and I also remember reading that they had to reverse-engineer the designed and build their own CAD models because they couldn't re-build the situation (and it looks like a lot of customization was done to each engine). But my overall point still stands, IMO. They couldn't just rebuild it , just because they had the plans.
Fact Check 2: Last I checked I can still download/clone repos anonymously, from public repos;
My point is , this can very quickly reverse. It won't take a lot of time for Github (and others) to add restrictions under any excuses to restrict anonymity.
Just like how it took one Apple and only a couple of years to make an entire industry almost completely eschew 3.5mm jacks for seeming no good reason (One excuse was waterproofing, but my s7 had a 3.5mm jack and was still IP67 rated).
Imagine if ifixit.org was de-platformed, because they were providing repair guides that was "illegal" from Apple/Google's perspective. Sure, as users we would rally behind ifixit because to us, the user's, ifixit's cause is noble. But, can you actually force Apple to reverse their decision, when it doesnt work out for your benefit ? If they don't , do you have an immediate alternative, that works for you, before your or ifixit goes out of business ?
Until recently I worked at a university - we had several data-centers, multiple fiber connections to the Internet2 as well as direct connections to both AWS and Azure. We were ready to move many of our core services to AWS when COVID hit but our systems were designed to run on a Kubernetes cluster so we could theoretically run locally or on any cloud.
This takes me back to my first Internet connection which was a partial T1 line back to a mid-tier Internet provider. We ran everything over that connection except for our main sales page and had a lot more autonomy. The provider didn't care what was running over that connection so long as they got paid.
My point is that I don't think the higher education institutions (where the Internet initially flourished) will be affected, nor will the big companies who already have connections as described above. Those of us who have traded our autonomy for cheaper operating costs and more convenience will indeed find that we've lot a lot of the control we used to have.
What happens when ISPs decide to deplatform you? Domain registrars, certificate authorities? What about banks?
At some point you're dependent on another entity if you want to exist on the internet. I think a noble goal would be to change that, but we're far away from it.
Before the internet, if you had a dangerous, fringe idea, your community would ostracize you and your idea would die.
Now, you can find the fringe from all the other communities. I think it is good that our community has found a way to ostracize fringe, dangerous ideas.
The problem is - who decides what should be fringe and ostracized? At different times in history, women's rights, abolition, etc were all heretical ideas that the majority would want to squish if they could.
We all do, collectively. That’s how society works. If you try to take “who among us can say what is right?” to the logical extreme, you get into situations like “should we not teach in schools that democracy is preferable to fascism?”
If early abolitionists were deplatformed, you think the idea of abolition would still magically arise in everyone's head at the same time? Nope,society would never heard the concept, never adopt it and we'd still have slavery.
Let's be a society of adults. Allow voices to be heard and be rejected or accepted by people as makes sense to them. Otherwise you are moving the decision power from the people to the silencers.
There's no precident in history for that working out well.
Let me pose the question to you again: do you believe fascists/segregationists/etc should be able to insert their platform into school curricula? Because again, that is the logical extreme of what you’re proposing. Or is that an acceptable form of viewpoint discrimination?
Democracy vs fascism is the discussion I hope you can win on merits. In fact I wouldn't mind honest debates on this topic at schools: it can serve to vaccinate people against intolerance and extremism.
Communities that shut down such discussions are usually authoritarian sects built on faith in a leader's guidance, not enlightened democracies.
Let’s actually switch examples to the Civil Rights Movement. That shows up on the curriculum in kindergarten. Would you have five year olds debating the merits of segregation?
Consider that people were having debates about whether things like democracy and slavery and caste systems were good for centuries before people got on board. And plenty of people still aren’t! What should the teacher do if the kids on Debate Team Jim Crow actually win the debate? Step in and say “actually, equality is better, let me show you why”? Or do we now have a bunch of kids who go through life thinking that we actually should make Black people drinking from different water fountains?
I also suspect that plenty of teachers themselves are not quite as bought in on racial equality as we’d hope.
Because problem is that segregation, fascism, etc aren’t “bad” per se. We don’t reject them because there’s some inherent logical fallacy — we do it because they’re morally wrong. It took us hundreds of years to get here, and if we’re going to get further it will be because we drew a line in the sand and said “hey, treating people in this particular way is just better than doing it this other way”.
I did not follow your reasoning about 5 years old debating the merits of segregation, can you elaborate? Many topics are introduced at young age, and can take many years until they become a part of the person's worldview that they person can meaningfully defend. But it better reach that state for key topics before the person is out of school.
> segregation, fascism, etc aren’t “bad” per se. We don’t reject them because there’s some inherent logical fallacy — we do it because they’re morally wrong.
Ouch! Fascism and segregation are morally wrong, but just as important they produce systems and societies that exhibit horrible features and, time and again, crumble and fail. Morality is pliable -- many things considered good two generations ago can now seen as morally wrong and vice versa. When your grandkids ask "grandpa, why did you break/prohibit/deplatform/cancel X?" you may want something better to stand on than "because we had that power and we could". Because that is how your argument reads to me.
> I did not follow your reasoning about 5 years old debating the merits of segregation, can you elaborate?
Sure. We teach five year olds about Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement because it’s an important part of our history. Children are going to have questions about why things happened, and what the “right” side of it was. What are we going to tell them? At that age, they’ll basically believe whatever we say. So we have to either decide that segregation will be the “fringe” view, or that kids will grow up thinking that it’s acceptable.
> Fascism and segregation are morally wrong, but just as important they produce systems and societies that exhibit horrible features and, time and again, crumble and fail.
Who’s to say what features in a system are horrible? If we’re truly neutral here, should we not implement those features too so as not to ostracize people who think they’re good? :)
My point is that for literally every “horrible” feature, there are people who want it in earnest — and they often want it because it benefits them, not because they haven’t been won over by the merits of the alternative.
Like, how are you gonna convince the dude wearing the Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt? It’s not like he’s never been exposed to the argument that genocide is wrong. At some point we just have to draw the line and say “this is bad” rather than wringing our hands about how we can really decide not to listen to people advocating segregation or fascism or genocide or whatever.
> We teach five year olds about Jim Crow and the Civil Rights Movement because it’s an important part of our history. Children are going to have questions about why things happened, and what the “right” side of it was. What are we going to tell them?
I hope you have a good answer. And if they question it, because it is natural for kids to question the world around them, you have a great chance to explain and reinforce that message with arguments. But if instead we shut down the questioner that chance will be lost, and they will likely revisit it later as they grow up, not inclined to take your priors anymore.
And yes, a few will always stay unconvinced. That is the price of freedom. But the country where the majority holds their opinions because they were allowed to think them through, consider alternatives and were not demonized for disagreement is much more resistant to sellers of next Auschwitz than the country where the majority parrots what a talking head on TV/Twitter/Facebook tells them.
> Like, how are you gonna convince the dude wearing the Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt?
A dude or a gal wearing the Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt is, as I said, the price you pay for freedom. In a society where the majority would like to live, the predominant reaction on the street would be "Yuck". In a society that is told what is right it is much easier for the ruling party to bring the next extermination camp to a site next to you.
I think we are talking past each other. No one is saying that we shouldn't allow people to question why things are right and wrong, or that we shouldn't explain our reasoning. Let me repeat the original comment to which I responded:
> The problem is - who decides what should be fringe and ostracized? At different times in history, women's rights, abolition, etc were all heretical ideas that the majority would want to squish if they could.
Rephrased: "since there is no omniscient referee to determine which ideas are good and which are bad, we should treat all ideas as equal."
But of course, not all ideas are equal. You and I have acknowledged as much in this conversation. One of the points of society — indeed, the very thing that lets us progress — is figuring out which ones are good and which are bad. And in the case of racial equality, genocide, etc, we've put in the work and mostly agreed that these are bad things.
The reason I reach for the teaching example is that it basically forces that choice. We either design the lesson so they learn that racial equality is good, and why it's good… or we throw our hands up and say "who decides that segregation should be a fringe view?" and teach them Jim Crow propaganda and race science as well.
And of course, despite all that, there will always be Camp Auschwitz sweatshirt guy. But if he wants to eat in our restaurants, or socialize on our networks, or host websites on our servers, we should have no qualms telling him to take it off first.
A democracy can be even more fanatically authoritarian than a fascist state assuming a relatively benevolent leadership for the fascist state, and a ramrod militaristic and homogenized culture amongst the population of the democracy. That is one of the absolutely insane things I just cannot wrap my mind around with people these days. No form of government is inherently "Good" or "bereft of evil". Saying as much is like saying a token ring network is inferior to a mesh network when the use case of said token ring network may not have anything to gain from the properties of a mesh network between all the nodes. It all depends on the people involved. Governments are much like computing systems in that Garbage In, Garbage Out applies.
A constitutional republic was deemed at the time of the founding to strike the best balance of all systems of governance at the time. That's it. It scaled, it resisted demagoguery, and most importantly, it virtually guaranteed that the pace of legislation and change was slow at the time. No man can do much damage in 4 years.
Fast forward to now, and you have D.C. pulling strings and reacting on weekly timescales. The status quo can change on the timescale of hours, not even days. Issues increasingly get pushed to be resolved at the National level instead of being delegated up only to the locality or States effected, which contributes to increased inter-state animosity. The key optimization that the Founders were going for is something that let everywhere "do as thou wilt" with a mechanism for collective action organized from the bottom up. It was certainly not the intent to drive the entire country at once from the top-down except in regards to matters of National Defence and International Diplomacy, and resolution of interstate matters. The role of the Federal Government has greatly expanded over the years, now including land management/conservation, operating regulatory edifi, law enforcement, etc...
The Founders understood a government was only as inherently good as the people running it, and admitted from the start it would only be fit for a nation of well-educated citizens with a vested interest in maintaining their own liberties. No formal guarantee was given that somehow the system would work sevoid of everyone putting their best foot forward, which in part means not getting what you want all the time, and actually accepting that just because you could do something, it doesn't mean it should be done forever, or even permanantly.
The difference is that now we've centralized who decides what is "dangerous [and] fringe". Many of the ideas that are popular at big tech companies are considered exactly that by many people. Now, instead of each community deciding what's acceptable for themselves it's a small handful of companies from California deciding for everyone.
If by thinking out of the box you and empowering marginalized ideas you are saying that the companies have a duty to provide the infrastructure and tools for planning violence and the disruption of democracy, then I suspect you will find that not many people in tech are too comfortable with playing an enabling role.
We have been presented with a slice of reality. The legislative branch of a superpower was stormed, normal democratic process was disrupted and people were killed. A mob was egged on by lies and conspiracy theories spread by a president who is effectively trying to set in motion a coup d'etat. It is likely that this isn't the last such event we will see in the coming years.
Why should companies be under any obligation to support groups who undermine democracy and incite violence? Is it not fair to allow companies to choose _not_ to support hate groups? Regardless of whether they have been successfully prosecuted in a cour of law or not.
Should we not have the freedom of choosing with whom we would like to associate?
Is it not hypocritical to expect companies to provide resources to hate groups on the grounds of "freedom of expression" when those same groups have shown, by their actions, that they themselves oppose freedom of expression and expel anyone who voices disagreement?
You appear to be confusing the government and private companies here. Government must follow a far more stringent set of rules in which certain determinations have to be done by courts. Private companies are under no such obligations when it comes to enabling speech.
You are arguing that one should be able to compel people to promote hate speech. May may not intend to argue that case, but by what is presumably thoughtlessness, that is what you appear to be doing.
> Should we not have the freedom of choosing with whom we would like to associate?
So, do you believe that a business should not be forced to serve racial minorities? How about the gay wedding cake situation, should a baker be forced to make a cake for a gay couple? Should I be able to refuse to hire trans people?
If you're not sure about those, then you don't believe in free association as a rule. I'm not saying anything about you personally, but most people only want to involve free association in the cases where it means they get to refuse people they don't like.
You seem to be arguing that those conspiring with criminal intent ought to receive protection from discrimination in the same way we wish to protect people from discrimination based on race, gender, age, religion, political affiliation etc.
I don't think that anyone on Hacker News is confusing between government and private entities by now. We have seen that exact argument hundreds of times.
My answer was to the question of how "society" should handle the situation. I fully understand that the companies are free to do what they want. And I believe that as capitalistic entities, they would not have cut off paying customer without pressure from a large segment of society. I just believe that segment was wrong in pressuring the companies to do so.
Again, I understand that it is also their (those who wants Parler to have no platform) rights to free speech. I just happen to think that it is the wrong way of approaching this situation.
Edit: if it was a single company removing the Parler community (similar to how Reddit was kicking off alot of subreddit a couple of years ago). I think I would be a lot more inclined with your line of reasoning. It's the coordinated action from too many sides that made me feel uncomfortable with how this happened.
So my freedom to choose with whom I would like to do business is not for me to decide, but is contingent on who else does not want to do business with them? Implying that if nobody wants to do business with them I am no longer free to make free choices?
So providing a platform for others to incite violence and ending democracy is a good choice?
I do hope you appreciate that this question stopped being a purely academic question four days ago and became the very real death of five people and the closest the US has come to a coup d’detat in a very, very long time?
The decisions to de-platform the United States president and the angry mob is not something any service provider wants or would do lightly. These are the hardest decisions many of these companies will make this decade.
Is it the best decision in this situation? We won’t know for years. Was it a good decision? Yes. And it was one that took courage.
I’m glad someone had the courage to make that decision.
After thinking it through a bit more, I will concede that there is a reasonbly high chance I was wrong with my insistence on absolutely keeping principles being more important than dealing with actual demonstrated bad actors.
As long as this doesn't lead to a slippery slope of more censorship (both by the state and private entities), and more power to non due-process witch hunt, I would be wrong. I don't think there are a way any of us can say for certain what will happen, so let's wait a couple of years and see how it turn out.
"marginalized idea" like white supremacy, and "thinking out of the box" like planning an armed attack on the capitol? Yeah, what happened to the internet?
We can ostracize but it remains to be seen whether we can halt the spread. Ostracism can lead to more alienation and confirmation bias for conspiracy theories.
I think it’s too late to turn the ship around at this point though. We’ve done nothing at all to address working class and rural alienation. Now we’ve got to somehow weather the storm.
For all the "making the world a better place," it seems so many in tech would rather it be the downfall of society, just to make a stand on the absolute extremes of some hypothetical principles.
The two main things are privacy and freedom. For various political discussions this year, it seems many on here believe in absolute privacy even when it's not reasonable: ie. privacy in your own home is good but that doesn't include being able to commit murder and be protected. Freedom of speech is good, but I don't think it extends to political figures being able to incite violence.
And honestly, my comment was somewhat hyperbolic, in response to a lot of the discussion that occurred last night on this topic of Amazon vs Parler. Many people were equating the violence of Wednesday with "somebody not liking us," trying to suggest that this single extreme situation is an indicator of Amazon/big tech freely making political decisions (much like this linked article) for run of the mill things.
I appreciate your polite question and your critical-thinking takes in your comment history.
Author here. Apologies for the factual inconsistencies in the article. I wrote the article in a fit of emotion and I do not write often, so you might find my thoughts and words messy.
I do not defend Parler or the people on it either. What happened was not a civilized thing. The whole point of rule of law is that society doesn't succumb to rule of the jungle
Should Parler be banned ? I don't know. A big chunk of me leans towards the answer yes.
But this very answer scares me. Who am I, in a civilized, nation state, with a legislative, executive, govt. , to decide who has a voice and who doesn't ? And even if I do , who checks my powers ? What stops me from doing the unethical, the incorrect and the evil ?
What I wanted to focus was, not on Parler (it was my prompt for ideas washing around in my head for a while), but on the sheer amount of centralized power and authority in the hands of Big Tech, at the moment. Wikileaks was the wakeup call. It showed how much financial, media and technological clout Big Tech has and how effectively they operate in conjunction with the government.
Social media unshackled the voices of the normal people from the dependence of print and TV. It made the system of checks and balances more approachable for the common. I fear that Big Tech is now becoming the very same villain that they wanted to liberate the common man from.
Should AWS and peers be compelled to host websites for Isis and other terrorist organizations? I think it makes sense that these companies do not want to be responsible for giving a platform to individuals who espouse violent viewpoints.
That's what this is. Parler has become a hotbed of radical and violent extremists calling for murder of politicians and people in the media.
These companies didn't shut off parler "quickly". They waited until after Parler took a large part in helping organize a violent mob that assaulted the capital.
> Parler has become a hotbed of radical and violent extremists calling for murder of politicians and people in the media.
Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook all have the same problem. The only way you can argue Parler being kicked out of AWS is right and Parler shouldn't be able to operate is if you think those sites should be shut down too.
With some of the comments I've seen here, honestly, this site gets close sometimes too.
Anybody want to talk about BDS? Because that's certainly advocating for violence and the death of lots of Jews and it's very popular among the Justice Democrats and their followers, just as an example. They consider it justified violence, just like the article "In Defense of Looting" did, but proponents of political violence always consider themselves justified. That was published by NPR, so I guess they should be shut down too, right?
Or is this actually about silencing a specific kind of political speech and not really about violence at all? That seems more likely to be.
The violence at the Capitol is just an excuse to silence political opponents.
Don't judge Parler with what you hear from the mainstream media. I'm on Parler and there a lot of intelligent conversations there that give you the other side, which is so hard to get otherwise (which is why I joined). Yes, I'm sure there are some crazies there, but there are many, many more by numbers on Twitter. Please join Parler and judge for yourself, don't trust the media narrative.
This isn't surprising, since the de-platforming already happened to Gab which now self-hosts themselves.
This is the amount of control that Big Tech has on the internet that allows them to coordinate actions like this and also tells us once again that you're licensed to use their platform and don't own anything. Once you keep using their platform for your services, you risk losing this control.
For example in the case for Github (now owned by Microsoft) and the developer ecosystem, I kept repeatedly making the case for self-hosting [0] rather than 'centralising everything'. Now self-hosting is another solution if the same Big Tech companies wish to de-platform your business/service for any reason.
For what the Big Tech companies can give, they are more than able to take away.
> If the BIG TECH majority even find you a threat, not only will they
It seems to me that big techs acted against Parler not because it represented a threat to them, but because of emotional reasons. "It was the right thing to do" or something like that.
If they acted for business reasons, it would likely be slow and gradual, not "like a pack of wolves hunting down a rabbit".
> The days of downloading source code from sourceforge anonymously are long gone.
I can't believe that author is deeply concerned about centralized github but an the same time feels nostalgia about centralized sourceforge. At least github does not spread bundleware.
Allowing people to express themselves freely is laudable until they abuse that freedom to incite violence. Defending someone else's access to incite violence makes one morally complicit.
Where on the internet can I be free from being indoctrinated by idiots about god's and ghosts that aren't well defined enough to exist, like the 'deep state'
I think tech community should bare some responsibility for preaching Chrome, Cloud (you can't get a dev job without AWS or Azure exposure), smart phones and smart TVs.
And you know why you added that, because you know quick can easily be disputed by simply looking back in time. Parler was on the services from 2018 to now. 2+ years is hardly "quick".
Google banned Parler the day before Apple and Amazon. Apple's ban was announced the day Google banned Parler but they gave Parler 24 hours notice to comply, which they didn't.
normally I would agree, but if you are to view the events of Jan 6th as domestic terrorism and Parler as one of the two platforms where such events were partially planned. then I think tech companies dehosting Parler because they don't moderate such content are fully within their right, outright morally obligated, to do so
pipe bombs, zip ties to take hostages, weapons, and people looking to exact their version of justice on government officials were on the premises of the Capitol. things easily could have turned much worse than
That doesn't answer the question. Moreover, the underlying problem with your argument is that "overreact" is entirely subjective. Everyone would agree that overreactions are bad, but the proponents of action would say it's not an overreaction and the opponents would say it is. The argument doesn't advance at all.
According to history, common sense, and several world religions.
What doesn't "advance" as an argument is using a senile boomer self-own chimpout as a justification for FAANG absolutism. One of these guys literally tazed his own balls! I believe natural selection will be quite sufficient here.
yeah that's not terrorism. setting up bombs, breaking into the seat of government with the intention of taking hostages and potentially executing people is
Pretty naive worldview if he actually believed in that to begin with. Capitalist entities doing capitalist things in a capitalist society, why are you acting surprised? Internet just came of age and became popular, that's all. And if you want some fringe stuff no one is stopping you either.
I mean, if ever there were an exception to free speech absolutism, now is the time—the more we learn about the capitol insurrection, the more we realize just how close we came (literally seconds) to a massacre on the senate floor, egged on by the president, and planned openly on these platforms.
Its possible to have a discussion about the power of big tech, about their anti-competitive behavior, and lack of democratic oversight, but perhaps those issues should be discussed separately from banning Trump and kicking Parler—which seem like good choices on the part of the companies, even though it was done far too late.
>If the BIG TECH majority even find you a threat, not only will they cut off your ability to communicate, or deploy to a server across the world, but even prevent you from writing software in the First place.
This seems like an exaggeration. There are alternatives to hosting your platform on AWS.
Of course, you're not supposed to allow users on your platform to issue death threats and act like you're not supposed to do anything about it.
I can't agree with holding Parler as an example of "freedom and the openess of the internet".
Look, if your party throws everything out the window to weaken the regulatory authority of the government, and to encourage corporations' eclipsing of power, and then the extremely powerful corporations decide they are tired of facilitating your snakepit of facists, and the government is toothless to intervene... Maybe some kind of contemplation about the path that led you to this point is reasonable?
I don't really have any sympathy anyway, but this is 50+ years of ideological chickens coming home to roost.
In this case I'm glad for the de-platforming of Parler, Trump etc. But as a knock-on effect, for anyone thinking of doing anything potentially controversial (and not just on the political right - this applies for things like WikiLeaks, and even Wikipedia itself - hosting "illegal numbers" etc) this will make companies think twice before relying on apps and the likes of AWS. For the moment, at least, webapps (vs app store apps) and self-hosted servers (potentially in a different country) are much safer from this kind of existential risk...
Exactly the point. We shouldn't cheer sensorship of the "other" because once we have allowed it to be an acceptable tool, it will inevitably swing against us as well when someone finds our views inconvenient.
When I was growing up, the ACLU would defend the rights of neo-nazis to speak, etc, because liberal people understood that if you don't protect the rights of the extreme you lose those rights yourself. It's shocking to me how quickly people seem to have lost hold of these principles.
Fact Check 1: NASA has not lost the blueprints and ability to engineer an engine like the Rocketdyne F-1. Sources:
[0] https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/20302/were-the-sat...
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20100818173517/http://www.space.c... /saturn_five_000313.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1#F-1B_booster
Fact Check 2: Last I checked I can still download/clone repos anonymously, from public repos;
Fact Check 3: De-platforming has been a thing for a long time, for businesses like porn, crypto (at least back in the day), scams, terrorism.
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Parler, seems to be targeted for the last one on this list, for unmoderated fringe content.
Why is the expected treatment different from other similar radicalized fringe groups?
Why does our complacency for not learning how to manage servers etc fall on big tech?
edited: formatting