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GitLab is now running on GCP

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Re: GitLab is now running on GCP

#141
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are hundreds of instances of Google censoring websites, YouTube channels and plus accounts that promoted political philosophies that did not agree with the company culture. I think by that metric Google is very pro censorship when it comes to their own social media platforms

Name 5

Bans Alex Jones from youtube (tbh fuck that clown)

Fires the memo guy

Complies to DMCA

My favourite is Google officially comparing EU’s right to be forgotten law with russia’s anti gay propaganda law... cannot get lower than that.

Re: GitLab is now running on GCP

#142
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name 5

Bans Alex Jones from youtube (tbh fuck that clown) Fires the memo guy Complies to DMCA My favourite is Google officially comparing EU’s right to be forgotten law with russia’s anti gay propaganda law... cannot get lower than that.

So 2 then.

Re: GitLab is now running on GCP

#143
post #135
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like a good solution to CryoLogic and your discussion might be for services to allow you to choose what you would like censored. For instance 'yzmtf2008' could simply say, don't show me content like this. Obviously there are some challenges in the 'like this' part, but it seems like it might scale better and be less prone to centralized censorship problems than the current mechanism. The sad part is that 'yz…

I agreed with that until I found some people on HN who thought PizzaGate was a real thing. Even then I was open to the idea, but when someone turned up with a gun at Comet Pizza and started shooting I decided individual decisions about conspiracy theories are insufficient. The big problem is that there is no valid counter argument to conspiracy theorist. That means all conventional means of combating them are useless…

So it's not just you wanting high quality content? You also want to stop others from reading content you disagree with? Seems like a pretty drastic solution to a pretty small problem. You want to suspend democracy over an event where no one was even injured.

Re: GitLab is now running on GCP

#144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

freedom of speech only applies to governmental entities. private businesses and individuals are not restricted similarly. freedom of speech does not keep someone from thinking you (not you specifically, but the general you ) are an idiot or a kook, nor does it protect you from the consequences of your words by those other individuals (obviously other laws protect you from intentional physical harm and the like). noth…

Your understanding is naive. EU is telling youtube et al. that they have to """voluntarily""" censor or there will be consequences, so governments are already involved in this. Imagine if China asked youtube to delete videos about Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and youtube complied, would you say the same things?

Re: GitLab is now running on GCP

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google as an infrastructure provider simply has no business being involved in where my content is available. No, Google has no business in it, but export control does.

Microsoft and AWS don't seem to have any problems complying with the law

[deleted]

Re: GitLab is now running on GCP

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took a cursory look through those, and every one I looked at appeared to be claiming that Sandy Hook/Las Vegas/Anothy Bourdain's suicide/some other thing was fake and a conspiracy. Can you explain how "Sandy hook was faked and no children were killed" is a political view? Or how "Anthony Bourdain's suicide was faked for monetary gain" is somehow a political opinion?

I never said I agreed with any of the channels or their content if you read my comment closely. I only against censoring freedom of speech and creating ideological echo Chambers.

I think YouTube would argue that their actions were not based on the content of these channel's views, but because they violated their community guidelines.

Their response to why they banned Alex Jones, for instance, was that it wasn't because of the content of his views, but that he violated their cyberbullying guidelines multiple times (he received several strikes in the past).

Maybe I'm being naive, but their motivation doesn't appear to be censorship, but to make YouTube a less toxic place than it already is.

Re: GitLab is now running on GCP

#147

I wish they hadn't done this. Google has a unique and strict interpretation of US sanctions on countries like Iran and Cuba, much more strict than that of Microsoft or Amazon. If your site is hosted on GCP, Google blocks access to it from any sanctioned countries.

If you dispute a law, your issue is with the government that passed and enforces it, not companies abiding by that law.

> If you dispute a law, your issue is with the government that passed and enforces it, not companies abiding by that law.

It's another vector to apply pressure to get the issue resolved. There's the direct course (you to your congressperson) which likely won't matter, unless you have enough like-minded individuals all applying the same pressure.

Then there's the indirect course (business to congressperson) which will likely matter more, since the business can donate larger sums of money, all at once.

Politics is the opposite of business, as far as cash-flow is concerned. Business wants sustained, regular amounts to allow for forward planning. Politics wants bursted, large amounts of cash to immediately address issues of the day.

Re: GitLab is now running on GCP

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically you might have inadvertently provided the answer to your own question. If Google make money from a website owner (in the EU, for example), and that website owner makes money (using their website) from someone in a restricted country, then an imaginative prosecutor could argue that Google are guilty of knowingly facilitating some sort of "money laundering", from the restricted country to Google themselves.…

This is not much more far-fetched than the idea that a site like The Pirate Bay is guilty of "conspiring" with its users to infringe copyright. "We're a piracy site, run by pirates, and we love piracy and pirates because of what piratical pirates we are, so we built a piracy site specially to cater to pirates and piracy! Also, we do not condone it in the slightest and built it for totally legitimate purposes, we prom…

I see what you're saying, and perhaps The Pirate Bay wasn't the best example I could have picked. Remember that the site IsoHunt was taken down as a result of a lawsuit, despite the name of the site literally suggesting it was a search engine for finding disk images of Linux distros. They also effectively complied with the DMCA, despite being based in Canada where the DMCA didn't apply:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IsoHunt#DMCA_takedown_notices

Of course the "intent" of the accused is something that a legal process can consider, but I've always been unimpressed with the argument of "It's right in the name!" when considering whether to censor The Pirate Bay. If they had changed their name to the "I Rate Bay", and branded themselves as a site for people to discuss and rate the quality of certain hex strings (magnet links), then, by the "It's right in the name!" argument, the site should be perfectly legal.

There were a number of factors which lead to the legal judgements against The Pirate Bay (across the multiple jurisdictions where the site is censored), but if the legality of a site were to come down to a single letter in its domain name, and not based at all on the actual functionality of the site, then I think that would put us in a very odd place in terms of freedom of speech and the enforceability of the law.

We're back to the "wine bricks" of the Prohibition era, with their "warning" not to leave the contents dissolved in a gallon of water in the cool cupboard for 21 days, to prevent "accidentally" creating wine:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ingenious-brick-he...

Re: GitLab is now running on GCP

#149

I wish they hadn't done this. Google has a unique and strict interpretation of US sanctions on countries like Iran and Cuba, much more strict than that of Microsoft or Amazon. If your site is hosted on GCP, Google blocks access to it from any sanctioned countries.

We are sorry that there are legal restrictions that are imposed for these countries. There isn't much we can do about this, but we have an open issue discussing this [1]. You can also see the U.S. Department of the Treasury link [2] for more details regarding these sanctions. We planned this move because we wanted to improve our stability, and you can read all the technical details that affected our decision in our blog post [3].

[1] - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/migration/issues/649

[2] - https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/Programs/...

[3] - https://about.gitlab.com/2018/06/25/moving-to-gcp

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