311–320 of 330 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Now you have a new problem: how to accurately identify critical thinking?
Using AI LLM NoSQL low code 4G 6S chain based solution. Use LLM for summary. Then add a critical comment. Then generate summary again. If summary is influenced by comment, and comment is on topic, then comment is critical.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1. [ISPs] could choose which newsgroups to provide access to as part of their USENET access service. Just as they could decide which websites you can visit, but, outside of government intervention, they normally don't. Similarly, they could limit which MX servers could connect to the ISP's MTA server, but they don't (not counting SPF, DKIM, and DMARC). Why would that be different for usenet? > 2. USENET or a modern…
1. Except some ISPs did eventually cutoff access to the alt.* hierarchy. Some terminated their NNTP service entirely. 2. That case is not related to the 1934 Communications Act and neither are the other two cases you cited. You’re thinking of the Communications Decency Act which is a separate law with the famous Section 230 clause, but Title I and Title II are different parts of the 1934 statute passed by Congress un…
That happened after the attorney general of New York threatened to sue them, not because the ISP didn't like certain opinions or viewpoints.
> That case is not related to the 1934 Communications Act and neither are the other two cases you cited. You’re thinking of the Communications Decency Act which is a separate law with the famous Section 230 clause
That was a misunderstanding on my part. Regarding net neutrality, I'm not sure whether its repeal made a practical difference in terms of how people are able to connect to services over the internet. Given the widespread use of encryption, ISPs wouldn't be able to tell whether someone is using a service over HTTPS on port 443 or some other application level protocol using the same port.
Though if ISPs did place substantial limits in their bundled usenet service, then people would choose other ISPs or 3rd party services and/or complain. Just as they would if their ISPcs SMTP server wouldn't send messages to certain domains or if their web browser was blocked from accessing certain websites.
> DNS is probably a core service.
The ability to establish a connection to a remote server using an IP address is a core service. DNS isn't required. Discounting TLS certificate validation, I could connect to a remote server using their IP address instead of their hostname.
ISPs used to provide documentation instructing the end user how to connect to email, usenet, and how to set up their router or computer to access the internet. This could involve access credentials, DNS settings, etc.
> ISPs trying to do anything but give me Internet for money = bad; so a USENET or USENET-like service but at a much larger scale as a service provided by ISPs = unappealing.
Personally, I don't see the issue. If I can get a service bundled in with my existing service, then why not? If the service is significantly inferior compared to third party offering, then I still have the choice to sign up and use it.
> When AT&T cut off USENET access in 2008, it wasn’t just because they were being threatened with legal action over hosting child pornography on their NNTP servers, USENET had in their estimation declined past the point of return and it was no longer worth providing to their customers, particularly with a changing legal landscape that put them further at risk for continuing to provide it.
That doesn't really explain why a lot of major ISPs made the same decision within a short timeframe. The threat of a lawsuit does.
> There will never be a sequel to or rebirth of USENET at social media scale without moderation
Unfortunately, people prefer to use third party services and complain about their free speech rights when those services make arbitrary decisions about what's allowed and what's not. Usenet didn't have that problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only people who would be willing to sign everything and build a web of trust would be a handful of academics, students, and professionals. I wonder if that could act as a gateway.
I think PGP proved that the Web of Trust is not a scalable concept.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let slide my ass, they were intentionally yanked off the table by monied interests. I distinctly remember my reaction the first time I encountered an actual honest-to-fuck ad campaign in an online space. Shock, followed my a grudging smirk at the novelty of it, followed by months of concerned chatter among the "netizens" I interacted with about what it would mean for the web if advertising or any other form of money…
By "we let slide" I don't just mean the initial privatisation of the internet or the web, which I agree -- it's hard to imagine any citizen was in a position to change that against the interests motivating it. Instead I mean the ensuing 30 years in which we've constantly ignored the warnings and analysis of e.g. civil society about the dangers of surveillance and data acquisition, devaluation and diminishing of trust…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
1. Except some ISPs did eventually cutoff access to the alt.* hierarchy. Some terminated their NNTP service entirely. 2. That case is not related to the 1934 Communications Act and neither are the other two cases you cited. You’re thinking of the Communications Decency Act which is a separate law with the famous Section 230 clause, but Title I and Title II are different parts of the 1934 statute passed by Congress un…
> Except some ISPs did eventually cutoff access to the alt.* hierarchy. Some terminated their NNTP service entirely. That happened after the attorney general of New York threatened to sue them, not because the ISP didn't like certain opinions or viewpoints. > That case is not related to the 1934 Communications Act and neither are the other two cases you cited. You’re thinking of the Communications Decency Act which i…
I am not disputing the reason. You are correct about that. This is still an example of an enforcement action, or moderation, on the part of the ISPs. Just as an aside, that prosecutor was Andrew Cuomo.
> That was a misunderstanding on my part. Regarding net neutrality, I'm not sure whether its repeal made a practical difference in terms of how people are able to connect to services over the internet.
No worries. And no, its repeal didn’t make much of a difference. If I’m remembering correctly, the Title II classification came in 2015 and this was undone in 2017, so not much time for the FCC to settle in and really do anything with their newly claimed powers over broadband service providers under Title II although it’s worth noting the drum beat of the pro-net neutrality crowd has been noticeably absent these past 5 years even with the change back which is certainly a change from prior to the Title II classification in 2015.
> The ability to establish a connection to a remote server using an IP address is a core service. DNS isn't required.
I was making a business observation, not a technological observation. An ISP could try to run their business like that. It would also not be a good idea if they intend to stay in business. Nobody signs up for an ISP expecting to BYODNS even though 3rd party DNS resolvers do exist (and I use one myself).
> Personally, I don't see the issue. If I can get a service bundled in with my existing service, then why not? If the service is significantly inferior compared to third party offering, then I still have the choice to sign up and use it.
That’s a personal choice. You can prefer that, but my argument against why I don’t is because I prefer as direct a billing relationship with my service providers as I can get. This offers me two things: direct insight into what every single line item on my CC statements is buying me and for what price, and also staves off the middlemen businesses that when they get too big for their britches more often than not try to exploit that status as the middlemen.
Often times middlemen are unavoidable or nearly so from an economic perspective in other contexts: a supermarket for example stands between me and the farmers. That relationship often gives them power over the farmers that can assist me in getting a known quantity in terms of item quality but may actually force producers to operate or behave a certain way. That’s meatspace though, literally and figuratively, but even in cyberspace given a choice, I prefer the direct relationship over the indirect one.
> That doesn't really explain why a lot of major ISPs made the same decision within a short timeframe. The threat of a lawsuit does.
As I stated above, I am not disputing the threat of a lawsuit. But if USENET was growing and a potential profit center for ISPs at that time, it would have been easier to make the choice to fight for it in court. A lawsuit isn’t a guaranteed victory for the one who brings it, but it wasn’t even worth defending to them, and in fact it had become a liability.
> Unfortunately, people prefer to use third party services and complain about their free speech rights when those services make arbitrary decisions about what's allowed and what's not. Usenet didn't have that problem.
As long as you are using someone else’s hosted service whether it’s AT&T’s pre-2008 NNTP services or Reddit in 2017 or Hacker News in 2023, your free speech rights are subject to the hosted service’s owners free speech and property interests. In a direct conflict on the service itself, yours loses. If it’s your server, then yours wins.
USENET in its heyday existed in a very different culture, legal environment and economy than today. USENET at only 1993’s scale can do just fine cultivating that same culture as before, but if all you want is the size of 1993’s user base that isn’t very ambitious, and it’s not like NNTP is a particularly nice experience compared to Instagram, Snapchat, Discord or really just name any social media service since 2004.
If you took 1993’s USENET and scaled it to 500 million users today, the same largely hands-off moderation policies of the cabal of hosts that provided users access to the service could not stand and they would have to change from that time, not because of specifically former New York prosecutor Andrew Cuomo, but because of pretty much all prosecutors everywhere they operate. Section 230 is a nice liability shield, but it can still be pierced with a good case.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a major component of the difference between contributing then and contributing now is friction/skill/interest. Back then, you had to be specifically interested in learning how to get connected, which was a niche endeavor, while the masses were oblivious or too cool for school. Now, you can simply join almost any online community using baseline skills that an enormous fraction of Earth's population already has…
You can always throw a shiny web interface on top of your usenet clone. If it reached critical mass, I'm sure someone would. SMTP : Gmail :: NNTP : ??? Personally I think the (necessary) lack of binaries is why it would never grow beyond its niche.
Except whoever made Google Groups (and bought out and shut down DejaNews for it) got their promotion and lost interest and so Usenet For The Unwashed Masses got nixed like so many other Google products.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think I agree. There has to be a cost. I cuts down spam and raises a cost for mildly the mildly annoying. What if, and this is based on the principle of making it cost something, crypto got incorporated into the idea effectively forcing one to pay to send a message on a given forum. Hardly perfect, but with one of the anonymous coins it might not be a bad balance ( assuming we can get past the current slew of news…
I am not a crypto fanboy but I fully agree that crypto is as close a solution as we have today. Some degree of elitism is needed to keep the community safe and self-moderating. How about a crypto platform where you pay to post but also pay to subscribe? The economics of it need to be worked out but it can’t really be a one way street or only advertisers will send messages. If my post helps you then you should pay me,…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can always throw a shiny web interface on top of your usenet clone. If it reached critical mass, I'm sure someone would. SMTP : Gmail :: NNTP : ??? Personally I think the (necessary) lack of binaries is why it would never grow beyond its niche.
SMTP : Gmail :: NNTP : Google Groups Except whoever made Google Groups (and bought out and shut down DejaNews for it) got their promotion and lost interest and so Usenet For The Unwashed Masses got nixed like so many other Google products.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No I much prefer email groups to online forums or Reddit. Easy to register, just send a subscribe message. Trolls can be ignored or banned by the list administrators. I am subscribed to several specific interest email lists. The information I get there is typically much better than what I find online.
> No I much prefer email groups to online forums or Reddit. Easy to register, just send a subscribe message. Trolls can be ignored or banned by the list administrators. Do you also prefer email lists over a moderated newsgroup? If so, why?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No I much prefer email groups to online forums or Reddit. Easy to register, just send a subscribe message. Trolls can be ignored or banned by the list administrators. Do you also prefer email lists over a moderated newsgroup? If so, why?
Why can't an email list be moderated? I've seen several that very much were. OTOH your own moderation by just ignoring certain senders may be relatively efficient even if nobody actually controls the list server, and the whole thing is just a bunch of peer-to-peer messages with CC large headers.
The other is banning members if they misbehave.
Neither approach is foolproof, and ultimately it's up to the list members to ignore any messages they don't like. One difference with online forums is that it's not possible to recall or delete a message after it's been sent out.