Exactly.

People like easy solutions to complex problems. If you don’t see the problems, it’s easy to assume they don’t exist, but what actually happens is that by banning things, you just push them underground, where they fester. Alcohol prohibition created the mafia, which caused so many more problems than alcohol ever did, and it’s still around today. Banning drugs seems to have created, or at least strengthened, the drug cartels. I wouldn’t be surprised if strict controls around CSAM actually ends up harming more kids as people who would be casual observers end up getting caught up in the worst of it and end up actually harming children. I’m not saying CSAM should be legal or anything like that, I’m just saying the strict censorship of anything close to it is more likely to push someone who is casually interested to go and find it. The more strictly something is controlled, the more valuable it is for the person who controls it.

In other words, it’s the Streisand Effect, but for crime.

No, what we need is better education and better (not more) policing.

I completely agree. I’m reading a book related to 1984, and all of the thought crime and whatnot it talks about is scarily on-point when it comes to social media censorship. For example, “sex crime” is strictly controlled, and in the same chapter that someone gets taken away for getting pregnant, the MC talks about sexual relationships she has and plans to have. Nobody can talk about love or relationships, yet everyone seems to engage in them, or at least one-night stands. In fact, the word used for “abortion” in that book is “unbirth,” which is right there with the term “unalived.”

Blocking out a huge part of human culture doesn’t help anyone, and it doesn’t actually work, because people will find a way. What can work is giving users the tools to hide stuff they don’t want to see.

National security interests are the interests of the people though.

In a broad sense, sure, but “national security interests” are a huge excuse for bad policy.

assuming I’m not leaking national security information

That only applies if you are in a position that has access to classified information, or have reason to believe that a certain piece of information is classified. If you acquire information without access to classified information (i.e. if you see something on government property with binoculars or something), you are free to share that information.

The US largely does not censor people using the power of the gov’t

Not individuals, sure, but there are backroom threats for journalists that can significantly impact what the average person sees. If you get a big enough audience, you’ll start to see these threats.

Here’s the press freedom index the RSF posts, and while the US is better than most, it’s not at the top, and it’s a big reason why I like to read news publications from other areas (Canada and UK).

And yes, China is way worse, that goes without saying. But that doesn’t mean we should completely block them, it means we should be taking an active role in pointing out the propaganda so the world can see through their BS.

This isn’t a case of, “oh, both sides are the same”.

Never claimed it was.

Good point, I’ll consider MOCA. The main problem is that we have three sets (OTA antenna, satellite, and internet), and I’m not sure which are which, but figuring that out should be quite a bit easier than running cable. :)

I’m not planning on getting anything more than gigabit in the near future, though my city is rolling out fiber and claims to support up to 10gbit.

Your experience echoes my own with our team. That said, I think we got a pretty good set of devs on our team, and I think a big part of that is my boss being Indian and worked at the org we hired, so he understands the culture there and how to get a better deal. The net result is that the teams we hired are pretty reasonable and work alongside mine (we actually hired two teams and had them “compete,” and we kept the better one).

The US constitution doesn’t guarantee Chinese citizens, living in China, the right to freedom of the press.

True, but the US constitution guarantees Chinese citizens, living in or visiting the US or its territories, all the rights in the Constitution. So when TikTok operates in the US and provides services to US customers, it gets the protections of the US Constitution, as well as the obligations of US law.

TikTok appears to be a tool of the Chinese gov’t

And this is covered by freedom of the press. There’s no legal requirement for press to be pro-US, and it doesn’t necessarily need to be accurate, it just can’t be fraudulent. If TikTok is being fraudulent, then they should be held accountable for that.

As I stated, if TikTok is sold off so that they’re no longer connected to China, then they’re more than welcome to continue to operate.

Yes, according to the law that they’re contesting.

I’m saying that I don’t think this law is constitutional. I don’t use TikTok, I believe TikTok is dangerous, and I don’t think anyone should use it, but I’m also uncomfortable with the government picking and choosing which apps I can use, especially when the justification seems to be about the speech on that app. So even though I wish TikTok would disappear, I don’t think that justifies using the law to accomplish that.

I think it should be illegal, full stop.

Then we’re certainly not in agreement. And that’s fine.

I think sale of data should be 100% allowed, provided the customer consents (and gets fair compensation). The customer, however, needs to be aware of what data is being sold, to whom, and what they’re getting in return. Burying that 20 pages deep in a TOS doesn’t count, it needs to be in a format that an average person could reasonably be expected to fully understand. The service provider and the company receiving the data should have strict legal requirements to keep that data safe, so if there’s a breach of any variety, the consequences would be a lot steeper than a few dollars per person affected.

So essentially what I’m after here is transparency to the customer, and actual consequences for companies that fail to protect customer data.

I disagree, especially because “other than necessary” is a pretty squishy concept (i.e. selling tailored ads could be considered “necessary to operate a website”). Instead of that, I think selling or providing any form of data collected without the customer’s explicit consent (and to consent, the customer must know what data is being s hared) or without a warrant (and only the data in the warrant) should be illegal.

That should be sufficient and actually enforceable, since it has very clear boundaries on what’s included.

Well, the day my boss says that is the day I submit my 2 weeks notice, and probably half of our dept. We were hired with the promise of always having 3 days at home most days, and my boss kept to that, even pushing back against company policy that tried to shift to 3 days in office.

Yeah, Jan 1 2000 gang rise up!

Wait, your name isn’t SagXD?

I’m 100% in the second camp. Facebook having my ID is a much bigger issue than having my kids’ profile be public. I as a parent can ensure my kids’ profiles are acceptable, or mark them as private myself. I can’t ensure Facebook deletes my ID after verifying my identity.

Yes, kids should be safer online, and that starts at home. Educate parents and kids about how to stay safe, that’s as far as it should go.

Exactly. We use a VPN to connect to anything somewhat important, and anything truly important requires manual access and approvals. I’m in a pretty senior dev position, and if I lost my laptop:

1. they’d have to break my password or biometric login (disk is encrypted) - with this they get access to most of our code, but no secrets
2. they’d need to hack my phone to access any internal documentation or test environments due to 2FA
3. they’d need to hack my password manager to access anything non-documentation - code repos, prod logs, etc
4. they’d need to hack someone else’s machine to get access to actual prod data, which is probably what they really want

And I’m not doing anything special here (and I’m certainly not a security professional), that’s everyone’s machines due to company policy. We also don’t handle anything particularly sensitive, the most sensitive thing I have is proprietary algorithms, and we’d sue anyone if we suspected they stole our code.

Oh, and if they try to run something sus, it’ll send a report to our IT dept. I actually got contacted by our IT dept because I ran something unfamiliar (I really like my CLI tools), so they added an exception after personally verifying with me that it’s not a hack.

We have teams across the globe, both inside the org and outside, and we haven’t had any issues with security, and we do regular audits. Our security team isn’t particularly special either, I’m sure many other companies have much tighter security than we do.

pretty trivial to do so

Yup. We have to “badge in” to our office, but the secretary will buzz you in if you ask nicely. Also, if you walk in with confidence as someone is entering/leaving, they’ll hold the door for you. Or go in around the EOD when the cleaning staff are there and they’ll let you in. All it takes is a very small amount of social engineering and you could steal a ton of stuff from my company.

But most people don’t lose stuff like laptops at home or in their office, they lose them when traveling. Maybe you drop by a coffee shop on the way to work and someone filches your bag, or maybe you take a flight for work and someone swipes it while you’re throwing something in the trash. They’re not going to break into your home or your office, they’ll snatch it while you’re out in public and not paying particularly close attention.

Cool, glad I didn’t listen to my parents, who wanted me to work for Amazon. Yeah, I probably could’ve made a ton more, but I’m making plenty where I’m at.

I work 2x in office, less if I have a somewhat passable reason to not go in. And I can WFH for a few weeks at a time if I need to travel for whatever reason. It’s nice working for someone that somewhat respects me.

Sure, and we should absolutely indict Facebook. And ideally our government wouldn’t be so corrupt that it could indict our own government agencies from buying information from them in violation of the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 9th amendments (and probably the 14th).

Get an ad blocker, problem solved.