Google Drive Can Help You Recover Files Affected by Ransomware

If you've been the victim of a Ransomware attack and you keep your important files on Google Drive, Google Drive can help you recover those files. Read the attached for the details.

Why Allowing Hate Speech and Harassment Is Inconsistent with the Reasons for Allowing Free Speech

At the surface, disallowing hate speech might appear to be inconsistent with the protection of free speech in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, but as +Yonatan Zunger explains in his blog post below, the opposite is true if you examine the reasons why free speech is protected. The intent of the amendment was to maintain an open marketplace for ideas.

The First Amendment was created with a specific, deadly threat to this marketplace in mind: the state using its power to pick and choose ideas. But to create a thriving marketplace, we need to ensure that other methods of suppressing speech don’t destroy it, either. In particular, people and groups using speech to prevent other people’s speech can close the marketplace just as thoroughly.

Hate speech is used to shut down or marginalize ideas presented by groups the haters attack. Harassment is very closely related. The difference between the two is that hate speech is targeted at groups whereas harassment in targeted at individuals. Both have the effect of blocking the expression of ideas and are therefore antithetical to the intent of the First Amendment. People's right to free speech is actually protected rather than limited by curbing hate speech and harassment.

I hope this perspective will lead Google and other service providers on the internet to take stronger stances against hate speech and harassment, and to deal with offenders more swiftly and firmly than they have in the past. Unfortunately, as Yonatan said, "Devising good speech policies is profoundly hard," because context plays such a key role in evaluating speech, so defining clear, succinct rules is incredibly challenging.

When a case involving alleged pornography (Jacobellis v. Ohio) went before the US Supreme Court in 1964, Justice Potter Stewart wrote: "I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description ["hard-core pornography"], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it." Perhaps the best starting point for dealing with hate speech and harassment would be to accept that what Justice Stewart wrote about pornography applies to hate speech and harassment, as well.

Update: See the comments below by +Yonatan Zunger concerning the last paragraph. While "knowing it when I see it" might work for a single individual, it seems that even similarly minded individuals do not tend to agree on what they see except in extreme cases.

A Rubik's Cube for the Colorblind

And it is dressed up for a formal occasion!

h/t +Erno Rubik

This Week's Update from +Peggy K

There weren't any major announcements this week (which is no surprise since Google I/O is right around the corner), but there were a few significant smaller announcements about Google+, Hangouts, Allo, and Google Street View. You can find the details in Peggy's post below. 

Get Your YouTube Subscribers the Old-Fashioned Way -- Earn Them

As +Peggy K explains, shortcuts to increasing the number of people who subscribe to your YouTube channel such as offering to subscribe to someone's channel if they subscribe to yours or paying for YouTube subscribers can get you into serious trouble with Google. Read on for the details. 

Create a Custom Badge for Your Blog or Website to Help People Find Your Community

If you would like to direct people to your Google+ community from a blog or website, you can create a custom badge to do that easily. People click on it will be taken directly to the community. If they aren't members, they'll see the Join or Ask-to-Join button and be prompted to create a profile if they don't already have one. See the instructions in +Peggy K​'s post below for the details.

The Rubik's Cube Makes a Cameo Appearance on Blindspot

As they said in the show, Rubik's Cubes are far more than children's toys. One becomes instrumental in a spy case in this episode, which looks really interesting.

h/t +Erno Rubik​