A thing working properly is not the end of moral criteria. To make an extreme allegory, you would hopefully not fail to see the problem with a government using chemical weapons against peaceful protesters simply because the poison gas was working as designed. What's being criticized is not the effectiveness of the recommendation engine at making accurate recommendations, but the unintended consequences of such a thing in the context of a world that largely exists outside the heads of software developers.

A big problem I have with streaming service silos is they each present their own (bad) UI and search space. So if there's a show I want to watch, it's quite difficult to figure out which of the services will have it other than to go to each Roku app, find its search screen, type in the query one letter at a time into the on-screen keyboard, find out the show isn't there, and repeat until I've exhausted all my options and, maybe, resort to just finding a torrent and having it in less time than that just took.

You can search the web but "which streaming service is show X on" is a surprisingly difficult query. At one point I investigated starting a website that automatically cataloged this information. Turns out these services tend not to have a usable API, and also tend to go out of their way to make screen scraping difficult as well.

Starts to make possessing your own digital media library more appealing, not just to avoid the silos, but to have a sane user experience.

It's really incredible how quickly a product developed in the US, by a US-based company, to sell to US-based culture, automatically gets attributed to China. Almost like the US is quite sophisticated at directing the national narrative such that even our own output is reattributed to our global rivals in less time it takes to think a thought. And if Slashdot moderation points mean anything, this happens to applause!

Maybe Mastodon will see another surge as a result. One of the downsides of Mastodon was the lack of influential people to dunk on. If Mike Huckabee is able to simply hide every reply reminding him of his son's canicide then Twitter loses a big part of its appeal.

This can all be looked up readily if youâ(TM)re skeptical, itâ(TM)s not secret. Presumably you have internet access.

And of course it got modded as a Troll. This site has gotten more and more reactionary over the last ~5 years.

Elliot Abrams, the recently named special envoy to Venezuela, has a past of using "aid" shipments to smuggle weapons into countries south of the border, weapons later used to massacre countless civilians, and then lying about it in testimony. No government in its right mind would allow such a shipment. The Red Cross and UN have both decried this maneuver by the US as a political stunt. And Venezuela is in fact currently accepting aid, just not from countries which have a record of both using aid as a Trojan horse for contraband and invading countries after dubiously declaring their governments to be illegitimate.

But why should I expect any of this information to be in a Slashdot summary.

Have you ever heard of the NSA

I use DDG as my default search engine everywhere, as for the last year I have been taking steps to de-Google my digital life as much as I can. That said, I can vouch that I end up falling back to the `g!` modifier to get Google results far more often than I would like. DDG is great, and I encourage everyone to use the best alternatives to Google's products available, but DDG search results definitely have room for improvement.

Came here to say this. As a typical US citizen, if some government is going to have access to my data, why wouldn't I prefer one that doesn't have jurisdiction where I live? On the other hand, a US company would obviously prefer the US government have their data, because the US government is generally interested in maintaining and extending the influence of US enterprise abroad; which isn't to say that the state wouldn't misuse the data (perhaps sharing it with domestic competitors in backroom deals?), but you'd be far less likely to suddenly have foreign competitors suddenly pop up with your trade secrets fully developed.

Too busy pursuing their mission outside the mission itself and the bounds of constitutional practice.

That said, I have trouble believing this, or really any offer of information to the public from government agencies. Sounds like a honeypot, or a false reveal of vulnerability. Who trusts any of them at face value?

All these Slashdot commenters jumping in front of this story like it's a bullet, just giddy to defend the international megacorp. I'm sure Bezos is very grateful for the free service.

They got me.

Surely you're just as indignant about the existence of KeyWiki, where my name is on a list and where some of my friends have full pages dedicated to profiling them.

*someone who has never heard of KeyWiki, where my name can be found on a list and where I have friends with full pages dedicated to profiling them and their political activities*