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End of the road for Google Drive in Transmit

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Re: End of the road for Google Drive in Transmit

#131

Post by quantadev »

mullingitover wrote: post #53
Spivak wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, they were kicked off for their content. I hesitate to call their content "viewpoints" but it's become roughly synonymous with speech so I guess it kinda fits. Regardless, I'm happy they did it. I think there is room for "exception that proves the rule" type behavior. When the bridge too far is literal Nazis I'm okay with considering AWS to still be politically neutral. No ToS violation (which was flimsy at best…

I didn't realize that death threats were a viewpoint.[1] > People on Parler used the social network to stoke fear, spread hate, and allegedly coordinate the insurrection at the Capitol building on Wednesday. The app has recently been overrun with death threats, celebrations of violence, and posts encouraging “Patriots” to march on Washington, DC, with weapons on Jan. 19, the day before the inauguration of President-e…

1) If you run the numbers on how many man-hours and cost it takes to moderate a popular platform, what you end up with is a situation where small players (like Social Media Startups) can simply never afford to get into the game, because of the moderation burdeon.

2) The other problem regarding censorship is that it has to be done by humans, and humans are not objective and benevolent. All humans will apply their own political ideologies towards their censorship decisions. This is true because your sense of morality is involved. That's what happened at Old Twitter. They were all Silicon Valley leftist moderators, and so they deemed conservative speech "immoral" and kicked people off for things even as mundane as misgendering or mere "impoliteness" to some "protected class". It got WAY out of hand. Thank God Musk came along and freed everyone.

Re: End of the road for Google Drive in Transmit

#132

Post by FredPret »

resters wrote: post #18

I think if there is one "value" that stands out from Google's culture (as it is reflected onto its customers) it is tremendous lack of empathy. - Google maps appears to be designed by non-drivers. Much of hte time it is impossible to find out the name of cross streets near one's location by zooming in. Pins get added accidentally and are hard to categorize and find, there is no notion of neighborhoods, and the voice…

Probably a big part of the problem is this:

- good engineers and managers earn well, especially in the US

- they want to own premium products

- where Google and Apple compete, Apple has gone for the premium end and Google has gone for the mass-market end

- speculation: thus Google employees aren't living in their own ecosystem

Re: End of the road for Google Drive in Transmit

#133

Post by mullingitover »

mardifoufs wrote: post #123
mullingitover wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't realize that death threats were a viewpoint.[1] > People on Parler used the social network to stoke fear, spread hate, and allegedly coordinate the insurrection at the Capitol building on Wednesday. The app has recently been overrun with death threats, celebrations of violence, and posts encouraging “Patriots” to march on Washington, DC, with weapons on Jan. 19, the day before the inauguration of President-e…

The death threats angle is a complete red herring, considering that other social media absolutely does leave out such posts for even longer than parler did (and very rarely is held accountable for whatever their users are posting, even when it takes literal months to moderate). But regarding your last paragraph. Sure let's agree that everything you said was right. So what? It still shows that AWS does cut off consume…

> The death threats angle is a complete red herring, considering that other social media absolutely does leave out such posts for even longer than parler did

Other big social media companies generally own their own infra, so they they don't need to get into existential crises when their landlords go looking into their activities.

> But regarding your last paragraph. Sure let's agree that everything you said was right. So what? It still shows that AWS does cut off consumers based on politics.

Not sure how you're able contort this argument together. Parler was involved in crimes. AWS didn't need to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt like the justice system did, they merely had to have a good faith belief crimes were happening on Parler and Parler wasn't making good faith efforts to mitigate them. They didn't merely fail to moderate, they basically told Amazon to kick rocks when they were provided with evidence of crimes on their platform.

It's honestly kind of insulting to cry about political repression when it was just garden variety crime the whole time.

Re: End of the road for Google Drive in Transmit

#134

Post by crabmusket »

quantadev wrote: post #9

Never hitch your wagon to somebody else's horse. Entire companies have been destroyed because they rely on Amazon, Google, or some other service, and then have the rug pulled. Sometimes companies have even been destroyed, notably by Amazon, for having the wrong political viewpoints. My rule of thumb is: Only use open source components, and only run my stuff on Linux. So that way I maintain full control over my stack,…

That's not really relevant to the problem at hand, which is the ability to integrate with the large and widely used tech giants' platforms. Customers do use Google Drive (unfortunately) and thus the need to integrate.

Re: End of the road for Google Drive in Transmit

#135

Post by cageface »

kulor wrote: post #119

Having recently had an infuriating experience with an Android app submission, it seems there's a horde of people in a similar jam, running the senseless bureaucratic review process gauntlet: https://www.reddit.com/r/androiddev/comments/1ck1wyp/did_goo...

I just dropped support for Android on my app. From now on it will be iOS only. That’s where all the users willing to pay for apps seem to be anyway any dealing with Google bureaucracy just isn’t worth it.

Re: End of the road for Google Drive in Transmit

#136

Post by quantadev »

aaronbrethorst wrote: post #130
mardifoufs wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, so what? That you agree with the political motivation behind the decision does not make the decision any less politically motivated, proving that AWS does in fact kick out consumers based on politics.

just because you say it was politically motivated doesn't make it so.

The fact that people will disagree about what's political and what isn't is precisely why censorship, in general, is illegal. Because when people have power over others (including censorship power) it's guaranteed they'll abuse it, even if simply by being convinced their own interpretation of reality is correct.

Re: End of the road for Google Drive in Transmit

#137

Post by deely3 »

acdha wrote: post #38
StarterPro wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they are connecting to Google Drive, is that not connected to the internet?

There’s no way for someone on the internet to reach into your Transmit app and make it do something.

How can you be so sure? Even after reading all the source code, there still can be bugs, attacks, demanding letters from different agencies, misconfigurations, vulnerabilities in code and in libraries, etc. etc. etc.

Re: End of the road for Google Drive in Transmit

#138

Post by mullingitover »

quantadev wrote: post #129
TwiztidK wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not too long after Parler was kicked off AWS, I was on a call with hundreds of representatives from power utilities about a modeling tool we were transitioning to. It was mentioned that the tool was hosted on AWS and someone suggested they have a fallback plan in case they got kicked off like "other companies".

Any company that's conservative-oriented in any way is coming under attack.

Elon Musk's companies are doing great under the democratic administration he publicly rails against. He's back on top of the richest list. Peter Thiel's portfolio seems to be doing great. PLTR is up 350% in the past five years. Facebook altered it's policies in a pro-conservative way by allowing falsehoods in political ads, and they're doing fine. Right-wing content has flourished there for years. Oracle and Larry Ellison are doing better than ever. Rupert Murdoch and News Corp are financially healthy and not in crisis.

Now twitter is doing badly, but that's not because of their political slant, it's because they're operating the business with ideology first, business acumen second approach. That's not politics, that's plain old bad execution.

Re: End of the road for Google Drive in Transmit

#139

Post by mikeocool »

kmeisthax wrote: post #109
closeparen wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what everyone said they wanted after Cambridge Analytica! For platforms to exercise due diligence before allowing users to delegate their access to third parties.

Yes, the situation superficially resembles Cambridge Analytica, but there's a few differences here. People aren't building detailed dossiers of themselves on Google Drive like they were on Facebook, and Transmit is a client app that is honest, open and up-front about how it uses your data - to move it in and out of Google Drive. To be clear, the problem with Cambridge Analytica was not Cambridge Analytica. The proble…

It seems like if a nefarious actor built a seemingly helpful app that asked for Google Drive access and convinced some people to use it, they could do a lot worse than Cambridge Analytica.

My Facebook account is largely limited to information that’s already largely public. I imagine there are Google Drive accounts out there with tax returns, health records, background checks, etc in them.

Yes, this sucks that it puts road blocks for well meaning developers, but for the general public, it’s pretty hard to tell who is a well meaning developer and who isn’t. Also, inexperienced or careless well meaning developers can still accidentally put your data in a public internet facing DB.

Re: End of the road for Google Drive in Transmit

#140

Post by mardifoufs »

mullingitover wrote: post #133
mardifoufs wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The death threats angle is a complete red herring, considering that other social media absolutely does leave out such posts for even longer than parler did (and very rarely is held accountable for whatever their users are posting, even when it takes literal months to moderate). But regarding your last paragraph. Sure let's agree that everything you said was right. So what? It still shows that AWS does cut off consume…

> The death threats angle is a complete red herring, considering that other social media absolutely does leave out such posts for even longer than parler did Other big social media companies generally own their own infra, so they they don't need to get into existential crises when their landlords go looking into their activities. > But regarding your last paragraph. Sure let's agree that everything you said was right…

How was it involved in crimes? Again, can you be more specific?

I agree with you about other social media platforms owning their own infra, by the way. But I'm not sure if that supports your point? If the only difference is that they own their own platforms, meaning they can do whatever, doesn't that show that AWS is actually unreliable for products like these? Which is what OP was arguing?

Also, it's weird to say that I was crying about political repression. My point was that your comment itself was arguing that they were still removed for political reasons. Which meant that you agree with the person you replied to, it's just that you think that it was morally correct which is besides the point.

And if Parler did commit a crime, or crimes, surely that would be public knowledge? Jan 6 lead to a rather intense series of prosecutions, so you'd think Parler would also face criminal charges. Unless you meant that it was used for criminal stuff, which is true. But that's a completely different standard, and one that AWS only applied to Parler (for obvious reasons). If you are saying that enabling criminal activities is a crime, then that would apply to other social media too (regardless of if they own their infra or no). Yet again, Facebook or YouTube has never been charged for anything like that.

It's totally fine since AWS was within its rights to ban them, but it's weird to argue that it had nothing to do with the politics of the situation. Again, AWS does not care about coups outside the US, which are just as illegal.

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