I don't get why this comment is being downvoted. This definitely contributes to the discussion. If the entire or a majority of the front page is paywalled articles than those of us who can't afford, don't want to support a specific publication, etc. can't meaningfully contribute to the discussion.
I think this is a BAD thing for the health of the comment section. An even worse outcome is people commenting based on the headline and maybe a blurb only. How is that supposed to promote a good community?
If you want paywalled articles being the bulk of the posts on hacker news that garner discussions then we might as well just go ahead and paywall this site.. because it's slowly becoming a paywalled tech discussion site.. just with more steps.
there are simple ways of circumventing paywalls for most of the commonly linked sites. NYT for example can be bypassed just by using reader mode in Firefox. for the others, this extension is a good start: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/ma...
it is mildly annoying to see the same complaint over and over when the solution involves only a minimal amount of research.
Piracy is the result of you wanting something and not wanting to pay anything towards its creation and the upkeep of the creators. Piracy is the collective result of personal greed. Don't try to hide it, and don't try to tart it up in some BS about bad business models.
I won't bother digging into all of the details of bad publishing business models in academia, but that is a direct counterpoint to the blanket statement you're trying to make.
With staying on topic re: The costs to the end consumers. It's not personal greed to not want to pay to access the content when the cost of the content doesn't reflect the cost to produce it or even a "fair premium" on top of what it costs to produce it.
You're also discounting the business models themselves and how they work. Let's say I care to read this one specific article from NYT. Why do I have to pay to access all of their content? If they want more money they'd allow me to do a microtransaction to purchase this article. And no, not 20-30% of what a month long subscription costs.
It is in fact a bad business model. In either case, I don't pirate these articles and I'm even arguing against using workarounds to view them without paying. So don't try to paint me as some comically evil person who just "doesn't want to pay" because my argument is inconvenient to your world view.
> I don't get why this comment is being downvoted.
It probably tells that you also hit the paywall. Those who downvoted probably didn't, perhaps because their setup doesn't trigger it by default, or because they searched by themselves how to avoid it.
I personally didn't see any paywall when accessing the site directly (ie, without a VPN).
If you’re U.S. based you may have free access to the NYT and other paywall ed news sources through your library. Usually they call it e-media and you can access news sources and magazines from across the nation and around the world. Hopefully your city library has e-resources you can take advantage of and participate more fully in the conversation.
To lean towards the socially responsible bent of your comment, yes, the arsonists and looters need to be caught so that, in future, peaceful protests cannot be misrepresented by the media or authorities as agents of anarchy, chaos, and destruction.
The message of the protesters is lost, or at least greatly obscured, by the actions of the destructive few. The protests are about improving the civility of society. Arson and looting works against that.
Also, if military surveillance is going to be used, the footage should apply to identification of any and all criminal activity, including that of police officers acting in violation of their role to serve and protect (making the potentially incorrect assumption that they're meant to be serving and protecting a civil society).
How much good grace would be earned if the military surveillance was used to prosecute police brutality and misuse of authority in addition to arson and looting?
Microsoft and Amazon stating that they will not allow their facial recognition technology to be used by the police makes me wonder if the tech world wants arsonists and looters to be caught.
Arsonists and looters have been caught and prosecuted without the use of facial recognition.
Your stance seems to be a common one when new laws and technology are proposed for the stated purpose of fighting crime, as if new thing is analogous to a silver bullet; without it they're essentially powerless, and arguing against is cast as arguing on the side of criminality.
In the specific example of facial recognition, what amused me since the pandemic started gaining pace, is that face masks render facial recognition far less useful than in the few days / weeks prior. So, whilst it may appear that Microsoft and Amazon are 'listening the people's privacy concerns', it might just be that there's so little to gain from it right now, due to the prevalence and increasing social acceptability of face masks, that the social credit they get for abandoning or delaying it is worth more than the potential contracts and social shaming they'd get for continuing to pursue it.
Can't argue with that in a vacuum. It's the subtleties of implementation, application, and scope that I would argue with in comparing the introduction of facial recognition with the introduction of body cams, in addition to the policies around access to, and retention of, the data captured by either.
On "beneficial": the panopticon would be beneficial in both cases. In a vacuum.
> How much good grace would be earned if the military surveillance was used to prosecute police brutality and misuse of authority in addition to arson and looting?
Nothing in the article says that they don't monitor police activity. I wonder what would be the police reaction if this were happening and made public.
> I wonder what would be the police reaction if this were happening and made public.
Probably not much. A vast, vast majority of cops are just normal people doing a difficult and dangerous job. A vanishingly small number are power hungry psychopaths.
We really only see the bad stuff in the news, while the insane amount of great things they do go generally unnoticed, with a few exceptions every now and again.
I hope so: this article assumes that for normal citizens, monitoring seems to be a problem, so it's only natural to expect the police forces to get upset for the same reasons. That being said, it's possible that they're already used to be monitored constantly.
The aerial photos aren't for identifying looters and arsonists. These aren't police aircraft, they aren't providing data to prosecutors. In fact the Air Force that purchased them isn't quite sure exactly what they were doing, which is what the linked article is about.
I mean... I think there's a reasonable argument to be made about what surveillance tools are appropriate and how they should be used during civil unrest.
But don't fool yourself. This isn't about catching petty criminals.
The federal government had no need to surveil its citizens in addition to the thousands of police officers and helicopters and drones at a city and state level.
It also shows such a signal of prioritization: Why isn't the federal government protecting its citizens from bad police officers? Why did it take three weeks of peaceful demonstrations (and some violence) to get any attention to this?
Are we supposed to be upset? It's easy to play down what's been happening these past few weeks from a suburb or small city, but we should hope that the extreme criminal acts that have destroyed whole neighborhoods recently at least have some chance of being solved.
Much as the sympathizers would like to deflect that insurance is somehow going to cover all of this (it isn't), anyone who complains about “food deserts” but cheers on riots in the hood is part of the problem whether they admit it or not.
Depends on what you mean. If they fired missiles at civilians you'd have a point, but merely flying a drone in the U.S. is routine, civilians do it. Some cities and states have restrictions on the routine use of drones by police, but using aerial surveillance is not generally illegal in the U.S. far as I'm aware (nor do I think it should be).
Nobody in power cared about George Floyd's death until the violent protests. As Noam Chomksy once said -
See, people with power understand exactly one thing: violence.
> Nobody in power cared about George Floyd's deaths until the violent protest
That is untrue. Well before the executions, arsons, and burglaries, there was essentially no ambiguity in the public perception of the case. Most people who watched the video believed they witnessed a murder, and that charge was already planned for Chauvin, well before the public was aware of riots.
And of course, even if it did work, it would still be wrong, and the people executing people and shooting senior citizens to death to steal televisions should be prosecuted.
This line is bogus. "I cared about police brutality until someone else who cares did something I don't like. Now, FOX News is telling me to care about looting!"
Stop using looting as an excuse to not really give a damn about police reform.
I feel like you are attacking me with a straw man, a very unfair one at that. Not everyone who sees things a bit differently from you is a baby-murdering psychopath who watches (gasp!) the most popular news broadcaster in America.
I never thought theft, assault, arson, or lynching was okay, and I hope most people don't need to watch TV to learn that.
FOX is despicable, bad faith programming and anyone forming opinions based off watching The Five, Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson are worse off for having been exposed to their lies and intentionally bad logic.
But you're correct on one front: I attacked your use of FOX and gave you an opening to avoid the real accusation: That you are using the (limited number of) riots and looting as a way to get out of focusing on systemic police dysfunction and the need to radically reform policing and public safety.
Who pushed out the police? That guy you're talking about who got shot? He was a cop. On duty. Guarding the courthouse. There were police right there. You're saying he got killed because there was no one to protect him while he protected us? How does that work?
In fact there wasn't even a protest going on in that area. This was a drive-by shooting by some kind of provocateur maniac, designed more or less PRECISELY to enable bad faith arguments like yours.
He was indeed a convicted felon that assaulted a pregnant woman (Black, if it matters) and beat his kids. So yeah, compared to everything else going on, hard to care that much.
Who are you talking about? Floyd? Was he being arrested at that moment for beating someone? Is beating someone a capital crime? Are the police allowed to execute prisoners? Did the police know he was a "bad guy" when they were killing him slowly?
Nothing about your point makes any sense, at all. It isn't about George Floyd the man, the personality. It's about yet another human, yet another black person, being murdered by law enforcement.
It was a trick, because Trump DID send the FBI in on the 2nd day, before the violent protests started. So people in power did pay attention and did care before the violence started.
I'm willing to entertain this possibility, but how can you be so certain that they weren't persuaded by the persistence of the nonviolent elements? baltimore's protests have been remarkably peaceful, and the city leadership has already made some (albeit minor) concessions.
> extreme criminal acts that have destroyed whole neighborhoods recently
Where do "facts" like this come from? I mean, a police station was burned. A bunch of windows have been broken in a bunch of places. But there's literally nothing to support anything like a statement like that.
Seriously: who told you "neighborhoods" had been "destroyed". Which neighborhoods? How many residents were displaced or whatever? Did you think to maybe question your sources when they arrived with no data at all? Didn't the fact that Fox (who normally are pretty good about journalistic micro-rigor, believe it or not) got caught faking image evidence about the unrest maybe cue you that you might be being misled?
But you're still going with that rhetoric? Why? Where are you getting your facts?
Further drone operators are required to stay in contact with ATC while a flight plan is in effect. VFR rules apply while the drone is in eyesight of the operator.
Assume the government can override these requirements with a flick of a pen.
That is funny. I noticed a very unusual amount of military aircraft including air to air refueling tankers in flight today and a good number of Canadian ones on the Canadian side as well.
I wonder how much of it really has to do with the protests. If I was a terrorist or other bad actor with some devious plans, this is a great time to act.
If the words "aerial surveillance" was replaced with the word "helicopter", then this article could have been posted verbatim 40 years ago, and been just as inconsequential.
Yes, but my point is that 40 years ago the intelligence capabilities of an aerial vehicle were orders of magnitude less useful.
A jet ranger carrying a passenger with binoculars is vastly different than that same jet ranger with modern optics and RF packages. The only real commonality between the two is that they are both deployed on aerial platforms.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 127 ms ] threadI think this is a BAD thing for the health of the comment section. An even worse outcome is people commenting based on the headline and maybe a blurb only. How is that supposed to promote a good community?
If you want paywalled articles being the bulk of the posts on hacker news that garner discussions then we might as well just go ahead and paywall this site.. because it's slowly becoming a paywalled tech discussion site.. just with more steps.
it is mildly annoying to see the same complaint over and over when the solution involves only a minimal amount of research.
Piracy is piracy
I won't bother digging into all of the details of bad publishing business models in academia, but that is a direct counterpoint to the blanket statement you're trying to make.
With staying on topic re: The costs to the end consumers. It's not personal greed to not want to pay to access the content when the cost of the content doesn't reflect the cost to produce it or even a "fair premium" on top of what it costs to produce it.
You're also discounting the business models themselves and how they work. Let's say I care to read this one specific article from NYT. Why do I have to pay to access all of their content? If they want more money they'd allow me to do a microtransaction to purchase this article. And no, not 20-30% of what a month long subscription costs.
It is in fact a bad business model. In either case, I don't pirate these articles and I'm even arguing against using workarounds to view them without paying. So don't try to paint me as some comically evil person who just "doesn't want to pay" because my argument is inconvenient to your world view.
It probably tells that you also hit the paywall. Those who downvoted probably didn't, perhaps because their setup doesn't trigger it by default, or because they searched by themselves how to avoid it.
I personally didn't see any paywall when accessing the site directly (ie, without a VPN).
For browser extension, see: https://github.com/iamadamdev
The message of the protesters is lost, or at least greatly obscured, by the actions of the destructive few. The protests are about improving the civility of society. Arson and looting works against that.
Also, if military surveillance is going to be used, the footage should apply to identification of any and all criminal activity, including that of police officers acting in violation of their role to serve and protect (making the potentially incorrect assumption that they're meant to be serving and protecting a civil society).
How much good grace would be earned if the military surveillance was used to prosecute police brutality and misuse of authority in addition to arson and looting?
Your stance seems to be a common one when new laws and technology are proposed for the stated purpose of fighting crime, as if new thing is analogous to a silver bullet; without it they're essentially powerless, and arguing against is cast as arguing on the side of criminality.
In the specific example of facial recognition, what amused me since the pandemic started gaining pace, is that face masks render facial recognition far less useful than in the few days / weeks prior. So, whilst it may appear that Microsoft and Amazon are 'listening the people's privacy concerns', it might just be that there's so little to gain from it right now, due to the prevalence and increasing social acceptability of face masks, that the social credit they get for abandoning or delaying it is worth more than the potential contracts and social shaming they'd get for continuing to pursue it.
On "beneficial": the panopticon would be beneficial in both cases. In a vacuum.
Nothing in the article says that they don't monitor police activity. I wonder what would be the police reaction if this were happening and made public.
Probably not much. A vast, vast majority of cops are just normal people doing a difficult and dangerous job. A vanishingly small number are power hungry psychopaths.
We really only see the bad stuff in the news, while the insane amount of great things they do go generally unnoticed, with a few exceptions every now and again.
I hope so: this article assumes that for normal citizens, monitoring seems to be a problem, so it's only natural to expect the police forces to get upset for the same reasons. That being said, it's possible that they're already used to be monitored constantly.
I mean... I think there's a reasonable argument to be made about what surveillance tools are appropriate and how they should be used during civil unrest.
But don't fool yourself. This isn't about catching petty criminals.
It also shows such a signal of prioritization: Why isn't the federal government protecting its citizens from bad police officers? Why did it take three weeks of peaceful demonstrations (and some violence) to get any attention to this?
Much as the sympathizers would like to deflect that insurance is somehow going to cover all of this (it isn't), anyone who complains about “food deserts” but cheers on riots in the hood is part of the problem whether they admit it or not.
That is untrue. Well before the executions, arsons, and burglaries, there was essentially no ambiguity in the public perception of the case. Most people who watched the video believed they witnessed a murder, and that charge was already planned for Chauvin, well before the public was aware of riots.
And of course, even if it did work, it would still be wrong, and the people executing people and shooting senior citizens to death to steal televisions should be prosecuted.
Stop using looting as an excuse to not really give a damn about police reform.
I never thought theft, assault, arson, or lynching was okay, and I hope most people don't need to watch TV to learn that.
But you're correct on one front: I attacked your use of FOX and gave you an opening to avoid the real accusation: That you are using the (limited number of) riots and looting as a way to get out of focusing on systemic police dysfunction and the need to radically reform policing and public safety.
Make law enforcement accountable to the people and the people accountable to the law.
When you push out the police, it's no wonder that people who would like to get away with heinous crimes show up.
In fact there wasn't even a protest going on in that area. This was a drive-by shooting by some kind of provocateur maniac, designed more or less PRECISELY to enable bad faith arguments like yours.
Nothing about your point makes any sense, at all. It isn't about George Floyd the man, the personality. It's about yet another human, yet another black person, being murdered by law enforcement.
Where do "facts" like this come from? I mean, a police station was burned. A bunch of windows have been broken in a bunch of places. But there's literally nothing to support anything like a statement like that.
Seriously: who told you "neighborhoods" had been "destroyed". Which neighborhoods? How many residents were displaced or whatever? Did you think to maybe question your sources when they arrived with no data at all? Didn't the fact that Fox (who normally are pretty good about journalistic micro-rigor, believe it or not) got caught faking image evidence about the unrest maybe cue you that you might be being misled?
But you're still going with that rhetoric? Why? Where are you getting your facts?
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/us/politics/investigation...
https://www.faa.gov/licenses_certificates/aircraft_certifica...
Further drone operators are required to stay in contact with ATC while a flight plan is in effect. VFR rules apply while the drone is in eyesight of the operator.
Assume the government can override these requirements with a flick of a pen.
I wonder how much of it really has to do with the protests. If I was a terrorist or other bad actor with some devious plans, this is a great time to act.
A jet ranger carrying a passenger with binoculars is vastly different than that same jet ranger with modern optics and RF packages. The only real commonality between the two is that they are both deployed on aerial platforms.