I thought The Guardian was against fascism, yet here they are pushing for corporations to act like the police. Or even more like the police, beyond keeping IP logs, message histories, transaction histories, and employing 15,000 workers to monitor their users.
Does it in fact "rely" on it, or does that merely expand its scope? Even if its claims of what is "derivative" were diminished to exclude linking/API calls, the GPL would survive, albeit as slightly less viral.
Being mad about this is like being mad the thief who stole your belongings then pawned them. The crime was spying on you in the first place. Automakers should not have any data, to share or sell or give to law enforcement with a subpoena.
Yes it is a broad thing, and yes government and private censorship are not the same, but they are both censorship, at least according to the wikipedia and ACLU definitions [1,2].
And given the volume of posts censored and users banned by social media, where most public debate happens these days, most censorship is now by private companies.
> our censorship (if we're really going to call it that)
With the possible exception of spam filtering, yes, we should call it that. I'm sure I would agree with many of those censorship decisions, such as e.g. YCombinators decision to censor things harming intellectual curiosity, but just because we agree with some censorship, doesn't make it not censorship. It's important to keep language free of little lies like using milder terms when we want to present something in a better light, because these little lies add up and become habits of both speech and thought.
Title is misleading - users can pick additional filters, but can't opt out of any of Bluesky's own censorship without going to a third-party server entirely.
You can also create violent and copyrighted images in MS Paint. Why should our tools police us? And what is the alternative - teach AI to perform a fair-use test on any output that touches copyrighted material?
> cultivating the mentality that lying in the trenches for your country/culture/values might be necessary.
That would mean cultivating the mentality that a country is more than just an economic platform, because that's not something anyone is willing to die for. It means cultivating the dreaded nationalism.
> There's other ways to find websites, like HN and word-of-mouth;
The problem is that, to get traffic to your site (i.e. have your speech heard), it doesn't help if you use these other ways to find websites. You need others to use these ways. And 99% of them won't. I'm all for advocating widespread change of these habits, but that's a society-wide effort, not something a single website can do, much less one de-listed by Google.
> hilarious because unlike the social media case, I dont think these faux pauxs have important real world consequences
Which is exactly why people mock this being referred to as "safety". Keep in mind the group mocking this PR bubble-wrapping of AI is largely opposed to the media professionals writing panicked editorials about how they were able to trick an AI into saying racism is good.
I have an idea - why doesn't Nevada install a bug on every minor's device, achieving the same effect, without Facebook's cooperation?
I know why! Because then the surveillance, privacy infringement, and gross overreach are obvious and in your face, and the culprit is clear! But they want to keep it discreet, like it's just a happy accident that you have no privacy left.
Putting aside how easy it is to compensate for this (e.g. report gunshots per area under surveillance), I'm curious how much crime estimates based on ShotSpotter or general policing differ from the frequency with which dead bodies are produced by an area. This latter measure mostly immune to overpolicing bias.
Hilariously, legally, software seems to be unpatentable in both the US [1] and EU [2]. Yet those laws are routinely ignored, and we continue to be plagued by software patents.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_patents_under_the_Eur... - The wiki states that because of the "as such" clause, the exclusion of software patents does not apply to software that does anything inventive or solves a technical problem. But those are already requirements of patentability for anything, software or not. In other words, this interpretation of "as such" renders that entire clause totally meaningless - it could be struck entirely from the law, and software would be no more or less patentable. Clearly such a reading is absurd, and only shows the willingness of courts to ignore law for business interests.
Let me describe exactly how you are defending them then, if you really think you aren't:
"this same expectation in the Apple ecosystem is why I've received single digit spam from their messaging services" implies it can be justified as an anti-spam measure that open services can't match. But I've received also single-digit spam (cumulative over multiple years, not per year) on the WhatsApp running on my rooted Android. Nor would this even hypothetically stop non-RCS spam.
In general, companies always have some convenient excuse to cover their user-hostile moves. HP bricked printers using 3rd party ink for "security". Uncritically believing them, or even inventing excuses for them, is defending them.
"if they don't want rooted phones to use their RCS gateway I don't think they should be forced to allow it" - so we've established these companies are actively hostile to your freedom to use your property as you wish. But you are willing to disregard any monopoly/market-power abuse concerns, and grant them the freedom that they deny you (you used "should", so I assume you're not giving a mere factual description of what you think the law is). Just like letting Bell charge extra for using competitor's equipment [1] has ill effects on the market (try selling a phone when all your customers will have to pay an extra monthly fee to Bell for using it) and was rightly banned, so does letting the Google/Apple duopoly control smartphone software. Saying they should be allowed to continue to abuse and expand their market power is a defense of these companies, or rather, is a defense specifically of their anti-competitive and user-hostile practices.
The difference between a "defense" that merely seeks to correct facts, and one that justifies behavior, can be subtle (e.g. "this is necessary to fight spam" vs. "this was done to fight spam" vs. "there was no other way to fight spam"), but I think your phrasing put you in the latter category.
Edit as reply: "I think" and "I believe" do not meaningfully change your position. "I think action X is justified because of Y" and "Action X is justified because of Y" only differ in implied certainty, not in quality.