But... but... the first poster on this article assures us Elon Musk got rid of the cEnSoRsHiP!!!1!!!!

I don't give a shit about movement to the right or left, not right now. I just want basic competence and support for the rule of law, because those are the things we've totally lost under the current GOP. A bit of compassion would be good, too. What I wouldn't give to have Dubya back.

Musk banned journalists and is shadowbanning posts that use transgender terminology (weirdly calling "cis" derogatory). He's also amplifying far right accounts so they drown out centrist and left wing voices.

Meanwhile Twitter, the social network Musk bought and turned into X, banned:

1. A few people who self identified as Nazis or white supremacists.
2. Hamas
3. People running harassment campaigns or who were otherwise blatantly violating the ToS (and then only after a lot of complaints.)
4. Trump, but only after January 6th, because of (legitimate) fears he was going to use Twitter to help with his insurrection.

And that's about it.

Now, if you're a Nazi or white supremacist, or a Hamas terrorist, or you want to run harassment campaigns, or you want to use Twitter to violently overthrow the government, you probably feel that this was "too far" and that somehow this is an affront to you. You probably think that PBS is "woke" too because of Mr Rogers Neighborhood. You are probably not a nice person.

Whereas the rest of us feel our social networks probably shouldn't have people like that in there, but have no objection to marginalized groups talking to one another, or journalists saying things that might offend the world's richest person from time to time. Most of us are dubious about algorithms in the first place, but especially feel our life isn't improved by having far right voices inserted in our feeds, preferring to have sane voices that aren't full of hatred, whether left or right.

But, that's just us. Just do me a favor: Don't pretend your version isn't "censorship" while pretending the version Twitter did was. People joined Twitter. They leave X.

Sure Jan: https://www.reddit.com/media?u...

It was a fucking Nazi salute. Own it, and fuck off.

While the pattern is the same the world has in fact changed a bit. Consumers generally expect things integrated. OSes need to include browsers, it's expected cloud storage to be included (an Apple innovation with iCloud closely followed by Google with Drive), and lets face it Microsoft was completely late to the party for any attempt to integrate an assistant at an OS level, they just slapped AI on it.

I suspect courts would not find these things anti-competitive in today's world. It's the unexpected bullshit that gets found anticompetitive, like Teams bundling with Office. Actually this has been explicitly tried in Europe, where a complaint to the EU commission directed at OneDrive bundling was eventually withdrawn in 2025 after the commission collectively yawned, ... and then proceeded to issue a ruling against Microsoft on Teams.

That is an insultingly accurate stereotype sir!

People seem to be forgetting that Ukraine is still a nation-state. That's how they can defend themselves. A guy in the basement isn't going to be able to do jack shit. First off 99% of those guys will get identified and taken out long before they get any drones built. For the remaining 1% they won't be able to throw enough drones at the problem because they're going to be too busy scrounging up food.

I don't think folks have realized just the scale of poverty that the Epstein class has in store for us. Go look up what it was like living on an American Indian reservation back in the 1800s. Think that. Maybe worse.

That a fine upstanding company like Microsoft would engage in potentially anti-competitive behavior? Perish the thought. Quick fetch me my fainting goats!

On a more serious note elections have consequences. If you like having choices when it comes to software 45 years of zero antitrust law enforcement is one hell of a consequence.

there are few clear mitigations.

Other than fixing your bugs.

Good for browsing and side by side though.

Companies don't care about the quality of your work or your skills. There is a small number of people who have unique and irreplaceable skills. They are a very small number. These are mostly people who are genetic freaks of one's kind or another. People who have amazing recall and focus and can learn incredibly complex mathematics or people who have incredibly good vision and hand-eye coordination who can become surgeons. Things like that.

For literally everything else good enough is always good enough.

Now if companies still competed against each other good enough wouldn't be good enough. Higher quality talent would produce a higher quality product overall and customers would flock to the better company.

We stopped and forcing antitrust law over 40 years ago. You can find the charts showing you the seven companies own basically everything. And those seven companies are owned by a handful of people when you look at who actually owns the stock.

So that gets you enshitification. I don't need to make a good product. If somebody comes along making a better product because they overall have better people I buy that company or I run it out of business. This is what Facebook does. You can look up the company's Facebook has bought and it's a who's who of up-and-coming social media competitors. Amazon did the exact same thing and it's how they became the number one retailer. It wasn't impressive tech it was buying their competitors and being allowed to do it by toothless regulators.

We broke one of the fundamental aspects of capitalism and they are downstream effects. In this case there's drastically less employment in our economy as a result and your wages and mine are substantially lower as a result.

It's a chesterton's fence. Don't pull the fence down if you don't know why it was put up

If there's a seed of truth to the story I suspect they used a quantum magnetometer to locate the transponder signal. It's possible the GPS was spoofed or jammed which means you'd have to triangulate or trilaterate the signal. The things are designed to resist that, as you say. Quantum magnetometers have been used in research settings to improve both sensitivity, especially wide band sensitivity, and directional resolution.

Someone was explaining it to Trump in suitably vague terms and maybe included the example that quantum magnetometers have also been used to detect heart beats without direct contact. Mix and serve.

That was actually my thought. It wasn't until I got to the mention of Twitter than I figured out they didn't mean X11.

I did think switching from X11 to Wayland was a funny thing to post publicly about. And a funny thing for /. to pick up.

I think the history lesson is stop listening to bros who slept through history class saying things like "{X} pulled it off."

I doubt Trump will be remembered for the Iran war. Most American presidents for the last half century have gone and killed a bunch of people in the Middle East. He's much more likely to be remembered for some tariffs and comments about crippling export weapons freeing a bunch of countries from the burden of being American allies.

The compounds of the ruling elite that own all of the capital and AI will be thoroughly shielded against EMP attacks of any kind.

Nobody is coming to save you. That includes mother nature. Although there is a distinct possibility that these idiots will get their hands on nuclear weapons and end our species.