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The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

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Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#271

Post by dragonwriter »

tastroder wrote: post #239
dragonwriter wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no public-interest benefit in hate screeds. Sure there is. If you can't read Mein Kampf , you can't recognize when a new work is following in its footprints.

> If you can't read Mein Kampf, you can't recognize when a new work is following in its footprints. Really don't know how to make this sound nicer but... German here, we have schools. Reading the source material of a genocidal maniac would have added zero value to my education. For some reason it's weird to see this free speech is a cure-all angle repeated time and again in a forum with US focus given the current adm…

> Really don't know how to make this sound nicer but... German here, we have schools. Reading the source material of a genocidal maniac would have added zero value to my education.

We have schools in America, and while reading Mein Kampf added negligibly to my education, no one being able to do so would have subtracted significantly from it.

More to the point, reading Kapital and the Communist Manifesto added significantly to my education, though many people on the US would see them as at least as worthy of suppression as Mein Kampf (which I wouldn't even be able to know was a bad idea if they—or Mein Kampf—were suppressed.)

> For some reason it's weird to see this free speech is a cure-all angle repeated time and again in a forum with US focus given the current administration's questionable stance on human rights, racism and a plethora of other issues like climate change.

First, a cure-all doesn't stop you from getting sick, it just makes it so you can get better. So, there's not even an inconsistency there.

Second, no one here (and virtually no one anywhere) describes it as a cure-all. A necessary element of a healthy society, perhaps, but not by itself sufficient even as a cure, much less a prevention, of bad government.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#272

Post by afiori »

OrgNet wrote: post #202
kd3 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we need is good p2p tech that will enable distributed storage that is impossible to censor while also automatically providing gazillion terabytes of storage distributed over all peers. Problem solved.

I would like that too but the government will make laws and all the peers from the p2p network will get scared

There is an argument to be made that archival and distribution are two different things.

There are justifiable cases where you might want to remove something from the public internet. Some problems of p2p distributed proposals is that the only way to take down a single bit is to dismantle the entire network.

In this sense a federated system is objectively better.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#273

Post by dragonwriter »

La1n wrote: post #243
tastroder wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you can't read Mein Kampf, you can't recognize when a new work is following in its footprints. Really don't know how to make this sound nicer but... German here, we have schools. Reading the source material of a genocidal maniac would have added zero value to my education. For some reason it's weird to see this free speech is a cure-all angle repeated time and again in a forum with US focus given the current adm…

Exactly, people act like restricting access (or in this case voluntarily not storing something) will also remove all the surrounding information about it. I didn't need to read pro-slavery propaganda to know slavery is bad, and I didn't need to read every type of propaganda to know or learn how propaganda works. Edit: Also this thread is full of people (including me to be fair) not providing any sources to whatever t…

> I didn't need to read pro-slavery propaganda to know slavery is bad

OTOH, one might need to read original pro-slavery propaganda to know that the myth, long adopted in many US states’ education systems as its own revisionist propaganda, that the Confederacy was not centrally about slavery and racism, was a lie.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#274

Post by claudiawerner »

refurb wrote: post #199
ntzm wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather not have a manual for starting a neo-nazi race war archived to be honest

This argument is the same used by authoritarian countries like China. They don’t say criticism of the govt is prohibited, they say that it’s necessary for the security of state. Doesn’t everyone want a secure state?

It is only superficially the same argument, which is to say, if you ignore the qualitative content of the two matters; the fact that they both reduce to opinion is irrelevant, since society is built upon general consensus on particular opinions rather than general principles everywhere. Just as not every action is alike (and we prohibit the expression of some actions), not all speech is alike (and, just as with action, we may decide to prohibit its expression).

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#275

Post by Swenrekcah »

weberc2 wrote: post #175
Swenrekcah wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree but I specifically mentioned the topics of Brexit and the admittetly broader ‘Trumpism’. On these topics the asymmetry is phenomenal. Take the recent ‘sharpiegate’ as an example for how little regard, contempt even, Trump has for the truth and facts.

(By the way, I didn't downvote you) I agree that Trump has no great respect for truth and facts. I also think the left is doggedly pursuing him in its own anti-factual aspirations. I see your sharpiegate and raise you the Covington Catholic affair (the most prominent news outlets in the country overtly slandering children, ostensibly on the basis of their race and gender) or the Google memo (same idea) or the sokal s…

A fair point and I certainly agree that the ‘woke’ SJW culture is a terrible idea.

I do see the examples you mentioned as legitimate differences of opinion, somewhat like the abortion debate or other controversial and digficult topics. Everyone succumbs, at least occasionally, to making a bad faith argument in support of their stance on those issues.

In contrast, and that was in part why I chose that example from the other 1000 this month, Trump’s sharpie drawing shows an utter disregard for facts, no consideration for spreading misinformation during an emergency, and complete ignorance of and/or indifference for the law. All to ‘save face’ for such a tiny idiotic non-issue.

There is real asymmetry here.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#276

Post by vidarh »

dragonwriter wrote: post #189
tracker1 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And people completely forget history... there were several popular variants of totalitarian socialism in europe. Russia in particular had civil-war like conflicts between the main 3 factions (iirc, red, green, white) and facism was definitely in the mix, but after WWII fell out and for some weird reason no longer considered socialist. After WWII, there were definite anti-communist movements, though McCarthyism took t…

Fascism was pretty much never considered socialist by much of anyone outside of the Nazi flavor trying to coopt the label, and the American Right engaging in revisionism in the last couple decades.

Notably the NSDAP originally was early on a total hodgepodge of ideological strands mostly united by nationalism. Some of those included left-wing economic views. Hitler systematically targeted those groups, and most were excluded or left long before the NSDAP got any influence.

Hitler eventually had the last remaining "left wing" faction of the NSDAP (the Strasserists) arrested and/or murdered - this purge was a large part of the purpose of the Night of the Long Knives. But even the Strasserists, despite wanting to borrow some left wing economic policies were staunchly ultranationalist and anti-socialist.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#277

Post by Retric »

Roritharr wrote: post #240
wahern wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the "different kings" metaphor. An archive has to think long-term. To do its job unimpeded it has to remain inconspicuous and unobjectionable, otherwise it may lose access to information altogether. Kings and cultures will come and go, but as long as they have the data then their mission is substantially fulfilled. At some point in the future even the most radical material will become innocuous and safe to pub…

My gut reaction was also:"oh no, not them, why don't they take a stand?" but your logic is completely valid, they shouldn't, for the futures sake. I just hope they ensure their source data stays untouched. What surprised me was that you say they respect the robots.txt, but the data is archived anyway, so they are crawling anyway, but only publish according the rules defined in the robots.txt? If so that is news to me…

The robots.txt changed and they applied the new robots.txt to the old data.

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#278

Post by _pmf_ »

Johnny555 wrote: post #84

If they really want to be trusted as a source of truth, they need to find a way to publish cryptographic signatures of every page that can be validated to prove that the page was captured when they say it was. Maybe some sort of blockchain. Otherwise there's no reason to trust that an Internet Archive snapshot is an accurate representation of the archived page.

Would storing the SSL/TLS session achieve this? Is this possible using browser means (HAR export)?

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#279

Post by collyw »

mirimir wrote: post #255
collyw wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious to see what ISIS propaganda is like, but I am scared to dig about looking for it for fear of being put on a watch list.

That's one reason to use Tor. Or VPN services. Or Tor via VPN services, so your ISP and friends won't see you using Tor.

I started paying with Tor a week or two before the Edward Snowden stuff broke. Read that using Tor gets you on a watchlist as well....

Re: The Internet Archive is waging war on misinformation

#280

Post by raxxorrax »

tastroder wrote: post #239
dragonwriter wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is no public-interest benefit in hate screeds. Sure there is. If you can't read Mein Kampf , you can't recognize when a new work is following in its footprints.

> If you can't read Mein Kampf, you can't recognize when a new work is following in its footprints. Really don't know how to make this sound nicer but... German here, we have schools. Reading the source material of a genocidal maniac would have added zero value to my education. For some reason it's weird to see this free speech is a cure-all angle repeated time and again in a forum with US focus given the current adm…

Nowhere in the education you received was an argument that free speech enabled fascism. On the contrary. Censorship and propaganda were a foundation for the fascist state. I am sure you agree to that point.
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