Unfortunately (or fortunately, really, from a broader perspective) you wouldn't be allowed to use the patent system to bar other people from asserting their rights in court.

Miners used to bring canary birds with them when mining. If they hit poisonous gas, the canary would die before the miners, alerting them to the gas.

The government can issue secret warrants to companies that they are not allowed to disclose, requiring them to hand over customer data. A warrant canary is a periodical statement from a company that they have not received such a warrant. The idea is that if they do receive a warrant, they will stop publishing the warrant, and the court can't compel them to.

I once looked into whether it was possible to get a ".ck" domain name, for juvenile and obvious yet potentially humorous domains. It turns out that that's Cook Islands' TLD, and they don't allow direct use of it... instead, they've done the same thing as the UK did, and only allowed domains under ".co.ck".

And if you want to make a domain name that makes use of that suffix in a crude way, you won't be allowed to:

> Domains considered profane will not be considered on any level, and the application will be dissolved with the applicant being notified, and future requests for the same domain name will be ignored. '.ck' domains are monitored on the web, on a regular basis for profanity on the Internet if it is found to be doing so, or if the site is deemed inappropriate, the domain will be terminated without notification or refund.

If they were that worried about the crude name possibilities, I wonder why they didn't go with ".com.ck" like some other gTLDs did?

Which made me chuckle for very similar reasons.

Nathan Barley dot cock

It was trashbat.co.ck which sadly seems to be down right now.

I think that statement asks that you let the parent have final say over how you interact with their children, not that you cater to their every whim because their child is disabled.

The first amendment does apply - just, it applies the other way around. The primary function of media sites is to broadcast their users' messages, and in doing so they're exercising their own freedom of speech. To force them to broadcast certain content would be to compel certain speech from them, which would violate their freedom of speech.

(do note that I'm not a lawyer, so this might not be 100% accurate)

Or maybe it's a metaphorical expression of sadness over the recent death of a respected idol?

Eh. The explanation they offered that they were hiring a large mass of moderators and some of them made mistakes is more than plausible. When they add that many people it's really inevitable that someone would get over-eager or misread the message of a video.

It can hardly be called a mistake when the same doesn’t happen to people and channels that align themselves politically with Google’s internal policies and culture.

Google can do as they please, YouTube is theirs, but you can’t seriously accept statements like these at face value.

Of course it can. Taking this action against someone with a political stance opposite from yours may be a mistake you're more likely to make, but it's still a mistake.

Besides that, the point I was trying to make was less about whether it was a mistake, and more that it's plausible that this was something that was done by an individual against company policy rather than in accordance with it.

Regardless of whether the actions are against company policy, they were taken on purpose by the "moderators".

I don't dispute that. What I dispute is the implication that they had been instructed to do so by Google.

So similar to the Wells Fargo account creation fraud.

You know, this group is still active, collecting revenue on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsdGlryupg5aU1849rUzeHw ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loose_Change

Trying to trample opposing political views by force won't end well.

"How do we know that FSLabs don’t use this, just because they say so?"

How do you know the main executable doesn't do the same thing? How is trusting them not to run this .exe different from trusting them not to secretly implement this functionality in the actual program?

Well yeah. The appropriate reaction here is to assume that the company is shipping malware in the product regardless of what particular format.

Sure, but what of significance has changed? Every time you run a program, you're trusting the developer not to do nefarious things like reading your Chrome credentials, because the only assurance you have is the developer's word about what the program does. As far as I can tell, that hasn't changed at all. I'm not saying this is okay - there are reasons why this is a bad thing to do, I just don't see how no longer being able to trust the developer not to be malicious is one of them.

There is a difference between "developer could hypothetically do bad stuff" and "developer has been caught doing bad stuff"

Once they ship malware in any one form, anything else from a developer is eternally suspect. Even if they don't do something like this in their apps' main executables _now_ doesn't mean they won't in the future.

Once a company pulls shit like this, they are dead to me, and they should be dead to everyone else as well.

Businesses don't have to abide by EU law when doing business with EU citizens, but when doing business in the EU. It's a small, but sometimes meaningful, distinction.

Check the GDPR. The EU requires certains things of businesses not in the EU, who interact with EU citizens.

Even worse it is EU residents and who may or may not be in the EU when they interact with you.

Only if "as individually as possible" means perfect prediction. If you assume that there's a limit to how well the future can be predicted, insurance still has value.

Also, car insurance specifically is usually legally mandated. There's a tangible benefit to having it (being allowed to drive) besides the risk mitigation.