Microsoft's chief research officer wants web licenses to end bloggers' anonymity

The Telegraph is sometimes colloquially known as the Torygraph. It is indeed decidedly opinionated, in both the opinion it publishes, and the news stories it chooses to cover and the space it gives over to them. It's particularly anti-EU, for example.

But then, news publications have to use some algorithm for story placement, so there's always some kind of bias. A po-faced "objective" newspaper that pretends to no bias at all can be the most insidious.

No, you are not the only one annoyed by the author's tone and style. I find it very tiresome. I also didn't care for his attempt to use a column about internet censorship as a platform for propagandizing about global warming, nor his apparent belief that he and others like him would be the likely targets of censorship (thus limiting his freedom of speech to, er, having a column in a major national newspaper, OH NOES) when historically the people picked on in this way have generally been of quite a different political persuasion.

The ability to filter out bias in an opinionated piece is very valuable. With practice your brain does it by itself and you hardly notice.

There's nothing wrong with being partisan. In fact, it's wrong to be non-partisan about important issues like freedom. If you're non-partisan about free speech, what are you partisan about? What freedoms would you have to lose to become partisan?

What's there to disagree with? It's one big glittering generality and I wouldn't be at all surprised that the author is grievously misrepresenting the positions of his opponents.

No, but you're asking the wrong question. The right question WRT to free speech is whether there is any free speech which requires anonymity -- and the answer to that is obviously yes. Martyrdom should not be required to speak against those in power.

But, even that is beside the point. An internet id implies authentication to use the internet. Identification is a _secondary_ purpose of a driver's license -- the primary purpose is to control who can and cannot operate a motor vehicle. That's the problem. Not anonymity,

If you can't be authenticated, you can't speak on the internet -- that is precisely what he's proposing (you can consume but not contribute). It's very small step from that to controlling speech. And it's not even about anonymity -- If you can't get on, no one is going to hear you complain. And guess who holds the keys?

And furthermore, cert authorities for the things that need them already exist. So, he is obviously pushing censorship, whether he's too stupid to realize it (it's a microsoft talking head, after all) or not.

You don't need anonymity to speak freely. You might need anonymity to protect yourself from loss of freedom, property, or life.

For example, in the 1770s some people wrote pamphlets criticizing a man named George, publishing them under pseudonyms to protect their lives. Others signed a declaration of independence with their given names, risking death. To each his own.

Such risks may not be an imminent danger where you live right now. Nevertheless, Craig Mundie's proposal will make it far easier for armed men to track down people who disagree with them. That is, of course, the whole point of the proposal.

> Is anonymity required for free speech?

Yes. This is why for example voting is anonymous in the US, so your employer or local corrupt official or whoever can't force you to vote a certain way.

> censorship is not what Mundie is proposing. He's proposing a connection between internet presence and identity, as a means of combating cybercrime.

Online there's not much difference between "doing" and "saying", and some kinds of online crime are about "saying" (ie, things like kiddie porn).

> While his proposal conceivably enables censorship activities

The only way it can possibly work is by enabling censorship (not proactive censorship, but reprisals for saying the wrong things).

> I personally don't see lack of anonymity as necessarily being the first step on an irresistible march towards a soviet dictatorship.

That's quite a jump, from censorship to dictatorship.

What permits bad rulers is that the people who know either don't care or don't matter. Censorship acts to reduce the number of people who know. Proper institutions can make it easier to reach individuals who both matter and care. If a large enough number of people know and care strongly enough, then together they can matter.

If there's a culture of removing bad rulers immediately, the ability to censor probably isn't a big deal. If there isn't, censorship can make it significantly harder (but not impossible) to remove the bad rulers once they've had time to get entrenched.

A piece of advice: never take your freedoms for granted.

I have lived most of my childhood under a right-wing military dictatorship. The "it will never happen here" concept is a very dangerous one.

Please read the comment above http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1121024

edit: or somewhere else on this page.

Would you have believed in 1999 that Patriot Act, etc. would come to pass in the U.S.?

I'm sure they'll roll out the analog to the underwear bomber in time (long before hell freezes over).

Since when being on the wrong side is something new for them?

What is the internet death penalty?

Hacking by anonymous? Heckling on 4chan?

I will go further down the limb by saying that the minimum safety requirement would be not to run Windows, but then I would be voted down into non-existence...

Oops... I just said it. Burn, karma, burn!

"Why do they even propose this? "

Propose what, exactly? The article does not give any direct quotes, so all we have is the paraphrasing of a writer with an agenda.

"That's what enables a massive amount of cyber crime: if you're attacked from a computer, you might be able to figure out where that particular machine is located, but there's really no way to go back one step further and track the identity of the computer that hacked into the one that hacked into you."

"What Mundie is proposing is to impose authentication."

Who is authenticating to whom, and how long is this recorded for (and by who)? If someone posts a virus on a random discussion forum somewhere, and I download it a month later and start sending spam and posting new copies after another week, will this be sufficient to track whoever posted the very first copy? If it is, what will prevent it from having an incredible chilling effect on free speech?

For there to be freedom of speech we can't be deciding who has the right to speak. We can only hope to keep the idiots penned up in places like youtube so they don't come to places we value.

Why the anger? Are they making you watch their videos?

> " . . .reinstate prosecutions for seditious libel."

A censor's wet dream, that.

They certainly have the software and bureaucracy for it.

I am confused. Wouldn't driving a Windows box immediately qualify as reckless driving?