Tag: technology

Flat UI is retarding.

It is literally retarding. It slows the user down by nearly one-quarter on average. I’ve always hated it, passionately, since I noticed Apple pushing it. Now I understand why, beyond the ugly, outdated aesthetics.

The mania for “flat” user interfaces is costing publishers and ecommerce sites billions in lost revenue. A “flat” design removes the distinction between navigation controls and content. Historically, navigation controls such as buttons were shaded, or given 3D relief, to distinguish them from the application or web page’s content.

The mania is credited to Microsoft with its minimalistic Zune player, an iPod clone, which was developed into the Windows Phone Series UX, which in turn became the design for Windows from Windows 8 in 2012 onwards. But Steve Jobs is also to blame. The typography-besotted Apple founder was fascinated by WP’s “magazine-style” Metro design, and it was posthumously incorporated into iOS7 in 2013. Once blessed by Apple, flat designs spread to electronic programme guides on telly, games consoles and even car interfaces. And of course web sites.

Flat designs looked “cleaner” and more “modern” (Microsoft’s subsequent portmanteau term for its Metro design), but there was a price to pay.

The consequence is that users find navigation harder, and so spend more time on a page. Now research by the Nielsen Norman Group has measured by how much. The company wired up 71 users, and gave them nine sites to use, tracking their eye movement and recording the time spent on content.

“On average participants spent 22 per cent more time (i.e. slower task performance) looking at the pages with weak signifiers,” the firm notes. Why would that be? Users were looking for clues how to navigate. “The average number of fixations was significantly higher on the weak-signifier versions than the strong-signifier versions. On average, people had 25 per cent more fixations on the pages with weak signifiers.”

The firm dispenses with the counter-argument that users were “more engaged” with the page.

“Since this experiment used targeted findability tasks, more time and effort spent looking around the page are not good. These findings don’t mean that users were more ‘engaged’ with the pages. Instead, they suggest that participants struggled to locate the element they wanted, or weren’t confident when they first saw it.”

However, the failure of the WarMouse to be embraced with any widespread enthusiasm taught me that for all they like the idea of fast computers, most people are not very concerned with interface speed. If people are not particularly interested in doubling their interface speed, which we demonstrated was the norm for WarMouse Meta users, it should not be surprising that they are not overly concerned about losing 22 percent of it either.

The Left begins to wake up

About the potential problems posted by the Big Social Media monopolies:

We’re basically too small for Google to care about. So I wouldn’t say we’ve had any bad experiences with Google in the sense of Google trying to injure us or use its power against us. What we’ve experienced is a little different. Google is so big and so powerful that even when it’s trying to do something good, it can be dangerous and frightening.

Here’s an example.

With the events of recent months and years, Google is apparently now trying to weed out publishers that are using its money streams and architecture to publish hate speech. Certainly you’d probably be unhappy to hear that Stormfront was funded by ads run through Google. I’m not saying that’s happening. I’m just giving you a sense of what they are apparently trying to combat. Over the last several months we’ve gotten a few notifications from Google telling us that certain pages of ours were penalized for ‘violations’ of their ban for hate speech. When we looked at the pages they were talking about they were articles about white supremacist incidents. Most were tied to Dylann Roof’s mass murder in Charleston.

Now in practice all this meant was that two or three old stories about Dylann Roof could no longer run ads purchased through Google. I’d say it’s unlikely that loss to TPM amounted to even a cent a month. Totally meaningless. But here’s the catch. The way these warnings work and the way these particular warnings were worded, you get penalized enough times and then you’re blacklisted.

Now, certainly you’re figuring we could contact someone at Google and explain that we’re not publishing hate speech and racist violence. We’re reporting on it. Not really. We tried that. We got back a message from our rep not really understanding the distinction and cheerily telling us to try to operate within the no hate speech rules. And how many warnings until we’re blacklisted? Who knows?

If we were cut off, would that be Adexchange (the ads) or DoubleClick for Publishers (the road) or both? Who knows?

If the first stopped we’d lose a big chunk of money that wouldn’t put us out of business but would likely force us to retrench. If we were kicked off the road more than half of our total revenue would disappear instantly and would stay disappeared until we found a new road – i.e., a new ad serving service or technology. At a minimum that would be a devastating blow that would require us to find a totally different ad serving system, make major technical changes to the site to accommodate the new system and likely not be able to make as much from ads ever again. That’s not including some unknown period of time – certainly weeks at least – in which we went with literally no ad revenue.

Needless to say, the impact of this would be cataclysmic and could easily drive us out of business.

Now it’s never happened. And this whole scenario stems from what is at least a well-intentioned effort not to subsidize hate speech and racist groups. Again, it hasn’t happened. So in some sense the cataclysmic scenario I’m describing is as much a product of my paranoia as something Google could or might do. But when an outside player has that much power, often acts arbitrarily (even when well-intentioned) and is almost impossible to communicate with, a significant amount of paranoia is healthy and inevitable.

I give this example only to illustrate the way that Google is so powerful and so all-encompassing that it can actually do great damage unintentionally.

It’s interesting to see that the Left is beginning to get paranoid about Big Social Media, even though they’re not being targeted by it. Yet.

Forced convergence

Google is now imposing its will and its SJW ideology on conservative sites:

On Tuesday evening, Google sent a conservative website an ultimatum: remove one of your articles, or lose the ability to make ad revenue on your website. The website was strong-armed into removing the content, and then warned that the page was “just an example and that the same violations may exist on other pages of this website.”

“Yesterday morning, we received a very bizarre letter from Google issuing us an ultimatum,” Shane Trejo, media relations director of the Republican Liberty Caucus of Michigan, wrote on The Liberty Conservative. “Either we were to remove a particular article or see all of our ad revenues choked off in an instant. This is the newest method that Big Brother is using to enforce thought control.”

The ultimatum came in the form of an email from Google’s ad placement service AdSense. The email specifically listed an article on The Liberty Conservative’s site, stating that the article violated AdSense’s policies.

“As stated in our program policies, Google ads may not be placed on pages that contain content that: Threatens or advocates harm on oneself or others; Harasses, intimidates or bullies an individual or group of individuals; Incites hatred against, promotes discrimination of, or disparages an individual or group on the basis of their race or ethnic origin, religion, disability, age, nationality, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or other characteristic that is associated with systemic discrimination or marginalization,” the email stated.

The email warned The Liberty Conservative that it must either remove ads from that page, or “modify or remove the violating content to meet our AdSense policies.”

“Please be aware that if additional violations are accrued, ad serving may be disabled to the website listed above,” the AdSense email warned. “Please be aware that the URL above is just an example and that the same violations may exist on other pages of this website or other sites that you own.”

Trejo argued that the article Google specified “contained no offensive content.” Rather, it “was merely distinguishing the many differences between the alt-right and literal Nazis.”

The Liberty Conservative writer suggested that the article was singled out because it was written by former Liberty Conservative contributor James Allsup. Allsup was involved in the “Unite the Right” riot (which Trejo described as a “rally-turned-riot”) in Charlottesville, Va. Trejo said the article was targeted because “it was authored by a man deemed to be an ‘unperson’ by the corporate elite.”

“Due to financial constraints, we had to comply with Google’s strong-arming tactics for the time being,” Trejo admitted. “An independent publisher such as The Liberty Conservative needs revenue from the Google ad platform in order to survive.”

Milo was prescient. Milo was right. From Dangerous, which is read by Milo himself and is now the #1 bestselling audiobook.

Twitter is the Silicon Valley company where progressive bias is most apparent, but Google is the company where it is most dangerous. If Google decides that it doesn’t want web users to find something, it would be very difficult to stop them—or even to find out they did anything in the first place. That’s probably why, out of all the Silicon Valley companies accused of bias, it was Google’s that Donald Trump addressed directly.

No conservative organization should be on AdSense. As is clear from the example of The Liberty Conservative, that is literally permitting Google to dictate your content.

Change or fall behind

Snidely Whiplash fails to understand why he’s not employed. Crew, who is not only of the Silicon Valley hiring class, but is the #2 Techstar and a member of the Infogalactic Star Council, is unable to set him straight.

Bob: The companies who try to move don’t succeed. They can’t convince their employees to move with them, and they can’t find the people they need in other locations.

Crew: I think this is not true. What you have in Silicon Valley is enormous numbers of H1Bs, some of whom have been laid off in the latest layoff rounds but they vary greatly in quality and putting together a good team can be very difficult.

Crew: Certainly, where I am we need people but we cannot find them and we are in the heart of Silicon Valley, so we do without and things just take longer to do. And the real problem is finding people who know how to balance short-term business needs (implementing what the customer wants to get their business) with longer-term company needs (doing it in a way that is supportable over the long term and doesn’t paint you into a corner.)

Crew: Despite that I still find time to work on Infogalactic and a couple of open source software projects. The reality is that people don’t go for those who have been laid off in most cases. Personally, I would prefer to employ Americans … but Silicon Valley has driven many of them out …

Snidely: And with pathetic attitudes like that, you’re helping to drive them out.

Jack: You still looking Snidely?

Snidely Whiplash: Sadly, yes, Jack. White, laid off, and over 50. Crew up there won’t hire me, no matter my skills or experience, because he’s an idiot.

I suggest that Snidely’s difficulty has less to do with his skills, his experience, or Crew’s purported idiocy than his personality. I’m not at all surprised to hear that he’s unemployed. He complains that Crew wouldn’t hire him, but I wouldn’t be inclined to hire him either. It’s one thing to not play particularly well with others, it’s another thing altogether to pride yourself on your complete inability to do so; even his self-selected moniker is an indication of misplaced pride. It’s not an accident that someone who elects to call himself “snide” reliably goes out of his way to say unnecessarily negative things about almost everything and everyone.

Snidely, that’s your main challenge. Not anti-American discrimination in tech. The moment I hear that negative, superior tone in a man’s voice, I immediately cross him off the list, whether he’s a programmer, an artist, or a writer. Sure, he may be directing it at something we mutually despise now, but I know perfectly well he’s going to be directing it at a co-worker, at the project, or at me before long. My experience has taught that such individuals never prove to be worth their downside, no matter how talented they are.

I’ll give you an example of that negative communication style right in that same thread.

This is how a normal person expresses his opinion: “Hey, it would be great if you would release audio-only versions of the videos. I would prefer to listen to those.”

That is a helpful, positive way to express an opinion. It’s a good idea too. Why not be sure to release the videos in podcast form or make them otherwise available for audio download? I expect we will do just that.

Now, this is how Snidely communicated the same idea: “One thing I would encourage, as it’s probably a make-or-break for me, is to have just the audio portion. Frankly, you’re not that attractive, and both my money and my bandwidth are limited.”

Same idea, different delivery, and it inspires an entirely different reaction: What the Hell? Fuck that guy! One has to read it twice to even register what the relevant opinion is, so distracting is the negativity.

There are three problems in just two sentences. First, the tone is heavily negative (make-or-break, frankly, not that attractive, limited). Second, he twice tries to make the entire subject about him when it isn’t. Third, he insults my appearance, and even worse, he does it without any need to do so in order to make his case. It’s just egregious. Now, I could not care less what some 50-something man happens to think about my appearance, but that sort of comment is not going to go over at all well with the average individual who is vain enough to be making videos.

So, Snidely, why would you EVER say anything like that? You didn’t need to justify your preference for audio over video, because I was openly asking for everyone’s opinions. And why are you whining and complaining about who Crew hires or doesn’t hire? You not only haven’t given him any reason to consider hiring you other than empty public posturing, you’ve given him excellent cause to not even accept you as a volunteer for any of the high-profile projects he manages. That’s not intelligent. That’s self-sabotage.

Now, I understand that this is a very challenging labor environment. It’s stressful for everyone. Even those with seemingly secure jobs know that they could lose them at any time due to an untimely comment overheard by the wrong person, a corporate acquisition, or a corporate move. One friend of mine, long self-employed, was convinced by his wife to take a great job offer at one of the strongest, most successful Fortune 50 technology companies in the world, in the interest of stability. He was even assigned to a mission-critical project. I would have sworn he had some of the best job security on the planet.

Nine months later, the CEO announced that the corporation was shutting down all its activities in my friend’s state. Since my friend was mission-critical, he was given the opportunity to uproot his family and move across the country to a place they knew no one. He wisely declined. So much for stability and job security.

The point is that in this environment, you have to continually up your game. And whether your weakness is on the skills side, the experience side, or the personality side, you have to shore it up. As I mentioned in last night’s Darkstream, video was never my medium. It still isn’t my preferred one, but I have upped my video game, and I am going to continue to increase it because that is what I have to do if I am going to be at all relevant to the 90 percent of the population that is post-literate.

The times always change. We can either change with them or we can fall behind.

Google’s gold, Google’s rules

I don’t know why anyone expected it to be any different. Google is paying for results, not research:

The New America Foundation has received more than $21 million from Google; its parent company’s executive chairman, Eric Schmidt; and his family’s foundation since the think tank’s founding in 1999. That money helped to establish New America as an elite voice in policy debates on the American left.
But not long after one of New America’s scholars posted a statement on the think tank’s website praising the European Union’s penalty against Google, Mr. Schmidt, who had chaired New America until 2016, communicated his displeasure with the statement to the group’s president, Anne-Marie Slaughter, according to the scholar.
The statement disappeared from New America’s website, only to be reposted without explanation a few hours later. But word of Mr. Schmidt’s displeasure rippled through New America, which employs more than 200 people, including dozens of researchers, writers and scholars, most of whom work in sleek Washington offices where the main conference room is called the “Eric Schmidt Ideas Lab.” The episode left some people concerned that Google intended to discontinue funding, while others worried whether the think tank could truly be independent if it had to worry about offending its donors.
Those worries seemed to be substantiated a couple of days later, when Ms. Slaughter summoned the scholar who wrote the critical statement, Barry Lynn, to her office. He ran a New America initiative called Open Markets that has led a growing chorus of liberal criticism of the market dominance of telecom and tech giants, including Google, which is now part of a larger corporate entity known as Alphabet, for which Mr. Schmidt serves as executive chairman.
Ms. Slaughter told Mr. Lynn that “the time has come for Open Markets and New America to part ways,” according to an email from Ms. Slaughter to Mr. Lynn. The email suggested that the entire Open Markets team — nearly 10 full-time employees and unpaid fellows — would be exiled from New America.
While she asserted in the email, which was reviewed by The New York Times, that the decision was “in no way based on the content of your work,” Ms. Slaughter accused Mr. Lynn of “imperiling the institution as a whole.”

Now we have Fake Funding to go with Fake News, Fake Traffic, and Fake Ads. I don’t have any problem with Google expecting the people it funds to obey them and sing from Google’s songbook, only with the pretense that things were ever going to be otherwise.

How SJWs react to defeat

An attempt to converge Node.js was successfully beaten back. But the SJWs who attacked it aren’t giving up.

After years of battling a string of systematic failures of governance and leadership, the Node.js community, one of the largest collectives of software developers on the internet, reached a breaking point.
Node.js steers the ship for the powerful open-source web technology. It’s relied on by dozens of Fortune 500 companies, like Microsoft, Netflix, and PayPal, for their critical infrastructure and core operations.
Its stable governance isn’t just necessary for the businesses that rely on it, but also the core community that develops and advanced the widely-used technology.
But Monday saw a stream of resignations, one after the other throughout the day from Node.js’ technical steering committee (TSC), a group that manages the day-to-day governance for the Node.js project. A third of the committee had quit their positions by the end of the day, including its first woman member. Three of the resigned members said they will stay on the core technical committee (CTC), which oversees the project’s core collaborators and code contributors. One person has left the project entirely….
The community’s reliance on a code of conduct acts as the de facto HR department for the project, which lets participants and members contribute while treating others with respect. It’s meant to ensure a workplace free from harassment and unacceptable behavior, while promoting sharing of ideas in a constructive way, and to foster community growth.
But that code of conduct, as Kapke pointed out, doesn’t allow the stifling of free speech or marginalizing of people’s views or opinions that might be disagreed with. It’s designed to bring together a diverse range of people from different cultures, beliefs, genders, and backgrounds from across the world to work on a project and be treated fairly — a core value of any global collaborative open source project.
“There’s better value in having diversity than having some individual have the free speech that would work against others,” he said.
That toxic culture in Node.js’ governance has led to an inclusivity problem.
Williams’ began an inclusivity group of about a dozen people, an initiative aimed at ensuring fairness for everyone who wants to contribute to the community. The group eventually disbanded, accusing the leadership of “continued derailment” and opposition to proposals that the group argued would make the community more cohesive.
All the women and non-binary people left the group, as did several men, following the disbandment last August. Many have decided to leave the Node.js community altogether.
“Driving away contributors can be fatal in the open source world where most developers are essentially using their free time and volunteering to contribute,” said Rudolf Olah, a web developer, in a blog post. “It is already difficult enough to attract contributors to smaller projects, and larger projects, such as Node.js, need to be careful to make all contributors feel welcome,” he said.

Note that they left the “inclusivity group” immediately after their attempt to unseat a former director from the steering committe failed. Now they’re switching tactics, attempting to create pressure from outside, while at the same time trying – again – to fork the project.

Moments after the failed leadership vote, Kat Marchán pushed the button that created Ayo.js, a new open-source project forked from Node.js. Ayo.js — a hat-tip to the Io.js (pronounced the same) project that forked from Node.js three years ago over a similar disenchantment over the software’s stewardship under its founding company Joyent — was born this week.
Days old, it’s already got a dozen developers and over a hundred people involved on the project’s chat platform, said Marchán.

Of course, the SJW fork is going to fail – again – because people who are diverse and inclusive aren’t capable of running projects without the straight white males they disdain. If they could, they wouldn’t have to use codes of conduct, inclusivity groups, and trust & safety councils to take over existing projects.
The steering committee really needs to clean house and encourage all the SJWs to move over to the fork as quickly as possible.

Fake Ads

As Facebook has already been caught multiple times, Google has been caught faking ad traffic:

The WSJ is reporting that Google is issuing refunds to advertisers over “fake traffic,” and are now working on new safeguards against the issue.
Google’s refunds amount to only a fraction of the total ad spending served to invalid traffic, which has left some advertising executives unsatisfied, the people familiar with the situation said. Google has offered to repay its “platform fee,” which ad buyers said typically ranges from about 7% to 10% of the total ad buy.

The company says this is appropriate, because it doesn’t control the rest of the money. Typically, advertisers use DoubleClick Bid Manager to target audiences across vast numbers of websites in seconds by connecting to dozens of online ad exchanges, marketplaces that connect buyers and publishers through real-time auctions.
As we at Adland have argued for years now, digital paid media is a fraud due to the many incidents of fake traffic, bots, and the smoke and mirrors that blind the less tech savvy clients. Last year, Russian bots earned 180 million by fake-watching ads all over the Google empire.
Google has participated in efforts to clean up the digital market, joining the industry initiative Ads.txt project launched back in May by the Interactive Advertising Bureau. They’re hoping to bring trust back into the digital ecosystem. But in the arms race between consumers who use ad blockers and ad networks making ads unblockable, unskippable and even more intrusive, the consumers are staying one step ahead. More importantly with each new fraud brought to light and the hundreds of millions wasted, it’s hard to believe clients take Google at face value much longer. Advertisers are finally figuring out that this is a house of cards, built by pretty graphs in slick interfaces that look great on paper but in reality does very little to drive sales.
Google’s latest crisis comes at the same time that it is removing content creators from the ability to monetize their content, policing Youtube like never before. Google’s policing doesn’t end there, however. In Professor Jordan Peterson’s case, they banned him from his entire account, including mail and calendar.
Bloomberg reports that Google has just begun their biggest crackdown on “extremist content”

The new restrictions, which target what Walker called “inflammatory religious or supremacist content,” are expected to hit a small fraction of videos, according to person familiar with the company. YouTube says it uploads over 400 hours of video a minute. Videos tagged by its new policy won’t be able to run ads or have comments posted, and won’t appear in any recommended lists on the video site. A warning screen will also appear before the videos, which will not be able to play when embedded on external websites. YouTube will let video creators contest the restrictions through an appeals process, a spokeswoman said.
If the appeals process is anything like what Adland encountered, then it will be labyrinthian, time-consuming and arbitrary. The only reason we were un-banned from Adsense the first time around, was because we knew someone who knew someone that worked at Google in Ireland. These days, the only replies we get are automatic. Adland.tv the domain has even been delisted from Google search completely, which we managed to fix, and we’re currently being heavily deranked for no apparent reason. Or perhaps these articles are the reason.
In dealing with international brand boycott of Google advertising, and cleaning house so that they no longer fund terrorism by running pre-roll Super Bowl ads on ISIS videos, Google is now again apologising and “tweaking” their system.

The ad economy is increasingly a) monopolistic and b) fraudulent. I have never used AdSense or Facebook ads because I have never seen any indication whatsoever that they are effective or reliable. I did try using BookBub four times, but after they rejected both A THRONE OF BONES as well as Jerry Pournelle’s THERE WILL BE WAR for ad campaigns, I stopped using them.
What I have found to be effective is a) this blog, b) Larry Correia’s book bombs, c) the Amazon giveaways, and d) the two mailing lists. In other words, direct marketing. Indirect marketing, be it advertising in magazines or the various social media ad schemes, only appear to benefit the owner of the advertising vehicle rather than the advertiser.
Notice that YouTube still puts ads on videos it has demonetized. Such as those produced by Ron Paul.

Former US Congressman Ron Paul has joined a growing list of independent political journalists and commentators who’re being economically punished by YouTube despite producing videos that routinely receive hundreds of thousands of views. In a tweet published Saturday, Wikileaks founder Julian Assange tweeted a screenshot of Paul’s “Liberty Report” page showing that his videos had been labeled “not suitable” for all advertisers by YouTube’s content arbiters.

The crackdown cometh

Google is amping up and automating its YouTube crackdown:

Starting on Thursday, Google will police YouTube like it never has before, adding warnings and disabling advertising on videos that the company determines crosses its new threshold for offensive content.
YouTube isn’t removing the selected videos, but is instead setting new restrictions on viewing, sharing and making money on them. A note detailing the changes will go to producers of the affected videos on Thursday, according to a spokeswoman for the Alphabet Inc. company.
Google outlined these moves in June, but the implementation comes as debate about extremism and political speech is front-and-center in the national spotlight — and when tech giants like Google and Facebook Inc. face deeper scrutiny over how they moderate information distributed through their digital services.
“These videos will have less engagement and be harder to find,” Kent Walker, Google’s general counsel, wrote about the plans in a June blog post. “This strikes the right balance between free expression and access to information without promoting extremely offensive viewpoints.” A Google spokeswoman declined to comment further on the changes.
The new restrictions, which target what Walker called “inflammatory religious or supremacist content,” are expected to hit a small fraction of videos, according to person familiar with the company. YouTube says it uploads over 400 hours of video a minute. Videos tagged by its new policy won’t be able to run ads or have comments posted, and won’t appear in any recommended lists on the video site. A warning screen will also appear before the videos, which will not be able to play when embedded on external websites.

I’ve already seen reports that videos that even contain the word “SJW” in the video, not merely in the title or description, have been demonetized. So, it’s not exactly hard to know which elements within Google are behind this.
So far, the saner elements are not prevailing.
This will, of course, have precisely zero effect on our plans for Voxiversity. We anticipated this and more.

Cloudflare CEO ponders his action

And the answer is, no, Mr. Prince, you were not right to pull the plug on a Nazi website.

I helped kick a group of neo-Nazis off the internet last week, but since then I’ve wondered whether I made the right decision…. At some level, it’s easy to fire Nazis as customers. They don’t pay you much, if anything, since Cloudflare offers a free version of its service. Our terms of use give us broad discretion to choose whom we allow to use our network. Beyond the horrible content, the Daily Stormer began claiming that we secretly supported their ideology, causing a major distraction to our team. Firing a Nazi customer gets you glowing notes from around the world thanking you for standing up to hate.
But a week later, I continue to worry about this power and the potential precedent being set. The reality of today’s internet is that if you are publishing anything even remotely controversial, your site will get cyberattacked. Without a massive global network similar to Cloudflare’s, it is nearly impossible to withstand the barrage. Only a small group of companies—names you know, like Facebook , Google and Microsoft , along with a handful of others you may not, like Cloudflare—have sufficient scale to keep their users online.
The upshot is that a few private companies have effectively become the gatekeepers to the public square—the blogs and social media that serve as today’s soapboxes and pamphlets. If a handful of tech executives decide to block you from their services, your content effectively can’t be on the internet.
Before terminating the Daily Stormer, Cloudflare’s policy had been to stay neutral to the content that used our network. We’d comply with the law in the jurisdictions where we operate, but we wouldn’t bow to political or public pressure to boot anyone off our network. And make no mistake, there is pressure: Hackers actually tweeted to us asking that we get out of the way so they could take down the Daily Stormer.
When standing up to government requests or angry Twitter demands to silence unpopular speech, it was powerful to be able to say we’d never terminated a customer due to political pressure. I’m not sure we can say that anymore.

Dear Mr. Prince,
In answer to your question posed in the Wall Street Journal today, the answer is no. Here are five reasons why:

  • You sacrificed Cloudflare’s moral authority and neutrality.
  • You contributed to the increasing fragmentation of the Internet.
  • You threw away any chance to meaningfully oppose the growing movement towards national Internet sovereignty. How can you possibly claim that China and Turkey, or any other government, don’t have the right to thought-police you when you are thought-policing others?
  • You encouraged other big tech companies to do the same, thereby leading tens of thousands of people to initiate backup plans in the event they are deplatformed for their opinions.
  • You gave in to the SJWs and informed them that you are susceptible to their pressure. You can safely expect further demands to functionally deplatform other sites under attack.

I am no fan of the Daily Stormer. It is obnoxious and their writers have personally attacked me on more than one occasion. Nevertheless, I would encourage you to invite the site back to Cloudfare, while at the same time making a public statement that Cloudflare will no longer thought-police Internet content and will not deny its services to any site that is in compliance with the law.
Sincerely,
Vox Day

Google unvanishes stats prof

Zerohedge helped Salil Mehta get his email, blog, and other accounts back after they were vanished by Google.

Yesterday we reported that in a shocking, and unexplained move, statistics professor Salil Mehta, adjunct professor at Columbia and Georgetown who teaches probability and data science and whose work has appeared on this website on numerous prior occasions, had been banned by Google on Friday, with his email, blog and other Google-linked accounts wiped clean and no longer accessible.
As we discussed yesterday, it was not clear what Salil did to provoke Google:
On Friday afternoon East Coast Time by surprise, I was completely shut down in all my Google accounts (all of my gmail accounts, blog, all of my university pages that were on google sites, etc.) for no reason and no warning.  A number of us were stunned and unsure, but clearly we know at this point it wasn’t an accident.
As Salil explained, he had never engaged in political discourse, and his content was purely math/statistics-focused: “My background is clean, and without a political or social agenda.  I am not promoting any specific viewpoint.  I teach probability math and that’s it.  Have worked with both the Obama administration and advised on polling statistics for the Trump campaign, am an adjunct professor at three top universities, an editor of the peer-reviewed journal of the American Statistical Association, and wrote a best-selling statistics book (all the proceeds of which I gave to charity!)”
And yet, Salil’s attempts to get to the bottom of his purge were fruitless:
I have followed their common “appeal” form but no response for three days.  Also connected with one of the VPs over the weekend and it still takes time until receiving this today!  Just more of a reflection of how cold a company can treat someone very poorly: without any information, and lack of ability to move forward in their life (can I get real reasons if any, can I get advance notice, can I get my contact list back from gmail, and why are university properties unrelated to my blog shut down?)
We are going to be looking back on this time in Google’s history and those of other social media and know that they have done some very immoral and confusing things, and it has hurt their public reputation with decent people who wanted to grow into the next future with them.
Until yesterday, Google’s only response was a generic form statement it issues to every account that is “in violation of its Terms of Service.” That changed yesterday, because after our article detailing Salil’s plight went viral, and was read 300,000 times, Google responded and as of this morning, has restored all of Salil Metha’s accounts.

That’s great and all, but the irony of someone being unvanished because he did NOT engage in any Constitutionally-protected political free speech is sizable indeed. Most people are not going to have the online might of Zerohedge behind them, or happen to be a politically unblemished minority professor who worked with the Obama administration, which means that most of us are beholden to the goodwill and commitment to Internet neutrality of the various social media giants.
Since these corporations are heavily converged, since SJWs always double down, and since the executives who are not themselves SJWs have repeatedly shown themselves to be too weak to stand up to much direct pressure from their internal SJWs, it is imperative that everyone who is to the right of Salil Metha have a backup plan already in place and already implemented starting right now. That means everything from email addresses, websites, and payment processors to ISPs and domain registry alternatives.
If you want to be accessible by our rapid response program and you are not VFM, you have four alternatives.

  1. Follow me on Twitter. This is the least preferable option since I anticipate a massive, multiplatform strike will be the next step after the surgical deplatformings and demonetizations prove ineffective. I am reliably informed that SJWs inside Twitter, Google, Facebook, and Paypal are already putting this plan together and are now working on figuring out how to sell it to the decision-makers at their respective corporations. Saner heads may prevail, in fact, they probably will prevail at Google and Paypal, since the executives there understand that further fracturing the Internet is not good for their future growth, but there are no guarantees, and as we know from our experience with Amazon, even a rogue strike or two by employees acting without permission or approval cannot be ruled out.
  2. Follow me on Gab. This is safe, but not necessarily timely, particularly if you’re not already actively using Gab.
  3. Sign up for the Book Club. You’ll get 1-3 book announcements per month. This is the least disruptive option that ensures you are rapidly contacted.
  4. Sign up for the Daily Meme Wars. You’ll get six emails per week, five with the Meme of the Day, and the sixth containing a summary and a poll to vote in the meme of the week. This is the option I’d prefer people to select, because #DailyMemeWars has proven to be increasingly effective social media artillery.
You can, of course, do any combination of these or all four if you see fit. But the important thing is to do at least one of them. And remember, you can always reach me at my infogalactic email if my gmail address is vanished.