It appears I was wrong about Android. The fact that they said you could just install APKs on it made me think what they called SteamOS was just Android here but your link is clear that FEX doesn't run there.
Guess they have yet another translation layer to run these APKs?
Very hard to take this article seriously when they claim the Model Y was just released this month when it actually came out in 2020. "Tesla also debuted a long-promised, cheaper sedan called the Model Y earlier this month in a bid to increase slumping sales. The new line of sedans received criticism from some analysts over its starting prices of $39,990 and $36,990 – significantly higher than Chinese low-cost competitors." Also the claimed "Rush to buy electric vehicles" put revenue only 2% above expectations?
Blame Tesla for the branding. Wikipedia on the Model Y L[0]
In June 2025, Tesla introduced the three-row, six-seater version of the Model Y, marketed as the Model Y L.[84] Debuting in China and produced at Gigafactory Shanghai, the variant introduces a six-seat configuration with a lengthened cabin and upgraded interior features. It is equipped with 19-inch aero wheels in a new design and offers a new exterior colour option called Cosmic Silver. Deliveries in China commenced on September 2, 2025.[85]
But they did introduce a cheaper sedan this month. It happens to be called the Model Y as well. This is unambiguously true. I think your reading comprehension needs work. It's not saying this is the only Model Y or that there is no other Model Y.
> Tesla for example garuntees >=70% capacity for 8 years or 100k miles.
If you're used to buying used vehicles - that's not sufficient.
For context, all the cars I've bought in the last 20+ years have been at least 8 years old when I bought them. I can get an 8 year old Toyota/Honda and know I'm good for the next 5-7 years.[1]
Buying an 8 year old used Tesla with only 75% capacity? No way.
[1] Likely a lot longer. I'm right now driving a 22 year old vehicle that only started showing issues a year ago.
Oh yeah, my daily driver is a 20-year-old vehicle. It has cost literally just a couple $thousand in maintenance/repairs in the time we've owned it (probably around 10 years? I forget). It's getting kinda rough, but like... at least it doesn't have a battery replacement looming around the corner that would cost more than the entire price we paid for the vehicle.
I want an electric vehicle, but I'm not willing to pay the insanely high prices they go for. I typically don't want to spend more than $10k on a vehicle and I only have once (and that one got totalled in an accident literally a month or two after I finished paying off its loan). The times I've found a used EV in that price range, it's old enough that it will need a new battery soon, instantly ~doubling the price of the vehicle for me.
I'm in the same boat, or was until I finally caved last year and got my wife a 5 year old vehicle, everything else has had >150k miles and >10 years.
I will say that my '03 Pontiac Vibe GT, at 280,000 miles, no longer has all the horses it did when it was younger. There's still a kick from 6000 to 8200 RPM, but I'm increasingly reluctant to hit that redline once a month to "keep it fresh" like I used to. The gradual compression loss and increased leak-down rate aren't that bad, but it might be 25% fewer horses, I guess. Man, I love that car and that engine. I ought to get it a new set of rings, get the cylinders bored out smooth, and give it fresh bearings. Sadly, the rust that's appearing on the body like a cancer probably makes that not worthwhile...
The good news for electrics is that those older motors will remain almost exactly as powerful as they day when they were new for decades.
Obviously, the fuel tank is still the same size it's always been, but range is not as much of a concern on a gas vehicle because gas stations are everywhere and you can fill up rapidly.
I personally hope that this becomes less of a concern as charger density improves year over year - in particular, as EVs become ubiquitous, landlords will start including L2 chargers in apartment parking complexes. Once everyone can charge in a garage overnight, range anxiety is hugely less important.
> You'll likely spend thousands less on maintenance on an EV.
I don't spend many thousands on maintaining an ICE to begin with.
I've kept track of all car expenses since 2008 for 3 different cars. My average per year is $445. This is repairs and maintenance.
I'm not a gearhead. I know little about cars. I do whatever repairs my mechanic suggests. Things just don't break down much with reliable ICE cars.
TCO calculators are, in my experience, off by an order of magnitude. Ignore them.
> The few oil changes on my recently out of warranty 2021 Toyota
Are you doing them at the dealer? You're likely paying too much. And are you doing them on the manufacturer schedule or have you fallen prey to the "Every 3 months or 3000 miles" propaganda?
Most cars need it every 6 months. And unless your car needs some high quality oil, it's typically about $40 to get a regular mechanic to change it. So $80-100/year.
I have a car over 20 years old. I don't spend much money on maintenance. I don't have a car payment, taxes are very low, and insurance is decently cheap. Had it for a few years, have replaced brakes and some minor things. Didn't spend much on the vehicle, either.
Having a car payment would automatically be more expensive than my current vehicle. More taxes, more money each month, and so on. For electric cars, I won't get the incentives here in Norway for much longer, as they are being (mostly) phased out in the next few years.
To be fair, though: I walk a lot. I have a 5-10 minute walk to work (depending on snow). Driving takes longer. The car is used a few times a month. Realistically, my car is a luxury item and I'm lucky to live in a place that makes it so.
This completely ignores the relatively high initial range of ICE (especially hybrid), and the poor real world state of the EV charging infrastructure, compared to petrol.
A 30% drop in range would be an extra 5 minutes at the nearest gas station, almost guaranteed to be within a couple miles.
And, that 30% is usually cheap to get back, usually just by some combination of changing the spark plugs, running a bottle of carbon removal/fuel system cleaner through, or changing the fuel injectors.
I have an electric, but I also understand why people are avoiding electric, and why 96% of people with EV also have an ICE car [1] (including me, with my newest being ICE)!
"Fuel efficiency on an ICE can drop up to 30% after 10 years"
Complete nonsense. Every 15+ year old ICE car I've known or owned was within 5% to 10% of original fuel economy, the reliable brands actually maintained their original fuel economy or surpassed it as fuel economy improves as engine wear in completes at the 20k-40k mile mark.
If your ICE car dropped by 30% then share the brand and your maintenance history.
The warranty doesn’t suggest the battery will be at 70.00001% on the first day of year 9. It says if it goes below 70% it will get replaced.
That 8 year old Toyota you bought came with a 6 year/60k mile warranty. If you are comfortable driving that to 2.5x the initial warranty then a used Tesla should be good to 250k and 20 years.
> The warranty doesn’t suggest the battery will be at 70.00001% on the first day of year 9. It says if it goes below 70% it will get replaced.
The point is that they're not confident enough to say it won't be in that range. Put another way, why don't they just make the warranty 80% instead of 70%?
If Tesla's not confident in it, I definitely am not.
> That 8 year old Toyota you bought came with a 6 year/60k mile warranty. If you are comfortable driving that to 2.5x the initial warranty then a used Tesla should be good to 250k and 20 years.
We hope so, but we don't know, which is the point. Toyota has a track record. Tesla hasn't been around long enough to have a track record.
That aside, the real point is that ICE cars don't have any particular component that costs that much to replace. How much will a new EV battery cost me? Sure, on occasion you may have to rehaul your whole engine, but that's really rare. I've only known one Toyota owner who had to do that, and it cost (in today's dollars), about $6K.
When I buy an 8 year old car, I don't expect perfection. I know things will break - soon. I buy it with the confidence that repairs will not be too expensive, and even after all the repairs I'll still save a ton of money.
The other blocker is the private party market. So far I've never bought a car from a dealer. I always go private party. The standard procedure with that is you take the car to a trusted mechanic who will examine it and inform you of any potential problems. With electric vehicles, those mechanics can't do much. I've asked them. They can look at a few things like the brakes, but stuff related to the engine is beyond their ability. So whereas I may be comfortable spending a lot of money buying an ICE car from private party, I'm not for EVs.
Why doesn’t Toyota make their powertrain warranty 80k miles? Or 200k?
The warranty is there to cover failures. If a pack has a defect it will drop under 70%. If it doesn’t then it will continue working beyond the warranty term.
You’re assuming linear decay and that Tesla has fit the warranty coverage tightly to that line. It seems more likely to me that Teslas warranty is designed to address unexpected exponential decay. This is consistent with ICE powertrain warranties.
The inconsistent part is the assured decay, as opposed to a low chance of catastrophic failure.
Your ICE car will either continue working basically the same, or it will fail catastrophically. I don't have to worry about my gas tank getting smaller over time, and even if it inexplicably does, gas stations are plentiful and stops are short.
It also makes resale rough, as people are talking about. You can salvage a power train from another scrapped car of the same model (or not, a lot of that is shared nowadays). Salvaging batteries is a bigger issue because so many will be worn down and materially worse than new, and they can be re-used which keeps their value high. Very few people have a use for an engine out of a 1983 Silverado, but a lot of people have uses for lithium ion cells.
I could probably get 2 ICE power trains for a decade old car for less than the price of a new battery pack, and I'd wager they'll go farther.
> Your ICE car will either continue working basically the same, or it will fail catastrophically.
This simply isn’t true. Fuel injectors decay. Catalytic converters decay. O2 sensors decay. Oil decays. Air filters decay. Spark plugs decay. Piston rings decay. All of these things affect fuel economy which directly translates to range.
Additionally the ICE related accessory pumps and sensors decay and fail and need replacement. Individually these are all cheaper than a battery pack but ICE vehicles absolutely have repair costs. They just spread those costs out across the entire complex powertrain.
You're not wrong, but none of this answers the question I have: What will the capacity be at 15 years?
My current car is 22 years old. I paid a whopping $3.5K for it, and have not spent much in repairs.
My prior car - used it till it was 17 years old. Would have used it longer but someone totaled it. I paid (in today's dollars), about $12K for it. Spent very little in repairs.
The car before that - used it till it was 16 years old. I know the person who bought it from me and he used it for another 3-4 years. I paid $5.5K for it (today's dollars). Spent very little on repairs.
So anyone who's buying a 6-8 year old EV needs the following answers:
Anyone buying a 6-8 year old ICE needs the following answers:
1. How long will the engine and transmission actually be good for?
2. How much will replacing it cost?
You don't actually know for any given car. You can look at analysis of failure rates over time and make some kind of guess about an average for that model, but who knows about that particular one. At least with a battery you can get some pretty detailed state of health readouts, BMS technology can tell you a good bit more about battery health than what your ICE will tell you about transmission and engine wear without tearing it down.
> How long will the engine and transmission actually be good for?
Fortunately, there's a ton of data out there. Some manufacturers/models are known to be reliable. Just hone in and buy those.
I've had to do repairs, but never that expensive. Never had transmission issues (keep in mind my cars are often over 10 years old - one over 20). For engine stuff, it's just a part replacement once in a while.
I posted elsewhere, but since 2008, my average car expense is about $450/year - that's repairs + oil changes.
> How much will replacing it cost?
Individual parts? Usually, not much. The whole engine? Dump the car. You got a lemon. Did you get it checked out by a trusted mechanic before buying?
> At least with a battery you can get some pretty detailed state of health readouts, BMS technology can tell you a good bit more about battery health than what your ICE will tell you about transmission and engine wear without tearing it down.
> The whole engine? Dump the car. You got a lemon. Did you get it checked out by a trusted mechanic before buying
Ok, so ICE cars are incredibly reliable, assuming you write off a ton of them as "you bought a lemon". I might as well say "the whole battery? You bought a lemon, dump the car."
Like, yeah, don't get me wrong, I bought a 2000 V6 Accord with ~80,000mi on it from a friend who I know babied it. I sold it later still in good condition to a family member. It's now nearly 200,000mi and largely just fine, although every now and then the transmission behaves strangely. I'm tempted to buy it back when they're done with it, I loved that car! But it ignores the massive flood of these that ended up with bad transmissions (seemed like a roll of the dice on this generation) and cars that weren't well taken care of. Even if you were to think Accords are generally reliable, the next generation wasn't anywhere near as reliable as that one in the end.
And it ignores all the millions of cars that were scrapped in that same time period.
If your standard of reliability is "hunt for a unicorn", well, that'll happen with EVa as well. It's still a curve of failures, some will be worse and faster than others. Some might make it several hundred miles before significant failures. Some may barely break 100,000. At least I can see the current battery health on the OBD-II port, I can't tell if they actually did fluid changes properly on an ICE.
We have a pretty good idea how EV packs decay. This isn’t a new technology. Google searches suggest 1-2% decay per year. So a 15 year old car would have 70-85% of original range.
For pack replacements I don’t know, however it seems unlikely you’d really need to. The battery will almost certainly outlast the car. Range will be degraded but I don’t see a lot of 2005 vehicles doing cross country trips either. Even a degraded EV will be useful in town. Many people only drive a few tens of miles a day.
The cost per mile is a simple calculation. It’s a function of your local electricity prices.
"In our 2023 reliability survey, 17 percent of 2013 Tesla Model S owners told us their cars needed battery pack replacements at a cost of $15,000 each."
This is 11-12 years in.
Granted, perhaps batteries were just crappier back then, but 17% is a scary high number for me.
Also:
"This is in line with data from Recurrent, a firm that analyzes and measures EV battery performance, which found that 13 percent of EVs older than 2015 needed battery replacements. By comparison, only 1 percent of EVs newer than 2016 needed new batteries. "
The source of some of the data. What happened with 2020 vehicles?!
> "In our 2023 reliability survey, 17 percent of 2013 Tesla Model S owners told us their cars needed battery pack replacements at a cost of $15,000 each."
What was the remaining range for those replacements?
> Granted, perhaps batteries were just crappier back then,
Tesla makes its own batteries right? When did that start?
> but 17% is a scary high number for me.
Is that high? I have no idea. How many ICE powertrains got replaced at the same time and what did it cost?
> What was the remaining range for those replacements?
Who cares? Spending $15K on battery on a used car is a hard "No!", unless the car is under $10K.
I'm thinking of buying another car next year. $15K is my budget for an ICE car - and only if it has all the bells and whistles. Otherwise it's $12K. Spending another $15K on top of that is ridiculous.
> Is that high? I have no idea. How many ICE powertrains got replaced at the same time and what did it cost?
>>> What was the remaining range for those replacements?
>> Who cares? Spending $15K on battery on a used car is a hard "No!", unless the car is under $10K.
> Well I do because I only need to drive at most 75 miles a day and even a car with 30 miles of range would satisfy my commute requirements.
The point is that when comparing dollar for dollar, I can likely get a used ICE for the same price that will work out better for me. If I already had an ICE car and was looking for a second car just for daily commutes, the EV may make sense. But the hassle of having to get a rental for longer trips - I don't know if it's worth it.
Also have to consider resale value - will people buy the (already used) EV from me if the battery has significantly reduced range?
(BTW, in my social circle, I don't know anyone who's bought a used EV - they all buy new ones out of fear)
> Can you get a better car for $25,000.00?
I have a list of things I want and need from a car. I can find plenty ICE for $15K that matches my requirements. $25K is the max I'll go for an EV, figuring that I may save $10K over about 8-10 years in gas based on the calculators I've used.
I can't find even one EV that matches my requirements for $25K. Each one has some problem - too little room or some other annoying problem (e.g. Ioniq 5 not having rear wipers).
I can get great ICE cars for $15K. I cannot get a single used great EV for $25K.
> I can get great ICE cars for $15K. I cannot get a single used great EV for $25K.
You absolutely can get good used EVs for $25,000.00. That buys a 2022-2024 Kia Niro. You can get the 2019 model for even less, barely more than your ICE budget. 2023 Nissan Leafs are also around $15,000. All of these cars still have 70,000 miles and 5-9 years on their factory battery warranties.
> You absolutely can get good used EVs for $25,000.00.
You're missing my context: I'm not saying "good" by some objective standard, but in terms of my preferences for a car. When most people go car shopping, they have an idea of what attributes they want (leg room, cargo space, safety features, fuel efficiency, etc).
What I was saying was that I can find many ICE cars at $15K that meet all my requirements, but none at $25K.
I spent a lot of time pondering the Kia Niro, Chevy Bolt and Hyundai Kona - all deficient in some way or other. I realized that had they been regular ICE cars, I would not have wasted any time on them, and that I shouldn't get a car I wouldn't otherwise like just because it's an EV. They're totally good cars for some people, but not me.
Ioniq 5 came really close, but lots of people have AC problems that they so far have not fixed. Simply not an option.
Batteries are getting cheaper, and I think there is a perception issue here as well as perhaps a real issue of used parts availability.
A brand new Model 3 battery pack, for example, is in the neighborhood of 10 or 11K installed. Or at least it was about a year ago, I don't closely track prices. Blow up an engine, and you won't be far off that in an ICE car. I know someone who just dropped $18K because they blew up both the engine and the transmission in a single shot. Oops.
But the ICE car has cheaper used options, for sure, where you can probably fix a 15 year old car by dropping in a reman or used engine for under five grand. Options for used Tesla battery packs definitely exist but are nowhere as plentiful. Yet!
100k isn't all that many for a modern used car and that's a pretty sizable hit on the range given that it's by far the biggest limitation of an EV. Given those numbers it's reasonable that a used Tesla with say 125k miles might not be able to do a 150 mile round trip on a full battery. That's a pretty big limitation for some people.
You're going off the minimum for a warranty replacement, which is pessimistic. Most Teslas with 125K miles have not lost anywhere even close to 30% of the capacity. Typical will be more like 15% or a bit less. And even less than that for the LFP cars, IIRC.
Some cars I expect to do much better, due to manufacturer decisions. Ford, for example, put a pretty big battery in my Lightning, and then made the top 10kWh or so unusable. So far, this means that Lightnings with 100K miles (there aren't a huge number of them yet, but they do exist) often have 0 apparent degradation, or very low single digits.
100k is a regulatory minimum. E.g. Toyota had to certify the original Prius traction batteries for 100k because they were considered part of the emissions control system.
OTOH Leaf is a proof that old batteries can be replaced and upgrade an old car.
Original Leafs were sold with a 24kWh capacity. Current ones have 48kWh for the same price, and 64kWh replacement batteries are available. So you can go from half of the crappiest range to 3× more range than when the car was brand new.
Old batteries with reduced capacity don't even have to be thrown out. There are projects that reuse old Leaf batteries for grid energy storage (any capacity is useful when they're sitting on the ground).
I'm betting that the current-gen mainstream cars will benefit similarly, especially that production volume is orders of magnitude higher now (lots of brands share the same platform and battery modules).
I think the numbers of those early leafs (a lot were sold), their horribly degraded batteries, and their consequently low sales price make the numbers appear a bit more dire for resale EVs as a whole than they are in reality (breakdown loss of resale value by model and other EVs are doing much better). However, I think it is also true that EV resale values are lower than they perhaps should be due to used battery fears.
There are a bunch of California-only compliance cars that were essentially given away that would depress the values in the sector. I considered picking up a used Fiat 500e, but even though it was electric, FCA still managed to mess it up and a common recommendation was to keep a few specific tools in the back that enabled quickly disconnecting and reconnecting the battery.
Eh, its kind of mixed. Some manufacturers like Hyundai have essentially a baked in extended warranty (10y 100,000mi) that is non-transferrable, only the base warranty (5y 60,000mi) gets transferred.
The level of time and effort being so low increases the likelihood of this happening. It's the same sort of reason there's red teaming for ensuring AI doesn't help bad actors with chemical weapons, lowered barriers for bad things is a concern even if the bad things were possible before.
The double whammy of conflation with bribing immigration officers and being done by Trump will be hard to get past, but evaluating the policy on it's own it seems like a net positive. Everyone who uses this must really want to be here and a million bucks to spend on food stamps or medicaid is a pure win.
Many major VPN providers claim to keep no logs, and some have had third party audits supporting that claim. Subpeonas don't do anything if the company doesn't keep logs.
I also wouldn’t trust VPN provider standing up to the pressure of really angry Western government. If Mullivad gets US FISA warrant followed by threat to destroy their ability gain access to US payments, they are going to flip logging for you on so fast.
I'm not necessarily sure they would, they've built their company based on no logs and privacy and seem fairly ideological, if this occurred their business would likely be permanently crippled. Most of their users use them because of their strong guarantees.
Turning on Logs for single user vs taking what could be crippling business hit? Maybe their CEO is ethical but that would be behavior I haven't seen from CEO ever.
Third party auditors aren't going to be allowed into Room 641A.
Courts can order providers to keep logs on certain users. Wiretapping laws also allow for it. And all of that goes out the window if the government decides there's a threat to national security.
If selling the physical location information of users isn't surveillance capatalism, then the term doesn't mean anything. "We don't surveil people, we just try to find out where they live and sell that data"
If that's "surveillance capitalism", what's your opinion on databases that map phone numbers to locations? eg. when you get a phone call from 217-555-1234, and it shows "Springfield, IL"? Is that "surveillance capitalism"? That's basically all geoip databases are. Moreover there's plenty of non "surveillance capitalism" uses for geoip that make it questionable to call it "surveillance capitalism". Determining the region for a site, or automatically selecting the closest store, for instance. Before the advent of anycast CDNs, it was also basically the only way to route your visitors to the closest server.
Is there a single company out there making it's money selling access to an area code database? GeoIP databases are much higher resolution and use active scanning methods like ping timing. If a company was spam calling me to estimate distance based on call connection lag, yes that would be surveillance capitalism.
There are companies out there making money selling any kind of data you can imagine. A quick search shows dozens of companies offering this data for sale.
>Is there a single company out there making it's money selling access to an area code database?
So if someone is making money off of it it's suddenly "surveillance capitalism"? What makes it more or less "surveillance capitalism" compared to aws selling cloudfront to some ad company?
Moreover you can do better than area level code granularity. When landlines were more common and local number portability wasn't really a thing, can look at the CO number (second group) to figure out which town or neighborhood a phone number was from. Even if this was all information you could theoretically determine yourself, I'm sure there are companies that package up the data in a nice database for companies to use. In that case is that "surveillance capitalism"? Where's the "surveillance" aspect? It's not like you need to stalk anyone to figure out where a CO is located. That was just a property of the phone network.
>GeoIP databases are much higher resolution and use active scanning methods like ping timing. If a company was spam calling me to estimate distance based on call connection lag, yes that would be surveillance capitalism.
Why is the fact it's "active" or not a relevant factor in determining whether it's "surveillance capitalism" or not? Moreover spam calling people might be bad for other reasons, but it's not exactly "surveillance".
Surveillance definition "Systematic observation of places and people by visual, aural, electronic, photographic or other means." If you are pinging someone's IP to determine their physical location, you are engaged in a form of surveillance. If you have a copy of the table of area codes to city mapping, you are not engaged in surviellance. If you aren't trying to make money, you are not engaged in capitallism.
>Surveillance definition "Systematic observation of places and people by visual, aural, electronic, photographic or other means." If you are pinging someone's IP to determine their physical location, you are engaged in a form of surveillance.
Setting aside the problem with pinging home IPs (most home routers have ICMP echo requests disabled), your definition of "systematic observation" seems very flimsy. Is monitoring the global BGP routing table "systematic observation"? What about scraping RIR records? How is sending ICMP echo requests and observing the response times meaningfully similar to what google et al are doing? I doubt many people are upset about google "systematically observing"... the contents of books (for google books), or the layout of cities (for google maps, ignoring streetview). They're upset about google building dossiers on people. Observing the locations of groups of IP addresses (I'm not aware of any geoip products that can deanonymize specific IP addresses) seems very divorced from that, such that any attempts at equating the two because "systematic observation" is non-nonsensical.
It seems like you missed the specifier "of places and people". Books are not people or places, but an IP addresses at any point in time is tied to either a specific person or place.
> They're upset about google building dossiers on people.
Their location being in that dossier is part of what upsets people.
>but an IP addresses at any point in time is tied to either a specific person or place.
Except I'm not aware of any geoip databases that operate on a per-IP level. It's way too noisy, given that basically everyone uses dynamic IP addresses. At best you can figure out a given /24 is used by a given ISP to cover a certain neighborhood, not that 1.2.3.4 belongs is John Smith or 742 Evergreen Terrace.
At least in some cases, e.g. when multiple devices that are logged into their respective Google accounts are using that IP, and Google knows what location those usually reside at when together.
I've had Google pop up reliable location results for me, to the granularity of a small town, even if they had no information about me specifically to help them deduce this. It doesn't always happen though.
Good to know, that does shift my opinion a bit. There is a spectrum from surveilling individuals to gathering population statistics. I'm not sure exactly where data that identifies a user to a group size of ~250 falls, especially given the geographic correlation, but it's definitely better.
> Is there a single company out there making it's money selling access to an area code database? GeoIP databases are much higher resolution and use active scanning methods like ping timing. If a company was spam calling me to estimate distance based on call connection lag, yes that would be surveillance capitalism.
Phone number assignments are mostly public, you don't really need to pay for this information, but there are certainly those who will sell it to you.
Of course, phone numbers don't really tie you to a rate center anymore, but a rate center is often much more geographically specific than an address for a large ISP. What I've seen near me, is a rate center often ties the number to a specific community. Larger cities often have several rate centers, smaller cities may have their own or several small cities may have one. Of course, phone company wiring tends to ignore municipal boundaries.
On the other hand, most large ISPs tend to use a single IP pool for a metro area. Not all large providers do it that way, of course, and larger metro areas may be subdivided. You can't really ping time your way to better data there either, most of the last mile technology adds enough latency that you can't tell if the customer is near the aggregation point or far.
Not really, but there are companies making their money selling a mapping of phone numbers to real names[1].
It's an uniquely American thing (Canada does it too, but access is regulated much more tightly).
This one[2] I could get reliable results from for free, but it seems to be "under maintenance" right now. Twillio just offers it as a service at 1 cent per number.
I'm surprised this is notable these days, because the mapping of numbers to names used to be a completely free service that was dropped off on everyone's front porch.
Phone directories were one of these weird "one way" services.
In principle, you could use them to map numbers to names, but the way they were designed, it was a lot more effort than using them to map names to numbers. That was deliberate I think.
A blog is speech, but I wouldn't say that deciding to operate a social media site is speech. That said, there are plenty of good reasons to oppose this law.
A social media site is speech (and/or press, but they are grouped together in the first amendment because they are lenses on the same fundamental right not crisply distinguishable ones); now, its well recognized that commercial speech is still subject to some regulations as commerce, but it is not something separate from speech.
I would disagree, for example section 230 reads "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." The content of the site is obviously speech/press, but the decision to operate the site doesn't seem like it is. Very possible I'm mistaken and there is case law to the contrary though, it's a nuanced argument either way
Not sure why you cite Section 230 as if it had anything to say about what is Constitutionally speech; other than inverting the relation between the Constitution and statute law, that is a pretty big misunderstanding of what Section 230 is (and the broader Communication Decency Act in which it was contained was) about.
I suppose this is what confused me then, as it seemed obvious that e.g. the Facebook reccomendation algorithm isn't speech, so if a social media site would be considered speech it would be due to the user content. Section 230 doesn't in any way supercede the constitution, but it does clarify which party is doing the speech and thus where the first ammendment would apply.
A lot of people want to conflate several things that shouldn't be conflated. To clarify:
* The First Amendment generally prohibits the government from enacting any laws or regulations that limit speech based on its content (anything you might reasonably call "moderation" would definitely fall into this category!).
* Private companies are not the government. Social media networks are therefore not obligated to follow the First Amendment. (Although there is a decent argument that Trump's social media network is a state actor here and is therefore constitutionally unable to, say, ban anybody from the network.)
* Recommendation algorithms of social media networks are protected speech of those companies. The government cannot generally enact a law that regulate these algorithms, and several courts have already struck down laws that attempted to do so.
* §230 means that user-generated speech is not treated as speech of these companies. This prevents you from winning a suit against them for hosting speech you think injures you (think things like defamation).
* §230 also eliminates the liability of these companies for their moderation or lack thereof.
There remains the interesting question as to whether or not companies can be held liable via their own speech that occurs as a result of the recommendation algorithms of user-generated content. This is somewhat difficult to see litigated because it seems everybody who tries to do a challenge case here instead tries to argue that §230 in its entirety is somehow wrong, and the court rather bluntly telling them that they're only interested in the narrow question doesn't seem to be able to get them to change tactics. (See e.g. the recent SCOTUS case which was thrown out essentially for this reason rather than deciding the question).
> Section 230 doesn't in any way supercede the constitution, but it does clarify which party is doing the speech
No, it immunizes certain parties from being held automatically liable (without separate proof that they knew of the content, as applies to mere distributors [0]), the "publisher or speaker" standard being the standard for such liability (known as publisher liability.)
It doesn't "clarify" (or have any bearing on) where the First Amendment would apply. (In fact, its only relevant when the First Amendment protection doesn't apply, since otherwise there would be no liability to address.)
[0] subsequent case law has also held that Section 230 has the effect of also insulating the parties it covers against distributor liability where that would otherwise apply, as well, but the language of the law was deliberately targeted at the basis for publisher liability.
So they are not the speaker for the purposes of liability, but they are the speaker for the purposes of first ammendment protections? That doesn't make sense to me, but it certaintly wouldn't be the most confusing law on the books and you seem to be more informed on the topic than me. Do you have any insight on how that dynamic would apply to something like The Pirate Bay? Intuitively on that basis, users uploading content would be liable, but taking down the site would be a violation of the operator's first ammendment rights.
> So they are not the speaker for the purposes of liability, but they are the speaker for the purposes of first ammendment protections?
People who are not “the speaker or publisher” for liability purposes have Constitutional first amendment free speech rights in their decision to interact with content, this includes distributors, consumers, people who otherwise have all the characteristics of a “speaker of publisher” but are statutorily relieved of liability as one so as to enable them to make certain editorial decisions over use generated content without instantly becoming fully liable for every bit of that content, etc., yeah.
And arguing the alternative is you making the exact inversion of statute and Constitution I predicted and which you denied, that is, thinking Section 230 could remove First Amendment coverage from something it would have covered without that enactment.
Speech isn't just shouting into the void; it's dialogue back and forth between two or more different people. Social media sites such as Hacker News and the WELL facilitate this, even when they aren't businesses, in much the same way as a dinner party or a church picnic does.
> Speech isn't just shouting into the void; it's dialogue back and forth between two or more different people.
In some cases this arises in US Constitutional law as the freedom of other people to seek and encounter the speech, though I'm not sure if there's a formal name for the idea. (e.g. "Freedom of Hearing".)
Sure, speech happens on and is facilitated by social media sites, but that doesn't imply that operating a social media site is a form of speech any more than operating a notebook factory is.
If having a dinner party at your house gets you busted by the police, you are not living in a liberal society. If notebook factories are under tight surveillance to ensure that their notebooks are serialized and tracked because bad people might use them to plot crimes, you are not living in a liberal society.
I agree in that narrow sense—but shutting down social media sites denies the sites' users their human right of expression, as well as other basic human rights*. The fact that the site operator doesn't necessarily suffer this harm† seems like an irrelevant distraction, and I have no idea why you brought it up, or why you keep repeating it, if you agree that the site users are being illegitimately harmed.
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* See UDHR articles 12, 18, 19, and 20. This is not an issue limited to the provincial laws of one small country.
† Unless the site operators also use of the site, in which case they too do suffer it; this is in my experience virtually always the case with the noncommercial sites that it is most important to protect.
In the context of "Law requires age verification for social media sites" and "This is an example of the kinds of onerous regulations physical business owners have to comply with being forced on website operators", I took your comment that "Websites aren't necessarily businesses; they're speech." to mean that operating a social media website wasn't like operating a business because it's a form of speech.
If social media sites are shut down but I am free to post my opinions on my personal blog site, how is my freedom of speech affected?
Did I not have freedom of speech before social media existed?
Is there an implication in freedom of speech that any speech facilitating service that can be offered must be allowed to operate? That's at least not obvious to me.
I echo what others said: There are good reasons to oppose all this, but blanket cries of "free speech" without any substance don't exactly help.
It sounds like you are falling into the sort of confusion that leads people to sometimes wonder if murder is actually wrong in a world where cancer and hunger exist.
On the contrary, you appear to be suffering the confusion that a service which facilitates a legally protected activity cannot be regulated, interfered with, or discontinued in the general case. Typically only targeted, motivated interference would constitute a violation.
Shutting down a notebook factory for dodging sales tax is not a violation of the rights of would-be purchasers.
I am fairly sure I am not confused. Instead I believe the post I am replying to didn't actually advance a coherent argument, but just appealed to emotions.
I am not sure that I have ever encountered anyone confused in the way you describe either...
