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Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

bbc.com

651–660 of 887 posts

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>2. The next government will take great delight in removing this law as an easy win. As a rule of thumb, governments don't take actions which reduce their power.

The types of quotes get bandied about all the time, but I don't think they are accurate. Politicians don't want to reduce their power, but politicians != governments. Lots of scary stuff actually empowers the civil service more than it empowers politicians. The main way politicians loose power is also not by the nature of the job changing, but by loosing elections.

> main way politicians loose power is also not by the nature of the job changing, but by loosing elections

This isn't true most actually gain more power because once you're out of the frankly trash job of being the figurehead of the country you can then take advantage of all the deals, favors and contacts you made doing it then move into NGOs/thinktanks/board position at meta/etc and start actually making real money and having real influence without the eyes on you.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#652
post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do what we say or we might get a warrant and find that stash of CP that we installed on your hard drive. How do you even defend against planted digital evidence? It would be easy to fake and very difficult to disprove. But when it comes to politicians and people with power, I think it's even worse than all of that. It's kind of obvious what Mr Epstein was getting up to with regard to blackmail.

> How do you even defend against planted digital evidence? With your good name. In the end, it is not important what the politician had or did not have on the disk, but who the public will believe more, the secret services, who claim that there was something there, or the politician, who claims that he is being set up and groundlessly persecuted for the purpose of political pressure. And as long as public opinion abo…

You’re dismissing something way more complicated. Many people with good names have supposedly had CP hoards. How would you even go about checking out confirming that it even is CP? You can’t, and would you even want to look into that? No, of course not.

Frankly, it could even just be made up. How would you know? I’m sure in most cases it is true and correct, but with as much corruption in every and all aspects of policing and justice, there is absolutely zero chance that when it involves something with such huge and hidden levers as CP, that there would be zero corruption. Cops still plant drugs on people even though they know they are on body cam and they still shoot people to death for no reason and are simply absolved by the system that protects itself; you don’t think that the black box of CP accusation that no one wants to or can look into is not used for corrupt reasons?

The whole system is rotten and corrupt, why wouldn’t it be corrupt in this case where there is a huge lever and no one dares look into it?

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#653
post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”The lesser evil” is the essence of any two-party system. Which I would somewhat facetiously classify the UK system as. Abolish ”first past the post” and introduce proportional representation now!

It's the essence of any representative democracy - you'd need as many parties as there are citizens for everyone to be able to vote for one that truly represents their views on all relevant topics.

True, but please see my reply to the sibling comment.

I suppose when choosing between electoral systems, the choice is indeed a matter of the lesser of two evils!

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#654
post #558

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The worst part is that they've somehow put me in the position of defending Nigel Farage. I've come to believe that is the point of forcing people to choose between extreme polarizing positions. It makes disengagement feel like the only moderate move.

Feels utterly demoralizing when you have to vote for lesser evil and not for someone you feel will be better for the future.

http://anthonyflood.com/rothbarddemocracy.htm still gets down-voted here, but perhaps we will finally see more people realizing that it is true, as it always has been.

You talk about the lesser evil here, well, it is exactly what is written there.

Some parts quoted:

> Democracy suffers from many more inherent contradictions as well. Thus, democratic voting may have either one of these two functions: to determine governmental policy or to select rulers. According to the former, what Schumpeter termed the “classical” theory of democracy, the majority will is supposed to rule on issues.[23] According to the latter theory, majority rule is supposed to be confined to choosing rulers, who in turn decide policy. While most political scientists support the latter version, democracy means the former version to most people, and we shall therefore discuss the classical theory first.

> According to the “will of the people” theory, direct democracy—voting on each issue by all the citizens, as in New England town meetings—is the ideal political arrangement. Modern civilization and the complexities of society, however, are supposed to have outmoded direct democracy, so that we must settle for the less perfect “representative democracy” (in olden days often called a “republic”), where the people select representatives to give effect to their will on political issues. Logical problems arise almost immediately. One is that different forms of electoral arrangements, different delimitations of geographical districts, all equally arbitrary, will often greatly alter the picture of the “majority will.” [...]

See the italic bit ("we must settle for the less perfect").

He talks about IMO the greatest contradictions after this part:

> But even proportional representation would not be as good—according to the classical view of democracy—as direct democracy, and here we come to another important and neglected consideration: modern technology does make it possible to have direct democracy. Certainly, each man could easily vote on issues several times per week by recording his choice on a device attached to his television set. This would not be difficult to achieve. And yet, why has no one seriously suggested a return to direct democracy, now that it may be feasible?

The whole thing is worth a read with an open mind.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If that is the case, and where suspicious means automatically rejecting anything that doesn’t agree with your vibes, then yes, that is a deep and flawed bias and statistical illiteracy. What if you're suspicious of all polling regardless of whether it agrees with your preferences or not? It's well-understood that leading questions and phrasing will get you any response to a poll that you want. That being the case,…

> What if you're suspicious of all polling regardless of whether it agrees with your preferences or not? I’d still call that statistical illiteracy. Polling, as a cohort, contains information. It’s dispersed across polls and concentrated among quality pollsters. It’s never definitive. But someone concluding that all polling is useless because the statistics are hard is sort of analogous to someone rejecting cosmology…

> I’d still call that statistical illiteracy

It am suspicious of polling because I have a decent understanding of statistics. That is the opposite of statistical illiteracy.

> But someone concluding that all polling is useless because the statistics are hard is sort of analogous to someone rejecting cosmology because we haven’t actually been to Andromeda.

That isn't the argument being made. Nobody said it is "useless". I said I was "suspicious of polling organisations". Polling can be and has been used to manipulate public sentiment.

Therefore it is prudent to be suspicious of any polling.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#656
post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wouldn’t be so sure that any next government will necessarily reverse this. Agreed. I think the supposed justifications for mass population-wide online surveillance, restrictions and de-anonymization are so strong most political parties in western democracies go along with what surveillance agencies push for once they get in power. Even in the U.S. where free speech & personal privacy rights are constitutionally…

Why do you think politicians are idiots? Yes, many of them are really stupid people. But they are not idiots. I think 95 percent of them are perfectly aware of why the laws they pass are really needed. And they pass them EXACTLY FOR THIS, and not at all for protecting children and internet safety.

There irony is that people who call politicians stupid are generally not very smart people themselves in my experience, regardless of various forms of advanced degrees they believe disproves that.

They may be puppets, they may be manipulators, they may be con-artists, they may be liars; but what does it say about oneself if an “idiot” managed to become one of a few hundred most powerful humans on this planet and in all of human history (in the case of an American politician) and you did not?

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#657
post #650
post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sweden has more parties than two and it's the lesser evil here as well - in what world would a party perfectly align to every single thing you like?

It is far, far more likely that you can get most of your opinions represented in a parliament with 8 parties than one with 2 or 3. In Sweden, in the past 50 years, people with ”new” or fringe opinions have successfully started parties, and won seats in either the national or EU parliament, on these issues: - Christianity - Environmentalism - Racism/populism - Internet freedom/privacy - Feminism - Racism/populism, aga…

The christianity party in Sweden could have been classified as "rascist" because that is how they voted many times, but they also had a humanist streak which took over in a lot of issues they engaged in.

I find these changes in tides between parties interesting. Populism is only applicable on specific takes issues not parties.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#658
post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is far, far more likely that you can get most of your opinions represented in a parliament with 8 parties than one with 2 or 3. In Sweden, in the past 50 years, people with ”new” or fringe opinions have successfully started parties, and won seats in either the national or EU parliament, on these issues: - Christianity - Environmentalism - Racism/populism - Internet freedom/privacy - Feminism - Racism/populism, aga…

The christianity party in Sweden could have been classified as "rascist" because that is how they voted many times, but they also had a humanist streak which took over in a lot of issues they engaged in. I find these changes in tides between parties interesting. Populism is only applicable on specific takes issues not parties.

I agree regarding the Christian Democrats.

But wouldn’t you agree that both NYD and SD were both founded on populist principles? Apart from racism, neither had any clear cut policies when they started, yet they both got pretty massive boosts from their populist streaks. I think the populist label on them is pretty well established by policy researchers. It’s in the first sentence on both parties’ Swedish Wikipedia pages.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#659

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand your comment, the government knows which sites you visit anyway because it can see the SNI field in HTTPS traffic. The main point is that the verification is done on the device. The device has a digitally signed flag, saying whether it is owned by an adult user or not. And the OS on the device without the flag allows using only safe apps and websites sending a "Safe: yes" HTTP header. User doesn't…

What about open source browsers that don't respect this convention?

In case with a smartphone, you will be able to install only white-listed apps from an app store on an unverified device, so you won't be able to install such browser. As for PCs, Windows might also prevent sideloading on unverified devices.

Re: Wikipedia loses challenge against Online Safety Act

#660
post #194

> The government told the BBC it welcomed the High Court's judgment, "which will help us continue our work implementing the Online Safety Act to create a safer online world for everyone". Demonstrably false. It creates a safer online world for some . > In particular the foundation is concerned the extra duties required - if Wikipedia was classed as Category 1 - would mean it would have to verify the identity of its c…

What do you mean, the UK always had a constitution!
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