The goal behind Amnezia is state censorship circumvention, it started as an activist project in Russia and target audience could care less about technicalities. This is something your slightly technical parents/friends can run to re-gain access to YouTube, Instagram or Telegram calls.
It's also useful if you use public wifi. Makes sure all your traffic is encrypted, and stops your IP changing constantly which can log you out of some services.
> The law was enacted without consulting the Hong Kong legislature and gave authorities broad powers to charge and jail people they deemed a threat to the city's law and order, or the government's stability.
The UK throwing a very big rock at a thin glass house.
I don’t agree with any such laws in any country, but I think it’s important to point out the hypocrisy here
When I was in my early 20s I used to think I was very clever for pointing out apparent hypocrisies. Now I realize how easily that devolves into “you are imperfect therefore you may never criticize anything”
Americans can never call out human rights abuses because of slavery. The British can never because of colonialism. Period. Forever.
If you find this line of argumentation compelling there’s no discussing anything with you.
You can easily call out way more recent stuff such as what's happening in central America right now with Colombia and Venezuela.
Sinking half a dozen ships in international waters is a crime.
Sanity would ask for intercepting those boats in your waters, and that's it, controlling what's in them, who are these people and send them in front of a court if they breached your law, on your soil (or waters).
Yet we are at the point nobody raises the voice where sinking civilian ships on the basis it's drug smugglers (without providing a proof, let alone the fact that even if it was true it's still insane) has any leftover of decency or justice.
Or calling for the annexation of Greenland and Panama by any means.
Or bombing Iran on the basis that it's developing nuclear weapons on behalf of the Israeli government (which is an act of war if Iran could wage it, the US does not get to decide who can have a nuclear weapon and who does not).
The list of breaches in decency or law is basically infinite.
You're not wrong, but I just wanted to point out that this level of arbitrary executive behavior and blatant massive government corruption is pretty new to us (the many millions of decent US citizens who are appalled at it), and we're still trying to figure out what the heck we can do about it. So at least for now I really hope it's valid to ascribe this just to the current administration, not assume the US will stay like this.
As much as I agree with you. Iran is signatory of the NPT with all its consequences.
Instead of letting more countries develop these weapons, we should work on denuclearizing all countries, starting with the US and Russia and their insane arsenals! And maybe build a unified international legal framework for civilian nuclear developments and applications from energy to medical outside of the "security council's" ferule!
There's a very precise protocol when a signatory of the NPT is suspected of breaching it: first it has to go through the IAEA which has to be able to inspect whatever site, then it gets escalated to the UN, then a decision is taken, at the UN level on the matter.
Not unilaterally by Israel calling the world's superpower for help.
Your logic is as sound as "since my neighbor makes something illegal at home, I'm gonna shoot him and then call my buddy sheriff for help". It is obviously illegal.
This isn't about things that happened decades or centuries ago though. It's about how right now, today, the UK is arresting 12,000 people a year, 30 a day, for supposedly "offensive" posts on social media.
As your own article points out that stuff has been on the statute books for years (covering stuff which is generally illegal everywhere like death threats as well as stuff which was merely allegedly sent to cause others distress or anxiety) and convictions actually fell between 2015 and 2023. For all its much vaunted constitutional protections, the United States has also arrested a whole bunch of people for vague and difficult to call a crime stuff like Charlie Kirk memes or (nuanced or otherwise) criticisms of Israeli policy recently as well as more obviously menacing stuff that happened to take the form of social media communication.
Neither are quite the same thing as railroading a government critic for "sedition"
The current UK government has arrested over 2000 people for holding signs on charges of terrorism, and is currently in the process of abolishing jury trials. This isn't about history.
My point is that a country may do reprehensible things, but that does not mean that the people in that country approve of those things -- or even that the people in government approve of them. Countries can be complex, with many contradictions, opinions, and opposing forces.
Your examples are a bit weasely because they happened long ago, and so seem sillier. What I assumed was meant here is that, currently, the UK government is out to punish wrongthink.
I don't see slavery as an albatross. If anything, America accelerated its demise by its abolition at home --where America wasn't even the biggest enslaver of people; Brazil, The British empire (Caribbean), France (colonies), Russia (serfs), had way, way more slaves than the US. Today, India, China, Horn of Africa, NK have large slave populations.
> When I was in my early 20s I used to think I was very clever for pointing out apparent hypocrisies. Now I realize how easily that devolves into “you are imperfect therefore you may never criticize anything”.
What's the solution? The alternative, where we can't criticize our governments on account of their hypocrisies and imperfections, robs citizens of their check against an institution with a monopoly on violence.
> Americans can never call out human rights abuses because of slavery. The British can never because of colonialism. Period. Forever.
There's certainly a difference between holding countries responsible for events that have long since ceased and holding a government responsible for double standards practiced presently. The UK lacks credibility on Hong Kong when its own citizens are being jailed on the basis of overbroad hate speech regulations and when its government agencies attempt to claim extraterritorial jurisdiction over the operation of foreign social media companies. Westminister can't be so empty-headed as to believe that its actions will go unnoticed by other governments.
It goes beyond just pointing out hypocrisy. This is a well known propaganda strategy called "Whataboutism." [1] It's unfortunately a tremendously effective smokescreen that divides the audience and shuts down meaningful debate.
There is some nuance, because I’ve also seen genuine discussion falsely labeled as whataboutism.
If the point in bringing up the hypocrisy is to end or distract the discussion, it is whataboutism. However, if the point is to compare two instances of a thing to make a point it’s fair game imo.
>When I was in my early 20s I used to think I was very clever for pointing out apparent hypocrisies. Now I realize how easily that devolves into “you are imperfect therefore you may never criticize anything”
There is nothing logically wrong with hypocrisy. I tell my toddlers not to do stuff I do all the time.
The problem with hypocrisy comes when one party is assumed to have more rights than the other. In this case, why would Britain (or the US's) government be allowed to be more corrupt than China's?
I assume Britain is brought up due to the British government's historic role in Hong Kong and China.
Even bad people can be correct. Evaluate every claim on its merits, as opposed to its speaker. Only when you get down to resolving ambiguities is the evaluation of the speaker necessary.
Nonsense, the currently alive young Britons are not the Britons that ran HK as a colony; they think the idea was terrible and have no desire to reintroduce it.
Its a common fallacy to accuse alive people of hypocrisy done by other people who came before them.
I don't think that's really true and I live here. People are convicted for saying 'rude' things online all the time, even if some of those stories are also hyped up in the news. Attempting to backdoor/otherwise break e2e encryption... also literally the case. I'm not sure where you think the nuance is.
You can say pretty much anything so long as you don’t insight violence or religious hatred. Nobody is allowed to shout fire in crowded theatre. Nobody has been convicted for saying something rude.
With relation to the article + Grand parent, the government first of all does not write on behalf of the BBC and in fact both Labour and Conservatives especially have had massive problems with its editorial decisions.
The ideal the you cannot criticise the government in the UK and that our laws here are similar to the ones in HK is honestly not a fair parallel at all.
I think the government are extremely naive and the security services try to push them into extremely stupid decisions on encryption.
> You can say pretty much anything so long as you don’t insight violence or religious hatred.
I don't think that's a fair characterisation. Recently we've convicted:
- an ex-footballer (i.e. someone with the means to mount a proper defence) for calling someone a 'diversity hire'; and
- someone burning a religious text in the street, as a protest.
Are these really meeting your bar for inciting violence and/or hatred? At a level might warrant imprisonment? For me, these things are not even borderline; they are well into legitimate free speech territory and the government shouldn't be trying its best to stifle them.
And those are just successful convictions, not initiated prosecutions, or the wider chilling effects of it all.
Even if what you said were true, those two things are largely legal in the US, so I wouldn't really say it's their tabloids over-hyping it as much as they legitimately find the actual standards here questionable.
Haha - you aren't even allowed to say what you think about the US government on social media and then travel to the US despite what the constitution says. Donald Trump has also made flag burning a crime. So it's not as if the US is a champion of free speech anymore.
I looked up the case against Joey Barton and it looks like he was deliberately trying to antagonise and abuse people upset which yes is illegal here. He could have easily made any points he wanted without abusing people. Note that he was given a suspended sentence in the hope that he would stop abusing people and has served no jail time as yet. Seems like a sensible decision.
The Quran burning outside the Turkish Consulate was even more weak stuff from you. The guy was fined £240 and told not to do it again.
Neither of these are about freedom of speech are they, they are about abuse online and deliberately trying to provoke muslims.
> you aren't even allowed to say what you think about the US government on social media and then travel to the US despite what the constitution says.
Does this matter? The question is whether the UK has a moral authority to tell China off over free speech. Nobody has said that different countries don't have varying types of restrictions on speech.
Even if I agreed with your characterisation of the US, you're talking about visitors, not residents or citizens. The UK also regularly denies visas for speech.
You're defending against whataboutism from China to the UK by invoking whataboutism from the UK to the US here.
> I looked up the case against Joey Barton and it looks like he was harassing people online which yes is illegal here.
No, harassment is a specific and different offence. He was convicted specifically for sending 'grossly offensive' messages, not harassing people. The definition of that crime is based on the content of the messages, not the pattern of their transmission.
> The Quran burning outside the Turkish Consulate was even more weak stuff from you. The guy was fined £240 and told not to do it again.
I don't really get how this refutes anything I've said. It's illegal to protest in this manner in the UK.
What is your argument here, that OK it's illegal but the punishment is not very severe so no problem? You understand that the specifics of _what_ is illegal is the criticism.
> Neither of these are about freedom of speech are they, they are about harassment online and deliberately trying to provoke muslims.
Neither of these is about harassment. Or they would have been convicted of harassment.
None of these laws limit your freedom of speech do they - you can perfectly well say you think that a TV presenter is incompetent without being arrested - it's the abuse that is the problem here. If your style of communication involves burning religious texts you must have very big mental health issues so I'm sorry for that.
> None of these laws limit your freedom of speech do they
Of course they do? Think we've descended into absurdity here if that's the claim.
Suffice to say, the Chinese response to Jimmy Lai would be along the lines of "well of course he has free speech, if only he did it in a completely different way that was acceptable to my sensibilities".
I'd like the right to burn any religious text I please, and to call someone a 'diversity hire', if those were my feelings. I thought that was clear from me using them as examples.
Crticisim of religion, through symbolic speech, is pretty classically part and parcel of the tenets of free speech. It's hardly some fringe belief.
Even if you think calling someone a 'diversity hire' is often untrue, or often racist, or some such thing, there are surely some cases where it is true or a legitimate criticism of hiring policy. Should we not be able to claim as much? On peril of imprisonment?
I don't think your views on this are particularly uncommon. It's just that British people don't have a history of wrestling with free speech, or its importance. Tone policing is a thought-terminating cliche in the UK.
On sentencing, Judge Menary KC told Barton: "Robust debate, satire, mockery and even crude language may fall within permissible free speech.
"But when posts deliberately target individuals with vilifying comparisons to serial killers or false insinuations of paedophilia, designed to humiliate and distress, they forfeit their protection.
"As the jury concluded, your offences exemplify behaviour that is beyond this limit – amounting to a sustained campaign of online abuse that was not mere commentary but targeted, extreme and deliberately harmful."
Seems like you're just lying with the 'diversity hire' content of Barton's posts aren't you?
Well feel free to roll all those in to what I'd like the right to say. I'm going with the most outlandish thing (to me) that he was convicted on, because by definition even without the other things you've now quoted, the 'diversity hire' comment in and of itself was found to be illegal. Thus it's illegal to say for anyone, even if they don't also call someone a 'bike nonce' or photoshop them onto unsavoury images.
None of this meets the bar for me, and ironically would not be illegal in China or the US, to address the original point.
Why is every political discussion boiled down to a whataboutism? Who cares what the UK does when the subject is HK's obvious slide in to naked authoritarianism.
Because once upon a time it was with pride you could point out all the ways your democracy was different than “theirs”.
Now you’re just condemning what you’ve already done. Why should anyone respect it? At some point you loose respect and eventually you just look confused.
> Why is every political discussion boiled down to a whataboutism?
Unfortunately, just like whataboutism can be a disingenuous rhetorical device, so is anti-whataboutism. Sometimes the comparison is relevant, sometimes it's not. In this case, I think it is.
Whenever one 'side' makes a statement about the other it's often dripped in some kind of righteous indignation or other moralistic tone, so it's hard not to descend into whataboutism in those cases. The Chinese, of course, do this too, just with their own ideology baked in.
Great Britain is very directly involved in a whole bunch of relatively recent messes in the Middle East, China, etc.
It's not whataboutism to point up the current messed up situation is not unrelated to the behavior of the UK, and their fingerprints are all over it. Of course things aren't static and new actors have changed the conversation, but this doesn't absolve them and they shouldn't be pointing fingers.
Since it fell from power, the UK does everything the US wants.
However, historically it set up a lot of bad things that happened in the Middle East, China, Africa, etc. The UK cannot untangle itself from it, "it's all in the past", because history is terribly influenced by things in the past, by definition.
So do you think citizens of the UK should be held accountable somehow? I honestly don’t think the UK has done much to harm other countries since the Iraq War which obviously made everything worse.
Authorities and government? Yes. Even if the current ones weren't born when history was made, it's their duty to understand the history of the country they are governing, and of how past decisions shaped the world as it currently is.
> I honestly don’t think the UK has done much to harm other countries since the Iraq War which obviously made everything worse.
The history of Hong Kong itself is deeply influenced by Great Britain's actions (as well as other world powers, of course), and it doesn't start with mainland China's takeover.
Another example of UK's actions deeply influencing the current world, unrelated to China, is Iran (and well, the Middle East in general). So the UK cannot simply point fingers at others and forget about how they helped shape the situation.
Why shouldn’t it boil down to “whataboutism”, aka comparison and putting things into context? Especially during UK’s obvious slide in to disguised authoritarianism.
One can also ask how HK ended up with English language and common law in the first place… though that wasn’t so recent.
It really is crazy. A lot of people here seem to miss the relative nature of countries' behavior and think they're all as bad as each other when the difference is huge.
Especially when it comes to China and Russia, people seem to think they're about as bad as the West when nothing could be further from the truth.
Maybe thats due to more people from the hard right haunting this place, or the general shift of the tech crowd to the right. I'm not sure what it is exactly.
No, that's not the right takeaway, at least for me. For me it means that even if a country isn't perfect, doesn't automatically mean they can't be against others doing harm.
I'm sorry, but "calling out apparent injustice" is not comparable to "literally throwing the first rock to stone someone to death".
That quote gets bent very far out of context. You could use it to justify any inaction under that interpretation, on the theory that you are not qualified to take it simply due to being imperfect.
Right, but you do realize that sentences can mean more than just the literal meaning it historically had?
Christ, we really need reading comprehension classes and ideally poetry classes or something similar, since people are unable to read more than the actual characters today it seems... Seems extra problematic in software/programming circles, maybe we need to add arts classes to science programs too?
If you wanted to reference the saying about people living in glass houses throwing stones, you should have referenced that one rather than a different quote about stones. They're not equivalent.
embedding-shape is quoting Jesus, who was in fact literally referring to killing people by throwing stones. (And, in fact, was talking to a mob that was literally about to do exactly that.)
The author points out that the sheer scale of what you generate in that 7 seconds is so vast that you’ll have plenty of time to generate the next tile even when moving at extreme speeds. So your only problem is the first tile, which you can pre compute at the very beginning.
Hear me out. What if it’s not capitalism as a whole but one specific facet. Debt.
> In the liberal fantasy, spearheaded by Adam Smith, bakers, brewers and butchers laboured within markets so cut-throat that none could make more money than the bare minimum necessary to keep their small, family-owned businesses running.
In a cash only capitalism world that you can’t conspire to have more than you earn. You earn what the market earns.
But debt suspends capitalism long enough for someone to “beat” the market. And when capitalism resumes you have this perverse player operating under exceptional circumstances.
> Joseph Schumpeter … Progress he argued, is impossible in competitive markets. Growth needs monopolies to fuel it. How else can enough profit be earned to pay for expensive research and development
I know this to be false. Almost all the big tech companies consistently FAILED to bring about innovation through research. They instead had to acquire SMALLER companies and teams that had the innovation.
YouTube, Android, Instagram, WhatsApp etc…
And almost every other innovation was gained at the startup stage not the monopoly stage.
I think it's unfair to think that growing a small service or operating system to a billion users doesn't require innovation. The skills and requirements to grow a company from 1 to 1,000, 1,000 to 1,000,000, 1,000,000 to a 1,000,000,000 are going to be different. It makes sense to me that there are companies who specialize in growing companies of a particular size. And innovating around the problems of doing so.
How is youtube's recomendation system, automatic subtitles (including translation), or content id system not innovative? These were key technological improvements required for the service to grow to a massive size.
A lot of that innovation benefits only YouTube . Also these other innovations (recommendation system, translations etc) existed before YouTube.
There are definitely innovations from the big companies but not “key” innovations.
In the article it looks at innovation from a national level. I.e new products and services, and methodology.
The scaling you describe is great but its only impact is within YouTube, and it’s not unique. Every other company of that size has also figured their own way to scale. No one was depending on YouTube for this.
Almost everything can be termed innovation, but we need to be mindful that we are trying to justify the existence of monopolies. Ie “society needs them otherwise we couldn’t figure it out”. With that the threshold for innovation increases quite a bit.
When was the last time YouTube did anything innovative? Aren't they just an ossified bureaucracy now?
The Soviets, too, innovated. Sputnik shock and all that. But at some point the structures were just too rigid - just like they have become in Big Tech capitalism.
Much of the Soviet space programme was down to the personal brilliance of Sergei Korolev and other such figures, and large dollops of intelligence taken from the Germans and the Americans. Definitely the greatest Soviet achievement, but Korolev died prematurely due to his time in a prison camp and their manufacturing sector often let them down.
YouTube is quite innovative, by the way, just not in the way it should be. Its comments sections change on a frequent basis allowing for ever more complex shadow banning and censorship systems. Its search algorithms also tend to exclude certain channels and big up others.
I can't remember the titles offhand unfortunately. Bear in mind that a lot of details didn't come out until the 1990s due to Soviet censorship. The BBC did a great documentary on Korolev about thirty years ago when some details came out.
Whatever one thinks of the Soviet political system, they did have some great achievements. Some of the ones that people forget include first probe and first automated rover on the Moon, first space station, first probe on Mars, first rover and picture from Mars (albeit scrambled), also first pictures from the surface of another planet (Venus)
NASA tried to claim recently it had the first sound from another planet (Mars) and airborne probe (helicopter). The Soviets had already transmitted audio from Venus in the 1980s and had a balloon there.
Surely though Schumpeter must have been right when it comes to new industrial projects where the technology is already well-understood, maybe research in universities or similar?
Yes, there are a lot of situations where that is true. And as you say industrial projects, and I assume you specifically mean heavy industries, like building a new type of airliner. I agree.
But when it comes to information technology those situations are far and few in between.
That's not really what Adam Smith proposes in "the Wealth of Nations" by the way.
Despite claims to the contrary, we live in a system where government and big business are coalescing. In fact, they make many decisions together behind closed doors at the World Economic Forum, which Yanis Varoufakis is a member of. (You don't get into Davos unless you are either a) invited from the inside or b) pay vast amounts of money to attend.)
Not really, it gives them justification to more thoroughly remove privacy and anonymity in order to make sure the age and identity of the user are more confidently known.
Worse still, EU isn’t actually a democracy. It’s an economic union. Which citizens voted for Vonderleyen? What power do EU citizens have over policies tabled in EU parliament? Who made the final choice on chat control?
Autocracy is what threatens EU democracy, not a check mark on a social media website.
So I don’t get called a Pro-Elon shill, I don’t like Elon, and think he is an ass. But he has done (maybe unwittingly) more for democracy on social media than his counterparts.
EDIT: Community notes might have been before Elon. So he only gets a half credit.
>Autocracy is what threatens EU democracy, not a check mark on a social media website.
This. The government diverges from the will of the people, the government structures itself to resist the people changing it to reflect their will, the people become more likely to say "f this" and so something drastic. This isn't a new pattern or even unique to democracy. The 1790s French professional managerial class lost their heads this way.
