I run a web crawling company named Datastreamer where we license data to social media monitoring firms.
We're very white hat... Don't even like to mess around with grey hat areas as we don't want something like the Cambridge Analytica situation coming back to bite us in the ass.
About 1.5 years ago we were contacted by a 3rd party firm which we eventually found out was a cut out for Saudi Arabia.
The deal was at least $350k per year but we never got down to final negotiation. They wanted a LOT of data and also custom support and engineering. It could have easily hit $1M which is a lot of money and would have been a significant percentage of our revenue.
About a month into conversations the questions became a bit disturbing. It was clear to me that they were interested in tracking ethic minorities and trying to track down their physical location.
... you can read between the lines in the RFP.
After finding out what happened to Khashoggi I'm VERY happy about my decision.
They were using this technology to harass him on social media and I'm sure are and were tracking other people.
This quote is interesting in a historic context (WhatsApp uses Moxie's encryption now.):
> More to the point, if you’re in Saudi Arabia (or really anywhere), it might be prudent to think about avoiding insecure communication tools like WhatsApp and Viber
No, in response to things like WhatsApp the Australian government just passed a bill enabling it to force companies to create backdoors to encrypted communications.
Too bad there are so many people like Manafort who are happy to take on that job for a quick buck. Sure people are being hunted down but check out the ostrich jacket!
Well the depressing part for me is I have seen good friends, extremely smart people who have no sane reason to be working on shady shit, fall down the rabbit hole. And I really haven't found effective ways to do anything about it...
There are two issues at play
1. Not everyone is prepared mentally to turn down big payouts. I have seen this happening up and down the food chain. You only understand how hard this is after you have been in that position. And these day some of the cheques that get waved in your face are insane.
2. People get sucked into a certain kind of "lifestyle" that they get insecure about loosing. And will do whatever it takes to maintain that lifestyle. Once they get "trapped" they are part of this global mega machine of similar folk. Sometimes it feels like watching ants in an anthill. All on autopilot.
The thing is they know they are trapped and convincing them to give it up is not simple.
It’s funny how things tend to get less black and white if you actually look at pros and cons and listen to arguments. The fact that there actually are pros and cons to most things means they are not black and white.
To elaborate for you, I was saying that with enough words anything can be justified.
Ergo, in response to your previous post, one of two things is true. (1) There is no true evil in the world. Or (2) one should be suspicious of elaborate arguments, because they're often coming from people paid to defend profitable evil.
The counterargument to (2) would be "Well, 'good' has PR too." But I think it's objectively demonstrable that evil pays much better.
The only reason one would share their empathy for these people is to garner sympathy. That is what I took issue with.
Let's try this again,
You said you haven't found effective ways to do anything about it.
How about you stop calling them friends for a start.
Secondly, say something. You're literally the only one who can.
Don't just sit there and try to justify their shitty actions so you can let yourself off the hook as if you tried but couldn't do anything because you know, what about their lifestyles.
Evil is more banal than that. I have no ostrich jacket but I’d create a spying tool for an authoritarian government for the right price. For me it would be about $5-10 million.
It would completely set up my family and children for life. I’d get to quit my job and spend all day with my kids. If some people I don’t know get fucked over for that, whatever. And that kind of thinking is why the world is such a wretched place. But I can’t say I wouldn’t jump at the opportunity.
If one of your kids was disenfranchised by the government in an illegal way (maybe it was denied healthcare, education, protection of the law or something else that's fundamental) but because an engineer was paid 5-10 million you were powerless to stop it would you be as motivated to build something like that too after knowing what the damage feels like?
If you're making this sort of software for one country or organisation then you're effectively a weapons trafficker so you might as well sell to all sides and reap in the profits.
Please be honest and admit that this is solely about yourself; your kids having nothing to do with this except with respect to your own benefit. Even Walter White "did everything for his family."
One could imagine him thinking about him taking the job as a sacrifice. He will sacrifice his morals and what he cares about for the security of his family and children. He knows that he will sell his soul and be crushed, but he also knows that his family will be okay.
It's one of the reasons suicide bombers blow themselves up too.
But, as in this case he will live and it ignores the lasting psychological damage on those around them - becoming malevolent will affect the people around, and not in a good way.
Yes, the commenter we are addressing is a trash bag of a human being and wants us to know because they have anonymity. We don’t need to deep dive further.
His soul will not necessarily be crushed. Think about it, most of us (well paid IT peoples) could easily spend 10-20% of our income to save some random people across the world from certain death by hunger/thirst/lack of basic meds or infrastructure. Each of us could be literally saving 10-100 people, but almost none of us do. I know I don't. Does it make me a shitty person? Yes. Does it crush me? No. I don't think about the poor dying people most of the time.
Perhaps I'm taking the moral high ground here, but you should contact the media or human rights organizations, spill the beans to help them investigate. Anonymously if necessary.
I'd see which newspaper had a reaction to the Khashoggi's death and try to directly contact the journalists writing the articles. They're people and they may be quite happy for the ammunition provided. For example:
Don't let scumbags have their way, if you can tip the scale in the other direction. But again, don't want to take the moral high ground and tell people what to do.
None. And it's not like wikileaks made a lasting and positive change anywhere so far. Plus, after "leaking" it's quite possible your life will be destroyed. Thus the utility becomes a net negative.
Three years ago I got a similar call to build a user-facing knowledge graph for the region. Effectively replicating Freebase, backed by the regional telecom and the Royal Family. It was likely the same group that approached you because I was approached in precisely the same way.
i dont know how engineers sleep at night who write spyware that track and ultimately contribute to people getting tortured to death, usually political dissidents.
also ppl designing new ways to kill humans. wtf is that shit? real contribution to humanity lol
AFAICT the way Dragonfly utilizing search log to probe Great Fire Wall blacklist and skip them in results was the same way how google.cn (localized Google search in china) worked.
That was a smart but arguable approach, Google was heavily criticized to present those "passively censored" results. However, no one from Google at that time did a #walkout or resign for that. Also notably Google did not quit China for the criticism it received, but for a later government sponsored hack targeting its code and service known as Operation Aurora.
So to compare 8~10 years ago and now, it seems GOOG leadership hasn't change much on what they think they can do (aka "moral compass"); Google employee did become more active on these issues which I think is progressive.
At least according to Sergey at the time, the key issue was "opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent".
> Brin: I don't think it's a question of taking on China. In fact, I am a great admirer of both China and the Chinese government for the progress they have made. It is really opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent, and that's the key issue from our side.
>SPIEGEL: Four years ago, you allowed your service to be censored. Why have you changed your mind now?
>Brin: The hacking attacks were the straw that broke the camel's back. There were several aspects there: the attack directly on Google, which we believe was an attempt to gain access to Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. But there is also a broader pattern we then discovered of simply the surveillance of human rights activists.
I always thought there were two ways to interpret that, and I was never sure which one was correct.
One is that the hack made Google realize it was not a good, stable place to do business, and the other reasons were just a good PR side effect. The other is that the hack gave Google occasion to reevaluate, and they realized being involved in that kind of censorship didn't sit right with them.
> > Brin: I don't think it's a question of taking on China. In fact, I am a great admirer of both China and the Chinese government for the progress they have made. It is really opposing censorship and speaking out for the freedom of political dissent, and that's the key issue from our side.
It reads to me like: "I really oppose prostitution, but I go to prostitutes anyways"
> Google employee did become more active on these issues which I think is progressive.
Because the world is changing. The concern around privacy and censorship hasn't reached that level back in 2006 (Mainly because most westerners hasn't been effected by it, funny).
The situation today is much different now.
BUT, I don't think this will be a easy battle. Many people on Slashdot don't even believe Google will just stop trying after this.
I'm partial to the complete and utter destruction of robots using overwhelming force. Except obviously for No 6 and the Boomer bots. They're smoke shows.
Seems the reply is not on the thread about log search and find people. It is not what you not see is the problem. It is the question you have asked that may get you if the log is “hacked”, shared or sold ultimately to the state. Or like apple have to relocate their data centre to compile with the laws.
And if you are on the wrong side of the current political regime ....
It is not just freedom to read but the protection of you against a totalitarian regime that worry us. Especially if you think it is safe to ask to google.cn
Also privacy concern of using 265.com data seems nothing but a process issue. Aggregating search log is such a common task for any search engine in US and EU, there has to be a way to achieve that while comply all the privacy/legal concern. Dragonfly lead skipping that is unwise and unnecessary IMHO.
Exactly. It's the same tactic employed with various authoritarian measures such as the DMCA, TPP, SOPA, etc. Unpalatable to the public is a temporary condition. They overplayed their hand this time, but corporations are slaves to the inexorable demands of "shareholder value", and those who stand to profit will ratchet up the pressure, notch by notch. This will be back in a year, and then a year hence, and by the Nth exposure the public will have been sufficiently desensitized to it.
How would that work? A secret search engine? Or Google pretending to give in under pressure from employees, then turn around and tell them (and everyone else) "haha, we lied" and launching it? How would that not create far larger harm than just not giving in in the first place?
> Or Google pretending to give in under pressure from employees, then turn around and tell them (and everyone else) "haha, we lied" and launching it? How would that not create far larger harm than just not giving in in the first place?
Google hasn't pretended to give in to pressure from employees. Project Dragonfly is still being worked on:
> In recent weeks, teams working on Dragonfly have been told to use different datasets for their work. They are no longer gathering search queries from mainland China and are instead now studying “global Chinese” queries that are entered into Google from people living in countries such as the United States and Malaysia
...and Google has made no promises that they won't launch it in the future:
> Pichai stated that “right now” there were no plans to launch the search engine, though refused to rule it out in the future. Google had originally aimed to launch Dragonfly between January and April 2019. Leaks about the plan and the extraordinary backlash that ensued both internally and externally appear to have forced company executives to shelve it at least in the short term...
I think the title overstates the situation. This doesn't seem so much like an end to the project than an internal political squabble. It seems like 265.com was purchased to do exactly what the Google Privacy Team has forbidden. I don't know Google's internal politics, but I'd be surprised if its privacy team has enough power to hobble one of the CEO's priorities enough to actually kill it.
Indeed, every part of this story really happened because of Ryan's coverage. His reveal is what brought it to the attention of other Google employees, members of Congress, and human rights groups. And eventually, it appears key information he released is what also led to it's effective closure.
It's a true testament to the power of quality investigative journalism.
You mean, it really happened because a brave Google employee leaked it. If this employee had leaked the same memo to Wikileaks, or the Washington Post, or any other mechanism of widespread dissemination would have been the same.
This is like giving credit to Glenn Greenwald instead of Edward Snowden, or Reality Winner, or Chelsea Manning. The real people who take the risks end up in the back, while the reporters end up with all the prestige on the stage.
If the whistle blowers wanted the prestige there's a way they could have done that: go on-the-record. They chose not to, perhaps fearing retaliation, which is fine. I don't see how that takes away at all from Ryan Gallagher. His stories had multiple sources so it's not like the Edward Snowden situation at all. He got the original scoop, and as far as I can tell, all the follow-up stories as well.
And it's not like the story has concluded anyway. Google's management still seems inclined to launching in China, they just want the heat to go away right now.
No one's saying he didn't do any work, but when a whistleblower's memo lands in your lap, it's mana from heaven. Had the memo landed at the Guardian, or WashPo, we'd be complimenting the brilliant work of a reporter there. There are reporters who sift through enormous historical records, conduct undercover investigative interviews, and uncover information that was hard fought, and hard won. That's quite a bit different than following up on a golden goose.
Also, 'going on the record' isn't always an option. In the case of someone like Reality Winner, Chelsea Manning, or Edward Snowden, it would mean life in prison -- or worse if they were in a non-Western democracy.
I would agree with you in general but this is probably not the best example of it. Sergey Brin and Larry Page own a majority of the voting shares at Google. So even though it's technically a public company, it's still for all intents and purposes their company. It's the same story with Zuckerberg and Facebook which is why things like 'shareholders calling for Zuckerberg to be replaced' don't really mean anything directly. If every single shareholder except Zuckerberg voted to replace him, he stays. Consequently the actions and behaviors of these companies strongly reflect the views and desires of these individuals.
Please don't break the site guidelines by introducing extraneous flamebait into threads. Especially not of the most-repeated variety. Those are the antibiotic-resistant bacteria of HN threads.
Yeah Pichai came across as sneakily dishonest in in the recent congressional hearing. He implied they weren't currently planning to enter Chinese search with a filtered search tool but then admitted they had 100 engineers working on dragonfly. Okay sleazebag so you're not currently planning to enter but you are building the systems that will allow a future plan to happen. Him saying they have no plans to enter prior to that admission indicates that he has flexible morals. Why wouldn't a sleazebag like that continue 'not planning' until the time is right for him to reap his profits?
> Scott Beaumont, Google’s leader in China and a key architect of the Dragonfly project, “did not feel that the security, privacy, and legal teams should be able to question his product decisions,”
If I was more eloquent I'd draw some analogy between Scott Beaumont's behavior and China...
Well it is clearly an authoritarian personality - don't question his decisions and just obey. Sucks to work under but isn't usually quite as bad as an authoritarian government. And really that sort of thing should be a reason to be fired instantly from a tech company - not because of employee morale, expecting people you pay to think not to think being bad management, ethics, or anything like that but just because that it is a massive security liability. If your boss really is the sort to demand to send over all employee records over email or else you are fired that makes everyone far more phishing vulnerable.
Of course if it is 'disregard safety procedures both can kill you just the same'.
>And really that sort of thing should be a reason to be fired instantly from a tech company
You will find this type of person throughout all companies, including tech. It’s really unfortunate but if these people get results, their horrible behavior is not only tolerated but rewarded.
Idk probably knew they weren’t breaking any laws and also wanted to hit an aggressive deadline.
That is if any of his engineers had qualms about what they were doing they’d be checked at the door because again it’s all legal according to the law and they had to hit a deadline.
Especially because there’s nothing here that’s technically exceptional other than it runs counter to what we Americans considered ethical.
Glad the PR fallout tipped whatever cost-benefit analysis they did by severely damaging the Google brand. Crazy they didn’t consider it up front.
The fallout feels similar to them the release of the Boston Dynamics video. They don’t want to be associated with “job automating” robots.
I think the issue is less PR but more labor dispute essentially - the high end having greviances is rarer but it does happen. They can weather being just another evil corporation reputationally - they can't weather mass defections of expensive talent that may decide to go to competitors or go Traitorous Eight on them.
They have a pattern there of being forced to bend since at least the "memo-gate" and although they don't like it the math is clear enough to them. If employees are making money net it is rational to replace them if the alternative could make more money. Willful employees are an annoyance with a relative liability to corporate but their productivity gives them cold rational sway that says "just add it to the employee expenses section if you know what is good for you".
It isn't ideal for everyone - indeed it works because they are outliers. If everyone can do flawless brain surgery it no longer demands a premium no matter how difficult it is. It is in some ways more powerful than traditional labor - they organize because they need the company. Companies can decide to leave and out source to cheaper locales in response. Powerful labor has few equivalent alternatives. I say powerful and not scarce because mere obscurity can be subsituited for - powerful less so. If they could have already they would have. The companies need the high end and they know it. Just look at Hollywood movie budgets to the stars - they can ask for such outrageous sums because the alternative is worse in the current climate.
Of course there is a caveat - if they ever become obsolete they will be dropped quickly due to their leveraging. Things can be very fickle especially with advances that can metaphorically turn weaving from an apprentice-journeyman-master trade to a factory job worked by illiterate women and children.
Interesting. A friend was just telling me about how inside Apple, the privacy and security teams have special powers. They can shut things down if they put customer data at risk, or allow them conditionally based on needed changes, etc. Very different culturally.
Pretty sure that's generally the case at Google too:
> Under normal company protocol, analysis of people’s search queries is subject to tight constraints and should be reviewed by the company’s privacy staff, whose job is to safeguard user rights. But the privacy team only found out about the 265.com data access after The Intercept revealed it, and were “really pissed,” according to one Google source.
I'm sorry, but almost every peace of information about Dragonfly we have is from the intercept, which has for source people who clearly are very biased against the project. So while we can come up with dozens of rumors that shine it in a very bad light, I'm not sure how fair that is, since we're missing the other half of the story.
With enough selective "facts", I can make almost anything look bad.
Neither, and I never said they were false (although they could be, there's no way to tell). I very clearly stated that it's still possible to paint a misleading picture of something only using facts. The key point here is that it's not the full picture, and some facts, without the proper context, sound very different.
No, that's not how the quote reads. It reads "If he made a decision about how the product would operate no legal, privacy, or security teams could contradict him."
So, if he says "we will deliberately expose private conversations directly to government agents", that's a product decision.
No, it's the Intercept that invented its own conclusion from out-of-context quotes from an interview with a disgruntled ex-employee. The only substance from that interview was that Google was being less open than they usually were. Zunger had a political objection, which was outside the scope of his field of work, and leadership dismissed it as unimportant. Zunger deemed this unfair. The Intercept chose to interpret that as Dragonfly completely bypassing security and privacy, which other Googlers on that team claim never happened.
"Traditional" companies like Amazon, Apple and Oracle heavily punish employees for banding together, freely communicating and protesting like this, so they would never have the opportunity to protest controversial projects like this. I fear the main lesson corporate leaders will take from this is to lockdown on employee freedom.
I think the main lesson from Google was make sure the mainstream media agrees with your point prior to protesting it. If the media does not agree, they will ask for your head(s) and threaten to boycott your employer until it is delivered on a silver platter.
The number of people protesting is inconsequential as platters can be built to accommodate a near infinite number of heads.
It's interesting, because if The Intercept is to be believed, Beaumont has basically gone rogue, carving out his own little empire, aggressively preventing other internal teams from figuring out what he's doing, and engaging in behaviour that violates internal Google rules and policies, as well as which opening Google to significant reputational risk.
I mean, I'll be the first to admit I have made mistakes in my career, but I can't recall ever making a mistake that got my boss called in to testify before Congress, or that got my company prptested by Amnesty International, or that got hundreds of my colleagues to sign a letter of protest! Managing to do all of those at once is...well, honestly it's sort of impressive, but is raises questions.
If The Intercept is just completely wrong, I'd expect to see a categorical denial; after all it would make Google look a lot better if they can convincingly demonstrate that all of this didn't actually happen. If The Intercept is right, I'd expect to see Beaumont fired; that's what happens when people violate internal rules and cause significant damage to their employer as a result.
Since we've seen neither...I guess the logical assumption is that The Intercept was right about what Beaumont was doing, but he...wasn't rogue? That official Google policy was to subvert official Google policy, and hide things from the internal teams charged with stopping that exact thing? Like...is the CEO really having meetings with the privacy team and telling them to be extra vigilant not to let product teams misuse personal data, and then later that afternoon meeting with Beaumont and telling him to be extra careful not to let the privacy team find out that he's misusing personal data to develop a product?
Working off the main campus, on a very sensitive project that the CEO himself likely shielded from other internal parties ... is not that bizarre really. I don't see how he's 'gone rogue' either, rather, this is more like a c-level sanctioned kind of skunkworks.
In a world where the share holder care that should trigger an investigation. I don't want to own shares in a company where management randomly does shitty things completely against the guidelines they've codified.
But, we live in a world where I guess the share holders nod their heads at inappropriate times when growth is on the line.
+1, this is a lot more common than people expect... though the "best practice" I've seen from megacorps doing morally gray things is to form a front/shell company that takes all the heat. Surprised Google didn't take this route.
Then I would expect them to fire Beaumont to at least keep some control over the culture. You can't tell the shareholders "we're too big to know what the hell we're doing, we might be throwing billions of dollars on a project with absolutely no commercial value because it's some executive's pet project all the while the C-level management, the board and the shareholders would be none the wiser. We're a sure thing, by the way, invest in us!"
That's what you're saying as a CEO when you're letting rogue executives do projects that bypasses company guidelines, deceives other managers and costs boat loads in resources and PR without any sort of consequences. Or, you're totally fine with what he did because it's a silent approval if you're a manager and you let unethical behavior go unpunished. Nobody told Mr. Pichai being in charge was going to be easy.
I agree completely, but I'm not sure I see how this is a cultural issue, or related to some differences in culture within different parts of Google.
If it turns out that the trading desk at a bank has been violating internal rules and conspiring to hide their trading activity from the risk management committee, we don't say "oh, this is a cultural issue; the commodities desk just has a different culture than the risk management committee", we normally say "you're fired, security will escort you from the building now".
Clearly this is a different situation! But in what way?
Never really understood why Google running a search engine in China is controversial, it wouldn't be the first US company doing business there, nor the first to censor due to local laws (Apple censors their app store etc) and it's not like tiananmen square queries will be the bulk of their traffic.
According to the rumors, Dragonfly goes far beyond censorship, in that it has provisions to identify specific people from search queries. So it's not just that searching for "Tiananmen Square" wouldn't give any useful results, but it'd also let the Big Brother know who was inappropriately curious.
Combine this with their upcoming social credit system, and you can easily see how this is proactively helping build an authoritarian panopticon dystopia.
> but it'd also let the Big Brother know who was inappropriately curious.
This changed my opinion. I thought the controversy was unwarranted; after all it's what many people in China wants. It's good that Google doesn't follow through.
people in china don't get a say. many are already irritated by the new points system but are afraid to speak out. china spins every further towards implosion
It's a foolish endeavour not to believe that China is capable of identifying every single citizen based on their internet traffic.
Ad companies have already been doing it for years. As entertaining as Black Mirror is, the episode featuring just such a scenario in China of being capable linking real life identities to online and offline activities for the purposes of a dystopic and a just plain shitty world is very possible. In addition, it's incredibly likely what will happen in China with the social credit system will be much worse than anything you'd see in Black Mirror.
Imagine a world where you could curb the enthusiasm of the entire population for democratic activities or activities that run contrary to state directives. Oh, you said something bad about some mundane activity. Your phone used voice recognition technology to pass that up to the state censor bot. The punitive measures taken can then be expected to occur up to and including an obligatory re-education.
"I pledge allegiance to the great firewall of China and the government of China. I will never make disparaging remarks about any state run corporation or agency, in private and especially not in public ever again."
The State panopticon: VOICE RECOGNITION CONFIRMED SAY THREE HAIL CHINAS AND CONTINUE TO INDOCTRINATION CAMP 3 FOR FURTHER RE-EDUCATION ACTIVITIES
It's what all companies there are required to do and the Chinese people accept it, and a lot of them welcome the social credit system (according to reporting on the program) it's arrogant to to presume we know what's best for them.
> it's arrogant to to presume we know what's best for them
Demanding that Google withdraw from this project is not about "what's best for them". It's about what we are okay with. There's nothing stopping China from implementing the same stuff without help from American corporations, and they're not in any way entitled to such help, so withholding it doesn't presume anything.
It's controversial because Google made such a big deal of not running a search engine in China, and built their corporate brand on top of that conviction.
Moral of the story: never try to be a good guy, because you'll be held to a higher standard than anyone else and crucified while your competitors, who never claimed to be anything other than malignant stains on humanity, fly under the radar and laugh. How disappointing.
There's no such thing as omniscience or perfect prescience and you will always screw up eventually. There's no physical law that says that people can only crucify you if you actually do something bad. Every one of your competitors is doing their level best to set up damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't fork and you will never outplay all of them all of the time. Nothing says that there's always a right answer that is Good. Nothing says that people are any good at all at telling what is Good. Nothing says that the entire population has a single definition of Good; nothing even says that any given situation has a course of action which anyone will perceive as Good. There are subjects on which the public has disjoint definitions of Good.
"Just stay good all the time" is the kind of logic that tears down exactly the people and institutions that we should be supporting. You can argue that they should be doing a better job. You can argue that they have taken on additional responsibility and should live up to it. You can argue that we would be better off if nobody claimed to be good in the first place. But "just stay good all the time" is a myopic double standard, crab-bucket thinking at its finest.
Hey it's their label, not mine. I guess in that sense then yes, "good" it subject to opinion.
But so is "innocent" and "guilty," which is why we have laws to define the two.
Google realizes that "good" is subjective. That's why they have QA, privacy teams, security teams, ect. They rely on a consensus of these groups to define what "good" means to Google using a variety of perspectives.
Choosing to ignore literally all of these mechanisms not only means that something isn't "good," but it's also a pretty clear indicator that the people behind it know it's actually bad.
Maybe I'm lacking in morality but I don't understand how serving censored content to people that already live in a society where the content is censored is considered evil.
>Maybe I'm lacking in morality but I don't understand how serving censored content to people that already live in a society where the content is censored is considered evil.
If only was just a simple web search with some results removed maybe it won't be such a big deal, but consider this:
- Google does this for big money, so they want to sell ads and maybe other services in China
- To make money from ads Google tracks people and collect their data
- By law all this data from China will have to be hosted in China and the government can access it whenever they want, no warrens needed, no way to opose such a request
So Google will track and collect data and hand it over to China to do whatever, I imagine they could do an SQL query to find who searched some "illegal" keywords and send them to work camps or worse.
I think is normal as an employee to tell your bosses that you don't want to work on tools that will be used for harming others and try to convince them to find other contracts since they have already enough money they could maybe be less greedy.
Well, its a line that everyone has, and its probably a little bit different for everyone. Plus I think there are real concerns about googles extremely cozy relationship with the all-seeing-eyes nations.
Beyond that, though, the early internet was very progressive and I think a lot of people saw google as a chance to show the world the good things that technology was capable of. I don't think anyone would argue that some curation is a great thing.. no one wants to find dentists in kansas if they live in montreal of course. I would honestly prefer that breitbart and publications of its ilk be filtered out of my results... but where is the line? Up until recently google was scanning people's emails, which seems a bit dystopian.
But not understanding something is not a valid argument against it. It says more about you than about the issue. It may seem like a trivial point to counter you on, but I do think this line of (non-) reasoning is overused or at best just very poorly worded, and should be confronted as such.
There are reasons. For example, it would be desirable for Google to avoid being complicit in human rights violations.
It seems Google has now strayed far from the "don't be evil" path. First came the illegal agreement not to hire from other tech companies, then the "say nothing to no one" employment agreement all employees have to sign and now this product the help Mr. Xi put the jack boot to every neck in China. I've probably missed a few, please fill in the blanks if you can.
To a large extent Google's business, like Enron's before it, depends largely on the trust of its users. Once it begins to wobble, head for the hills.
Less colored than your take, but;
Each time they cancel a beta, a vast amount of engineering work gets laid to waste. These engineers could be making the world a better place in other industries.
Other industries cancel products too. Something like 80% of all drugs that start being test never make it to market, for example. Other industries will have multiple draft proposals being drawn up, often at great cost, only to dismiss all except one.
I know, I just don't think it being common makes it right.
There are also untold numbers of fascinating patents which never see commercial success, duplication of effort, and arguing about who gets the biggest slice of a cake that doesn't exist yet.
Google's business depends largely on technologies and useful tools for the users and customers. The trust is somewhat involved too - users think Google won't do horrible things with their data - and Google won't (selling the data to the advertising industry is not considered horrible by Google' users). Customers think Google won't do horrible things to them too, as do shareholders, and they are obviously right. So a reasonable amount of trust involved, but it's not about China.
Well, 'horrible' is subjective.
Nobody really talks about the google agenda of
replacing all the 'old, unsafe, inferior' tech and
methodologies with their own versions and methods.
Google wants a world they build and they don't really
think anything could be better or as good.
That is horrifying to me.
I started working on fuzzy matching searchable encryption for this very reason; you can send an encrypted search term and match using jaccard similarity to an encrypted index of similar documents without information leakage of the search query or the encrypted document.
This is the state of the art at the moment and would be useful for such things as:
1)Private search over encrypted documents
2)getting your FICO score like equifax without leaking any information
3)finding genetic treatments for conditions you are predisposed to without revealing your private genetic makeup or a pharmaceutical companies patented gene therapy sequence
Typically retrieval of the document would require a TOR like network.
Ill post a link to my work in the near future. Msg me if you're interested.
I imagine a decentralized search service for a particular set of search queries that users want privacy against.
it leverages Additive and Multiplicative Homomorphic Encryption with Elliptic Curves. I wanted a fuzzy searching algorithm so went with a minhash implementation on document bigram vectors which were then converted to a locality sensitive hash.
Unfortunately, it is an interactive protocol unlike something like zksnark/starks :(
I have written it in Javascript and plan to deploy it as a plugin in Brave Browser. Sundar really disappointed me recently with his rhetoric; he claims googles pursuit for information accessibility but also want to censor and allow authoritarian governments to profile users.
This would also allow location services without revealing your location
This is a great loss to Chinese people who have to use worse products such as Baidu and so.com. I was hoping Google's re-entering could result in a better Internet (or Intranet) ecosystem in China but alas...
Since you are one of the few people who support a re-entry of Google into China, can I ask a question? There is no doubt that a cultural gap exists between Chinese and Americans, and their perceptions of the current Chinese government. Should a foreign company like Google adopt the culture of the country they're entering, or maintain the culture of where they're headquartered?
From what I've read, the main opposition is only coming from Americans... oddly enough.
> the main opposition is only coming from Americans... oddly enough.
Precisely because Americans are concerned that the technology as prototyped in the Chinese market might subsequently be applied in a dark-future American market.
It's not farfetched considering the current political climate here.
It's not coming from just Americans, it's coming from anyone who wants to hold companies accountable for their behavior when it impacts the general wellbeing and rights of human beings, regardless of where they live. There's probably just more of that in western, non-authoritarian countries.
> From what I've read, the main opposition is only coming from Americans... oddly enough.
Google is headquartered in the USA. Not only that, but the engineers working on Dragonfly also reside and work in the USA. As such, not only is it not surprising that the main opposition is coming from Americans, but American citizens have a unique right to express it and have something done about that.
If Google execs want to operate in China without being impeded by the American public opinion, they are welcome to spin off an independent organization for Dragonfly and headquarter it in China, where there are no such pesky obstacles.
Just by reading the comments below, I don't think there is any room for opinions of Chinese here. It will be downvoted to hell.
Anyway, I will give you one thing: for Chinese it's about to have an obviously better product to use. It has very little to do with morality when they support it. Of course it's not the case for Americans (or any Westerners) as it doesn't directly affect them.
This is an unfair argument because it's not a matter of 'culture' it's a broader set of ethical issues at stake.
The Chinese are putting people into concentration camps on the basis of their ethnicity or religion, many are dying and their organs are being harvested.
If the Western press weren't so hypocritically afraid of speaking out - this would be a huge global story, it's a really big deal. This is getting into holocaust territory in 2018 for gosh sakes.
And it's definitely more than Americans speaking out.
I think pointing to different culture and history is a valid point of discussion. The point of view of a lot of the mainland Chinese people I've spoken to is that the post-Mao CCP has done a lot of bad, but also an immense amount of good for China as a whole. Compare the modern CCP with all of China's past governments of the last two centuries, and it's unambiguously better than Mao, the warlords, or the late Quing dynasty. Sure, maybe China would have been better off if the KMT won the civil war, but we can't change history.
The history of what did happen is that after Mao the country went from struggling to feed most of it's people to what is likely the 2nd most powerful country on Earth. It went from GDP per capitalism of $1,000 in 1970 to $8,000 in 2010. China singlehandedly halved global poverty in doing so. While some of it's actions are appalling to foreigners, they are tolerated for historical reasons. E.g. distrust of organized religion stems from repeated religious rebellions that killed tens of millions of people, so many Chinese see the suppression of religion as a necessary measure to ensure social order. In that sense many Chinese have the same underlying ethical framework (don't needlessly cause harm, try to better the lives of everyday people, etc.), but the lessons history taught the country means that they pursue these ideals in a different way, and opt to make different tradeoffs when balancing different needs. While I am indeed apalled by some of the CCP's actions, I can empathize to a degree as to why Chinese people would still have a positive view of it overall.
Of course, this is coming from a Westerner summarizing my interactions so it obviously risks putting words in other people's mouths.
I think you're missing the point. Ask the question "What is the most effective way of curbing sectarian violence?". Both Chinese and Westerners agree that sectarian violence is bad - that's the same underlying ethical value. But the answer to that question will probably differ. At least in the US we try to curb sectarian violence by promoting tolerance and integration. Historically that had worked pretty well for us, we haven't seen much sectarian violence outside of small scale acts of terror and regional conflict (e.g. fights with early Mormon settlers). China, on the other hand, has lost 30 million people due to a religious rebellion in the 19th century. A staggering figure, exceeding even China's WWII casualties. Furthermore, the Holocaust did not occur in Asia (at least the overwhelming majority of it occurred in Europe) so concentration and surveillance of religious minorities does not strike the same nerve.
With that history, I think a person can genuinely, earnestly believe that the CCP's policy towards Uhigyrs or Falun Gong is limiting human suffering in the grand scheme of things. This is what I mean when I say that it's possible to have the same underlying values, but people from different societies can come up with drastically different or even conflicting implementations.
This is moral relativism to a degree. But empathy is an exercise in relativism. I don't like what China is doing to it's religious minorities, and I don't want this post to come off as trying to justify it. But if we do want to convince the country to change it's ways I think it's important to see why the country is doing what it is, and not pick an easy conclusion like saying China or the CCP is immoral.
No, I'm definitely not missing your point, I'm disagreeing, fyi and your comment is shocking and repulsive.
You are justifying, on cultural grounds, the mass incarceration of a minority because 'they could pose a potential social problem, even though they are not presently' which is abhorrent.
Yes a 'cultural context' of Han ethnocentric racism and open bigotry, perhaps, but of course this isn't really justifying anything.
There is no rationalization for arbitrarily incarcerating massive parts of the population, it basically doesn't make any sense at all.
Especially considering the none of the Falun Gong, Tibetans, Uighurs represent any threat to China's peace in the first place.
Every place on Earth has had some degree of calamity or violence in the past, and China has definitely had it's share of mass murder (giving and receiving), there's no shortage of this in their own history books, if anything they should be even more enlightened about it all.
There are no cultural arguments that can be made here, the situation, particularly because of the deaths and subsequent organ harvesting, is approaching 'holocaust' terms.
> they could pose a potential social problem, even though they are not presently
It's because
> This region is exhibiting separatism over religious lines, and our country has an established pattern of religous separatist movements turning into catastrophic wars that claim tens of millions of lives.
In short, while Westerners might see mass incarceration of religous minorities and think, "holy cow, if we don't do something this will be another Holocaust" Chinese might look at Uhigyr separatism and think, "holy cow, if we don't do something this will be another Taiping rebellion". The former occurred more recently, but the latter was several times larger in magnitude. I'm not Chinese myself so I can't speak to the magnitude of the Taiping rebellion in their social memory. But the point is I can at least empathize with their point of view even if I find it's results abhorrent.
And as I have stated repeatedly, do not mistake justifications of Chinese opinions as justifying the actions themselves, and I have repeatedly stated that Chinese treatment of Uhigyrs appalls me. The fact that you accuse me of justifying their actions in spite of explicitly stating otherwise is indicating that you aren't reading my comments with the degree of attention that is necessary to have a productive conversation on a controversial topic like this.
Your understanding of this issue is much better than many HNers
on the reason why the "concentration camp" exist. Most HNers get all information from West Media with many convincing "evidence" with map and photo analysis. That's why you "appall".
However, there are other sources of information selectively filtered by media. For example,here's a story of a famous Uhigyr celebrity went back to her alma mater (in Chinese):
The Uhigyr celebirties are disproportional more than Han based on their poplulation. But they seems to work/live like nothing happen although the whole world are angry. There are 2 possible reason:s
1. They(all of them) don't care about their compatriot
2. They know the "camps" but they also know the real nature of the "camps".
Most Chinese know these celebrities very well through entertainment news. One even show up on TV almost everyday. If you were a Chinese , which reason would you bet?
3. They are disgusted by the camps, but they know if they speak out they'll end up inside one.
China keeps a tight leash on its celebrities. The government is willing to make even internationally famous ones like Fan Bing Bing disappear for months without explanation. It probably wouldn't take much to make one of the Uhigyr celebrities you mention disappear permanently.
What I said to the other commenter also applies here: don't confuse my empathy with why these camps exist with approval.
Empathy is unnecessary in this case. I would frame it as entertaining a thought without accepting it, as in Aristotle's educated mind.
Moralizing is an easy to way to stop thinking and settle in a comfortable narrative, a cop-out so one can avoid questioning their own ideological identities. The thirst for a comfortable narrative is so strong today few can resist it, which almost looks like we live in an era when we can no longer afford entertaining different thoughts.
Think of it as how Americans are completely tolerant of communists while people who lived under communist rule tend to be not so much. Americans have not experienced Cheka, Holodomor or Cultural Revolution. They also have not experienced Taiping rebellion or any of the other massive slaughters that happened in China over religion. Think 30 year war except it happened quite recently.
Would I be ok now with now with grabbing every random moron wearing commie t-shirt and throwing him into re-education camp? No. 15 year old me who just finished reading Archipelag Gulag and was finally told my family history during Holodomor? Well I would get a rope, find a tree and get to work.
Things like this are very complicated. Having said that Google is idiotic trying to reenter PRC market. Communist party will never allow them to grow to any degree there if they have any independence, they would need to become a servant of the party 100%, even then.. likely they will just get all of their tech stolen and bunch of intelligence officers placed into leadership roles. There is NO path for them to grow in China and succeed, what they sell is too valuable for control of people to allow foreign controlled entity any growth inside PRC.
> The Chinese are putting people into concentration camps on the basis of their ethnicity or religion, many are dying and their organs are being harvested
A few glossy points are made here that rides on a racial or national stereotype.
1. It was Chinese government put people in concentration camp, not Chinese. In the current political atmosphere, I am very cautious to draw this line as a Chinese myself, for the fear of mobbing attacks on Chinese people oversea.
2. many are dying and their organs are being harvested
You need to have reports to support claims of such outrageous behavior. Also it's not clear what is the actual things being done.
Are people dying naturally in the camp, and got organ harvested? Or they were left to die without reasonable medical attentions.
I presume the organ extraction has not got consent from the people, right?
#1 is a good point, but in my experience, 'The Governments' approach to Tibetans, Uighurs etc. has the general tacit support of 'The Chinese' and by that I should say 'Han'. Han ethno-nationalism is total and out in the open, it's normative. I suggest most of non-minority China actually supports much of this.
As far as #2, it's splitting hairs. People are put in jail because of their ethnicity or faith, and one way or another, organs are being harvested on mass. Discussions of 'did the prisoners approve of their dismemberment after execution' are just a little insulting really.
The link you provided is for a Japanese budasim presit who still has hairs. Could you at least provide some information with first hand authenticity, like from survivor and/or those close to them or the ones died in the camp?
And plenty of American overreactions to terror attacks also had broad support. Same for the Russians, the British, the French..
It's definitely interesting that Chinese nationals were almost universally for dragonfly and yet the "progressive" activists didn't care at all, preferring to pivot the topic into nationalist rivalry. Ask them in a vacuum and they'd say they treasure diverse perspectives..
> It's definitely interesting that Chinese nationals were almost universally for dragonfly and yet the "progressive" activists didn't care at all
Human rights are not subject to a simple majority rule.
And this whole thing isn't about what Chinese want. It's about what Americans are okay with helping Chinese do. If the majority of Chinese support labor camps for ethnic minorities, that's one thing; but when American citizens aid them in filling those camps, then those citizens are a fair target for their compatriots, regardless of what the Chinese think about it all.
Dragonfly is a search engine with the ability to track people who use it, said ability being there for the express purpose of cracking down on political dissent.
I'd love to see you try (and when you speak against it actually highlight how it would be used to send muslims to concentration camps, put anyone who dared to do harmless searches, such as Tiananmen Massacre at risk, etc.). Best case scenario: your posts won't be seen by anyone since keywords such as Tiananmen Massacre will result in it being shadow banned upon submission. Worst case scenario: your life comes to an end.
For me is not thing about culture, its mainly convenient, I travel to china quite often, it sucks to have to mess with vpn which often doesn't work. Human rights issue is little of my concern, it doesn't effect my life in significant way.
Agree. A lot of Chinese like Google more than Baidu but they have no choice. I have no problem to use Google as I'm now in China but a lot of normal people don't know how to get around GFW.
Perhaps Chinese citizens can petition the Chinese Communist Party to foster a better foreign investment environment by putting an immediate end to the forced imprisonment[1], labor[2] and torture[3] of millions of people in China.
How good is Yandex indexing and search technology?...My guess is that probably not even close to Google, and heavily optimized for slavic inflections and cyrilic.
I am not aware of any single South Korean who has used either Yandex or Baidu. They don't even support Korean at all, so why would any Korean bother to use them? Very interested in the source of your statistics, which I guess completely incorrect.
I heard that nowadays search engine quality is largely determined by traffic that's used to infer relevance from user behavior. Less traffic - less quality. Bing, for example, has decent engineers, but since Google is already ahead it will stay ahead if only just for that reason. So I was told.
So Yandex doesn't have that much hope outside of Russia. Unless a dramatic breakthrough is made, of course.
This is just one of many great losses for the Chinese people brought on by the Chinese government. Their government enjoys the benefits of permanent UN Security Council membership but don't respect the very human rights this organization works to uphold. This makes China a less attractive place to do business in.
So, if the Chinese people are so concerned about attracting Google, they could maybe understand that they need to change their government into something that respects human rights.
These ethical dilemmas are really confusing for me.
One one had I don't want to be part of this type of behavior but it's just going to give China the opportunity to fund a Google competitor to do it for them...
It really shouldn't be a dilemma unless you're morally bankrupt. Would you sell a gun to a Neo-Nazi that you knew intended to use it to murder innocent people? After all if you refused (and continued to do nothing to stop him) then he would just buy from your competitor.
Well, considering the fact that America as a whole is morally bankrupt (by imprisoning reporters, black and brown people, and concentration camps full of kids), I’d say the attack against Google is a coordinated manoeuvre.
The fact that you compare China with fascism is it's own can of worms, but even your comparison with selling armaments falls short. China already has search engines, Google wants to sell them a better one. Sure, it'll be censored but there's nothing to indicate Google China would be any more or less censored than Baidu. How does a China with Google become any more dangerous than a China without Google? I suppose better search engines make the country's labor force slightly more productive, which in turn means more tax revenue, some of which may be spent on the military. But if you really subscribe to such a belief, you should boycott all Chinese goods - and I'm going to go out on a limb and doubt you're going to do that.
Fine, the Neo-Nazi already has a pistol but you want to sell him an AK-47. Sure, it'll be used to murder innocent people, but there's nothing to indicate he would have kill more with your gun than the gun he already has.
Google is technologically superior to Baidu, and well, basically every company in the world. Less people using VPN = more people exposed. Superior tech = can imprison/murder more innocent people. More companies and governments supporting China with tech + billions = they'll become evermore powerful and continue to do great evil. Google becoming financially dependent on China will give their government more leverage to force Google to share data and add backdoors to their other applications, and they'd be more likely to help build other tools that will help their government build a dystopian surveillance state.
Do I boycutt all Chinese goods? No, but I do avoid everything "Made in China" whenever it's possible (e.g. clothing, DSLR camera, etc.), and I try to discourage other people and companies from doing business with China, as well as protect their online privacy.
- Google search
- Facebook
- YouTube
- Wikipedia (Chinese)
- Twitter
- Netflix
- Instagram
- Tumblr
- WhatsApp
- BBC
- New York Times
- Bloomberg
- Reuters
- WSJ
- TIME
- The Economist
Weird. I've been primarily using Internet in China, and I have never heard of 265.com before. I believe that's also the case for most Chinese Internet users. I doubt how valuable the data collected from that site would be.
I don't understand. I used Microsft's Bing when I was living in China. It was very obviously censored. Just type in a "rude" word and you get a message that the search results were blocked. Part of the fun was seeing what risque slang wasn't recognised and, therefore, blocked.
So what compromises are Microsoft prepared to make, but Google isn't?
Title seems wrong, it sounds like Dragonfly is still undergoing active development, just with reduced data access (no more access to 265.com search data) but the article references ongoing development, even though some developers were removed. That doesn't sound like it's actually ended. And the title's quote of "Effectively Ended" seems only to be quoting itself, there's no one in the article the said those words.
Pichai's words to congress could easily be read to mean "we don't have a release date at this time" not that it wasn't still an active project.
The political battle against Pichai made a success. So now the public support can be tuned down and Google can move on to do the only thing they could do in their current situation: building tools for the chinese gov to enter the market. They'll probably do the same thing behind closed doors and without the public Google label on the final result. Maybe baidu will suddenly provide better search results or something.
That's how this world works, and it's not like they really have a choice in that matter.
I think Google does have choice, they could forego revenue when it's knowingly generated by efforts to censor and oppress people. "how this world works" absolutely includes people & companies that betray their ideals for money, but there are those that stick to their principals too [0],[1]
My guess is they will just switch to doing a pilot project in another country, just as repressive, but somewhere where the abuse of power is relatively speaking more under the radar for most people than China. Myanmar, for example, or Vietnam. This way they can achieve the research goals of learning how to operate in such an environment, while pretending to have stopped.
if this company is still being pulled along (i hesitate to say led) by the CFO, and i believe it is, then this will have lasting repercussions.
the spark of revolution has been quelled and the peasants have been appeased. but their hand has been shown and they have but one card to play. ok sorry for the poor job at evocative rhetoric.
basically, from this point and for the next 5 years the culture will be changed by subtle, barely perceptible nudges. at the end, the engineers will be left without any real voice and any uprising will by met with backlash from their peers, not their betters.
then, google will be able to explore china and similar markets.
or perhaps, much like many tech companies license their IP from an IE subsidiary, the core tech will be licensed to a subsidiary that isn’t constrained by western morals.
Now where are the people claiming nothing but quitting, and not even that, would ever change a company's decision? Or how not investing in China will get Google managers thrown into a dark Delaware jail for wasting an opportunity to maximise shareholder value?
So many people here only look at the business cost of what Google wanted to do and don't care about the human cost.
It's great that you were born in a western country with a good understanding of freedom and your rights. The majority of the world don't have these conditions. Your "business" decision effects billions of people in the world.
I was born and mostly raised in Iran. "Business" decisions from companies that sold the government DPI equipment made sense for them, their shareholders, and their investors. But at what cost? Iran is a very young country in terms of population age. Many Iranians simply didn't have the opportunity to grow simply because a few companies wanted more $$$ in their pockets.
If you in any way support these decisions while having complete freedom not to, then you're complicit. You're part of the reason so many countries have a lost/dark generation. You're part of the cause of so much suffering in the world.
Good on you Google Engineers who stood against making a few $ of profit to stop the suffering of many, many people.
I get what you're saying but a country is sovreign from othets and corporations don't get to decide what's acceptable in a country.
It comes down to this imo: will the product be used in ways that are morally wrong? Or will it be used in ways which are legally wrong or socially unacceptable?
I agree with you that a company should not sell their products to enable a moral wrong in any country.
However, free speech and oppression of democracy is not a moral wrong. "Free speech" in the west means the Government shouldn't censor speech,this is a relativly new concept almost unheard of in history. It certainly isn't a human right. If a legitimate government of a country censors speech they're merely excercising their authority unless their laws restrict them from doing so as in the west. Whatever your view may be, a corporation does not get to decide social norms and what should be legal in any country.
I wasn't refering to what the UN thinks but what is universally accepted as rights humans have. For example liberty isn't a human right,neither is equal treatment. But food,shelter,dignity are human rights. These are rights humans get just for being human this includes prisoners,soldiers and the like.
If you say freedom of expression is a human right,then how come no soldier or prisoner is afforded that right? Did they forfeit their humanity? If so,by what authority did they forfeit their own humanity?
Not my definition but whatever is actually universally accepted. You'd find a large majority of people outside the west don't think free speech is a human right.
Human right as in rights you have for being a human,not a membet of a specific nation or group but rights you are born with. UN defines human rights based on what member states agree is a human right based on voting and electiond. Universally means by nearly every sane and rational human,not by a simple majority.
Good example: most people agree rape is wrong because it's a terrible thing to happen to person and it isn't acceptable. However,the right to not get raped is not a right you have simply for being a human but rather socieities agrees it shouldn't happen to anyone. You'd find marital rape is unprosecutable in some countries and perfectly legal in the west even in the last few centuries. I.E.: people decided it wad bad.
Otoh: a person can eat(if they find food),sleep,and be alive because they're human.
No, but China does recognize it as a human right since it has ratified the declaration and they enjoy permanent membership on the Security Council (after having gotten that position from Taiwan, and they did it under the condition that they would uphold their decisions).
I posit that breaking the very morals you believe in yourself, and lying about it, is immoral.
i'm not saying you have to agree with it, but this seems like as universally accepted an answer to "what are basic human rights?" as any that might be given (i'm assuming there is actually no universally agreeable definition, but this seems like one of the more respectable and frequently cited sources).
I don't think the downvotes were warranted given that the comment introduced something worth discussing, but my thoughts might be in line with some of the downvoters.
Human rights are not objective truths. The entire concept is something we made up based on beliefs that we formed through the course of history and we formalized the ones that a bunch of us were able to agree upon. They are a figment of our imaginations that we buy into because they're useful tools for structuring a society that isn't absolute chaos. As a result, citing a list that the UN formalized as some sort of factual evidence is, to me, on par with citing religious texts to promote their corresponding belief systems as "correct". That's not to say the list doesn't have value, only that it's open to debate and represents beliefs rather than facts.
You can claim that it’s not the most common or most plausible view, but that doesn’t make it so.
I would wager that most people have never bothered to ask the question because morality is useful either way. Even if your claim is true, most people also believed common myths like the earth being flat at one point, so that’s hardly a compelling argument.
I’m not saying morality has no place, only that it’s not a physical reality and you can’t point to a list as definitive proof of what is and is not moral.
> You can claim that it’s not the most common or most plausible view, but that doesn’t make it so.
You're right. But if it's a question of evidence, I can certainly provide it.
The fact that most people in the world adhere to one of the major religions [1] [2], which have moral duties, a fortiori implies that your view isn't the most common. Even this is vastly under-counting, of course, since it excludes humanists and non-humanists who adhere to secular ethics. I think the uncommonness of your view is quite clear and it would be disingenuous to deny that.
Second, your view isn't the most common even among professional philosophers whose raison d'etre is precisely to ask and analyze these questions. Specifically, your view is the most common neither among those who study meta-ethics nor among the general population [3].
> Even if your claim is true, most people also believed common myths like the earth being flat at one point, so that’s hardly a compelling argument.
I didn't say its uncommonness makes it untrue. I said it's neither the most common (which may or may not warrant a higher burden of proof) nor the most plausible.
Thank you for the survey results - these are genuinely fascinating. I acknowledge that you weren't arguing that my view is incorrect, only that it's not a given, and I was debating a point that you weren't making. I buy your argument and agree that most people, if asked, would probably give an answer more closely aligned with moral realism than not. What's the case for moral realism that makes it so compelling?
On a separate note, I take issue with the suggestion that an individual identifying with a major religion qualifies as adherence to its principles. This is nitpicking and doesn't impact the larger point you're making, but I think it's an important distinction in general.
> I take issue with the suggestion that an individual identifying with a major religion qualifies as adherence to its principles.
I agree that this an important distinction, but a person identifying with a major religion is a strong prima facie reason for thinking they're moral realists. Keep in mind that believing there are some moral facts is a much, much weaker position than believing all or even most moral claims of their religion are true.
> What's the case for moral realism that makes it so compelling?
My personal favorite are Moorean arguments of the form:
(1) Torturing people for fun is morally wrong.
(2) If there's at least one moral fact, then moral realism is true.
(3) Therefore, moral realism is true.
You can replace (1) with your favorite moral fact, such as
(1) The Nanjing massacre [1] was morally wrong.
(1) The torture and murder of Kelly Anne Bates [2] was morally wrong.
(1) The torture and murder of Unit 731 victims [3] was morally wrong.
and have the argument go through. The key point is that, as far as I know, there's no argument against moral realism whose premises are all more plausible than (1).
Another class of arguments are so-called partners in crime arguments [4][5][6], which link moral reasoning with prudential and epistemic reasoning.
The trouble I have with that line of reasoning is that while I believe torturing people for fun is morally wrong (along with all proposed substitutes for (1)), that only proves that I believe that, not that it is a physical reality in the absence of our perception of morals. To be fair, I think the burden of proof for arguing that objective morals exist is incredibly high and I can't think of anything that could reasonably prove it. I'm reading up on partners in crime arguments - looks like there's an incredible wealth of related debate to peruse.
Hope you find this material useful. The way I look at it is the other way around: The burden of proof lies squarely on the person who denies such an obvious proposition as (1). The same is true for similarly obvious propositions like "there is an external world which I can learn about through my senses" and "inductive reasoning is a valid way of attaining knowledge", which underpin the scientific enterprise and, moreover, any basis for critiquing (1) itself. One way to capture this is through the principle of phenomenal conservatism [1][2][3] as formulated by philosopher Michael Huemer. He has also written a book on the subject called Ethical Intuitionism.
What's moral or not isn't static. Plenty of people believe the suppression of speech is morally wrong. Your distinction between what is morally wrong and what is Socially unacceptable is unclear.
Of course companies don't have the ability to directly change laws in sovereign countries but they can definitely influence them, just like people in mass can.
Whether or not this will have any effect on China I lean towards absolutely not but at the very least some people at these companies don't want to help them.
I should have clarified then,I meant morally wrong according to the the moral views of the person claiming wrong was done. If I argue Google is wrong for moral reasons then I need to argue as to why my standard of morality is accurate and applies to Google.
For your second point,companies do influence policies but they have no right to force a policy. For example,Google can say "we're pulling out of country X because they don't have this policy" that's arm twisting and in disregard to the sovreignity of the country and its people.
Google isn't irreplacable in China,Alibaba+tencent compete with them heavily anyways.
I think you've taken the legal positivist philosophy (what's authorized by those who have authority is law, regardless of morality) and tried to indicate that the existence of said authorization overrides the moral and normative considerations of the actions in question (the law is good - a mere exercise of authority - and you don't get to complain).
Quite the opposite actually. No law overrides moral convictions of a person. But companies operate under the law. Where the objection is not moral legal authority must be observed and disregard for a nation's laws and customs is disregard and disrespect towards all of it's people.
Where the objection is moral,if your moral worldview has an a moral authority suoerseding a nation state,that moral authority must be obeyed (for example,I have my God as an absolute moral authority with absolute authority over all things)
> However, free speech and oppression of democracy is not a moral wrong.
i and many others disagree with this statement.
> "Free speech" in the west means the Government shouldn't censor speech,this is a relativly new concept almost unheard of in history. It certainly isn't a human right. If a legitimate government of a country censors speech they're merely excercising their authority unless their laws restrict them from doing so as in the west. Whatever your view may be, a corporation does not get to decide social norms and what should be legal in any country.
why should the sovereignty of a national government supersede the inalienable rights of an individual? what makes a particular government "legitimate"?
if a totalitarian government decided that ethnic cleansing against a minority population was the correct course of action for itself, and if it carried that out entirely within its borders, would you consider that to not be a moral wrong, because the nation was exercising its own sovereign power? i'm just trying to figure out how much sovereign government power justifies in your moral framework.
A government is legitimate if it can excercise authority over its people and land.
Sovreignity means even if others disagree with what a country is doing or with the way things are in a country,they have no authority to do anything about it by force. An individual may have their most basic rights violated, however everyone outside of that country lacks authority to help them. That's why countries keep militaries,to protect their sovreignity,not just borders and people. Sovreignity means they have the right to self-determination,the right to decide what they think is legal and what rights people can have and the people get to fight for what form of government they should have and how these rights and laws will be written and executed.
Yes,ethnic cleasing is very wrong,however other countries lack the authority to interfere. They can however ooenly welcome and protect refugees and take diplomatic action that affect that government's relations with other governments.
> I get what you're saying but a country is sovreign from othets and corporations don't get to decide what's acceptable in a country.
That is not the question at hand. If China or Iran want to implement censorship, Google can't stop them.
The question is whether Google should help them. And since Google is not a Chinese or an Iranian corporation, but rather an American one, USA as a sovereign country - and, since it's a democratic republic, its citizens - absolutely gets to decide what's acceptable on its soil, for its citizens, and for its corporations.
So, it's citizens get to decide what is legal not what's moral. American law does not define morality. Based on american law,no law is being broken by Google.
If you're saying it's citizens get to decide morality,then which citizens? Is morality a matter of popularity? For example some might consider Google' core business practices thar involve stalking users immoral. On a different note most adults consider adultery and greed immoral but neither is illegal and you don't see people quitting companies because the company is too greedy.
> So, it's citizens get to decide what is legal not what's moral.
The citizens get to decide both for themselves. Then they translate that to public policy in various ways - by voting for people who they expect to pass laws on what they consider illegal, and by e.g. boycotting companies that do what they consider immoral.
Your post introduces an imaginary issue. The question is not whether a company "gets to decide social norms", the question is whether a company gets to decide whether it agrees with terms set by a government that conflict with the social norms of the company. The the answer to that question certainly is positive.
A comoany gets to decide whether or not they'll do business in a country after considering its laws and customs. If they decide to do business,they don't get to pick and choose which laws and customs they'll respect. Refusing to provide a particular good or service because of a local law or custom is just as bad as providing a good or service in violation of local laws and customs.
People and forces within the country. By peace,agreement and customs or by force and warring they get to fight for and decide what their government should be like and what rights and responsibilities their people will have.
Google in China won’t make the people more oppressed. It gives us a tool for searchinng. It’s better than being oppressed AND have nothing to search with.
It most definitely would make the people more oppressed. Even if we ignore the fact that the searches would be directly tied to a person, as well as the fact that there are nobody better than Google when it comes to tracking users on mass-scale, then you just have to think about all the people who would stop using VPNs as a result of this. You'd also be a fool to believe that China wouldn't slowly force Google to assist them outside the search engine.
All domestic online activities are already linked to individuals. All apps and websites are required by law to do this so the marginal harm of having a censored Google is minimal, if any. People use VPN for a lot more than political searches on Google: Youtube, Instagram, Steam, Wikipedia etc. It's unlikely a censored Google will discourage using them all. on The other hand for those who'll never use VPN services, another search engine choice will greatly improve their access to information, especially in non-Chinese languages.
No they're not. The big players are, but that doesn't include all. For instance, my websites are available to Chinese users and have no tracking whatsoever. The government can see they visited the website, but not necessarily what pages they visited.
I suggest you read the previous Dragonfly threads, they were filled with Chinese users proclaiming that they hated paying for VPN just to use Google. I'm not saying everyone would stop using VPN, but a significant percentage would.
Not necessarily. You are correct in that you can't look at the literal messages inside the packets anymore but you can make educated assumptions based on usage patterns and packet sizes combined with data that's already in the header. Just take a look at this almost 3 year old submission detailing someone's experience with the Great Firewall: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10905076
Since that was 3 years ago, I suspect there's much more advanced network wizardry available today.
I.e. side channels. There are side channels for everything. And if you don't care about precision that much - e.g. you're willing to filter out anything even remotely resembling the actual thing you're after - then TLS isn't going to be a hard problem.
No, the DPI box or another network box should be the one that is actually sending the cert. You are only exchanging a cert with DPI and then the DPI will send it’s cert to your destination.
The client must trust the DPI cert for it to work.
I believe that is "deep packet inspection". So looking at the contents of a packet rather than just the information found in the header. Pretty sure the Great Firewall makes extensive use of DPI to restrict its citizen's internet freedoms.
A note that Tim Cook is in favor in doing business in China:
"Your choice is, do you participate or do you stand on the sideline and yell at how things should be," Mr. Cook said. "My own view very strongly is you show up and you participate, you get in the arena, because nothing ever changes from the sideline." [1]
Apple has a very significant manufactoring presence in China, so unfortunately they can't cleanly separate from China like Google can without risking retaliation
Apple has a very significant manufactoring presence in China, so unfortunately they can't cleanly separate from China like Google can without risking retaliation
Apple can walk away from China whenever it wants to. Apple is the one company in the entire world best equipped with the cash to make this kind of public stand. But it doesn't want to because doing so will cost a lot of that money.
The only thing stopping Apple from closing its Chinese stores, and moving manufacturing to another country is fear of the faceless shareholder bots that have no AI for morality, and will punish Apple for doing the right thing.
Every time I see Tim Cook on stage patting himself on the back for making some minor environmental improvement because it's the right thing to do, I can't help but think it's all a farce because incremental environmental improvements aren't even low-hanging fruit. They're the fruit that has already fallen from the tree and rolled through his front door into his kitchen.
If Mr. Cook and the rest of his company want to impress, then do something hard.
Disclosure: Apple shareholder, with morality, but not enough shares for Apple to care.
It would take money and time but it's something they're very able to do. And, yes, they couldn't make this decision and instantly pivot, there are real physical things that would need to be built before they could.
Moving manufacturing out of China, either to another country with even cheaper labor costs, or back to the United States with automation is extremely hard. The whole ecosystem of manufacturing is centered in China. It's not a right thing from efficiency point of view not something consumers want.
> Disclosure: Apple shareholder, with morality, but not enough shares for Apple to care.
If you really cared about this, shouldn't you sell your Apple stocks and invest in a company with morals compatible with yours instead? Otherwise, you're part of the problem as you're willing to profit from China just like Apple.
> If you really cared about this, shouldn't you sell your Apple stocks and invest in a company with morals compatible with yours instead? Otherwise, you're part of the problem as you're willing to profit from China just like Apple.
Actually, if you really cared about this, I think it'd be better buy more Apple stock and start making a fuss in their shareholder meetings.
At the risk of sounding whataboutist, you could say the same thing for pretty much everything you buy, starting with your gas, electricity, and everything that's manufactured using them.
It doesn't absolve Apple or other companies (or me), but it does make Apple an odd target to fix on.
If you want to make a point about responsible corporate governance it probably does make sense to focus on one of the largest companies in the world, especially one with an exceptional amount of cash that makes it better prepared than others to suffer the consequences of a conscience-driven, money-losing decision.
The reality is there's no way the company can make that change on the basis of "it's the right thing to do" without also being able to convincingly argue that it's better for long term shareholder value.
Hey, never said I didn't approve of China's shite privacy & labor laws. That's why I always thought any minimum wage or labor law needs an accompanying tariff, to prevent manufacturers from just making the situation worse by externalizing their shit overseas
I like that idea. After briefly searching for possible discussion/implementation of it I was unable to find any. Do you have any useful keywords or phrases I could use for such searches?
Unfortunately I don't; it's mostly a homebrewed concept after seeing too many arguments justifing outsourcing our everything because of high labor and environmental costs.
I don't care if your for or against those types of laws, but if we go through the legislative effort to give up the economical efficiency for the social good and pass those laws, than you damn well better contribute to said social good if you want to do business on our shores
The only unique thing here is Google officially left China years ago, while other companies never did. Leaving China is a choice any company can make, and Apple could do it too. It's not like China is the only country in the world with workers or factories. Other countries would love for Apple to bring jobs to them.
The decision isn't free, and that is the problem everyone is pointing out. You can't expect companies to "do the right thing" when it gets in the way of profit. The only way to make that happen is to put massive PR pressure on them to do "the right thing" whatever you believe that to be.
>The only way to make that happen is to put massive PR pressure on them to do "the right thing" whatever you believe that to be.
Bad PR isn't enough. It takes convincing A LOT of customers to stop buying their products or convincing A LOT of shareholders to stop holding their stock. Public opinion is just a loose proxy for expected revenue - if revenue doesn't at least look like it might begin to significantly suffer, nothing is likely to change.
1. the ones expressing dissent were caught in internal Apple network and subsequently quietly laid off for whatever official reason, preemptively
2. reporting such news could cost a reporter highly in the future; surely getting no access to latest Apple stuff but other SV companies are watching as well
Have you audited the code for Signal's app? Have you built and installed the app from that audited source?
Asking "have you audited the source" is such a meaningless question when you're not building from source (and auditing the compiler...), which practically nobody, not even HN users, are doing.
> And even though Chinese iPhones will retain the security features that can make it all but impossible for anyone, even Apple, to get access to the phone itself, that will not apply to the iCloud accounts. Any information in the iCloud account could be accessible to Chinese authorities who can present Apple with a legal order.
> Apple said it will only respond to valid legal requests in China, but China’s domestic legal process is very different than that in the U.S., lacking anything quite like an American “warrant” reviewed by an independent court, Chinese legal experts said. Court approval isn’t required under Chinese law and police can issue and execute warrants.
Previous to this, the data was stored on American servers and subject to American legal safeguards.
The account data will be in data and will be accessible, however the messages are not as those go direct device to device without ever being plaintext on Apple's servers.
You're missing the point. iCloud access can't get you access to iCloud messages. Those are encrypted on the devices and the keys are on the devices, not in Apple data centers.
Your article says that using iCloud for storage is optional and all users were warned of this change and had to agree to new service terms. Why wouldn't anyone worried about their data, simply do backups on a computer?
Apple doesn't store iMessage messages in the cloud. Those are stored on the device and have end to end encryption. That has always been true and will continue to be true.
Last time I checked, if I forget my iCloud password, Apple can send me a new one. This means Apple holds the private key to decrypt whatever I store on iCloud. iMessages on my phones are encrypted though but that's not what OP was talking about.
> Messages in iCloud also uses end-to-end encryption. If you have iCloud Backup turned on, your backup includes a copy of the key protecting your Messages. This ensures you can recover your Messages if you lose access to iCloud Keychain and your trusted devices. When you turn off iCloud Backup, a new key is generated on your device to protect future messages and isn't stored by Apple.
It's hypocritical to attack Google for moving back to China after pulling out 7 years ago while other companies have been there continuously for years without backlash.
I'm pretty surprised China didn't hand Google the dataset itself, or provide an IsThoughtCrime API. Perhaps they're actively looking for what sites Baidu proactively censors, rather than simply what gets blocked at the filter level. There's no way Google could operate without the PRC's blessing, and since they are, the PRC has no reason not to help them out with the firewall. But they can't exactly ask Baidu for a cup of sugar..
Maybe I'm missing a part of the plan but caching what was already going to be censored anyway doesn't seem that much further of a step. Is it that the censorship is more hidden?
If they had a "show censored results" checkbox would that be acceptable? Or is Google search currently blocked entirely and trying to get unblocked is the moral dilemma? I'm just trying to understand the moral difference.
Dragonfly is about making Google an extension of the Chinese surveillance state, collecting personal information about Chinese people committing thoughtcrimes in google search, and giving that information to Chinese Communist Party
Do you think that bing and baidu and whatever else aren't doing the same?! Google not entering isn't going to change that except now they get less of a say because they're on the sidelines.
It's not hypocritical, because taking issue with Google's behavior and cheering for them losing here doesn't mean we support other companies still being in China.
Except that I never see any posts from you decrying Apple or any other company except Google. Google isn't operating in China right now, their "behavior" is that of having worked on something that didn't ship and apparently will never ship, as opposed to other companies actively collaborating and shipping things which harm Chinese citizens.
Apple employees need their jobs. Walking out would be risky. Google employees don't care because they can get another job by virtue of having Google on their resume. A bit of a hyperbole but there is some truth in it.
I'm sure there is weight in having Apple on your resume but Google engineers are generally sought after for SE positions. I hear managers pining over Google candidates all the time at my company.
Arguing about which company's name looks better on a resume is an irrelevant distraction that avoids addressing the actual problem: standing up to fight against something may require personal sacrifices. In general, anybody with salary has the opportunity to quit. This is certainly true for most tech jobs.
I understand if someone working variable part time[1] hours for minimum wage cannot afford to lose their job. There isn't any room for sacrifices when you already have to e.g. decide each month if you can afford to pay for both food and utilities, or if you aren't going to have hot water for a while[2]. Yet even though they face far higher risks than the average tech worker, sometimes they still choose to make sacrifices[3].
Yes, you might get fired. You might have to adjust your standard of living. Banding together into larger groups can help to mitigate some of these costs, but regardless, the average tech worker is fortunate enough to be able to make a significant sacrifice.
[ This is why some of us try to warn about growing problems early, when the cost of counteraction is low. Unfortunately, most people decide to ignore the problem because it isn't an obvious, widespread, damaging problem. ~sigh~ ]
[1] different, computer-optimized schedule each week, could be anything that still counts as part time (including 0)
As a Silicon Valley outsider that surprises me. I've heard that interviews at all the FAANG companies are all difficult (as an aside, why is Microsoft never in that list??). For organizations the size of Google and Apple, there are bound to be employees who squeaked by their interviews and would not have been hired at the other company. Why does "Google" on a resume look better than "Apple"? Is the Google interview that much more selective than Apple's?
In a nutshell, Google has a more rigorous interview process with less loopholes. I believe this is primarily due to the fact that they have a hiring committee and paper trail for approving hires rather than giving full control to hiring managers.
> I've heard that interviews at all the FAANG companies are all difficult (as an aside, why is Microsoft never in that list??)
Because the original definition of FAANG was for the investor crowd, and looked at companies solely from the perspective of their stock performance and "potential growth". Microsoft wasn't supposed to be good at either back when this was coined.
We now use it in very different contexts, though, such as when discussing employment practices and internal work culture of those companies. In that particular context, I think Microsoft does belong there.
You're repeatedly arguing that Apple employees are prisoners in their jobs because they only work for the 4th or 5th most impressive looking company to have on one's CV instead of the first? Do you not see how ridiculous that sounds?
It's not really as far-fetched as it sounds, although I am exaggerating as I mentioned earlier. Have you ever spoken to people that worked at Apple vs Google? There is quite a difference in mentality.
China is a world on its own. Google sees the writing on the wall, enter China or become FB (talk about a has-been.) Google, FB etc need 20% quarter to quarter growth and Google has pretty much saturated the western world. So it is China...kiss the ring and all. Google is not going to lose market cap because of so called values. They're so 2005
how do you turn a P/E of 21 into needing somewhere between 20% annual growth (your current claim?) and 200% annual growth (your original claim? 20% quarter over quarter.)
I run a web crawling company named Datastreamer where we license data to social media monitoring firms.
We're very white hat... Don't even like to mess around with grey hat areas as we don't want something like the Cambridge Analytica situation coming back to bite us in the ass.
About 1.5 years ago we were contacted by a 3rd party firm which we eventually found out was a cut out for Saudi Arabia.
The deal was at least $350k per year but we never got down to final negotiation. They wanted a LOT of data and also custom support and engineering. It could have easily hit $1M which is a lot of money and would have been a significant percentage of our revenue.
About a month into conversations the questions became a bit disturbing. It was clear to me that they were interested in tracking ethic minorities and trying to track down their physical location.
... you can read between the lines in the RFP.
After finding out what happened to Khashoggi I'm VERY happy about my decision.
They were using this technology to harass him on social media and I'm sure are and were tracking other people.