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Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

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Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#281

Post by tim333 »

pastage wrote: post #277
_el1s7 wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia looks like a fantastic resource, but it's not really a reliable source of information. Everyone can write things there, including people with biases and conflicting interests. Their rules about editing are really annoying and unfair, they don't care about facts. I enjoy reading Wikipedia sometimes, but it's a broken system, a lot of truths missing in it's articles because of crap editors and political propa…

I mostly fact check and do notable research for obscure Wikipedia articles. This is usually a no drama environment sure I have helped delete articles that later became notable and removed true facts lacking sources. Many of these things have fixed themselves over time. My biggest fear with Wikipedia is citogenesis https://xkcd.com/978/ I have found one in a major news paper, this took three months to take down.

I edit a bit and it seems mostly accurate but I've followed covid origins for a while and the bit "While other explanations, such as speculations that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a laboratory have been proposed, such explanations are not supported by evidence." isn't really true. There is evidence but for some reason they only want to cite papers from the scientific establishment saying the scientific establishment is innocent.

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#282

Post by ruthmarx »

josephg wrote: post #222
ruthmarx wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree with you, I think it's inevitable that governments, maybe eventually all, will abuse the power they have to censor the internet. It is important that fraud charges can be reversed and people like Alex Jones shut up, but if the normal internet becomes too restricted and an alternative free one where crime is rampant is the only place to get a lot of information, that's where people will go. While I too w…

> I think it's inevitable that governments [..] will abuse the power they have to censor the internet. Censoring isn't inherently an abuse of power. If nude photos of my 10 year old niece were circulating on the internet, I'd be in favour of censoring those photos too. Dang censors HN all the time, by removing posts. Is that an abuse of power too? > While I too want better rules, I also want insurance in place for wh…

> Censoring isn't inherently an abuse of power.

I didn't say it was, I said governments will abuse the power they do have.

> The fact that people in Russia or Gaza can use bitcoin doesn't make them a great place to be right now.

It means they can participate in the global economy and internet to an extent despite their government trying to prevent it.

> But I'd much rather a government that doesn't need to be overthrown in the first place.

Sure, and I'd much rather no one was ever mean to anyone ever again. But realistically, it's likely there will be a need for an internet that can't be censored for a variety of reasons.

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#283

Post by ruthmarx »

Aeolun wrote: post #269
ruthmarx wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm already annoyed I have to wipe my devices whenever I travel there or risk a $5000 fine and maybe jail time if they want the password and I don't give it up. Australia has to be the least free country in the anglosphere.

What kind of thing do you have on your PC they’d care about? Actually, I guess if you don’t want them to know you won’t tell me now either xD I don’t like the idea of handing out my password any more, but wiping my PC is too much effort.

> What kind of thing do you have on your PC they’d care about?

You get that's not the point, right?

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#284

Post by ruthmarx »

SirHumphrey wrote: post #250
ruthmarx wrote: post #146

We desperately need more work done on a separate internet that by design cannot and never can be censored. I know there are some projects toward that already, but my fear is they won't reach maturity before governments blocking any content they don't want their population accessing is the norm. Some things should be illegal, sure, but if governments start attacking free speech and limiting what materials a population…

This fundamentally doesn't work because internet is not something existing in a vacuum - you need wires, fibers and servers to make it work, and those are located in somebodies jurisdiction. The willingness to transmit encrypted data exists for now in most countries, but would some kind of fully encrypted ungovernable internet take hold, that may rapidly change. As with DeFi, some problems cannot be solved by technol…

> This fundamentally doesn't work because internet is not something existing in a vacuum - you need wires, fibers and servers to make it work, and those are located in somebodies jurisdiction.

The reason it works is because there are numerous ways of hiding traffic at various layers.

Eventually it will probably be feasible to do DPI on every single packet and prevent that, but at the moment it's quite doable.

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#285

Post by j-bos »

EasyMark wrote: post #95

I can understand shutting it down to Indian IP ranges, but the whole world? I think they should have stood up to the Indian court and took wikipedia offline for India, otherwise soon there will be avalanche of demands to take down anything negative about modi, trump, xi, and putin.

I don't assume leadership, even in Wikipedia, is particularly concerned with freedom of knowledge. The foundation is flush with cash, constantly begs for more and still can't manage to stand up to this challenge?

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#287

Post by jb1991 »

ruthmarx wrote: post #174
userbinator wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're seeing the effects of globalisation. India has no right to control what the rest of the world sees.

Neither does Europe, yet they still try.

European push for privacy legislation seems quite different than we’re talking about here.

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#288

Post by Amezarak »

ruthmarx wrote: post #150
endgame wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Have governments become more authoritarian? Judging by the various misinformation legislation they're rushing to adopt, yes. The free internet said too many things that powerful people didn't like. An Australian example: https://x.com/SenatorRennick/status/1834455727764869593#m

Australia is an especially bad country in this regard.

The wider Anglosphere is pushing this too. One organization behind it in both the UK and the US is the UK Labour Party. Yes, you read that correctly - high level Labour party operatives formed a nonprofit in the US to lobby for misinformation legislation, to ban X, and to pressure various other websites into deleting content.

> CCDH also held meetings with federal legislators while pushing for “change in USA” toward a censorious proposal it calls the “STAR framework,” which would create an “independent digital regulator” that could “impose consequences for harmful content.” STAR’s core concepts are similar to Europe’s just-instituted Digital Services Act and Britain’s even more stringent Online Safety Act, which puts the national media regulator Ofcom in charge of determining fines for uncooperative platforms.

The whole article is worth a read, where many people were targeted for innocuous stuff or in at least one case, for reporting on an article in JAMA:

https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/election-excl...

Apologies for the Substack link, but it covers (and cites) material you otherwise need a dozen links to discover.

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#289

Post by fjdjshsh »

safety1st wrote: post #252
Symbiote wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They banned people employed by sanctioned organisations from being maintainers. This one worked for a company making hardware for the Russian military. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41932225

This is obviously unfortunate but I think the issue is a lot bigger than Linux. It should serve as a reminder that there are no liberals in war. The civil liberties you take for granted, in a major war, they will be gone. They will die in one day and it will take decades to get them back if ever. Remember that in WW2 America was throwing Japanese citizens into internment camps and the other side was doing far worse.…

Even at war, the USA was still much more "liberal" than Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan: for starters, they didn't put any German citizens / German descendants in a concentration camp.

The Japanese descendants/citizens living in the USA were treated different because of racism. You can argue that having a racist government isn't compatible with being "liberal", but it's a matter of degree. Having a democracy that doesn't allow non whites to vote is still more "liberal" than having a monarchy / dictatorship

Re: Wikipedia article blocked worldwide by Delhi high court

#290

Post by tomrod »

hackernewds wrote: post #159
tomrod wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they? What is the administrative division of governance in Liechtenstein? I don't know, and you might, but we mostly live blissfully unaware in the undergirding bueracracy that surrounds us. And if Liechtenstein calls for my head for saying that I know nothing about them, fantastic. I'll still never hear about it. The have no power where I am. But a government threatens an internationally beloved and fundamental i…

A market with billions of users is a bit different than Liechtenstein

The economy is not the government, and banning sites clearly doesn't work well.
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