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Telegram is not a behemoth like Facebook so doesn't have their resources to moderate everything. Even Facebook isn't particularly good at it. They mostly rely on software which often produces false positives.

This arrest is completely preposterous and is just an attempt to get Durov to play ball with France's privacy destroying authorities.


Not being a behemot is not an excuse if they are not moderating criminal behavior at all. I dont know if that is the case, just pointing that logic is not sound.


As many people say when Facebook's failures came to light: a tech company cannot pass the buck by blaming their inability to perform their legal obligations on scale.

If a business can't do a thing it is required to do, their CEO's option is "close business" or "break law".


lately when i see arguments like yours one thing keeps popping into my head. i’m not sure how i feel about the following yet but it’s been on my mind a bit for the past couple of years:

if someone is incapable of making good faith genuine attempts to mitigate against atrocious things happening openly in the property they control, then isn’t this fairly solid evidence they’re just not capable of owning that property? if they make such an excuse, it would seem to me they’re either too irresponsible or just plain incompetent.

again, i’m not sure how i feel about the implications of this, but the whole “we just don’t have the resources” feels like a cowards excuse rather than reality—particularly as someone already pointed out, they seem to gather their wits to make a sizable dent when it’s spam.


According to this rule, approximately 100% of officials must be thrown out of their jobs right this second. I think you are mostly correct about irresponsibility, incompetence, and excuses, but I don't see why there should be legal consequences for people who did not take on any obligations. Especially in the situation, when people who take on, like all officials, have no responsibility


it’s still a bit muddy why he was arrested, but it seems like it’s due to his constant dismissal of any responsibility.

i’m not sure of the specifics of what you mean by 100% of officials must be thrown out” but if im understanding what you’re implying, i disagree, most land owners, elected officials, capable owners of organizations take meaningful or genuine good faith efforts to address open corruption in their spaces . and if they don’t, then yes, why wouldn’t we hold them responsible?

it seems like you’re indicating there should be no consequences for people who don’t take on obligations…

> i don’t see why there should be legal consequences for people who did not take on any obligations.

of course they take on obligations, it’s partially why we pay executives so much because they’re taking on obligations. this isn’t some pauper struggling to pay rent on his studio apartment—he was arrested after traveling from one country to another in his private jet.

again, i haven’t spent much energy on the implications from effect iteration of this but we have pretty solid evidence of what happens when we allow these wannabe kings to claim they should have nothing but positive personal benefits while externalizing any negatives onto the rest of us.

“you should pay me obscene amounts and treat me like a king while i take no responsibility whatsoever” is absurd. and we’re seeing the cascading effects of this absurdity in real time.


>most land owners, elected officials, capable owners of organizations take meaningful or genuine good faith efforts to address open corruption in their spaces

And I am saying that zero percent of them do that. And somebody saying that Durov "take meaningful or genuine good faith efforts to address open corruption in their spaces". My point is that there is no way to verify the degree of "good faith genuinity", so we cant use that parameter in aspect of legal actions.


> My point is that there is no way to verify the degree of "good faith genuinity", so we cant use that parameter in aspect of legal actions.

That's literally a thing that happens during trial, at least for certain crimes and legal systems.

Can't speak to this specific case because (1) IANAL, and (2) my grasp of the French language is so bad that I can't even reliably say the French for "I don't speak French".

https://www.criminal-lawyers.com.au/criminal-defences/lack-i...


> there is no way to verify the degree of "good faith genuinity", so we cant use that parameter in aspect of legal actions.

of course there is…

one of the reasons people justifiably bring up spam in these “my free speech” cases is because it shows definitively that the “free speech absolutists” don’t actually care about free speech—if they truly believed all speech is as valuable as all other speech then spam would have the same weight of priority as non-spam speech for them, yet they have no problem silencing spam.

off the top of my head, we would consider their guard rails against spam and have they implemented those same guard rails against the things they’re being charged for? if not, then obviously they’re not making real attempts.

of course there are multiple ways to determine whether they’ve made meaningful attempts. i think this is all moot though, if my understanding is correct, he’s resisted doing anything at all which is why he’s been charged.

as i said in a different post though, it’s still muddy on the specifics, we’ll know more later—we’re just wildly guessing at this point.


> if they truly believed all speech is as valuable as all other speech

That's a strawman. They believe all speech should be held legally equal, not that's it's value is equal.

It's that any speech has the potential to be extremely valuable to the person not responsible for regulating it.


"The property" you mean the council housing where all the ganging, killing, raping and terror plotting occurs, right? Sure, the administration of said council should be jailed ASAP.


It is indeed completely illegal to own a property where illegal activities happen, know it and do nothing about it in France. Reporting the issue to the police is an adequate step. And yes, people have been jailed for owning apartments where terror plotting happened. Thank you for this good exemple.

For the good of the discussion, I would however appreciate if you kept your baseless fantasies about council housing - which is both numerous and very safe in France, a country which tries to do something to mitigate poverty - out of it.


District 13 excellent series of movies shows that council housing ("banlieues") is exactly where these crimes happen.


> Captain Damien must team up with Leito, a local insurgent from District 13, to defuse a neutron bomb that has fallen into the hands of a local drug lord, Taha, and rescue Leito's sister Lola.

This "shows" those things in much the same way that First Contact "shows" how one may convert a Titan missile into a 3-person faster-than-light spacecraft in a post-nuclear-war Bozeman, Montana.


Banlieues are not “council housing”. HLM is council housing. Banlieues literally means suburbs.


Well, suburbs where these social houses are located and where police is afraid to go, stop pretending you dont know what all this is about.


if the administration took zero good faith demonstrable attempts to address it, then they should at least be removed from the position, yes.

if they refuse to take steps whatsoever, yes, that’s a problem. why does it feel like you both understand the problem yet are defending the problem at the same time?


>if someone is incapable of making good faith genuine attempts to mitigate against atrocious things happening openly in the property they control, then isn’t this fairly solid evidence they’re just not capable of owning that property?

Even if true, what then? It doesn't follow said property can be ethically transferred to anyone else; otherwise you've just thrown out all semblance of property rights. You've sold off the world to the HOA's, as it were; now anyone who objects to the way you maintain your grounds has a button to push to make sure you are deprived of any grounds you keep. Be they real, or digital.

If I make a platform that shuffles bits around, and a bunch of users start using it for CP and terrorism (lets assume perfect enforcement/investigative capability up until piercing the platform, so probability 1 on the CP/terrorism front); I don't think the choice then is "lets shluff this to someone responsible to admin/make a tap". The only ethically tenable approach would be "well, no more moving bits around by anyone for anyone else anymore". And at that point we've unmade computing essentially.

No one, and I mean "Not One Single Entity, government or otherwise" can be trusted to not to abuse privileged access; and once put into the position to abuse, abstain from doing so. Abuse is probability 1. This is part of why I believe Stallman was right. The concept of the user account has been a disaster for the human species. As it is by the prescribing of unique identifiers to discern one operation on behalf of someone from another that has created a world in which we can even imagine such horrifying concepts as a small group unilaterally managing the entirety of the rest of humanity, for any purpose.

For me it is a sobering thought on the impact of automated business systems. I've practically 180'd on actual character of my own life's work. It's got me in a spot where I'm strongly considering burning my tools. Extreme? Maybe. Sometimes though, you have to accept that there are extremely unpleasant consequences out there that cannot be satisfactorally mitigated.

So I have a return question for you. Are you sure that the question you asked is the one you should be asking, or should you be asking yourself, "how many lives are acceptable casualties in order to continue operating within the bounds of my assumed ethical envelope?" Because there is a counter of people effected; you may not be able to read it or write it, but it's there.


Preposterous accusations! It's like arresting a CEO of a phone manufacturing company because phones are sometimes used for nefarious activities.


Zaluzhny has been a royal pain in the ass for American military advisors and is now paying the price.


Looks like there's finally a benefit to Android OS being such a clusterfuck with some many versions being currently active on a significant portion of devices. Not updating quickly increases the number of versions floating around.


In the email I got from them she says she didn't have to take any action for this crap to be installed on her iPhone.


That's partially true but mostly an excuse people, who think they're smart and deserve to get funded, make for not being able to get funding.

Hustlers get funded regardless of their background.


Lots of good replies but I liked this one the best. 100% right on and what a ton of technically smart people don't understand.

Tons of technically very smart people are a great example of that. Are they technically smart? Yes. Do they overanalyze the shit out of everything and almost always come up with reasons why it won't work? Yup.

Every smartup CEO I've worked with has been delisionally optimistic and very charismatic. Their main skill is to be a true believer (at least externally) and brainwash everyone around them into their vision (investors and current as well as perspective employees).


Would love to know where you're meeting all these amazing girls. Online dating absolutely sucks for men with the exception of the ones who look like cover models and are over 6 feet tall. Everyone else might as well go die in a ditch.


This is true for a lot of people in tech, in general. Part of it is because tech people are, on average, much smarter and much more curious than an average person. Now, you take a smart, curious person and you make them work at a computer connected to the internet -- the largest knowledge base ever created. That's like hiring an alcoholic to work at a liqueur store and expecting them not to drink during the work day.


You're basically arguing for what totalitarian regimes do when they censor any speech they deem undesirable.

I'm sure you will reply that the type of speech you want to censor is actually bad but who decides that? You?

Freedom of speech without significant negative consequences is one of the main principles of a democratic society. As long as the speech in question is not promoting violence it should be allowed.

The fact that so many liberals now think that it's desirable to have consequences for expressing a wrong opinion is mind boggling and scary. That is a completely illiberal stance. It's also stupid because it somehow misses the point of freedom of speech being a principle. What if these woke people faced significant negative consequences for expressing THEIR opinions?


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