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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

#381

Post by ScottBurson »

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…

> Case in point: "premises". So many people treat this singular noun as a plural and use horrors like "on-premise"

I didn't know that! Thanks!

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

#382

Post by kakapupu »

pnathan wrote: post #19

This, right here, is the consequence of the withdrawal from politics many geeks advocated very strongly in an earlier time. "Everything is corrupt, it doesn't matter"... turns out to only be a viable philosophy when things mostly work well enough . What we have in protections and freedoms were purchased through a ton of hard work by prior generations: the liberty to slack and think that it just works ok is a nice sid…

> This, right here, is the consequence of the withdrawal from politics many geeks advocated very strongly in an earlier time

Well, do you want to risk your life fighting in a revolution?

Politics certainly doesn't matter in the sense that it's all bullshit anyway. No matter how hard you call "your" representatives, they won't give a flying fuck about you because they're all psychopaths.

> What we have in protections and freedoms

.. Was apparently nothing in terms of "protections" at all, considering here we are again.

Look, the real problem is that political power exists at all. If people didn't believe that they need to be ruled over, we wouldn't have all the problems caused by government, and you wouldn't need to preach at people about not having already overthrown the government when they "still had time".

How about just stopping this insane cycle of tyranny --> relative freedom --> tyranny --> relative freedom .. this-time-it's-different-if-i-just-vote-harder?

Rather than asking the government to grant you better "protections" from itself, how about just removing the need for protections altogether?

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

#383

Post by hueving »

3131s wrote: post #368
defined wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Point taken, I made a mistake, but I think you're so focused on picking apart the comment that you've ignored the meat of it. That's ok, I said my piece and expected it to be downvoted - and it was.

I'll upvote you (although technically HN doesn't like meta-commentary about upvotes / downvotes) because you made your point well. I don't have an issue with every "error" on that page and I have no problem with style guidelines for writing, but the problem comes when the prescriptivists think that logic is on their side when they opine on subjective stylistic and dialectic issues. "Ice tea" is a perfect example. The…

Apple pie is not the same thing as "ice tea".

Apple is describing the type of pie. "ice" is not a type of tea.

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

#384

Post by johncolanduoni »

gwu78 wrote: post #311
johncolanduoni wrote: post #295

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. 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 S…

> 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.

I just said that because it's the only one I can think of people still having around that doesn't support SNI. OpenSSL, NSS, etc. have all supported SNI for a decade. In fact, I can't find any TLS implementation that supports even TLS 1.1 that doesn't support SNI. So unless you have an example I'd say SNI reached fixation a long time ago.

> Notice I never said TLS sucks, you did.

From another one of your comments: "I would not use SSL. Why spend time learning and fiddling with something that is so flawed?". Using TLS definitely counts as fiddling with SSL (TLS is a derivative).

> 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?

Sure, write your own SSL/TLS/CurveCP implementation. But you started with "Just say no to SNI" and claimed privacy advocates should push back on it, which obviously doesn't only apply to you.

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

#385

Post by dragonwriter »

foota wrote: post #296
alphapapa wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couple of issues here: 1. The opposing party's opposing the ruling party is a natural process of government. It's the normal state of things. Your saying that it was "poor behavior" implies that it was an anomaly, that the Republicans did something wrong by not supporting everything Obama wanted to do, and that the minority party is supposed to accede to every demand of the ruling party, which would be absurd. 2. The…

Your comments that this isn't how the government was intended to work are spot on -- the founders did not want a two party system.

> the founders did not want a two party system.

Well, they said they didn't want a factional system, then they built rules which guaranteed two factions, modelled directly after rules which had done the same elsewhere, and all while organizing themselves into two factions which were visible in nascent form in the first national elections under the Constitution and well solidified by the time Washington was to be replaced as President.

So, do you listen to their words, or their actions? The founders were, to all evidence, a lot like politicians of today, publicly cursing the ills of partisanship while deeply engaged in it, mostly as a rhetorical device against the other party.

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

#386

Post by dragonwriter »

ReinholdNiebuhr wrote: post #379

Question. When were these FCC rules implemented? I know they were under Obama but right now as I try to learn the history google just keeps giving me the news of the repeal.

> When were these FCC rules implemented?

Adopted last November, published in December, parts went into effect in January and parts earlier this month, with more parts due to go into effect in June and December.

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

#387

Post by ReinholdNiebuhr »

dragonwriter wrote: post #386
ReinholdNiebuhr wrote: post #379

Question. When were these FCC rules implemented? I know they were under Obama but right now as I try to learn the history google just keeps giving me the news of the repeal.

> When were these FCC rules implemented? Adopted last November, published in December, parts went into effect in January and parts earlier this month, with more parts due to go into effect in June and December.

Thank you.

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

#388

Post by vizeroth »

ComradeTaco wrote: post #162
tomohawk wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also can't just say that the internet is the same as POTS. The FCC has scarcely been better than these companies. It has a history of being a revolving door for companies. Consider what RCA/FCC did to Armstrong back in the day. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Howard_Armstrong Just because the FCC does something doesn't mean its good, legal, or whatever. It's just what 3 of 5 unelected, unaccountable appointee…

I understand that a phone connection is different from an internet connection. But I couldn't think of two more similar industries. Wasn't dial-up,the first real consumer internet delivered through via telephone lines and switches?

More importantly, at the backbone level, the phone system has been run through the same type of SONET fiber optic networks as the internet for the last couple of decades, at least. In most cases the only reasons the two were isolated from one another were: - phone traffic was considered higher priority if an outage occurred (it used to be, but probably not any longer) - regulations on the internet (especially as pertains to giving access to ISPs, such as the cable companies) giving the phone companies incentive to segregate the two as much as possible

Another point regarding the consolidation of the two industries comes in the form of most of the cable companies now delivering home phone service through the internet.

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

#389

Post by simplyluke »

nikkwong wrote: post #238
pnathan wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Democrats also have policies that are... poor, particularly around the internet. This is a cross-party problem.

Care to elaborate?

Well, I'd encourage you to look into the expansion of the NSA under the obama administration and how his administration responded to whistle blowers who leaked information related to that expansion.

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

#390

Post by kartan »

xelxebar wrote: post #361
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",…

OP's comment is the straw man, not yours. If you go out and talk to these actual Democrats and Republicans, the bipartisan distinction seems more and more like a fraud. Seriously, have you ever met a person who's "core driving force" is money and "all they care about"? Does that description fit about half the people your know? Seems pretty cartoonish to me.

> Seriously, have you ever met a person who's "core driving force" is money and "all they care about"? Does that description fit about half the people your know?

The people around me are not mega-rich. It is not a problem of that people being "bad people". It is a circumstance problem. The situation is that they have so much money that can change the laws.

Cut lobbing, redistribute wealth and you will stop this cartoon evil behavior. Keep people so rich that they don't understand what being middle class is, and they will continue pressing for ridiculous reductions on our rights.

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