blacklight86

7 years agodiscuss

I switched to Brave a few months ago because I knew that Google would have done exactly a move like this. People should simply stop using Chrome because there's not a single good reason left to use it. Once upon a time it used to advertise its complete adherence to web standards, but nowadays it has now become the new IE when it comes to breaking them. And from now on it'll do everything not to harm Google's core business (i.e. ads revenue). And, unlike 10 years ago, there's plenty of comparable or better alternatives around.

blacklight86

7 years agodiscuss

It's quite curious that he didn't mention Rust as a possible alternative. Still fast compilation, still no forced OOP bloatware added, plus static memory management that prevents the issue with garbage collection that happens in Go.

blacklight86

7 years agodiscuss

Time to start avoiding any browser that limits the power of extensions.

Browsing the web today has become a dirty business, it's easy to be tracked, and users have the freaking right to defend their privacy when browsing, and to do it in whichever way they like.

I'm tired of these paternalistic and uningenuous claims from Google and Apple that sound like "but we do it for you, you know, adblockers really hurt the performance of your browser". Something hurts my browsing experience? Well, it should be my call whether the pros outsize the cons or not, it should my call whether to use it or not, not the browser's developer call. After all, the web browsing experience today is way more compromised because of the huge amount of third-party scripts that run on most of the pages, surely not by extensions, but browser producers don't seem to put the same emphasis on the need of reducing the use of third-party scripts and trackers.

To me decisions like blocking external web API calls in extensions just because "they may slow down your browser or put your security at risk" sound like if the Linux kernel suddenly decided to disable the support for network sockets because "you know, hackers might use them for backdoors, or you might end up connecting to an extremely slow server and hurt your experience": a complete nonsense bullshit.

Plus, browsers like Brave have recently proved, with its native content blocker developed in Rust, that it's still possible to use a traditional adblocker without compromising the browsing experience.

Time to uninstall Chrome. Time to uninstall Safari. Time to ditch away all the browsers that do their best to limit your freedom on how you surf the web. Extensions are among the foundations of a modern browser, and limiting their power to static lists of rules is an immoral decision that deserves a serious boycot act from users.

blacklight86

7 years agodiscuss

I know that the American legislation is quite laissez-faire when it comes to defamation than in other countries (Canada, the UK and most of the European countries). But it still exists and I believe that the 8chan case still violated what's the defamation/slander bar in the US. According to these guys http://kellywarnerlaw.com/us-defamation-laws/ there's defamation when the defendant:

Published or otherwise broadcast an unprivileged, false statement of fact about the plaintiff (true, many of the messages posted on the 8chan would talk about an invasion of Hispanic people who would mostly be into crime, something that can be disproved by just comparing Hispanic crime rates against those of white Americans).

Caused material harm to the plaintiff by publishing or broadcasting said false statement of fact (true, 30 casualties is a textbook definition of "material harm").

Acted either negligently or with actual malice (true, the negligent behaviour is especially evident on the 8chan side, which failed to apply simple moderation guidelines even when advised to do so).

blacklight86

7 years agodiscuss

What kind of free speech are we exactly advocating here? The freedom to spread cheap hate, fake news and bigotry against minorities? I'm sorry but moderating such offenses isn't a limitation to free speech. For the same reason why, if you start shouting nig or monkey to black people in a shopping mall, the police is likely to intervene and take you away - and I don't think that any sane person would argue that they're violating your freedom of speech. Popper taught us that we can't be tolerant towards intolerants, if we really want to protect our tolerant rule of law.

You can still have freedom of speech while implementing moderation to make sure that hate speech, bigotry and fake news don't spread - because if those things spread then they leak into the real world as death. 8chan has been shut down not only because it hosted hate communities, but because it refused to apply any moderation there.

However, the problem is not 8chan alone. It's good to shut down websites where hate speech proliferates without constraints, but a couple of days or weeks later new *chan websites are likely to pop up to replace them, or maybe they'd make a Telegram group. The root problem is Americans. And I'm honestly not sure of how to fix the problem with a whole population that has become so irrational, polarized, ignorant and sensitive to hate speech.

blacklight86

7 years agodiscuss

Those who backed the new copyright law claimed that it will guarantee a fair share of revenue to flow from the IT companies to the authors of intellectual property.

What they haven't realized is that paying authors a fair revenue when a copyrighted content is shared is still a problem below the horizon. Or, to be more precise, it's also a problem, and it requires a good degree of innovation (see micro-payments, content consumption tracking, Blockchain+smart contracts etc.) in order to be tackled.

But we haven't gotten there yet because the real problem is upstream: HOW do we recognize that some uploaded content is copyrighted in the first place, and who's the right copyright holder for that content?

How do we do it in a scalable way on platforms where thousands or millions of videos, images or posts are shared per day?

How to pinpoint the right copyright holders for a certain content, taking into account that the current situation is extremely fragmented to say the least, that there are multiple national societies for authors that have barely progressed technologically in the last decades (nor have been pushed to do so), that many of them haven't even digitized their own records, let alone provide a unique database where the information about their intellectual property can be publicly accessed?

And finally, how to find the right balance between blocking the unauthorized publication of copyrighted content and avoiding an over-zealous approach where companies start blocking legit content as well? (Hint: it's not by putting strict time constraints on taking content down and threatening huge fines on companies).

YouTube has already had for some years some content filtering algorithms that automatically block the upload of copyrighted material. It has taken years to build to a company with the size of Google. It required billions of videos to be collected and labelled, massive investments in manual reviewers and engineers, and it's still an algorithm that makes lots of mistakes. How do we expect a smaller start-up to successfully implement a better solution?

How could the EU regulators fail to see that this law will create more entrance barriers than those it promises to take down? Google, Facebook etc. have been fighting against this law because it's really bad for the internet in general, but they'll be the ones to benefit most from it. Sure, they'll have to pay a higher toll to make business in Europe, but it's guaranteed that they won't have many competitors. Because, unless the EU pushed for a more distributed and open access to intellectual property, they will be the only ones who can afford to build an infrastructure that really complies with the new regulation.

It's really a shame because the law could have been written in a way that would have really solved the problem without creating new ones. Even people like Tim-Berners Lee (the dude who created the web) and people at MIT, Stanford and Berkeley have raised their voice: the EU had the moral obligation to sit with them and listen to their concerns before going down its path, and it failed to do so.

There were tons of better ideas. Pushing the associations of authors and artists to digitize their information and make it available in open format. Make a shared database of copyrighted content. Expose an API that businesses can use, where you provide a snippet of some content or its hash digest and the system will tell you whether it contains any copyrighted material, and who are the authors. Set up a continental infrastructure for micro-payments to make sure that authors receive their fair share for each play or view, regardless of where the content is consumed. These are big things to build and no company is really incentivised to do it alone: that's when politics should step in and remove the blockers on the way. Unfortunately the EU this time has chosen the "we set the bar, we don't know if it's too high, and actually we don't even care, good luck you guys" approach without listening to anyone. And that's a huge shame on them.

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