hunter Biden is under investigation.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/12/09/poli...

Update: replaced link with a more relevant one
Simply get something from fdroid.
> I want to be able to trust the "justice" system to allow people back into society when they're able to.

Where should people stay before then?
No. If there are valid reasons to block Parler they've been evident since its inception, and should have been acted on long ago. Blocking Parler right now is political expediency.
It's all fun and games until you try to overthrow the government.

Parler's entire business model was centered around Trump holding onto power, by any means necessary. This isn't a "free speech" issue. Don't promote violence, and don't try to incite insurrection and you'll be fine.
Most antidepressants actually have it right there on the tin as a potential side effect.

Paradoxically, starting an antidepressant regimen can increase the odds of suicide for some people. The mechanism seems to be something like "doesn't completely cure your depression, but makes you un-depressed enough to actually act on suicidal ideation."

This is why any competent psychiatrist will pair getting started on antidepressants with an increase in vigilance of the patient.