Marsden is Here

This weekendish DreamWidth is changing one of it's service providers because [DW have] ethics. You can read the details in the DW Maintenance post and comments if you want to know more.

The comments took a left turn into free-speech, censorship and content-moderation (which are, to be clear, completely unaffected by this move) and several very good analogies were brought up which I want to preserve for my own future reference/use :)

Content warning: references to potentially triggering topics.

For a tamer example, it would be entirely possible to make a bot that responds to everything a particular person posts on Twitter with pictures of human poop. If you use public-domain images, like Wikimedia's, it's even legal. But no one wants to use a website that's plagued by Poop-Bot and its ilk. A site that allowed Poop-Bot to run rampant would lose all its users in short order.

I somehow think, even though it's just gross and not actually dangerous, Poop-Bot would get kicked off the vast majority of "free speech" sites.
raininshadows

Everyone always says they want to use a website that doesn't "censor" content. ("Censor" in scarequotes there because people treat it like it's a magical word even when they're not treating it like the greatest possible offense... If you actually look at how people behave, though, the vast majority avoid unmoderated or undermoderated spaces, and the people who don't avoid them are the ones who've been kicked off every other service -- usually for cause -- and are shitty fucking neighbors. People do not actually want to hang out on a website that is nothing but spam and neo-Nazis! They just have no idea how much careful effort it takes to keep a website from becoming wall-to-wall spam and neo-Nazis, because good content moderation is invisible; they never see the amount of stuff that gets removed or the sheer volume of shit-tier spam and garbage that would cover 95% of every even mildly active site in 24 unmoderated hours.
denise

...banning content that actively harms human beings isn't censorship, it's basic safety and human rights.
...
This isn't about free speech, it's about protecting users from actively harmful content like human trafficking and doxxing. As in, things that happen to real human beings and should not be happening to real human beings.
sarajayechan

"Free speech" is the wrong framing! "Free speech" is about the government suppressing or punishing you for what you say, and we aren't the government. Any online site that accepts user-generated content (which is the fancy term for "the stuff y'all post" as opposed to "the stuff the site itself posts") has to set forth content policies that govern what their users can post, because without those policies (and active enforcement of them) a site will be unusable in days, if not hours, because it will be overrun with spam, child sex abuse material, and a thousand other categories of things that make a service impossible to use and create legal liability. Like every other site out there, we have content policies that govern what people are and aren't allowed to post, and we will (and do) remove content that's reported to us that violates those policies.
denise

Actual free speech actively requires deplatforming those whose only "side of the story" is trying to harm and/or silence others.
onewhitecrow

There's an immense difference between fictional content and conduct that has concrete, tangible, offline harm. (Not trying to police your use of the term at all, but I personally try to avoid "real-world", because dammit, after 20+ years of us all living, working, and socializing online, and *especially* after the pandemic and associated virtual event shift, "online" *is* also the real world.) But there's also a huge difference between "someone posted a link to my Twitter account" and "someone posted a link to the GPS coordinates of my house", and the potential consequences of both are wildly different. Smart policy needs to recognize that!
denise

Last week a new ISP appeared on the radar. Fyx offered flat-rate broadband and a "global mode" which would mitigate some of the geolocking preventing kiwis from viewing certain content over the internet (even if prepared to pay for it).

Not entirely surprisingly global mode has already been pulled for the meantime. Fyx has dropped their prices and offered refunds in compensation.

I was less interested in global mode than in how the pricing stacked up against the capped plans more generally on offer. Having an unexpectedly free evening I've done some spreadsheeting.

It's difficult to exactly compare like with like - every company has a slightly different take. But what I'm looking at here are phone+broadband packages with the phone cost (typically about $40) stripped out because although Fyx don't provide a phone service their baseline service does require you to have a copper landline with another provider. I may do the naked broadband comparisons in another sheet at some point. I've included TelstraClear's fibre options although it's not really an apple/apple comparison. I've charted Gb used (on the x axis) vs Cost ($ on the y axis) up to 100Gb.



Conclusions? Slingshot is generally the cheapest option followed by Fyx, although at the very top of the range (100Gb) Fyx is overtaken (undertaken?) by Snap and Telecom is closing fast. Although both those providers have steps coming up that won't cause them to lose much ground. At the slightly more expensive rates Fyx initially offered (with global mode enabled) I don't know that it would have beaten Slingshot at any point. OTOH it's not generally considered hard to beat Slingshot on service... which beings us to it being important to bear in mind that this is purely a $/Gb comparison, it doesn't take into account speed (promised or actual) or anything else.

This is of course purely academic as I'm not considering switching away from my fibre connection - almost but not quite the most expensive option.

Mapperiffic visualisation of a day's Twitter traffic, via the Herald and SciBlogs (recommend watching on the Vimeo site in HD, w. scaling off)
[Edit - LJ doesn't want to accept the embedded version, you'll have to follow the link :( [/edit]

Mapping a Day in the Life of Twitter from Chris McDowall on Vimeo.

~~~
Pumpkin Patch wins this year’s NZTE International Business Awards. Idealog has an interview with the CEO which contains this ponderable quote about "Made in New Zealand".

It’s worth noting that if Pumpkin Patch was manufactured in New Zealand we’d be a much smaller company and we’d employ a lot fewer New Zealanders.

Bumbling about on the internet today I came across

http://www.zenbu.co.nz/
which I decided was an interesting local directory project, and the unrelated

http://www.zenbu.net.nz/
network of wireless internet hotspots which I spent a lot of time pondering. I like the concept, have ever since I learnt about Tomi some years ago. Can't afford a $250 outlay just on an experiment though. (And it's probably against TC's T&C to on-sell their residential service in such a manner, but their smaller business plans are cheap enough).

It might be something to bear in mind for Creative Space if it starts looking to a different venue.

Anyone know any reliable residential VOIP providers based in Christchurch or with a respectable nationwide presence?

2talk.co.nz came to my attention this morning, but while their plans look good I'd have to be a network geek to understand their FAQ section and without that I have no idea what hardware I'd have to purchase (at minimum it looks like a new router or some sort of PABX).

The inability to call 0900 numbers is also a problem, since that's how I make most of my charitable donations.

Ideally of course all I want is a skype phone which accepts multiple accounts (bastards)

Something for the library geeks (although you probably already have it)
LibraryTechNZ blog
~~~

And for the postgrads (via RWW)
Deep Dyve (the scientific journal search engine) Launches Rental Service for Research Articles

Buying a single article from a scientific journal is usually prohibitively expensive if you are not a student or teacher at a school that subscribes to the journal. Most academic journals are available only behind these paywalls, but Deep Dyve just announced a new product that could radically change the marketplace for scientific, technical and medical articles. Until now, Deep Dyve only indexed articles and directed users to the journal's own site. Starting today, users can rent articles from Deep Dyve. Accounts start with a pay-as-you-go account, by which users are charged $0.99 to keep an article for one day, and go up to an unlimited account for $19.99 per month.

Did anyone else get an email from 'feedmil.com' asking for more information on their LJ RSS/Atom feed?