Social media, which everyone here is complaining about, is by far the most open and democratic form of mass media that has ever existed.
It would be if it were actually social - if the messages people saw were written by authors those people were interested in because of some kind of social relationship. But of course that's not really the case.
One problem here IMHO is that the meaning of terms like "press" and "media" has shifted significantly with modern Internet trends. Freedom of the press used to be an extension of freedom of speech. The principle was essentially the same but it acknowledged that some speech is organised and published to a wider audience. Neither has ever enjoyed absolute protection in law anywhere that I'm aware of because obviously they can come into conflict with other rights and freedoms we also think are important. But they have been traditionally regarded as the norm in Western society - something to be protected and not to be interfered with lightly.
But with freedom must come responsibility. The traditional press has always had the tabloids and the broadsheets or some similar distinction between highbrow and lowbrow content. But for the most part even the tabloids respected certain standards. What you published might be your spin but you honestly believed the facts in your piece were essentially true. If you made a mistake then you also published a retraction. If someone said they were speaking off the record then you didn't reveal the identity of your source. You didn't disclose things that were prohibited by a court order to protect someone involved in a trial from prejudice or from the trial itself collapsing. Sometimes the press crossed a line and sometimes it paid a very heavy price for it but mostly these "rules" were followed.
In the modern world of social media there are individuals with much larger audiences than any newspaper still in print but who don't necessarily respect those traditional standards at all and who can cause serious harm as a direct result. I don't see why there is any ethical or legal argument for giving them the same latitude that has been given to traditional media if they aren't keeping up their side of the traditional bargain in return. We have long had laws in areas like defamation and national security that do limit the freedom to say unfair or harmful things. Maybe it's time we applied the same standards to wilful misinformation where someone with a large audience makes claims that are clearly and objectively false that then lead to serious harm.
If anyone wants an honest answer to that question it is fairly simple. Polling has suggested - very consistently and over a long period of time - that a majority of the British public (though often a fairly slim majority) tend to support authoritarian interventions by our governments in the name of protecting the public. Most of the time our governments and government agencies do appear to use such powers responsibly and so they tend to maintain that public trust. There has always been a significant minority who were more cautious on civil liberties grounds and there has always been an issue that the supportive majority aren't always very well informed about what could happen if the laws were applied more strongly in practice.
As a personal observation - I think this might start to change over the next few years and the current positions of MPs and government might start to look very out of touch. We are seeing the fall of our long-standing "big" political parties and the rise of a very right wing populist party that is increasingly looking like it might actually win significant power at the next general election. I think awareness of the potential for abuse by the next people to run the government and agencies is growing among the general public. Whether it grows enough to stop some of these policies from becoming law in the near future is a different question of course.
I still think it was a mistake for Firefox to dump its old plugin model. The customisation was a USP for Firefox and many useful tweaks and minor features have never been replaced.
Today the ability to run proper content blockers is still a selling point for Firefox but obviously wouldn't be if they started to meddle with that as well. (Has there ever been a more obvious case of anticompetitive behaviour than the biggest browser nerfing ad blocking because it's owned by one of the biggest ad companies?)
Other than customisation the only real advantage I see for Firefox today is the privacy angle. But again that would obviously be compromised if they started breaking tools like content blockers that help to provide that protection.
It doesn't require consent for cookies or similar data that are strictly necessary to do what the user has asked for - a token for logging in or the contents of a shopping cart are the two canonical examples.
It certainly does require informed consent in other situations though and the dreaded cookie banners were the industry's attempt to interpret that legal requirement.
No, it's now entirely accurate. Nothing in the GDPR requires 'cookie banners', and your Wikipedia link doesn't 'dispell' that 'misconception', but nice try...
My point is that it was never the GDPR that required any sort of "cookie banner" in the first place.
The cookie banner requirement is itself a widespread misconception because the actual rule is neither specific to cookies (it would also cover other locally stored data) nor universal (for example it doesn't require specific consent for locally storing necessary data like session/login mechanics or the contents of a shopping basket).
The requirements for consent that do exist originate in the ePrivacy Directive. That directive was supposed to be superseded by a later ePrivacy Regulation that would have been lex specialis to the GDPR - possibly the only actual link between any of the EU law around cookies and the GDPR - but in the end that regulation was never passed and it was formally abandoned earlier this year.
So for now rules about user consent for local data storage in the EU - and largely still in the UK - do exist but they derive from the ePrivacy Directive and they are widely misunderstood. And while there has been a lot of talk about changes to EU law that might improve the situation with the banners so far talk is all it has been.
Not all banks, government services, travel and ticketing systems, and the list goes on.
The unfortunate reality is that we have a duopoly in the mobile device market and having one of those devices are now a practical necessity to live a normal life for most people. Without regulation to force the market to open up there's little to stop organisations that want ever more control over the devices you can use to access their systems. Trying to go outside the two big players just means you're going to get a substandard or completely pointless experience. And even governments are in on it.
Which is going to be interesting when both the huge US corporations that form that duopoly and/or the government of their home nation decide to do something that goes against what the government or laws in other places want to happen.
You're not wrong, but I'm trying to raise the issue with any service forcing me into the duopoly by showing them my Librem 5. Sometimes it's quite entertaining. This is another venue for making the change.
Now show what banks (and where) have apps targeting that phone
Not glorified webpages. Full on apps. Preferably by the banks themselves (sorry bedroom hobbyists, I don't quite trust you with my banking details yet!)
That's a true claim today. The defence industry moves surprisingly slowly for a field where more advanced technology is such an advantage so it probably will be true for close to another decade as well because Europe has no native fifth gen fighter.
However the story might be different in a decade as sixth gen aircraft like Tempest are entering service and probably other modern technologies like unmanned/autonomous drones and hypersonic and directed energy weapons are more widely deployed. Connectivity between units in the field is also clearly a huge deal that is going to matter more and more and that is going to require a level of interoperability and trust that won't be kind to "partners" who aren't good team players.
On that kind of timescale I expect "buying American" will be much less attractive to most "allies" of the US than it has been for most of the past century and it will show exactly in decisions like who is making and buying whose planes.
Then no country should have legal authority over companies operating in the country but based internationally.
But this is the real issue. To what extent is a company "operating in" a country where it has no staff and no physical presence?
The principle that someone should become subject to the laws of a country they've never visited and where they have no assets just because they communicated with someone else who does live in that country seems questionable. Even if money is sent by the person living in that country to someone based elsewhere it still seems questionable.
Taken to their logical conclusion these kinds of arguments would kill off a lot of the value of the modern Internet (assuming they could be practically enforced). Can you even write a blog post any more if it might be controversial in any country in the world? Do you have to pay if you show ads next to that blog post and someone from the Sovereign Republic Of East Nowhere visits - but the Sovereign Republic Of East Nowhere has a law prohibiting online advertising as a social harm and imposing a fine of 1000% of global revenues generated through ads? What happens when the laws of two different countries are in direct conflict and one requires you to include an official warning of some kind alongside certain information on your blog but the other one prohibits such statements unless you're formally qualified to give advice in the field?
If you want to interfere with international trade or international communications at all then it makes far more sense practically - and arguably both morally and legally as well - to legislate so that your own people in your own country who are subject to your own laws are the ones who must or must not act in a certain way. If there's some kind of regulation on physical goods then make the person importing those goods responsible for compliance. If you want to tax international transactions then make the person in your country who is participating in those transactions responsible for declaring and paying the tax. But realistically this leads to a lot of non-compliance because your citizens don't have to be experts in international tax law so you can collect your $1.53 when they bought a new T-shirt from some online store based in another country and had it shipped.
Probably the most annoying thing on the web lately is Cloudflare and all the "mysteriously verifying that you're a real human" junk.
Probably the second most annoying thing on the web today is when you click a link that looks interesting but the page you land on almost immediately says you have to do or pay something to actually read the thing the referring page implied. I don't even start reading a Medium article now if I can see that pop-up below - it's just an instinctive reaction to close the tab. I wish people wouldn't link to articles in walled gardens and search engines would remove those articles from their index - or if that's not reliable then exclude entire sites. Those walls break the whole cross-linking model that made the web the success it is and they waste people's time on a global scale.
I recognise that my position may be somewhat hypocritical because I'd rank AI slop as #3 and maybe #1 and #2 are making some kind of attempt to avoid supporting AI slop. But then I'd propose a more draconian solution to that problem as well - one involving punitive penalties for AI companies that scrape others' content without permission to train their models and possibly for anyone else using models that are tainted.
“Probably the second most annoying thing on the web today is when you click a link that looks interesting but the page you land on almost immediately says you have to do or pay something to actually read the thing the referring page implied.”
If you feel you’re entitled to everyone else’s labor - I dunno what to tell you.
On the other hand, if you value your own time so little that the only amount you're willing invest in the quality of what you read is $0 - I also don’t know what to tell you.
Either way, I hope you figure it out.
Medium (at least what it is today) tries to bring down the friction of making valuable content available at a reasonable price.
The alternative solutions the
web has been to come up with is to take the valuable content and lock it up in hundreds of silos (Substack, etc), leave residual low value content marketing available, and then cover most everything else with a browser melting level of “adtech”
If you feel you’re entitled to everyone else’s labor - I dunno what to tell you.
You're perfectly entitled to keep your content commercial if you want. Just don't put it in the same place as the freely available material that everyone else was working with and then complain when people find you irritating. Some of us are content to share our own work for free on the web and to enjoy work that is offered freely by others. We're all doing it right now on HN and many of us run non-commercial blogs of our own too. And we made the web an interesting and useful place long before sites like Medium came along and tried to centralise and commercialise it.
I remember a time when Google search would downrank you if you showed different content to the user then you showed to Google. I wish we had that functionality back.
I too have used Caddy on multiple production systems. It's a great bit of software.
I try to avoid engaging in online flame wars but I will say that the developers - including Francis - have been nothing but helpful and courteous to me personally and I've also learned a lot from their numerous positive contributions to Caddy-related forums.
It would be if it were actually social - if the messages people saw were written by authors those people were interested in because of some kind of social relationship. But of course that's not really the case.
One problem here IMHO is that the meaning of terms like "press" and "media" has shifted significantly with modern Internet trends. Freedom of the press used to be an extension of freedom of speech. The principle was essentially the same but it acknowledged that some speech is organised and published to a wider audience. Neither has ever enjoyed absolute protection in law anywhere that I'm aware of because obviously they can come into conflict with other rights and freedoms we also think are important. But they have been traditionally regarded as the norm in Western society - something to be protected and not to be interfered with lightly.
But with freedom must come responsibility. The traditional press has always had the tabloids and the broadsheets or some similar distinction between highbrow and lowbrow content. But for the most part even the tabloids respected certain standards. What you published might be your spin but you honestly believed the facts in your piece were essentially true. If you made a mistake then you also published a retraction. If someone said they were speaking off the record then you didn't reveal the identity of your source. You didn't disclose things that were prohibited by a court order to protect someone involved in a trial from prejudice or from the trial itself collapsing. Sometimes the press crossed a line and sometimes it paid a very heavy price for it but mostly these "rules" were followed.
In the modern world of social media there are individuals with much larger audiences than any newspaper still in print but who don't necessarily respect those traditional standards at all and who can cause serious harm as a direct result. I don't see why there is any ethical or legal argument for giving them the same latitude that has been given to traditional media if they aren't keeping up their side of the traditional bargain in return. We have long had laws in areas like defamation and national security that do limit the freedom to say unfair or harmful things. Maybe it's time we applied the same standards to wilful misinformation where someone with a large audience makes claims that are clearly and objectively false that then lead to serious harm.
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