FSE meets the FBI • Hacker News Board

Re: FSE meets the FBI

#141

Post by lmm » Tue, Jun 10, 2025, 12:06 AM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #122

lmm wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone could be violent, but that screenshot is total weaksauce. Is it even the same guy or just someone random blowing off steam?

The problem is entirely that you cannot tell a baseless threat from a real one from just the forum post. Just like for credit card fraud, you can only improve your heuristics so far. At some point, you either treat every single possible as real for investigative purposes, or you accept that you find a threat, ignored it, and people die as a result. Plenty of real world crazy terrorist bullshit had a pointless online…

> Just like for credit card fraud, you can only improve your heuristics so far. At some point, you either treat every single possible as real for investigative purposes, or you accept that you find a threat, ignored it, and people die as a result.

This isn't borderline though. This is blatantly nothing. You might as well arrest everyone who leaves their house in the morning.

> More importantly, depending on the threat, it's probably a crime itself. Bomb threats are criminal even if it's clear that it wasn't a realistic threat.

That doesn't make the legal system better, that makes it worse! What world do we live in where Pepsi can offer a valuable prize and welch on it and it's fine because they're joking, but it doesn't go the other way?

Re: FSE meets the FBI

#142

Post by lmm » Tue, Jun 10, 2025, 12:13 AM UTC

mrguyorama wrote: post #127

lmm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking that on a story specifically describing how the FBI is either avoiding or directly violating the constitutional restrictions they are supposed to follow?

I'm sorry, how did the FBI violate anyone's First Amendment rights here? Where in this story did they take down content? Where did they compel speech or silence or association? LMAO you do not have a first amendment right to not be investigated for making threats in public, even if those threats are baseless! You do not have a right to baselessly threaten people!

Their agents were bypassing OP's security measures (and breaking the CFAA) to make an extremely broad search of their papers. That's absolutely a Fourth Amendment violation.

Re: FSE meets the FBI

#143

Post by amy214 » Tue, Jun 10, 2025, 2:06 AM UTC

trollbridge wrote: post #54

immibis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the US has very unfree speech, despite what someone wrote on a piece of paper in 17-whatever year. In general, the US ranks pretty low on most freedom metrics, except for the freedom to kill with a gun. In general, the more your country has to tell you you're free, the less free you actually are. Many other countries explicitly do not have free speech in their constitution, but something more narrow, like fre…

Could you elaborate how the U.S. doesn’t have free speech?

In the USA, speech is free, but you are not free of consequences for said speech

Re: FSE meets the FBI

#144

Post by aydyn » Tue, Jun 10, 2025, 7:09 AM UTC

aydyn wrote: post #109

noworriesnate wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s illegal to call for boycotting Israel in many US states [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-BDS_laws

Which countries in your opinion does have free speech?

Crickets

Re: FSE meets the FBI

#145

Post by winternewt » Tue, Jun 10, 2025, 8:46 AM UTC

os2warpman wrote: post #123

kstrauser wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run a medium sized Mastodon server. I blocked them because one of their users called me the n-word, I reported them to their admin, and nothing happened. It had zero to do with fediblock or any other communal mechanism. Their users acted like assholes, their admins did nothing about it, so I decided I didn’t want to talk to them anymore. The notion of FSE whining about being blocked by some cabal is hilarious to me…

>Their users acted like assholes, their admins did nothing about it, so I decided I didn’t want to talk to them anymore. It has been my experience that the more vocal someone is about free speech rights the more likely it is that they are only vocal because they want to use those rights as a shield against criticism of their bigoted, annoying, or anti-social behavior and they want to criticize people for distancing t…

At least when someone promotes free speech there's a chance that they are proponents of democratic principles. If they are against free speech you know that they have an authoritarian ideology.

Re: FSE meets the FBI

#146

Post by CaptainFever » Tue, Jun 10, 2025, 11:26 AM UTC

Interesting to see that this is kicked off by the referal header. Seems like a privacy issue to have your browser tell servers part of your browsing history by default.

IIRC, Tor doesn't have that issue.

Re: FSE meets the FBI

#147

Post by immibis » Tue, Jun 10, 2025, 12:59 PM UTC

amy214 wrote: post #143

trollbridge wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate how the U.S. doesn’t have free speech?

In the USA, speech is free, but you are not free of consequences for said speech

Which is the same thing as speech not being free.

Re: FSE meets the FBI

#148

Post by kstrauser » Tue, Jun 10, 2025, 1:36 PM UTC

winternewt wrote: post #145

os2warpman wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Their users acted like assholes, their admins did nothing about it, so I decided I didn’t want to talk to them anymore. It has been my experience that the more vocal someone is about free speech rights the more likely it is that they are only vocal because they want to use those rights as a shield against criticism of their bigoted, annoying, or anti-social behavior and they want to criticize people for distancing t…

At least when someone promotes free speech there's a chance that they are proponents of democratic principles. If they are against free speech you know that they have an authoritarian ideology.

No one believes themselves to be against free speech.

Re: FSE meets the FBI

#149

Post by hoistbypetard » Tue, Jun 10, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

CaptainFever wrote: post #146

Interesting to see that this is kicked off by the referal header. Seems like a privacy issue to have your browser tell servers part of your browsing history by default. IIRC, Tor doesn't have that issue.

Interestingly enough, it's configurable both from the user side and from the referring site side.

Most (all? all the relevant ones, I think) browsers honor the referer-policy[1] header if a referring site sets it. There are options in common site frameworks, like Django[2] to control that for UAs that respect it.

Since most UAs respect it, if the indexing site had wanted to, they could easily have prevented the header from being sent for most users.

[1](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Refere...)

[2](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.2/ref/middleware/#referr...)

Re: FSE meets the FBI

#150

Post by account42 » Tue, Jun 10, 2025, 3:33 PM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #148

winternewt wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least when someone promotes free speech there's a chance that they are proponents of democratic principles. If they are against free speech you know that they have an authoritarian ideology.

No one believes themselves to be against free speech.

You do.

> I blocked them because one of their users called me the n-word