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Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

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Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

#41

Post by danenania »

rayiner wrote: post #28
coopdog wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't care about privacy for my personal (not corporate) information from Google. The worst they can do is disconnect me, and I can always leave them. I do care about that an organisation with the power to legally kill or imprison me without trial, with the world's strongest military and a penchant for punishing anyone who embarasses them has all of my data, including who I associate with, what I say and whereever…

> The worst they can do is disconnect me, and I can always leave them. No, the worst thing that Google,[1] can do is share that information with credit card companies, HR departments, health insurance companies, etc, who do have the power to ruin your life and are much more likely to do it than the government. What happens when the advertising money hits the wall and can't support revenue growth sufficient to keep th…

Collusion among private corporations is scary, but it's not as scary as totalitarianism, mass imprisonment, and genocide. The precedents set for what governments end up doing once they get their hands on this level of social control are very bleak.

Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

#42

Post by jfoutz »

jlgreco wrote: post #35
jfoutz wrote: post #8

Betteridge's law in action http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Just for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5852146

That is brilliant.

I still think headlines with question marks are cowardly writing. Be bold! Take a stand! Come right out and say Betteridge's law is bullshit.

I kinda get the socratic effect the author is going for, but i still think it's a cheap trick. I didn't ask that question, the author did.

Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

#43

Post by jfoutz »

parennoob wrote: post #27
jfoutz wrote: post #8

Betteridge's law in action http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

I don't see why this is the most downvoted option. It does seem on point that the piece doesn't have any hard polling data about worldwide reactions to the recent NSA revelations, and the stuff about alternative services mostly refer to Chinese competitors, who are large players locally, but not worldwide. Hence, you'd think Betteridge's law was applicable. No?

I never noticed till someone pointed the law out on HN this year. IMHO the trailing question mark is almost always lazy writing.

Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

#44

Post by danilocampos »

purephase wrote: post #30

Nothing will change. If you think that those involved were not prepared for the eventually of a leak, you'd be very naive. The fact that all of these companies have been sitting on boilerplate denial statements speaks volumes. Contingency plans have been put in place for this eventuality and the people making these plans are experts at dealing with these situations. My guess is that the gameplan for the US government…

> The fact that all of these companies have been sitting on boilerplate denial statements speaks volumes.

Can you show your work on this? How would we know this?

Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

#45

Post by devb »

decasteve wrote: post #33

I'm Canadian. I'll be locking down my communications as best I can: email (GPG), instant messaging, chat, etc. I'd like to see my American neighbours do the same and hold their politicians feet the fire over this. I feel like I should boycott the US companies on the list, at least to some degree. I have made the switch to DuckDuckGo and Mozilla. A Blackberry, as opposed to Android, will be my next smartphone. As a de…

How do you plan on telling everyone you communicate with, "I'm sorry, this channel is unencrypted, this conversation cannot continue."

Why aren't companies scrambling to provide a plug-in encryption product? Forget Google's default https, I want easy end user encryption.

Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

#46

Post by wisty »

raganwald wrote: post #9

It's odd, I hear people saying, "no big deal, nothing will change." But then I wonder, if you're saying it's no big deal, are you an American or not? The point of this pst is that foreign business will be affected, AFAICT, Europeans have always held the Internet to a stricter standard than Americans and have passed stricter laws around everything from what data can be retained to the behaviour of tracking cookies. If…

It's not just about what people think. It's also whether they think hosting stuff on US servers is even legal.

I can imagine the Pirate Party suing some EU groups (governments, companies, whatever) because they are using US providers, and the US is not safe enough to conform with EU privacy law. And there's money on the line too, lots of EU companies will want the contracts that are going to US ones. And keeping jobs onshore is always popular with the masses.

Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

#48

Post by wisty »

purephase wrote: post #30

Nothing will change. If you think that those involved were not prepared for the eventually of a leak, you'd be very naive. The fact that all of these companies have been sitting on boilerplate denial statements speaks volumes. Contingency plans have been put in place for this eventuality and the people making these plans are experts at dealing with these situations. My guess is that the gameplan for the US government…

You don't care. I don't care. The EU companies which are running systems on US-based SAS platforms care.

Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

#49

Post by zainny »

ritchiea wrote: post #31

One biggie that the author left out of the piece: The US Gov continues to insist that they are not monitoring the data of US citizens because that would be unconstitutional without warrants. But that's a tacit admission that they are openly monitoring the data of non-US citizens. I think this is one of the most important revelations of this leak, the US Gov has made it clear that if you are a non US citizen using a w…

As an Australian, that's what I found most interesting as well about all the commentary going on. From the perspective of the NSA it seems my data is fair game under any and all circumstances.

Well fuck that. Google, Amazon, et al. - I'm out

Re: Did Obama Just Destroy the U.S. Internet Industry?

#50

Post by rayiner »

danenania wrote: post #41
rayiner wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The worst they can do is disconnect me, and I can always leave them. No, the worst thing that Google,[1] can do is share that information with credit card companies, HR departments, health insurance companies, etc, who do have the power to ruin your life and are much more likely to do it than the government. What happens when the advertising money hits the wall and can't support revenue growth sufficient to keep th…

Collusion among private corporations is scary, but it's not as scary as totalitarianism, mass imprisonment, and genocide. The precedents set for what governments end up doing once they get their hands on this level of social control are very bleak.

The amount you should reasonably be worried about something happening is the probability of the event multiplied by how bad that event would be. Government gone totally off the rails would be much worse, of course, but corporations going off the rails is much more likely.

How many liberal democracies can you point to that have gone the way of totalitarianism, mass imprisonment, and genocide? I don't see a lot of examples around. Yet I can look around and see tons of examples of corporations doing evil things with your information (health insurance companies dropping coverage when you get sick, credit card companies sharing credit history for any purpose other than setting interest rates, etc).

I think things you can see examples of every day are generally much more worthy of your worry. Or at the very least, it's not rational to be so worried about government surveillance while giving a free pass to the companies creating a surveillance apparatus that can be abused by corporations.

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