To the bunch here that complains about their data being in there and them supposedly being leftists: You're not very much a leftist if you're doing business with a company owned by a person well-known to be a Neonazi.
Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret
91–100 of 139 posts
Re: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why you need to stop them before they came to power. World learned that in 1933.
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I'm not sure what you're after here, but between your comments in this thread, the trollish username, and the fact that your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle (or close), I've banned the account. Would you please not create accounts to break HN's rules with?
Re: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Violating their expected privacy, fostering moralistic vigilante justice against them, and creating an environment where they have to fear expressing opinions -- that's "poisoning the well" in a far worse way.
> Violating their expected privacy They're trying to be secret, that's true. But expectations of privacy are for personal matters, this is posting hostile things and then hoping nobody finds out it's you. I don't think the author necessarily has a reasonable expectation of privacy. > creating an environment where they have to fear expressing opinions The Holocaust was a thing that happened. Pretending it didn't isn't…
> They're trying to be secret, that's true. But expectations of privacy are for personal matters, this is posting hostile things and then hoping nobody finds out it's you. I don't think the author necessarily has a reasonable expectation of privacy.
I disagree with this. I think they did have a reasonable expectation of anonymity, they just didn't do a great job at protecting it. Per the article it seems like Epik accept fake names and cryptocurrency; they could have done that and avoided this mess.
I'd expect my registrar to protect my personal address, for example, despite the website being my full name. And for my other domains I absolutely would expect them to protect my identity because I paid for WHOIS protection. And none of them are even remotely controversial.
> The Holocaust was a thing that happened. Pretending it didn't isn't expressing an opinion.
Also disagree. It's an opinion, but a wrong one that they should face social opprobrium for.
Re: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
and also everyone it is only happenstance that online purchases require name and address, as this is required to process over credit card networks at lower transaction fees (due to slightly lessened ability for payment fraud - which could be reversed - from the payment processor's perspective). As crypto currencies do not have reversal without nearly complete network consensus, such information is not applicable.
There's a certain sense to that. If it is effective for the worst of society who are constant targets, it will work for grandma. However that is assuming the technology can become user friendly/cheap.
No, there is no sense to that. The worst of society have a lot of tools that are effective for them, that your grandma has absolutely no use for. The worst of society will also put up with using some pretty weird things as long as they will help them break the law, that are incredibly awkward to use for anyone else.
Re: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
This entire comment section is maybe the clearest example I have seen in a long time of why so many other industries outside of tech kind of look at the tech scene as a amoralistic dumpster fire. I never used to see the value of trying to include humanities as a part of a tech degree until a few years ago and now I think it can't happen fast enough. So many of the arguments presented here wouldn't pass any kind of a…
I strongly suspect you never had a 101 humanities class. Pretty sure "philosophy" is all about what you know and what you can and what you have to believe. Maybe you confuse it with "Bible class 101", where you get told a set of moral rules that you are supposed to follow and never question, because they are supposedly given by god. Still, I would be curious to hear your reasoning of why it is supposedly morally mand…
You would be curious to hear my reasoning for why it is morally mandatory to believe in objective reality?
Re: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
I'm not sure what you're after here, but between your comments in this thread, the trollish username, and the fact that your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle (or close), I've banned the account. Would you please not create accounts to break HN's rules with? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[flagged]
Re: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
I strongly suspect you never had a 101 humanities class. Pretty sure "philosophy" is all about what you know and what you can and what you have to believe. Maybe you confuse it with "Bible class 101", where you get told a set of moral rules that you are supposed to follow and never question, because they are supposedly given by god. Still, I would be curious to hear your reasoning of why it is supposedly morally mand…
You would be curious to hear my reasoning for why it is morally mandatory to believe in objective reality ?
Yes - what makes you think you can determine objective reality, and even assuming you, or somebody, could determine it, why should there be a MORAL obligation to believe in it?
Would you say then there is a moral obligation to not believe in god? After all it seems unlikely that god is a part of objective reality.
Re: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's one of the issues - the "far-right", depending on who is using the term, can range from someone advocating for genocide of anyone without blue eyes and blond hair, all the way to someone who says that Donald Trump wasn't that bad as a president.
Americans have no context for left and right. They literally are both far right because that’s a political alignment, and one that Donald Trump absolutely fits. The ones advocating genocide are violent extremists on top of that. The democrats are a center-right party while the actual left is effectively frozen out of the political system and is currently focused on building alternate power structures for when the US…
If the "actual left" is "currently focused on building alternate power structures for when the US government inevitably collapses" - how would you define far-left? What are they doing?
Re: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
And Freedom of Speech isn't just the First Amendment.
Sure. The issue is that you’re implicitly trying to find a way to say that these people’s speech should be protected, while the free association rights of their bosses and colleagues should not be. There is no principled way to consider racist trolling free speech, but not also those calling for their firing to also be considered free speech. I think Popehat says this best. > Private consequences are something else.…
> the free association rights of their bosses and colleagues should not be
I'm not sure "free association" applies to employment. If someone chooses not to have any friends that aren't the same race as themselves, racist as that might be, it's not illegal.
But if they start a business they cannot filter either customers or employees based on race; in that sense they aren't free to choose who to associate in a business sense.
> There is no principled way to consider racist trolling free speech, but not also those calling for their firing to also be considered free speech.
I wouldn't say firing someone is merely an "expression" of speech, it's also the ending of an actual contract.
Re: Fallout begins for far-right trolls who trusted Epik to keep identities secret
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am old enough to remember when a year ago, these same media companies censored the hunter Biden story falsely claiming it was Russian disinfo and result of hacking and thus didn't report it. Do you really believe this is about data breach and not about only political vendetta? The article is doing a lot of cheering if you read the article.
"After a scandal narrative [about Hunter Biden] failed to gain traction in the mainstream press, conservative media and personalities pivoted to a "meta narrative" that the press, social media platforms and the "deep state" were suppressing news of the scandal." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...
A failed scandal narrative doesn't imply anything about the underlying facts, even though "narrative" has a implication of falsehood about it.
That article has some pretty mixed signals, both in the "intelligence" section and the one about Murdoch sources.
In any case, the WSJ has since published:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hunter-biden-laptop-is-real...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/vindication-over-hunter-biden-e...
WP describes WSJ: "Most editors consider The Washington Post generally reliable."
But also, these articles are critical of the majority of media outlets overage. So, what are we to conclude?