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The article has a very long list of alleged Israeli violations of international law and human rights. Here's a quick summary. Genocide in Gaza. It is described as a "genocidal campaign" implying systematic targeting of a national, ethnic, or religious group, prohibited under the 1948 Genocide Convention. This is what the ICC is investigating now. War Crimes: - Killing of Palestinian civilians, including children and…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if the future should simply be a cloud version of a personal computer. Rather than subscribing to a lot of SaaS where your data distributed across various platforms, you "purchase" a cloud computer (could be a tiny SOC + disk, or a VM), install software on it (licensed, not subscription based), and store all your data on it, as good old-fashioned files only you and your programs can access. Including your vi…
And then the company goes under, or decides your variant of the service is not worth maintaining, or that there is potential for enshittification. All your data, gone. And it WILL happen.
Developers already know how to do this with EC2s, Droplets, Linodes, Azure VMs etc. The process just needs to be more average-person-friendly.
Facebook have a Zionist censorship team. YouTube probably has far worse. All US social media are bound to US foreign policy which enables Israel to continue it's invasion and systematic cleansing of Palestinians.
It turns out that it's much easier than anyone thought to end freedom of speech in the United States. If no one cares about the Constitution, then it's just paper. Trump sanctions the International Criminal Court and anyone who provides evidence to it, and now pro-Palestinian groups can't post videos of Israeli abuse on YouTube. The First Amendment is nowhere to be seen.
The ICC is not a beneficiary of the Constitution, nor is YouTube bound by the Constitution. I'm unhappy for the same reasons as you, but this isn't how 1A works.
The problem is that in practice, if you can't do YouTube, Facebook, Tiktok, INsta, etc... your speech will not be heard by anyone. It's like if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, the fact that it makes sound is irrelevant. So effectively, it amounts to censorship, even though the government potentially had no hand in it.
Now imagine someone in Trump administration pressured Google with a juicy contract, or the prospect of an expensive lawsuit, and the quid pro quo was dumping these videos that annoy "our Israeli friends". This kind of "pay to play" is at minimum corruption. It may also fall of short of constitutional guarantees for free speech. Ironically, it is exactly the same thing a lot of members of the Trump administration have accused Biden of doing (exhibit: the so called "Twitter Files" etc... ), although I don't believe this went anywhere in federal courts (am I wrong?)
I honestly don't know what the answer is. But I would not be surprised if in 50 years time, some of these large companies get regulated as "utilities" and are no longer able to yank "videos" from their platform just because they feel like it. And every time they "abuse" their powers, I feel like we get an inch closer to that onerous regulation.
That's why we have Peertube and your personal (not hosted by a corp) website. It's amazing how people forgot to use the internet in exchange for "easier" UX.
I'm not sure that's enough. A few years ago there were some set of websites that wanted less censorship than the main corporate sites (or at least, a different set of censorship rules), I forget all their names now - voat, rumble, gab, parler, etc and people who didn't like the content they saw there just went upstream to cloud providers, app stores, registrars, payment processors, CDNs, ISPs and anywhere else in order to shut them down, cut them off or prevent access.
Tons of sites that failed to perfectly comply with American media conglomerate's interpretation of copyright have been forced offline, had their domain names seized, etc.
There was a period of time where the MPAA and RIAA were routinely suing random teenagers and grandparents for life-destroying sums of money because they used Napster to share a song they liked with a friend.
I think to maintain any sort of real open web, we're going to need some sort of new Tor network that can support billions of users anonymously accessing information which can't be deplatformed and can't result in people getting arrested, losing their jobs, their visas or their funding for saying things that the people in power don't want said.
It turns out that it's much easier than anyone thought to end freedom of speech in the United States. If no one cares about the Constitution, then it's just paper. Trump sanctions the International Criminal Court and anyone who provides evidence to it, and now pro-Palestinian groups can't post videos of Israeli abuse on YouTube. The First Amendment is nowhere to be seen.
The ICC is not a beneficiary of the Constitution, nor is YouTube bound by the Constitution. I'm unhappy for the same reasons as you, but this isn't how 1A works.
nitpick - Youtube is bound by the US Constitution, it is the highest law of the land. 1A[1] is only about binding the government/congresses power though so youtube is not bound by 1A.
[1] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-1/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the vast majority of videos on YouTube are not at a particular risk of deletion. Specific topics are, but the average Linus tech tips video is not.
Amusingly, Linus Tech Tips has had many videos censored and removed by YouTube.
If all this is true, then it's another step towards freedom. Freedom to delete and rewrite history.
Bing maps seems to be entirely pre-war as far as I can tell. In a way, that's kind of useful, as it can serve as a reference for what Gaza used to look like in A/B comparisons.
Google maps on the other hand has had at least some updates. Southern Gaza appears basically unscathed, but the Northern part shows some wide swathes where there's very little left but dust and rubble. I think Google did that update a couple months ago. Before that it was kind of hard to find any serious damage at all. (Jabalia refugee camp has shown as a ruin before that update.)
To some extent it's understandable that neither company wants to be updating all of their satellite images all the time. Still, the war has been going on for years and this is a place that a huge number of people really want to know what's going on. Updating slowly (Google) or not at all (Microsoft) at this point seem like deliberate policies, and I'd imagine they're probably highly contentious within those companies.
Facebook have a Zionist censorship team. YouTube probably has far worse. All US social media are bound to US foreign policy which enables Israel to continue it's invasion and systematic cleansing of Palestinians.
With even a small percent of population they can do so much !!