according to the snowden documents it is quite obvious that if the US government had a backdoor then the UK government would have one through five eyes
All the tech ceos are on the trump train this time around, it was a specific strategy of the trump campaign. Using words like “caved” as though they were pressured and not already aligned with the government is a disservice.
I interpret ‘caved’ in this context to mean they’re not gaining much in return - they make a loss by doing this, just they make an even bigger loss if they were targets of a Trump tantrum.
That’s fair, I don’t think the CEOs are fully aligned culturally with Trump but they are sick of pretending to be liberals that care about other people and they want to make more money.
> I don’t think the CEOs are fully aligned culturally with Trump
Does it matter? If all their actions are in support of a regime, does it matter if they secretly don’t agree with it and don’t even say it? Does it matter that your neighbour says they don’t agree with ICE of they still rat you out to them? Ideologies without action aren’t worth much. At this point, we should assume these CEOs are fully on board with and support Trump’s policies. There’s no reason to make up excuses that they might not be when they repeatedly demonstrate the opposite.
Depends on who you mean. Some of them are nodding and smiling while they count the days until Trump dies. Some of them are “pilled” and totally on board.
And ultimately the consequences of both group is the same. The only way to get rid of fascism is to fight against it, there is no "neutral" position possible unfortunately.
May shame and disgrace follow them for the rest of their lives.
Having been around for a while, to go from optimistic, but sort of naive techno-libertarianism that was once a thing in Silicon Valley to kissing up to a would-be authoritarian is a very sad arc.
They know what they are doing. To survive as a large entity during this administration you have to kiss the ring. If you don't, you'll get targeted for being 'woke' or whatever. In fact, kissing Trump's ass is more important for success than actually making a good product at this point.
I definitely don't think what these CEOs are doing is moral, but it's certainly rational.
No, the matter of fact is that Apple would survive no matter what. But would they (the people involved, not the company, Cook & other executives) make as much money if they went against the administration compared to how much they could make while playing along? Also no, and is why you're seeing people bowing down, they personally make much more money then.
This is unacceptable behavior, and terrible that anyone would think this way. You're telling me that if Tim Cook wasn't getting on his knees every couple of weeks Apple would end? That's farcical.
What a surprise, IIRC in Hong Kong there was a platform that was fully decentralized. HK protesters used it on their phones during their uprising and China could not block it.
Maybe it is time people move to that. Sadly I forgot its name or where to get it. Of course the app stores could block that too.
There is always USENET I guess. I wonder if there are apps on Cell Phones that can access USENET and format the posts to work with the small screens. And of course reformat posts to comply to USENET formatting requirements (ie: wordwrap at Col 70).
Anything that is P2P E2EE is hard to block by utilizing traditional measures. Personally I use and trust Tox. If you also want anonimity you can pair it with tor.
Bridgefy, Firechat, Bitchat and other bluetooth/wifi peer-to-peer SoMe's are great as long as you're enough people around. As long as you don't rely on one of the big tech app stores (or use an iPhone), it's not hard to get them even when the government is being tyrannical. It would be interesting to build something that would work over the various IoT networks which basically span all of Europe, but I guess that would be hard in countries where there are large areas of "nothing". It also depends on farmers choosing open source technology for their tech since you'd need a lot of farming IoT equipment to connect cross rural areas.
> It would be interesting to build something that would work over the various IoT networks which basically span all of Europe, but I guess that would be hard in countries where there are large areas of "nothing".
A portable device that could effortless hook up to the existing decentralized wireless networks would be even better, Freifunk covers large part of Germany, Guifi covers large parts of Spain, probably there are more somewhere else too, but AFAIK there is no portable device that lets you easily just connect and chat, still requires a bit of setup to participate.
A centralized platform with marginally cleverer cryptography can technically allow posts and comments to belong to a user, but not be traceable back to the user! When asked by the government who made a particular post or comment, it should not be possible for the platform to readily identify who made it. Of course the IP address should not be tracked either, certainly not beyond 1h. The logged in user would still be able to view and manage all of their posts and comments, also see responses, because they would have the cryptography key to do so. So what about spam and guardrail control -- one solution is to let AI classify it. Much more can be possible with cleverer uses of cryptography. In short, it is not formally necessary to switch to a decentralized or federated solution to address the anonymity issue.
What I find most interesting about this is that US tech companies are doing what people accuse China of doing.
In fact, theoretical Chinese informed was the entire (performative) justification for the Tiktok ban. The reality of course was that TikTok wouldn’t censor what the US government wanted to censor.
The irony is that these companies are sowing the seeds for their own destruction and the US government is undermining US tech dominance, which is a potent foreign policy tool.
I think Steve Jobs would be rolling over in his grave at Tim Cook’s capitalization. I once trusted Apple to be more user-forest than any other platform. Now? I think I’d trust Huawei more.
At this point I think the biggest tangible difference between China and the US is that one country has high speed trains and affordable health care and the other has neither.
This kind of reductionist pithy comparison needs to stay on Reddit. Sure stuff is messed up here, but there are very real differences in both the degree and breadth of government abuse of power when you compare with China.
Uh.This has happened plenty. It's pretty well known that there's a lot of various abductions/disappearances of people the Chinese govt doesn't like. Including outright deaths in the streets:
Careful before trusting that any of the quotes in this article are real! Default assumption should be that it's all hallucinated unless you've checked it personally. They don't check it in-house.
My entire life it’s been about nothing more than domination of the “immoral” and the end justifies any means when the alternative is someone else winning the vote.
They are the people the phrase “there is no hate like Christian love” is referring to.
Turned out they just were the selfish assholes everyone always said they were, with everything they say just being poor attempts at rationalization of their deep lack of morals, including their self-serving primitive religion.
It's not hard to find similar dunks for the other side, eg. "I thought Democrats were for bodily autonomy" (with regards to vaccine mandates/passports) or "I thought liberals were for free speech" (with regards to cancel culture).
I mean obviously they never were. I think what really surprised people is that it turns out that despite it's supposed "libertarian" roots, the tech community has largely broken hard right authoritarian when the rubber hits the road. Kind of reinforcing the old adage that libertarians are just republicans who want to legally smoke weed.
I'm not sure it's the worst attribute you can have, but I definitely agree with the sentiment.
As I've gotten older, I've become less fond of slippery slope style arguments. People love making them for censorship-related rules and laws.
"Oh if <biden> is allowed to ask/tell social media to stop publishing so many lies about covid then that means trump will be able to <whatever>"
First of all, trump and his ilk are probably going to do <whatever> regardless of what people did in the past and the technical legality of the actions seems to be of only minor concern.
Secondly, I hate this idea that laws and rules can't have nuances. We can, with our collective brain power, probably come up with a law that helps reduce covid lies and doesn't also apply to government criticism or whatever.
I get the appeal of a simple "all speech is free! No laws about speech allowed!" But fairly obviously you're going to have laws about fraud/threats/slander/"porn" at which point we're back to nuances and deciding which bits we allow and where.
As for modern republicans, I'm not old enough to have ever believed their states rights/small gov/freedom lies, but I thought I could at least count on them to be anti-russia invading other countries.
These articles are actively mixing two very different topics: claims of people simply criticizing ICE, and people who are reporting on officer locations or otherwise providing information that could viably result in danger to the officers, difficulty enforcing the law, and so on. I think you'll very few conservatives would be supportive of the censorship of criticism, but many and probably the overwhelming majority would be supportive of censoring information of the latter type.
If there are genuine aims to censor or target Americans who are genuinely simply criticizing ICE, I don't understand why the media isn't naming names with their permission. For instance when Jay Bhattacharya was revealed as one of the people censored for having contrarian views on COVID related decisions, I think it was a major turning point because it made it clear that the censorship extended to the point of censoring highly qualified people simply for having different opinions.
That's, at the minimum, debatable. The primary point of people reporting on the location if ICE agents is to enable other people to evade or interfere with law enforcement. And that walks right into the illegal zone in various ways - accessory, obstruction, interference, aiding and abetting, and so on.
I wonder how much the tech bros are going to regret having bent over for Trump in 2028 when a Democrat is sitting in the Whitehouse looking at rolling out some retribution using the new legal tools the Trump team succeeded in securing during his second term. We might see some heavy regulation descending onto the industry as a response.
On the other hand, the long term trend of billionaires and large companies getting their way politically will likely continue.
Not much is what im expecting - they will bend the knee as always , most people forget that very similar actions were being done under Biden - their targets were different : Covid and some anti grnocide protests.
The tools once there will be expanded and continu ding what the gov of the day wants - same reason ICE , Pathriot act ,FISA etc saw their largest expansions after Obama came into power.
Targets will change but the tools will remain , aftter some sanitization youll even have proICE dems boosting.
How is a Democrat going to be sitting in the Whitehouse when Trump/Vance is still there with a large contingency of loyal armed ICE agents looking to target dissenters?
Large corporations, especially publicly traded ones, have zero power to resist their sovereign government. Publicly traded companies are heavily regulated and dependent on their stock price, making them trivially vulnerable to political retaliation.
I’m not sure why people look to corporations for political resistance. It’s the wrong place to look. They’re not structured for it and it’s not their purpose.
Corporations are people and money is speech, making corporations the strongest forces in politics. Obviously they're not on your side but there's no mystery why people would want to influence them.
All the more ironic when those selfsame corps act as arms of govenment agaist official enemy governments/people. See the recent brouhaha by Facebok over getting banned from Russia and years previously from China over pretty similar demands.
And the way they all fell inline with sanctioning the ICC (Microsoft/Google) when the only laws in play were US domestic ones being pushed globally.
Sure corporations have to respect the LAW in their juradiction, even if said law is unpopular or unethical.
But they don't have to, and shouldn't where ethics and human rights are involved, go beyond what is required by the law. Since Trump has come to power a lot of big organsations seem to be reversing their previous positions to gain political favour, which is wrong.
The solution is probably for them to appeal to the public. "We stand up to ICE abuse" would probably help them in the markets.
Something interesting happened recently in France where it turned out that the American subsiduary of CapGemini was selling serives to ICE. They were forced to sell that subsiduary after public outcry.
I wish I understood how that works. Retail investors are so small, compared with hedge funds and whatnot, that "average people" cannot move a stock price significantly. So, when Trump tweets about a company, how does the stock move? Who is actually doing all that selling to drive the price down?
And, since the price almost always recovers within a week... does it even matter?
its not just the tweets. this administration came out of the gate swinging with its extortionate demands. it claims the power to redirect, cancel, and append conditions to congressional funding. its has as its disposal all of the departments who ostensibly exist to serve the populace, and use them to file lawsuits, charge people with crimes, remove or establish new regulations or targeted taxes, all in service of whatever the president might desire.
Again and again with the fascists, the accusation of weaponization of government was really a confession of their own crimes.
Same with the Epstein files, same with the accusations of groomer while their ranks are filled with rapists, same with the Jan 6 insurrection, and likely this fall, accusations of election fraud and intimidation.
Taking down an app is hardly unprecedented. Forcing companies to add backdoors in secret is, so it's a stretch to think that ADP is compromised.
We have precedent: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/apple-admits-to-...
Apple: sure, but only if you pretend you didn't get access
Brits: jolly good
AFAIK the bar is even higher - incitement to violence is allowed, as long as it's not 'imminent': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imminent_lawless_action
Does it matter? If all their actions are in support of a regime, does it matter if they secretly don’t agree with it and don’t even say it? Does it matter that your neighbour says they don’t agree with ICE of they still rat you out to them? Ideologies without action aren’t worth much. At this point, we should assume these CEOs are fully on board with and support Trump’s policies. There’s no reason to make up excuses that they might not be when they repeatedly demonstrate the opposite.
Having been around for a while, to go from optimistic, but sort of naive techno-libertarianism that was once a thing in Silicon Valley to kissing up to a would-be authoritarian is a very sad arc.
I definitely don't think what these CEOs are doing is moral, but it's certainly rational.
Maybe it is time people move to that. Sadly I forgot its name or where to get it. Of course the app stores could block that too.
There is always USENET I guess. I wonder if there are apps on Cell Phones that can access USENET and format the posts to work with the small screens. And of course reformat posts to comply to USENET formatting requirements (ie: wordwrap at Col 70).
Are you thinking of HKmap.live?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HKmap.live
> Of course the app stores could block that too.
And Apple did.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49995688
A portable device that could effortless hook up to the existing decentralized wireless networks would be even better, Freifunk covers large part of Germany, Guifi covers large parts of Spain, probably there are more somewhere else too, but AFAIK there is no portable device that lets you easily just connect and chat, still requires a bit of setup to participate.
In fact, theoretical Chinese informed was the entire (performative) justification for the Tiktok ban. The reality of course was that TikTok wouldn’t censor what the US government wanted to censor.
The irony is that these companies are sowing the seeds for their own destruction and the US government is undermining US tech dominance, which is a potent foreign policy tool.
I think Steve Jobs would be rolling over in his grave at Tim Cook’s capitalization. I once trusted Apple to be more user-forest than any other platform. Now? I think I’d trust Huawei more.
https://rsf.org/en/beaten-death-state-security-rsf-shocked-g...
That said, they also use them as slave labors.
Maybe that's what ICE is going to do with the plan to setup large detention centers in the US
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47013059
My entire life it’s been about nothing more than domination of the “immoral” and the end justifies any means when the alternative is someone else winning the vote.
They are the people the phrase “there is no hate like Christian love” is referring to.
They are against very specific parts of big government and censorship
Yes. Both sides censor people. I'm sure we'll see a comment about Biden censoring anti covid vaccine posts and the poster is somewhat right.
The difference is the Republicans run on freedom of speech making them hypocrites.
Being a hypocrite is the worst attribute a politician can have in a representative democracy
As I've gotten older, I've become less fond of slippery slope style arguments. People love making them for censorship-related rules and laws.
"Oh if <biden> is allowed to ask/tell social media to stop publishing so many lies about covid then that means trump will be able to <whatever>"
First of all, trump and his ilk are probably going to do <whatever> regardless of what people did in the past and the technical legality of the actions seems to be of only minor concern.
Secondly, I hate this idea that laws and rules can't have nuances. We can, with our collective brain power, probably come up with a law that helps reduce covid lies and doesn't also apply to government criticism or whatever.
I get the appeal of a simple "all speech is free! No laws about speech allowed!" But fairly obviously you're going to have laws about fraud/threats/slander/"porn" at which point we're back to nuances and deciding which bits we allow and where.
As for modern republicans, I'm not old enough to have ever believed their states rights/small gov/freedom lies, but I thought I could at least count on them to be anti-russia invading other countries.
If there are genuine aims to censor or target Americans who are genuinely simply criticizing ICE, I don't understand why the media isn't naming names with their permission. For instance when Jay Bhattacharya was revealed as one of the people censored for having contrarian views on COVID related decisions, I think it was a major turning point because it made it clear that the censorship extended to the point of censoring highly qualified people simply for having different opinions.
On the other hand, the long term trend of billionaires and large companies getting their way politically will likely continue.
The tools once there will be expanded and continu ding what the gov of the day wants - same reason ICE , Pathriot act ,FISA etc saw their largest expansions after Obama came into power.
Targets will change but the tools will remain , aftter some sanitization youll even have proICE dems boosting.
I'm going to guess they'll have fled the country with their winnings by then.
It gives to the rest of the world one more reason to cut ties with the US.
The world needs to stop trusting in Americans. Trump only keeps giving them reasons to do so.
I’m not sure why people look to corporations for political resistance. It’s the wrong place to look. They’re not structured for it and it’s not their purpose.
And the way they all fell inline with sanctioning the ICC (Microsoft/Google) when the only laws in play were US domestic ones being pushed globally.
Sure corporations have to respect the LAW in their juradiction, even if said law is unpopular or unethical. But they don't have to, and shouldn't where ethics and human rights are involved, go beyond what is required by the law. Since Trump has come to power a lot of big organsations seem to be reversing their previous positions to gain political favour, which is wrong.
The solution is probably for them to appeal to the public. "We stand up to ICE abuse" would probably help them in the markets.
Something interesting happened recently in France where it turned out that the American subsiduary of CapGemini was selling serives to ICE. They were forced to sell that subsiduary after public outcry.
And, since the price almost always recovers within a week... does it even matter?
Same with the Epstein files, same with the accusations of groomer while their ranks are filled with rapists, same with the Jan 6 insurrection, and likely this fall, accusations of election fraud and intimidation.