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The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

cyberlaw.stanford.edu

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Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#441

Post by iso1210 »

roenxi wrote: post #319
aprinsen wrote: post #315

Earlier 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.

The people of Australia get to vote in 4 months for a new government. If people really hated the covid restrictions as much as you, then they will get rid of the people who implemented them.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#442

Post by onetimeusename »

Joeri wrote: post #292
kragen wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These people seem incapable of understanding the existential threat to free society and democracy posed by limiting everyone's ability to communicate private thoughts. The existential threat this bill poses to free society and democracy is exactly why they're supporting it. It's not some accidental side effect. They're opposed to the existence of free society and democracy because it limits government power, which…

Free society means limited government, and the only way for the government to be in favor of that is for the government to vote against its own interests. I would argue that a free society protects people’s rights, and this is impossible without a strong government. As for voting against its own interests, the government in a true democracy is quite literally the will of the people. We get what we vote for. So if peo…

There has to be protections for minorities defined as people having minority view points. Otherwise there is tyranny of the majority. A democracy protects the rights of minorities which includes preserving their speech. That may mean allowing opposing viewpoints to take root.

If the majority wants the government to outlaw and ban opposing viewpoints or speech I think that although that is the government doing the will of the people, that is undemocratic.

To tie that to what the OP post is about, it mentions censorship that goes beyond what the stated purpose of the law is. I think most here are aware that that is probably intentional.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#443

Post by missingrib »

School-Cotton wrote: post #282
kragen wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a continuum. Just because Gary Webb "committed suicide" with multiple gunshot wounds to the head doesn't mean the CIA in the 01990s was just as unaccountable as Beria's NKVD, much less just as oppressive. Dan Rather's CBS Evening News was no Wikileaks , much less Wikipedia, but it wasn't Pravda either. Serpico got shot in the face for being the first honest cop in the US, but you could still do business in New Y…

Just FYI the zero-padded date thing is incredibly distracting and weird. (Yes I know there’s some “foundation” pushing this, but still).

What foundation?

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#444

Post by iso1210 »

j16sdiz wrote: post #263
zdragnar wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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,…

disclaimer: I am not American, and know nothing about American politics. I think all these start around Trump's administration. Trump start calling some media/social media as fake news, and some media/social media start censoring his supporter. After seeing the worse effects of misleading information, many free-speech-supporter back off alot.

McCarthyism predates Trump, and I'm sure that social pressures of what you can and can't say in public date back far further

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#445

Post by friendlydog »

dane-pgp wrote: post #438
friendlydog wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some parts of government should be immutable, and putting safeguards to ensure constants are constant makes a lot of sense to me.

The idea that a part of the government could be unchangeable even if 100% of the people in the country oppose it, seems not just dystopian but philosophically absurd. As a compromise, though, how about having some rules about which laws the government is allowed to make, and requiring something like a two-thirds majority to be able to change those rules. Then you could have a rule saying that the government can't mak…

Not sure if you are being sarcastic, but the facts on the ground are that the constitution is broken all the time without anyone being punished enough to stop them from doing it again. Unless you outline penalties or protections such as qualified immunity for defending the constitution it becomes meaningless.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#446

Post by wizzwizz4 »

citruscomputing wrote: post #176
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #137

Earlier 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.

Does the devil need an advocate?

The Catholic Church seems to think so, and they've got a notorious anti-Devil bias. It's useful to put forward arguments against things, even if you don't agree with them, because it helps to put into words why you don't agree with them.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#447

Post by strulovich »

raziel2p wrote: post #323
strulovich wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those single issue voters are the not present in many other countries besides the US. This might show that the right arguments and lobbying can turn what is not a big political debate into a wedge over time.

they absolutely are - you'll find plenty of voters in Europe who care about nothing other than immigration, for example.

I’m not saying there’s no single issue voters, just that the single issues are not universal and depend on culture and geography.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#448

Post by MereInterest »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #215
MereInterest wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why isn't it a productive argument? This is a question about what goals society should optimize towards. There's no amount of objective measurements that can determine the relative worth of cheaper policing compared with decreased privacy. The only way for such an argument to proceed is to convince enough people that such a trade results in a world not being how it is supposed to be. TL;DR: This argument lies on the…

I wasn’t familiar with the is-ought problem, thanks! I think in this case, I was commenting on the parents presumption that the their “ought” was a universally shared (or even widely shared) axiom. In that sense stating one’s belief without defending it is not really an argument at all (in that it’s not persuasive), and therefore (in my opinion) not as productive as starting from a more universally held common ground…

No problem, and I'm glad that it helped! It's a useful distinction for determining what type of arguments will be useful to make. If two people agree on goals, but differ on the ways to reach those goals, then "is" arguments are useful. If two people disagree on goals, then there isn't yet any common ground on which to have that conversation, and the first step is to have an "ought" conversation to find common ground.

(This is also simplifying a bit, as there are cases where differing goals can have the same next steps. An apolitical example would be a temporary alliance in a board game, where you and I team up to stop a third player from winning. Our long-term goals differ, as each of us wants to win for ourselves, but our short-term goals align at stopping the third player.)

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#449

Post by abecedarius »

kragen wrote: post #400
3np wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As can be seen here, it’s really distracting. Writing years like that is a great way to have people ignore or forget what you’re actually wanting to communicate. Which is unfortunate, as they do have some interesting thoughts that are now masked by insisting on their own edgy year format.

#notallpeople

It seems like there was a time when these Long Now dates would prompt curiosity here on HN, without so much hostility as now. I don't care about the dates, but the aggressively conventional are something else.

Re: The EARN IT act is back, and it’s more dangerous than ever

#450

Post by tagoregrtst »

colinmhayes wrote: post #440
tagoregrtst wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feinstein is the senator I dislike the most. Even after she complained like a baby that the FBI had surveilled her (what did she expect?) it didn't affect her political positions one bit. She cant loose the elections because shes a Dem from CA. She cant get primaried because shes in the hands of the SV

> Feinstein is the senator I dislike the most You don't mind the senators that voted to disenfranchise the millions of voters in Arizona?

It follows from basic math that, if I dislike Feinstein the most, I dislike the other 99 senators less.

However, it doesn't follow from:

“Feinstein is the senator I dislike the most”

That I don’t mind the other 99, or any subset thereof.

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