It seems pretty counterproductive for Google to penalize the linked-to website for this, because they don't necessarily have any control over the links. This means that now a good strategy would be to make a bunch of spam links to your competitors' websites and have their rankings go down through no fault of their own. While that would be less effective than having your own go up, it's still useful.
What Google should do is make the links have no effect at all, thus preventing this abuse.
This is tricky. Generally the spammers are doing it because they're paid to do it by someone. Penalizing is the right thing to do. But you raise an interesting point - perhaps an unscrupulous firm would unleash a spambot pointing to their competition, to damage them. I'm not sure of a good way for Google to differentiate, other than your suggestion of ignoring.
Thank you for allowing me to talk myself into a circle. :-)
It's entirely possible that a lot of people don't know what -CURRENT really means if they're new to FreeBSD. They could be on 10.1 and think that that means that they're on -CURRENT, and thus affected by this bug, but they're not.
Not right. If the US was peaceful, there wouldn't be much of an argument for developing nuclear weapons, but the US is the most aggressive nation in the world, and nuclear weapons are the only thing that give them pause. The actions of the US since the end of World War II - invading other nations at will, interfering in their internal affairs, starting secret wars - give legitimacy to nations who want to develop nuclear weapons for their own defense. Nuclear weapons bring safety from you.
As far as superpowers in history go, the United States post WWII is downright benevolent. The other contenders in recent memory being: the Soviet Union, the British Empire, Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, the French Empire, the Italian Empire, Austria-Hungary, and so on and so forth.
Once the United States starts claiming pieces of South America and Arabia as their sovereign territory you can start shouting about Iran's self defense. The United States is far from perfect, and all the criticisms you leveled are completely true. But be honest about the situation. The only thing that Iran's government is protecting by developing nuclear weapons is their own corrupt regime and their influence in the middle east.
Why run an overt colony system when you can achieve the same control by destabilizing existing governments?
The CIA is known for its activities in countries like, gee, Iran, where they overthrew the existing DEMOCRATICALLY elected government and installed a monarch instead.
Or see the case of Guatemala, where on the advice of businessmen the democratic government was overthrown on charges of 'communism' with lots of help from the US.
Yeah, iranians screwed up when they took US embassy hostages. It's a fact (too lazy to put references) that that embassy was actively messing with the iranian state (I would like to see how US would react if some foreign embassy did same intensity stuff in US) and that revolution was overthrowing corrupt dictator directly installed by UK & US. They should just politely kicked them out of country, and not giving US administration more cannon fodder.
Without those hostages situation, right now Iran might have been on par with Dubai/Abu Dhabi or similar. They have the richness in oil & gas. Been there backpacking last year, people are amazingly, no AMAZINGLY friendly and nice. One of best trips of my life. They have their issues, some rather big ones, but so does other places.
The CIA went into foreign countries and purposely destabilized them and started civil wars. It continues to this day: see the Arab Spring. The Soviet Union's actions were quite tame by comparison.
For every Soviet or Russian invasion, there's a corresponding US one that is just as bad: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the US interferes with the internal politics of many more nations to boot. See Pinochet in Chile, the Shah in Iran (although the British had a big part in that too). Russia threatens its immediate neighbors, yes. But at least they oppose the US. Think they are all bad? They keep Snowden safe and sound. The US threatens any nation in the world that doesn't fall into line. When they thought Snowden was on board an official government aircraft, they had their cronies in Europe force it down in violation of international law. Think that the European nations make their own decisions? Think again.
This is the threat that the US poses to the world, and most of the world is already under their control. Iran isn't, so they are threatened with war. They've been threatened with war since Bush's idiotic "Axis of Evil" speech. Since before that. You think they don't have the right to try to defend themselves? To prevent that? Nuclear weapons, in this world, bring freedom. See how North Korea has never been invaded. See how the US knows better than to engage Russia in outright conflict. Nations that have nuclear weapons can have actual independence.
With the Trans-Pacific Partnership, they are trying to force their laws onto the entire world, and that is just one of many such agreements. Canada is already a puppet state of the US. The current state of the world is that no nation can try to free themselves of US influence without getting an internal revolution or even an outright invasion, and that is a much bigger threat than Russia is, or China, or Iran, or anyone.
not that I don't agree with all you say but... having lived under outright occupation by vast amounts of russian forces (former czechoslovakia), seeing how lack of freedom of speech, travel and... well just lack of freedom, centrally planned everything and the rest of it screws up entire generation of people, I would still opt for US.
But that's the thing, that goes thought topics here too - US stepped down, and is continuing downwards, from "that hunky good friend of yours that you don't piss off and do what he says, and all is more than OK, otherwise he'll steal your lunch and breaks your leg" to simply lesser of all evils... BRAVO :(
As far as superpowers in history go, the United States post WWII is downright benevolent
I'm not sure the citizens of Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Uruguay, Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, D.R., Honduras, Panama, the Philippines, Vietnam, or any of the other sovereign nations the US has invaded, would agree with this statement.
Sorry, please remind me of when the US invaded Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, or Chile?
Our involvement in Vietnam was in fact, at the time, conducted with the full cooperation of a sovereign country, the Republic of South Vietnam. To be fair, US forces definitely did violate the sovereignty of Laos and Cambodia during that conflict.
I believe I understand your general point here, but can we at least get basic facts right when we have these discussions?
Just because the US doesn't invade by name, doesn't mean they aren't involved, often at a fundamental level. Look a Chile; Nixon gave the orders and supplied to weapons and CIA support behind the coup that brought Pinochet into power. 3,000 people were killed and 200,000 were exiled during his reign. The US has always tried to get its way by pulling strings behind the curtain, where public awareness is absent.
> The U.S. provided material support to the military regime after the coup, although criticizing it in public. A document released by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 2000, titled "CIA Activities in Chile", revealed that the CIA actively supported the military junta after the overthrow of Allende and that it made many of Pinochet's officers into paid contacts of the CIA or U.S. military, even though some were known to be involved in human rights abuses.
Nowadays invasions aren't explicit like in colonial times (where every superpower raced to colonize as much as possible), but there is definitely covert "warfare" going on.
Thanks for asking! Argentina: 1890. Chile: 1891, plus direct support for the 1973 coup. Sorry about Paraguay and Brazil, US merely engineered and directly advised murderous corrupt dictatorships. Invasions however also include Bolivia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Grenada, Haiti, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela.
Regarding South Vietnam, does "full cooperation" include assassination of their president in 1963?
The examples you cited for Argentina and Chile were -- in both cases -- the US sending a landing party of Marines to defend the embassy grounds during political unrest. That's an "invasion"? OK....
Replace US with Russia and the comment still fits perfectly. I don't disagree with much of what you say, but there are others who are just as bad or worse, just on a much smaller scale
This statement is the most upvoted piece of propaganda I've ever seen on Hacker News. I think the shills that Greenwald told us all about are all over HN too.
There's no point in praising anything the NSA does unless you are perfectly happy with them destroying security for the entire world and spying on everybody at all. The NSA has the power to blackmail politicians and run the country. They lied to congress. They are a completely rogue agency. And you praise them!
You need to pick your battles. Nobody is going to listen to your serious concerns about NSA overreach if you're freaking out any time the NSA does anything at all. If you hope to rein in the NSA, impose real oversight, and limit its power, you're going to have to start by acknowledging that "shut down all US intelligence agencies" is not a real policy proposal and not everyone who thinks the NSA has some legitimate role to play in US security is a paid government shill.
Yep, it is exactly the same rhetoric, word for word as used in other NSA-praising comments on HN. Posted by a 1-year old account that had exactly 1 comment in their history until today.
It's a shame HN doesn't auto-minimize the sub-comments once they get to a certain size and depth to make it easier to view other OPs. I often find that the first comment dominates the tone of the discussion about an article making it an easy target for astroturfing campaigns like this one.
To your point, I read the OP and thought to myself that it seemed very familiar, I then checked the details on the user account and feel reasonably confident in thinking that it is a targeted attack. It's just sad that it worked so well.
That's not exactly the same wording, and there are many expressions of the same sentiment in different words. Why insist on believing that this is some nefarious conspiracy rather than the simpler explanation that some - perhaps even many - people sincerely believe that it's acceptable for governments to perform espionage?
It's not propaganda, it's a reasonable observation about the NSA's duties, and it's not meant to tell the whole story. The conspiracy types need to tone down a bit so that a thought-out and nuanced discussion can take place. You're just ranting and throwing Alex Jones and Greenwald buzzwords around, disabling any real insight.
But the pro-government shills ARE here. That's not paranoia, that's fact, unless you think they'd target Reddit only for some reason, which makes no sense. So why can't we talk about them? If we don't face up to the reality of this kind of propaganda, we won't be able to have proper discussions about important topics like this one.
As the other responder to me pointed out, this account had ONE post to its name almost a year ago before the post I responded to today. I don't think they got their money's worth out of this one due to how easy it was to spot, but all the other ones upvoting it are earning their pay.
You think I am accusing him of being a shill because I don't agree with him? Have you seen his posting history? That's pretty much the definition of a shill who isn't trying very hard. Much more dangerous are the ones who actually make normal posts on stories throughout the year and only turn on the propaganda when the discussion turns to the NSA and government activities. Those ones you can't detect.
I don't understand why you're more upset with me for pointing out propaganda than the propaganda machine itself.
Because your evidence that yeahyeah is a shill is circumstantial at best, and sowing doubt by invoking an intangible enemy within whose only observable property is disagreement with some orthodoxy is itself blatant propagandism.
And even a cursory glance throughout this thread would reveal that it isn't exactly brimming over with warm and fuzzy feelings about the US, so I don't know what it is you're worried about. This pervasive shilling you claim is happening here doesn't seem to be working.
You may be right. You may very well be right. But you're not accomplishing anything except signaling to people that if they think too hard about certain points of view, then they're just being stooges. You can argue against it without stooping to the same tactics you're accusing others of.
I'm not attacking someone just because of his opinion, nor am I advocating that. I'm calling out a shill. Look at the facts. One post before today. A pro-NSA post that reads like rhetoric. This post is voted up to the very top comment of the discussion, DESPITE the lack of "warm and fuzzy feelings about the US". Now, in a conversation where the sentiment is so anti-NSA, why do you think this has so many upvotes? That's evidence of rigged voting. That he has failed to sway opinion here does not at all mean that he isn't a shill.
That's enough evidence to convict.
Look, here's an article where you can start reading about these kind of psyops: http://ultraculture.org/blog/2014/02/26/reddit-shills-tried-... Discussion forums like this one need to be aware of this sort of thing going on. We have to talk about it. We have to try and point out people whose job it is to steer conversations to their liking. It is the right of a free people to associate and freely converse with their peers and make up their own minds free of malicious interference and cointelpro. If government agents actively manipulate public opinion in favor of them, and the public opinion is different from what it otherwise would be, then there is no democracy. That is wrong.
What can we do, when there's no proof? We can use our brains and examine the evidence. We can call out obvious shills to try and stem the tide. That is what I am advocating for. We should point out obvious shills so that discussions have more of a chance at reaching their natural conclusions. You seem to be advocating that we do nothing at all, and that is what I disagree with.
And here I just figured folks would think it was a throwaway account that somebody used to avoid having paranoid internet trolls dig into their online presence. Seemed like such a good cover, too.
>You seem to be advocating that we do nothing at all, and that is what I disagree with.
Not at all. I'm only suggesting that what you're doing is counterproductive.
> Now, in a conversation where the sentiment is so anti-NSA, why do you think this has so many upvotes? That's evidence of rigged voting.
It might be. But we don't actually know how HN's voting algorithm works (secret sauce), and we do know for a fact that the HN staff will manipulate vote gravity in order to make the content of a thread more accurately reflect 'quality'. So it's not exactly ironclad evidence of government vote rigging, when Hacker News is a black box which is rigged by design.
It's also not out of the realm of possibility that more people who agree with yeahyeah's point of view have upvoted him than people have upvoted other threads. And this is a long thread, so the effect of commenting and upvoting throughout may be cumulative. And some comments in other threads have been downvoted into near oblivion.
>If government agents actively manipulate public opinion in favor of them, and the public opinion is different from what it otherwise would be, then there is no democracy. That is wrong.
Actually, I would argue that is democracy working as intended. The government has the right to present its point of view and try to convince people to agree with it - that is literally how democracy is supposed to work. The government may be trying to 'actively manipulate public opinion in their favor,' but on a discussion forum, so is everyone else. That's the point of a forum, and it's especially true on HN, where die-hard capitalists and anarchists and everyone in between all fight for the intellectual high ground. The government doesn't actually have some kind of magic that makes people believe them, theirs is just one more voice in the herd.
>What can we do, when there's no proof? We can use our brains and examine the evidence. We can call out obvious shills to try and stem the tide.
I think a more effective countermeasure would be to examine the evidence of the arguments presented and call out lies when you encounter them. Attack the comment, not the commenter, particularly since you're never going to have more than suspicion and confirmation bias as evidence.
> It might be. But we don't actually know how HN's voting algorithm works (secret sauce), and we do know for a fact that the HN staff will manipulate vote gravity in order to make the content of a thread more accurately reflect 'quality'. So it's not exactly ironclad evidence of government vote rigging, when Hacker News is a black box which is rigged by design.
> It's also not out of the realm of possibility that more people who agree with yeahyeah's point of view have upvoted him than people have upvoted other threads. And this is a long thread, so the effect of commenting and upvoting throughout may be cumulative. And some comments in other threads have been downvoted into near oblivion.
So because there's no absolute proof, he's not a shill. How about deciding what's more likely? What is more likely: that this post was voted to the top despite lack of support in the thread, or that a circle of upvoters voted it up? Remember, it is a LOT easier to hit that upvote button than to make an actual contribution to the discussion, so you would expect to find that a ring of shills would operate in that fashion. One posts, as that takes actual thought and effort, and the rest upvote.
> Actually, I would argue that is democracy working as intended. The government has the right to present its point of view and try to convince people to agree with it - that is literally how democracy is supposed to work
If they want to convince people of their point of view, then why can't they do it legitimately?
Do you somehow think that this sort of behavior isn't subversive? That it doesn't work? And that makes it okay for the government to manipulate public opinion in this way?
It's okay. I can't believe you think that. There is one hell of a difference between presenting your own point of view and having thousands of fake people presenting the views that they are paid to.
> I think a more effective countermeasure would be to examine the evidence of the arguments presented and call out lies when you encounter them. Attack the comment, not the commenter, particularly since you're never going to have more than suspicion and confirmation bias as evidence.
No. Doing both is much more effective. Otherwise they control the first posts, they make a sense of a false consensus in their favour, and these things really can influence how people think. Don't believe me? Research it yourself.
I would much rather people make up their own minds instead of being tricked into thinking what the government wants them to. I still find it hard to believe that I live in a world where the latter is what actually happens.
>What is more likely: that this post was voted to the top despite lack of support in the thread, or that a circle of upvoters voted it up?
You're assuming those are the only two credible possibilities. This thread could also be at the top because of the cumulative lack of upvotes, or the weight of downvotes (which have been biased to count more compared to upvotes), in other threads. Or because of the effect of upvotes on individual posts, or its relative length compared to the others. I think it's too complex and opaque a system to read so definitively, particularly given the effort put into it by the staff to prevent exactly the sort of gaming you're talking about.
Although, yes, given those two scenarios specifically, the 'circle of upvoters' is the more plausible.
>If they want to convince people of their point of view, then why can't they do it legitimately?
That's the problem - what you're calling out as evidence of illegitimate actions could just as well be legitimate. Your evidence is that people apparently agree with and voted up yeahyeah, and that yeahyeah's account seemed insufficiently 'real'. Have you taken into account the possibility that people might actually agree with the post?
>Doing both is much more effective. Otherwise they control the first posts, they make a sense of a false consensus in their favour, and these things really can influence how people think. Don't believe me? Research it yourself.
But I have a hard time believing that people are that malleable, or that such a simple tactic could be so effective. Although there is perhaps a good argument to be made against karma-based systems being in any way meritocratic, 'consensus' on Hacker News doesn't really count for much.
Just for giggles, I'll let you reply to yourself on this one:
> You seem to think it's a good idea to summarily believe accusations with no evidence and no attempt to involve the legal system and convict someone in the court of public opinion just because somebody said something.
Me thinks you managed to derail the conversation to a much greater degree than yeahyeah ever could. Saying this as someone who likes voluntaryism but acknowledges that it might be an idealist view that is incompatible with many hidden variables of the real world, I acknowledge that three-letter agencies might have a place in this world. Yeahyeah just pointed this out. He didn't prevent you from creating good counterarguments. He made a very valid point, that unlike dragnet surveillance of snowden this revelation is more targeted, and invited you to a discussion of whether it has a right place in this world. You on the other had shat across the screen with tangential accusations. Me thinks you are the shill.
> There's no point in praising anything the NSA does unless you are perfectly happy with them destroying security for the entire world and spying on everybody at all.
That is a ridiculously absolutist statement. Do you really stand by this? It's not possible that some things the NSA does are good and beneficial, because other aspects of that organisation are questionable?
I'm sorry, but your entire post comes off as very partisan - and quoting Greenwald plays into this as well. Hell, I am left-leaning by nature, but I've had to unfollow him on twitter recently, as he portrays everything in the worst, most dramatic light possible. Don't get caught up on the hate train.
Any sort of praise or tacit approval for the NSA reduces people's anger towards them. Any reduction of anger towards them helps breed complacency. This is why they would make a post like this at all. People need to be mad at them in order to want change badly enough.
This is a big story about cyberespionage. It comes out of Kaspersky Labs, a Russian company and hardly a front for the NSA. It would be surprising if the story _didn't_ make the front page, and it would be surprising to me if in a forum which prides itself on serious discussion no one would make the comment that heads this thread.
That such a comment would be the most popular suggests nothing about psyops involvement unless you assume such an opinion doesn't exist in the theater in which the conversation takes place. The suggestion of such manipulation is useless without evidence, and is therefore not an actionable accusation. It assumes by default bad faith on the part of those who disagree with you and makes actual discussion difficult or impossible.
Furthermore, such an accusation is as much of a sideshow as any manipulation you're alleging.
If, rather than making wild assumptions, you made actual counter-arguments (as many are doing above), you might convince others of what you believe to be true, and you might bring those who once disagreed with you to join in the fight on your side.
A much better idea than that is to actually imprison all the top level executives of the company if their company commits a crime that would get an individual thrown in prison.
I can't tell if you're defending this line of thought or making fun of it, but the term "regular language" has a specific mathematical meaning and perverting it to include how Perl uses the term is wrong, plain and simple.
I was, in fact, slightly mocking both the argument and the related argument that people who use sloppy language like to bring out in favor of using words to mean whatever they like. I certainly agree that words with precise meanings are important to use correctly.
Celebrating that is a recipe for resting on your laurels and allowing it to continue. There is nothing to celebrate here. You should be mad as hell and doing something about it.
Not every opportunity is great for everyone; people with families generally don't like to travel, that doesn't mean that a job that entails travel is a bad one.
Having a family is clearly a choice. And having 3 kids is very different from having 1. These people will always have less material goods and have a harder time scraping by than someone with no dependants when the cost of living is high. This is true of any industry in any expensive area, it's what you should be expecting if you have kids.
In any case, the original comment is wrong about housing prices, you get shafted when you try to live right in the heart of SF, pretty much everyone with a family is going to have to commute from somewhere, you can still get comparatively cheap 3 bedroom houses in san jose, and there's still plenty of tech companies with offices in the south bay.
> If it becomes widespread, the choices are to support DRM or be locked out of the web.
Or use a free and open source browser that doesn't implement it. If this is something people want to take a principled stance against, those browsers will doubtlessly continue to exist.
Unless you're referring the content access. That's a general trend with technology that likely won't be stopped. If you choose not to use certain technologies, it's unsurprising that you won't be granted access to certain things.
Not being able to play protected content (which you couldn't in the first place without installing Flash or another proprietary plugin) is a far cry from being locked out of the web.
What Google should do is make the links have no effect at all, thus preventing this abuse.