wow I am just utterly surprised how the politicians in US are trying to pass the bill via CSAM just like the politicians in korea. Korea already has a DNS surveilance on porn related websites because it may contain sexually abusive material that may harm teenagers' mental health (it is called children and teenangers act). They even passed a bill to monitor the videos shared in online chatroom because people may share sexually abusive material via messengers. They have a very strong ethical reason in that they are trying to protect children and teenagers, and it is difficult to overcome that by making a case for privacy protection.
The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
331–340 of 520 posts
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
My government has restricted travel in order to stop a pandemic virus spreading to the point where hospitals are overwhelmed and we start seeing 10% of the population dying instead of 0.5%. Thankfully they have also implemented a nationwide vaccination scheme and a vaccination pass which is accepted pretty much anywhere worldwide.
With benefit of hindsight, turns out there was never a risk of 10% of the population dying. The disease isn't that deadly, even if the hospital system did give out (and the numbers I've been looking at seem to suggest that the risk of the hospital system giving out was oversold - it didn't look fun but it also didn't seem to buckle enough to justify the authoritarian response in my eyes). If I were being uncharitable…
> Nobody has ever threatened my rights as profoundly as my strong government.
Nobody has ever betrayed my trust quite like my own Government, either.
I live in the UK, which (for now) has Boris Johnson as its Prime Minister. This means that while they were fining people for having Christmas parties, going outside, and forcing people to stay indoors, he had a string of parties (12) which did not follow the COVID rules.
It's honestly sickening to watch (the Jacob Rees-Mogg video, too), and it's a great example of how the Government really doesn't stand by the people who put them in power. How would you even go about fixing this?
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a general rule it's unwise to hope for some unintended side effect of bad legislation to solve unrelated problems. The goal of this legislation is surveillance and control. If passed, it will achieve that goal. If it has a side effect of significant number of people starting to use encrypted P2P communication (doubtful imo), they will pass more legislation to make that illegal too, since "child abusers are obvious…
Never claimed to hope for the law to pass and that to happen. It was more speculation on what might happen if it did pass. Regarding them attacking P2P.. IMO they wouldn't be able to attack P2P specifically without attacking encryption in general. There are to many ways to implement P2P using standard encryption technologies. I think they are starting to realize they can't win that fight without losing the larger war…
They can certainly, say, ban Apple and Google from hosting such P2P apps in their app stores, then any such apps are useless to most people. They could also go after developers, forcing them to either install backdoors or shut down - see what kind of laws Australia passed about that, as an example.
Remember they only care about most people, they don't need to get every last one of us. Their point is to make default methods of communication unencrypted.
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#334While this bill is strongly opposed by the Internet Society, ACLU, CDT, and EFF, the critiques I've read don't get much into the real "why" behind this legislation continuing to be pushed so forcefully. The pretext is, of course, "protect the children" and more generally law-and-order with a bonus side-helping of "stop those awful social media giants." While these justifications are (hopefully) obvious misdirection t…
I'd personally love to see social media shut down tomorrow, by holding twitter and facebook liable as publishers for the content of every post on their platform, and letting them defend in civil litigation every time they re-publish their users' false statements for profit. But that has nothing to do with government censorship, that's pure libertarianism and letting the publisher bear the cost. The entire notion of i…
> I'd personally love to see social media shut down tomorrow
Yeah, ok, I'm with you there...
> ... by holding twitter and facebook liable as publishers for the content of every post on their platform, and letting them defend in civil litigation every time they re-publish their users' false statements for profit.
Whoa there, hold on. If we hold Twitter and FB liable for that stuff, then that means we also have to hold every single web forum, support forum, mailing list, blogging platform, etc. liable as well. So those things essentially just disappear overnight, because no one is willing to expose themselves to that sort of legal liability.
Eventually, the only things you can read on the internet come from big corporations that can afford big legal teams, or people who have the technical know-how to host their own blog. HN is gone. Slashdot is gone. The Raspberry Pi support forum is gone. Hell, the LKML is gone. That's not an internet-world I want to live in.
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
To play Devil's Advocate: people had to meet up for face-to-face communications, but they don't have to meet up for remote communication.
That’s a true fact but why does it make traditional policing impossible?
What is "traditional policing" in your view?
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd personally love to see social media shut down tomorrow, by holding twitter and facebook liable as publishers for the content of every post on their platform, and letting them defend in civil litigation every time they re-publish their users' false statements for profit. But that has nothing to do with government censorship, that's pure libertarianism and letting the publisher bear the cost. The entire notion of i…
What you are proposing is that the only writers we should hear from are professionals at publishing institutions, who have editors to vet their work and lawyers to defend it. That is certainly a take on what The Discourse should be! Return to the print media era, basically. But it is weird to see this take expressed in the same form it wants to end. Hacker News is social media and YCombinator is surely not going to s…
No, not exactly. Unlike in the print age, we all have the ability to set up a home server or distributed servers; we have the ability to reach anyone in the world. But we don't have a natural right to do that or extend our readership through someone else's platform. I can sit here and host whatever I'd like. In the BBS era, you were responsible for people posting illegal stuff on your board, and you were held responsible if your board was full of some bullshit propaganda, and it should still be that way. Zuckerberg should be treated like any asshole sysop who isn't tending his domain.
Hacker News does, to a large degree, moderate what people write here. Much more so than any social media platform. That's why it's still a functional platform. You can't just go on here and slander or espouse libelous conspiracy theories. You won't get far.
I'm not saying the gov't should regulate it! Not at all. I'm saying the content distribution networks shouldn't be shielded from civil litigation. HN and Facebook and Twitter aren't general carriers. If they simply delivered messages from point A to B, they might not be liable; but the more a service like FB news feed chooses to re-distribute something, the more they should be held liable for content. Simply putting it on top and letting it be downvoted, like HN, is far less nefarious than re-targeting it and repeating it relentlessly to the most vulnerable 15% of dumbasses who'll believe it. One person posting and having it sink isn't a big deal. But re-targeting that post to others makes you a re-poster. They aren't the postal service. They aren't neutral. Re-posting lies has monetary, reputational and social costs. Facebook profits directly from massively re-posting lies, but bears none of the cost. All I'm saying is that no one in a position to determine what's re-posted or not should be allowed to profit from spreading disinformation with one hand while externalizing those costs onto society, without a neutral arbitration willing to reassess the cost to individuals they harmed.
[edit] The current system can't support free speech, because shielding the re-printers of false speech makes it impossible to disentangle truth from propaganda; and in an asymmetrical field, propaganda always wins. Letting the courts sort it out and putting the social media networks on notice that they were responsible for veracity would solve this silly debate over whether "free speech" is being quashed on private networks, and also, encourage better forms of debate that conformed to certain standards of logic. And if you don't want to conform to any kind of logic, you can always set up your own server.
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#337Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm probably making assumptions, so I'd like to clarify, which government prohibited travel to such a degree? In the my US Midwest jurisdiction, the truly restrictive lockdowns closed indoor business, and discouraged gathering, but to my knowledge it was never illegal to travel. And indoor gathering restrictions didn't last more than a few months in private spaces. Although, certain behaviors were strongly discourage…
Australia. NSW to be specific since each state had its own response. But US law affects a lot of services I use. And I wish our government had taken a light-touch approach like yours. Dare I say I wish they'd adopted a philosophy of weak governance and respecting people's rights by letting them make their own choices.
No post body was provided.
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#338Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The minute your system depends on good behavior from any of the parties involved, you've failed as a designer. Everyone is bad designers then. All of them rely on operating system providers not stealing your messages. Some with the people providing the chat application. Since they have to be able to display messages they are able to log them somewhere. Society needs trust to function.
> All of them rely on operating system providers not stealing your messages. You can compile your own operating system and control your hardware supply chain - you don't have to rely entirely on trust for those components. > Since they have to be able to display messages they are able to log them somewhere. If they're end-to-end encrypted, no, the people providing the chat application can't log anything except noise.…
>You can compile your own operating system and control your hardware supply chain
It's unrealistic for everyone to audit their operating system and hardware.
>If they're end-to-end encrypted, no, the people providing the chat application can't log anything except noise.
Yes, they can. If you used a comprimised Element app your encrypted Matrix messages can be stolen.
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd personally love to see social media shut down tomorrow, by holding twitter and facebook liable as publishers for the content of every post on their platform, and letting them defend in civil litigation every time they re-publish their users' false statements for profit. But that has nothing to do with government censorship, that's pure libertarianism and letting the publisher bear the cost. The entire notion of i…
> I'd personally love to see social media shut down tomorrow Yeah, ok, I'm with you there... > ... by holding twitter and facebook liable as publishers for the content of every post on their platform, and letting them defend in civil litigation every time they re-publish their users' false statements for profit. Whoa there, hold on. If we hold Twitter and FB liable for that stuff, then that means we also have to hold…
No - I think there's a strong case to be made that FB and Twitter aren't like email providers or other forums like Reddit which are neutral in just showing content. Nor am I saying anything should be censored by the government. All I'm saying is that to the extent Twitter increased the viewership of some piece of propaganda, they should be allowed to be sued for damages. It's their ability to amplify that's the issue, particularly to amplify horrendous lies to the most gullible (and to profit from that). It's not their simple transmission from peer to peer. They're explicitly not just a forum, and they're not a telecommunications service.
Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They want the police to have all the power they can get because, as far as they're concerned, they're the good guys, and giving the good guys more power helps them win against the bad guys. But we all know that giving excessive power to good guys turns them rather reliably into bad guys.
> But we all know Excepting the approval of end to end encryption and residential zoning, pretty much every problem thread on HN is littered with comments about how we need more regulation and laws to solve X or Y or Z. Wanting the "good guys" to have more power is pretty much the default response on here nowadays. I remember earlier- including before I had signed up for an account- when HN was much more libertarian,…
Honestly … times have changed. I was a optimistic liberterian once … I still am… but look at reality. You give people and bussines to much freedome and they use it for things that harm society. Facebook and telegram for example. Snake oil sellers where allways a problem but now it seeems to explode and destroy my liberterian word view :(