One benefit is not having all of your online purchases tracked by your credit card company, which can produce further benefit for you down the road when insurance companies and whoever else is unable to purchase meaningful data about you to exploit you.
I do not have any problems with Twitter's actions in the New Yorker article. I don't find "slippery slope" arguments persuasive when there is real harassment being committed right now. I don't think the wikipedia link is relevant to this conversation; it seems to be about state censorship. The "Controversy" section as it's written now is obviously not NPOV and cites no sources.
I know! It starts when you can't call a woman a slut, threaten her life, and post her private details and nude pictures on Twitter, and then before you know it you can't print out her picture, ejaculate onto it, and mail the soiled photo to her family[1]. What a crazy world we're headed towards.
Exactly! So let's just pick that one thing, and then invent some "guidelines" that totally won't prevent anything like that ever, but allow you to arbitrarily censor people with the wrong opinions. Awesome! War against "harrassment", mission accomplished!
I don't have a problem with Twitter "arbitrarily censor[ing] people with the wrong opinions." Its their platform and they don't have to give a voice to everyone who has one, they can do whatever they please and promote any agenda they want. That is their choice. If you don't like Twitter's rules you're free to start your own site, or write a book. Nobody is entitled to use someone else's site any way they wish.
People are bringing this up to say that it could annoy many users and chase them away, as well as limit their user growth, not that they don't have the right to do it. Bad business decision, in other words.
Just to clarify, DigitalOcean does not offer any form of DoS mitigation services so they blackhole during a DoS. Its for 3 hours, a lot less than other providers.
If you've got a DoS issue, you definitely need a 3rd party DoS protection service. Cloudflare free works pretty well
It's not "a lot less than other providers". You know what happens when someone starts DDOSing one of my AWS servers? I get a CloudWatch alert saying "high inbound traffic" and that's it. They don't black hole the thing and cut off all traffic. Then, I can log in, see what's happening, and take my time diagnosing the problem. Even under a fairly heavy DDOS I never feared losing access. With DO, the black hole happens before the email alert. It's a terrible policy and I can't use or recommend DO until it's changed. I can't stick CloudFlare in front of every server I own.
Yes, but I'd ideally go to a licensed, brick-and-mortar store for the reputation and reliability over either eBay or Craigslist, if it weren't for the prices and availability of items. My point is that the benefits of centralized, non-blockchain solutions can outweigh what you lose when you go decentralized, and that's something that should be questioned of every new blockchain application.
Just to clarify, if you use Signal, there is no meta-data. Who you called, who called you, the call times, and so on are hidden. It's like with Tor and how your browsing history isn't saved. All the WIFI network operator can know is that you accessed Signal to make a call / text.
Uh, I'm not sure about that. TOR uses many layers of obfuscation in its attempt to hide where your traffic is going. I think Signal does no such thing, and this metadata is insecure. Also, I think your mention of browsing history is a non sequitur.
I forget the term for this, but you've poisoned the discussion by leading it to a dead end with an impossible goal: ridding humanity of prejudice and assumption. Since that isn't remotely possible, we might as well throw our hands up in the air. And forget about data, it's not at fault here.
Like you, Snowden's freedom of speech line never impacted me... until I read this article. It suddenly hit me. The reason I was missing his point is because I was framing it in terms of what's in it for me rather than looking at it as what's in it for us. Someone who doesn't care about freedom of speech doesn't care because he doesn't see what's in it for him. But I doubt you'd argue the benefits of the first amendment.
Similarly, privacy is very important. You might not care (even though you really do), but defending privacy is about ensuring security. Privacy is important for all of us, just like freedom of speech is.
As for what the actual problem is, the problem for the most part is ignorance and a failure to quench it. We need more privacy / cyber-security advocates who can educate people on why they ought to care. It's like teaching people why it's important to lock their doors at night or why they should put their letters into envelopes instead of just using post cards. It's why my mom had to drill into my brain the importance of not giving out my social security number willy nilly. Are you so liberal with your SSN? You don't care about privacy, so would it bother you if Facebook or Google asked for it. After all, they just want to make sure you are who you say you are.
Things aren't obvious to us until they're obvious, and then it feels like common sense. DUH, lock your door! DUH, encrypt your messages!
This is very conspiratorial, but it'd be interesting if Facebook intentionally shut this down to show its new user base how vital it is to their lives. By giving new users a service and then taking it away, it could drum up support for reinstatement. Wouldn't put it past Mark to pull something like that.
Would be awesome to see a mass exodus from Facebook. It's already passed its peak anyway, with many US teenagers using different, non-Facebook-owned networks and apps.
I'm against Free Basics and am boycotting Facebook, but playing devils advocate...
> They're called "public" libraries; not every library is free. I remember once trying to enter Stanford's library (Green?), and they refused to let me in without a Stanford ID.
Zuckerberg is referring to public libraries, not paid ones. The public library offers a set of books that, while not comprehensive, provide at least some free knowledge. Free Basics is analogous in that it offers some free services. Could Zuckerberg do more? Yes. Could public libraries have more books? Yes.
> In America?!? Hell no. You have emergency room care, and it is NOT free. Medical bills are the #1 cause of bankruptcies in America.
This isn't what he's saying. Some places around the world do offer free basic healthcare. And he's talking conceptually, not concretely. If Zuckerberg ran a healthcare startup and offered free basic healthcare to a region, would they complain that it doesn't offer all possible services? Would they rather have no healthcare than some?
