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posted by martyb on Wednesday July 16 2014, @03:16PM   Printer-friendly
from the arrows-buy-ennui-utter-gnome-our-crust-as-wheat dept.

According to the Google+ Page, Google is finally giving up on forcing everyone to user their real names to join Google+.

When we launched Google+ over three years ago, we had a lot of restrictions on what name you could use on your profile. This helped create a community made up of real people, but it also excluded a number of people who wanted to be part of it without using their real names.

Over the years, as Google+ grew and its community became established, we steadily opened up this policy, from allowing +Page owners to use any name of their choosing to letting YouTube users bring their usernames into Google+. Today, we are taking the last step: there are no more restrictions on what name you can use.

We know you've been calling for this change for a while. We know that our names policy has been unclear, and this has led to some unnecessarily difficult experiences for some of our users. For this we apologize, and we hope that today's change is a step toward making Google+ the welcoming and inclusive place that we want it to be. Thank you for expressing your opinions so passionately, and thanks for continuing to make Google+ the thoughtful community that it is.

I know many folks that refused to join Plus, just because of the restrictions and the fact that they *cough* suggest you to anyone in your contacts. They've given up on youtube comments, app store ratings, and a dozen other things that require Plus accounts.

Some might now join, though most probably won't simply because Google was so darn stubborn about this for so darn long.

What say the Soylentils?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 16 2014, @09:41PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 16 2014, @09:41PM (#69989)

    Well, since they could get jailed merely for speaking, speaking into a microphone doesn't give them much immunity. Its not like the USA is immune, providing formal legal or medical advice without a license is problematic.

    From what stories I heard of authoritarian regimes, a ham radio license was seen as something of a privilege and administrative interference was seen as kind of a non-judicial punishment. So did your license renewal disappear because of no reason at all or because you're talking about naughty things? Also a lot of the authoritarian regimes wouldn't issue a license to individuals or at least strongly discouraged it, but clubs were OK and everyone assumed someone in the club was an informant. Don't screw up everything for everyone else in the club, that kind of thing.

    There's lots of "grind game" ham ops who just want to log that they talked to some far away state. I said Hi to a guy in the Dominican Republic a couple years back on the 6M band (which is mildly unusual) and at least 100 other people were also trying to say "Hi", and I don't speak Spanish anyway, so that was a rather short conversation, which would make it hard for him to get in trouble anyway.

    I have had long conversations with North Americans. I would say its very much like meeting someone's spouse at a christmas party, if the first thing you two do is start screaming politics and religion at each other you've probably both had too much to drink already. On the internet it seems accepted, but ham radio despite being weirder is none the less more "real life" than the internet. This Canadian guy I talked to for awhile, health care system just never came up in the conversation. That wouldn't happen on the internet, that's for sure.

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