According to their latest tax returns Facebook and Apple have a net loss in the US so if anything they should pay the government a commission for sending customers to their more profitable offices in Ireland and the Caribbean.
I don't believe ideas are inherently good or bad. A lot also depends on timing and execution. Twitter turned out to be a great idea, but I don't think there are many people who could have pulled it off the way Jack Dorsey and his cohorts did.
I think it's time we give up on the idea of communicating privately over a centralized network. Wiretapping was invented only a few years after the invention of the telephone[1]. It won't be stopped by technology and certainly not by legislation. People need to get used treating the Internet as a public space: cover your mouth when you cough, don't pick your nose in public and don't communicate sensitive information over the Internet.
The next big thing (hopefully soon) will be communication through a decentralized, infrastructure-less device.
It seems like no matter what you do, it will always be possible for someone to tap into a wire or node between point A and point B (unless some revolutionary point-to-point information teleportation is invented). So isn't the next big thing just the strengthening (or proper application) of encryption?
Otherwise, how can a "decentralized, infrastructure-less" system really guarantee any privacy beyond simply making it more of a hassle to wiretap?
The outgoing chairman of the FCC was interviewed recently [1] and alluded to new ad hoc networks created by cell phone users, to be used in times of emergencies where networks get overloaded.
I've heard it said that what finally helped bring an end the prolonged violences of 'The Troubles', was not the political process put in place by Blair, but the fact that after 9/11, many Americans suddenly felt a bit bad about sending money back to the IRA (no that they had experienced terrorism on their doorstep). With their main source of funding removed, the IRA was unable to keep up their armed resistance. I'm sure the situation was far more complex, but it's a fact that bars and clubs that once publicly collected money to send over, now no longer do.
Sorry, the Syrian "freedom fighters" ARE terrorists. They are only "freedom fighters" for the US Media.
Assad is not that good himself, but the "freedom fighters" are just a bunch of muslim fundamendalists that have slaughtered innocent people and have little popular support.
"During his time in Syria throughout much of 2012, videographer Robert King followed Aleppo's Al-Tawhid Brigade as he dodged bullets and rocket fire to learn more about the largest brigade of the Free Syrian Army. Somehow Robert managed to track down Haji-Mara, the Al-Tawhid Brigade's commander, for a rare interview, during which the former-businessman-turned-freedom-fighter espouses the many difficulties the rebels face against the alleged brutality of President Bashar al-Assad's regime."
Yes, one sided propaganda. What about it? In Europe people have followed the story decades before Robert Kind even heard of Syria, and know both sides and their backgrounds and goals.
No, it's conditional in whether they have popular support and/or represent a change for the better, or are just thugs that want to enforce a Taliban style rule.
Of course they are. Hopefully next time the police and the FBI will do their job properly: after killing 20 or 30 terrorists the rest will get to know their place.
We lack the budget because that's the government we voted for. And the reason we don't spend a third of our budget on defense is not because we can't but because we don't want to.
I'm glad we don't have a mass-surveillance system and I would like to keep it that way. I don't get this attitude of "we're no better so who cares". What the US government does in the US is their business and what ours does here is our business, but when a foreign government starts spying on me that pisses me off. I wonder what your reaction would be if it was China reading your emails.
And the difficulty in spending this much comes in two ways:
a) The more important your hammer becomes, the more everything looks like a nail. The US has frequently undertaken a military response for areas where other countries might use diplomacy.
b) The military, plus contractors, plus jobs that depend on the military, plus PR and lobbying firms, all tend to distort politics in favour of increasing military importance.
Don't get me wrong: the UK and EU in general owes a lot to US military power over the years and should thank the US for a lot of our freedoms. But there is a flip side, and I think it should be recognised that such a large amount of spending does distort things.
Facebook and Google have always been the least transparent imaginable AND they're both in damage control mode AND they're obviously under some DHS gag order. So why anyone would give any credence to a word they say is beyond me.
It's not out of faith in Google or Facebook, it's that they have put up a reasonably testable defense rather than what they could've done, which is to remain mostly silent. Moreover, the very size and complexity that most people distrust them for also means that their cooperation with any government function is going to involve a lot of moving parts...it's not likely to be the case that Zuckerberg can lie about something and be sure that those involved all stick to the script.
So given that, I think it's worthwhile to actually test their assertion (I.e. not rush to judgment) rather than patting ourselves on the back with the logical fallacies of:
* "Well, the reports about Facebook and Google must be true because it comes from a group that is itself evil and who I would normally not believe" (the enemy of my enemy is my friend)
* "Well, what else would you expect an obviously evil entity to say after being accused of evil acts?" (circular reasoning).
Again, it's not because Google and Facebook are poor disenfranchised groups that must be sympathized with, but because it feels a little dishonest to subject them to the same kind of inescapable logical trap that our government has used to go after and prosecute suspected enemies of the state
Just out of curiosity...can you really not imagine a less transparent corporation than either Google or Facebook?
With PRISM, if the allegations were false, Facebook and Google would deny them, but if they were true, Facebook and Google would still deny them. So the denial carries no information in and of itself. Parsing the denial might bear some clues--for instance, all these companies use the same technicalities and talking points.
What are the similar talking points? They both do strongly deny knowledge or participation in PRISM, but that's not really a talking point.
And I don't think it's an either-or situation: either it's the truth and they deny, or it's false and they deny. There's a third option: it's true, and they remain silent.
Also, is it such a crazy idea that Facebook, Google, etc. would get together and come up with their own talking points? That was my first reaction on seeing the similar statements -- that they're acting with a common purpose and agenda, but one that's their own, not the governments.
Why would companies who aren't collaborating with the NSA suddenly start collaborating with each other to deny collaborating with the NSA? Wouldn't they issue their own denials in their own words?
I don't really understand your question. It seems like you're asking why several groups, under attack in the same way, might get together to defend themselves, but I'd have thought that self-evident so -- what are you saying?
Google has been by far unquestionably, undeniably the MOST transparent. They were the ones that started disclosing government requests in the first place. They are the ones currently fighting against National Security Letters as being unconstitutional in the courts.
If you can find a more transparent company when it comes to government data requests I would love to know about that company.
And no shit Facebook and Google are in damage control mode. They'd be in damage control mode regardless of if they are guilty or innocent, this is a huge PR disaster for both of them and nobody seems to give a shit what the facts are - this went from a few bad power point slides to national panic overnight.
>If you just mean that patent enforcement is inherently scummy and antagonistic, well, I have no snappy response for that.
Well then finally we can all agree that Monsanto is detrimental to the development of GMOs. No one is claiming that Monsanto is "waiting for the wind to blow IP-encumbered seeds onto fields", so that might explain why you can't find any evidence of it.
What people do have a problem with, is a patent troll and a litigious one at that. That's what Monsanto is and there are plenty of cases to prove it:
What people are concerned about is basically "embrace, extend, extinguish" business practices applied to agriculture, with the result being a consolidation of ownership of the means of seed production into the hands of a small oligopoly of companies with interlocking patent agreements.
(Others have pointed out that no, Monsanto does not control the whole industry. But they are by far the dominant player.)
That sounds bad. Is it what's happening in practice? I'd like to learn more about this. I certainly don't want to be knee-jerk in the opposite direction (that Monsanto is totally O.K.).
Trying to keep a certain level of civil discourse on a social website is not a slippery slope. Banning rape jokes is not a slippery slope. For as long as I can remember Facebook has had the option to report posts about:
- Hate speech or symbol
- Spam or scam
- Graphic violence
- Drug use
- Nudity or pornography
That is not trampling the First Amendment. There are plenty of other hate forums where people who are afraid of a slippery slope can freely enjoy and share rape jokes.
Correct - that only refers to prohibition of government censorship.
I suspect that Facebook wants to keep things "nice" (for some value of "nice") so that the advertisers won't get spooked away and they can continue on their trajectory of world domination.
The trouble is that not every user, advertiser, or activist group agrees on what is "nice", or at least "permissible".
Here's mine (NSFW-ish): http://nl.neocities.org