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Disapproval of FCC regulations a significant blow against privacy protection

nytimes.com

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Re: Disapproval of FCC regulations a significant blow against privacy protection

#221

Post by peregrine »

sctb wrote: post #204
peregrine wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for being transparent. It seems nearly everyday I see articles rise to the top of HN only to disappear when I return. With no explanation or transparency for the reason. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13939514 For example was on the front page for less than 2 minutes before disappearing with zero discussion nor reasoning. Even though it contains extremely Hacker News friendly analysis and discussion.…

> HN needs to come clean, is the no politics rule continuing? Or are the politics of the moderators or the "politics deemed appropriate" going to continue to rule? You're not asking this question fairly or charitably, but that story wasn't touched by moderators. The detailed mechanics of the site are not completely transparent for obvious reasons. On the flip side, we're happy to explain when the community has specif…

I get you'd like to avoid spammers, bots and etc, but its not at all fair to claim you're not playing politics.

> but that story wasn't touched by moderators.

Is uncharitable as it gets. I cannot verify it. Based on 3163 days of intuition I can see "ahh yes sometimes stories get unfairly flagged automatically" but I can I also see that 1) Its political 2) It discusses a YC company in a not so appealing light.

I'll take your word on it here that nobody touched it, but I honestly see stories disappearing every day whenever they so much as negatively glance at YC/Investments or Politics that benefit YC and YC Investments. (Many former YC companies will more than likely benefit from being able to purchase our browsing history, for example.)

Re: Disapproval of FCC regulations a significant blow against privacy protection

#222

Post by erdojo »

Might be an ignorant question, but could individual websites do more to prevent an ISP from seeing your activity on the site?

I know HTTPS should be able to help (?), but ISPs can still see the domain you're visiting and get metadata on the encrypted traffic, which can be revealing.

Are there architectural or tech stack decisions a company could make that would basically lock an ISP from knowing anything except the root domains you visited?

Re: Disapproval of FCC regulations a significant blow against privacy protection

#224

Post by galacticpony »

pseudalopex wrote: post #219
galacticpony wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't a new problem. We "know" the common people don't care because all attempts at scandalizing this in the media, for years, have not found much resonance.

If people didn't care about privacy, companies wouldn't be so opposed to regulations requiring them to get consent before selling personal information. Advertisers wouldn't disguise targeting to avoid creeping people out. Uber wouldn't have deleted a blog post mapping one-night stands. Republicans wouldn't have had any reason to spin this bill as being about which agency should have authority. People do more to prote…

Some people care about privacy. Most probably may even care about it to some degree, but not to the degree where they sacrifice their convenience for it.

Again, the media has done its best to scandalize the very real privacy concerns with companies like Google and Facebook. Did it hurt their success with the unwashed masses?

If privacy was really such a big deal, why would Uber write that blog post in the first place? Sure, enough people complained online to get it pulled, but that's not representative.

To wake people up, we'd need a real "story" here, like somebody getting fired over googling something relatively innocent.

Finally, if advertisers really try to disguise targeting, they're doing a terrible job at it. Just try turning adblock off for a moment to see for yourself. Yes, even the common folk thinks targeting is creepy, but at the end of the day they don't care that much.

Re: Disapproval of FCC regulations a significant blow against privacy protection

#225

Post by dang »

peregrine wrote: post #221
sctb wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HN needs to come clean, is the no politics rule continuing? Or are the politics of the moderators or the "politics deemed appropriate" going to continue to rule? You're not asking this question fairly or charitably, but that story wasn't touched by moderators. The detailed mechanics of the site are not completely transparent for obvious reasons. On the flip side, we're happy to explain when the community has specif…

I get you'd like to avoid spammers, bots and etc, but its not at all fair to claim you're not playing politics. > but that story wasn't touched by moderators. Is uncharitable as it gets. I cannot verify it. Based on 3163 days of intuition I can see "ahh yes sometimes stories get unfairly flagged automatically" but I can I also see that 1) Its political 2) It discusses a YC company in a not so appealing light. I'll ta…

Let me try to allay your concerns. The story you linked to was penalized automatically. There's no moderator penalty on it. No moderator may even have seen it.

We don't moderate HN to protect YC startups—just the opposite. This comment summarizes the situation and has links to plenty more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13861389.

It's common—standard, in fact—for politically committed HN users to believe that the site is secretly aligned against their politics. That's mostly not because it is; it's because humans typically perceive their side to be at a disadvantage. I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13932041, with links to plenty more.

You'll notice I said "mostly". That's because I have no way of guaranteeing that our own biases (which, being human, we have) don't affect moderation. I can't even guarantee that to myself. But we do work hard at it and have a lot of practice. If you know of any large community on the internet where that's more true than it is here, I'd like to see it.

Lack of bias is never perceived as 'lack of bias'; it's perceived as strong bias in favor of the opposing side, in proportion to the strength of one's own views. That's unfortunate for us, but it's how the human nature cookie crumbles.

Can you verify any of the above? Not fully, nor could you with more data. A quantum of trust is necessary for a community to function. If we say we didn't moderate a story and someone doesn't believe us (meaning, among other things, that they think we'd be dumb enough to lie), I doubt there's much we can do.

If you still have concerns, feel free to send them to hn@ycombinator.com.

Re: Disapproval of FCC regulations a significant blow against privacy protection

#226

Post by vocatus_gate »

pestaa wrote: post #218
vocatus_gate wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seriously doubt you're getting 75 MEGABYTES down over Wifi. Did you mean 75 Megabits (Mb)? There is a major difference between Mb and MB. 75 MB would be equal to 600 Mb per second.

Why not? 5 Ghz connections are capable of delivering > 1 Gbit over the... air.

:eyeroll: Sure, and MIT managed to transmit data wirelessly at 1 Tb/s one time. But we're talking about the real world and regular consumer hardware here.

Re: Disapproval of FCC regulations a significant blow against privacy protection

#227

Post by programmarchy »

shopkins wrote: post #209
programmarchy wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree with you on Facebook and Google. There's a choice, and at least there is no law preventing competition/disruption. Not the case with the NSA, but that's a tangent. The root issue is the national providers lobbying the state to prevent competition at the municipal level. Granting more power to the FCC does not solve that problem. Rather, it would only serve to lock in the existing monopolies and further centrali…

Absolutely, competition will protect the consumer best. But we need that competition first :) In the meantime, it seems logical to take some steps to limit the damage that our currently monopolistic telcos can do and give someone power to enforce a rule that: "(1) applies the customer privacy requirements of the Communications Act of 1934 to broadband Internet access service and other telecommunications services, (2)…

The summary does sound reasonable on the surface. But read the whole whopping 73 pages. The regulations hurt small ISPs much more than national carriers.

For example, there's a Mom & Pop cellular-based ISP that serves my small mountain community. They could certainly be put out of business by this type of regulation after they pay for lawyers, IT services, training staff on new operations, etc. -- and heaven forbid they get audited by the FCC.

Maybe if the regulations only applied to national carriers, then you could argue this wouldn't hamper competition. That'd be something I could support.

Re: Disapproval of FCC regulations a significant blow against privacy protection

#228

Post by learc83 »

rayiner wrote: post #214
learc83 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know that you know campaign finance is more nuanced than that. It's perfectly legal for a corporation to donate to a Super PAC supporting candidate's reelection efforts. And they're adding donations from individuals in the industry.

I find it dishonest for an article to say that corporations donated to a candidate, when they actually mean that a corporation donated to a PAC or that employees donated to a candidate. It creates an extremely misleading picture. Telecoms are major employers in places like Tennessee (which Blackburn represents). AT&T alone has 5,600 employees in Tennessee (more than Twitter has employees total). It's no surprise tele…

>Are all those votes suspect?

No because those representatives didn't vote in a way that favors the companies that donated. If I bribe 10 politicians and 4 of them don't do what I want, does that that mean the other 6 who did are now above suspicion as well?

Voting in a way that favors a company that donates money to your political campaign creates at the very least an appearance of a conflict of interest. In those cases we should rightly be suspicious.

>I find it dishonest for an article to say that corporations donated to a candidate, when they actually mean that a corporation donated to a PAC

Do you find it dishonest when an article says a corporation donated to a candidate, when actually they mean that a corporation donated to a candidate's campaign?

A candidate only personally benefits from campaign donations insofar as they help them get reelected--the same way they benefit from PACs.

There isn't much distinction at this point because PACs routinely operate as extensions of campaigns, even though they are technically prohibited from coordinating. It doesn't stop them from doing things like winking and putting up random video clips with no audio on the campaign websites that PACs can just happen to download to make advertisements with.

>or that employees donated to a candidate

I agree that this is a little more misleading.

>AT&T alone has 5,600 employees in Tennessee

That's true, but my guess is that most of the money that was donated from employees of the telecom industry came from a much smaller number of high level employees donating near the maximum.

Re: Disapproval of FCC regulations a significant blow against privacy protection

#229

Post by UncleMeat »

notheguyouthink wrote: post #144
cjcampbell wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three problems here. First being that the ISP is a permanent MITM. Second is that TLS will not protect the hostnames, which are sent in the clear so that servers can identify the correct certificate for a given connection. Likewise, DNS is not encrypted (though companies like OpenDNS do provide alternatives here).

Regarding the MITM, more specifically i meant able to compromise HTTPS. If i sit between you and your https site, can i read all of your traffic? I know very little about the nitty gritty of HTTPS, so forgive my ignorance, but i thought the most i could do was try to pass off a custom key (ie, spoof the key authority), but then the signing done from the https site (say, https://google.com ) wouldn't be valid based on…

You don't need to compromise HTTPS. You need to get your cert onto the trusted list on the device. "As part of the setup for Comcast-Super-PlanTM please run this script" is enough to let your ISP terminate the SSL connection and restart it so they can read content. In the worst case, they can pay a company like Lenovo to stick their certs on devices on day 1.

Re: Disapproval of FCC regulations a significant blow against privacy protection

#230

Post by spudlyo »

EGreg wrote: post #162
edraferi wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Worse, you're only moving the problem to a different location I agree that's true from a technical perspective. However, the VPN provider has an economic incentive to compete on privacy. I would much rather just trust my local ISP, but at least I have a choice in VPN providers. > privacy shouldn't be limited to people with a technical background Absolutely. That's why I want this as a product that Just Works instea…

Not just that, but being able to choose your VPN+ISP is better than being able to "choose" your ISP.

Excellent point. In the US you likely only have a small number of ISPs you can choose from, but there are huge number of VPN/PaaS/HaaS providers out there that you can route your traffic through. Surely some will compete on privacy.
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