In their defense (and I don’t defend Google often), addressing this really well means:
- knowing all the complexities of every local, state, federal, international jurisdiction that might interfere with the whitelist
- awareness of the content in question which could be millions of subpages
- a customer support team that is definitely not incentivized based on tickets triaged per day, but is somehow incentivized to spend hours on “whale” tickets.
- going through ticket history and solving the problem for everyone now that its policy to solve this
- dealing with the inevitable rush of fraud that follows every tiny change in google systems
The current site is a nice and fair summary (though I think the attribution to the original sources rather hidden) with easy links to the original source.
If yu start doing automated summaries, you are taking nearly all the value of someone else's work.
Yeah fair I have had similar thoughts on this subject. Maybe some kind of ai companion that translates news into your local language and can answer your questions directly with voice would be something interesting.
Hackers, allegedly Chinese, got into the federally mandated surveillance backdoors of Verizon and AT&T's networks, snooping on everything.
The mandated backdoors were first required on phone systems in 1994 by the CALEA law, then controversially extended to broadband by the FCC in '04.
That's right folks. Broadband is so important that it must have backdoors for cops, but not important enough for the FCC to require consumer protections
It's not dubious. That's exactly what DT has been doing for a long time. DT is partly owned by the German government, which might explain why it's been allowed to be a bully.
It ran this same shakedown routine on an academic network in the middle of the pandemic.
It's run this against Hetzner.
It's the same playbook that Comcast/Verizon/Time Warner used vs Netflix/Cogent/League of Legends in 2014.
DT tries to make everyone that peers pay them. Facebook used to pay the ransom, then decided to stop. Now its going to move to a transit connection.
The problem is DT keeps its transit routes congested or artificially limits how much traffic a transit provider can deliver.
So now when FB moves to transit, will DT widen those connections or will it keep them narrow to try to make Facebook's applications get terrible enough performance that Facebook will pay DT.
It's a showdown. DT wants to get paid twice for the same service, once by its subscribers and once by every app and website on the planet.
FB should allow DT to degrade the quality of service and display a banner to DT users - the people it pisses off are going to be the Instagram-using public who in theory were the ones paying to connect to Facebook anyways.
"We’re stuck surrounded by the exhausts of the stories that pollute the epistemic commons and they together make up the much of the information sphere in which we live."
With no sense of irony, this blog is written on a platform that allows some Nazis, algorithmically promotes publishers, allows comments, and is thus only financially viable because of Section 230.
If you actually want to understand something about the decision, I highly recommend Eric Goldman's blog post:
I'd never heard of Ghost.org, but looking at their website, they appear to be much more than just a free newsletter platform. It's not what I'm looking for, but it does look pretty cool for somebody that needs a professional publishing stack. They show their competitors as Medium, WordPress, Substack, and Patreon, and if I were considering any of those I'd give Ghost a closer look.
Just one more place where the web gets screwed by a company too big to have to do basic customer service.