71–80 of 111 posts
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Just a guess, you supported Paypal, Visa, Amazon, etc. in the WikiLeaks case. Amiright?
Paypal, Visa, Amazon took political positions in the WikiLeaks case. But you didn't like it because it went against your politics. Amiright?
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I agree in principle, but in this case there's one side attempting to cut off all uncontrolled communication in and out of the country. It seems like an easy choice to side against their position on communication.
What if the revolution is successful but the current government is replaced with something far worse? Would you want to be part of a company that encouraged that?
If an oppressive new regime rises, then it's bad because it's oppressive, and you couldn't blame it on the existence of freedom of communication during the revolution. Of course I don't speak for Google in any of this, but I think it's simply supporting the notion that, when in doubt, more freedom of communication is probably better. (At least at this point, where the status quo is currently, "cut off from the outside world".)
Don't get me wrong, I want to know what is going on there, and anyone willing to leak that information out is doing something heroic imho - but the safety of these individuals could be in serious threat - or maybe I am just overly paranoid...
They just shut off the cell networks too: http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/01/31/5962180-egyp...
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Yes, let's support brutal dictatorships on the off-chance that a revolution might result in an even more brutal dictatorship.
The sarcasm is unbefitting of the seriousness of the occasion. What if it's not an "off-chance" but a 90% probability. Or even a 50% probability? The situation the way I see it is this: currently the bad guys are in power. The opposition forces are the not-so-bad guys (liberal democracy types) and the much worse guys (radical Islamists). The Muslim Brotherhood ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_Brotherhood ) are,…
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I think the events in Tunisia and Egypt show just how wrong that perspective is. Twitter and social media in general are in their infancy and yet already are having such a massive impact on social change around the world. The ability to communicate thoughts, events, instantaneously, as they happen, and from the people actively involved in those events around the world, is unprecedented in human history. The revolutio…
I think the revolutionary effect you are seeing can be better attributed to the fact that these populations have access to the Internet, especially through mobile phone. These people aren't leveraging the unique features of social media (the web of interpersonal relationships) so much as they are leveraging the ability to quickly get text, pictures, and video out of the country and onto servers hosted in countries sy…
The networking capabilities of these appliations is what makes them useful to protesting organisations. Otherwise there woudl be a deluge of emails going out to notify of each individual update - rather than a simple, distributed notification which people can jump on at any point.
I've asked an Egyptian friend living in the UK if he could offer translations (transcripts) of some of these.
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Why?
I'm not the OP, but I can see his point. Foreigners (not just Americans) taking sides in political disputes which they don't really understand might wind up helping the wrong side. Even if we just define "the wrong side" as "not the side they would have supported if they'd known more about the situation". Alternatively, even if they pick "the right side", they might wind up inadvertently helping the wrong side, since…
I am surprised no one is concerned about this in regards to the safety of the callers. The government is obviously taking all steps in silencing in or outbound communication - with the obvious control structure in place over communications, it would seem feasible for the government to trace calls to these specific numbers (even if they block them) and punish people who do so. Don't get me wrong, I want to know what i…