As much as I am not remotely bothered by the banning of TikTok (which seems like it may well not go through anyway), maybe we should start with banning the sites that literally funnel a bunch of heavy metals into people’s mailboxes and cause actual known physical harm both to the naive people who still buy this stuff and to their neighbors, family members, and postal workers?

I live in a very small city with a Walgreens and 2 CVSes, all within a mile or so of each other, and they all seem pretty busy. We also have a Walmart, a medical supply store, and a small neighborhood pharmacy, as well as two grocery stores. I think how busy your local drug store is is pretty variable. We do have a college in town and also a pretty active main street with a lot of shops and restaurants that bring in a lot of tourists and people from neighboring towns and bigger nearby cities.

But like, we have kind of a lot of CVSes and Walgreens around here and they all seem to do well enough. I don’t think it’s just that we’re in a college town. Though, again, we do have a lot of colleges in general.

Have you tried Discord? I’ve met a ton of people on Discord servers or in games that have a focus on Discord, and we talk at length on a regular basis, both in text and in voice. Hell, sometimes I’ll sit in a voice chat with them and talk about nothing in particular all day or literally just sleep in digital proximity.

Instagram or any social media with DMs is probably shit for chat because it’s literally not intended as a chat client. That’s a function that’s tacked on as an afterthought and usually pretty poorly.

Something like Discord, Element, or IRC is probably a way better bet. It’s the same as trying to hold a conversation over email or Livejournal in the late 90s or early 00s rather than using an AIM, ICQ, YIM, or MSN client. Or like, IRC or even Palace or just some small web-based Java chat. You’re just kind of doing it wrong, I think.

What the fuck? How is this legal to begin with?

The title gore of these headlines is a bit silly. I get that Amnesty International uses colons in its headlines, but burying the fact that it’s Amnesty International saying these things just makes it look like the group they’re talking about is the one saying it.

Eighty years ago a generation came together across 51 countries to fight fascism and put an end to a genocidal regime bent on conquering as much territory as it possibly could.

And then their children handed it all over without a fight over the next several decades in exchange for some trinkets and the promise of carrying their social and economic power to their deathbeds. What a fucking waste.

Is it actually a free speech issue, though?

It’s not as though SCOTUS is trying to rule on whether to ban short-form video or content from particular person. The allegation in regard to TikTok isn’t ‘dangerous speech’, it’s the platform’s collection of user data and the manipulation of available content via an algorithm that they claim is a tool of a hostile foreign entity. Neither of those issues constitute ‘speech’ whether related to a foreign or domestic company.

It seems to me like this is being framed as a speech issue to protect other vendors with hostile algorithms. If Google were forced to stop pushing AI and paid results to the stop of its searches, would that be a free speech issue? If Facebook were forced to put more weight on users’ choices about what shows up on their feed rather than pushing dodgy political posts and paid advertisements, would that be a speech issue?

Honestly, deciding that toxic algorithms are protected speech seems like a much more dangerous precedent to me than coming to a conclusion that a company that’s beholden to a foreign entity that may be forcing it to engage in hostile intelligence operations and soft power can be restricted.

If someone made a piece of malware that ropes your PC into a botnet and uses it to perform DDOS attacks, would banning it be a speech issue if it happens to come in the form of a blogging platform? A chat client? A music sharing service?

Just having speech on a platform doesn’t mean everything that platform does qualifies as speech and requires first amendment protections.

404 Media: we’re not like the rest. Except when we are.

So like, how about these big tough military guys stop hand-wringing and do something about it. Fulfill your oath and defend the fucking constitution.

It seems like a lot of people who do that don’t understand that there’s an inverse relationship between devs soaking up all the emotional labor that comes with being the target of end users’ ire and having the energy to get the actual work done. Especially when it comes to open source stuff, they could literally be spending the time they’re spending shouting at a dev to do more dev things like… learning to fix it themselves and submitting a commit.

The fuck is Prezbo doing in that picture? Also, isn’t that bald cop in the suit from NCIS or something?

Couldn’t even spring for actual cops.

I feel like we’re on that part of the roller coaster when you’re juuuuust getting over the peak of the big hill and you feel that initial momentum. Gravity will kick in eventually. History doesn’t lie.

I needed that. <3

You know what seems like a really good idea when we’re trying to reduce carbon emissions? A bunch of new satellite networks. We could get, like, one of the least trustworthy people on Earth to launch thousands of the things and then get everyone else to launch their own because he can’t be trusted. Literally just blot out the sun with them. No biggie.

There is a world of difference between being excluded from spaces where you’re marginalized (such as society on the whole) and creating spaces where you aren’t marginalized. Does that make sense?

Cool, another paywall.

I miss the old Internet.

Honestly? Good.

I don’t really see this as a free speech issue. TikTok isn’t being banned because of the kind of speech that’s on there, it’s being banned because it’s a predatory app created as a means of soft power by a hostile foreign nation. Does that mean we should also shut down Twitter? Yeah. Probably.

This isn’t some newspaper with dissenting opinions, is a foreign intelligence operation that simultaneously interferes with the normal operation of our democracy, puts our citizens in danger, massively inflates narcissism, and collects our user data to hand to a country that literally is actively spying on us.

Frankly, I’d be okay with tossing any similar social media with obfuscated engagement algorithms anyway. Make YouTube and Facebook bring all that shit above board while we’re at it. All this is is corporate regulation, and I fully support it. Fuck TikTok.

It’s good to hear that soon the NHS will be capable of launching cyber attacks again.

It astounds me that people legitimately assume that the other animals on this planet don’t feel pain. It seems incredibly obvious to me that they would, or that we should at least be assuming they would.

Yeah, buddy. I lost a bitcoin on an old hard drive too. That’s like, where most bitcoin are. So what?

That’s like saying that you thought about investing in Apple in 1995 but forgot to actually call a broker. Nobody cares that someone gave you a free bitcoin when they first came out.