The responses to this issue appear to fall into two groups: The first group doesn't care, and the second group is apoplectic but is unable (or unwilling) to explain why.
>Should we assume any competent government like China (through it's Great Firewall) has gained access to a large pool of secret keys used on the internet? The potential that they have known about the exploit for 2 years it is without doubt that they could have captured any secret key they wanted.
There are so many things wrong with these two sentences I can't decide where to start.
Maybe a good launching point is the fact that it's never outlined why China or literally anybody else has any "secret keys". In the next sentence there's a reference to "the exploit," but obviously we could be talking about any exploit. Are we talking about any exploit? Who decides what exploit we're discussing? Do I get to pick my favorite?
>competent government like China
Why a government? Why not anybody else?
>(through it's Great Firewall)
In English, this bit expands to "(through it is Great Firewall)" or possibly "(through it has Great Firewall)", which are not real sentence fragments that mean anything. If we assume, for the sake of brevity, that our author meant to use "its" instead, the sentence is now grammatically stable but still doesn't mean anything to the reader. Why is the "Great Firewall" relevant?
Horvath isn't so much protecting her image as she is heaping dirt upon it. She's allegedly harassed in the workplace, and the first place she goes to is Twitter? Nowhere in the flowchart of "how to deal with workplace issues" will you find a square that says "whine on Twitter." "Blog about it" is also conspicuously absent.
I'm having a little difficulty taking seriously any points that are punctuated with smiley faces. If I'd realized that Ph.D. discussions about the tech industries would take the same form as AIM discussions from when I was in middle school, I might have made a different decision about higher education.
This is a bold claim that goes unsupported by the article linked.
The closest we get is a quote from an Irish Times article:
"The YouTube permissions that Google has given the Home Office in recent weeks include the power to flag swaths of content “at scale” instead of only picking out individual videos."
I'm not sure what "at scale" means in this context, but it sounds substantially different than "automated censorship." I see no indication that any automation will occur. Frankly, the article linked has a perfectly fine headline already:
"Mad About Government Censorship? Let’s do something about it."
I'm not sure why an inaccurate headline with claims that are in all likelihood unfounded was used instead.
It starts with a very bold claim, right in the subtitle:
"Google has given officials special access to its video site"
I would be very interested in hearing more about this "special access." Is there some kind of secret pre-Youtube where you can look at videos before they're available to everyone? Perhaps a clandestine vault where only the best clips of baby animals and people falling down are kept? That would certainly qualify as "special access," but if such a thing exists, the article is silent about it.
"...allowing them to have content instantly reviewed if they think that it threatens national security."
This is the only point in the article where I felt even slightly "informed", and even then, Youtube already has at least one framework by which videos can be submitted for review and possible removal. It would be nice if the article went into exactly what the review and removal process might entail if the request came from a security concern instead of a copyright one. The article lets us down on this front as well.
"The YouTube permissions that Google has given the Home Office in recent weeks include the power to flag swaths of content “at scale” instead of only picking out individual videos."
I don't know what this means. I can't think of a functional difference between "selecting a video and then another video" and "selecting a group of videos."
"UK prosecutors already have the power to request removal of illegal content."
So do prosecutors everywhere. So do I. So does my dog. I don't think there's anywhere in the world where you can't request that Google remove illegal content. Heck, I can request that Google remove perfectly legal content. I can request that Google do my homework for me, or give me a lift to the store. Nobody gave me (or UK prosecutors) the "power" to do this, except I guess Google itself, by virtue of existing.
"The UK’s security and immigration minister, James Brokenshire, said that the British government has to do more to deal with some material “that may not be illegal, but certainly is unsavoury and may not be the sort of material that people would want to see or receive”."
This quote is completely out of context. Is Brokenshire even talking about Youtube videos?
"He said that among the issues being considered by the government was a “code of conduct” for internet service providers and internet companies."
Again, please, give us some details about what this "code of conduct" might entail. It sounds important. It sounds like a prime opportunity to inform readers about a real, topical issue. It sounds like a very poor time to end the article, which is exactly what happens.
I'm not particularly satisfied with how this story is presented. The link goes to a paragraph on a website that asks me to complete a survey. This paragraph makes several claims I would love to see expanded on, but they aren't. The piece simply ends. Fortunately, the claims are sourced- via a paper behind a paywall. The abstract for that paper does not support several of the claims made by the original piece.