Sure the "principled high road" has meaning. Coming out of the 90's, the US had a dominant position in international institutions and a 'vibe' that it was willing to subordinate its interests in favor of the global community. The post GWOT shift to a 'selfish' position, clearly illustrated here by your argument, reflects the absolute cratering of international public opinion, and frankly the collective loss of trust in a less selfish America.
With the fall of the Soviet Union and apparent end of the Cold War, many people came to believe that we were at "The End of History", beginning a new era in which major conflicts were a thing of the past, and with that, strategic considerations were seen as a dated anachronism. Future conflicts were anticipated to be small "police" actions, with America filling in not just the role of world police, but also judge, jury and executioner of any country that had a problem with it. Simultaneously, there was obviously a lot of opportunity to loot the former Soviet states, and what better framework for organizing and legitimizing that looting than the "Rules Based International Order", defined and enforced by America, which would disarm any opposition to this looting by framing the looting as economic liberalization.
So the 90s vibe you speak of was in fact America imposing a global hegemonic order which was calculated to benifit, if not American interests, then certainly the interests of the western oligarchs who were aligned with America.
Why take the chance that the food you buy from the grocer may be contaminated? I have respect for human creativity, and the limits of farmers. It's not easy to keep constant vigilance against all sources of contamination. Easier to restrict food to only what you produce yourself.
Glibness aside, there's clearly a continuum to the concept of 'we live in a society', and to how far the monkey brain's tribe extends. But the argument against routers is clearly arising from a biased set of priors, whether fairly or unfairly.
Because it's a strategic issue. The internet is critical infrastructure. While TP-Link might not have contracts with ISPs and datacenters, it doesn't take a lot of imagination to think what damage you could have with 30% of the home / small business routers under your control.
This could range from plausible deniability stuff (like the examples in the article), to targeted investigations / attacks (Bob who works at the Gov Accounting office for Miliary Spending), all the way to a 100-million unit botnet turning to provide a few days of distraction ("Bad hackers compromised our OTA system. Sorry!") on while a certain island is being eminant-domained.
Your food example is not the same. You can't trojan-horse an apple pie, or target an individual customer from the supplier-side (yet). If you decided to poison them, that's pulling the pin from the grenade right now.
> Why take the chance that the food you buy from the grocer may be contaminated?
Food doesn’t have the incentives here, and because the FDA is involved with food production they regularly discovers issues and issues recalls etc. Even better manufactures can no longer influence food after it enters a distribution center limiting their ability to hide issues.
Now suppose you deploy a home router with automatic updates, that’s not necessarily malicious but means the device can be under the manufacturer’s control whenever they wish. Saying we haven’t discovered malicious activity is therefore meaningless here.
That's a farcically absurd statement given the context. Following this logic, Japan and the US being adversaries is the only justification you need for Japanese internment camps.
"Against the public interest" is the vaguest bar for investigation I can imagine, it's even vaguer than "probable cause" in policing! As long as you can find a person who disagrees (and presumably pays taxes), you're good to go on "against the public interest"?
The problem is the concentration. One person majority owning a platform as influential as Twitter or an expansive media empire (Murdochs) is not good for democracy. If the empire was split up to ten different multimillionaires we'd be better off.
In the UK we have the BBC where every word is considered to be a fact. They have TV channels and radio shows where 'today's curated and extremely edited sound-bites' are broadcast every 30 minutes, 24/7.
At least with billionaire owners it's taken as read there is going to be some nuance.
Trailing 12 Mths Inflation: 3.2% (Headline) 3.8% (Core). In both cases, it's at least 50% above target. While a smaller gap than in recent years, it's still fairly sizable, all things considered.
Nothing about the current conditions are particularly abnormal. CPI was at 2.5-3 through the entirety of the dot com boom, higher than that still in the 80's, and of course between 1968 and 1982 it was almost entirely above 5%.
I really don't think you're considering all the things, all things considered.
It's insane to me that most of the heat is being directed at Fujitsu. Sure, there's definitely some culpability there, but the Post Office (especially their legal team) holds the vast majority of the responsibility. There's a lot weighing in on the multi-year investigation that (has been) ongoing, but I can't help but feel like they're waiting for the public furor to cool down before releasing anything.
The Post Office also paid independent people to figure out where the problem is, and the answer was "Horizon is garbage, you can't rely on it". So, they fired those people.
1. "We aren't wrong, you are too involved to make an impartial decision. We need somebody independent to investigate"
2. "The independent investigation has finished, but we need to properly digest their report, so we can't tell you what they said yet"
3. "We've now realised the independent investigation was inadequate, everybody who worked on it was incompetent and its findings are useless so we've destroyed the report. We declare ourselves exonerated, we were right all along".
People tend to have this mistaken understanding of morality which assumes they're a good person and so therefore obviously what they did must be good (since they're a good person) and so they might need to uh, fix differences between the world as they've imagined it and the slightly less rosy reality.
For example sure, you know that stabbing Sarah in the throat resulted in Sarah becoming dead, but you had to do that, because you're a good person and Sarah was going to tell the Police that you'd stolen $18.5M from the business. You didn't steal that money! Sure, yes, you took the money and maybe you technically shouldn't have done that, but you had a 100% sure strategy for playing Blackjack and recovering the $800 000 you lost last month, except that you got a bit confused and lost all of the $18.5M, but that's not theft, that's just a minor mistake you will be able to soon fix, if only Sarah doesn't tell these lies about stealing and get you arrested. So you had to, it wasn't murder, it was really self defence. You're a Good Person!
> The Post Office also paid independent people to figure out where the problem is, and the answer was "Horizon is garbage, you can't rely on it". So, they fired those people.
A UK tradition!
> In 2009, the government came under fire when ACMD [Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs] chair David Nutt of Imperial College London was sacked for questioning government drug policy in public
That implies that the Post Office didn't know about the true situation, but they most definitely did know about the issues, but continued to lie and fraudulently collect money from the sub postmasters affected whilst collecting bonuses for each successful prosecution.
Free speech may not be the relevant criticism here, but there's... somewhat of a discomfort of a government (if admittedly foreign) agency calling out specific individuals. I know we're in the era of terminally online politicians, but this crosses some sort of professionalism boundary?
EDIT: Which is to say, it's not illegal or anything, but I'm sending a frowning emoji.
> but this crosses some sort of professionalism boundary?
I don't know. I assume any organisation interested in directing online discourse about subjects it is vested in does something like this. Especially political organisations.
This is politics. Kinda dirty, but that's what it is, I guess. It's probably only noteworthy because the context and persons/groups involved are noteworthy.
