1. WL disclosed information to US population.
2. WL is accused of being "Non-state Hostile Intelligence Service".
3. Hostile intelligence services work for enemies.
4. US population is the enemy.
To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, "Fake News is the Last Refuge of the Scoundrel".
The "fake news" meme itself is the last desperate attempt to preserve the fake news monopoly which giant publishers enjoyed for so long. There is really nothing left when this one wears out.
Before "fake news" we had massive injections of noise to drown out information, but that didn't work quite well, not in the long run.
The current trend of turning giant social platforms to Disney-like dystopias is not working well either. People are flocking back to ... web sites!
So what can we expect after "fake news" ? Probably Disneyfication of DNS, and that's where it ends.
Because audiences will shift to the lowest commeon denominator - IP addressing, as they did in the beginning (Napster, Gnutella) and still do (Bittorent, Tor).
It is far from 'clear' or 'obvious' that the Directive is a bad deal for content producers. Read it yourself - especially Articles 11 and 13.
The narrative funded through GOOGL (and its affiliate EFF) and other big platforms is that this is evil doing of big content distribution monopolies.
What is missing in this picture is that this Directive gives affordable enforcement muscle to all content producers, including the smallest ones.
This Directive is the death knell for these platforms, which peddle content produced by 'nobodies' (their users) without any remuneration. There is nothing natural, just or given about it.
What is the most optimistic benefit of a driverless car?
If we put aside creation of unemployment, putting limits on what human drivers will be able to do, and similar dystopian outlooks, what are the benefits for the masses?
People who cannot drive will be able to use cars as people who can. Is this good? Are interesting places on the planet going to have the same fate as Internet did, when it transformed from elite audiences in 90s to tragedy of commons today?
It's becoming obvious that well-off 'progressives' strive to crown their status with the ultimate pet: human beings in need. Horses are not so in vogue any more.
Like all pets, they are to be kept in the appropriate place, like horses that is. Not in the living room.
The ideological control - via identity politics and associated infantile concepts of safe spaces, trigger words and the 'right not to be offended' - has finally landed on the mainstream open source software development, after preparatory excursions into gaming, Tor and few other 'fringish' niches.
This ideological carpet bombing was neccessary because there is no other way to control the open source community - there is no simple corporate hierarchy and money by itself is too slow and doesn't always work.
It serves the purpose - the servility is rewarded, and the opposition is punished. The end result is more pliable "open source workforce" - yes, there is such a thing, and the assurance that it will not engage in controversial developments, for the simple reason that personal servility to political correctness is highly correlated to personal servility to the prevailing power.
In this particular case, it is about Orwellian purging of the inconvenient history. This comment was document of its time, several decades ago. Software has history. Everything humans do has history. The abort() itself is a history, as someone thought of it few decades ago. Are they going to change it to freedom() now? Why do manual pages have to look 'nice' to victims of arrested development?
I cannot begin to understand how is it better to reveal your DNS access patterns to the global company like Cloudflare, as opposed to revealing them to your local ISP?
Who do you think can smoother monetize your data - your local ISP or Cloudflare? Or maybe Cloudflare solemnly promised never to do it?
If an effort is to be taken, the best thing is to run your own DNS resolver that will query root servers and follow the chains directly.
The scariest part is un-adult emotional environment, where employees (people hired at-will to work) refer to other employees as "brothers and sisters".
This looks more like _Lord of the Flies_ setup than like for-profit company workforce that sells 8 hours of its time in return for paycheck, with some reasonable socializing at work.
This seems to be the trend, and is by no means limited to Facebook. Providing socializing benefits (food, playground, etc.) and requiring emotional committment at work is far more sinister than it appears.
While keeping employees emotionally arrested at 12-year-old stage may extract extra sweat, the overall downside for the society is abysmal.
These topics all have overwhelming support in local media, PR and marketing copy, in other words in the official ideology.
The actual people are not much different than anywhere else in the US. But they quickly learn to provide lip service to the official ideology, especially when seeking employment or acceptance in social media-mediated groups (and there are very few that are not.)
The real problem with computer techies is that they tend to be more sycophantic to the prevailing power than other profesions.
There is a linguistic sleight of hand at work here: 'libertarian' and 'left' is not what is happening in SV. These terms have been hijacked by the identity politics cartel.
The SV political and ideological climate is all about pidgeonholing you into 0.01-0.3% segment ('left-handed bisexual javascript expert'), then maintaining these segments and manipulating the fractured society into neoliberal directions.
It is obvious that there is nothing that can be named as a common interest in SV: there is no such discourse. The commonality is restricted to your 0.01-0.3% segment.
There will likely be shift in the liability approach, and drivers will be made liable for accidents caused by inadequate technology.
This approach worked well (for some parties) in many other areas, for example in education: now the teachers are the only ones left responsible for the structuraly failing education system.
Now, if these were 1930s, with hundreds of independent auto makers, perhaps the invisible hand of the market would fix this.
Sadly, exactly 50% of engineers are below average, so hiring the best all the time is unsustainable. Thinking that you hired the best, however, is sustainable.
The art of managing relies on the capability to get work done by all kinds of engineers. The talent is rarely universally allocated. Some very 'bright' ones will never properly finish the work. Some 'slow' engineers may have remarkable attention to details.
The event where one line of buggy code ('==' instead of '<=') creates global consequences, affecting millions, is great illustration of the perils of monoculture.
And monoculture is the elephant in the room most pretend not to see. The current engineering ideology (it is ideology, not technology) of sycophancy towards big and rich companies, and popular software stacks, is sickening.
1. WL disclosed information to US population. 2. WL is accused of being "Non-state Hostile Intelligence Service". 3. Hostile intelligence services work for enemies. 4. US population is the enemy.