Turned out they just were the selfish assholes everyone always said they were, with everything they say just being poor attempts at rationalization of their deep lack of morals, including their self-serving primitive religion.

They were also supposed to be for state’s rights.

My entire life it’s been about nothing more than domination of the “immoral” and the end justifies any means when the alternative is someone else winning the vote.

They are the people the phrase “there is no hate like Christian love” is referring to.

That'd be the Libertarian Party

No, that's just the nonsense they say to hide their bigotry/fascism focused goals.

This is why the both sides argument is frustrating to hear.

Yes. Both sides censor people. I'm sure we'll see a comment about Biden censoring anti covid vaccine posts and the poster is somewhat right.

The difference is the Republicans run on freedom of speech making them hypocrites.

Being a hypocrite is the worst attribute a politician can have in a representative democracy

I mean obviously they never were. I think what really surprised people is that it turns out that despite it's supposed "libertarian" roots, the tech community has largely broken hard right authoritarian when the rubber hits the road. Kind of reinforcing the old adage that libertarians are just republicans who want to legally smoke weed.

These articles are actively mixing two very different topics: claims of people simply criticizing ICE, and people who are reporting on officer locations or otherwise providing information that could viably result in danger to the officers, difficulty enforcing the law, and so on. I think you'll very few conservatives would be supportive of the censorship of criticism, but many and probably the overwhelming majority would be supportive of censoring information of the latter type.

If there are genuine aims to censor or target Americans who are genuinely simply criticizing ICE, I don't understand why the media isn't naming names with their permission. For instance when Jay Bhattacharya was revealed as one of the people censored for having contrarian views on COVID related decisions, I think it was a major turning point because it made it clear that the censorship extended to the point of censoring highly qualified people simply for having different opinions.

Remember, it’s only censorship if they block what I want to say, if the block what I don’t like it’s for the greater good

> I thought Republicans were for small government and were anti-censorship.

They are against very specific parts of big government and censorship

It's not hard to find similar dunks for the other side, eg. "I thought Democrats were for bodily autonomy" (with regards to vaccine mandates/passports) or "I thought liberals were for free speech" (with regards to cancel culture).

I interpret ‘caved’ in this context to mean they’re not gaining much in return - they make a loss by doing this, just they make an even bigger loss if they were targets of a Trump tantrum.

They know what they are doing. To survive as a large entity during this administration you have to kiss the ring. If you don't, you'll get targeted for being 'woke' or whatever. In fact, kissing Trump's ass is more important for success than actually making a good product at this point.

I definitely don't think what these CEOs are doing is moral, but it's certainly rational.

May shame and disgrace follow them for the rest of their lives.

Having been around for a while, to go from optimistic, but sort of naive techno-libertarianism that was once a thing in Silicon Valley to kissing up to a would-be authoritarian is a very sad arc.

Bridgefy, Firechat, Bitchat and other bluetooth/wifi peer-to-peer SoMe's are great as long as you're enough people around. As long as you don't rely on one of the big tech app stores (or use an iPhone), it's not hard to get them even when the government is being tyrannical. It would be interesting to build something that would work over the various IoT networks which basically span all of Europe, but I guess that would be hard in countries where there are large areas of "nothing". It also depends on farmers choosing open source technology for their tech since you'd need a lot of farming IoT equipment to connect cross rural areas.

A centralized platform with marginally cleverer cryptography can technically allow posts and comments to belong to a user, but not be traceable back to the user! When asked by the government who made a particular post or comment, it should not be possible for the platform to readily identify who made it. Of course the IP address should not be tracked either, certainly not beyond 1h. The logged in user would still be able to view and manage all of their posts and comments, also see responses, because they would have the cryptography key to do so. So what about spam and guardrail control -- one solution is to let AI classify it. Much more can be possible with cleverer uses of cryptography. In short, it is not formally necessary to switch to a decentralized or federated solution to address the anonymity issue.

> Sadly I forgot its name or where to get it.

Are you thinking of HKmap.live?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HKmap.live

> Of course the app stores could block that too.

And Apple did.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-49995688

Anything that is P2P E2EE is hard to block by utilizing traditional measures. Personally I use and trust Tox. If you also want anonimity you can pair it with tor.

> Of course the app stores could block that

That is the problem with technical solutions. Governments can ban them, or mandate on device scanning to monitor your usage.

Sad this may be considered a "problematic" opinion to some. The extremes on both sides root for censorship when their political enemies are the target.

Yes. During COVID so many opinions were censored, including the medical opinion of actual Medical doctors and experts, if it did not fit the "accepted narrative".

Now we certainly see some excesses with companies like Palantir and others ramping up government surveillance.

Each side ramps up the encroachment on privacy and civil liberties without realizing the next time the other side comes into power they will gladly use and abuse everything the previous administration put in place during their rule.

Was it ever?

>If it's that easy, how long do we really expect Advanced Data Protection to be free from government backdooring?

Taking down an app is hardly unprecedented. Forcing companies to add backdoors in secret is, so it's a stretch to think that ADP is compromised.

  Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government “prohibited” the company “from sharing any information,”

That'll never work; what works is building un-censorable platforms, that cannot be banned in the same way it's impossible to ban torrents no matter how hard they try.

Corporations are people and money is speech, making corporations the strongest forces in politics. Obviously they're not on your side but there's no mystery why people would want to influence them.

I disagree.

Sure corporations have to respect the LAW in their juradiction, even if said law is unpopular or unethical. But they don't have to, and shouldn't where ethics and human rights are involved, go beyond what is required by the law. Since Trump has come to power a lot of big organsations seem to be reversing their previous positions to gain political favour, which is wrong.

The solution is probably for them to appeal to the public. "We stand up to ICE abuse" would probably help them in the markets.

Something interesting happened recently in France where it turned out that the American subsiduary of CapGemini was selling serives to ICE. They were forced to sell that subsiduary after public outcry.

All the more ironic when those selfsame corps act as arms of govenment agaist official enemy governments/people. See the recent brouhaha by Facebok over getting banned from Russia and years previously from China over pretty similar demands.

And the way they all fell inline with sanctioning the ICC (Microsoft/Google) when the only laws in play were US domestic ones being pushed globally.

Then what’s all the lobbying money for?

"When?" There is still plenty of time for the Reichstag fire.

> I wonder how much the tech bros are going to regret having bent over for Trump in 2028.

I'm going to guess they'll have fled the country with their winnings by then.

How is a Democrat going to be sitting in the Whitehouse when Trump/Vance is still there with a large contingency of loyal armed ICE agents looking to target dissenters?

Not much is what im expecting - they will bend the knee as always , most people forget that very similar actions were being done under Biden - their targets were different : Covid and some anti grnocide protests.

The tools once there will be expanded and continu ding what the gov of the day wants - same reason ICE , Pathriot act ,FISA etc saw their largest expansions after Obama came into power.

Targets will change but the tools will remain , aftter some sanitization youll even have proICE dems boosting.

The bar in the US right now seems to be if someone with any authority feels like killing you.

> Advocacy of force or criminal activity does not receive First Amendment protections if (1) the advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action, and (2) is likely to incite or produce such action.

You'd need to say something which directs others to violate the law or commit acts of violence, at a specific time ("imminent"), and your statement must be likely to be effective at causing them to do so.

Protesting, encouraging others to protest, expressing your political beliefs, organizing a protest, etc. are not incitement to violence. Nor is "doxxing" (filming, identifying) a public employee. None of these activities satisfy those criteria.

Remember the "Twitter files" nonsense? I recall they were upset at the government influencing the expression of political views on social media. Not hearing much backlash about this from the same people, because this is what they were claiming, but 100x worse.

At this point I think the biggest tangible difference between China and the US is that one country has high speed trains and affordable health care and the other has neither.

Welcome to Slopworld.

https://www.pangram.com/history/f51a237d-df7c-46cb-8cf2-c5b7... It scores 100% human written.

This comment is getting downvoted because it didn’t provide context: Are Technica was caught sharing hallucinated quotes from someone yesterday and they quietly deleted the article when caught: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47013059