There’s a difference between a state actor controlling the whole of the public arena and a private individual controlling their own privately-sponsored forum; the latter allows you to crack open a blog and flog whatever opinion you want, and the former does not. I admit there’s some gray area for something like google, which by virtue of its size and role as intermediary has censorship abilities approaching governmental levels.
Freedom of Speech is a restriction on the government, not a duty on the part of private individuals to let you come in and piss on their living room carpet.
This argument is touted around a lot to justify censorship by private parties. Don't be misled - it is censorship. The law doesn't protect this kind of speech, which means they are legally permitted to participate in censorship, but it is censorship all the same. Yours is a common and poor argument for justifying this behavior. There are plenty of things which are both legal and immoral. I would prefer to participate in a transparently moderated community where the rules are clearly defined and aren't selectively enforced. This makes for a better community.
They don't have a legal obligation to behave this way, but that needs to stop being used as an excuse to shut down discussions on how to make the community better.
This ends up being a debate about word choice, and I normally hate that. But there is good reason to distinguish the two carefully, and the easiest way to do that is word choice.
I cannot, by definition, censor someone. I can ban them from my systems, kick them out of my home, refuse to listen to them and tell all my friends to ignore them, but I can't censor them, because I do not have the power of the state behind my decision. The difference is I can do all of those things, but nobody else needs to put up with my antics. If Dang banned you, you can still talk on thousands of other places.
I absolutely agree with you that this argument is used to shut down discussions, but that doesn't mean the distinction isn't important. Just listen to all the dishonest, deceptive bullshit we hear from politicians defending themselves by whining about the First Amendment when criticized, as if their right to speech is a right to be free from criticism. The problem being, of course, that people who don't necessarily know better fall for it and suddenly believe false things about how free speech works.
>I cannot, by definition, censor someone. I can ban them from my systems, kick them out of my home, refuse to listen to them and tell all my friends to ignore them, but I can't censor them, because I do not have the power of the state behind my decision. The difference is I can do all of those things, but nobody else needs to put up with my antics. If Dang banned you, you can still talk on thousands of other places.
I would argue that this is definitely censorship. Just because you can go somewhere else doesn't mean you aren't being censored - you are being denied access to the HN audience. Somewhere else isn't going to have the same audience. And that audience isn't making the decision - a small number of moderators are. But you're right that this is just down to pedantic word choice, feel free to discard this thread of the discussion if you'd rather not push the matter further.
>I absolutely agree with you that this argument is used to shut down discussions, but that doesn't mean the distinction isn't important. Just listen to all the dishonest, deceptive bullshit we hear from politicians defending themselves by whining about the First Amendment when criticized, as if their right to speech is a right to be free from criticism. The problem being, of course, that people who don't necessarily know better fall for it and suddenly believe false things about how free speech works.
I'm not here touting free speech like it's a legal right I have as a submitter and an obligation HN has as a publisher. Instead I'm touting it as a damn good idea that makes for a better medium for discussion and suggeting HN embraces it anyway.
> feel free to discard this thread of the discussion if you'd rather not push the matter further
Think you're right. You completely ignored my point, so this is pointless. But the root issue is not different than, either through ignorance or deceptive calculation, claiming that copyright infringement is theft. It is a category error that negatively effects people's understanding of what's going on, so it matters.
> This argument is touted around a lot to justify censorship by private parties. Don't be misled - it is censorship
It's not about justifications, it's about prerogatives.
> There are plenty of things which are both legal and immoral.
Despite what you seem to be implying, the operators of a privately run forum have no moral obligation to let anyone speak, regardless of how that might impact the quality of discussion in the community. It is totally fair for participants to criticize the moderation efforts, but just because the site is high profile doesn't mean that the moderators are any more morally obligated to permit comment than you are morally obligated to amend your fine article with my commentary.
You seem to believe that it is a moral obligation of anyone with an audience/platform to provide that platform to anyone that wants to use it...? Specifically, you described “depriving (someone of an) audience” as the immoral act.
Just to recontextualize that: if I have a blog, am I immoral for not allowing comments? Am I immoral for not allowing guest bloggers? Do I have a moral obligation to allow advertisement?
This is odd. A moral obligation to use one’s private resources to provide an audience to all comers isn’t free speech; it’s not even a free marketplace of ideas. It’s appropriating someone else’s communications infrastructure.
I think a blog is a different enough medium that it renders the comparison meaningless. Hacker News is a website that posts user submissions. I wouldn't make this argument about your blog, but I might make it about Medium.
But they’re not a site that posts user submissions. They’re a site that posts certain types of submissions: that’s what distinguishes them from reddit, 4chan, voat, etc.
A failure to maintain that identity would fundamentally change their offering and lose them their audience. You make it sound like a trivial expenditure of Nothing more than a little bandwidth.
And you haven’t meaningfully distinguished it from a blog. Blogs host comments; they host guest posts, and multiple authors. The degree to which they’re one voice or many depends on their individual structure - and none of that contradicts your core moral statement about the immoral act being not letting people have a free-for-all on your private platform. You make a distinction without rationale for why some private platforms are allowed to curate their offerings, and why others are /immoral/ for doing skz
>But they’re not a site that posts user submissions. They’re a site that posts certain types of submissions: that’s what distinguishes them from reddit, 4chan, voat, etc.
>A failure to maintain that identity would fundamentally change their offering and lose them their audience. You make it sound like a trivial expenditure of Nothing more than a little bandwidth.
They have rules and guidelines, and they set the overall topic by calling it Hacker News. Users do the rest by voting up stuff that they find relevant or interesting. This doesn't work everywhere, but it works here. I've seen it first hand by browsing my stats, posts that are off-topic don't make it far.
>And you haven’t meaningfully distinguished it from a blog. Blogs host comments; they host guest posts, and multiple authors.
Your blog is still curated. I can't make an account on your blog and post an article to it without being invited by you and presumably having you read and approve it. On HN, on the other hand, every submission is like this. If you make a "blog" where every article is submitted by users, then I'm going to give you the same speech.
All arguments are subjective so I'm not sure what that statement is supposed to convey except maybe "I am not concerned with the persuasiveness of my argument".
No, I would argue that it's different. CNN has a limited amount of time to fill and doesn't accept user submissions. HN has neither constraint, and gives users voting rights over some of the success of each post.
I think it's entirely valid for me to present my case and submit it for the consideration of the community and the moderators. I don't understand what you're getting at here, you're not making a very compelling argument for anything in particular.
In arguing that CNN's decision not to air your opinions in prime time is legitimate while HN's decision to be selective about what they'll provide a venue for isn't, you've accepted unquestioningly CNN's constraints while dismissing HN's.
In both cases, you're applying an enormous amount of subjectivity. But you'd prefer not to acknowledge that, and so have instead attempted to reframe the discussion as if your conclusions about CNN and HN are self-evidently objective. They are not.
I didn't think you had a point, it looked like you were asking contrived questions so you could antagonize him with his answers and "win" the argument, instead of just making your comment about subjectivity in the first place.
For what it’s worth: to the extent that you keep answering “but you refuse to apply your own logic to (any other medium, without reason as to why)”, I think a lot of people in this thread believe that -you’re- not debating in good faith. You can only handwave an argument away with “but different medium” so many times without explaining how a change in medium changes the relevant logic.
I think it's clear to everyone how the mediums are different. What's not clear is how subjective decisions CNN makes about what to air are acceptable, but subjective decisions HN makes about what to allow on the front page aren't.
What's especially weird about this argument is that the US media market is in fact in the middle of a giant debate about how acceptable CNN and Fox News's editorial decisions are. It's not like it's a reach to get from moderation to CNN's editorial decisions; it's a pretty obvious comparison.
Thank you, I understand where you're coming from now. Let me clarify.
The difference is because CNN makes a subjective editorial decision about what to air. Their content is curated and prepared by paid staff. The success of CNN is entirely built on the talent and hard work of these people. There's a whole side discussion about the ethical responsibilities of CNN we can have, but let's set that aside and just distinguish them from HN.
HN's success is built on its community. The overwhelming majority of submissions are user contributions - far less than 1 in 1000 HN posts are written by the mods, and they're generally meta posts. HN owes the success of its content to the community, and such I feel that they're morally obligated to treat that community with a certain level of respect. Part of that is everything I've argued for today - well-defined rules that are enforced equally and transparent moderation.
I'm not invested in CNN. I haven't participated in the formation or success of their "community", if you could even call it that. But I, and many others, have participated in the success of Hacker News by submitting articles, Show HNs, etc - and participating in discussions on the site. HN would be nothing without the community that participates in it, and frankly I think YCombinator's core business itself would be measurably worse off without HN.
Since the HN community is responsible for HN's success, I say we can call for transparent moderation.
I don't question your ability to call for it, but I don't think it's realistic to expect it. HN is built on a whole lot of user participation, but YC has also spent millions of actual dollars keeping it running, maintained, and moderated. It belongs to them, not to us.
Your recourse, if you don't like how they're managing it, is to start your own site, or to move to a different site. Indeed, if value on HN primarily comes from its users, as you say, it's hard to imagine a more powerful recourse to have.
Tangentially, I think HN's value to YC is hugely overblown. YC has been privately telling batch companies not to participate here for almost the whole time the site has existed. The fundamental key to YC's success is being first to fully commit to a market for small investments in marginal startups. It was an extremely good investment thesis, and it compounds dramatically every year as the value of the alumni network increases.
YC could kill off HN tomorrow and it is unlikely it would harm their returns at all. If you're not close to SFBA tech company investing it's easy to miss the extent to which YC is currently running the table on small startup investing, and none of that has anything to do with how HN is moderated.
> A lawsuit challenging the doctrine on First Amendment grounds, Red Lion Broadcasting Co., Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission , reached the Supreme Court in 1969. The Court ruled unanimously that while broadcasters have First Amendment speech rights, the fact that the spectrum is owned by the government and merely leased to broadcasters gives the FCC the right to regulate news content.
So are you suggesting that if I (the grandchild of Holocaust survivors) ran a link aggregator site, I would have a moral obligation to let self-declared Nazis who want to exterminate people of my ethnicity use it as a platform to speak about their hatred of people like me?
Or that a rape survivor has an obligation to allow someone to post on their site that there's no such thing as rape and every woman is "asking for it"?
No, and that's not what I'm asking of HN. I like communities that:
- Have well defined rules
- Enforce them equally
- Moderate transaprently
That's it. I'm not asking for an unfettered platform for free speech. If one of your rules is "no hateful posts targetting specific people or people groups", then it's a well justified decision to remove that post.
OK.... so if I enforce "no hateful posts targetting specific people or people groups", I have to ban the person who posts "the KKK are awful people and I think we should jail them" as I do someone who posts "people with dark skin are awful people and I think we should burn them"?
I'm somewhere between you and the parent. So much of the public square, figuratively speaking, is owned by private companies today. It's good to understand what the parameters are so you can know to what extent free expression and the free flow of ideas is occurring in a particular venue. Personally, I'm wary of just about any form of censorship, but I recognize it's a continuum, and not even I have my settings at 0.
I think this is a silly comparison. The HN curation isn't done to further some sort of agenda (at least, not at its surface or in some obvious fashion). It's to make sure we have higher quality content, not to sway the users' perspective in favor of some hidden cabal.
It isn't silly, it's an exact comparison to Newspeak, which is what the OP was doing. I mean, it's clear as day: the OP didn't even attempt to argue that censorship isn't happening. They just wanted to change the word describing it to make it feel less like oppression and more like helpfulness.
Don't get caught up in the comparison to a fascist regime. Plenty of left-wing socially conscious movements use this same tactic. I think everyone does this, usually unconsciously.
Is this definiton of censorship from Wikipedia incorrect then?
"Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information that may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by governments, media outlets, authorities or other groups or institutions"
No. But a thing being "censorship" does not imply that it is bad, unless further context is considered. However, when censorship is a good thing, we usually give it a different name because "censorship" bears a negative connotation.
As a basic example, parents frequently censor their children, but we call that "childrearing". Managers censor their workers, but some of that is necessary to run a company.
That's not the point. They just don't want to think censorship is an accepted part of their daily lives because censorship often implies oppression. But censorship is part and parcel of almost every forum. The social values of the people who own the forum, as well as incentives behind their operating it, determine what kind of censorship is applied.
For example, on YouTube, hate speech [which I know isn't actually a thing] is commonplace - they don't feel the need (or perhaps don't have the resources) to censor comments which certain people find detestable. But they have created complex systems to analyze videos so that they can identify certain ones and remove them automatically. The end result is that censorship isn't applied uniformly. In one example, a YouTube account that was documenting videos of attacks on the people of Raqqa was flagged for spreading terrorist propaganda. You could make the argument that while the hate speech didn't impact their bottom line, the videos could, so they accept a certain amount of unequal and unintentional censorship in order to maintain their business position, defend their corporate values, and of course, retain their user base.
Moderation is a more nuanced and human approach to censorship. By giving people second chances, answering emails, giving the occasional explanation, etc they build social capital and prevent emotional backlash that could threaten the status of the forum. By helping users to understand the error of their ways and have a chance to redeem themselves, they can't be accused of unfair treatment. But they are indeed imposing specific social and political values on their users, to the point of hiding or removing the post or user when it doesn't align with their values. This shapes not only the quality of the dialogue, but its content. This is the essence of censorship.
To severely paraphrase 1984: "To control speech you control language, as controlling language controls thought."
"By helping users to understand the error of their ways and have a chance to redeem themselves"
Could you elaborate a bit more on this part? I find your post quite insightful and well thought out as a whole (though my sarcasm detectors may be a bit off especially when it comes to the above sentence), but in any case, I'm not sure why you wrote "that's not the point" when everything you say seems to support exactly that point.
If you think of moderation as a tool to shape the flow of discussion in a certain pre-approved way (without, say "malicious" intent, though that can always become debatable from someone's point of view), when does moderation become censorship, or more specifically - at which point are the users allowed to think that the moderation actually became censorship? I mean, who sets the criteria? The moderator?
I was trying to convey that they weren't disagreeing with you about it being censorship, they were disagreeing of whether it was wrong or not depending on context. My reply was probably a bit disjointed.
A moderator is supposed to be an arbitrator or mediator. Moderation becomes censorship when they start enforcing policies to get users to align with their values rather than simply bringing people to an accord. Users are allowed to think it's censorship once they lose their value or become a liability.
> Users are allowed to think it's censorship once they lose their value or become a liability.
To someone who happened to live under a de facto Soviet occupation (not de jure, after all it was just a "requested friendly intervention with the noble intent of suppressing the rising nation-wide anti-people criminal elements, that just kind of somehow happened to last for a few decades"), this kind of wording (and the associated themes) sound indeed very familiar.
But it's interesting to see how many HN users don't see this as troubling at all, at least judging by the dozen (-s?) of downvotes that my original comment earned me since posting, not even mentioning how quickly other people that somehow dared to draw a parallel between censorship and the other, friendly kind of censorship got quickly downvoted into white five minutes from posting.
There's a practical difference between optimizing for content quality with honest and well-known criteria. And, optimization to prevent people to subject the party-line to criticism.
Unless you have examples where it has been the case, that's an unfair comparison.
> There's a practical difference between optimizing for content quality with honest and well-known criteria. And, optimization to prevent people to subject the party-line to criticism.
Well, yes. I really appreciate what dang & the rest of the moderators do in order to remove spam & optimise for quality — yet at the same time I really dislike a large number of the instances I've seen where they've exercised control to protect the party line from criticism (e.g. detaching subthreads or posting 'please don't argue X; we don't accept that here'). My perception (which of course is subjective, subject to confirmation bias & could be wrong) is that the vast majority of those instances I've seen have been egregiously wrong.
I've noticed fewer instances recently, perhaps because the moderators have been silently moderating or perhaps because they've actually refrained from exercising so heavy a hand.
Like I said, I approve of the good they do with respect to quality, but I actively disapprove of the censorship they have committed. Instances of the former greatly outweigh instances of the latter, but one instance of censorship is too many (it is, of course, Y Combinator's site to do with as they will).
The downvote(s) on your comment were really saddening, though I was expecting exactly that when reading it few hours ago. This is sadly a trend with any discussion platform becoming "popular" past a certain threshold - the presence of forum warriors who "moderate" the content based on the few initial words is only going to rise up until everything becomes Reddit.
That said, I think your post was well written and right on spot - but the first sentence is a so obvious trigger that there are always going to be people that won't even bother reading past it. After all, there's so much to moderate and --- "Oh, hey! There's another post that looks dangerous! I've just noticed some words!"
On reflection and keeping the very useful posting guidelines in mind, I edited my comment into its present form, likely after you read it. (The original first sentence originally contained over-the-top trigger words like literally being an example of Godwin's law, as a demonstration that this was insufficent to cause it's removal.) I decided to edit it into its (still satirical) present form because the HN guidelines about making substantive comments are good and improve the site for everyone. Although the original phrasing invoking Godwin's law still wouldn't have been removed, and therefore still would have served as an apt demonstration, I think the present phrasing is better.
Actually the fact that my original phrasing did not meet the nominal guidelines on civility (because it invoked Godwin's law) whereas this one does is an important point: after all the video obeys YouTube's nominal guidelines. (For example it doesn't contain nudity.) So my present, quite civil (in line with HN guidelines) phrasing is the best analogy/demonstration.
Besides DD-WRT, which can be at times quite flaky a unreliable on WRT54GL with its outdated OS base and a slow UI (and also a real pain to keep track on the few working firmware revisions as time progresses over the years; many DD-WRT users and the DD-WRT site will sadly keep suggesting to use half a decade old firmware for it [1][2][3] and any 'official' activity seems to have stopped years ago) and the Open-WRT which sadly hasn't supported WRT54GL for the last several generations [4] despite its by now somewhat ironic name, there's also Tomato by Shibby [5] (note: This is a fork of the original 'well known' Tomato that stopped its development half a decade ago - though surprisingly people sill run even that one), which is amazingly supported today with regular and frequent updates [6], latest security fixes and modern revisions of base software and OS tools, with properly working kernel 2.6-generation, IPv6, QoS and not at the very least with the staple slick Tomato configuration interface. If you happen to run a WRT54GL, you must give Shibby's Tomato a try sometime to see what this piece of hardware can still do.
Disclaimer: I'm by no means affiliated, but run WRT54GL hardware actively and at times I'm still regularly amazed at what Shibby can squeeze out of the mere 4MB of flash space and a hardware that wouldn't properly run a smartwatch alarm applet in 2016.
If you're lucky, you may also end up with gems like this:
> Malachi - DD-WRT Guru
> Your router was made in the 1800's. Why do you need firmware made yesterday.
Got a WRT54GL here that runs on a recent DD-WRT build. Also run Shibby's tomato on a beefier Linksys. openWRT on yet another Linksys and plenty of pfSense around here as well. They are all quite wonderful.
> any 'official' activity seems to have stopped years ago
That's what I thought as well until I searched a bit better.
DD-Wrt is under development and the recent DD-WRT v3.0-r29837 mini (06/06/16) does run quite well on the Linksys WRT54GL.
Installed it 12 days ago and it just runs and runs [1].
Yes it is a beta branch, but I've been on the beta track on a variety of builds for over a year and never had any issues.
The trick was in finding out at the forum on what still worked on that old router.
The download location [2] is not as easy to find as official page only links back to the really really old firmware.
Just navigate up on that ftp-site and you can find newer builds as well.
From the different firmware builds on the beta tree that I tested, the mini build is the one that appears to work best on the WRT54GL. The normal build might work, but I had some troubles with it when I tried.
Of course I understand it if you prefer not to run beta software, but it's very stable and better then running a very outdated firmware in my opinion.
> Of course I understand it if you prefer not to run beta software,
Oh not at all, this is good news that there is still some activity wrt 54GL (pun intended). Having alternatives to fall back to is always a good thing. I've been on DD-WRT originally since about 2007 and went through many, many years of digging through forum threads, tracking and collecting all the reasonably stable revisions, kept comparing results with nightlies with other GL owners, had some good long stable runs even with a few broken features here and there and a good number of near-brickings saved only by a handy TFTP bootstrap...
I've only dropped my last DD-WRT install roughly some two years ago when I discovered Shibby and replaced all the other alternatives with it (i.e. the other very good VicTek's RAF firmware is not usable in all deployments as it can't fit even IPv6 support into the 4MB build that the 54GL is limited with, making your options limited) and I stopped keeping much track on DD-WRT since. Some other current DD-WRT people I know weren't very happy still, even though some stay with DD-WRT for own obscure reasons.
But by the way, the forum threads you linked to don't paint the situation in the best light with regard to stability:
> My WRT54GL is running since ages on the mini-generic 14929 build, you can find it here:
> ftp://ftp.dd-wrt.com/betas/2010/...
> Together with a daily scheduled reboot I tend to forget were the thing is located in our house
"2010 firmware..."
"daily scheduled reboot..."
Or:
> I just upgraded to:
> ftp://ftp.dd-wrt.com/betas/2016/...
> I've tried a few different bin's and while I did get the standard version to work, it seemed a bit unstable.
"a bit unstable" is pretty much as good as simply "unstable".
Now with Shibby I currently run GL with average half a year uptimes (usually ended by a forced powerplant cycle in the location, never had a crash or a spontaneous reboot on it as far as I remember). Still, as long as recent versions of DD-WRT build and run on 54GL, there's some chance at a good revision that can possibly squeeze few more years out of the hardware, depending on what features will work. Will keep an eye on it, it may still become handy if something bad happens with Shibby's work, which at this point and the age of the hardware wouldn't be that surprising.
Hehe, that last reply in the thread is mine. Yes it _was_ unstable for me running the standard build. That was just an experiment though as I had been running on the mini build "forever". Figured I try the standard build, but after a few hours with weird errors I reverted back to the mini build.
As for the 2010 remark, well I don't know why somebody would run a firmware that old, especially if it isn't stable.
If I'm not mistaken then the last released -non beta- version is:
At least that's what is in my notes, but I'm happy on the beta trail.
FWIW, the mini build also doesn't support IPv6 which is exactly why I tried the standard version again. In the past the standard version did no longer fit into the 54GL anymore. At the moment it is not a real issue for me as the 54GL only serves a WiFi guest network, but if IPv6 ever gets adopted ;) it might become one.
As I noticed the current size of the standard build download was smaller I ended up trying it again. Didn't work well in my case, but the mini build is good.
The router with Shibby that I have here gives a similar experience it great uptime and really only ever gets rebooted when I decide to run a firmware upgrade (or when there's a power outage which is very rare down here).
Out of curiosity, what is your reason to run DD-WRT on a GL? Considering you have Shibby also deployed and are thus presumably familiar with its feature set, is there something in DD-WRT that makes it particularly important to have on the GL?
Familiarity, curiosity and not even realizing that the firmware from Shibby runs on the GL are some of the reasons. Besides that there's customers running on DD-WRT so it is good to have at least one form of it running inhouse. Those customers are not on the mini nor on a GL, but there it works and in that case cross flashing remote routers is something I'd rather not do.
I always loved Tomato; ran it on my 54GLs which I still have (though one is pre-L branding).
I had a Cisco E3000 that I tried to love; bought it because it supported DD-WRT so once I got sick of the Cisco firmware I tried DD-WRT. It seemed like an endless headache and never worked quite right, so I flashed back to the stock Cisco stuff; I realized the stock OS supported everything I needed anyway, and was more stable.
I wish consumer stuff had more cool graphs and the like.
>It seemed like an endless headache and never worked quite right
The E3000 is based on a Broadcom SoC without free drivers. That's always a bad sign for third party support. Basically you are limited to some ancient kernel which may or may not be running stable. I know the E3000 and DD-WRT on it is indeed a mess.
"Supported" with proprietary drivers often means nothing more than that it boots somehow. The same goes for the new Linksys models with "official" OpenWRT support. The wifi isn't stable at all.
For the moment, you still can, in a certain way. I've just made another lengthier comment about it elsewhere in the thread [1], before noticing yours which sadly got buried at the very bottom.
Semi-hijacking your question to mention the other side of the pond too, which many people do not seem to know about and I run into this issue quite regularly.
While the laptop situation is indeed pretty bad (the X200 is probably as best as you can get here), for people looking for a modern workstation, AMD's current FX processor lineup is still free from this trash. Past the 2013 designs (Family 16h [1]) AMD includes their own equivalent of Intel's ME called PSP [2], so presumably the upcoming Zen is going to be heavily backdoored too.
Now, you can still buy an 8-core/4 GHz+ AMD Vishera [3] generation (which is the "current" FX), add a motherboard with ECC support (in a stark contrast to Intel, all AMD FX processors fully support ECC memory and for example ASUS sells a number of AMD motherboards with ECC support) and build yourself a workstation that will easily last for another decade, possibly longer (you can always buy a motherboard or two of your favourite model as a backup for the times when they finally disappear from the market). All FX processors are factory unlocked [4] and can be pushed much farther past their design specs with decent cooling, adding another bit to their possible usefulness over the long term.
Some more (random) reading on the subject of avoiding AMD PSP and Intel ME:
I can confirm that sadly - this exactly mirrors my own experiences with DDG XMPP. Sometimes for entire weeks I have been what looked like the only person reporting (or caring) that the XMPP servers are down (mind you that this was years ago, I can't comment on the current state of things), sometimes followed with reactions like "Oh, right... We've restarted the server, see if it works for you." at which point I gave up and moved to a self-hosted ejabberd ever since.
While nowadays most of my contacts are on private XMPP servers, I remember few having some reasonably solid experiences with https://jabber.at/ (can be also found at https://xmpp.zone/ for a better sounding domain name, which I guess matters to people who hate the now obsolete "Jabber" term). Can't from my personal experience vouch for a "good for a long period of time", but if someone is looking for at least a well established server, this should be as good start as any. Also, the news page shows they're quite serious about server updates and transparent, which is a big thumb up in my eyes.
# Why is the latest AMD hardware unsupported in libreboot?
It is extremely unlikely that any post-2013 AMD hardware will ever be supported in libreboot, due to severe security and freedom issues; so severe, that the libreboot project recommends avoiding all modern AMD hardware. If you have an AMD based system affected by the problems described below, then you should get rid of it as soon as possible. The main issues are as follows:
# AMD Platform Security Processor (PSP)
This is basically AMD's own version of the Intel Management Engine. It has all of the same basic security and freedom issues, although the implementation is wildly different.
The PSP is an ARM core with TrustZone technology, built onto the main CPU die.
That sounds even worse than ME:
Intel Management Engine (ME) is a separate computing environment physically located in the (G)MCH chip.
Theoretically, if a third-party can figure out how to make a compatible MCH they can use Intel CPUs without ME, but that is impossible with AMD's design.
Then again, developing a compatible MCH would be nontrivial too --- the last truly "open" x86 bus interface was probably Socket 370 (still in use by VIA and others), and the later bus interfaces are such high speed that they require some very expensive signal analysers to even see the communications properly.
I second that. I browse, guessing, about 95% of the public web with NoScript + uBlock on and unless the content that doesn't work without JS is especially crucial to what I'm doing at the moment, I'll just leave the page that won't render/work properly and look it up elsewhere, without a second breath.
But that sometimes makes for really bizarre experiences watching other people browse the same websites, cursing at how slow, bloated or broken they are, seeing that until now I didn't even know that the particular website that I've been visiting for years can do THAT.
The Bloomberg site is a really good example of it - for the first time I've turned the JavaScript on for it and... WHOA.
It's like every single piece of that 'extra' JavaScript functionality serves just one single purpose - to make your time spent on the site reading the articles as much miserable as possible.
I probably don't even want to know what I'm missing elsewhere...
How about:
"Curation by Ministry of Culture of the People's Republic of China"