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Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

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Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see those as separate. Paying someone to take on risk I see a clear argument for. Its specifically the "do it this way because insurance wont cover you otherwise" that I'm reacting too, because I think that had caused a lot of damage to society. Effectively nobody is taking on risk under the model insurance companies push - insurance won't let you do anything risky, and won't pay if you do. That's why I say it's a…

This is a good point, and also a general fact of life I think. Society is not just modeled by laws, but also by influencial groups. If your company gets banned by visa/mastercard for dealing with porn, you’ll steer away for anything porn related. You know banks won’t give you a loan for growing legal weed, if your goal is actually to make money you’ll grow other fancy aromatic plants instead, etc. You still can push…

That's a good, concise description. My particular beef with this happening with respect to insurance is that it "nudges" us to all be risk averse and boring, and artificially prioritize safety over all kinds of other outcomes.

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#182
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically yes, but they are removed when a person is found not guilty or released without being charged thus protecting the innocent and falsely accused. The mugshot sites capitalize on this by scraping the government websites and archiving them forever - until you pay a removal fee. Mugshots.com was doing exactly this until they got hit with extortion charges: https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-mugshot…

" Technically yes, but they are removed when a person is found not guilty or released without being charged thus protecting the innocent and falsely accused. The mugshot sites capitalize on this by scraping the government websites and archiving them forever - until you pay a removal fee." I don't believe anyone has an obligation to remove if someone found not guilty. The arrest happened, that's a fact. The informatio…

Yeah, you're confusing "it's legal" with "it's not a depraved waste of one's humanity praying on the weakest of society".

That should be wholly obvious from the fact that these sites exist, out in the open. And from the fact that nobody argued what you're refuting.

(It's wrong, obviously, and such practices should be illegal, as they are in every civilised country and then some. But that's a separate matter)

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#183
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I'm thinking more about a "decentralized Google" where it's impossible to remove things like revenge porn. Is there anything we can/should do about that potential?

You mean, anyone's web index that they created outside of Google? Indexing the web is an old tradition.

Not quite, the analogy breaks down here… discoverability vs. accessibility is different. Both contribute to the distribution of content. Google solves one part of that equation, but I’m referring to total decentralized distribution.

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#184

This is an example of a large central authority censoring information. How does the notion of a purely distributed, unregulated, uncensorable, blockchain-backed internet handle "revenge porn" or other genuinely harmful content? An argument I hear from the crypto community is that blockchain is good because it enables freedom of speech that can't be banned by governments or other central authorities. The crypto commun…

> How does that work on a blockchain?

Since none of us are the operator in the matrix, we're not looking at the raw bytes of the blockchain, we're always using some view layer over the data. So the view layer can choose to not see the content of some block.

This could be done by having community operated blocklists to the effect of "you don't want to know what's at these locations" - you can't take back what's been said on chain, but you can cover your ears.

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#185
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People already added it into bitcoin if you stretch the definition a bit. As in the bits needed to reconstruct the image exist in the chain.

> People already added it into bitcoin if you stretch the definition a bit. Which is a fancy way of saying that they haven't. The only images in the bitcoin blockchain are ascii art. There are plenty of hashes of different types of data in the bitcoin blockchain, but hashes are not the hash function's input data. Schneier himself repeated this bogus "there's illegal content in the bitcoin blockchain already!" claim,…

I agree that a hash of data != the source data, but these links seem to indicate that it is at least possible, if not already evident, that illegal images and content can be encoded into the bitcoin blockchain (and presumably other blockchains that permit similar writing to the ledger)

JPG of Nelson Mandela encoded into bitcoin blockchain: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photo...

Illegal porn and classified documents embedded in the blockchain (page 3): https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/pdf-33/accenture-editing...

Original research source: https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a good point, and also a general fact of life I think. Society is not just modeled by laws, but also by influencial groups. If your company gets banned by visa/mastercard for dealing with porn, you’ll steer away for anything porn related. You know banks won’t give you a loan for growing legal weed, if your goal is actually to make money you’ll grow other fancy aromatic plants instead, etc. You still can push…

That's a good, concise description. My particular beef with this happening with respect to insurance is that it "nudges" us to all be risk averse and boring, and artificially prioritize safety over all kinds of other outcomes.

You are right on the distortion. Even safety can be kind of out of the wibdow with people taking their insurance's approval as a GO sign for otherwise detrimental behaviors, like building houses in submersible areas.

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean electrician's insurance? I do have a so called "DIY insurance" on my home policy - if I damage something while doing a DIY project(drill into a cable or a pipe for instance) my home insurance will cover the repair. Is that not enough?

No, that's just for incidental damage and probably legally mandated by your state. If your house burns down to due to DIY wiring, the insurance company won't pay out a dime (if the inspectors discover it). Electricians have liability insurance provided by an organization specializing in policies for practicing tradesmen. If an insurance company fails to disqualify a homeowner's policy and pays out, it will then go af…

What country are you talking about?

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say it's all or nothing. Several of the more regressive countries already demand access to decryption keys. The government gets easy access to the data but it's still hard for the non-state bad guys to intercept.

Doesn’t help if people are using end-to-end encryption.

They can block any traffic that they can't decode

Re: Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The crypto community needs to address the other side of that coin Do they? Nothing is ever _really_ deleted on the good old-fashioned internet either. We can't have our cake and eat it too. Having a centralized arbiter of truth is more dangerous to the truth than bad people who do bad things.

> Nothing is ever _really_ deleted on the good old-fashioned internet either. Tell that to folks doing web archival.

They're both distributed. The fact that anyone _can_ archive anything forever reasonably excludes the assumption that it's not, accessibility/curation notwithstanding.
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