> Ideally you'd hope that they would allow third party takedowns. But the ability to do third party takedowns provides a target for the exact attackers that their business is trying to protect against.

I don't think that argument holds water. There's a world of difference between knocking a site offline with a DDoS and making a legal request which results in a hosting provider shutting it down.

Sure. Any evidence such a legal request has been made in this case? If not, why the whining?

They are both denial of services. While there indeed differences between them, they don't seem relevant here.

If a third party takedown system is poorly implemented (and it's pretty hard to create a balanced takedown system at scale), it may become more effective to abuse it instead of using DDoS.

It's a little hard to get outraged about that hypothetical, given that legitimate usage of DocuSign typically involves sending them documents containing all sorts of sensitive information.

Shutting down GMail would practically amount to shutting down email. It's by far the largest email provider in the US (and probably in the world but I don't have that data). There's no other provider who could take up the slack; if it were to abruptly shut down, a lot of users would simply lose access to email altogether.

They'd generate a huge amount of ill will by shutting it down, and that in turn would likely lead to a nontrivial share of people moving away from Google core products (like search) out of pure spite.

Wait, Google does search these days?

At one point AOL was the largest ISP and email provider on Earth too. If gmail died off people would just move to something else. It'd be annoying, but it wouldn't be the end of email

Google could actually do everyone a solid by killing gmail. They have enough influence in the industry that they could create a standard for email address portability, and then slowly force everybody to move off. By the end, one of the biggest problems with email would be solved and people would be able to switch email providers like how we can switch phone providers without needing to change our phone numbers. And Google would get to save a lot of money by no longer needing to provide everyone's emails

No, that wouldn't happen. Lots of people don't have email through Google, for one. Those people will still use email just fine. Moreover, the people who do use Gmail will simply sign up with another provider. It won't be a big deal.

> No, that wouldn't happen. Lots of people don't have email through Google, for one.

Based on some data I collected around five years ago, roughly 80% of US customers used GMail for personal email. It was overwhelmingly the most common choice. I suspect that number has only drifted upwards since.

(What about the rest? 15% were using Yahoo; the rest were spread thinly across AOL, Microsoft, ISPs, and colleges.)

I’d honestly expect to see regulatory intervention if they tried this.

In a better time I would expect the government to step in a acquire this fundamental service and fund it with tax money. Right now? The only intervention I would expect is a massive subsidy to pay Google to keep providing it, while also letting them continue to spy on everyone's mail (which is a crime, but not if the mail is on a computer, I guess).

Government-operated Gmail would become such a massive cesspool of spam and hijacked accounts. It'd be spectacular.

Do you believe that if the government provided email, that the government wouldn't keep track of everything you did on it?

Depends on the health of our institutions. In the US at least they're legally obligated not to by the highest law in the land. It gets ignored now, but it's a more promising path to privacy-preserving digital infrastructure than letting the private market handle it.

Oh, I think it's been ignored for a long time. Remember Snowden?

> but it's a more promising path to privacy-preserving digital infrastructure than letting the private market handle it.

The history of governments suggests otherwise.

Unfortunately, the Constitution has been flagrantly ignored by the federal government for close to 100 years now, if not longer. Everything that FDR did was blatantly unconstitutional, but nobody stopped him, nor did they roll it back when he was gone. The Constitution has no real practical power to restrain the government if the people don't exercise their rights as voters to hold it accountable, and it is abundantly clear that the unconstitutional stuff the government gets up to is (largely) actually pretty popular.

Do you believe the government doesn't keep track of your email, just because it's hosted on googles servers?

I used a private mail server for years, and the government didn't keep track of it. Of course, what happened at the email's destination, who knows?

Given the era, I wouldn't be surprised if it came down to "someone on the development team liked that part". (Or "someone in the purchasing department got a bunch of them really cheap".)

Are you sure that's the only cause? I can think of some other events in 2020 that might have led to a lot of youth dropping out of in-person programs.

I think the problem goes beyond that. Meta never had a particularly coherent story for what "Horizon Worlds" was supposed to be to users - it was variously pitched as an online conference room, a social hangout, a way to explore 3D models, a video game... it felt as if they were throwing ideas at the wall to see what stuck, and nothing really did.

Ultimately yes, that was the issue. In theory they built a viable product, even if it still was cartoonish etc. But it was enough to see that even if it was perfected - there simply wasn't a killer app for what to actually do in there. The vast majority of the worlds that got any traction were just kids playgrounds with silly or trivial games. Some of them were quite fun. But none of them represented a serious value proposition to anybody with actual money.

The crazy thing is, they built a half decent app called Horizon Workrooms. You could go in there with colleagues and co-work. With so many people WFH it was an actual useful thing to be able to share a room with your colleagues and anybody could throw up a shared screen on the projector, while having your own display in front of you that nobody could see. I did this with folks from my team and it became a regular Friday afternoon type thing for us all to hange out. This was actually useful. But they managed to screw it up and eventually canceled it as well.

That's what metaverses are like - big spaces in which users can do things. What to do is largely up to the users.

I'm especially curious how much small-scale shared hosting is left. The big companies like EIG are certainly still around, but the little one-off hosting companies are much less common.

> The response of this request is a Golang binary compiled for the requested operating system, architecture, package version, and the binary's name—using Go 1.17.x

Uh... Go 1.17 is almost five years old. (The current version is 1.26.) Why is this service using an ancient version of Go?

It's been a long time since I've done it, but I could type pretty quickly on a TI-83 - even with the silly ABC keyboard layout and all.

Eswatini is also an absolute monarchy which bans the formation of political parties, does not allow women to own property, and has the highest rate of HIV/AIDS infection of any country in the world. So, probably not a great place to hold a conference.