Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares this report from ProPublica:

As Turkey launched a military offensive against Kurdish minorities in neighboring Syria in early 2018, Facebook’s top executives faced a political dilemma. Turkey was demanding the social media giant block Facebook posts from the People’s Protection Units, a mostly Kurdish militia group the Turkish government had targeted.

Should Facebook ignore the request, as it has done elsewhere, and risk losing access to tens of millions of users in Turkey? Or should it silence the group, known as the YPG, even if doing so added to the perception that the company too often bends to the wishes of authoritarian governments?

It wasn’t a particularly close call for the company’s leadership, newly disclosed emails show. “I am fine with this,” wrote Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s No. 2 executive, in a one-sentence message to a team that reviewed the page. Three years later, YPG’s photos and updates about the Turkish military’s brutal attacks on the Kurdish minority in Syria still can’t be viewed by Facebook users inside Turkey. The conversations, among other internal emails obtained by ProPublica, provide an unusually direct look into how tech giants like Facebook handle censorship requests made by governments that routinely limit what can be said publicly…

Publicly, Facebook has underscored that it cherishes free speech: “We believe freedom of expression is a fundamental human right, and we work hard to protect and defend these values around the world,” the company wrote in a blog post last month about a new Turkish law requiring that social media firms have a legal presence in the country. “More than half of the people in Turkey rely on Facebook to stay in touch with their friends and family, to express their opinions and grow their businesses.” But behind the scenes in 2018, amid Turkey’s military campaign, Facebook ultimately sided with the government’s demands. Deliberations, the emails show, were centered on keeping the platform operational, not on human rights. “The page caused us a few PR fires in the past,” one Facebook manager warned of the YPG material…

“Facebook confirmed to ProPublica that it made the decision to restrict the page in Turkey following a legal order from the Turkish government — and after it became clear that failing to do so would have led to its services in the country being completely shut down.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – How Facebook Silenced an Enemy of Turkey To Prevent a Hit To the Company’s Business

“The impressive performance and battery life gains of the new M1 MacBooks have created a historic discontinuity in the normally placid resale market,” reports ZDNet:

Should you spend $800 for a one year old MacBook Air when for $200 more you could get a MacBook Air with several times the performance and 50 percent better battery life? That’s a question savvy buyers are asking themselves. Not surprisingly, the most common answer seems to be “Nope…!”

Unless buyers check out a site like Everymac they won’t know what they’re missing. The bottom-of-the-line M1 MacBook Air has a Geekbench 5 multiprocessor score that is almost 2.5x that of the early 2020, top-of-the-line quad-core I7. For 80 percent of the price. And most users won’t need to spend the extra cash for the 16GB version since the memory management and page swapping is so efficient. The contrast is even more striking when comparing MacBook Pros. Not only is the 13″ MacBook Pro faster on the Geekbench 5 single and multiprocessor benchmarks than the top-of-the-line 16″ MacBook Pro Intel I9, it’s less than half the price. And it isn’t just a single benchmark. Search on “M1 MacBook Pro vs 16 MacBook Pro” on YouTube to see multiple videos testing real world workloads on both machines.

The article also makes a prediction: “The best deals on Intel ‘Books are yet to come, assuming Apple offers retailers price protection.

“There seems to be a large inventory of Intel based MacBooks, and they have to clear them out before the end of 2021.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Apple’s Powerful M1 MacBooks are Lowering The Resale Value of Older MacBooks

“Bitcoin’s rally this year has hit a speed bump, putting it on track for the worst weekly slide in almost a year amid wider losses in risk assets,” reports Fortune:

The largest cryptocurrency slumped as much as 20% this week, the most since March, and was holding at about $46,925 as of 10:22 a.m. in Hong Kong. The wider Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index, tracking Bitcoin, Ether and three other cryptocurrencies, is down 22% this week…

Bitcoin’s weakness in the face of market gyrations raises questions about its efficacy as a store of value and hedge against inflation, a key argument among proponents of its stunning fivefold rally over the past year. Detractors have maintained the digital asset’s surge is a speculative bubble and it’s destined for a repeat of the 2017 boom and bust.

While Bitcoin is often touted as the new “digital gold,” the yellow metal is winning out at the moment with spot gold holding at $1,768 per ounce, down less than 1% for the week.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Dropping Nearly 20%, Bitcoin Suffers Worst Weekly Drop in a Year