The state is saying Visa is committing the crime. The states media cheerleaders are squawking it to all that will listen.
If Visa loses, payment processors have little choice but to remove processing from sites that allow user generated content, including Reddit. They are legally responsible for all under-18 content, and as "Big Evil Corporations" they have no support from anyone in the community that matters.
The EU and UK is even worse in this regard, so no anonymous commercial social networks will ever be created again.
Nothing to do with transaction risk. Congress and the executive branch have a myriad of ways to harm a large business if they don't get what they want.
Visa's issues with religious fundamentalists started in the Tipper Gore days. During the Bush presidency it was nearly impossible for a porn site to get a US payment processor.
Google+ and circles were a good idea and should have been given a team with a lot of free rein and left to grow organically.
Google+ died because it was forced on everyone that had a Google and a Youtube account by psychopathic managers to "grow the numbers". This included forcing a realname policy on non-G+ users that explicitly did not want their online persona connected to their identity. It became the least cool platform on the internet overnight.
The mistake they made was having it be closed invites for so long. Facebook butchered Facebook Chat, and my whole friend group was ready to jump ship. Except Google wouldn’t let us, and then Facebook had enough time to get Chat/Messages kind of good enough again, and by the time anyone could get on Google+ no one cared to.
There were also some really bad decisions: for example, G+ on iOS would send you a push notification every time some rando who had you in their Gmail contacts joined G+ or added you to a circle. There was no way to turn that off other than disabling notifications entirely or deleting the app for something like half a year. I chose the latter long before they implemented it.
Circles were potentially interesting but if memory serves the first implementation was clumsy and I found it limiting because it required you to know what your followers were interested in and, if memory serves, didn't have a way to de-dupe shares so you'd see the same blog post shared by 20 people as separate notifications. My impression of that time was mostly seeing things I wasn't interested in or had seen before.
>Google+ died because it was forced on everyone that had a Google and a Youtube account
Today I have two Youtube accounts despite every effort to not end up with a real name G+ account. And while all of my main activity is on my non-real name account - i.e. the one I actually want, I'm forced to use the other to connect to rewards (Overwatch League tokens to my Battle.net account for watching Overwatch League), because I'm not allowed to do that on my "branded" account. An account I never wanted to exist.
In practice, for Circles to actually be useful, they need to be scrupulously maintained.
If you send a message to a certain circle about a pool party, and it turns out that you forgot to add a friend to the circle they will be insulted.
Or if you send a message to a circle that included someone who the message was not intended for, once again, you’re in trouble.
Group chats tend to work much better because they are simpler and are only created when you have a specific need. They can last beyond that need if the people in it end up being a useful grouping for the long term, but this filtering happens organically.
To replace Pichai the two largest Google shareholders would have to give a shit about the direction of the company. But they've been absent for longer than Pichai has been CEO.
Yes. Normally people are too quick to attribute power and fault to individuals, or so everyone says, but here's a case where two individuals really seem to have something close to full power and ability to fix at least the more obvious and readily fixable problems—they simply choose not to—and yet people usually diffuse the blame among "Google" or "the incentives".
Google and Bing (and hence DDG etc) are no longer a search engines, they're "information the powers that be permit you to have" engines. Forums, blogs, and small independent websites have disappeared from indexes. Large walled garden platforms like Facebook are impossible to query.
I certainly notice this too. I remember searching for technical queries and would find many (not SEOsplurge) blog posts or random forums where the question is discussed. Now it is just the same stackoverflow answer replicated across multiple content farms.
Peculiarly, I have found the more 'genuine' websites by using image search. Perhaps because more things fit into a grid, and I can usually gauge whether the website is genuine or a botfarm from the images its author chose.
If I search "presstv", the .com site of which was literally seized by the US govt, I get their unseizable .ir site as the first result. No scary warnings, no fluff.
If I search "rt", I get RT site as the first result.
Similarly for smaller sites that have caught flak or been banned for opposing US government narratives (SCF, CN, GZ, etc).
Ironically, it's "open" platforms like Wikipedia that have the lowest tolerance for political dissent. Twitter, Facebook are quite compromised as well.
From what I can tell, DDG said they were going to downrank known propaganda sites, which meant that, in practice, dissenting results would also appear.
Then, the pro-Russian-propaganda outlets got upset and started complaining about free speech. (As though exclusively showing sites from one hostile foreign government would be aligned with the intent of the 1st amendment!)
Wish there was something like Read Something Interesting (http://readsomethinginteresting.com/) but with a search index, where you could search only the blogosphere.
.....what? What forums have dissapeared from Google? I get and search forum results all the time. This is not including of course the forums that have gone private or purposely delisted themselves
I can't surface them at all for non-programming sites. Occasionally automotive, but it's still mostly AI generated made for adsense junk. I can use site: filters on sites I know about, but I can't find anything on a page I don't know that way. Your filter bubble may be different.
Yeah, there's a minimum volume required to store an electric charge and memory has reached it.
Global demand is collapsing due to the Great NotARecession, whatever price we reach by Christmas will be the lowest planar DRAM ever gets. So buy up all the DDR4 you need. ArF immersion tools that sit in DRAM fabs are now full amortized and memory lines are not likely to be earning much more than the marginal cost of maintenance, power and materials that they consume, any lower in price and they get turned off.
I hear good things about vertically stacked thin film transistors as a future technology, but they haven't left the lab yet.
A bunch of the cost is test and packaging which is constant so there will be a small cost per bit reduction. But the new chip will cost significantly more to manufacture than a 512Gbit device. No free lunch.
If Visa loses, payment processors have little choice but to remove processing from sites that allow user generated content, including Reddit. They are legally responsible for all under-18 content, and as "Big Evil Corporations" they have no support from anyone in the community that matters.
The EU and UK is even worse in this regard, so no anonymous commercial social networks will ever be created again.