The passive voice of "Facebook...has been assailed" is amusing given that the present publication has been the one leading the charge.
The central exhibit of this piece is an assertion is that a political ad should be censored by Facebook and others because it "falsely claimed [Biden] committed corrupt acts in Ukraine". It did not make such a claim. The ad, which was much harder to find than the dozens of articles declaring it "false", repeated a video statement by Biden that he used a US-backed loan deal to get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired, and it repeated a statement by the Ukrainian prosecutor claiming he was fired because he was investigating a company associated with Biden's son. But other sources assert that the US wanted the Ukrainian prosecutor fired because he was corrupt himself, or because he was getting in the way of other corruption probes.
This isn't libel, this isn't accusing someone of a crime, this didn't fabricate sources or quotes: it's just political innuendo. Demanding censorship of electoral material because it's tacky or slightly misleading by dubbing it "false propaganda" doesn't seem right.
I'd do the same, but this is just describing the choice of every worker in a free labor market. And almost nobody in the US has more labor market power than tech workers. Some people leave their jobs because their leadership is too Christian, or their boss is an adulterer, or whatever reason.
This seems like a knee-jerk backtrack that is a step or two too far. "Gitlab Inc is full of wishy-washy dudes and I think old people always drive slow." I guess I'm banned from paying for Gitlab now if anyone chooses to "assess" me, since I made derogatory statements about your community and encouraged discrimination, however trivial, against the elderly.
Any particular advertiser needs Youtube more than Youtube needs the advertiser. Youtube has a critical hold on the young adult market in particular. If Youtube just said, "if you don't like it, Pepsi, someone else can enjoy this ad space instead", what recourse would they have? In conclusion Youtube demonetizes because they want to and need an excuse.
I love Tor, but it's almost suspicious how fast it's become, like I'm wondering who's paying for all this bandwidth. Home, businesses, hotels, you name it, Tor Browser almost never takes more than 2x as long to load anything on the web as the raw connection does. I admit don't have an understanding of how Tor works mathematically. There are organizations funding Tor exits and relays (torservers.net, Emerald Onion, Tor Project itself) but has anyone added up the bandwidth they provide and compared it to the total?
>The boys were at the age when their sperm cells...were forming. The studies showed that overindulgence in food or exposure to toxins at this key developmental stage left a biological memory on sperm cells that could be passed on to future generations.
This is not exactly accurate, because sperm cells are constantly re-created. It would be more accurate to say that some sort of epigenetic mechanism, that authors of the linked study admit they are not sure about, during the time of initial spermatogenesis can affect future spermatogenesis and therefore future generations.
The implications of epigenetic inheritance research, including regarding the fetal environment, are pretty shocking. Endocrine disrupting chemicals, drugs, smoking, and obesity can hurt your grandchildren.
This is a measured and well-thought out response. I'm not really sure where the detractors of Github here think the "cancelling" should stop. Should everybody start building additional backdoors in their software that shuts it down if it detects some sort of "bad" thing is being created, or possibly hook it up to a Twitter feed and shut down if people are saying bad things about the software operator?
Github emphasized that they don't know what is being done with the on-premises, firewalled software they sold to ICE. What about the guy delivering pizza to ICE headquarters -- is he cancelled too? He doesn't know if the "must separate the children at the border" team or the "let's arrest the leaders of this slave trafficking ring" is eating the pizza.
At least to me, some of the other protests in regards to ICE have been even more obviously incoherent, like the demand for Wayfair to stop selling clean beds for detained people to sleep in.
Strong encryption may be unbreakable in a mathematical sense but encrypted communications are not unbreakable in practice. Key extraction through side channels or compromise of communications by physical surveillance or evil maid attacks is practical. It just can't be done to a billion people at the same time. Read here https://github.com/maqp/tfc/wiki/Threat-model for an overview of all the ways an all-out, unusually secure encryption system (encryption and decryption done on separate computers with data diodes, 100% reproducible build) can be broken.
It's likely that insurgents wouldn't be treated as irregulars or partisans under the Geneva Convention in any case, so the incentives to not just "blind away" with lasers would be more about personal reservations, retaliation, and PR.
I definitely support civilian ownership of self-defense robots. But for them to be affordable (or maybe even possible), there needs to be substantial production of non-defense humanoid robots like robot maids to build up the supply chain. Even then humanoid robots have a lot more moving parts so they'll never be as cheap as today's civilian drones.
The rise of killer death robots like Boston Dynamics definitely changes this dynamic. A handful of people in charge of the robots could order them to murder whomever with little oversight or room for ethical qualms on the part of the "soldiers".