>Another response I usually see is “But Signal is all we have!”. While that is somewhat true — at least by the metric of “secure messengers your granny can use”, there are some promising alternatives who are especially focused on decentralizing E2EE communications.
So the author readily admits that these alternatives aren't actually good enough for the average user.
Newsflash: This IS for the average user! This is for my grandma and my cousins overseas who don't know anything about the internet! They don't know anything about "cryptoshit" or what "E2EE" stands for. Once you actually have something worthwhile that my grandma can use, then maybe you can claim it's better!
If the average user was fine with the terrible clients which are Skype, Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger why should we hold Element to a higher standard?
Oh, I’ll grant you the UI of these clients can be terrible. Facebook Messenger takes a shocking amount of resources.
But what’s the job to be done for most people? Chatting with friends. FB Messenger has the network effect built in. You can just message your friends. And send them goofy stickers.
What will get people to transition to an encrypted messenger where they have to duplicate their social network? Privacy? Yeah, OK, I am definitely going to get a friend to download a new app, create a new account, and go through whatever dance is necessary for encryption to ask if we want Mexican or Thai for dinner.
As someone hiding behind a throwaway account in an effort to avoid doxing and harassment, and getting my more legitimate online presence removed due to hysterics:
I welcome the idea of this change. Though I think it is wrong the way it is implemented. I do not speak Polish, and maybe perhaps the Polish law is more nuanced than the article describes.
There should be a law that says you cannot produce a unilateral terms of service (you know, the shit everyone skips over when they sign up for a website to get their data harvested) that says your account can be terminated at any time for whatever reason. It should be a bilateral agreement:
-I agree to follow the rules of your service
-You agree to not arbitrarily remove me from your service
There are dozens of examples and minutia to digest that have lead us to where we are today. Voices are being silenced because feelings are too easily hurt. Misinformation too easily spread, and egos too easily bruised. People are specifically being targeted for hearsay, and because they lack a megaphone in the Court of Public Opinion, they lose catastrophically with real world consequences.
Hiding behind monopolistic corporations with snide remarks about "private platforms can do what they want" is genuine cowardice. For right now you are nothing more than a jester, and one bad joke away from your head rolling off, gleefully oblivious of your own downfall.
You have to be careful there, too, though: Amazon is claiming that Parler (to use the most currently relevant example) did violate their terms of service, because their terms of service are so vague and broad that they can be used to apply to almost anything.
I haven't used Parler, but from what I read there were loads of people actively calling for violence. Sure, there's no set line, but Amazon shouldn't have to support that if they don't want to.
> You agree to not arbitrarily remove me from your service
Per basic contract law, this is only going to fly if money is changing hands. You and Facebook sign a contract with these stipulations and you pay them for the privilege of using their platform, and now if they remove you you have damages that can be enforced. Absent you paying them they have no obligation to host any of your content. Are you willing to pay Facebook to use it in exchange for these rights?
I'm not sure that's true. Typically (and of course other jurisdictions vary anyway) there doesn't have to be money; there just has to be a consideration, which can be money. Something of value flowing both ways. A lot of contracts end up with a consideration on one party of something nominal like a dollar or a pound, but it doesn't have to be money.
"You get my details and my attention and can harvest my data and make money from it" certainly sounds like it could be argued as having value.
You're out on a bit of a shaky limb here. There's clear precedent in contract law for damages when money is changing hands. But non-compensated access to data? I'm doubtful. Do you have any established case law in this vein you can point to?
"Christans have always had the idea of sexual privacy, something they inherited from the Jews. We have plenty of writing from early Christians that make it clear that they objected to how open the Romans were."
I would like to add more to this. With the fall of Roman Empire, the early Dark and Middle Ages changed perspectives on nudity because of paganism. Most ruins and statues were seen as symbols of idolatry. This view slowly changed with the Renaissance period, as the Catholic Church embraced perspective that man is the image of God. Many famous sculptures and paintings were made in this period.
These artistic works then became censored because of the Council of Trent. The Catholic Church had to implement changes because of Protestant Reformation. This is why many classical works of art have fig leaves. Michelangelo had to come back to his Sistine Chapel painting to censor it, for example.
If you have the time, take a look at the supporting information for Materials and Methods. This is interesting to me as well, but my understanding of the English language is not as good.
Some key takeaways:
-They use delivery data from different categories of births, including 'complications occurring during the course of labor and delivery'. Do they account for the conditions in which the babies were born, and then attribute that to the types of doctors handling those deliveries? In other words, do they make a distinction saying emergency white doctors perform worse than emergency black doctors? Because I cannot find that information in the research.
-Since doctor race data isn't codified in Florida's database (where they use the data from), they used web pictures and determine if the doctor is white or black. They narrowed this task down to 4 people who were good at it.
-Black female doctors performed the best, they mention some control of the gender but I do not fully understand how they did it.
-They used a Latino doctor group as well to account for differences, but found that while there is a distinction, it is much smaller than Black-White.
I also don't understand if/how they control for the quality of the hospital. Is there one bad low income hospital with white doctors in a predominantly black area?
