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Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

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Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#201

Post by realusername »

adventured wrote: post #123
realusername wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's mainly an issue with the poverty of the English language, in most languages, they are categories of criminals and they are called differently.

That's blatantly not true. The English language is overflowing with options, at different levels of character or crime, when it comes to describing people. Murderer, killer, rapist, pedophile, wife beater, convict, criminal, felon, thief, liar, embezzler, con artist, forger, bum, hobo, dishonest, deceitful, traitor, unethical, petty criminal, cheat, scammer, scam artist, pick pocket, snake oil salesman, chiseler, cro…

Oh yeah sure, there is tons of words to describe criminals, but the problem is the word "criminal" itself works for all of them, if you look at the news and how people speak, you never see those words, you only see "it's a crime to do something" or "this guy is a "criminal".

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#202

Post by FreeFull »

grrowl wrote: post #181
dublinben wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WoT can't be effectively spammed, unless those spam accounts are trusted by people you trust. The spam accounts can vouch for each other all they want (a la Twitter), but you control whose trust you value.

It only takes one break in the chain to compromise the entire web of trust. With such wide-spread connections across the planet these days, the chance of someone you trust three times removed accidentally breaking that chain is quite real.

Let's say you see some spam. You could have the software tell you which part of the web has made the spam trusted, and then you could manually mark that part of the web as untrusted. If there are only a few breaks in the chain like that, it'd be a workable solution.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#203

Post by ianstallings »

pyre wrote: post #172
ianstallings wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well let me clarify what I said above a little more to give you some perspective of where I'm coming from. I'm not making a moral judgement of what you did. I'm making a statement of fact - society will punish you for not following the law. And if you know that up front and you willingly ignore it because you think you're in the right, well don't be surprised when you come into conflict with law enforcement and autho…

> Take that responsibility on your shoulders, because you chose to act a way that would get you locked up. Would you say this (with a straight face) to Alan Turing in 1952? "What did you expect having a private homosexual relationship in a society where that is illegal? Just take the chemical castration or the jail sentence. Why are you getting so upset about this?"

Yeah that totally applies here. Because all situations are alike and all statements apply to every situation. All thoughts that I have can be summed up above. This is simpleton thinking. Sorry I'm not falling for your completely irrelevant shit.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#204

Post by ianstallings »

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #98
thejrk wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't matter if you disagree or not, it IS illegal.

Legally, in some places homosexuality is punished by death. The law is the law, so should they just shut up and be executed?

That doesn't apply here and you know it. This is the US justice system and I get tired of the red herring bullshit.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#205

Post by ianstallings »

NhanH wrote: post #30
ianstallings wrote: post #15

Warning: this opinion probably won't fit into the HN zeitgeist. If you commit a crime online don't be surprised when they seek to gain evidence against you. This isn't a liberty issue. This is a you're probably a criminal issue and law enforcement is coming after you. I don't protect drug dealers in my neighborhood because of their right to free speech and personal liberty so why would I protect these guys? It just a…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification Law does not equal to the "rules of society", at best they asymptote the "rules of society", if there is even something like that. In programming term, law is the formalized code (ie a program) of a society's moral stance. And as any computer program, it has bug, unintended behaviours, and changing one part of it will affect other parts due to unknown complexity. Imagin…

Then perhaps you should use societies systems in place to change the rules, since you're part of it. Ignoring the law because you think you're morally right is kind of meaningless when talking about law enforcement. That's my point. This isn't about morality. This is about reality. You know they will punish you, you break the law, get caught, then complain that it's unfair? That's what a fool would do.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#206

Post by ianstallings »

hnnewguy wrote: post #37
ianstallings wrote: post #15

Warning: this opinion probably won't fit into the HN zeitgeist. If you commit a crime online don't be surprised when they seek to gain evidence against you. This isn't a liberty issue. This is a you're probably a criminal issue and law enforcement is coming after you. I don't protect drug dealers in my neighborhood because of their right to free speech and personal liberty so why would I protect these guys? It just a…

> It just always makes me chuckle when criminals won't face the fact that they are criminals. "I know, right? Why don't all those damn sodomites just take their chemical castration and shut up and accept the fact they're criminals?"

I'll take a red herring #3 please. Thanks.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#207

Post by Sir_Substance »

vacri wrote: post #196
hurin wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Perhaps reddit can even transition into being a reader (a la google reader) for people that don't want to set up their own node. >The issue of "abuse" which is harmful to people other than users of the forum should also be considered carefully. If you think of always accessing the information through a "reader" rather than in raw form, than effectively the reader mods can delete and remove spam - users could subsc…

In which case you would get people with different views of what's going on - some people could see some articles but not others. Confusion would then be a problem - it's one we already have on forums that allow editing or deletion of commentary.

This is a pretty common argument, I see it a lot when someone suggests forums should let people delete posts. There's always someone saying it makes the forum impossible to read.

Well, if there's one thing we know from 10 years of reddit its that people being able to delete content and usernames completely has negligible impact on readability.

Similarly, with 20 years of experience with ignore lists, I can confidently say that what small amounts of confusion might occasionally be generated from my ignore list being different to yours are well offset by the benefits of us being able to choose who we don't want to interact with.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#208

Post by CyberDildonics »

dragonwriter wrote: post #175
CyberDildonics wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one has claimed they are 'just' revolutionaries. The founders of the US wanted to stop paying as much in tax. In the process they set up the most decentralized system of their time.

The level of taxation was not a central concern of the founders, nor was the US system any more decentralized than, say, the Holy Roman Empire.

States rights, separation of justice, executive, and legislative branch, equal senators per state, congress numbers by population, no central bank, right to bear arms, jury of your peers...

These are all decentralization of power. The Roman empire had an emperor.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#209

Post by Lawtonfogle »

ianstallings wrote: post #204
Lawtonfogle wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legally, in some places homosexuality is punished by death. The law is the law, so should they just shut up and be executed?

That doesn't apply here and you know it. This is the US justice system and I get tired of the red herring bullshit.

The US law where homosexuals were locked in cages less than 15 years ago, where their are still homosexuals in cages and under other punishments for actions that would have been legal if they had been heterosexuals (one example a child molester in Georgia who would have been protected under Romeo and Juliet laws had the young party been a girl instead of a boy). We still have a justice system where owning certain plants can get you years if not decades locked in a cage. If you smell any BS around here, I'd think the natural source would be the legal system.

Re: Feds Demand Reddit Identify Users of a Dark-Web Drug Forum

#210

Post by Lawtonfogle »

coverup wrote: post #115
Lawtonfogle wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a view I would see nothing more than government propaganda. 'If you don't like the law, then you should break it and peacefully accept any punishments.' Should we tell homosexuals in some areas of the world that they should go ahead and draft up their wills and turn themselves to be executed because they should accept their punishment for their crime?

You seem to be assuming the government wants people to break its laws, so it gets to punish people. It costs the government money to put people in prison; not only the cost of their food, shelter, supervision, etc. but also the cost of removing a taxpayer from the workforce. Furthermore, a democratically elected government that is increasingly imprisoning more and more of its people is not likely to remain popular. I…

>It costs the government money to put people in prison; not only the cost of their food, shelter, supervision, etc.

Except when being used as a talking point to stir a base, they do not care. If anything, their budgeting practice of use it or lose it creates a desire to spend as much as they can.

And as the other commenters have pointed out, it is very very beneficial for the most virtuous form of protest to be 'break the law and accept punishment'.

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