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We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

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Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#241

Post by vikinghckr »

bluejekyll wrote: post #16
pojzon wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are mostly "Software Engineers" and not a lot of them. Google can kick them out and replace within a month. Unfortunetly I dont think executives will give a slightest heck about this article..

> Google can kick them out and replace within a month. Ah. A believer that software engineers are cogs and can just be “replaced” without training and learning of code bases. Hiring software engineers, bringing them up to speed, and having them contribute to production features, is expensive. Also, you’ll never truly recoup the lost knowledge that goes.

There are hundreds of thousands of developers around the world who dream every day about working at Google. If you think a few dozen engineers aren't replaceable by a company like Google, you are wrong.

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#242

Post by lostgame »

HillaryBriss wrote: post #190
EZ-E wrote: post #28

At this point I don't believe this project could be successful. Even if it's not canceled the Chinese government is never gonna let a foreign company get the market share against the local champions : even more as this company has internal disent about the project. Also the links with the US government won't help.

agree. i don't quite see what enduring, long-term competitive edge Google could actually have in China. is it the huge quantity of computing resources behind their search engine? (wouldn't Baidu or other Chinese companies be able to easily outbuild Google?) is it the incredible, mysterious superiority of the super-duper secret Page Rank algorithm? ( jk ) is it the sophisticated and complex home page design and superi…

Yeah, it seems like it's more of Google's desire than China's, even, which especially makes it questionable.

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#243

Post by calgoo »

lostgame wrote: post #222
PavlovsCat wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit older, but it's a citation: http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/from... > You said: "There has never been a better society than in the United States in 1958." What do you mean by that? > FROMM: Well, I mean it, of course, in relative terms. The history of man so far is nothing to brag about, from the standpoint of our ideas--and what I mean is, that in comparison with most other soci…

[flagged]

Bush Jr. also did a lot of destruction with the war on terror, and before that we had the war on drugs... Etc. Its something ongoing since the early days with the US (and most countries). Sometimes someone gets into power, but even if they wished to do great things, I get a feeling that they would not be allowed to do so.

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#244

Post by zimpenfish »

chrisco255 wrote: post #231
lostgame wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> a massive proponent of free speech and human rights Yeah, 'human rights', right, so that's why they're so[1] focused[2] on separating families[3], and I guess 'free speech' is what allows the POTUS to be a racist[4], fear-mongering, corrupt[5] liar[6]? Or is 'free speech' the thing that allows denial[7] of climate change[8] even while California burns to the ground? And I guess with 'human rights' that goes along…

[1][2][3] Besides being a revised policy that no longer applies (and yes, policies take time to unwind)...there is no universal human right to emigrate to any country whatsoever. I know a lot of people think so... but also this pales in comparison to the abuses of existing Chinese nationals by China, taking Muslim property [1], placing citizens in internment camps and abusing them, placing them under "deeply invasive…

> he's not racist, by the way

Literally his first appearance in the NYT was for being a racist asshole - https://www.nytimes.com/times-insider/2015/07/30/1973-meet-d...

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#245

Post by TearsInTheRain »

thoughtexplorer wrote: post #185
educationdata wrote: post #10

There are not many Chinese names in the signed letter, and I can fully understand. If you are a Chinese H1B or green card holder, and you signed this letter, it is almost certain the Chinese government will contact your family in China.

What does that mean? What will they say or do to the family?

China regularly makes people disappear. They are the epitome of a 1984 style totalitarian state: https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/25/asia/fan-bingbing-china-opini...

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#246

Post by scarcely »

stochastic_monk wrote: post #209
scarcely wrote: post #167

Censorship has its uses. I often open these China threads on HN just to add users to my cosmetic filter.

Can you provide more details regarding your cosmetic filter and why posters from a post on China would be good candidates? It’s not clear to me from your post.

I'm not a programmer, I'm an academic. Topics in my academic specialty routinely get posted on HN. When they do, I browse the comments section, look for users who exhibit many signs of lacking rigor and/or intellectual honesty, and add to my filter accordingly, on the grounds that their opinions on programming topics are probably not worth reading either.

I'm also a Chinese person. China matters is like an extra AOS for me and so I apply cosmetic filters for the same reasons

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#247

Post by electrograv »

fzss_ wrote: post #213

Hypocrites. Have you considered the human rights of Chinese users? Thanks to the absence of Google, monopoly of Baidu has enabled them to sell ads of unlicensed hospital that literally kills people. A censored version of Google in Chinese will undoubtedly improve the quality of life of Chinese Internet users.

Do you really think Google stepping in would prevent them from selling ads to unlicensed hospitals, etc.? If anything, this represents Google’s willingness to violate the moral standards of their own employees (I’m talking about the majority, and leadership prior to being corrupted by greed) no matter what, so long as it means growing their revenue/profit.

It was clearly demonstrated that all Google cares about is money, when they canceled project Maven immediately after protest, yet refuse to back down on Dragonfly. The only difference? Dragonfly promises to be immensely profitable, whereas Maven was small enough that the employees lost over it was assessed to cost more than the project’s profit.

So you really think that Google would then suddenly develop the moral fortitude, out of thin air, to reject bad ads in China that are nonetheless profitable? Even if their policy is to do so now, don’t expect that to stay — remember, their policy used to be ’we will not be complicit in censorship, because it is morally wrong, period.’

And even if it did, many would argue that it’s still a bad idea to seek a short term good at the expense of the long term. Enabling state censorship by giving the state more advanced censorship tech, could be seen as akin to enabling a heroin addict by giving them more heroin. Sure, they’ll feel good and they won’t suffer withdrawal. But overall it’s going to lead to a very dark place that ultimately yields extreme suffering and often even death.

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#249

Post by PavlovsCat »

burneracclordo wrote: post #154
komali2 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It boils down to what the American culture, or I guess the employees at Google's culture, are willing to censor. China wants to censor its own human rights violations, I think there morally bad. Certain EU Nations want to prevent fat right nationalist radicalization via censorship. I think that's clumsy, but good. So hence "why single out China." It stops whenever the employees put up a fight. Isn't that the point of…

> Certain EU Nations want to prevent fat right nationalist radicalization via censorship. I think that's clumsy, but good. But, who will be deciding what is considered as ultra-nationalist? Some liberal government that might be overly corrupt and is about to lose the election could just label their political opponents as modern day Nazis and have them be censored on Google search. For example Germany treats the AfD a…

> For example Germany treats the AfD as a far-right party, but in other countries they would be centrist at best.

That is an "example" of an "overly corrupt" government that labels them far-right, because they would otherwise have lost an election to them? What speech of the AfD got censored in any shape or form?

Yes, in other countries what is considered far-right in Germany is considered centrist. Those countries also consider what we consider centrist as leftists. So? They're a German political party, they will get judged by Germans, on the grounds of German history, thankyouverymuch.

> perhaps only censor stuff that is related to illegal activities or terrorism

So basically, back to square one, since you haven't really solved the problem of who defines that and how (which we do actually over centuries, it's not a problem to not have it solved once and for all perfectly, right now -- if anything the problem here is the misunderstanding that this could be possible), achieving nothing other than claiming that the AfD isn't far-right.

Re: We are Google employees – Google must drop Dragonfly

#250

Post by Spooky23 »

bronco21016 wrote: post #175
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China has a vested interest in spreading it's influence globally, the same way the United States has (and is receding from a bit under the current administration). It would be far more valuable to China to get a global company like Google propagating their censorship requirements than continuing to prop up their own state-run option. If Google caves, other countries might ask for the same demands as well, which suppo…

I don’t understand why this is being downvoted. Google is dominant nearly worldwide. If China is able to get Google to cave and build the censorship machine then what barrier is there to turning the feature ‘on’ for other countries that ask for it? There are plenty of oppressive regimes interested in a censored Google but they don’t have the pull to get Google to build it right now. Once it’s built though why wouldn’…

You are spot on, and there already is a track record of this with telecom.

Remember all of the handwringing about BBM messages being difficult to intercept? Then the crying suddenly went away, and a few months later you heard about police breaking up organizers of riots.

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