ddiq

I see what you're saying, but it's just a bit naive. It's not that easy to create a new provider to help political dissidents. A number of web services have been started to do so, and forced to shut down by being cut off by upstream providers. "Just make your own ..." at some point isn't viable, because other companies at every level are making sure you don't succeed.

It's ok to go after the free speech of political dissidents if you slander them with generic insults first?

Doesn't seem to matter, since that comment is getting downvoted as well.

I guess technologists don't want to see the future they're creating, and would rather just come up with tactics that barely defend against the surveillance we have now.

If you think this story is limited to, or even about, political correctness, you are mistaken. It could be your insurance rates going up for jaywalking, even with no cars around. It could be your credit score dropping if you have too many drinks at a bar. It's about your personal activities all being tracked, measured, and in the end, controlled by corporations.

It's the year 2027. You get a notification from the H8Watch™ by the ADL app, default installed on every phone, and can't be deleted without jailbreaking. You open the notification, and it shows a video of you from 2 weeks ago, from a camera embedded in the table of the fast food restaurant from where you were eating lunch with your friend. Your voice has been reconstructed through lipreading software and played back to you. "You're such a feandra, I paid last time!" you said to your friend playfully, using the new insult people just started using to refer to someone thrifty.

After the video and reconstructed voice plays back to you twice, it changes to a message. "Minor class-based insult detected." The nonsense word "feandra" had been added to the H8Watch™ database 2 hours ago, and your offense had come up as part of their program to catch racists and classists retroactively. This prevents the use of new words or euphamisms that may otherwise be used to bypass H8Watch™ detection.

Moments later, you get more notifications. Twitter: account suspended for 1 day, your bank: $25 has been deducted from your account for terms of service violation, Facebook: 2 offenses so far this month, 1 more and all three videos will be posted to your Facebook feed.

You quickly swipe away the rest of the notifications, you'll deal with them later, and text the friend you were going to meet for dinner. "Hey John, I can't make it tonight. Cash is a little tight after another violation, and I can't risk a public conversation this week."

Out of curiosity, would you be ok with a non-citizen Japanese person lecturing you on why Americans are bad because they don't have the exact same outlook and attitude as Japanese people?

Because that's what the author of this article is doing.

There's always an explanation where the answer is racism, even if it isn't the correct explanation.

Wider than the average Japanese person and crowding the seat(s) next to you? They must not sit next to him because he's black.

Of course, I commented on his picture and it would be pretty hard to notice his width and not his race. I don't see why this is pertinent, though, he's not Japanese and I was commenting on the fact that he's not Japanese, not on what race he was.

Likewise Amazon removing books from its site is much more effective than any book burning.

Do you not think studying gravity lead to predictive value before we reached a point of being able to compute orbital dynamics of a spacecraft?