The article centers around activity in Syria, but the problem is much more endemic. In the United States, Apple has consistently taken down apps providing information about US government airstrikes - including those that strike wedding processions, children, bystanders, etc. Recent efforts to identify and scrub foreign propagandists in the United States have silenced legitimate voices of domestic dissent, as foreign influence campaigns typically attempt to magnify grassroots dissenting opinions (this is true also of US foreign intelligence efforts). There's many reasons why these kinds of apps, comments, and conversations are taken down due to their content.
Fundamentally, being a gateway to information in a legal environment where the hosting the content as a curator puts you under risk creates deep incentives to whitewash content. Those forces are already present for companies which might accidentally sustain 9gag/4chan type cultures/commentary which contradicts however its productizing its platform.
Reddit is another example a company that has recently scrubbed itself of most controversial content, including content critical of or dangerous to its host's countries political and national security naratives. Twitter has started down that journey as well.
It feels like we're experiencing the growing pains of social network and hosted content boom reinvented on web technology over the past couple decades.
It's kind of amazing in retrospect how controversial some of the "mundane" applications of technology to society have been, whereas a couple decades ago most of the moral panic centered around concepts like "online dating", which to date have actually been relatively controversy scarce.
Australia lacks safe harbour laws which the US has had for some time. This has a chilling effect on certain types of platforms. Even something like a photo hosting site is very risk heavy in Australia as the type of content on your servers is your responsibility.
I feel like those safe harbour laws in the US are at risk, at least in practice, as the idea of a content "conduit" begins being less plausible as platforms start moderating more and more.
Now, I am all in favour of moderation. Real life communities are moderated, and all the strongest online communities have some kind of moderation. But there needs to be protections for companies who are moderating the best they can and still have evil content on the site. Else these platforms won't be sustainable and will be in heavy legal risk to boot. They won't make much sense anymore.
> I feel like those safe harbour laws in the US are at risk, at least in practice, as the idea of a content "conduit" begins being less plausible as platforms start moderating more and more.
The way the US got the safe harbor to begin with was as follows.
There was a court decision that essentially said that you weren't liable if you were just carrying bits, but if you did moderation then you were.
The problem with this is obviously that you then either have to have no moderation at all or it has to be 100% perfect because you're liable for everything you get wrong, and getting everything 100% perfect isn't really possible. So the result would have been that nobody would do any moderation and everything would be overrun by trolls and spam. To prevent that, Congress passed a safe harbor that allowed platforms to do moderation without immediately ending up in court.
The problem now is that the constitution and jurisdictional issues make it difficult for governments in the US to do the kind of censorship that a lot of people now want somebody to do. So they're trying to get in the back door by creating laws that will force the tech companies to do it, because on the one hand the companies have minimal stake in hosting any given information and will execute just about every takedown no matter how ridiculous if it will reduce their liability, and on the other hand they're not bound by the First Amendment when they over-block protected speech. So imposing any kind of liability on them that will cause them to execute spurious takedown requests is basically the censor's birthday wish, and even better if you can get them to over-block things ahead of time.
But there are solid reasons for the First Amendment to be in effect, and "governments shouldn't be able to erase evidence of their crimes" is pretty far up there on the list. So this ploy to put the national censorship authority into the offices of Facebook and Twitter really needs to get shut down one way or another, or we're in for a bad future.
>The problem with this is obviously that you then either have to have no moderation at all or it has to be 100% perfect
I'm not sure. You can let the users moderate themselves, then you're still just carrying bits. That's where a pluralistic organisation of the platform comes in handy. Things like Reddit or image boards are not just one community, but a plurality of communities. None of those suit you? Go ahead and open your own subreddit, splitter! Then you can moderate there as you please. The problem is of course, the bit carrier cannot expect an advertiser to agree with all the subcommunities. But that's a different, and solvable problem. You need better targeting for ads and you need to accept that some subcommunities will just not be attractive for any advertisers at all.
It wasn't long ago that it was shown that being host to a hateful sub community lead to overall higher levels of hate in unrelated communities.
You don't actually have this imagined separation you imply: hosting fatpeoplehate mean you impose a higher moderation burden on unrelated communities. And while the reason for this might be the principle of free speech, in practice you are only defending the act of hating fat people.
Out of curiosity, what was the court decision? I've been thinking about this recently from the same perspective; that once you start allowing moderation then you should lose the shield of liability, but wasn't aware that this had been articulated by the courts previously.
The EFF has a good page on CDA 230 here [0]. The relevant court cases are the 1991 case 'Cubby, Inc. v. CompuServe, Inc' [1] and 1995's 'Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Servs. Co.' [2]. In 'Cubby', CompuServe was found to have no liability for content hosted on their site as they did no moderation themselves, had no knowledge of specific content on their site, and were thus not a publisher. In 'Prodigy', Prodigy Services was found to have liability as their moderation practices were judged to make them the publisher of the content.
CDA 230 was the legislative response to this, allowing companies to not assume liability for moderating content.
The DMCA had the safe harbor provisions, which the GP claimed were added in response to a court case. It's that court case that I'm interested in learning more about, because it sounds like the logic used in that case mirrors my own thoughts on the issue and I'm curious to see if that is the case.
The big social media players underappreciate the areas that they've found themselves in, a major part of news media.
Dealing with fake news, intelligence backed propoganda, and censorship of certain content are very difficult tasks. They aren't just "security" or "platform abuse" issues. These are editorial & fact checking issues.
Ultimately, it will be impossible to deal with them via clear policies and software. The only way to do it is with human intelligence, decision making and judgement.
A video of an isis execution could be snuff, critical news, isis propoganda, baathist propoganda...
The types of organisations that do these kinds ds of jobs tend to have it baked into their DNA. Journalistic organizations for examlr, that have editorial philosophies embedded in their DNA the way Facebook has software development embedded into it's.
In terms of online media, Wikipedia is the best example, imo. Dealing with this stuff is at it's core. I can't see FB ever becoming adequately capable of dealing with these types of issues.
Even bans get I to tricky territory once you reach FB/twitter scale.
Not a surprise. Many of us grew up believing we as Americans are exceptional, that we are inherently the good guys in any international conflict.
The reality is our government has interests. Morality and interests are orthogonal, with the latter being influenced primarily by profits or some perceived direct or indirect threat to America’s elite.
"Many of us grew up believing we as Americans are exceptional, that we are inherently the good guys in any international conflict."
Sounds like the USSR, only that we get rid of this delusion almost 30 years ago.
Now it's slowly coming back thanks to the Russian government's propaganda, but it is still far from the present US level.
What is unsettling is that the US is clearly not a dictatorship (or at least, not like "any dictatorship ever"). It manages to stay reasonably democratic even with this and other dictatorship enabling mechanism (powerful Executive Power, heavy sectorial financing of the government, etc). On this point, they are exceptional.
It's definitely not a dictatorship, it's something a lot more insidious. It's a self-sustaining informal plutocracy that masquerades as a paragon of democracy.
I don't understand how people still believe the US is an exceptionally democratic country even after learning about how democracy is implemented here. The whole thing with Electoral College and two-party system is just the tip of the iceberg. For me, it was the revelation about the existence of riders [0] that was the final nail in the coffin of my belief in democracy.
> dictatorship enabling mechanism (powerful Executive Power, heavy sectorial financing of the government, etc).
+ significant increases in secret courts and endless budgets and free reign for intelligence agencies that report to executive branch.
All shifts that have been happening over the last two decades.
It only becomes a problem to most people when someone they don't like is given those powers. Which is why they should never have those powers in the first place. Something many have warned about this for a long time and something the US has had a unique history of pushing back against, which is now long ago.
Curiously, I had much the same experience despite being from the UK — Americans were always the heroes. British too (e.g. colonialism, empire, and commonwealth presented as an unmitigated good thing), but if there was a conflict of any sort between the UK and the USA, the USA were almost always the good guys.
Well, for one, all the major movies and tv series are American, so they will present any war, conflict, etc, under American viewpoints, to an international audience (including politically naive, historically ignorant and impressionable young ones).
Even when the plot will cast doubt on the legitimacy of the conflict and the actions of the heroes, those will still be the protagonists (and with the humanizing superiority of at least being able to be morally conflicted about their actions), whereas the nuances of the other side are either hidden altogether, or obscured by some "we're all human after all/both sides are equally at fault" message.
I had the same experience being from and growing in Poland.
I think I can give you a simple reason: Hollywood. Through movies and TV shows, America has been defining the mass culture for the past few decades, for almost the entire world.
This is very deliberate. From 1911 to 2017, 800+ films and 1100+ television shows have received backing from the Pentagon and the CIA [1]. Several films received major script changes, primarily to create a certain perception of the US military and intelligence agencies.
That's an interesting link you have there, but it feels like limited hangout. "Yeah we admit we routinely manipulated film and more, but only to paint ourselves in a favorable light."
>I think I can give you a simple reason: Hollywood. Through movies and TV shows, America has been defining the mass culture for the past few decades, for almost the entire world.
I think this can conflate cause/effect. Hollywood creates these movies and stories because the people producing them believe the narrative.
It's interesting to me which narratives are questioned, and which aren't. The Vietnam War is widely considered controversial, but World War 2 was about defeating the evil Nazis, period, right? Adam Curtis has some interesting interviews with soldiers in The Living Dead about this topic; often the men on the ground couldn't tell good from bad.
The issue isn't about Americans believing America is exceptional. Every nation believes themselves to be the protagonists. The difference between the US and everyone else is that the US managed to export its movies to the point they became an integral part of culture of half of the world. In any western nation X, for the past decades, you only had two categories of movies of importance: local movies, and American movies. And usually the latter were better / more interesting.
Yet in reality British colonialism was, being equal to other european countries colonialism (France, Spain, Portugal, Dutch, Belgium, Germany a bit), one of the greatest evils in mankind's history, probably the worst if you count all direct and indirect casualties. I would be properly ashamed of my ancestors if I was from one of the countries, yet people simply don't give a nanofraction of a fuck.
Much of the mess we are facing in last 20th century till now is due to that. Countries literally raped for centuries, all their wealth stolen. Generations raised as servants to powerful overlords. Promoting more submissive minorities into ruling classes. Afterwards some idiots in their tea club draw semi-random lines on the maps when creating new countries, creating perfect storm for future conflicts.
And what we have today? Colonialism with a modern face - continuous brain drain so that only poor uneducated or lazy stay in their home country. And of course resource drain never stopped, look at companies like Royal Dutch Shell or DeBeers and many, many others.
> I would be properly ashamed of my ancestors if I was from one of the countries, yet people simply don't give a nanofraction of a fuck.
I think it’s pretty obvious why people aren’t ashamed. Because they didn’t do the act. Take your expectation of shame to it’s conclusion: It’s very selective to only call out European colonialist countries as being ones where shame should be expected. If we are looking at crimes across history everyone on the planet must end up ashamed of their ancestry as there are few innocents. Not like the current borders and genetic make up of countries in Europe has been static throughout history, let alone every other plot of land in the world.
It is important to learn from history, but assigning blame on the living -- yourself or others -- for what dead people did is a certain path for repeating many of those same historical mistakes.
The British empire to the early 18th century could be considered an example of this as it was entirely a private sector phenomenon and not considered hugely relevant in government policy.
>that we are inherently the good guys in any international conflict.
How else could any human or organization function if not by acting in ways they believe are right?
>The reality is our government has interests.
The reality is everyone has interests. The "government" isn't some homogeneous entity pushing towards a single plan; it's an incredibly complex network of individuals.
The nation isn't perfect, but does anyone really believe that, on net, America hasn't been a force for good in the world? What is your benchmark?
"The nation isn't perfect, but does anyone really believe that, on net, America hasn't been a force for good in the world?"
Wow. You really never moved out of your bubble, did you?
There are many people(not just IS extremists) who consider the US-Empire as plain evil.
And much more who just think of US as arrogant, ignorant, self righteous bricks who try to enforce the american way of life on the whole world.
And covertly or openly destroy anyone who opposes.
Now I am not that extreme, in my view and I actually think that good or bad, all in all, probably yes, but there is too much truth in the accusation. And you proved the ignorant part very well.
(btw. technology and science are the things that do the net good for me ... but politicaly, hell no. Just another empire posing as nice to go after selfish motives. Nicer than other empires maybe but still a empire)
I see the word "empire" bandied about when discussing this subject a lot, and I'm never really sure what people mean by it. I mean, sure on the face of it you're correct, an "empire" according to various dictionaries is just an expansive amount of territory under a single rule, but it doesn't seem like that's what anyone really means when they say it. Otherwise, why aren't most countries empires? They have an "expansive" amount of territory by some definition. Or what about the EU? China? Russia?
What seems especially confusing to me is that "empire" has a very specific negative connotation but it's rarely out and out said what people who say "empire" actually think the US's crime is. I could imagine it to mean the way we treated Native Americans, but it doesn't seem like that's actually what's being talked about most of the time. Furthermore if we're talking just about global economic and cultural influence, that's voluntary(?) so the connotation meant doesn't work there.
What's the real deal here? What are we actually talking about?
And just to be clear I'm very much against US interventionalism but that doesn't constitute an empire... Or does it?
Also, openly destroying people for disagreeing with the "American Way Of Life" isn't something I've seen before. Are your referring to the Cold War, or stuff with the Middle East?
"During the Cold War in particular, the U.S. government secretly supported military coups that overthrew democratically elected governments in Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, the Congo in 1960, Brazil in 1964 and Chile in 1973. "
This is what empires do.
Dominating their way onto weaker states, by all means. Sanctions, assasinations, supporting, supressing, blocking, sending weapons and ultimatively troops. There is a reason why there are US bases all over the world.
And yes, sometimes that can be a net gain, like in Nazi Germany, but usually all the human rights democracy talk is just facade.
And also yes, smaller states do the same, act like empires, but the US is by far the largest Power since the USSR vanished.
But china is on the rise and europe likes to be an empire as well ... but for example with europe I have the hope that we tend to stay more a democratic federation and not go down that path as well.
Okay that does make sense. I think that there are good and bad sides to the US' actions though, and the good actions are not limited to WW2.
It's important to note that, at some size any nation becomes an "empire" by that definition-- it really isn't possible to not do that, and survive. Beyond a certain amount influence, there will be constant threats to security and prosperity and people trying to harm you, and rightly or not the solution any government would look to for these problems is violence. Because government is fundamentally based on force, inside and out (government is enforced at the point of a gun). So to say that the US's government is uniquely terrible is not really true.
Also for the most part the actions of the US are in service to what they say they are in service to. On this I disagree with you slightly: the values US talks about are usually not a facade. And the times that they are, those become highly contentious actions, even in the US, whereas in other countries I don't know that they would be-- so to act as if the US's people are uniquely terrible is again very disingenuous.
In the example that you quote, those actions were clearly in the interest of toppling an even greater evil. I don't think this rationale is morally right, but you could say we went with the "lesser evil".
So I agree with you, that the US does act like an empire, and that other countries would too if they had to or could.
However I see a lot of specific condemnations of the US as if it were unique. That's more what I was responding to. I don't think either of us think that's right.
"So to say that the US's government is uniquely terrible is not really true."
I never said that. What is unique with the US is just that you are the biggest power today. That's why so much of the negativity is focused on your empire.
If china would be dominating, it would be them. (and I know their human right standards are much lower)
But with this I disagree very much:
"It's important to note that, at some size any nation becomes an "empire" by that definition-- it really isn't possible to not do that, and survive"
If you are powerful, because your people work hard and efficient, why do you have to invade other countries?
"Beyond a certain amount influence, there will be constant threats to security and prosperity"
Because they are a threat to your prosperity, because they don't sell you their ressources at a price you want?
Note that many people think, that terrorism is the answer because their land was exploited.
Understood. (: I was mostly going on a tangent there, where I was responding to the kind of comments my OG comment in this thread responded to.
> If you are powerful, because your people work hard and efficient, why do you have to invade other countries?
Perhaps because a country is funding terrorist attacks against you and/or preparing nuclear weapons or ICBMs to attack you with?
> Because they are a threat to your prosperity, because they don't sell you their ressources at a price you want?
I'm very against force retaliation for things that are not force initiation. That's not what I meant so perhaps I should elaborate, although it's a red herring away from my main point: what is included in acting like an empire is anything that expands a nation's influence and domination. That doesn't specify the use of force. So something like having trade wars with countries that refuse to stop ignoring copyright and subsidizing their own products in a dubious way, would be included in acting like an empire. And since those countries are leveraging state power to control the market, why shouldn't the US be allowed to retaliate in kind, since that's apparently OK?
(Side note: I don't think we should have started the trade wars, personally. I think it's an unfortunate circumstance for the economy. But I think doing that kind of thing, once again, is an inevitable necessity for a state because it has to prove it can't be taken advantage of).
> Note that many people think, that terrorism is the answer because their land was exploited.
It seems like American Exceptionalism has been shifting from a definition of “America is unique” to “America is perfect”. Obviously no country can meet the 2nd definition.
America has definitely been a force for good in the world, but just like every other organization run by humans, it makes mistakes and sometimes succumbs to human weakness like greed and overconfidence.
>>that we are inherently the good guys in any international conflict.
>How else could any human or organization function if not by acting in ways they believe are right?
Being convinced that you're always right is not the same as doing the right thing or acting the right way.
>The nation isn't perfect, but does anyone really believe that, on net, America hasn't been a force for good in the world? What is your benchmark?
Hoo, boy. No, America hasn't been "a force for good in the world", because that's a really naive, simplistic idea. America has done many things in (and to) the world. Some of them have been good for certain groups of people at certain times.
> The nation isn't perfect, but does anyone really believe that, on net, America hasn't been a force for good in the world? What is your benchmark?
Lots of people all over the world who have been on the receiving end of US military or economic aggression enacted in the interests of the US plutocrats.
African Americans, Native Americans, most of South America, pretty much all of the Middle East and North Africa, anyone who has suffered structural violence as a result of the US's insistence on a morally bankrupt Friedman hack-job neoliberal economic ideology.
The US has done a lot of good things, but on balance I think it's done more damage and has merely replaced the British Empire as the current Anglo-sphere imperialist power.
Abusing its power to exceptionally shield itself from international justice, while at the same time practicing extraterritorial judicial reach, is also not a good sign of being a net force for good.
Do you believe that in the countries where the US has intervened that without US involvement things would be that much better? Seems to me that when the US supported a dictatorship, the alternative wasn’t a thriving democracy but just another dictatorship aligned to a different power.
p.s. We've had to warn you repeatedly about using HN for political or ideological battle. At some point we ban accounts that keep doing that—regardless of what they're arguing for or against—because it's highly destructive of the intellectual curiosity this site exists for. Would you please fix that?
You've proven my point exactly. Your standard for America is perfection - a country that has never done anything wrong or made mistakes. Under your standard, every country is evil. It's a silly way to look at things.
And, I see you've swallowed the Mossadegh narrative hook line and sinker. Iran was in chaos prior to the coup. Mossadegh was not uniformly popular, there were riots on the street. He was on his way out regardless, as he had failed to deliver on many of his promises.
As for Iraq, sure, that didn't turn out well.
By why did you ignore my comment about Taiwan, Japan, Western Europe, etc? You trot out examples of failures, but completely ignore the success stories.
Don't forget "economic warfare", where the US crushes its "enemiy countries" through painful sanctions, which always leaves the poorest portions of those countries in shambles. Not to mention the refugee crisis it creates, which in turn has the "pleasant" effect of lowering wages across the globe.
Wait, so the US is evil for not giving the benefits of it's economy to states it doesn't like/that dislike it? That seems really backwards-- how does anyone else have a right to the US's economy?
Even more, (if I understand your point correctly) the US is also evil for having a good economy and society that refugees want to flee to?
So the US is both evil for having a great economy available to people and also for not making that economy available to people? Is there any way to win besides just not having a good economy (and society)?
Is this just hating on the strong and successful because they are strong and successful?
It's fine, there is a certain collective on HN that do not believe or want to even google United States and the past dealings with the middle East and South America.
>The article centers around activity in Syria, but the problem is much more endemic. In the United States, Apple has consistently taken down apps providing information about US government airstrikes - including those that strike wedding processions, children, bystanders, etc. Recent efforts to identify and scrub foreign propagandists in the United States have silenced legitimate voices of domestic dissent
>The article centers around activity in Syria, but the problem is much more endemic. In the United States, Apple has consistently taken down apps providing information about US government airstrikes
Well, Apple is not some international beacon of progress and activism.
It's a US-based company, run by people who feel US-patriots, and their differences with this or that sitting president aside, will do what's best for their country's "national interests". Same as Google, Facebook, etc.
Which is why countries with any major claim to sovereignty and with their own interests and stakes, build their own equivalents of major search, social networks, etc (e.g. Baidu).
>Recent efforts to identify and scrub foreign propagandists in the United States have silenced legitimate voices of domestic dissent
I wouldn't say the latter was not part of their purpose. You can't have your country's own citizens dissent to the elite/bipartisan consensus. Trillions are at stake...
Things are much more simple I'd say. Those "algorithms" I'd say are very dumb, nor human flaggers that are better.
Even very innocent family videos are being flagged all the time, you just have to speak a foreign language and look like a middle easterner.
Some say that just speaking in elevated tone in Arabic and having a beard is enough to be flagged on big dotcoms.
And if you are openly are a member of just any social organisation, your account deletion is pretty much a matter of time if you are a middle easterner, no matter if you are pro-regime, anti-regime, or have nothing to do with that. The Egyptian national symphonic orchestra was once banned by Facebook as a "terrorist organisation"
This is ironic given that all big social networks including Facebook outsource content censorship to companies in obscure countries like Algeria or in Balkans.
> Reddit is another example a company that has recently scrubbed itself of most controversial content,
I agree with you on most points however reddit takes no action against extremists and fringe groups proliferating on their platform until substantial pressure is applied from either advertisers or journalists. They go as far as shadowbanning users who bring up their lack of action to shine a light on their culpability, presumably to keep it off of mainstream journalists radar, thankfully it's now too late and enough good journalists have picked up the scent. Expect to see many great pieces about this in the near future.
Reddit also scrubs the profiles and post history of mass shooters who were indoctrinated on their platform, one example is Elliot Rodgers the incel and Santa Barbara shooter from several years ago, truly disgusting and frightening behavior that denies researchers and journalists from understanding the reach and impact of the spread of ideologies and hatred on these platforms.
Reddit has banned Russian [0] and Iranian [1] "propaganda accounts", now lots of people over there are calling to ban "Chinese propaganda" [2] aka anybody who gets tired of anti-Chinese submissions constantly being pushed on the front-page.
Gee, one might wonder where that might be coming from? [3] That's the absurdity of the situation: Russian, Iranian and Chinese "propaganda" gets banned, while US propaganda [4] isn't even recognized as such because being pro "democracy, freedom US" is considered the default "good" position and anything not in line with it must be evil or at least bad.
Reddit has been a declining trash heap for quite some time now. It definitely has to do with its emergence into mainstream popularity (the problem gets worse the larger the subreddit). It's the perfect platform for every armchair expert with a bigoted view to gain admiration and affirmation of their views from other uninformed bigots. It happens to be much easier to be a loud and belligerent bigot than to express an informed and nuanced opinion.
The only thing stopping HN from completely morphing into that cesspool is the diligent and fair moderation and the diversity and quality of opinions expressed. For the most part, hackers tend to be more critical and suspicious of authoritative sources than other groups.
>anybody who gets tired of anti-Chinese submissions constantly being pushed on the front-page
It's not really anyone who gets tired, it's the accounts that revert to whataboutism whenever the communist party is criticised, flat out deny things like the Tienanmen Massacre, and spread a lot of hate when something happens that the CCP doesn't like, such as a Tibetan woman being elected president of a student union.
>anti-Chinese submissions
Anti-CCP. It is important to note that criticism of a government does not constitute hate speech towards the citizens. This is another tactic used by propagandists.
> flat out deny things like the Tienanmen Massacre
I'm fairly active on Reddit and I've literally never seen that happen. That's because the Chinese people so deep in historic revisionism often don't even care to begin with and can't even access Reddit in the first place, at least not "easily".
It's usually people with a "anti-China" position who bring up Tienamen square, to conflate it with whatever a given submission is about. As in: "Huweai must be spying because the Chinese government is authoritarian evil because Tienamen square".
> This is another tactic used by propagandists.
Just like conflating issues to give the impression to fight for the only "just cause" [0].
Redditors will gleefully jump on (by voting to the front page) anything even remotely critical of China. I suppose it fulfills some deeply-rooted sense of 'defiance' in them and gives them some sense of satisfaction. It's basically the childish game of "oh, you don't want me to touch this? I'm going to touch this over and over because of that".
The net effect is that they will judiciously post, for example, the anniversary of Tienanmen Square every year without fail, but fail to mark the dates of equally tragic, but unpatriotic or unflattering events. When was the last time the anniversary of the Mai Lai Massacre or No Gun Ri was upvoted to the front page? How about the anniversary of the invasion of Iraq?
Hint: Never.
It's ironic (and very telling of their motives) that the events they have complete freedom to discuss never receive equal attention or criticism.
Nevermind these users really don't do anything constructive since the problem at hand censorship.
Holocaust denial got worse because of efforts to silence some crazy people who did. Not slightly worse, it is really shit you have to think about it again. And people complaining aren't even jews or age above 50.
The self-righteousness, while the incentive might be good, really doesn't help at all.
And yes, denial of the holocaust is a form of censorship, so adjust your talking points correctly.
> agree with you on most points however reddit takes no action against extremists and fringe groups proliferating on their platform until substantial pressure is applied from either advertisers or journalists.
They banned IRA_memes because IRA I guess and quarantined waterniggas because it had "niggas" in the title even though the whole sub was just about drinking water. They're definitely taking an approach of culling anything that advertisers might not like.
The internet was founded on a military backbone, then grew to an information is everywhere backbone, now the fences of the garden have been contracting to a walled garden again.
There is a scene in firefly where the dr. character gets a box. It was implied as a openish internet. Pretty sure that's where were headed.
Information is free until the folks in the back of the courtroom make sure it's not.
The history of China's rise as a technologically enabled state is in direct contradiction to the premise of the accusation.
The West invented technologically enabled surveillance. The Stasi in Germany - for example - developed a records and accounting system and would use home telephony equipment to spy on dissidents. As of the 70s and 80s the United States NSA has backdoored much of the modern global communications systems - and has build these systems to scale intelligence into actionable intelligence for partner enforcement organizations (CIA/FBI/etc). At a municipal scale, the United States is networked with threat scoring systems, camera networks with facial recognition, ISMI interceptors (with continuous passive collections events over all major cities), data fusion centers between policing and data networks, requirements to data holding companies to compel data access, and much more - these systems were build several decades ago but are constantly being updated.
China was struggling through these decades to reestablish itself, and has only recently copied modern Western systems of surveillance.
I don't really have teeth in that game though. I realize this is a political topic ("blame"). The fact that the West employs a sophisticated and pervasive surveillance state should not restrict us from criticizing Eastern implementations of the same gross mal-application of technology. And the fact is that who "invented" it is a bit of a non-starter, as state surveillance existed thousands of years ago in rudimentary forms that have evolved independently between states - and the application of modern technology is just one aspect of historical picture.
Of course the surveillance situation in the United States goes much further, with state intelligence agencies actively "engaged" with the public so that public perception can be shaped. The NSA calls this combination of surveillance and engagement "active listening". I don't know whether China has learned from this yet (such topics are hard to research) but it wouldn't surprise me.
This does seem to be the way that Open Source has gone: The operating system and some other critical components (compilers, runtimes, etc) are open source - but applications, services, desktops, marketplaces, firmware, etc are closed.
I'd still call this a huge win for both open source and free software. But obviously its a much bigger win for open source than for free software.
The fact of the matter is that the United States considers strong industries in strategic technology fields in adversary nations a national security threat. This is why NSA seeks to modify US standards for export across the world. It's why US lawmakers have worked with US telecommunication firms to gain access to international communications. It's why the US has gone after Kaspersky AntiVirus. It's why the US has gone after Huawei, and intelligence officials have supported debunked stories about (e.g. SuperMicro). It's why the Trump Administration has stripped the regulations on 5G development (to speed it up so that American companies and technology can dominate the standard).
This isn't a uniquely American thing. Russia and China are doing the same things (heard of the Great Firewall?)
Opening doors to journalists is a good and appropriate step. It won't fix the underlying issues, though, as they stem from National Security competition - not wrote press misunderstanding.
Others have pointed out some errors with the methods employed in this report.
Still, who else is collecting this kind and fidelity of data? I found the trends very informative. First that we're still a long long way from having hardened base operating systems, but also that the trend is positive and slowly moving in the right direction.
Even just getting a breakdown of CVEs is interesting (though I would have liked better granularity than "bypass something") for both trends and to understand just how many DoS issues come up per year versus say code injections or overflows.
If the data collection is faulty, then it doesn't matter how interesting the results are or how needed they may be, because they're compromised and unreliable. Yes, this should be studied, but to be at all useful the study has to be accurate.
Wow. I love explaining Reed Solomon codes and this didn't do it justice.
The basic concept is that if I give you five points all on the same line, you only need any two of them to reconstruct the line.
Reed Solomon doesn't use lines (it isn't optimal) and the geometry they use isn't the Cartesian plane (this requires infinite precision) - but this is what the codes do!
Just like it requires two points to reconstruct a line, three points are required to reconstruct a simple polynomial (degree 2). Reed Solomon uses "high degree polynomials" which require n+1 points to reconstruct the degree-n polynomial.
The codes take data, make a polynomial out of it, and then send points from the polynomial to the other side, which can interpolate it as soon as enough points are gathered!
All of this looks like impenetrable discretization and matrix operations if you just get a description of the algorithms, which makes it seem a lot less approachable than it is.
I remember playing a computer game in math class where you were presented with a XY plane and had to "hit" points (really circles, didn't need to be exact) by plotting equations through them. With some trial and error you could make a polynomial go through basically as many as you wanted, it's neat to see this applied to a real problem!
Doing this kind of thing was my first introduction to Lagrange interpolation, too, but it turns out that you can do Lagrange interpolation without trial and error; you can just use linear algebra, since the points are a linear function of the coefficients, regardless of the degree of the polynomial.
This was in fact the first decoding algorithm for Reed–Solomon codes, but it's not very efficient when you don't know which of your points are the ones with the corrupted data; you kind of have to guess, which gets expensive fast when you're trying to tolerate more than one or two errors.
Although it turns out that there are better algorithms for that, the most commonly used RS codes don't actually encode a series of points on a polynomial, as subjoriented's comment at the root of this thread suggests; instead they are so-called "BCH codes", where you consider the data you transmit (both the original data and the "parity" symbols) to be actually a sequence of coefficients. So where does the redundancy come from? After all, any set of numbers is valid as the coefficients of a polynomial.
BCH codes require the polynomial to be divisible by a known generator polynomial, and that's where you get the redundancy you need to correct errors. Gorenstein and Zierler published an efficient error-correction ("decoding") algorithm for BCH codes in 1960; the first efficient decoding algorithm for original-view RS codes (where you transmit a series of points) wasn't found until 1986, and even today, BCH-code decoding algorithms are more efficient than original-view decoding algorithms.
The Gorenstein–Zierler algorithm works by evaluating the received polynomial at the roots of the generator polynomial. Since it's supposed to be a multiple of the generator, it should be zero at those roots, as the generator is; if it's nonzero, the values at those roots are due to some "error polynomial" that's been conceptually added to your message in transit. If you suppose that it has only a few nonzero coefficients, there's a clever way to compute the error polynomial from those values that should have been zero. This allows you to subtract it from the received message to correct the errors.
At least, I think that's how it works. I haven't implemented an RS decoder yet, so I might be getting some of this wrong.
But something like that was what I was actually hoping to read at the above link.
It runs in O(n^3) time, and unfortunately is not the state of the art. What actual Reed-Solomon implementations use are the Berlekamp-Massey and Forney algorithms, which run in O(n^2) time.
That’s an interesting duality between the coefficient and pointwise representation. I wonder whether this connects to the discrete Fourier transform, which can be viewed as the evaluation of a polynomial at the complex n-th roots of unity. (and the inverse DFT must be equivalent to Lagrange interpolation I guess - insert some handwaving here)
Also, the BCH encoder multiplies the input sequence with the generator polynomial, which is a convolution of their coefficients. Fourier-type transforms (i.e. number theoretic transform) relate convolution and pointwise multiplication, so I feel there’s an underlying connection here, but I don’t have enough experience with finite fields to connect the dots...
You seem to have answered your own question! For any set of `n + 1` sample values for degree-at-most-`n` polynomials, there's a map from the coefficient representation to the pointwise representation (obvious), and one going the other way (Lagrange interpolation). The DFT is just one instance of this, but a particularly nice one, because the map is essentially involutive, and subject to considerable computational speed-up.
What dots do you want to connect? (Anyway you can connect them with a high-degree polynomial curve. :-) )
Indeed, the wikipedia article on RS codes [1] mentions this equivalence between the DFT and RS encoding/decoding.
They mention that both procedures are basically a multiplication by a Vandermonde matrix, with the Fourier transform having the additional requirement of using the n-th roots of unity.
what a blast from the past - i remember this game and it blew my mind when i first realized i had the power to plot a polynomial through all those points with little effort required
I have a background in error codes - hamming, and luby and raptor and, and, and. Reed-Solomon is particularly "beautiful" from a mathematics perspective (more so than Raptor) - something I can usually explain to anyone and get them interested.
Do you want to give it a try? I just attempted to explain RS in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19248444 but I am significantly impeded by the fact that I don't actually understand it myself, so I'm sort of summarizing the Wikipedia article. Am I focusing on the right algorithms? Did I explain them correctly, as far as my short explanation goes?
The explanation from BackBlaze that you linked to goes into more depth.
It looks to be built on matrix algebra.
Kinda nifty how simple and elegant the underlying concept is, really. Reminds me of the surprising conceptual simplicity behind Diffie-Hellman.
I guess simple is relative, but in my opinion, coding theory is not simple. It requires some high level math to understand what is going on. Many people's eyes will glaze over when you go into Galois (finite) fields. Abstract algebra is not part of the typical undegrad CS/engineering math curriculum. And then the efficient algorithms for the decoding procedure were found much later than Reed & Solomon's original paper by Berlekamp.
> Abstract algebra is not part of the typical undegrad CS/engineering math curriculum.
It should be (says the mathematician)! That it doesn't probably comes from confusing the elegant theoretical perspective on finite fields to the computational perspective, which (at least from my pure-math point of view) can get pretty hairy.
if you want to learn finite fields somewhat more formally, but not so formally, this is a pretty good introduction (yes, it's for AES, but the principles are the same): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1v2tX4_dkQ
Not that I have any real answers here (re: theories of everything), but I do have something to add regarding "laws".
Charle's Law states that Pressure * Volume = Temperature.
That's true and you can do a million experiments with a million balloons and liquids/gases to validate it - until you find a non-newtonian substance, try to apply it to a solid, introduce moving fluids, etc.
Charle's Law isn't a fundamental law of physics, but a consequence of the material properties and statistical outcomes of a large number of interacting molecules. Before atoms and molecules are characterized, it _does_ look like a fundamental law to an experimenter.
It doesn't seem to me that looking for "lower layers" of theoretical physics (holographics, quantum foam, strings, whathaveyou) is an infinite regress and doomed to never be a completed project. I do think that the project may reach some point where the theories fail to be scientific (read: falsifiable) because it could be possible that reaching deep enough through layers of physical abstraction can not be achieved / no physical instrument can provably be built to look deeper (as an analogy, no instrument can be built to probe the full amplitude space of a quantum state).
I started listening to "Serial", "This American Life", "Hardcore History" and a large number of other programs. Podcasts are generally easier to consume, reconsume, and schedule. That said, recently (several years) I've moved off of podcasts because there was a surge of podcast content, and no good mechanism to find quality programs. That and I was never able to find consistently good podcast software.
Fundamentally, being a gateway to information in a legal environment where the hosting the content as a curator puts you under risk creates deep incentives to whitewash content. Those forces are already present for companies which might accidentally sustain 9gag/4chan type cultures/commentary which contradicts however its productizing its platform.
Reddit is another example a company that has recently scrubbed itself of most controversial content, including content critical of or dangerous to its host's countries political and national security naratives. Twitter has started down that journey as well.
It feels like we're experiencing the growing pains of social network and hosted content boom reinvented on web technology over the past couple decades.
It's kind of amazing in retrospect how controversial some of the "mundane" applications of technology to society have been, whereas a couple decades ago most of the moral panic centered around concepts like "online dating", which to date have actually been relatively controversy scarce.