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The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

washingtonpost.com

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Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#311

Post by gwu78 »

johncolanduoni wrote: post #295
gwu78 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you understand why I do not like SNI? It has nothing to do with getting these stupid hostnames. It is a modification that needs to be made to software to accomodate the spread of the use of the SNI extension. As a user, I have no need for SNI. Are you saying that doing reverse lookups on every IP address, where some of these IPs will have many virtual hostnames, is easier than extractng the plaintext hostname from…

> Do you understand why I do not like SNI? It has nothing to do with getting these stupid hostnames. > It is a modification that needs to be made to software to accomodate the spread of the use of the SNI extension. As a user, I have no need for SNI. It's a modification that has already been made to software and widely deployed. The RFC was back in 2003. Are there even any TLS implementations that don't support SNI t…

I do not use Windows. I do not use the kernel or the browser you use. It is not your business what I use anyway. Notice I never said TLS sucks, you did.

Maybe I do not care about security and I just like carefully written software by people who do not make many mistakes? Is there something offensive about that? Am I allowed to make my own choices of software?

This is all beside the point. I care about having to use SSL and now with SNI. It is a hassle. Whether one likes SSL or not. It makes everything more complicated.

I believe there are too many websites encrypting content that honestly does not need to be encrypted. But I am sure they have their reasons.

I know how old the RFC is, but only in recent years has SNI become widespread. Probably because of all the hype around https adoption.

It is obvious that some people must care about privacy and/or security, or maybe they are just pretending to care? How else to explain the growth of https?

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#312

Post by mozumder »

defined wrote: post #289
mozumder wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Government is just one, and it represents 300 million people. And what's the problem? Everyone wants to be a king. Government's job is to make sure no one is, with a social contract.

Except when the government effectively becomes, collectively, the king, and represents nothing more than their royal self-interest. Which is how I see things going in the USA, for all intents and purposes.

Government is always the king. That's their job.

And, in a Democracy, the self-interest of government is the public's interests.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#313

Post by mozumder »

losteric wrote: post #307
Chathamization wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the general. But you also have to look at the primaries. For instance, this year we had 22 major candidates running for president in the two major parties. And people like Trump and Sanders show that there is plenty of room for heterodox candidates to be successful.

Primaries are part of the problem, not the solution. If I'm a member of party A, I can't voice a preference for the failed candidates of party B or A. I can only pick between the winners. For example, I've heard from a small but non-trivial number of swing supporters that they would have voted for Sanders, but instead voted for Trump. Ranked voting might have allowed them to vote Sanders > Trump > Hillary in 2016. Ot…

What everyone wants is Approval voting. Far simpler than Ranked-choice voting.

Really, do people expect the public to be able to rank their candidates?

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#314

Post by ars »

mozumder wrote: post #261
ComradeTaco wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The votes in both the house and the senate were almost entirely along party lines. Every republican in the senate that voted, voted for this act and every democrat in the senate that voted, voted against this act.

This is what happens when you vote Republicans. Republicans will do anything for profit. This is their core driving force. For them, money determines value for everything. "Who gives a shit about anything else? We should reinstate slavery because it would increase profits! Also, poor people are terrible people!" Democrats believe profits are nice and all, but isn't the final metric on value. There are a lot of other…

> If you value things like privacy or the environment, then never vote Republican. Always vote Democrat.

I guess you are too young to remember SOPA/PIPA - that was voted for by Democrats, against by Republicans.

As you mature you'll realize Republican vs Democrat is not as simple as you make it out to be.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#315

Post by mozumder »

state_less wrote: post #284
mattnewton wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that anyone is defending this system, it's that it is the only stable equilibrium of the winner-takes all parts of our elections.

Right, I think you have to change the dynamics. Voting ought to better capture citizens preferences, it like we vote with one hand tied behind our backs. Why can't we at least rank the candidates?

Too complicated.

Approval voting is much simpler than ranked-choice, and more appropriate for the general public.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#316

Post by ars »

pnathan wrote: post #279
richforrester wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I realise this is a total straw man, but whenever I read Republicans vs Democrats I can't help but think about how utterly insane it is to have the opinions of 300 million Americans represented by TWO parties. Two. So Americans choose to agree with either EVERYTHING person A says, or EVERYTHING person B says. That's what it boils down to. And it freaks me out that in a day and age where we're so educated and "free",…

This is definitely something worth pushing for, if you're an American. Figuring out how to shift our system into one where viable third parties can play ball would be frigging grand . I'd like to see the GOP split into the 2-3 parties it shelters, and the Democrats go their 3 or so ways as well. I'd bet it'd significantly stabilize US policy and reduce the zero sum power plays that are becoming quite common.

If you want that, push for your local voting to switch to approval voting. That's the #1 thing that will enable more parties.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#317

Post by chimeracoder »

CalChris wrote: post #275
tbrownaw wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder how many people really felt strong enough about politics to claim both sides are equally bad and then decided not to vote on that basis alone. Since both sides are astonishingly bad, I usually end up voting third party in races where there is one.

The third parties are even worse than the two parties. The Libertarians ran Bob Barr, a Clinton House prosecutor and Gary Johnson who happily sent people to prison for drug crimes. Jill Stein supports Putin.

> and Gary Johnson who happily sent people to prison for drug crimes.

...what? Gary Johnson is himself a marijuana user who has long been am advocate of drug policy reform (not just for marijuana, but for other drugs as well).

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/qa-former-nm-gov-gary-jo...

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#318

Post by acdha »

Jach wrote: post #83

Maybe someone at YC could reach out to Thiel who could convince Trump to veto? Something like that is probably the only realistic chance of this failing, and I have no idea how much Thiel personally cares about this issue anyway.

A presidential veto is a big deal, especially going against his own party whose support will be critical for getting anything done (or staving off those pesky ethics investigations).

I don't think Thiel has that kind of juice. Maybe Bannon does but it really seems like this would have to be an issue he cares deeply about personally, and it's hard to think of one where there's much space between the president and the modern GOP.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#319

Post by warlox »

malchow wrote: post #81
mtrpcic wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're conflating a single anecdotal example with the overall issue. Of course this vote doesn't mean that all websites that are free, open, or focused on knowledge will go away. What it _does_ mean that your ISP can now sell the fact that you post here to Microsoft, who will know that malchow is you (tied to your real name, since the ISP knows that), and now Microsoft can start targeting you in new and exciting ways…

If my argument was impaired, it was certainly less impaired than the parent, who declared that the glorious free and open internet is over (b. 1974, d. 2017) because of this regulatory rollback. By the way, the fact that you cannot predict Microsoft's "new and exciting" ways of targeting me is a great example of why your argument is unconvincing. Do you really want me to believe that, as long as we kept this rule in…

If you knew the first thing about economics, you would know that the natural, regulation-free state of ISPs is for them to merge together into a single company the way that oil companies merged together to form Standard Oil at the turn of the 20th century. In that scenario, what you would get is the choice of one product, and you would pay an unreasonable amount of money for it.

Of course, since you don't know the first thing about economics, what we're treated to instead is some false ideological platitudes about the free market.

Re: The House just voted to wipe out the FCC’s landmark Internet privacy protections

#320

Post by peteretep »

defined wrote: post #283
3131s wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those are made up prescriptive guidelines, mixed in with some common misspellings. One grumpy person does not get to decide how the rest of us choose to use and evolve language. The "forceful" / "forcible" example is particularly inane and pedantic but hardly the worst on that page. I'll continue to say "being that", "ice tea", "center around", etc. as I please. In linguistics the illustrative analogy is that…

> I'll continue to say... as I please. By that argument, we should all just be able to say and write whatever we want however we want to, even if it's technically or factually incorrect, like Humpty Dumpty or Donald Trump. Why bother hewing to "elitist" rules of grammar and accepted spellings, being that it's just prescriptivism? How does one decide objectively if something is just plain wrong, or merely prescriptive…

    > write whatever we want
    > however we want to
You have conflated two separate things.

    > being that it's just
    > prescriptivism
The irony of course being that "being that" in the way you've used it is one of the examples of "incorrect English" given by the op. And you're using it to support the idea that these things are important...

    > This word came about ... as a
    > corruption ... without the excuse
    > of it being a different language
You have some unorthodox ideas about how language came into being.
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