Sep. 10, 2022
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Reader beware the fearsome binary letter. Unstructured and generally bad post is really bad, as is everything else on the site.
In his infinite wisdom, Cloudflare CEO, Matthew Prince, has made the decision to backtrack on the company’s prior statements and drop Kiwi Farms, citing “immediate threat to human life” as a reason, and also expressing deep frustration towards legal due process. This comes just days after the company made a long and overly verbose post wherein it stated it did not wish to and that it would not continue to act as the Internet Police.
Jun. 18, 2022
Earlier this June, I received the following electronic communication from YouTube:
Hi XXX,
We have reviewed your content and found severe or repeated violations of our Community Guidelines. Because of this, we have removed your channel from YouTube.
My initial reaction, reading the first paragraphs, were of mild confusion more than anything else. Had I been more invested in the platform – that is, had I been uploading many videos over an extended period of time, or had a boatload of views and subscribers – then I might’ve had a stronger reaction.
Jan. 25, 2022
Censorship comes in many forms and from different directions. There’s oppression of speech and expression on the state level, and there’s censorship further down the line. Whichever level in comes in at, it’s still an inhibition of the populace’s expression. One happens to be illegal by way of the constitution, while the other is not considered so. Whether borderline monopolistic companies should be held to a similar level as the state, that’s a question for another day.
Jan. 22, 2022
Welp, time to add Shueisha and Viz to the No Buying From-list. Oh, right, Viz already were on the list, about a hundred times over.
Remember folks, companies that do not care to give you a decent product do not deserve your money either. Do not settle for leftovers when there’s perfectly good sources. Cough, that one cat-tracker, cough, and MangaDex, cough.
Jan. 17, 2022
Anyone with a keyboard can easily send off a DMCA takedown request to anyone, though should it be done in error, and given that the receiver should care enough, it could result in legal actions. However, that’s a what-if that rarely comes to realization. In the countless cases of large corporations sending a false takedown request to, for example, a search provider, requesting de-indexing of the alleged infringing content, it will not have any sort of negative repercussions for the false flagger; only resulting in problems and potentially massive financial losses for the affected sites.
Feb. 20, 2021
The one argument you always hear when there’s talk about translation, is that you can never get the same experience reading a translation as the original, and that expecting to get the whole experience is meaningless. Another is that translation is the same as “localization,” and that cut content and altered content will always be necessary for a translation to be done correctly.
While it’s certainly true that you often can’t translate a language word-for-word, it’s often those that has a certain inclination for censorship that tries to argue that translation can’t be done without altering the original work’s message, and thereby without compromising the original’s integrity.
Feb. 16, 2021
TL;DR Turns out Seven Seas has not only been translating Japanese media, but has been engaging in moral editorial work. Don’t buy anything from Seven Seas until they’ve made an apology and proven themselves worthy of your money again; until then, just sail the high seas for their stuff if you really want to read it.
Seven Seas has been caught with their pants down, and apparently it’s not even their first rodeo either.
Jan. 7, 2021
What the Mastodon’s developers are doing – publicly denouncing instances and trying to enforce their moral rules on others – goes against the very core of a free and open internet.
Despite flying under the banner of decentralization and openness, the core developers at Mastodon sure are trying very hard to centralize control over the network. Their attempt at forcing every instance to block those that they deem are not proper, is by definition an attempt at centralization of control.