Seems like it's back up, with no changes to the app: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bambuna.po...
Good news!
Google bans Podcast Addict app over non-approved Covid-19 content
571–577 of 577 posts
Re: Google bans Podcast Addict app over non-approved Covid-19 content
#572Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is the solution of taking away power from the government to fix this. You would need to limit the punishment of people to be the same as corporations. For example, if a corporation commits negligence that kills people and gets fined 2% of its income, then the penalty for negligent homicide becomes a 2% yearly income with no jail time. The problem is that right now the government will jail an individual and fine…
I don't see how that would work, because fining a corporation indirectly fines every employee they need to lay off and can no longer find a job. Of course, we should fine corporations more, but trying to treat a company like a person is just a stupid metaphor in general and extending that will lead you nowhere sane.
>I don't see how that would work, because fining a corporation indirectly fines every employee they need to lay off and can no longer find a job.
Do we stop putting people in prison if they have a child? Either we have to punish children by depriving them of a parent (potentially putting them into foster care) or we have to allow family status to be a factor in sentencing individuals (institutionalize discrimination on a protected class)?
Currently when we punish someone, little thought is given to secondary victims. I don't see why we would make an exclusion for corporations.
Re: Google bans Podcast Addict app over non-approved Covid-19 content
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
My feeling is they pushing the extra crazy ones though. Watching a clearly not well Person argue crazy theories isn't very convincing to healthy people anyway. On the other Hand people like Dr. Erickson get censored, because they simply dare to question the lock down and argue that there is no evidence supporting it's effectiveness in saving lives.
> On the other Hand people like Dr. Erickson get censored, because they simply dare to question the lock down Erickson, among other things, makes provably false statements about the prevalence and mortality of covid19. You’re allowed to be misinformed as a private citizen; you’re not allowed to grandstand in public as a physician and spread misinformation. He’s lucky he only got deplatformed, rather than have his lic…
> you’re not allowed to grandstand in public as a physician and spread misinformation
For all I know Erickson is saying no one died of Covid or something that ridiculous/obviously false, but labelling statements as misinformation and censoring them instead of retracting endorsements and getting others to realize those statements are false is an aggressive seize of power by authorities over what is or isn’t true.
I realize authoritative knowledge is necessary; not everyone has the time or ability to parse through medical information and come to reasonable conclusions.
But authoritative bodies should have to earn their authority from the public, not use censorious platforms to assert it. The fundamental problem we’re running into now with misinformation is a lack of trust, not a lack of information. Forcing people to listen to sources they don’t trust and blocking sources they do trust will make the situation worse.
If people trust a crackpot more than they trust an established authoritative body, that authoritative body should take a real hard look at themselves in the mirror and ask themselves why that’s the case.
Re: Google bans Podcast Addict app over non-approved Covid-19 content
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can also get officially supported Sailfish OS on a couple Xperia devices: https://jolla.com/sailfishx/ Perfectly suitable for daily use, typing from such a device just now. :) IIRC there is a community port for PinePhone as well.
Sailfish is pretty great and I wish them all the best, I did find myself in need of a few features while using it, one thing being their web browsers lack of usb access for devices like yubikeys: https://together.jolla.com/question/213458/usb-2fa-support-i...
couldn't edit, but want to add that there are now more alternatives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7LFPw9Z2aM
Re: Google bans Podcast Addict app over non-approved Covid-19 content
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
Putting users in charge does not solve censorship problems. The majority opinion - if it is in favour of censorship - will censor competing opinions. Public ownership does not solve censorship. See: the CCP. Effective policing does not solve censorship. The police will be tools of whoever and whatever is funding them. The only way to combat censorship is through decentralised and distributed platforms that are made p…
CCP is not public ownership. CCP is a minority political party that subjugates the public through violence.
It is a bit of both. Sure, 'public' becomes a bit tenious
(Perhaps 'government' is a better descriptor?), but still applies. Other truly communist nations have had similar issues with despotism however. And as is parroted so often, a government is where the state has a monopoly on violence. The trick is to limit the rights and abilities of the state to do so without just cause while allowing minority opinions to flurish.
Re: Google bans Podcast Addict app over non-approved Covid-19 content
#576Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can also get officially supported Sailfish OS on a couple Xperia devices: https://jolla.com/sailfishx/ Perfectly suitable for daily use, typing from such a device just now. :) IIRC there is a community port for PinePhone as well.
From what I can read, the use of Sailfish is only allowed in certain EU countries. Why is that? Their site does not address this.
I'm just guessing but one reason could be to avoid having to support foreign payment, tax and possibly warranty regimes (Jolla, the company behind Sailfish OS, is based in Finland).
Also they might want to avoid doing business in countries that support software patents and are over litigious over that (eq. USA).
But this limitation is pretty much artificial - the only thing you need to do from the EU is buying the image. This can be achieved via an EU based VPN (reportedly the built in VPN in Opera works) and AFAIK any mainstream payment card will work (does not have to be from an EU country).
Once you got the license and installation image, there are no real EU specific limitations. I have used Sailfish OS twice while on a trip in Japan and all worked just fine - repo access, etc. Also from the download statistics from OpenRepos (a community package repository for Sailfish OS), you can see there is a lot of users from countries that are not officially supported:
Re: Google bans Podcast Addict app over non-approved Covid-19 content
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is indeed a problem here, and FAANG are being hamhanded and overaggressive in their response, but it's hard to find an overt bias that maps neatly onto the dominant (American?) political cleavage. Much more often (as here), these companies are 1) making decisions in a way that allows them to abstract away and thus ignore the nuances of individual cases 2) putting the burden of implementation on underpaid worker…
>but it's hard to find an overt bias that maps neatly onto the dominant (American?) political cleavage. What about things like google search suggestions being manipulated to hide unfavorable suggestions, but only for certain candidates? I remember seeing this happening real time after trying it one day per a reddit post and then a few days later per another reddit post that such suggestions had stopped showing. The i…
I don't find it hard to believe that Google does things like this, but can you be more specific? What experiment can I run myself to verify that this happens?