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I speculate that the real reason they are canning the canary program is that it was headed for extinction all by itself anyway. Reddit's canary is gone, and th
by abraae 10y ago
I speculate that the real reason they are canning the canary program is that it was headed for extinction all by itself anyway.
Reddit's canary is gone, and they made it as clear as they legally can that it was due to a National Security Letter.
Effectively the canary program lost one of its best assets and few people gave a damn.
The flaw at the heart of the canary program is that it relied on public uproar when a canary disappeared. In the absence of that, they will disappear one by one - death by a thousand cuts - and then the program itself is dead.
EFF have seen the writing on the wall and pulled the plug before the program was seen to be doomed anyway.
- hammock 10y agoHow hard is it to run a "canary watch" though? The overhead has to be pretty low. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to pull the plug.
- superobserver 10y agoI would somehow think that is itself a canary, but I have some misgivings about that.
- Terribledactyl 10y agoI think the missing part is the public uproar. I remember the public reaction to reddit's lost canary as, "ehh?"
- tommyman 10y agoWhat was to be expected? It makes reddit unusable for a lot of things (free & open communication being one of them). If you have something important to say then you don't say it on Reddit. If you have cat pictures or want to talk about train sets then reddit.
- TryAgainMaybe 10y agoI don't understand your comment at all. If there is something you want to say on Reddit, then say it. The NSA doesn't care about you or almost anyone else. Why would they? Billions of posts and a couple of security notices? It's zero.
- privong 10y ago> How hard is it to run a "canary watch" though? The overhead has to be pretty low. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to pull the plug. I don't imagine the decision was based on resources, but rather on a realization that the "canary watch" didn't work, because people just didn't care. In that case, it might make more sense to abandon it rather than continue to suggest, in the face of evidence to the contrary, that it's a productive tool for keeping tabs on government overreach.
- nxzero 10y agoAt this point, no idea why anyone would except uproar over any invasion of privacy, security, etc.