Ugandan government blocks Google Play Store, Apple App Store, and YouTube • Hacker News Board

Re: Ugandan government blocks Google Play Store, Apple App Store, and YouTube

#131

Post by stevehawk » Sat, Jan 09, 2021, 11:46 PM UTC

BlueTemplar wrote: post #21

andrewzah wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe you could do some introspection and think about what would have to lead up to you being banned? Every politician on twitter has been fine except for 1 particular individual. Nevermind that 1 individual -chose- to use twitter as their primary base of operations, instead of the usual channels.

Weren't others banned at the same time as Trump?

twitter did start banning some left extremists... i had never heard of a lot of them so I'd love to hear from someone educated on it if these other bans were just to appear bipartisan or actually meaningful

Re: Ugandan government blocks Google Play Store, Apple App Store, and YouTube

#132

Post by eunos » Sat, Jan 09, 2021, 11:47 PM UTC

nsajko wrote: post #114

eunos wrote: post #83

Seems the great social media purge towards GOP personals really made many countries rethinking their information sovereignty. There's no way they would allow access to social media, the 21st century mass communication be controlled by some Silicon Valley companies located in the USA. Expect the indigenization also occurs in financial ecosystem, etc.

> the great social media purge towards GOP personals This seems like a weird way to put it if only Trump and stuff like Parler was removed off the big social media platforms.

Should just use Trumpist.

Re: Ugandan government blocks Google Play Store, Apple App Store, and YouTube

#133

Post by oblio » Sat, Jan 09, 2021, 11:47 PM UTC

nickysielicki wrote: post #86

ajconway wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banning (or, more precisely, disturbing operation of) a decentralized service is much easier than a big, important centralized one. You just need to obtain the DNS names or IP addresses of the nodes the same way everyone else does — by participating in the network. This way you can even selectively ban the "bad" nodes. Banning a centralized service like gmail is easier, but then you lose in productivity as 90% of you…

Your argument seems to depend on the idea that centralized services are inherently more popular than decentralized services, which isn’t necessarily true. To say that it’s “much easier” to ban hundreds of IP addresses instead of a dozen IP addresses is ridiculous. It’s no easier to get IP addresses in a distributed system than it is to get them in a centralized system. GMail is a funny example to point to, because em…

In practice centralized services are just more popular. Less hassle to handle them, for users.

And email is practically the only decentralized system in widespread use these days. And it's not centralized, but close to it. You shut down 3 or 4 email services, 95% of its traffic is gone.

Re: Ugandan government blocks Google Play Store, Apple App Store, and YouTube

#134

Post by jimkleiber » Sat, Jan 09, 2021, 11:47 PM UTC

im3w1l wrote: post #72

jimkleiber wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate this point and it makes me think more and more about how we try to govern global businesses with national governments and how I wonder if we'll ever get a more powerful global body to balance the power of global organizations.

We will, and it will be a bad thing. Nowhere to run when it eventually goes corrupt and evil. Hopefully we will be space-faring before that.

I hear that point and agree it could bring fear, especially as it gets very powerful. What I wonder is, what shall we do as global organizations get stronger and stronger and play national governments against each other, or less nefariously, try to abide by 200+ national laws at the same time, which most certainly conflict with each other?

Re: Ugandan government blocks Google Play Store, Apple App Store, and YouTube

#135

Post by mullingitover » Sat, Jan 09, 2021, 11:47 PM UTC

tetrometal wrote: post #116

mullingitover wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's not split hairs. When: You have the world's largest megaphone. You bring tens of thousands of hardline supporters to the Capitol on the day that officially seals the transfer of power. You and your henchmen spend hours forcefully lying and claiming that the entirety of the national election apparatus is in a conspiracy to steal the election. You tell them to march on the capitol to 'fight.' You are inciting a r…

This is precisely the expertly spun narrative I can watch on CNN or MSNBC. It's wonderfully constructed, people get paid a lot to do it. It's also just a lie. To fully half of the American population, and a rapidly growing proportion, this is a bald-faced lie. So please, hold the speculative narrative. Don't repeat talking heads to me. Show receipts. Demonstrate with evidence that Trump tried to get his rally to inva…

Show the receipts that the election was stolen before you decide to broadcast that claim to millions.

Trump's legal team had the chance to do that in court dozens of times, and failed to do so every time. He took the same discredited claims to a massive crowd in the capitol, and we see the result.

> You can't conveniently ignore the much worse riots that took place last summer as you try to spin your crazed narrative, we see through all of this now.

You can't "both sides" this because none of the marches for social justice this summer attempted to kidnap and execute the executive line of succession.

Re: Ugandan government blocks Google Play Store, Apple App Store, and YouTube

#136

Post by roenxi » Sat, Jan 09, 2021, 11:48 PM UTC

mimikatz wrote: post #55

tedunangst wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unclear how banning the App Store prevents Twitter from banning you.

You go full China and ban those as well.

At the time of writing people were downvoting you, but I'd say to them that this is a legitimate strategy. China has succeeded in building their own internet economy, unlike the EU or Africa.

A "ban them all" strategy is not unthinkable.

Re: Ugandan government blocks Google Play Store, Apple App Store, and YouTube

#137

Post by mullingitover » Sat, Jan 09, 2021, 11:49 PM UTC

vimy wrote: post #126

mullingitover wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just trying to be clear, are you saying these events were justified, or that the attack on the US Capitol was justified?

It's okay when the left does it but it's a national crisis when the right does it. Pointing out the hypocrisy.

I don't recall the time when armed insurrectionists with guns, bombs, and zip ties attempted to execute the Vice President when the left did it, can you share some links?

Re: Ugandan government blocks Google Play Store, Apple App Store, and YouTube

#138

Post by roenxi » Sat, Jan 09, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

erentz wrote: post #26

madhadron wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trump has a press office and a whole press corps that shows up to listen to what he might want to say to them daily.

Right. A serious percentage of people think the only way the president can communicate is via Twitter and there’s been this right wing persecution complex building for a few years now that they believe they are constantly being censored. Despite the fact that right wing news and pundits get a lot more shares on social media. It’s all part of the weird twisted mass delusion that we find ourselves dealing with.

They'd be wrong about only communicating through Twitter, but at this point I demand original long form footage before I believe the media in what a politician did or did not say. They simply don't do an accurate job of summarising.

Re: Ugandan government blocks Google Play Store, Apple App Store, and YouTube

#139

Post by tetrometal » Sat, Jan 09, 2021, 11:50 PM UTC

mullingitover wrote: post #109

trident5000 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not really a fan. But I must say, he asked for a protest, not for them to storm the Capital. He probably wanted to stir it up, but never thought it would go that far. I have not seen any explicit tweets where he asked for that. The other thing I want to mention (in demonstrating the two standards) is that the dem leadership cheered on protests in the summer with battle like language which turned into far larger a…

> But I must say, he asked for a protest, not for them to storm the Capital He's not completely stupid, at least in the short term. I'll give him that. The fact is, however, that he made breathtaking, wholly unfounded claims of a vast conspiracy that if you believed them would lead you to believe that a revolution was in order and completely appropriate. Then he turned them loose on the Capitol.

You're just making assertions and hoping that the zeitgeist continues to agree with you.

It's easy for the winning side to trot out a bunch of people that support their position (and if you try suggesting R's are on the same side as Trump supporters, then you're more divorced from reality than I feared). Trump supporters don't care. They want specific concerns addressed.

And frankly, they should be. Every election in a bona fide democracy should be characterized by the winning side steel manning the losing side's objections and addressing them one-by-one until the fraction of the population continuing to object is minuscule enough to ignore.

That didn't happen. Instead objectors got people they didn't trust trotted out before them declaring "There's NO evidence of election fraud" (demonstrably false, there's evidence of election fraud in every election), stonewalling, and running out the clock.

They should have steel-manned and addressed in a very public and forthcoming, unspun manner the more compelling arguments presented. Matt Braynard's [1] work, for example, should have been litigated to hell and back.

Undergoing these challenges is critical to maintaining democracy, but the left was hell-bent on painting a narrative that pursuing election transparency in 2020 (not 2016, mind you; they had quite a different take then when they were mucking with the electoral college themselves [2]) was somehow antidemocratic because all questions had been settled by the people only they were permitted to declare trustworthy.

So what we have now is a huge fraction of the population that feel the election has been stolen:

"Sixty-one percent (61%) of Republicans say it’s Very Likely the Democrats stole the election, but just as many Democrats (61%) say it’s Not At All Likely. Among unaffiliateds, 29% feel it’s a stolen election; 45% do not." [3]

I don't have much of a dog in this fight. I'm about as pure a libertarian/ancap as you can find. I leaned slightly Trump because I despise war, but I would have been just as happy with Biden and a republican senate. I'm telling you with open eyes (the same eyes I use to attempt to discredit the Q and Lin Wood madness on the right) that you have bought into a false narrative sold to you by the leftist media. You are nowhere in the vicinity of "woke". You are stuck in a bubble that decries other bubbles and you don't even realize it. Worse, it's the most powerful bubble that is causing the most damage to society. It is YOUR bubble that is causing the most damage to democracy in this country.

[1] https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/matt_braynards_...

[2] https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/12/17/how-democrats-attempt...

[3] https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/ele...

Re: Ugandan government blocks Google Play Store, Apple App Store, and YouTube

#140

Post by selfhoster11 » Sat, Jan 09, 2021, 11:51 PM UTC

tobylane wrote: post #27

ilaksh wrote: post #3

What Trump was doing was extreme, but stories like might make you think twice about enthusiasm for censorship.

What if I’m enthusiastically against censorship and enthusiastically for deplatforming in cases like Trump? Which makes me strongly dislike the news in the post.

Deplatforming is a kind of censorship. With social media monopolies in place, deplatforming is effectively removing someone's voice altogether, so basically the same as censorship.