Taking quotes out of context like that is just appalling

How is it out of context? Would you care to provide the missing context that makes her comments seem more reasonable? I picked that site because it was one of the first hits on Google for the phrase you claimed was "made up shit" - I have no idea who the person who made the video is. It just happens to contain her saying it.

"Women are being institutionally oppressed all the time, in nearly every facet of our lives" ..... I can't imagine why you think the statement is odd or unusual.

Because it's obviously false, highly inflammatory garbage that no rational person would ever say. Women are not being "institutionally oppressed" in any sense of the term, and this kind of nonsense is exactly why prominent feminists attract so much negative attention. The fact that some of them actually debate this idea just goes to show how disconnected from reality they have become.

Go back a few hundred years when women couldn't vote, couldn't work in many professions and were basically owned by their husbands. That was institutional oppression.

Here is a hint: there is feminist critique of every art form. If you don't like it, you don't have to read it or pay any attention to it.

I don't read it, which is why I had to search for the quote to see if your accusation that epyT-R was making things up was true. Obviously you don't read this stuff either, otherwise you wouldn't have made yourself look foolish by assuming that quoting Anita S's extremism was "making shit up".

I was responding to your post that read:

I doubt if anyone will get banned and be surprised about it

and I argued that people will be surprised because the policies will inevitably be arbitrary and rather biased. The surprising way the UK police enforce very very similar rules on Twitter users as Twitter now wants to enforce itself is highly relevant to that point.

You seem to think I said Twitter shouldn't be allowed to do this, or some other argument about ownership of private spaces. I didn't mention it, though.

This is an obvious straw man

No, a straw man would be where I claim you argued something you didn't, and then knocked down that non-argument. You straw manned me when you said "Twitter are allowed to do this regardless of what you think" - that's a response to something I never said. Obviously they're allowed to do it. The question is whether it's a good idea or not, and what the consequences will be.

I think the consequence is very likely to be that they tolerate abusive and threatening tweets if they come from particular kinds of people or support various kinds of political positions, and crack down hard on ideas and opinions they/the moderators don't like under the guise of fighting "abuse".

I'd say 99% of people I've met in my life can tell what hate speech is when they read it.

This is the "appeal to the reasonable man" approach. It's quite common in law. Basically punts the decision to a randomly selected judge who is just trusted to be reasonable.

The problem is that the people deciding what reasonable means are of course never a perfect cross section of society at large. In the UK there have been cases where e.g. someone posted to Facebook that he hated British soldiers and he hoped they would go to die and go to hell because of all the muslims they killed.

This was interpreted as being literal hate speech. He was arrested, charged with "a racially aggravated public order offense" and then found guilty of sending a "grossly offensive communication" and sentenced to community service. The police explained, "he didn’t make his point very well and that is why he has landed himself in bother".

Most likely this post would violate Twitters policies (if Twitter allowed such a long tweet).

Now what about posts like these? What about tweets that threaten "the terrorists" with death? Do you seriously think Twitter, an American company, is going to start shutting down these sorts of accounts? What about movie studios tweeting quotes from American Sniper to promote it?

I am seriously skeptical. Most likely it will be like every other attempt to do this I've seen - what is or isn't threatening or abusive will depend entirely on the world view of the people doing the moderation and how famous/politically connected the tweeters are. It won't ever attempt to be even handed.

Are you just making this shit up?

Why not Google it and find out? That's what I did - took 10 seconds. That is a quote from Anita Sarkeesian, in this video where she says (apparently without irony) that "Women are being institutionally oppressed all the time, in nearly every facet of our lives" followed by the quote about porno fantasy, which is apparently about the game Bayonetta.

You should spend some time reading the comments section of the Guardian before being so sure about this. The Guardian has a policy that you cannot post comments that insult or offend the journalists. Because, you know, that'd result in a hostile and threatening environment, or whatever.

The result is that comments which point out bias, or even factually inaccurate statements, have a habit of being rapidly deleted. Because implying that a journalist has an agenda or might not have done proper journalism could be offensive, you see! I've observed multiple times comments that would be +5 Insightful here on Slashdot being erased within minutes, thanks to their unbelievably vague and broad set of "community standards".

Or take a look at the totalitarian way the UK police are attempting to make Facebook and Twitter non-offensive. Someone posted on Facebook that they thought soldiers might (gasp) have personal moral culpability for signing up to fight in Afghanistan or Iraq and killing people. The mother of a soldier saw the post, was offended, reported it to the police and the guy ended up being sentenced to community service. Only because he repented his heresy of course. If he hadn't he'd have been tossed in jail. Now is the idea that soldiers are responsible for their actions really so offensive? Of course not! That was the core legal basis of the Nuremburg trials: "I was just following orders" is not a defence.

If Twitter decides that any threatening or harmful tweet is to be erased, half of Twitter could end up being thrown out. It's too bad their new CEO is on the warpath about this. People who received threatening tweets or whatever, could always just log off and stop seeing them.

Fwiw I love the new maps. The new map updates itself as you search and lot more of the screen is used by the map. Plus it's got a version of Google earth that loads instantly which is pretty nice. But people who like the new thing rarely yell about it.

We wish you luck, but if it breaks, dont come crying to us over it.

The history of mobile operating systems shows that your preferred strategy is a losing strategy. Users DO come crying over it, and developers cry twice as much. J2ME was basically Android 0.1 and took this approach - it was just a bunch of API specs and then phone vendors could license different implementations, write their own, etc.

J2ME sucked. I know this because I tried to write apps for it. Literally every freaking phone had its own unique combination of stupid, obvious bugs that rendered key APIs unusable without enormous piles of hacks. J2ME developers theoretically wrote Java, but often used a C style macro preprocessor because so many hacks required different source code to handle.

Android learned from J2ME and took a different approach - one single reference implementation that everyone builds off and is not pluggable except in very small, tightly controlled ways. You can modify the reference implementation to your hearts content unless you want access to the Play Store, in which case you have to pass the "Compatibility Test Suite" for core OS functionality, and for some other kinds of things that are impossible to unit test (e.g. Maps quality), agree to ship the Google implementation. This saves developers from J2ME hell making users and developers happy, and still lets manufacturers tweak things that aren't covered by the CTS, like reskinning things.

I see no evidence the EU has any understanding of the delicate balancing act Android represents, or the history of mobile phone operating systems. I fear this will be yet another bull-in-china-shop scenario. On the other hand, if Google are doing things like what Microsoft used to do by saying "if you sell any Google-services phone you cannot sell any non-Google-services phone" then that'd be a problem that is correctable without hurting developers.

That someday will be when Intel and AMD move to Europe or Asia or when somebody comes up with a CPU good enough to unseat x86 as the architecture of choice.

I guess you missed the fact that the architecture of choice for the majority of the worlds computers is ARM.

Fast chips for nuclear simulations? Yep, Intel have the edge there ..... I guess. I'm somewhat surprised that stuff isn't better run on GPUs to be honest, but whatever. OK, so their simulations take 20% longer to run. BFD?

This isn't about spying its about compliance with records requests and privacy laws.

Two sides of the same coin, isn't it? The government wants data about foreigners, from a foreign place. They want, in short, to spy. Their chosen method of attack is to pressure people in the USA who happen to have access to that data, as opposed to e.g. placing a mole inside a foreign organisation, but the tactic used does not change the goal of the mission.

EU has all kinds of (frankly downright crazy) privacy laws around email

EU privacy regulators don't have a great reputation I agree, but perhaps once the most productive parts of America have been ruled for decades by a totalitarian communist state that has informers in every street, you might not see the rules as all that crazy.

Or just use Chrome. It does its own revocation stuff on top of the OS root stores. This only really affects users of Safari and Mail.app.

Plain DNS is useless, a MITM could fake the results.

DNSSEC just replaces a competitive market of certificate authorities with a different, less competitive system of new CA's called registrars. It's hardly a positive.

A lot of people hear "some company I never heard of can sign for my site" and immediately conclude the whole system is broken. But that's ridiculous. Why should people be locked into one or two CAs based on where they are in the world? I live in Switzerland. There is a local CA called SwissSign. Like everything Switzerland their EV certificates are more than double the price of what DigiCert charges (based in Utah). So I go to a foreign CA and get my cheaper certs. That's called globalisation.

Likewise, if someone in America wants to pay a Belgian CA for a certificate for whatever reason, why shouldn't they?

He was heading for Ecuador which is a democracy. The USA stranded him in Russia by revoking his passport whilst he was trying to transfer flights. So, no.

I think John Oliver did an excellent job of educating Snowden on how to speak.

Right. Snowden, for all his bravery and balls of steel, has a speaking style that doesn't connect with the man on the street. Asked simple questions he gives long, complex answers that are full of nuance, appeals to the Constitution and attempts to be reasonable. If I knew every word I uttered could one day play a part in deciding my freedom I'd speak pretty damn carefully too, so maybe he's like that in "real life" and maybe he's not. But Oliver forced him to give short answers in laymans terms. I hope ES remembers.

It's a specific case of a more general problem though. The civil rights movement has really struggled to give clear explanations for why people should care. The best explanation is We should all have something to hide by Moxie Marlinspike. He sums up arguments I was developing myself before I found that blog post. Sure, the man on the street feels he is boring and the world of political intrigue is far away from his life. So talk about how this stuff affects issues like gays going to jail (lots of people have gay friends), or how marijuana could never be legalised if there was perfect enforcement of anti-drug laws (which is enabled by this type of surveillance). Heck, for conservative parents who might find both issues irrelevant, point out that their darling teenagers are very likely to be guilty of producing and distributing child pornography. All it takes is for them to send a nude selfie to their new boyfriend/girlfriend between the years of 16-18 and they're guilty of sex crimes. Lots and lots of people either have had teenage children or will have.

No, WebKit already traces through C++ for the DOM GC. Oilpan is a project to make it use GC for *all* Blink objects including objects not exposed to the DOM at all. Read the design doc to learn more.

Um, I did work at Google for quite some years, and given the vast size of their C++ codebase the chances of it all being ported to Go any time this decade is zero. And for what it's worth I keep hearing from people who still work there that they're desperately trying to avoid being forced to use Go. It's hardly a slam dunk language decision.