You have to be careful when you edit comments - you can be seen as editorialising, which can lose you protection against being liable for defamation in some jurisdictions. Probably not a huge issue for a small website, but now risk than I'd like to take
There's a case in process that'll likely resolve in the next two months. Quite a few companies have filed suite banking on getting their fees reimbursed.
In the current political climate nothing is certain - but this will likely come to a resolution in the near term.
And, if Treasury must refund to the companies that "paid" the tariffs, the companies will keep the refunds despite consumers' having actually carried the burden by paying higher prices and suffering attendant inflation. A win–win for the Epstein class!
There's plenty of evidence that many people are not making rational and informed decisions due to advertising practices. That is absolutely being forced into things
I don't control most of the discord communities I'm in. Some have been going a long time, and every platform migration sheds and shreds members. The 'mild effort' to move an old community to a new platform more often than not killed the community
> and every platform migration sheds and shreds members.
What's the problem? You're filtering out people who don't really care about participation in whatever group or society is there. People who want to participate will move to an acceptable service and those who feel that is too much effort probably weren't participating much (if at all) anyway - in that case the only difference is the visible list of people with accounts going down, not the actual "users".
The people will just recreate the same community on the same platform without you as the owner. They don’t care about you running it.
It’s also a futile effort since age checks for adult content is becoming the law around the world so soon any platform you move to will have the same checks.
I disagree with this sentiment. It is entirely possible that there will be people who are regulars on one platform who are just unable (actually unable or perceives themselves unable) to migrate and the morale lost from losing their regulars is huge. Or a subset who insist on staying, forming their own sub-community, and neither the migrating group nor the people who insist on staying produce enough engagement for the members and so the community as a whole fizzles out. This is all squishiness. There is a reason why deplatforming appears to work in reducing the effectiveness of political groups, even if the people who remain in the community post-deplatforming are hardened in their loyalty to the political policy of the group.
>You're filtering out people who don't really care about participation in whatever group or society is there.
You underestimate how many people would rather do nothing than be inconvenienced, sadly. If you're not the personality that the community is rotating around, you'll find the migration pretty lonely.
Heck, even esablished personalities can only do so much. Remember that Microsoft paid top Twitch streamers 10s of milllions to move to Mixer for exclusive streaming. Even that wasn't enough to give a leg up.
Several companies have resisted these court orders successfully. Google can afford a lawyer to go over the order with a fine tooth comb if they wanted to - it's just easier to roll over and let the government rub their belly.
Trump has also repeatedly used government apparatus to illegally retaliate against companies and individuals for not going hos way, with no consequence, so it is hard to entirely blame corporations for behaving that way
Apple has a slightly better track record than Google of fighting this stuff, but ultimately if you're using a product from a US tech company then it's likely ICE can get their grubby little mitts on everything that company knows about you
Is there any evidence that Apple fights administrative subpoenas issued by US federal agencies?
Or is Google just more transparent than Apple about the government orders it complies with?
For example, after the Department of Justice demanded app stores remove apps that people use to track ICE deployments, Apple was the first to comply, followed later by Google.
It's a constitutional right to record them doing their duties, in public. That's clear.
Here's a question: Is making a reporting system around that, for the purpose of/approaches/is realtime tracking, also protected? Maybe related to "non-permanence"?
The removal case was administratively closed on appeal which meant that he was legally authorized to stay in the US while waiting for a green card application to go through.
He was here on a work permit when the police arrested him for filming a protest. Journalism isn't a crime so all the charges connected to his arrest were dropped, but ICE placed a detainer on him to keep him locked up anyway. A judge granted him bond so that he could be released but ICE fought that too and continued to keep him locked up. Finally they reopened the 2012 case and used that to kick him out of the country.
Sure it is. The same way it was legal to track and report on CIA "extraordinary rendition" flights using publicly available information.
What is not protected is actual interference or obstruction, and first amendment protections can be lost if the system’s design, stated purpose, or predictable use crosses from observation and reporting into intimidation or operational coordination that materially interferes or obstructs.
Given how these systems are already being used, and the likely intent behind building one, that's a real risk if you're not careful.
Alternatively, use them pseudonymously? There's little reason any of these companies need to know your real identity. This will both reduce the likelihood of ICE finding your account from a real-life interaction, as well as reduce the likelihood of ICE finding your real-life identity if they do get your account data (they'd at least need to dig through it more than just going by first/last name on the account itself).
You can’t do that. If you think you can, you haven’t tried recently.
They all require phone numbers, and they almost all require phone numbers tied to ID-based names. They require CC even when you aren’t buying stuff. It’s very difficult even for experts to achieve truly pseudonymous use.
A prepaid SIM or burner phone can still be purchased no? I believe the CC requirement can be bypassed if you create your Apple ID from trying to "purchase" a free app (or for the accounts that do require payment, I wonder if a gift card can be used).
For linking activity back to your person? Without name, payment details, photos of face, or IRL social graph the easiest path that comes to mind is IP address. But that's going to involve additional inquiries and is likely ambiguous (unless you live alone, but determining that is again more work).
“allow google to search for devices on your network?”
I’m not trying to be condescending here, but I’m just asking what someone thinks is happening here and what they can do with information scanned on your network.
I don't follow how that's relevant? In terms of the information yielded by an administrative subpoena of an account will that even appear? I'm not clear how the result of the scan is being used.
Suppose the data is retained in association with your pseudonymous account. So now in addition to my IP they have, what, the internal IPs and device names from my LAN? How does that lead directly to me without significant additional effort? I think their best option is still hitting up my ISP to get the billing info and service address of the account.
use it as a thought experiment i guess. your devices will advertise themselves to your local network and are easily fingerprintable to any device with network permissions and talk back a lot more than they should. The only point I’m trying to make is that you can’t fool this kind of with filling in form that’s wrong.
I only guessed that because that is a strange conclusion to draw when Apple was involved in PRISM, they worked with China to black pro- democracy hong kong apps, and I believe they turned over data to China and Russia.
Apple's PR/marketing is best in class, so I can also see this just being a knowledge level error rather than bias.
You can trivially disable web access to your data; at that point, Apple literally does not have the keys to your end-to-end encrypted data and cannot read or disclose it.
Exactly Apple has and will continue to comply whatever is needed to help authoritarian regimes to crush their citizens while Google refused to. It's hard to look at Apple in any other light.
I'm guessing your constraint is impossible as living in the US pretty much requires banking and working with companies that will gladly give government agencies your information. I severely doubt that tech is the only group doing this.
> Don't use products from large US tech companies?
What does large have to do with it? Why do you think smaller companies are any more likely to resist? If anything, they have even less resources to go to court.
And why do you think other countries are any better? If you use a French provider, and they get a French judicial requisition or letters rogatory, then do you think the outcome is going to be any different?
I mean sure if you're avoiding ICE specifically, then using anything non-American is a start. But similarly, in you're in France and want to protect yourself, then using products from American companies without a presence in France is similarly a good strategy.
> Why do you think smaller companies are any more likely to resist? If anything, they have even less resources to go to court
Somehow smaller companies do resiste much more. Examples: Lavabit refused to expose Snowden, Purism offers SIM-cards protecting you from tracking ("AweSIM").
No, some smaller companies do. Plenty don't at all. Apple is a gigantic company and known for being super privacy focused, keeping your information encrypted to protect it from governments wherever they can.
So what makes you think size has any relevance here?
> Apple is a gigantic company and known for being super privacy focused, keeping your information encrypted to protect it from governments wherever they can.
I wouldn't trust this marketing. Companies are on the users' side when the competition is strong. Apple is practically a monopoly. See my other comment with examples how it doesn't care about users.
Are they going to stop because a company fights a subpoena? Or perhaps in the case of some touted alternatives, even if a subpoena were acted upon, no data would be intelligible?
Maybe they'll just show up to your house next time. I'm not sure why people complain about US companies complying with US government subpoenas. Isn't that how it is supposed to work? Imagine if the opposite were routine, would you like that?
People want to stop using Gmail to feel agency in a situation where the real problem is their own government. The real answer thus lies in deeply reforming a federal government that really both sides of the aisle (in their own way) agree has gotten too powerful and out of control.
It's more nuanced than "the federal government is too powerful." I feel more like non-law-enforcement agencies like ICE are too powerful right now, but I also believe that the FBI and the DOJ had a good mandate that should be preserved. And I also believe that antitrust needs to be a high priority. Please don't lump me in with people who just want to tear it all down so they can live in a fiefdom. There are good people in the US government, and there are good things about it. It's just not all of it is good and none of us can agree at all times on what's bad here.
If you've had a 100%-tolerance policy to illegal immigration for years then that's the government not being powerful enough, or not using its power to the correct level for its citizens. If there's a better, gentler fix for illegal immigration then everyone would absolutely love that, but it's such a huge thing to tackle due to the previous years' encouraging of illegal migration.
The system is clearly breaking. Rather than couching your language in rehashed partisan politics that will only lead to further and more egregious breaks, the best thing you could do is acknowledge these events as a system failure. The safest thing is then to first work to defang the system. This is also bipartisan and more likely to succeed.
Just look at the situation as the founders would. It's amazing a society that came from a generation that engineered their own form of government is now trapped by their forebears' invention. They told us explicitly they were merely men, not gods. When America was founded it was a weak, newborn power of 3 million people who were forced to make awkward compromises mostly to protect the country from being recolonized by European domination. And yet our system of government has remained mostly unchanged from the founding.
Any of you Americans out there worried about a European armada? Or the British burning down the White House again?
America's sister republic - the French - has gone through many more iterations. Your problem is you have no imagination. Regardless of what you think of Trump, he does. He is an avatar for a group of people that understand correctly that what had been the prevailing system was no longer responsive to the times, so they are essentially remaking it on the fly. What is your answer to that, that isn't just lets rewind the clock? You tried that with Biden and the disease became worse.
Do it a second time and I fear the future will bring you someone who makes Trump look like a saint.
But that 8% is almost as many prisoners as comparable countries have, total. The lobbying and sometimes outright corruption around private prisons doesn't care if it also feeds people into non-private prisons as long as it also feeds the private prison beast
Because AI is really good at generating code that looks good on its own, on both first and second glance. It's only when you notice the cumulative effects of layers if such PRs that the cracks really show.
Humans are pretty terrible at reliable high quality choice review. The only thing worse is all the other things we've tried.
> Because AI is really good at generating code that looks good on its own, on both first and second glance.
This is a good call out. Ai really excels at making things which are coherent, but nonsensical. It's almost as if its a higher-order of Chomsky's "green ideas sleep furiously"
reply