tempz

It's elementary, my dear Watson:

1. WL disclosed information to US population. 2. WL is accused of being "Non-state Hostile Intelligence Service". 3. Hostile intelligence services work for enemies. 4. US population is the enemy.

To paraphrase Samuel Johnson, "Fake News is the Last Refuge of the Scoundrel".

The "fake news" meme itself is the last desperate attempt to preserve the fake news monopoly which giant publishers enjoyed for so long. There is really nothing left when this one wears out.

Before "fake news" we had massive injections of noise to drown out information, but that didn't work quite well, not in the long run.

The current trend of turning giant social platforms to Disney-like dystopias is not working well either. People are flocking back to ... web sites!

So what can we expect after "fake news" ? Probably Disneyfication of DNS, and that's where it ends.

Because audiences will shift to the lowest commeon denominator - IP addressing, as they did in the beginning (Napster, Gnutella) and still do (Bittorent, Tor).

It is far from 'clear' or 'obvious' that the Directive is a bad deal for content producers. Read it yourself - especially Articles 11 and 13.

The narrative funded through GOOGL (and its affiliate EFF) and other big platforms is that this is evil doing of big content distribution monopolies.

What is missing in this picture is that this Directive gives affordable enforcement muscle to all content producers, including the smallest ones.

This Directive is the death knell for these platforms, which peddle content produced by 'nobodies' (their users) without any remuneration. There is nothing natural, just or given about it.

Few weeks after installing really loud air horn, it became apparent that:

- it's impossible to effectively use horn and brakes in emergencies;

- one starts to rely on the horn clearing the way instead of slowing down, which is suicidally dumb;

- horn is used after-the-fact, which needlessly raises the temperature.

The only sensible use is to alert far-away pedestrians that are obviously going to do something stupid.

What is the most optimistic benefit of a driverless car?

If we put aside creation of unemployment, putting limits on what human drivers will be able to do, and similar dystopian outlooks, what are the benefits for the masses?

People who cannot drive will be able to use cars as people who can. Is this good? Are interesting places on the planet going to have the same fate as Internet did, when it transformed from elite audiences in 90s to tragedy of commons today?

No he is not. Do not confuse 'minority' with 'people comfortable expressing unpopular opinions'.

It's becoming obvious that well-off 'progressives' strive to crown their status with the ultimate pet: human beings in need. Horses are not so in vogue any more.

Like all pets, they are to be kept in the appropriate place, like horses that is. Not in the living room.

I cannot begin to understand how is it better to reveal your DNS access patterns to the global company like Cloudflare, as opposed to revealing them to your local ISP?

Who do you think can smoother monetize your data - your local ISP or Cloudflare? Or maybe Cloudflare solemnly promised never to do it?

If an effort is to be taken, the best thing is to run your own DNS resolver that will query root servers and follow the chains directly.

Better headline:

"Google Workers Astonished: Found Out They Work In Capitalist System, Not Nerd Commune"

The scariest part is un-adult emotional environment, where employees (people hired at-will to work) refer to other employees as "brothers and sisters".

This looks more like _Lord of the Flies_ setup than like for-profit company workforce that sells 8 hours of its time in return for paycheck, with some reasonable socializing at work.

This seems to be the trend, and is by no means limited to Facebook. Providing socializing benefits (food, playground, etc.) and requiring emotional committment at work is far more sinister than it appears.

While keeping employees emotionally arrested at 12-year-old stage may extract extra sweat, the overall downside for the society is abysmal.

These topics all have overwhelming support in local media, PR and marketing copy, in other words in the official ideology.

The actual people are not much different than anywhere else in the US. But they quickly learn to provide lip service to the official ideology, especially when seeking employment or acceptance in social media-mediated groups (and there are very few that are not.)

The real problem with computer techies is that they tend to be more sycophantic to the prevailing power than other profesions.