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This seems like it would cause the https://xkcd.com/989/ effect.

That's a parody/satire account.


That doesn't solve it. If the hardware itself is backdoored, none of those other things being open source will save you.

tl;dr: PayPal support doesn't understand and can't be convinced that gmail.com email addresses that differ only in "."s belong to the same account.

> I use a 5 year old phone

I don't, because I care about security updates, and I don't want to have to choose between a highly degraded battery and giving up waterproofing.

> an 11 year old car

Crash safety has improved by leaps and bounds in recent years. I suspect you're more likely to be killed in a car accident that you wouldn't be in a new car, than to be killed by one of the industries that California bans.

> think the US Navy could function just fine with a lot less budget and warships

If a powerful adversary goes to war with us, then we'd want a lot more, and only increasing then would be too late, because we'd lose the war first.


Vote out every single politician who supports this. If you can't successfully primary them, that means you might have to vote for someone of your non-preferred political party in the general.

except there are only two parties and both want this (when they are in power, otherwise they’ll use it to try and get elected and then proceed with implementing it)

How is that a bad thing? Our goal should be to maximize the amount of collateral damage that any censorship causes, with the ideal case being that the only two choices available to the censors are "no censorship at all" or "completely air gap yourself like North Korea".


That extreme centralization makes the single choke-point vulnerable to all kinds of other problems. The web is supposed to be decentralized and distributed.


I agree with you on the technical premise, but I think the point made was that the bigger the disruption, the greater the backlash and swift reversal, in ideal theory at least.


In theory. It’s strange to argue about hypothetical issues with something currently defending against actual problems. One battle at a time.


I'd hardly call decentralization a "hypothetical" issue: we've already seen governments are willing to issue gag orders so that we can't even find out what they're doing inside major companies. That's clearly a lot easier to do when there's a single central point of control.

If there's a single central point of control, then that also means an outage takes everything offline, instead of just 1-2 tools. That also makes it a bigger target for attackers.


It doesn't even need to be an attacker - CloudFlare themselves have managed to take down impressive portions of the internet more times than should be accepted just this year.


So do you apply the same logic for measures gov/Apple/etc put out about on-device scanning and e2e messaging stuff? It's always "hypothetical" until it hits the fan.


Sure, I agree there are bad things about extreme centralization. I'm just saying that the increased collateral damage of censorship is a silver lining of it, not one of the bad things about it.


> we are unable to reverse the suspension

I hate when companies say "unable" when they mean "unwilling". Google's statement is a lie because it's neither impossible nor illegal for them to change or rescind their policy, or give users an exception to it.


It's worse than that. Google will ban you just because someone you've previously worked with has gone onto do something they don't like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30855065 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28730283


No, if you did that, they'd start by saying "hey, stop that", not jump immediately to "you're banned from every Golden Corral location for the rest of your life".


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