They are though, Juicero being a scam or not (it's not, they shipped at straight forward pricepoints).
Even "traditional" pressed juice companies are starting to see a crunch, as their evangelical customers ("health nuts") are realizing that eating an apple is healthier than pressing 4 of them.
Credit Karma's mission is to make financial progress possible for everyone. We have over 70 million US members and are a true mission-oriented business, a rare case where our incentives are aligned with our users - we succeed by helping our members attain financial progress. We're growing very rapidly right now, and have tons of opportunities for people to solve hard problems while helping people grow their financial progress.
It absolutely is, just not with the government. If private companies have the abilities to squelch speech from the public internet, that is a very bad thing. Google is the second registrar to kick them out. I don't care for what they say, but if we want a free internet, we have to allow the good with the bad.
I mean we complain when China does it, how is this fundamentally different?
> I mean we complain when China does it, how is this fundamentally different?
Because a private company declining to participate in the hosting of somebody's speech is a hell of a distance from the government mandating blocking said speech? How is this even a serious question?
Random House probably isn't interested in publishing a neo-nazi racial superiority manifesto, either. That's neither a free speech issue nor "tantamount to Chinese censorship".
Undesirable speech removed from the internet via multiple registrars refusing to host DNS, vs undesirable speech removed from the internet via Chinese firewall has the same result: undesirable speech removed from the internet. That's the fundamental issue. That is not different.
Mandating that Google host this speech would constitute compelled speech, and violate the first amendment. Ironically, what you seem to desire here is something much more in line with China's conception of constrained freedom.
I desire anyone the ability to say anything on the internet without being squelched. I don't see how that is the same. If private companies want play that game, it's time to take the internet out of their hands.
The solution to that problem is to have a federalized registrar that will allow anyone to register anything and is required to uphold free speech laws as they apply to the internet.
> You aren't allowed to respond by gluing someone's mouth shut.
Refusing to actively collaborate in spreading someone else's viewpoint isn't gluing their mouth shut.
Now, if you want to argue that domain registration should be a public utility and not a private interaction where the service providers freedom of speech and association is protected, that's perhaps a reasonable argument. But that's not the status quo.
I'd rather argue for neither. Name-to-number resolution is too much of a strategic choke point to allow anyone to have too great a degree of control over it.
But in the system we have now, domain registrars and DNS providers should not be engaging in viewpoint-based discrimination against the domain owner, or in content-based discrimination against anything they may have on their servers.
I can certainly condone web hosting service companies embargoing troublesome customers, but anything closer to infrastructure than that should not be cut off for any reasons other than failure to pay the bills.
> If we cheer this, we are cheering the death of free and public internet.
I don't think it is that simple. ISIS does just fine on the web, I'm sure Neo Nazis will do just fine as well. But that's no reason why the IT giants of the planet should aid and abet them.
Television stations, radio stations and newspapers all decide which editorials to air or stories to cover. There's no requirement that they provide every organization equal time to present whatever they think might be valuable.
Perhaps if DNS service was regulated as a utility, or if Google was an arm of a state or federal government, there might be something to your argument.
Anyone can start and distribute a newspaper. Not everyone can broadcast on a spectrum (there are technical reasons to now allow that). If you think of a website as a newspaper, and there are similarities, then this in effect is a private entity preventing someone from publishing and distributing a newspaper.
In the same way that anyone can start a newspaper, anyone can also start a website. In the same way that someone needs to sell the newspaper vital supplies like paper and ink, so to do websites need to have network providers and web servers.
If you think that a pro-Nazi newspaper would have no problem setting up shop, you are sorely mistaken. They will have the same problems as this website and people of conscience will refuse to have them as clients. This website, as would those newspapers, will need to find suppliers sympathetic to their views.
That few people are sympathetic to their views, in my opinion, is the market at work.
That's what I've been thinking. Maybe Namecoin (.bit) should be taken up by all "Free speech extremists", regardless of which side they are advocating. By Free speech extremists I mean people who agree that Nazi sites should have a registrar, regardless whether you agree with the Nazis or not.
>Is it really that hard for people to understand that the first amendment only applies to the federal government?
That's the standard fallback of authoritarians. The law says the government can't ban speech, but the spirit of free speech, particularly on something like the internet, should be protected.
> If private companies have the abilities to squelch speech from the public internet, that is a very bad thing.
the whole point of the net neutrality folks is ensuring that ISPs can't keep them from accessing whatever sites they want, isn't it?
if it is in some sense OK for google to refuse these domain registrations, is it also OK for google (and then comcast, etc etc) to refuse to carry the packets for these sites?
It would be wrong for Comcast to drop packets for specific websites, if Net Neutrality was still a thing. Google is a private company and can refuse to service customers.
If they choose to base themselves on extremist idealogy, it is their problem to figure out how to sustain themselves let alone craft its own monetization plan!
One perspective is that Google runs their own DNS that many people and services use as a convenience.
Also, as I get chastised for using Bing (because they pay me) and much of their traffic comes from browser defaults, it's arguable that if they stopped hosting on google.com it may not be that negative of an impact.
To the same degree, note that Amazon CHOOSES not to list their more specific apps in the google store and force customers to download THEIR store and change their phone permissions.
You weaken your own rights by choosing to interpret "speech" literally instead of as participation in public communications and discourse, which increasingly occurs over channels that do not require everyone to be within shouting distance of each other. Freedom of the press now extends further than a literal ink-on-paper printing press, to digital publication on an http server.
Delisting a domain from the DNS is metaphorically equivalent to raiding the premises of a newspaper publisher and ripping the banner off the front page of each printed copy, while leaving the remainder intact, so that anyone attempting to read the latest copy of that paper would not be able to find one, even if they were standing on a stack of them. It is backdoor censorship, by attacking people's name-based associations.
> Delisting a domain from the DNS is metaphorically equivalent to raiding the premises of a newspaper publisher and ripping the banner off the front page of each printed copy, while leaving the remainder intact, so that anyone attempting to read the latest copy of that paper would not be able to find one, even if they were standing on a stack of them. It is backdoor censorship, by attacking people's name-based associations.
No, it isn't. It is merely saying that you won't take an entry in your copy of the phone book, but you're free to petition the other issuers of phone books and you're free to create your own phone book.
Which kicks the can down the road to the issuer of the phone book book, which is not obligated to list any particular phone book in it, including the one you created yourself, because no one else would list your number in theirs.
Do you think it acceptable for casual users of the phone network to keep their own list of phone books that include self-published phone books that the major phone book book publishers won't list?
> Do you think it acceptable for casual users of the phone network to keep their own list of phone books that include self-published phone books that the major phone book book publishers won't list?
I didn't really get your point, too many books in it. Care to rephrase it, please?
> You weaken your own rights by choosing to interpret "speech" literally instead of as participation in public communications and discourse, which increasingly occurs over channels that do not require everyone to be within shouting distance of each other.
Are you implying that every online community and service should be forced to accept absolute freedom of speech?
Porn is speech, should YT and Fb be forced to host porn?
It's a little different with domain registrars, particularly when two of the biggest ones blocked a domain from registering. A power the US government gave them. Also, no one is saying "force," you are injecting that as a straw man. Just because people think free speech is something worth fighting for rather than actively fighting against because sometimes it is distasteful, doesn't mean we want the government to force anything.
Also, Google and GoDaddy sure forced Stormwhatever to not be accessible through their domain name. Again, using power given to them by the US government.
Do you believe you are actively fighting against the freedom of this group to speak? Do you see where some people would think you are? Do you think that will come back to bite you in the future?
With no requirements that they should not refuse service to anyone.
> Also, no one is saying "force."
Then what are you saying? Should Google be "xxxxx" to accept Stormwhatever? What is "xxxxx"? Honest question, what are you proposing?
> Again, using power given to them by the US government.
And doing so per the conditions specified by the US government.
First Amendment lawyer Ken White describes the Daily Stormer as a "sewer of humanity." In a statement to Ars, he argued that the article about Heyer "is repulsive, and arguably advocates for killing people in general, but it's not actionable incitement under the law. GoDaddy, of course, can kick Nazis off its platform as it likes, though."
That's a good question, thanks for keeping the gray cells going.
So the internet was created with public funds; you and I paid for it. The registrars were then privatized, which I don't particularly have a problem with, but since the internet was created with public funds, it should allow the freedoms the government gives us.
Like I said, I'm not suggesting Google be forced to do it, but the US government should run a "public option" registrar that protects the freedom of speech / expression that putting up a website provides. If the government feels like they should ban a website, allow it to go through the court system and see if they agree. With privatization, we don't have the court system to go through (well we do, but since it's a private company, courts probably won't hear it.) That would be a good solution for me. Let Google keep their censoring and data collection if they want.
> So the internet was created with public funds; you and I paid for it.
Very little of the current infrastructure was built with public funds Most of the hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure around the world come from companies, some government owned, some private.
> The registrars were then privatized
Actually, they weren't. They never existed in a public fashion. You're mixing up registry and registrar.
Today, it isn't a monopoly, so anyone can create their own registrar if they want. So if they don't find a registrar wanting to do business with them, they can spend a few thousand $ and create their own.
On the "government-run neutral registrar", I'm not sure if that's a good solution. I've rarely ever seen a government keep something neutral...
I'm not Clubber, but I think Google should choose, by their own volition, to accept Daily Stormer in order to promote freedom of speech and an open internet. In the same way sense that the rich "should" donate to charity even if there isn't necessarily a legal or moral obligation to. They should do it because the world is a better place with the open exchange of ideas.
I am implying that the internet is now communications infrastructure, and should therefore be equally open to all comers.
Domain registration and DNS are [nearly] essential now, in the same way that street signs are essential for a road network. If your city council decides to rip out the street sign that labeled the street you live on, such that visitors could not easily locate your house, and mail would not be delivered in a timely or reliable fashion to your mailbox, do you think you might have grounds to complain?
Assigning a street name and postal address to your lot is not the same as building a house on it.
So not "every online community" should be barred from censorship on their own properties, but if you're running a core information service, you're danged skippy that censorship is not okay.
If Cthulhu comes up to your desk chewing on half of a Dagonite cultist, you accept its business, and charge it exactly the same fee per month as you just charged smiling baby Jesus holding two cute kittens for his domain registration. The amount of editorial control you may exercise is inversely proportional to your power to influence the entire Internet. Since domain registration is right there at the center and has such great power, you do not get to color the whole Internet with your own personal values.
> So not "every online community" should be barred from censorship on their own properties, but if you're running a core information service, you're danged skippy that censorship is not okay.
Google or GoDaddy aren't running the DNS system, or even street signs.
They are running a phone book service, which is also run by many other companies, each under their own ToS. They can reject service to anyone (well, except protected classes).
Root level domains are part of DNS. You have to go through a registrar to get listed in a root level domain (.com, .net, etc). So yes, if they block you from registering in a top level domain and you don't have an alternative, you are blocked from DNS, at least the public one.
But there in lies the problem. Private companies don't want the stink of Stormwhatever associated with their name in the press and are more likely to banstick them because profit.
I think the best solution is a public option registrar.
Been on that train for a while. Ever since Twitter banned Milo, who I'd never heard of until reading a news article about him being banned, the internet in the USA is slowly resembling the internet I experience in China whenever I visit the mainland. And the slippery slope is greased with "but muh private companies" even as these private companies become more and more monopolistic and indistinguishable.
Allowing Nazi's any platform carries a risk, some memes are best kept away from fertile ground lest they spread. Germany learned that the hard way, I'm curious how the USA will deal with this and if they will manage to control it while keeping the free speech laws. I don't know which way it will go but I can see some problems.
I also wonder how many of the 300+ million Americans are now quiet converts waiting in the wings. Scary times.
There is nothing magical about Nazism; it's not some kind of special Pandora's box waiting to spring upon an unsuspecting public. It's just one of many ideologies that appeal to people who feel oppressed by giving them the easy target of vulnerable populations on whom to blame their misfortunes.
That it happened to be the ideology used to horrific ends in the industrialized world last century is much more a product of its moment in history than due to anything unique about the ideology itself.
The poisonous seed isn't the problem - rather, the ground fertile to it must be tended so that it will reject such things taking root.
Well, without the seed the ground would lie fallow. It needs both, not either one or the other and while it is definitely a requisite that the ground be tended that's a hard problem revolving around education and a general idea of ones place in the world and what rights and obligations we all have. And in spite of trying for a long time we have yet to come upon an infallible way of making these things known to all.
Nazism is a meme, just like stupid cat videos and the bible. It spreads from person to person seeking fertile ground in terms of an easy to identify scape-goat and an association with trouble experienced in a persons life. Allowing such memes to spread unchecked is playing roulette with open societies, the question then becomes whether you'd prefer free speech if it becomes the deciding factor in whether or not a thing like that can take root on a scale that it could cause a disaster or whether you forgo free speech to some extent in order to squelch the problem before it gets out of hand. Note that the Nazis themselves were not exactly free speech fans.
So even if it isn't a necessity it certainly will help to make it grow, and will allow it to grow faster.
Your rationale is exactly what every dictator throughout history has used to protect their power. Every, single, one. You either have free speech and allow all to express their ideas unfettered, or you will end up in a dictatorship sooner or later, guaranteed. To be clear, i'm talking about expressing ideas like "men and women differ biologically" and not speaking about threats/fighting words. Once you start punishing people for their ideas you're on the road to dictatorship, at least if every dictatorship in history is any guide.
Right, that's why all countries that do not have USA style free speech are dictatorships. Come on, that's not even trying. If anything the USA is more at risk of becoming a dictatorship than many other democracies.
You're not going to see any trouble anywhere - except on private property - for expressing ideas such as 'men and women differ biologically', note that no government you'd care to list here has ever suppressed speech like that.
But Nazism is on a different level, and if you're willing to go down that road protecting the free speech of Nazis you really have to be very optimistic about human nature. I keep hearing echoes of 'it can't happen here'. But I believe it can happen, and it probably can happen everywhere. The question is if we will let it and what it will take to stop it once the ball starts rolling.
You seem to defend the idea that 'limitations to free speech lead to dictatorships' by defining a dictatorship as 'any government that puts limitations on free speech'.
You could make just as a valid (and philosophers like Popper have) that allowing unfettered free speech has also led every society that tried it down the road to dictatorship.
Dictatorship is one of the easy to find local minima of human organization, that we have to fight everyday not to slip down towards. You do that by accepting the humanity of your opponents, finding reasonable compromises, and there's no reasonable compromise to be had with the Nazi ideology, just ask the dead.
> Allowing Nazi's any platform carries a risk, some memes are best kept away from fertile ground lest they spread.
I have two rather distinct objections to this line of thinking. One is that this isn't especially true. To name one semi-controlled experiment: Germany has laws against using Nazi symbols, denying the Holocaust, and so forth, and yet the crypto-neo-Nazi NPD pulls down hundreds of thousands of votes every election--not enough to win anything aside from one European Parliament seat, but a significant number anyway. Meanwhile, the US has no laws against neo-Nazi expression and also doesn't seem to have very many more neo-Nazis per capita--even in Charlottesville, the neo-Nazis numbered in the high dozens to low hundreds and were vastly outnumbered by counterprotesters.
A more philosophical objection is that you don't want to go into the business of deciding what ideas are too dangerous to express, because there's a greater risk that any institution with the power to make and enforce that judgment call will abuse that power. This is also a lesson that Europe learned the hard way, but seems to have forgotten.
But Germany has so far managed to keep the NPD on the fringe. The number of votes they get is low enough that it can be considered a safety valve of sorts. More interesting would be to see how Germany would react if the NPD got within striking distance of control of the Reichstag.
As for your second point, ideas may be too dangerous to express and you're still free to express them. But that's no reason to hand someone a megaphone to express those ideas and I think that Europe learned that there are points in time where small changes can have large effects, and that some of those effects can get out of control. So they tried (and possibly failed, but so far so good) to put mechanisms in place to stop a re-occurrence of recent history.
Which system is better only time will tell, but what's happening in the USA right now does not have a parallel in Europe.
> Which system is better only time will tell, but what's happening in the USA right now does not have a parallel in Europe.
Likewise, a lot of what's happened in Europe does not have a parallel in the USA. Elections have been seriously contested and sometimes won by the likes of Golden Dawn, Le Pen--both father and daughter--the BNP, Alessandra Mussolini, Jorg Haider, and so forth. Sure, in Europe you don't have a hundred white nationalists marching down the street carrying swastika flags, but you have an awful lot of them in the European Parliament.
> you have an awful lot of them in the European Parliament.
We're working on it. The last batch of elections was pretty scary but so far so good. If WWII wasn't enough to teach the world a lasting lesson you have to wonder how bad it would have to get before we will. Quite possibly it can not be done and we will occasionally revert to type.
The scary thing is that WWII is quickly passing out of living memory. In the next 20 years, there will start to be a critical mass of voters who have never MET anyone who was an adult in WWII.
By constructing the mechanism by which one may deny a bad guy any platform, you now have a mechanism that may be used to deny any other kind of person a platform. Such a thing is more dangerous than any individual bad guy, and will--very ironically--eventually fall into the hands of a person as bad or worse than that bad guy you were trying to stifle in the first place.
Censorship cannot triumph over evil, because it is evil in itself. The only reasonable counter is constant vigilance and tireless opposition. Furtive, deceitful whispers in the shadows call for floodlights and truth. Open demonstrations call for larger counter-demonstrations. The effective counter to objectionable speech is not censorship, but speaking the objection.
Absolute free speech is fundamentally incompatible with a free and fair society.
Allowing some forms speech has an incredibly chilling effect on other forms of speech, or on the safety of people.
Even America does not have absolute free speech (Although its further on this spectrum then all other Western democracies.) See - fighting words, direct incitements to domestic violence (Indirect domestic ones of the winkwinknudgenudge ones are fine, as are direct ones that incite violence against foreign persons or nations.)
That's not quite what happened in Germany. After the Beer Hall Putsch, there was a 5 year period where the Nazis would get into violent street clashes with members of the communist party.
Reacting to the Nazis with violence was tried in Germany. And it backfired very badly.
Yes, because driving them underground onto the dark web, without any adult supervision is a way better idea right? You drive these groups underground and one day are going to seriously regret doing so.
We are in the midst of a cultural civil war. The funny thing is that the more you suppress their ability to protest and their speech, the more converts you're making.
Maybe we should start by asking WHY these groups are getting more popular, why they are so enraged and angry and suddenly are out front airing their frustrations. And saying this is all about Trump is simply masking something that has clearly been brewing for a long time prior to this.
Every society has a population of disenfranchised people that can be turned to the tune of the right words. That's not unique to Trump followers, or even the USA.
What a society does when that monster rears its ugly head is what matters.
Pushing it underground is maybe ineffective as a sole strategy but making it seem acceptable is also not right.
Lots of these people only do this because they feel they have cover.
>> What a society does when that monster rears its ugly head is what matters.
In that last decade, apparently not much - which is why you have the problem you have now. This idea of doing something has not been done at all, but now all the SJW's have their hammers out and now everything looks like a nail.
It doesn't work like that. In a society that values the ability to speak freely, you can't pick and choose your winners based on who's OX is being gored this week, or which party is currently in power.
> In a society that values the ability to speak freely, you can't pick and choose your winners based on who's OX is being gored this week, or which party is currently in power.
I agree with that. Until we're talking about a party whose sole purpose is to take away those rights from others. That's one rule in the democratic playbook that we should all subscribe to and that should be a prerequisite for being allowed in the sandbox.
Credit Karma's mission is to make financial progress possible for everyone. We have over 70 million US members and are a true mission-oriented business, a rare case where our incentives are aligned with our users - we succeed by helping our members attain financial progress.
We're growing very rapidly right now, and have tons of opportunities for people to solve hard problems while helping people grow their financial progress.
Considering “the whine of the electric motor in Waymo’s 25mph prototype is mildly annoying when my window is open and they drive by several times an hour” is a real thing in my own life as a resident of Mountain View, it’s odd to see the assertion that they don’t drive around.
It's not for the faint of heart or faint of technical skill - different drivers have different behaviors and ways to enter the various capture and raw packet modes needed to do this.
Personally, as long as I stick to supported chipsets, I've almost never had an issue.
I've had great luck with this wireless card. Works out of the box on any linux distro I've used it with. I bought it specifically for its aircrack compatibility (packet injection and monitor mode).
Not all Alfa products are OOB compatible, you definitely need to be careful. I have the AWUS036AC which requires compiling a DKMS module.
It was a pain the get working on my Raspberry Pi, I had to try several different drivers and edit a Makefile to get it to compile. But I did eventually get it working as an AP, there's a script called create_ap which is very nice to painlessly run an AP on Linux.
I tested some of the most popular Kali Linux compatible cards against each other here[0]. Note that there is a version 2 of the popular and cheap TP-Link TL-WN722N which DOES NOT work like the version 1 and should be avoided.
All of these cards are "known to just work" on linux at least.
This implies that the bios can be corrupted - the bios shouldn't accept unsigned updates (without an in bios flag being switched first), even from a root-level user on the OS.
Even "traditional" pressed juice companies are starting to see a crunch, as their evangelical customers ("health nuts") are realizing that eating an apple is healthier than pressing 4 of them.