> Under current law, Big Tech platforms have the final word on their services. They have the right to decide which thinkers, politicians, and businesses are allowed onto their platform and which they will expel. This seems reasonable until you consider Big Tech’s scale and how fundamental the internet is to modern-day life.
I think that's the heart of the matter. I've thought about this quite a bit, but when we say break them down, how does that work ?
Could there be legal thresholds such as what already exists with regards to ( actual ) hate speech and encouraging violence, based on publicly agreed upon standards ?
Platforms being legally accountable for enforcing arbitrary or biased deplatforming or shadowbanning ? They are a special kind of service ...
I guess you'd need a watchdog with teeth. Does anyone have a link to something that covers all this in depth ? Could well be a HN thread ( maybe this one .. )
A simple and more robust strategy is to force players to open up communication protocols, allowing end-users a variety of (federated) clients to communicate through. Users no more held hostage, that will encourage healthy market mechanisms in policy/curation decisions be it “disinformation” or whatever heuristic. And it would be great to have services with a variety of different policies so people can choose what they like and where to self-associate.
That way there’s no need for detailed and heavy-handed regulation, only an enforcement of a common protocol.
I am considering offering my services for Bitcoin, at a custom rate, subject to regular review, for a part of my salary to be discussed. The main point is building an economy around that damn thing. Many people "believe" in it, but not many people put their Bitcoins where their mouth is. A bi-weekly salary is actually a good use case for the shitty transaction rate. I still have some details to iron-out, but it makes sense to me at this point. Anyone here who has experience in working / hiring for Bitcoin ? I do mean in the surface economy. Any authoritative resources on tax policies / issues and what not ? I haven't fully thought this through just yet, but I'm gonna.
Personally, I find that this [0] doesn't break many sites at all, but messes with cookies to an appreciable extent. Combine this to an extensive use of that [1] and clearing your cache and cookies every day, and I think you're in decent shape while some heavy and heavily lobbied government body inches towards doing something about it.
I went a step further and installed Temporary Containers. Unless the domain is a special one (and goes in a long-lived container), a new tab cannot share any content with other tabs. Whenever the tab is closed all site-related content is removed.
It's still a bit wonky because some sites do redirections, and it's not properly caught (unless there's some option I missed)
The next step is to disable _all_ cookies, even first-party, by default (unless I have a special relationship with the domain of course). It's working surprisingly well and I believe this should be the default.
I did this too. Another pain point I've found is when logging into websites with github or other oauth provider requires grouping that website in with the services perminent container.
"Careful writing about traumatic or uncertain events, past, present or future, appears to produce a variety of benefits, physiological and psychological. Written accounts of trauma positively influence health. Recent investigations have shown that the explicit written description of an ideal future produces similar results. A large body of research conducted in the industrial and business domains also demonstrates that future authoring or goal-setting results in improved productivity and performance." [0]
> And the results are revealing: Sichuan, second only in the hashpower rankings to Xinjiang, is a province characterized by a massive overbuild of hydroelectric power in the last decade. Sichuan’s installed hydro capacity is double what its power grid can support, leading to lots of “curtailment” (or waste). Dams can only store so much potential energy in the form of water before they must let it out. It’s an open secret that this otherwise-wasted energy has been put to use mining Bitcoin. If your local energy cost is effectively zero but you cannot sell your energy anywhere, the existence of a global buyer for energy is a godsend.
> But to ambitious data scientists like Pocovi, who has worked with major political parties in Latin America in recent elections, Cambridge Analytica, which shut down in May, was behind the curve. Where it gauged people’s receptiveness to campaign messages by analyzing data they typed into Facebook, today’s “neuropolitical” consultants say they can peg voters’ feelings by observing their spontaneous responses: an electrical impulse from a key brain region, a split-second grimace, or a moment’s hesitation as they ponder a question.
> "Proof of work" is just a synonym for "having wasted tons of energy." This is my main beef with these systems. Gaining fundamental value from the act of wasting energy [...] is not a sensible basis for a 21st century technology.
This is my main beef with the system we live in already.
"Bullshit Jobs: A Theory is a 2018 book by anthropologist David Graeber that argues for the existence and societal harm of meaningless jobs. He contends that over half of societal work is pointless, which becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth."
I am not contesting the Bitcoin situation is ... interesting.
Have you managed to verify this or you're just assuming it ? I'm just assuming it, that's why I'm asking. Like have you made a request for your data from Facebook / data brokers and it looks straight ? I trust Mozilla to the fullest and have made no effort to investigate.
I don't trust that this is all they have about me. Wasn't there reports that they were generating dark profiles about people not even on Facebook (by mining contact information from others)?
That skepticism is definitely healthy, but by the GDPR, this is required to be every single thing they have on you, under penalty of significant fines.
That doesn't mean it is everything... but it at least makes that a little more likely? Some light optimism for you, I guess.
Edit: seems even this isn't necessarily true.. damn.
They have to tell you everything they know about you, by law... but that doesn’t mean this webpage contains every information they collected. And getting everything is rather complicated: https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/
Facebook collected this data for years but only recently started disclosing it. There's no reason to trust that they're disclosing all the data they're collecting.
Interesting...I've been using the Facebook container for well over a year and have been very careful to only access facebook from it....but they still list very recent (like yesterday) data in my off_facebook_activity. This is very frustrating.
Facebook managed to get some off-Facebook activity from me even using this. The site in question was also loaded in a Private Browsing window and Facebook claimed it was from pixel tracking. I'm guessing they've inferred it based on IP, especially as I live by myself.
How this is legal under GDPR, given I'm a UK citizen, I'm really not sure.
I guess it depends on the country. In Poland my experience is that every time EU passes some regulation Polish parliament passes the corresponding bill implementing it. So even if we left EU tomorrow those bills will still be in effect.
Also, I'm not sure about this "immediately enforceable" part - I recall some cases where member states delayed implementing EU laws for years, sometimes ending up being sued to European Court of Justice.
Yes, the UK has the DPA-2018 legislation which basically implements GDPR in the UK. [1] Its application is supervised by the ICO. Subject Access Request can be issued to pretty much any public institution / company [2]
"You have the right to find out if an organisation is using or storing your personal data. This is called the right of access. You exercise this right by asking for a copy of the data, which is commonly known as making a 'subject access request"
GDPR directly doesn't apply to the UK anymore (except for organisations that handle data of EU citizen, of course) but the UK chose to enact the GDPR into UK law via the Data Protection Law of 2018, which is aptly dubbed "UK GDPR".
I do this, but to every webpage - so there should be much less cross-site talk. Not that the advertising machine doesn't have a million other ways of getting though.
I recently realized and talked about how HN has been my third place for a while ( young account but ( relatively ) old soul ). Thought I should submit the thing itself.
Turns out those are really important, and their destruction is one of the serious side-effects of the sanitary measures that is almost completely ignored, or at least not part of the equation of all the downsides to this non-sense ( referring mostly to lockdowns ). Anyway, I'm not in the mood for a Covid debate, just find it useful to delineate this concept.
I think that's the heart of the matter. I've thought about this quite a bit, but when we say break them down, how does that work ?
Could there be legal thresholds such as what already exists with regards to ( actual ) hate speech and encouraging violence, based on publicly agreed upon standards ?
Platforms being legally accountable for enforcing arbitrary or biased deplatforming or shadowbanning ? They are a special kind of service ...
I guess you'd need a watchdog with teeth. Does anyone have a link to something that covers all this in depth ? Could well be a HN thread ( maybe this one .. )