Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google's Project Dragonfly 'Terminated' in China

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 305 posts

Re: Google's Project Dragonfly 'Terminated' in China

#121

Post by TeMPOraL »

throwaway2048 wrote: post #95
chillacy wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s game theory, each company needs to stay ahead of the others and end up in a globally suboptimal state. One solution to the prisoners dilemma is “the don” who ensures nobody defects, aka the government.

aka if you defect the big boss shoots you in the head.

Yes. Whether actual bullets are involved or means like imprisonment or fines, this literally is the solution to prisonner-dillemma's like problems, and in various forms exists everywhere and forms the underpinning of a civilized society.

Re: Google's Project Dragonfly 'Terminated' in China

#122

Post by sorokod »

ezoe wrote: post #98
peteretep wrote: post #41

To me, this feels like an area Uncle Sam and the EU need to get involved in. Declare all censorship or need to comply with the Great Firewall to be a trade barrier, freeze out all Chinese tech companies on that basis, and find a way to strongly discourage American and European companies from in any way enabling it.

Both US and EU exercise censorship in the name of: + copyrights + trademarks + patents(really bogus patents) + religion(these days, US outright ban any casual religious reference because it offend some believers, resulting modifying some manga/anime/game) + national security + ex-political party symbol(swastika, but they can't tell the difference between nazi symbol and Buddism symbol which is widely used in Japanese…

Perhaps you can share the moral justification used by the Chinese government?

Re: Google's Project Dragonfly 'Terminated' in China

#123

Post by jgalt212 »

chrischen wrote: post #47
peteretep wrote: post #41

To me, this feels like an area Uncle Sam and the EU need to get involved in. Declare all censorship or need to comply with the Great Firewall to be a trade barrier, freeze out all Chinese tech companies on that basis, and find a way to strongly discourage American and European companies from in any way enabling it.

Any sort of heavy hand the West takes to “prove” that whatever it is that China is doing (censorship, communism, etc) is wrong/doesn’t work is going to backfire to the highest degree. It will entrench them in their already strong beliefs that the West is only interested in holding progress back from China (out of jealousy at their high economic growth). If you believe your system is better, then you really should not…

I guess, but the temptation to do "something, anything" is too great. In the 1980's there were all sorts of efforts to economically freeze out South Africa. Other than making Marc Rich a very wealthy man, I cannot definitively say it sped up or slowed down the unwinding of apartheid, but it was the morally correct thing to do.

Action must be taken.

Re: Google's Project Dragonfly 'Terminated' in China

#125

Post by khc »

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #109
khc wrote: post #86

As an overseas Chinese (born and grew up in Hong Kong but have relatives in China) I am sadden by this and HN comments. Any claim that Google would have helped China censor Chinese citizens ignores the fact that Chinese search engines are already censored. Because laws in this area are often vague, I can see that dragonfly would apply varying levels of censorships and as a side effect, allow people to access some inf…

> Any claim that Google would have helped China censor Chinese citizens ignores the fact that Chinese search engines are already censored. So what? That does not make censorship morally acceptable. This would be the same as saying that using slave labor is ok, if you do it in a country that already accepts slavery anyway, and you are treating you slaves better. > And by surfacing better information for queries, it ca…

Comparing this to slavery is silly. This is more like when the entire country is enslaved, and you move to the country. The analogy breaks down because the fact that you may or may not have slaves doesn't change the supply and demand of the slaves.

When you said all information is filtered by the government, that shows your ignorance of how things work in China. The rest are not worth responding to.

Re: Google's Project Dragonfly 'Terminated' in China

#126

Post by TeMPOraL »

HALtheWise wrote: post #108
kyrra wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the arguments at the time when dragonfly was leaked, it was brought up that there is censorship, though in a different form, already in the EU. Be it right to be forgotten, or filtering of information related to things unsavory to the past of any given country in the EU. Then the US and EU both have censorship around things protected by law. So you can sue people to take down slanderous material, or material tha…

You're getting a lot of flack for this comment, but I think it's a reasonable way of looking at the problem. In the United States, we have strong cultural conceptions about what are acceptable reasons for the government and companies to forcably suppress information (copyright violations, "terrorist" content, white supremacy, child pornography) and what aren't (political dissidence, social stability, insults, most ot…

> Being from an American cultural background myself, I have an obvious set of intuitions about which of these are reasonable and which are ridiculous, but I find it hard to make a clear argument about why.

And being technically from European cultural background but having ingested plenty of American-made utopian visions of the world in my formative years, I find myself to have yet different obvious set of intuitions about this. Like e.g. I think copyright-related censorship is overused and borderline unethical, while speech threatening social stability might be a problem.

I say that only to reinforce your point that there's not one and not two, but many differing cultural conceptions about these things.

Re: Google's Project Dragonfly 'Terminated' in China

#127

Post by schoen »

ezoe wrote: post #98
peteretep wrote: post #41

To me, this feels like an area Uncle Sam and the EU need to get involved in. Declare all censorship or need to comply with the Great Firewall to be a trade barrier, freeze out all Chinese tech companies on that basis, and find a way to strongly discourage American and European companies from in any way enabling it.

Both US and EU exercise censorship in the name of: + copyrights + trademarks + patents(really bogus patents) + religion(these days, US outright ban any casual religious reference because it offend some believers, resulting modifying some manga/anime/game) + national security + ex-political party symbol(swastika, but they can't tell the difference between nazi symbol and Buddism symbol which is widely used in Japanese…

I'd be happy to see any country challenge any other country's information restrictions in the international trade system, but I think your examples about the U.S. are partly mistaken.

> + religion(these days, US outright ban any casual religious reference because it offend some believers, resulting modifying some manga/anime/game)

Religious sensitivities run high in the U.S., but criticizing or mocking (or advocating or practicing) a religion is a core territory of legally protected speech, and people very commonly criticize other people's religions and religious beliefs, including in mass media. There is no such ban.

> + national security

This is pretty complicated, but it appears that the courts will protect the publishers (not the leakers) of leaked classified information.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_S...

> + ex-political party symbol(swastika, but they can't tell the difference between nazi symbol and Buddism symbol which is widely used in Japanese commercial products, especially manga/anime/game)

The U.S., differently from many European countries, does not prohibit the sale or display of swastikas, including when they are actually used to show sympathy for the Nazi Party.

> + child porno(their definition includes some commercial Japanese manga/anime/game which we believe not possibly be a child porn since it's a pure fiction and no real-life human being harmed).

There's still always a risk of obscenity prosecutions for comics in the U.S., and import restrictions on sexually explicit material are famously much more restrictive than domestic restrictions (which sounds like the very definition of a trade barrier). But there is a Supreme Court case specifically addressing attempts to ban sexual images that depict fictional children

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashcroft_v._Free_Speech_Coalit...

The Court did not accept categorically banning these images.

Re: Google's Project Dragonfly 'Terminated' in China

#128

Post by khc »

whatshisface wrote: post #99
khc wrote: post #86

As an overseas Chinese (born and grew up in Hong Kong but have relatives in China) I am sadden by this and HN comments. Any claim that Google would have helped China censor Chinese citizens ignores the fact that Chinese search engines are already censored. Because laws in this area are often vague, I can see that dragonfly would apply varying levels of censorships and as a side effect, allow people to access some inf…

You're assuming that Google would act as a mole, implementing the censorship in bad faith. Why wouldn't they advance the state of the art for censorship, making it even more effective in an attempt to please the Chinese government? In fact, if China is allowing them in, the party must have some reason to believe the second one will come to pass instead of the first.

They could. Do you know that's the case? China allows a lot of foreign investments and to think that the only reason is to further their censorship is silly.

Re: Google's Project Dragonfly 'Terminated' in China

#129

Post by rifung »

ezoe wrote: post #98
peteretep wrote: post #41

To me, this feels like an area Uncle Sam and the EU need to get involved in. Declare all censorship or need to comply with the Great Firewall to be a trade barrier, freeze out all Chinese tech companies on that basis, and find a way to strongly discourage American and European companies from in any way enabling it.

Both US and EU exercise censorship in the name of: + copyrights + trademarks + patents(really bogus patents) + religion(these days, US outright ban any casual religious reference because it offend some believers, resulting modifying some manga/anime/game) + national security + ex-political party symbol(swastika, but they can't tell the difference between nazi symbol and Buddism symbol which is widely used in Japanese…

Note I'm only familiar with the US

> + religion(these days, US outright ban any casual religious reference because it offend some believers, resulting modifying some manga/anime/game)

Where has this happened? The censorship you're describing sounds like it violates the first amendment. I think people may decide to remove religious references because it offends people, but that's not the same as the government censoring it.

> + ex-political party symbol(swastika, but they can't tell the difference between nazi symbol and Buddism symbol which is widely used in Japanese commercial products, especially manga/anime/game)

Where has this happened? Again, considering we have straight up neo Nazis in the US who are allowed to display the actual swastika legally, I don't understand how this could happen.

Re: Google's Project Dragonfly 'Terminated' in China

#130

Post by i_am_nomad »

Matticus_Rex wrote: post #29
anvandare wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that they even started the project speaks for itself. Companies don't have ethical standards, only slick PR departments.

Some companies do have ethical standards, but the question is where those standards live with respect to decision-making. If projects can get started before they get any attention from the standards, their momentum can keep them alive (particularly in public companies where shareholders pressure you not to leave money on the table).

This is a very good point, I'm glad someone said this, since it adds some much-needed nuance to my original comment. The corollary is that ethical standards are irrelevant if they're not applied, and to your specific point, if there's no structure or workflow that allows them to be applied early and often.
Post reply on HN