This article doesn't relate to spam prevention as far as I can tell.
The author is concerned that content which would be valuable to the 'tech-scene' by virtue of demonstrable ability to gain traction quickly is being suppressed due to site owners wanting to avoid damaging their investments.
I once had a flatmate who worked in IT at MIT at the time that happened. I don't remember the details, but it was a sad fluke that the feds even got involved - something like it was reported at the wrong time of day/when the person who should have got it was off-shift, or the feds happened to be doing something with the state police when the report came in and wanted to make a big news splash.
Whole thing was incredibly fucked up.
Interesting to see how much more thorough the Wikipedia page is now.
Stepping aside the fact that I think most everyone here is playing fast-and-loose with the “slave” terminology here… Why do you feel prisoners doing low wage labor to be wrong?
Practically everyone in human history since the dawn of time has had to go out and produce something of value. Why, all of a sudden, should a murderer or rapist get to sit on their ass and consume what we all produce? I find nothing questionable about a humble job for them at all.
1. Why should they be restricted to ludicrously low wages? If they're producing something of value, they should be compensated. Not only is it morally wrong to, you know, enslave people, on a more practical level it would be very helpful for people who are leaving prison after serving their sentence to actually have some money saved up, so they have better opportunities, to avoid recidivism.
2. The reason they can sit on their ass and consume what they produce is that they effectively become wards of the state. They're still human beings, and if we have decided to incarcerate them, we become responsible for them, and they still have rights as human beings.
A humble job is fine; I'm not saying they should be sitting in an aeron chair bullshitting on Slack for 8 hours a day. But slavery for pennies on the hour is wrong.
> Most people never think twice about the random mix of letters and numbers the DMV assigns them.
I started thinking about it when someone parked next to me in a nearly-identical model - same brand, year, etc, the only difference was some roof accessory - and a nearly identical license plate. (Think ABC D12 and ABC E12). I started trying to open their car door, and was confused until I noticed some things in their front seat that were clearly not ours.
Later that week, I was shopping around for car tires, and saw that some shop - PepBoys or something - let you punch in your license plate and let you know what kind of tires you need, and that their API response included the car make and model. I thought about poking around it, and seeing if there was a pattern to the way my state assigned license plates, but never got around to it.
(They live in town, too, and I've seen where they park. I should go introduce myself to our car twin.)
Had two GM 3500 cargo vans, one a 2002 Chevy Express, the other a 2001 GMC Savannah. Same vehicle different badges. Noticed the keys were a bit similar and found that the Chevy key could in fact unlock the GMC with some wiggling but not the other way around. It did not work in the ignition lock.
Yes. For ICE cars I can just buy older cars. _Some_ modern ICE cars avoid this. As recently as 2024 the Nissan Frontier base model has no cellular modem, and also only has one small screen but otherwise has physical buttons and physical gauges.
The Slate would be the only EV coming out that avoids this problem, which combined with the price is one of the reasons I'm interested.
You can buy an old ICE and convert to electric. At this point most ICE that isn't a tracking device is old enough that you need to be comfortable doing your own maintenance anyway so the effort of the above is no longer an excuse.
I don't know, if the CEO of some software I used suddenly came out as anti-miscegenation, and started donating money to the cause, I'd stop using the software until the CEO was fired too.
Where this analogy breaks is that at the time (2008), Eich's position had majority support in the US. The proposition he wad funding passed with majority support. Mixed marriages by contrast had overwhelming support in 2008.
Eich didn't suddenly come out against anything in 2014. People dug up his prior funding.
Demanding permanent ostracization for supporting a majority position is fairly anti-democratic. You can beat someone in a process (Eich's side lost) without demanding total victory forever or declaring more than half of a whole society as permanent villains. In 2008 55% of the US opposed gay marriage, 36% supported it.
This is a non-sequitur. He didn't donate because it was the popular thing to do, he donated because it was consistent with his religious beliefs.
Christianity has never been a popularity contest. It has steadfastness in the face of rejection and martyrdom in the face of oppression baked into its fundamental fabric, borne from its oppression as a minority religion in the first centuries of its existence.
There's three options on every stance: support, oppose, and neutral. When in doubt, you should be neutral - not opposed.
Just because everyone else is opposing gay marriage, or integration, or emancipation, doesn't mean you should.
Maybe you don't have the time or energy to try to find out what path you should take. Okay, fair. You can always do nothing. You can literally say "I don't know enough about this to have an opinion".
But following the majority IS NOT that. You ARE taking a hard stance if you do that! You're making a choice, and that means you better understand that choice. You are responsible for it, accountable to it!
> Demanding permanent ostracization for supporting a majority position is fairly anti-democratic.
It depends a lot on what that position is. Donating your personal wealth to discriminate against a marginalized group, which includes many of your employees is worth calling out.
Segregation was once a "majority position" in this country. Shaming segregationists was a really effective way to change that. For example, George Wallace, who eventually redeemed himself.
So you agree: for you, it's more important that the Mozilla CEO shares your political views, than that Mozilla makes a quality product.
That's exactly what the parent post is talking about. When Mozilla started prioritizing political correctness over software quality, software quality predictably declined. That's why they are struggling now: they reduced their user base to the tiny group of political extremists that will put up with an inferior product for the sake of political signaling.
By the way, Eich didn't “come out” as anything. His private donation (a mere $1000) was exposed by people who wanted to cancel him for his political views. It wasn't Eich who forced the issue, it was his political opponents, who do not tolerate any viewpoint diversity. Eich's views weren't even fringe or extreme at the time: Proposition 8 passed with support from the majority of Californian voters.
I think the correct formulation is: "There are political views that the CEO of Mozilla could hold which would be sufficient for me to abandon the use of products that Mozilla makes". And I think that would be non-controversial for most people.
The problem with that formulation is that it denies the importance of the quantative aspect of the difference of opinion.
Of course there are views so extreme almost nobody would put up with them. But at the same time, being tolerant of differences of opinion is an important aspect of a free society and a functioning democracy. There is a word for people who cannot tolerate even the smallest difference of opinion: bigots.
But differences of opinion aren't binary; they lie on a spectrum. Similarly, bigotry lies on a spectrum. The person who doesn't brook the smallest disagreement is a greater bigot that only considers the most odious points of view beyond the pale.
For an extreme example, consider these cases: 1) A CEO is fired for arguing that the US government should round up all Jews and put them in extermination camps Nazi Germany style. 2) A CEO is fired for arguing that the local sales tax should be raised by 0.25 percentage points.
Are these cases exactly the same? You could argue in both cases the CEO gets fired for expressing sufficiently unorthodox political views, but that doesn't cut at the heart of the matter. Clearly it's necessary to quantify how extreme those views are. The extent to which the board that fires their CEO is bigoted depends on how unreasonable the CEO's views are; they are inversely proportional.
So now back to Eich. What was his sin? He donated $1000 to support Proposition 8, which restricted the legal definition of marriage to couples consisting of a man and a woman. This view was shared at the time by Barack Obama and a majority of California voters. It didn't strip gay couples of any formal rights: all the same rights could be obtained through a domestic partnership or an out-of-state marriage. It was just a nominal dispute about what the word “marriage” means.
Clearly this is a relatively unimportant issue; closer to a tax dispute than a genocide. You can disagree with Eich and the Californian public on this one, but being unable to tolerate their point of view doesn't make them monsters; it makes you a bigot.
The fact that Mozilla didn't allow their CEO to deviate from the majority point of view on this issue (again, a minority viewpoint in California at the time!) revealed Mozilla to be a heavily politicized, extremely bigoted corporation, that puts ideological conformity first.
I feel like we've awakened from a dream. I look around, and I see that the hyper-transphobe's book series has become a best-selling videogame. I wish I were asleep like you...
I think treating every human with equal dignity goes beyond politics. While the specific context here was political, but that is only the context, not the principle.
> So you agree: for you, it's more important that the Mozilla CEO shares your political views, than that Mozilla makes a quality product.
He doesn't have to share all of them, but we have to have enough overlap for him to consider me & my friends enough of a human being to share the same rights that he does.
As another commenter pointed out, there are beliefs heinous enough that will override the quality of optional software that I might choose to use.
In 2008. You know, the year the majority of Americans didn't approve of gay marriage? [1] The year Obama said that marriage is between a man and a woman? [2]
Applying modern sensibilities to history is stupid.
Are you referring to his donation to prop 8? Im a younger dev and a bit out of the loop but how would that be anti-miscegenation? Wasn’t that more related to gay marriage?
I used anti-miscegenation as a stand-in, as an example of a ludicrous, indefensible position to hold today, while there are still holdouts who apparently think that gay marriage is some sort of affront to the moral fabric of society.
Oh okay, I see. It is wild to see how much things change because amongst my generation your analogy makes sense, but at the time prop 8 was passed by a majority of Californians.
Eich was appointed Mozilla CEO in 2014. Not 2008. 2014 polls said 60% to 70% of Californians supported same sex marriage. Most California voters would not qualify for most jobs in any case. And Eich's 2008 discrimination support mattered less than his 2014 inability to say he wouldn't do it again.
As an example, Loving v Virginia, the Supreme Court case that struck down all anti-miscegenation laws, was in 1967. In 1968, a Gallup poll indicated that less that 20% of white Americans "approved of marriage between whites and non-whites."
Three decades later, in 2000, Alabama finally voted to repeal its (inactive) law, and a full 40% of voters voted to keep the racist, useless law in their state constitution.
State-declared marriage is an tax saving scheme, that the state does in expect for future tax payers. Not granting it to people who won't "produce" tax payers seems entirely reasonable to me.
Exactly. It's one thing to be an idiot on Twitter, it's another for you to donate money to a cause specifically designed to deny rights to people - a cause that was actually successful for a time. That's something that speaks to a fundamental lack of empathy that I'm not sure he's ever directly addressed.
But in any case, I've heard this argument before, and the timeline doesn't make sense. At the time he resigned, Chrome was very firmly ahead of Firefox, and given his track record with Brave, the idea that Eich would have single-handedly saved Mozilla is also pretty dubious to me.
It seems like a disingenuous and lazy talking point tailor made to blame the demise of Firefox on a culture war politics, when in reality it's the fact that Google was willing to throw much more time and resources at the browser market than a non-profit, unimpeded by the same sort of anti-trust and lack of development that brought Internet Explorer low.
> The complaint also alleges that the four involved in the plot were not attempting to kill people, and if they saw anyone in the area of their bombs, they would try and warn them.
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