41–50 of 414 posts
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im not fine with another 20 canadians being kicked out of society every day, especially when there isnt even mail service.
im not in favour of forcing all companies and apps and whathaveyou to implement these checks
Consider this scenario. Your isp emails you that they are terminating your account. You phone gets disconnected. You call them and helpdesk doesnt have a clue why. You try to sign up for new services and they refuse and wont say why. All because a politician has decided it 'reasonable' to disconnect you from the internet; and he can order complete secrecy and there's no judicial oversight. Perhaps you showed up at th…
Let me remind everyone this again. Democracy is not an autocracy with time limits and turns. It's not a system where you elect a few individuals and hand them the power to rule over you for a few years. They are supposed to be your representatives who raise your concerns and protect your interests in a forum that takes decisions that affect all of you. Legislation like these are the small steps that convert the latte…
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Anyway, the USA is a representative republic.
It's not "getting bad" it "is bad."
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Anyway, the USA is a representative republic.
There is a reason why labor movements have been nearly completely wiped out from collective history.
Those who don't take this govts anti-socialist stance seriously must realize that the history of modern warfare and the history of anti-socialism share way too much space.
Mass democracy is a threat to the status quo.
They don't even have to pass laws to ban VPNs or read private chat messages or enforce identity verification, or whatever other unambitious attempts other governments are making. This will do it all:
Knock knock, it's the Chinadian government. You host a web service that uses encryption? Great. Now provide a backdoor for us or we'll ban you. Oh and don't tell your users. We'll ban you for that too.
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Hello user, we noticed that you've shared some concerning information online, and you're also using this E2EE chat service that we can't monitor. A friendly reminder from the government: continuing to use such services and spreading such harmful information online may cause your Internet connection to malfunction.
Sounds very much like a social credit scoring system
Which doesn't even exist.
Why would it makes sense to remove that process, while introducing an incredible opaque decision-making process in its place, which totally bars anyone from knowing why they were excluded from accessing the internet? It even prevents wrongfully excluded individuals from receiving compensation.
For example, I could be cut off from the internet which I need to do my job. Say I'm unable to work for a week or two and then it's determined that I can access the internet because an error was made... Well, as far as I can tell, I'd be SOL. That doesn't seem right...
Worse still is that this seems about as technically competent as using an IP address to determine a person's location. Any serious threat vector, human or otherwise, will find other ways to access the internet or perpetuate their threat if they care to. If they're a serious threat, why wouldn't prison be a better solution than... Calling their ISP and banning them from the internet?
All of this seems very short-sighted, undemocratic, and naive.
And while the 'human or otherwise' phrase I used might seem odd (I know someone's dog isn't shit-posting on X), what I mean to say is something like... What if an LLM is posting from an unsuspecting person's computer and was placed there as a virus? Once it's cut off from that poor person's computer, it's very likely it will eventually or already be functioning from some other unsuspecting person's computer, server, or whatever other device. Their toaster. My point is that we live in an age where there are non-human agents causing harm online. The machine they operate from will not always be OpenAI's or Anthropics, and indeed, will probably rarely be so.
This was already the case with human actors, but it made much worse with the advent of AI-based agents.