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18 Jul, 5 tweets, 2 min read
The law he is presumably referring to is Section 230, which keeps owners of online forums from being liable for what participants post. This law allows small websites like mine to exist. Without it, we would only have the tech giants, who can afford massive legal departments.
If you or someone you love has been hurt in an online argument, and you want to bring the fun and excitement of US personal injury law to the world wide web, then Section 230 repeal is for you! You may be entitled to a cash settlement; call the number on the nearest billboard.
This view that misinformation is inflicted on an unwilling and innocent public is starting to grind my gears. The demand is driven by people hungry for more and more of it. Mark Zuckerberg is not responsible for the human condition, and linear algebra didn't radicalize your aunt
If you agree with me that propagating news through social networks and feeding user behavior back into automated recommendations engines is irredeemably harmful, then ban or regulate those. Personalizing it as Zuckerberg being some kind of malevolent supervillain is preposterous.
Calling for a CEO to be jailed because someone posts stuff to their website you don't agree with is some North Korea-level shit. I'd suspect Baron Cohen is doing a bit here, except his bits are normally funny.

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Pinboard Profile picture
18 Jul
The spyware scandal in the news today is a chance to reiterate that human beings are incapable of producing defect-free software at any scale. In particular, there is no such thing as a secure online system or a secure mobile platform. This foundational issue won't go away.
Our main line of defense against malicious software is that human ingenuity is also limited, so we only find a fraction of our errors. And the malefactors go on to make more mistakes coding the malware. Incompetence is the great defensive wall securing most of our infrastructure.
The phone situation in particular is dire, and I hope we see a future where these all-in-one devices are supplemented by simpler machines that do just one thing (make phone calls, send text messages) and can't be turned into a 24/7 surveillance beacon by hacking an emoji renderer
Read 10 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
17 Jul
I watched the first episode of a 2016 Chinese police procedural called "Medical Examiner Dr. Qin" last night, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Spoilers ahead, but as you'll see it doesn't really matter.
The show starts with police finding a deep-fried human hand in a vat of illegal cooking oil. An unscrupulous vendor skimmed it from a sewer, where a criminal had just happened to dump the deep-fried remains of his two victims.
Having found deep-fried human remains of a human hand at a food market, the police decide they have 48 hours to solve the crime before the public becomes upset. For the rest of the show there is a digital counter, letting us know how the men and women in blue are doing.
Read 13 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
17 Jul
Good example of the catastrophizing mode that is the official line on climate change. Another truth is:

1. Some places will become unlivable
2. Some new places will become very comfy
3. There's a lot of money to be made moving wealthy people from A to B

nytimes.com/2021/07/17/cli…
I understand that "DOOM! DOOM!" is an engaging headline, but we should talk some more about how to live in the coming world as a practical matter, and how to create economic incentives to help the people most affected.
Much more climate change than we're already seeing is locked in. If emissions went to zero tomorrow, we'd still see hotter summers for years. I understand the political goal of making every headline sound like we're about to die, but it's cynical and I believe counterproductive.
Read 4 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
17 Jul
The deadline the Senate is racing to meet is that they're sending themselves on another vacation. Can senators get the legislation written in time to go off and do fuck-all in August? A nation holds its breath.
Politico calls trying to get something done before going on a month's vacation a hardball tactic. The Senate is also on vacation right now, making it harder to meet this deadline. I'm not making any of this up.
I understand the difficulty of moving bills through an obstructionist Senate, but I don't understand why Democrats don't make everyone stay and do their job for as long as it takes to produce legislation. The utter lack of urgency is infuriating.
Read 7 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
16 Jul
Thanks so much to TechCheck for having me on! Let me expand a bit on what I think the structural China problem is. The country is basically a theocracy, but since Deng's time it has been ruled pragmatically by rulers who were willing to interpret the faith quite broadly indeed
In this framing, the Chinese state religion is Marxism/Leninism/Mao Zedong Thought. Marxism of course doesn't think of itself in those terms—it claims to be a scientific theory of history—but treating it as a religious faith gets you to interesting conclusions, so let's do it.
Until recently the modus vivendi with China was that the CCP could try however it wanted to explain that it was still a Communist Party domestically, but in its external relationships the country would fully participate in global capitalism and not get all weird on us about it
Read 16 tweets
Pinboard Profile picture
15 Jul
Fixed the headline
American policy toward the Democratic Republic of the Congo is enormously important, but no mainstream journalist would ever suggest sending troops there, or suggest that we're "losing" the DRC to China or Russia. I wish this attitude were the default in our foreign policy.
The world is full of countries with problems, and it would be nice to go back to our sensible pre-WWI tradition of staying out of them. The best way we can help people in other countries who are suffering is letting massive numbers of them immigrate, to our mutual benefit.
Read 4 tweets

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