I am wondering if we could solve the current madness with arbitrary content policing by waiving copyright protection for monopolistic platforms and enforcing interoperability. Imagine if anyone was legally allowed to create their own fork of Reddit, or Google Groups, preserving the original content , and even being able to post new content through the fork, as if they did it directly. If google decided to ban some co…
Monopolistic platforms don't own the copyright on user-generated content. The users do, and they license it to the platform.
Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
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Re: Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google had the most complete archive of comp.lang.c (and the rest of Usenet). That archive is now inaccessible. Users posting to comp.lang.c through Google Groups were a problem -- especially with the recent bug that caused GG posts to comp.lang.c++ to have the "++" quietly dropped. If Google made its archive of all Usenet newsgroups available, I'd be fine with them dropping the posting interface. (And some users act…
This is hilarious because Google is probably the largest user of C++ and has the most people on the C++ standards committees .
Re: Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
#53People should get used to be deplatformed. I see this as a good thing. Maybe the cloud lock-in madness will stop.
Re: Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
#54Dennis Ritchie posted, sharing an extremely early version of a C compiler. Richard Heathfield (well known C book author) jokingly chided Ritchie for posting something off-topic, as it was not part of ANSI C. In typical Usenet fashion, this triggered a huge thread, arguing over the appropriateness of the joke. Even Linus Torvalds got involved.
Apparently Heathfield emailed Ritchie privately to apologize, and Ritchie's response is well known to anyone in clc: "Usenet is a strange place."
Original thread: https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/c/wbzzoyS... (I believe it was crossposted to clc)
Some discussion of the saga: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Dennis_Ritchie
RIP dmr
Re: Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
#55Re: Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
#56People should get used to be deplatformed. I see this as a good thing. Maybe the cloud lock-in madness will stop.
This is an interesting point: that a commitment to practical free speech for everyone, everywhere, will tend towards consolidation of platforms and natural monopolies. Cancellation, deplatforming, etc. might actually drive platform diversity and innovation which will, in turn, further freedom of expression far more effectively than public pressure to tolerate everything.
If you dont think right now we have opinions as controversial as "Gay people should be able to marry each other if they want" was 100 years ago,an opinion which right now we consider almost self-evident, I would urge you to think harder.
Re: Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
#57People should get used to be deplatformed. I see this as a good thing. Maybe the cloud lock-in madness will stop.
Re: Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
#58Re: Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
#59Re: Comp.lang.c Google Group has been banned
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every ISP I used a decade or two ago had its own Usenet server. No ISP I have used in recent years does. They have all been switched off, with the ISP citing low levels of use. It's hard to blame them, with modern Web-based discussion forums able to do better in almost every way, but that's a lot of freely available information and insight about a lot of subjects that is being consigned to history. Maybe one of the o…
That, and the fact that the bulk of Usenet traffic is encoded binaries of copyrighted media and porn of varying levels of legality. The amount of traffic in the "big 7" hierarchy (like comp.*) is tiny compared to that.