Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

eff.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 1001 posts

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#171

Post by sneak »

frabbit wrote: post #20

It is not just ISPs. It is crowdfunding and payment processing companies. See for example this apparent seizure of funding to independent journalists happening right now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314499 If you care about there being genuinely independent news media then funding these guys is something you can do right now.

There is a new internet payments technology that is 100% effective against abuses like this, even when the state decides it shouldn't be possible.

Censorship-resistant payments are an essential prerequisite to a free society, something I have been asserting in public for a dozen+ years.

Unfortunately as of late they have been vilified. If I were a paranoid man, I might point out that this happened right around the time they became known to the mainstream.

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#172

Post by plagiarist »

HideousKojima wrote: post #167
plagiarist wrote: post #150

What I'd like to figure out is how there are still so many Nazis despite readily-available facts that Naziism is racist delusions? And how are countries like Germany still doing kinda okay despite making it illegal to do Nazi stuff? Isn't it a slippery slope directly from banning Naziism direct to North Korean-style authoritarianism?

>And how are countries like Germany still doing kinda okay Only for certain definitions of okay

Okay, share your definition.

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#173

Post by autoexec »

Once again the EFF is proving that they'll stand behind their principles and defend freedom even for those they disagree with. They are one of the few remaining organizations that I feel I can support without reservation. Taking this difficult position isn't easy, but it is the right thing to do and I'm so glad to see that the EFF has the strength to do it in the face of growing opposition to free speech ideals.

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#175

Post by lr4444lr »

unsui wrote: post #40

Why does it have to be absolute/binary? If I can't have full, unfettered free speech, then it's the end of the world. Let's put aside the slippery-slope arguments. The real world is messy, with ridiculously obscure corner cases that make blanket statements and policies practically impossible to operationalize without significant collateral damage. Shouldn't a more realistic approach be something like "give me speech…

I don't think you deserve to be downvoted, but you're missing the point: we need guiding principles to help us work through tough cases so that we can best avoid setting bad precedent. The EFF made a good move today.

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#176

Post by carbotaniuman »

torstenvl wrote: post #66
gravitate wrote: post #12

I hit CTRL+F to find the word 'neutral' in this article, but no such word appeared. But it did appear in another EFF article titled 'We Need to Talk About Infrastructure'[0], which is the crux of the issue here. My only question is; what is regarded 'internet infrastructure' these days? Is Cloudflare really just an ISP? Is VPN infra considered an ISP? Are mixer nets like Tor/Hyphanet an ISP? 'Essential internet infra…

Essential internet infrastructure should not be content-neutral. Content neutrality is a higher bar than you think it is. Content-neutral means the rules cannot take content into account at all . If the content is millions of ssh login requests on thousands of servers with ec2-user and the top 10000 most used passwords, the infrastructure should be able to block that. Content-neutrality would probably make it illegal…

Viewpoint neutrality is debatable though, in this situation, HE could argue that they aren't banning based on viewpoint but rather the nature of the content, and point to other websites sharing similar viewpoints that they carry. It just seems like a half-step that pleases no one and does nothing. Let private companies be private companies, we don't need the unelected bureaucrats to tell us how to run DDOS protection or route traffic.

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#177

Post by Avamander »

alexb_ wrote: post #44
unsui wrote: post #40

Why does it have to be absolute/binary? If I can't have full, unfettered free speech, then it's the end of the world. Let's put aside the slippery-slope arguments. The real world is messy, with ridiculously obscure corner cases that make blanket statements and policies practically impossible to operationalize without significant collateral damage. Shouldn't a more realistic approach be something like "give me speech…

> considerations that are negotiable, such as, "does this speech promote destroying the institutions on which the speech itself is based on" That's not a considerable negotiation. Give people power and they will use literally every single bit of it and then some. ISPs should have absolutely no say, in any way, of what people do. They shouldn't even be able to know anything about what I'm doing past what is needed for…

> ISPs should have absolutely no say, in any way, of what people do. They shouldn't even be able to know anything about what I'm doing past what is needed for the ISP to function.

Up until the point you become disruptive to the service, other customers or third parties for ex. DDoS attacks.

Absolute statements like these are silly. Making comparisons with houses is quite silly if you can figuratively "take your house somewhere else", people don't have to just turn the other cheek.

Though it would indeed be better if law(makers) would target malicious activity, but providing a billboard for it should not be mandatory.

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#178

Post by dumpsterdiver »

jqpabc123 wrote: post #6

Maybe Hurricane needs to police it's own network first. My web server constantly receives malicious probes and invalid requests from Hurricane owned IPs. How does a malicious actor get direct access to a Tier 1 address? The only way I can see is by being inside their facilities.

Oh wow, I didn't realize which "hurricane" we were talking about until you said that. Years ago I wrote a script that automatically updated firewall rules to block apparently malicious IP blocks (based upon observable behavior as well as IP reputation), and Hurricane was consistently near the top of the offender list. I recall finding it interesting at the time how the various Hurricane servers showing up in our logs reminded of an actual hurricane.

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#179

Post by another_story »

amiga386 wrote: post #95
another_story wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past the ACLU has defended hate groups right to freedom of speech. Do you have evidence that they'd do something to the contrary?

Their national director's statement in the immediate aftermath of the Charlottesville riots: https://www.vox.com/2017/8/20/16167870/aclu-hate-speech-nazi... > The backlash has already spurred other ACLU chapters to declare that they don’t believe free-speech protections apply to events like the one in Charlottesville, and led the ACLU’s national director, Anthony Romero, to declare the group will no longer defend the…

The first point is interesting to me. Choosing not to defend the 2nd amendment while defending the first. Thank for the info.

Re: ISPs should not police online speech no matter how awful it is

#180

Post by plagiarist »

lr4444lr wrote: post #164
bb88 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> despite readily-available facts that Naziism is racist delusions? A lot of people on the right are talking about the US having a mental health crises when it comes to mass shootings. If that's really true, then yeah, that's how we get natsies. > Isn't it a slippery slope directly from banning Naziism direct to North Korean-style authoritarianism? Well I mean if there's a mental health crisis then yeah, people are g…

> I personally don't think the founding fathers of the US understood the future gullibility of their citizens. They absolutely did. When only white, male, decently educated property owners could vote, they had decent reassurance that a constitutional republic with state-specific voter management could work. I think they'd be horrified to see that today we don't even demand a basic proof of civics education. And I hat…

We need score voting. Being able to express a preference for a third candidate without danger of flipping the election would fix quite a bit. Unfortunately doing so currently is more useless than using the ballot as toilet paper.
Post reply on HN