I find it interesting that even those that defend him admit how flawed his writing is to the point of near outrage.
The worst part is that I believe that we both believe in the same sorts of ideals…however when a self proclaimed speaker so so many topics I care about makes the arguments so impeachable by the other side, it doesn’t matter how much circlejerking will happen with the true believers, it’s the folks that need to be convinced that see right through the bullshit and hyperbole. Maybe he only cares about the page views, which then the circle-jerking makes absolute sense, but otherwise he is damaging the narrative.
I wont say you are wrong but I will point out that they definitely have their own agenda and their articles are often heavily colored with editorial voice.
(& @ficuswhisperer) I dont think he views himself as a persuader but rather as a cheerleader for the home team. Unfortunately, even where I might agree with some positions, this sort of cheerleading does really come off as “crazy guy shouting on the streetcorner” when it goes over the top and I dont even want to be a fellow traveler there.
I don’t believe most Americans are bigoted in the way Mr Trump and his cronies are – and by that I mean actively, vocally, virulently bigoted and racist. Some are, absolutely, and especially in the South… where a great deal of his support came from.
But I believe that much of his support didn’t come from bigots. It came from people who have a lot of unfocused anger, people who’re jaded and distrustful of politics and the media and the government, and people who want to table-flip the system. The thing I hear most from Trump voters has been that they want something different… not a politician, a businessman, someone outside the system, someone entertaining. And many of them wave off his flaming bigotry as “just entertainment, empty words”. Voting for Trump doesn’t require racism or bigotry, but it does require a whole crap-load of willful ignorance.
If you are willing to vote for a flaming bigot, bigotry is not a disqualifying trait for your vote. So you’re at least bigoted enough that you’ll vote for a bigot who promises economic betterment.
Every news source has an agenda. Every single one of them. The key is to keep the range of news sources you use wide enough so that the agendas tend to cancel one another out.
That’s the problem…I care about these issues. I care about getting the truth behind these issues. I tell myself I’m not going to click on his articles, but more often than not, he is posting links to the stuff I care about. In this case, it was a yellow journalist Sam Biddle still making up shit the way he did with Nick Denton. This is an issue that honestly deserves to be investigated and reported. We are already seeing folks flee blanks investing in DAPL, and this was because of real investigative reporting. I don’t want to deal with any tech company that would even consider selling the tech to allow Trump to do something like this, even if they claim that it’s just a database and what they put in it is their own problem. However, most of these company’s HAVE stated multiple times that if their tech is going to be used for these purposes, they will not sell in any form.
I want actual news on this, and often times through Corys bullshit take on the links, there is information on the other side…that often negates everything he wrote, so I soldier on through it. Those claiming that we hate the site or disappointed in it, like it or not this has become the center of a lot of tech issues that you and I care about. I want this information without the bullshit and with actual understanding and without a click bait buzzfeed title. If I wanted just driving trollies and bullshit, I’d stick with Reddit…however, it feels more like 4chan with his writing.
I’ll put it this way: you don’t have to be actually bigoted, but you have to be comfortable enough with bigotry and racism to vote for a bigoted racist. Or, as I say, you see him as an entertainer whose words mean nothing to start with, and can wave off his vocal bigotry as meaningless bluster, which I’ve heard a lot of as justification.
I do think it’s important to judge entities on their deeds - words are cheap. Let’s take a look what those US tech companies did in regard to collaborating with the government before the public got a look behind the curtains:
Exactly as I’ve put it in the past. I think this is misguided and there’s a tipping point where you realize, “Oh, he did mean much of that”. But it’s too late, the power has been transferred. Let’s hope our system of checks and balances is strong enough.
Theres the technical aspects, theres the legal wrappers around the technical aspects and then there is the hysterical hyperbole of the reporting.
Lets take for example an old chestnut related to DRM. I cant say I’m opposed to the existence of DRM as a tool. I recognize that it has its legitimate uses. Not simply because in the past I’ve derived some income as a musician/producer/small label owner, etc but also because I recognize that creative works and technical works or the technical expressions of creative works do always come at no cost. I cant buy into the hysterical hyperbole because I recognize facts.
However, when a legal wrapper gets put around DRM to create a different purpose such as sub licensing or territorial sales agreements (as is the case with DVD & BluRay video discs) I do have some sympathy for a “cause”. The way Kindle books are sold also comes here.
Im grateful to those who build tools that let me work around problems of using things I’ve purchased. But the more the hyperbole the more I start to feel a kind of sense of “fuck you” to the cause. Same with all the Trumpophobia sadly. Here regardless of the particular journalist, a statement made by DJT, a man known to be unreliable to his word, gets pasted over a tech issue which really has nothing to do with tech itself.
It was once thought that Lessig was going to be the Savior Persuader but after watching all those efforts fail, all we are left with is cheerleaders.
The problem with this is that it is inaccurate in a lot of ways. This was an internal cheerleading as much as everything else, where there was varying levels of support.
I know several of the companies made it impossible for the gov’t to come in WITHOUT a warrant. Some gave a direct line to the gov’t. Some changed their applications so that the gov’t could technically see all encrypted data coming through, but made certain the keys resided solely on the user’s end meaning that it was line noise to the gov’t but following the strictest protocol of the law. Several went to court at great expense because it was cheaper than dealing with the technical issues. Several went to court because they knew as an international corporation, it was a bad business practice that would hurt their bottom dollar to be complicit in this.
We know from the past and evidence released that most of these companies did not start handing over data just because the gov’t asked them to, nor did they do it in a way that was particularly useful.
Again, in the end if you are an international corporation, your sales outside of the US become far more important than the ones in the US. Even if they didn’t disagree on principle, they did disagree on the fact that it would hurt Q4 earnings.
I personally can’t stand DRM, but it works. Full stop. It works.
It may not work for the people that are entirely devoted to subverting it, but we’ve gotten to the point that it stops the average person that would have to deal with 100 hours of futzing or simply go to Gamestop and pick up their latest PS5 game. I worked in a creative industry before moving into mental health / academia. I had SEVERAL products where the company we developed for had actually given us a $100k DRM package that would lock the programs to individual machines – in this case it was audio content for professionals that worked on high-end specific machines with chipsets that did all the heavy lifting (you know, the stuff that my watch can do now without breaking a sweat). I refused. It was far more important for my well-being to allow people to do what they wanted and NOT have to constantly contact me everything they upgraded or worried about fixing something and the chip with the identifier somehow got damaged.
To be DRM is moronic. And I lost a lot of money over not being a complete dick. I also gained a lot of sleep over not being a complete dick.
And yet, I understand why companies with multimillion dollar budgets that rely on slowing or delaying the theft of their products knowing that their first-week sales will pretty much be what they can count on…there is a reason they do it.
I don’t like it, but intellectual property is not a crime against humanity. And I believe in copyright laws and teeth behind them. As someone that makes a good part of his living in the world of imaginary ideas that could be easily copied…I don’t want to be devalued below the guy that digs ditches simply because his labor can be seen as a tactile expression of work.
I don’t know about the other companies, but Apple has routinely worked to fight even FISA and NSLs even before it was shown to the public. And when forced by law and congress and threat of dismantling a multi-billion dollar corporation, they created devices that couldn’t be backdoored easily. And worked in a way that specifically required the security from even internal intrusion.
Again, it may not have ANYTHING to do with them being good people that care about their user’s privacy. It could be that they don’t give a fuck about their users or their privacy but know that it makes business sense. Even the most cynical could understand that certain companies charge a premium specifically because their users demand certain assurances.
But to piss away time and energy on anti-DRM activities like “Defective By Design” is worse than moronic. To put that into scale, PETA is at the moronic level but their public activities are done in a way to make their message clear and understandable in a very short time to passers by. They strategize to get high profile attractive celebs to endorse their cause because regular folks, the people they want to target their message to will be persuaded by supermodels and hollywood actors. Thats just life.
The anti-DRM preachers and cheerleaders? Super complicated message with confusing visuals and neither Stallman nor Doctorow has a face that would attract Joe & Jane Lunchpail to the cause. As you say, intellectual property isnt a crime against humanity so how do you persuade regular people (much less regulators) of the righteousness of the cause when it takes 45 minutes to explain it to even moderately savvy people?
