jnky's comments

All contributors to open source are not created equal. It is different when a literal 3 trillion dollar company does it, thus demonstrating they were unworthy of the trust and goodwill put in them. They have the money, they have the cloud infrastructure, they are doing all kinds of scraping themselves.

Well it obviously mattered enough for the Founding Fathers of the US to enshrine freedom of speech in the Bill of Rights, and in the last 200-ish years it also mattered enough for US courts not to overturn or politicians of various parties to change it.

Now where I'm from (Germany), not just "hate speech" is against the law, but it's also unlawful to insult another person. It's complicated, but for the latter it's mostly sufficient that they feel insulted by what you said to them personally.

Now while I don't go around insulting people in person or on the Internet, I personally think - for instance - that it should be allowed to call a person an asshole, if they behave like an asshole. Yet, if I did that here, or even online to another German person, they could go to the police and press charges. If the public prosecutor is sufficiently bored, this very low barrier could also be used to dox me in an otherwise reasonably anonymous setting, since the resulting lawsuit could result in my data getting subpoenaed from, say, Twitter and my ISP. This has happened to other people here in the past.

Now while I'm neither in favor of either hate speech nor randomly and viciously insulting people online, I consider the law in Germany as outlined unreasonable in an online setting. I think freedom of speech is more important fundamentally than another person's right to not feel hurt, or for some powers that be to silence or punish me because I said something inconvenient that they merely claim to meet some of the criteria for speech that is restricted here.

Mind you, this is the case all the while freedom of speech is enshrined in the German constitution as well. But I think it is a pretty good example of why I think freedom of speech should not be curtailed just in the name of another person's feelings about said speech. Even if a person, as you do, doesn't see a direct and tangible benefit in allowing that kind of speech, I would argue that a larger fraction of people are against disallowing it, because of the indirect consequences and where that line of lawmaking leads.

Another thing to consider is this: Say you're modestly happy with the current government wherever you live, and you'd be happy for them to have an "easy" way to curtail freedom of speech. Would you also be happy for the opposing political side to do the same thing? What if some extremists came to power?

This kind of reasoning is why free speech absolutists are so staunchly defending freedom of speech, even if it may be inconvenient or insulting to themselves or others.

> Please help me understand what the difference is between, say, platforming racist harassment because of a "political commitment to free speech" and platforming racist harassment because you just kinda like racist harassment?

The difference is intent. Intent matters. Intent is the difference between murder and manslaughter, or between a conspiracy and mere speech.

I disagree that the "Do-Not-Track header is a perfect solution to this", because it implies that the default (i.e. the header being absent) should allow sites to track you. I (and apparently EU legislators) think opting in to privacy is wrong. You should have privacy by default. If anything, there should be a "Creepily-Track-My-Activity-Over-The-Entire-Internet" header, that, when present, allows tracking.

There also used to be another standard called "P3P" that tried to integrate privacy into browser UIs with a more or less standardized interface and that, too, failed. Among other reasons because companies wanting to track people subverted it.

I had a similar problem a while back where Google demanded a second authentication factor for an account that didn't have 2FA set. It asked for a previous password that the account must have had >10 years ago and I think the answer to a security question that I couldn't answer, because I always use cryptic responses to those and apparently didn't save this one way back when. My rationale was that I wouldn't need any of that, because I knew the account password so there would never be a need to go through account recovery.

Either way, I found a solution to that on one of those Google user support forums: I had to not try and log in to the account for approximately 40 days. After that, it'd let me log in with just the password again. This is apparently because Google keeps flagging the account of getting attacked and requiring a second authentication factor for some reason and the timer for that keeps getting reset after a failed challenge for one of the account recovery factors. After something between 30 and 40 days, I could log in to the account with just the password again.

> And while we're at it, standardizing on a browser-provided consent UI, instead of each site providing its own, with its own dark patterns. It's the same idea.

We've already been there and it was basically shelved because users were indifferent and companies wanted the data regardless.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P

Wouldn't Ireland be your best bet? It's close, English-speaking, culturally similar and some UK citizens are eligible for Irish citizens to boot.

Hasn't this been tried before? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P3P

People want Facebook to stop following people, especially those signed out or without an account to begin with, around the internet in a creepy way. How hard can it be really? Is it too much to ask that some company I don't have business with doesn't spy on my web surfing habits?

The announcement also reads to me as if the "clearing" doesn't even do what people may expect it to do:

> Once we roll out this update, you'll be able to see information about the apps and websites you've interacted with, and you'll be able to clear this information from your account.

This sounds to me as if they still keep the information and just don't associate it with your account anymore.

Is this a joke? The four color theorem is a proven theorem and not some crackpot theory.

https://i.imgur.com/m3Ruasq.png

You can change the folder names after the fact. It is annoying, though.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/2826855

I don't know how precise the ad targeting exactly, but what if you narrow the base group down to your 19 fake accounts and your target user.

If you could the further filter your ad based on gender (as mentioned above), personal interests or other private data, you may be able to use your ad impressions to figure out things about an unsuspecting person.

I'd consider that a huge breach of my privacy.

Or you can download an emulator and a rar with all 721 SNES games for free.

> I assume that you think that Amazon would be clearing parts of the African Serengeti and protecting it's racks from lions, wildebeest and tribesmen.

And I assume you think of me as some kind of idiot. Of course I understand that Kenya is not as you just said, but I consider Kenya an underdeveloped country that does not have its act together. I really don't see how you can argue against that based on facts.

I agree with everything you said in principle, but I disagree with your conclusion.

I don't have to cherry pick facts to make Kenya look bad, I just picked a bunch of pretty bad ones about Kenya to illustrate my point.

I also find it telling that, instead of cherry picking positive things about Kenya to disprove my point, posters in this thread resorted Whataboutisms with respect to the US.

I really don't like being in this thread, arguing viewpoints that I myself consider borderline bigotry, but the notion that Kenya is somehow on par with the US or even any other developed nation is preposterous.

> I don't have to experience something to know anything about it. I'll make my opinion from a far from statistics that have no correlation to whether a datacenter could actually thrive in Kenya.

First of all, I reject the notion that only first hand experiences are a valid way of forming opinions. In fact I would argue that statistics and facts are better than feelings and impressions for making business decisions in basically every single way.

Second, I never said a datacenter wouldn't thrive in Kenya. It probably would, as Afrika is in dire need of a datacenter, which is the context of this thread. That said, I wouldn't build a datacenter in Kenya, because I - in contrast to your assertion that Kenya isn't "the backwoods that the west thinks it is" - think that the facts conclusively prove that Kenya is, in fact, a shithole.

Other countries (like America) may have their problems, but not at this scale and severity.

Of course I haven't. But I was quite sure that you would say something along those lines. I think that if I went to Kenya, I would have a great time, see friendly people and come to the conclusion that the country has potential and is on the right track.

That may all well be true, but it doesn't change the fact that Kenya - as it is now - is not a country I would build a datacenter in. I don't have to go to Kenya myself to know if it is a backwards country or not. The facts are the facts.

I find that hard to believe. Wikipedia says its HDI is 0.555, placing it at 146 of 188. Wikipedia also says that 6.3% of the adult population have HIV, while female genital mutilation has a prevalence of 27%. Also some women are seemingly attacked and sometimes killed for witchcraft.

I understand there are worse places in Afrika, but for me that makes Kenya a proper shithole.

I don't think that works. As per https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=624128... Widevine is bundled and setting this policy just disables the updates. Also it seems that this setting disables updates for all components, most notably Flash. While I don't want Widevine (enabled) on my machine at all, I do want Flash updated automatically for the rare times I have to use it.