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We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

federalregister.gov

71–80 of 395 posts

Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#71
post #13

What an absolute nightmare. I would also be surprised if iaas providers arent in vehement opposition, i will instantly migrate all cloud resources away from AWS if they start requiring KYC docs. Theres close to zero effort for doing so

Wow, what layer of abstraction do you have that allows for that? Even with typical IaC, Terraform, it's going to be a rewrite. If you're leveraging anything beyond load balancers, compute, and containers I don't see how that approaches zero. Some of the services could end up with you having to build/run your own to get any equivalence.

Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#72
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is great that you ask a question, because we live in a world with the freedom to opine on things. What could be considered a massive issue to me may not be a massive issue to another; and if we feel the world will be better by debating our positions, we have the right to do so. Today, anonymity and pseudonymity exist and allow people to speak freely without risk of backlash for having a different opinion as often…

This doesn't seem to affect users of internet services, though. It's just IaaS, so things like AWS. With that limited scope, what is the adverse affect of KYC laws on freedom of speech?

How much longer before IaaS platforms require their customers to also have similar KYC policies in their ToS to be able to shift liability downward in case anything goes down?

Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think everyone has a sour taste left over from decades of half-baked laws written by politicians that don't understand the basics of the internet or technology in general. With that said, I also don't understand the issues people are having with this.

What laws are you talking about? The Internet has grown a lot that’s largely because we have smart politicians and strong institutions. I really think the regulation of the Internet has been amazingly good.

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Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#74
post #22
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ask this 100% genuinely, since this isn't a subject I've ever given any mind to. Why should we oppose this? What are the potential negative outcomes if this goes through? Can you steelman the argument for why people support this, and explain why you find the arguments unconvincing?

It is great that you ask a question, because we live in a world with the freedom to opine on things. What could be considered a massive issue to me may not be a massive issue to another; and if we feel the world will be better by debating our positions, we have the right to do so. Today, anonymity and pseudonymity exist and allow people to speak freely without risk of backlash for having a different opinion as often…

I'm not in favor of this rule, but it seems to me you are conflating several issues into one without showing the effect of the rule. Can you explain how the rule that would be implemented causes these effects? I do not see the connection here.

Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#75
post #44

This is about foreign customers only, so as an attempt to abolish the constitution, it is severely flawed in respecting it enough to keep its distance. I can't think of any US service I am using that doesn't already require KYC? None of the large providers will let you get far without a credit card, as far as I remember? Since the discussion here will consider itself mostly with upright revolutionaries being disenfra…

And FISA was only about surveilling non-US persons.

No. With a court order, FISA always allowed surveillance of "agents of foreign powers", even if they were US citizens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveilla....

Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#76
post #21

Skimming through the article, it seems like the extent of this is to require IAAS (Infrastructure) providers to verify the identity of those who are using their services to train AI. It's an attempt to stymie sanctioned or malicious actors, from training AI and especially from hopping between services or using aliases to continue training on their model. It seems a bit benign and I don't understand the parallels othe…

Skimming the regulations, this does not seem right. All IAAS providers (which is everyone who allows customers to run custom code, so it includes any web host like Dreamhost) to verify the identity of foreigners who open an account. This would seemingly entail the service provider needing to verify everyone's identity, in order to figure out who is a foreigner and who is not.

In other words, if you want to run your own Wordpress, or Mastodon node, or your own custom CMS web site or group chat or IRC or bitcoin node, you would need to reveal your identity to the hosting service that you want. This does seem quite bad and could obviously be used to identify political dissidents.

On top of that, the IAAS must report to the US Commerce department about foreigners who are using services to train large AI models.

Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#77
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past that would be true. But given most blockchain platforms require it, I imagine it is more widely known in the tech-savy hn-like realms? Then again I worked on blockchain tech around half a decade ago, so I might be knowledge biased here?

Definitely biased. I had no idea what KYC means. I don't think typing it out fully once at the beginning is too much to ask, is it?

No definitely not, I fully agree with you and others there. Just was a bit surprised by how many of you were there. But that’s okay. Days where we learn are rich days. The richest of them all.

Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think everyone has a sour taste left over from decades of half-baked laws written by politicians that don't understand the basics of the internet or technology in general. With that said, I also don't understand the issues people are having with this.

What laws are you talking about? The Internet has grown a lot that’s largely because we have smart politicians and strong institutions. I really think the regulation of the Internet has been amazingly good.

For example: CAN-SPAM. If I want to send emails to a list, I have to burn $90 of my scarce dollars every year just for a PO box for the address at the bottom on the off chance someone sends a letter to unsubscribe. Unless I want to put my home address in every email, which I don't, and no one should. Unsubscribe links and highly effective spam filters were already completely standard when the law was passed in 2003. It doesn't matter if the email you send doesn't actually require it because every mailing list provider requires it.

Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#79

I would argue that for most use cases Internet Services are already collecting sufficient KYC data that it won't make a difference. Try signing up for anything infrastructure related without providing a credit card and/or billing address and/or cell phone number and see how far you get. That said the system is only as strong as the weakest link in the chain, and while getting a credit card/cell phone number in the US…

This totally depends on what is collected, if the requirements are some form of national id submission, ie. licenses or passports, then it opens all handlers up to tremendous abuse possibilities. Or at the very least paints a big sign on their backs that they handle mass quantities of offical government forms of biometric id, something I think would do much more harm than good in the long run as each company would need to be bulletproof to avoid.

Re: We have 4 days to contest KYC being required by internet services

#80
post #13

What an absolute nightmare. I would also be surprised if iaas providers arent in vehement opposition, i will instantly migrate all cloud resources away from AWS if they start requiring KYC docs. Theres close to zero effort for doing so

I think this is about preventing sanctioned countries or individuals using US technology we don't want them to have access too (like China not having modern GPUs). That goal seems reasonable though there's always a fear that the law is way broader than the high level intent. Why would it be "an absolute nightmare" if it's so easy to migrate?
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