Trump

[merman]

Here's the thing.

Postal ballots in the US are very fair. In fact they have a much lower rate of fraud than the UK and several other European democracies.

You have to go back to 2000 for the biggest ever anomaly in US postal ballots.
When several thousand absentee ballots from US military personnel filed AFTER the postal deadline were allowed to stand, giving a certain George W Bush extra votes in key states including Florida...

[Rubisco]

Here's the thing.

Postal ballots in the US are very fair. In fact they have a much lower rate of fraud than the UK and several other European democracies.

You have to go back to 2000 for the biggest ever anomaly in US postal ballots.
When several thousand absentee ballots from US military personnel filed AFTER the postal deadline were allowed to stand, giving a certain George W Bush extra votes in key states including Florida...

You're right of course. And you have the right to say so. And so does the media.

Because you are accountable for what you say. Newspapers are accountable for what they print. TV stations are accountable for what they broadcast. You have editorial control.

Social media companies have been afforded protections under law against being held accountable for what people publish on their platforms, on the basis that they do not exercise editorial control. They want to have editorial control without accountability, to have their cake and eat it.

It's disconcerting seeing left wingers cheering on a corporate power grab.

[tufty]

Social media companies have been afforded protections under law against being held accountable for what people publish on their platforms, on the basis that they do not exercise editorial control. They want to have editorial control without accountability, to have their cake and eat it.

Like it or not, it's what affords protection to the likes of yakyak as well; without that legal protection this place couldn't exist. Because as soon as someone said something that someone sufficiently rich didn't like, regardless of the truth of that statement, a high-cost lawsuit would sink the place.

[gilesgoat]

Social media companies have been afforded protections under law against being held accountable for what people publish on their platforms, on the basis that they do not exercise editorial control. They want to have editorial control without accountability, to have their cake and eat it.

Like it or not, it's what affords protection to the likes of yakyak as well; without that legal protection this place couldn't exist. Because as soon as someone said something that someone sufficiently rich didn't like, regardless of the truth of that statement, a high-cost lawsuit would sink the place.

You mean that basically no forum/media in the world could ever exist ( nor freedom of speech ) then ?

[tufty]

You mean that basically no forum/media in the world could ever exist ( nor freedom of speech ) then ?

Without that protection, that's pretty much it, yeah.

Look at the concept of "superinjunctions" and "SLAPP suits". "Freedom of speech" only exists as long as you're not annoying the rich and powerful.

Here's John Oliver on SLAPP

[gilesgoat]

You mean that basically no forum/media in the world could ever exist ( nor freedom of speech ) then ?

Without that protection, that's pretty much it, yeah.

Look at the concept of "superinjunctions" and "SLAPP suits". "Freedom of speech" only exists as long as you're not annoying the rich and powerful.

Here's John Oliver on SLAPP

*SNIP*

What is really "so weird" is that at least "in the past" some politicians were clever enough to still "do whatever they wanted" but at least keeping "a respectable appearence" and still being able to keep "a decent image" of themselves and what they should represent.

For example "even if the effect could be the same" you DO NOT say "that person is a moron" .. you say "that person is someone I have different points of view about what he says" or "we'll start shooting at .." .. you say "we'll take necessary measures to solve the problem" or "that person is a thief" .. you'd replace it with something like "I am not so sure about the way he operates" ..

You should not turn "politics" into "drunken pub talk" or "shitfest throwing insults".

Anyway yeah "freedom" .. in general .. always been like "as long as it does not hurts the one with the powers to make you stop whatever you are doing that they think hurts them".

But nowdays a lot of politicians look like "I am in power I can do whatever the fuck I want anyone else that does not agree with me is a piece of crap and/or an enemy I'll crush you".

But MOSTLY "despite all they try to say" they are NOT convincing at all that "they work for the people" but rather "for their personal agenda".

And then even when "they work for the people" they seems to go for "whatever people would vote most for" even if that is "technically wrong / not the best thing to be done".

But yeah .. overall "politics is now something really NOT nice to listen/look/talk at" I truly rate is as "one of the most depressing things of this century".

And "social" is starting to get there as well.

[Deckard]

Good article on the new york times today - talking about trolls and Trump

I recently called Matt Haughey, the founder of one of my favorite early 2000s forums, MetaFilter. Having spent years overseeing a spirited online community, Mr. Haughey is a veteran observer and referee of message board drama. He said that Mr. Trump’s crusade against Twitter felt familiar.
“Every bad thing at MetaFilter happened with someone who had been testing the rules for a year or two,” he said. “Those are the ones who tend to blossom into super-trolls over time. They’ll see what they can get away with, they’ll figure out what the limits are, and just stay a step inside. It can go on forever. And when you inevitably break and say, this is a bad idea, they freak out, and try to play the victim.”
The stakes of Mr. Trump’s war on social media companies are significantly higher than the stakes of a random internet message board dispute. But the platforms can learn from their predecessors that some users do not want to compromise or be reasoned with. Their goal is power, not fairness. And if the mods are afraid to hold them accountable when they break the rules, they will keep pushing the limits again and again — until ultimately, the board is theirs to run.

[Harlequin]

What is really "so weird" is that at least "in the past" some politicians were clever enough to still "do whatever they wanted" but at least keeping "a respectable appearence" and still being able to keep "a decent image" of themselves and what they should represent.
…
You should not turn "politics" into "drunken pub talk" or "shitfest throwing insults".

There have been a few totalitarian leaders who have given zero shits for tact or diplomacy but I think the recent growth of such behaviour within (at least nominal) democracies can probably be traced to the subject of this thread. Many people seem to associate unrestrained rudeness with "telling it like it is" and thus consider the speaker to be "one of us" in contrast with the careful wording of the "elite political class". This despite, of course, the demagogues usually being obscenely rich and socially powerful.

And "social" is starting to get there as well.

Largely due, I suspect, to Russian manipulation building upon the Don Tramp effect. Although it did start a while before Tramp was officially elected.

[KlaxonCow]

Social media companies have been afforded protections under law against being held accountable for what people publish on their platforms, on the basis that they do not exercise editorial control. They want to have editorial control without accountability, to have their cake and eat it.

Actually, they absolutely don't want that at all.

For the longest time, Twitter / Facebook / YouTube exercised as close to zero editorial control as the law would possibly allow. They don't want to have to spend money in order to lose their liability protections. They don't want to be an unofficial, unpaid cyber-police force on behalf of the world's governments.

That's why when Theresa May and Amber Rudd, as Home Secretaries, complained about Apple using end-to-end encryption, this was farcical irony, because the basic reason why Apple and others have moved in that direction in the first place, is because of government demands on them and NSA / GCHQ mass-surveillance. They caused this to happen - and then moan about the "unintended consequences" that they created.

Simply, governments around the world were coming to Apple and demanding they break the encryption on iPhones. Here, Apple, here's a thousand phones for you to break open. We'll be back next week with another thousand phones.

Apple is just expected to pay out of its own pocket to set up some "phone cracking" department on behalf of an overreaching government that, again and again, thinks it owns everyone's data.

So the simple way out of this is end-to-end encryption. The encryption happens on the ends of the connection, so that it's already encrypted before Apple ever touches it. They can't break open the encryption, because they just as equally have no idea what the keys used were, than any government agency.

So, like, stop bringing thousands of phones to us to crack, governments. We can't do it anymore than you can. Go away.

YouTube initially had little copyright infringement mechanisms. They gave zero shits. But then Google bought them and then Viacom attempted to sue YouTube for a billion dollars. Music publishers also kicked up a storm.

And that's when YouTube introduced their "ContentID" system. Upload copyrighted material and their servers will create a "digital fingerprint" of your content and then try to pick up any copyright infringement by matching the "fingerprints" of all content uploaded to the platform.

These systems ain't cheap. They would adore not having to arbitrate any of this shit. But the law compels them, massive lawsuits from big corporations compels them.

(YouTube has always had a pornography filter from the off. That's the only self-imposed editorial control they chose to place on themselves - and, even then, it's still a legal / commercial thing. Because there are additional laws over pornographic content - age restrictions, bans on particular types of porn, etc. - and if you're aiming to be universal and "family friendly" then you can't afford to have children's cartoons and political discussions one click away from "Debbie does double penetration", and then encouraging advertisers to be happy that their product pre-roll that sort of video. So, yes, that one was a self-imposed filter. But it's not about "controlling the narrative", it's about making the site as commercially viable as possible.)

The grand irony here is that Facebook and Twitter had no "fake news" warnings until, well, Trump coined the term "fake news" in the first place. Until the political sphere imposed it upon them, demanding that it does something about "fake news" and Russia manipulation of elections.

I'm no fan of Facebook. I consider them an evil, from their various policies to refuse to delete data and the fact that they are, fundamentally, a social pyramid scheme and if they actually charged for membership then they'd actually be technically illegal in many countries for that. They get away with it only because it's a data pyramid scheme, not a "give me $5 and send this out to 10 people, who'll also give me $5 each too" monetary pyramid scheme.

But, in fairness, the Cambridge Analytica scandal came about because Facebook were trying to be more open and "Web 2.0", providing APIs for programmers to access data, in the hopes that this would generate new innovative applications. Well, yeah, that happened - but not in the optimistic way they'd hoped for. The APIs were used to scrape mass data into the hands of "dark actors" who data mined it for political advantage.

YouTube was made to implement "ContentID" by law and lawsuits. Twitter and Facebook and YouTube have been politically pressured to add the "fake news" warnings, as politicians lamented that these platforms weren't doing enough. Note that all these platforms, even in complying to these political demands, have been as "soft touch" as possible - they add fact-checking "fake news" warnings, but the content itself stays up.

A big fuss is kicked up when, pressurised to do so, Twitter and Facebook and YouTube banned controversial figures like Alex Jones or David Icke from their platforms. But, like, those people have - until that point - been fully able to make use of those platforms for well over a decade.

They're only complying with these things - demanded by the politicians - to avoid the lawsuits, to avoid the laws being changed, to avoid advertisers abandoning the platform due to the poor PR of having their ads pre-roll in front of David Icke saying 5G causes Covid, etc.

They don't want editorial control. They've been repeatedly pressurised into doing this by politicians, who've been constantly trying to recruit the big tech companies as an unpaid, unofficial private police force to "control the message" on their behalf.

I empathise with their position because, on a small scale, I've had to make a similar decision myself. At work, we supply cloud storage for businesses and individuals. I run that side of things. And I had the choice - do I encrypt the disks? The software we use provides end-to-end encryption. Do I turn it on?

If I leave it off and then I see a filename like, ooh, "Taylor Swift - Shake It Off.mp3" on our disks, then I'm now potentially liable for knowingly leaving copyright infringement on our platform. If the police come knocking on our door, then I'd be legally obliged to hand over various data. Do I want the immense hassle of trying to install Yahoo's open-source "NSFW" filter software to verify everything? We're a small operation, I cannot do anything like this - or "ContentID" - to automatically scan all files on my own, and it's good of Yahoo that they actually open-sourced their filters to allow them to be used more widely.

And I don't want to be an unpaid, untrained "secret police force". That's not my job. That should not be forced upon me as my job, not unless the taxpayer is willing to pay for setting a department for this and paying / providing the necessary training. And, on moral principle, governments should not be setting up private police forces around the edge of the law, they should be, you know, funding the actual police force - with its legal and constitutional protections - to have more police officers and better equipment to do this job, as a taxpayer-funded public service.

With the correct legal oversights, with suitable training, with the necessary psychological support and, yes, they should pay for all this, to make sure that it gets done properly and legally.

If I leave the encryption off, then I'm vulnerable to all this and legal liabilities and everything. But if I turn it on, then I can't decrypt the files. Not my problem. Get GCHQ and the police to do their jobs, under legal oversight with legal accountability and the full expertise and training to do it properly, and stop trying to enrol platforms as your own personal, private, untrained, unfunded police force in the shadowy background.

I get exactly why Apple turned on end-to-end encryption. Same reason I did it.

Since Snowdon, we all know how badly behaved governments actually are on the Internet. For pity's sake, the very person who coined the term "fake news" was Trump himself!! Even though he's proved to be one of the biggest generators of "fake news", it was his whinging and moaning - and other politicians, on the left and right, worried about Russian manipulation that helped Trump to win (!), if it really did occur - that nagged all these "fake news" warnings onto these sites in the first place.

They don't want the cake. Please, take the cake away. Stop foisting cakes on us. We know that your cakes are a lie. We don't want anything to do with your cakes.

But the politicians - and the advertisers, through political scandals - have been pressurising all these system of editorial control and demanding that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube be accountable for what's on their platforms.

They don't want this shit. It costs money. It wastes time. Like Apple, they fear that if they happily crack open an iPhone for a legitimate police operation, then the police will show up with bags full of iPhones every single day and ask them to, on their own time and money, act as a private secret branch of the police force. To act as the "political correctness police" for left-wing causes. To legally oblige them to do the police's job, but without paying for it or training anyone.

(And, you know, when the police have to do the shitty jobs - looking through material to find child porn or beheading videos - they have rules and regulations to protect their employee's mental health. They have psychological support. They have rules for how long you can do it and how many times you can do it, and do the job in shifts, to minimise exposure to all the supremely fucked up content they have to search for.

Honestly, it's not just that it's legally dodgy as fuck to have private companies be obliged, politically, to do this shit "on the cheap" for governments that are, at the same time, cutting police number and police funding - and we should all be wary of any of this turning into "secret private police forces" for political regimes, which are constitutionally illegal in most countries for damned good reason - but it's just that this "cyber policing on the cheap" means it's going to be done very badly. Apple and Facebook and Google should not be doing these policing jobs, because they're not trained police officers. They should not be being forced to be "judge, jury and executioner" in political disputes, under the pressure of the current political regimes in charge, because those decisions will be increasingly wrong and increasingly corrupt, when there's zero legal oversight on any of this, as it's happening in private and "off the books". Their employees should not be being made to crawl through hours of pornography, looking for children, without any psychological support to back that up.

I call "bullshit".

These platforms don't want the cost and effort of "controlling the narrative". They want to remain happily as "platform" and not "publisher", to enjoy no liability for what others do on their platforms. They had resisted, again and again, to police the Internet under political pressure. They've all gone down the "HTTPS everywhere" route because the NSA / GCHQ were secretly performing mass-surveillance on absolutely everyone all the time. They've gone down the end-to-end encryption route, so that governments can't force them to police the data - they have abandoned their own ability to access the data completely, so that they can't decrypt it themselves, so they can't be forced by governments to do all this policing work, on their own coin and their own clock.

Sometimes the only way you conquer the pull of power is to set it down.

[F-ZeroOne]

Cat, meet pigeons:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-52846679

[KlaxonCow]

Just to temporarily dip back into the renewables thing, I finally found the video I remember watching ages back. I wanted to post it, but couldn't find it.

Basically, a parabolic mirror that, concentrating all that sunlight to a single focal point is capable of instantly setting fire to wood, melting steel and can also melt rock:



As they mentioned, there is, in fact, no known material that can withstand the heat. This can burn anything, and it's only 2 metres square of sunlight - but all focused to a single point.

Just wanted to add this, as I feel people - taking the Sun for granted - often fail to appreciate just how much energy that thing is throwing at us. Almost a 100 million miles away but yet it'll still happily burn your retinas out and make you blind, if you stare at it directly. Almost 100 million miles away and you can still feel its warmth on the back of your neck on a cold Spring morning.

Again, the Sun delivers more energy to the surface of the Earth in a day than all of humanity uses in a year.

Because we're so used to the Sun and perhaps take it for granted, without giving it a second thought, it's easy not to realise just how ridiculously powerful that massive fusion reactor actually is - even being almost 100 million miles away, with the inverse square law in operation. It ultimately powers everything, really, as the energy in coal, oil and natural gas came originally from plants photosynthesising sunlight.

Basically, the Earth average is roughly 1kWh-ish per metre squared.

[merman]

Here's the thing.

Postal ballots in the US are very fair. In fact they have a much lower rate of fraud than the UK and several other European democracies.

You have to go back to 2000 for the biggest ever anomaly in US postal ballots.
When several thousand absentee ballots from US military personnel filed AFTER the postal deadline were allowed to stand, giving a certain George W Bush extra votes in key states including Florida...

You're right of course. And you have the right to say so. And so does the media.

Because you are accountable for what you say. Newspapers are accountable for what they print. TV stations are accountable for what they broadcast. You have editorial control.

Social media companies have been afforded protections under law against being held accountable for what people publish on their platforms, on the basis that they do not exercise editorial control. They want to have editorial control without accountability, to have their cake and eat it.

It's disconcerting seeing left wingers cheering on a corporate power grab.

1. I never mentioned social media. I mentioned the fact that there has not been major fraud involving postal ballots at US elections.

2. Twitter are being socially responsible by fact-checking the President. Trump is not socially responsible at all. Compare and contrast with Facebook/Mark Zuckerberg's contention that it is not Facebook's responsibility to fact-check.

3. Social media crosses borders, as does the Internet. Who regulates it? Does one country have the right to impose different rules on it?

4. Trump's Executive Order/tantrum might actually be against the US Constitution. Would you rather I cheer for that?

[Rubisco]

They don't want editorial control. They've been repeatedly pressurised into doing this by politicians, who've been constantly trying to recruit the big tech companies as an unpaid, unofficial private police force to "control the message" on their behalf.

Pressurised by which politicians? Certainly not by America's most powerful politician. Quite the opposite.

Seems like they are picking and choosing which pressure they want to cave to.

[rowan]

Just read he's having a minor meltdown or something, quitting WHO & lashing out.
Strange guy.

[p-saurus]

Just read he's having a minor meltdown or something, quitting WHO & lashing out.
Strange guy.

He's trying to divert attention from his handling of the Coronavirus pandemic, the fact that the economy has crumbled due to his botched response to it, and his call for violence against protesters who are rising up against more than 400 years of deep systemic oppression. This sort of stuff is red meat for his brain-dead right wing political base.