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Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

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461–470 of 514 posts

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#461
post #97

One of the simplest functions of a justice system - before impartial judgement, before detailed laws, before qualified advocates - is simply the right to summon a powerful person to justify their actions. Increasingly it seems that we will need this to be applied here, ideally in some simpler and less costly way than a full trial. It is just wrong for companies to make money by inviting people to rely on them , and t…

I think that's the wrong answer to a real problem. Instead of trying to prop up an equally-powerful entity to address power abuses of another powerful entity, why not decentralize power in the first place?

Why should there be megacorporations or nation-states to begin with? They seem to be causing more problems (massive inequality, environmental destruction) than they are solving.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#462
post #97

One of the simplest functions of a justice system - before impartial judgement, before detailed laws, before qualified advocates - is simply the right to summon a powerful person to justify their actions. Increasingly it seems that we will need this to be applied here, ideally in some simpler and less costly way than a full trial. It is just wrong for companies to make money by inviting people to rely on them , and t…

I agree. But I'm not sure what the solution is. A lot of people will say "Hey, it's a private company", and as a libertarian minded person I tend to agree. But increasingly these private companies have more power of my life than my own government does, and it's accelerating further it seems.

As a libertarian, you would surely agree that leveling the playing field (with regulations and technical solutions) is a good thing. What do you think about hosting coops such as those listed on libreho.st or chatons.org federations?

Your capitalist reflex might be to dismiss self-organized, user-oriented coops... but they seem to provide better service and support than most commercial services i've dealt with.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still only get one or two, if you're lucky, high speed Internet service providers.

Right, in my apartment building I don't have a choice. It's all through Comcast.

As a person residing in France, that's alien to me. We've had government regulations for ISP choice for almost two decades now. I'm very critical of them because they're actually not enforced (still very hard/impossible for smaller non-profit ISPs to use big corp fiber despite the law saying so), but at least they enable me to choose whatever xDSL provider i'd like, or even start my own for somewhat-reasonable prices.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#464
post #68
post #56

This is your daily reminder that nothing in your digital life should EVER entierly depend on any Google services. Im writing this from an android phone. It is not de-googled per se, but uses a replacement for every single Google service (files, books, maps, search, movies, ...). Yes I pay money for those replacements, but God its good to not my life in the hand of a overzealous ML algorithm.

There's a middle ground too. I use lots of cloud services, but I also spent $300 on a home NAS device to sync copies of the stuff I can't live without. Not affiliated with them, but I bought a Synology unit, and the UI lets you pretty easily sync things like Google drive. I'd still be scrambling around a bit to fix stuff if Google banned me, but I'd at least have copies of the most important things.

That works for us tech people who have know-how and cash. Most Internet users across the world don't have 300$ to spend right away (in many parts of the world, 50-200$ for a laptop/phone is already quite the expense).

I believe only by empowering smaller, user-friendly providers (eg. hosting coops) can we actually change the situation.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#465
post #43

I'm curious if "has locked my account" means just Google Drive, or if he also lost Gmail, Android functionality, Chrome profiles, Adwords, YouTube, YouTubeTV, purchased movies and tv shows, Fitbit, Nest, sites where he used federated login (DoorDash, Uber, etc). I see, for example, his YouTube channel is up, but it's associated with 'team@armouredarchives.com', and not the personal gmail account he posted in the link…

What about starting/developing tech coops like those listed on libreho.st?

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#466
post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your point as a whole but the Apple CSAM wouldn't really have this issue as it compares the images hashes against hashes of a specific list of CSAM.

Reminder that it's perceptual hashes , not cryptographic hashes. So it's enough that images have enough visual resemblance, according to the model. Natural collisions have been observed and generating collisions for planting on someone elses device is trivial. Apple also only recieves a DB of hashes and so have no way to verify that they're only scanning for CSAM and not other "undesirable" content. https://github.co…

Ah, I stand corrected. That's even more worrying then.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#467
post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you don't stop using them completely then the fewer services you use then the lower this risk. eg If you don't use photos or storage then zero risk that they will cause you to lose your gmail account.

You can use everything and just dump your account data frequently with Google Takeout. It's super simple to use and provides the data in a format you can easily upload to alternatives. Google drive and photos are my primary data copy and the .tgz dumps are my backup.

The problem with this is you need to remember to do this often enough before the ban hammer falls. The only automated takeout default they allow is once every two months.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#469
post #43

I'm curious if "has locked my account" means just Google Drive, or if he also lost Gmail, Android functionality, Chrome profiles, Adwords, YouTube, YouTubeTV, purchased movies and tv shows, Fitbit, Nest, sites where he used federated login (DoorDash, Uber, etc). I see, for example, his YouTube channel is up, but it's associated with 'team@armouredarchives.com', and not the personal gmail account he posted in the link…

G employee. If you are using G to store anything important and if you do not have an offline backup or some other redundancy please reconsider.

G employee: how does that work for Google Docs? You can only backup export versions of docs, and you lose most of the collaboration capability.

Re: Google Drive of historical footage locked and flagged as terrorist activity

#470
post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having recently dealt with what I’m assuming are a meatbag support team from Microsoft (specifically their business partnership program), I can honestly say there’s not much difference between a bunch of useless meatbags and no support whatsoever. It took me 4 weeks to sign up for a service which requires few business details and proof of a domain by form of an invoice . For a reason I don’t understand, it has no bea…

However you feel about a company and their support policies, don't call other people "meatbags". That's gross. You're no higher tier of person than they are.

I was differentiating between humans and bots. Claiming we’re some higher form of being than an animal is equally dehumanising to the animals.
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