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Oppose the Earn IT Act

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Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#261

Post by Forbo »

ollo wrote: post #132
pphysch wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define "regular people's interest". American values? Health and security? There are governments that are pro-people (as opposed to pro-money) but they are generally not big global players, or if they are, they are designated Enemies of the West and it is enormously politically incorrect to discuss critically about them.

there is no such thing as "regular people's interest". everyone's interest is a little bit different.

Not even the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs?

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#262

Post by tribeca18 »

jrumbut wrote: post #241
apeace wrote: post #208

If you want to convince your friends they should support encryption, here's how I like to get past the "nothing to hide" argument. Imagine we're sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming. We still don't "have anything to hide". We're ju…

I think the key here isn't broadcasting, it's storage. In the future (?) we might think we can detect Parkinson's or MS very early through voice/video/typing characteristics. Your conversations were recorded, the data leaked to or purchased by a fly by night company hired by your bank, and now suddenly despite your excellent credit history you can't get a 30 year mortgage, you try to find a new job but companies are…

Oddly specific, but this is such a great plausible example that I'm going to use from now on.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#263

Post by dcow »

godelski wrote: post #238
apeace wrote: post #208

If you want to convince your friends they should support encryption, here's how I like to get past the "nothing to hide" argument. Imagine we're sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming. We still don't "have anything to hide". We're ju…

I mentioned something about this yesterday in another thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23693298 Basically it isn't about having anything to hide but the instability of democracy and what power bad actors have. Do I have anything to hide from Google? Not really. But do I want that same data that Google has to be in the hands of someone like Putin? No. I don't even want it in the hands of the NSA. The issue…

Sadly I've come to the conclusion that people don't really actually care about the stability of democracy so long as they have food on the table and a warm bed at night. No matter the fact that a stable democracy free from the tyrannical rule of a monarch is what gave rise to their entire lifestyle as they know it. But people forget so quickly what we sacrifice for democracy. It's almost irrelevant, though. Our once pristine western democracy has been slowly eroded by the forces free markets. So I don't know who's crazier, the people who seem to care less about the values required to maintain a democracy, or the people who still think we participate in one...

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#264

Post by AnthonyMouse »

godelski wrote: post #222
elihu wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think when people talk about RCV (in the context of single-winner elections), they're almost always talking about the same thing as IRV. "Ranked voting" is the more general term. > Ranked voting is any election voting system in which voters use a ranked (or preferential) ballot to rank choices in a sequence on the ordinal scale: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. There are multiple ways in which the rankings can be counted to det…

I'm basically agreeing with literally everything you are saying, I just want to expand on certain things. > RV vs RCV These terms are too similar and really just confuse people, which is why I push back against it. I try to use "ordinal" a lot, but it is best for places like HN but not when I'm discussing with family. RCV makes people think that this is the only way you can rank people. > STAR Anyone who is advocatin…

> I'm certain everyone in the Condorcet camp would vote for STAR and everyone in the STAR/Score/Approval camp would vote for Condorcet (specifically RP) if given the chance.

Eh... I'm in the STAR/Score/Approval camp and I would be somewhat inclined to vote strategically against Condorcet, because it's worse than what I want and once it was implemented it would be even harder to dislodge in favor of STAR/Score/Approval than the status quo.

It's also a false compromise because the opponents aren't generally people who benefit from the worse voting method, only people who haven't yet understood why it's worse.

Of course, if we were using STAR/Score/Approval to vote on which voting system to use then I could express my preferences more accurately.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#265

Post by kinghajj »

markkanof wrote: post #248
zelly wrote: post #229

This is the consequence of companies like Discord letting child predators run rampant on their platform and doing nothing about it. There are two sides to every story. You can imagine how the government would react after seeing hundreds and hundreds of cases coming out of Discord, Snap, even FB. Reading the actual bill[1] rather than sensational headlines, you can see this is mostly about creating a tip line and bure…

I initially thought you couldn't possibly be right about this, but what you stated does seem to be the case. After skimming through the full text, the main point of this seems to be about setting up a committee that will come up with "best practices" that online service providers can follow to reduce/eliminate the exploitation of children on their platform. Can someone explain how this "creates a threat to strong enc…

If they determine that "best practice" no longer includes secure end-to-end encryption that a service provider can't decrypt independently of the user, they'll use that as political leverage. "See, our self-selected panel of experts said that this isn't a best practice, yet Apple and Facebook are still doing it anyway!"

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#266

Post by beckingz »

einpoklum wrote: post #260
jrumbut wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the key here isn't broadcasting, it's storage. In the future (?) we might think we can detect Parkinson's or MS very early through voice/video/typing characteristics. Your conversations were recorded, the data leaked to or purchased by a fly by night company hired by your bank, and now suddenly despite your excellent credit history you can't get a 30 year mortgage, you try to find a new job but companies are…

> In the future (?) we might think we can detect Parkinson's or MS very early through voice/video/typing characteristics. We probably won't.

Want to see if we can get 10M in VC money to try?

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#267

Post by qppo »

newacct583 wrote: post #256
qppo wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CA has a blanket primary, which means that all candidates from all parties take part in the primary and then the top 2 compete in the general election, regardless of party affiliation. Feinstein wiped the floor with everyone in the primary in 2018. She took 44% of the vote, and the next leading candidate (Kevin de Leon) took 12%. When they ran against each other, de Leon lost by a fairly large margin but turnout kind…

Getting to the point you were responding to: in fact Feinstein won on the back of a bunch of "republican" votes, cast strategically in a "blue" state where a traditional candidate wasn't likely to win. Which is to say: nonpartisan voting did exactly what it was advertised to do and resulted in the election of a centrist candidate. Obviously there are other externalities to consider (Feinstein is very senior), etc...…

> fact Feinstein won on the back of a bunch of "republican" votes, cast strategically in a "blue" state where a traditional candidate wasn't likely to win

Except de Leon carried the red districts. Not Feinstein.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#268

Post by justinyan »

The act itself seems to revolve around limiting section 230 protections (https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:47%20section:...) to those who pass a checklist of TBD requirements determined by a TBD bureaucracy.

I've struggled a bit to find resources helping to describe what section 230 protections are actually for, however. Many of the examples explaining section 230 protections seem to revolve around things like defamation in Youtube comments or product reviews, but I'm having trouble making the leap from that to why messengers are so concerned about this bill. Why do tools like messengers need section 230 protections to begin with? AFAICT they still have to submit to things like national security letters, so what does section 230 buy, say, Whatsapp or Signal?

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#269

Post by cortic »

apeace wrote: post #208

If you want to convince your friends they should support encryption, here's how I like to get past the "nothing to hide" argument. Imagine we're sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming. We still don't "have anything to hide". We're ju…

My nothing to hide argument is a little different;

Nothing to hide is an incomplete sentence. Nothing to hide from who? Surly you want to hide your children from abusers and predators? Don't you want to hide your banking details from con artists and fraudsters? Your identity from identity thieves.. Your location from burglars, your car keys from car thieves or your blood type from some rich mobsters with kidney problems..

we don't know who are any of these things. So we should protect ourselves from all of them, in effect we have everything to hide from someone, and no idea who someone is.

Re: Oppose the Earn IT Act

#270

Post by kulahan »

apeace wrote: post #208

If you want to convince your friends they should support encryption, here's how I like to get past the "nothing to hide" argument. Imagine we're sitting at a bar, chatting. None of us have anything to hide. Then the government passes a law that all conversations must be streamed on Youtube Live, so an agent comes in, sets up a camera at our table, and starts streaming. We still don't "have anything to hide". We're ju…

The best argument I ever heard was:

"Would you give up your right to free speech just because you have nothing important to say? No? Then why would you give up your right to privacy just because you have nothing to hide?"

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