Few people know that Google voluntarily removes some search results
twitter.com
twitter.com
> One of the surprising things about working on the slander series is how few people in the field, even experts, know that Google voluntarily removes some search results. (No court order needed!) You have to visit this generic url: https://support.google.com/websearch/troubleshooter/3111061?...
Down the thread, she adds this:
> Because so few people know about it, "reputation managers" are charging people like $500 a pop to "remove damaging information from Google results." And ALL THEY DO is fill out that form for free. Someone tried to hawk this service to my husband after he came under attack.
I didn't know about this service URL, and had just assumed "reputation managers", if they did anything at all, were limited to SEO spamming.
edit: Searched HN for mention of this link and found exactly 5 results, 3 of which look unique, and the earliest in Dec. 23, 2015:
While that sounds like a high price, and you usually don't want to just hire the first person you see advertise a service, the concept of specialization there, and some people just not wanting to devote the time to becoming experts everywhere, seems perfectly fine and normal.
People often pay electricians even for tasks that are just "flip a switch and turn some screws," after all.
I know a retired electrician. He hires electricians for anything nontrivial, for the insurance.
That said your broader point has a lot of merit. I hire plumbers for anything more complicated than snaking a drain, and it's because of their specialty knowledge.
The reality is that unless someone knows you and your work personally (friend, relative, w/e) it can be really difficult to find an inspector who is willing to sign off on some random persons work as there is a liability component (nowhere near as large as there is in the US, we have publicly funded "accident insurance" called ACC) in doing so.
That being said, anything I can legally do myself I do and I am sure to maintain good relationships with the inspectors I know.
If you screw up your electrical wiring, your house can catch fire. If a house is on fire, the neighboring houses are rather likely to also catch fire. Once you have a handful of houses on fire, all bets are off - the entire neighbourhood might burn. Still think you should have that "freedom"?
Dude, trust me. Yes there are building and electrical codes. Many are written in blood. The perception that there is no implicit freedom to be found anywhere is unique to our internet worked world where you can pull the tail of the invisible cat and have it yowl at the inspector in short order.
What you are probably struggling with, is the concept of the Social Contract's primacy. There are those that believe what is allowed starts with a yes/no from the biggest baddest enforcer of their idea of the Social Contract. I call these folks Hobbesian. Then there are those who see the Social Contract itself as something subject to the independent acceptance in whole or in part by independent, free-thinking agents. I call these folks Locke-ian. They are famous for the intellectual fireworks that get set off if you lock them in a room together to settle their differences.
The reality is, the truth is something more akin to: let's implement paperwork and objective inspections so people have a safe recourse, but leave the door open for people to do what they want with things they own, and only argue about the more philosophical notes when there is a clear and present breach of decorum by one party or another.
This arrangement tends to keep both parties reasonably happy.
People don't want to get hit by a car, so we've collectively agreed to require that all drivers pass an exam that proves they know how to drive safely enough to bring the risk of them running someone over with a car to an acceptable level. The general freedom to drive a car does not exist - we've collectively limited it to only those individuals, who pass our standard. Similarly, everyone does not have the right to build their own airplanes and fly people around in them, because those people could get seriously hurt - we have limited that "freedom" to only people who have proven that they know enough about how to build and/or fly planes to, again, decrease that risk down to an acceptable level.
Do home-owner repaired house catch on fire more often than houses repaired by licensed contractors?
My insurance company has never told me I can't repair my own house.
Easy to say things like this, but once you get out into the real world you notice a lot of America doesn't want to pay $150/hour to change a light switch...and has the knowledge to DIY it.
That it seems entirely reasonable is most of the problem.
Because people imagine that getting certified is a two week safety course, and that getting inspected is paying someone $10 to spend ten minutes looking over your five minute job.
But then the licensed professionals capture the regulators and the licensing requirement stops being about safety and starts being about gatekeeping, so getting licensed becomes impractical for anyone not full-time gainfully employed in that industry. And the gatekeeping and bureaucracy cause the inspection to require weeks to get an appointment and the payment of $150 over the replacement of a $10 light switch.
Then, you notice that the light in your living room flickers sometimes. You would be inclined to have your buddy the electrical engineer come have a look except that he's not a licensed electrician and you're not convinced that the lights flickering once in a while is a problem whose solution is worth $150. Two months later the light switch with the bad connection finally overheats and your house burns down. Or you're willing to pay the money but it takes 15 days to get an appointment and the amount of time you had before the problem became a fire was two weeks.
Making repairs to safety-critical things less accessible is dangerous.
I took household lighting classes at the local community college and our union electrician uncle helped use redo his house.
Impossible in my state to get a electrician license without doing 1+ years as an apprentice under a electrical company full-time. Once you get the "apprentice" license, you then spend another year or two under more supervision to become a journeyman.
At that point you are able to pull permits and work on your own. So 3-5 years working as a full time electrician. They expect you to learn everything on the job and eventually take a test.
More time to get an electrician license than to become a licensed police officer (250 hours of academy training).
Sweet. All of that to legally change a dishwasher in my house.
So all of the people on this forum spouting off about "certified electricians" are either part of the electrician racket themselves or have 0 actual clue what they are talking about.
Either way we got a good deal on the house and I’ve been learning a lot about how to fix it the right way.
There were also some hot wires just dangling out of a box in the basement, and a couple fried plugs, so I and I assume the inspector knew that there were bound to be more fun surprises.
It’s not like the inspector is going to say “well we better open up this wall just in case”
Ended up rewiring one of the bathrooms after what started out as “change a couple of switches and add a GFCI”
As you point out there are likely punitive consequences but those are after the fact.
I do have a so called "DIY insurance" on my home policy - if I damage something while doing a DIY project(drill into a cable or a pipe for instance) my home insurance will cover the repair. Is that not enough?
Electricians have liability insurance provided by an organization specializing in policies for practicing tradesmen. If an insurance company fails to disqualify a homeowner's policy and pays out, it will then go after the electrician and his insurance to recoup their losses. Residential electrical fires are extremely preventable so insurance companies almost universally refuse to insure homes with DIY electrical work because the homeowner is the one liable.
Homeowner's insurance routinely covers preventable disasters. Did you leave a candle on or a heater plugged in and start a fire? Did you not cut down a tree that was looking unhealthy and it fell on your home? These are all situations where your insurance would pay a claim. The cases where they would not pay a claim are more along the lines of "deliberate arson".
You may well need to certify that work is permitted in order to get an insurance policy.
Relevant reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/HomeImprovement/comments/7vwe23/doe...
They allow them to change sockets and light switches. Anything requiring a city inspector is literally the same thing as getting a licensed electrician. Municipalities have a lot more insurance than an electrician does, often unwritten by the same reinsurers as the electricians.
> But second and maybe more importantly how would you ever be able to get insurance on an older house. There may have been dozens of different electricians and homeowners that did work over the years. Who would the insurance company go after if a problem occurred.
The insurance company goes bankrupt and the state bails out the homeowner. That's why we have electrical contractor surety bonds.
Do you have any evidence to point to where someone changes a dishwasher or some other small electrical project, and later insurance denies a claim?
I can imagine scenarios of gross negligence (wires run all over exposed, gas leaks, etc. etc.), but if we are talking small mistakes by homeowner during a un-permitted DIY project, I have a very very hard time believing insurance is going to scour the rubble to investigate...like literally how to you prove that!?
Like someone else said - when you buy a house you don't know how the electrical wiring was done and by whom. Paperwork is required only for the things I mentioned above - new circuits added after the house was built mostly. And even then someone would need to prove that it was done after construction.
So even if the insurance company wanted to deny a claim due to a DIY fitted socket....I think they would struggle, as there's absolutely nothing forbidding me from installing one, and most importantly - my contract with the insurance company doesn't forbid me from doing so.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/04/24/technology/on...
I guess this is more analogous to flipping someone’s breakers in their house and then charging them to flip them back on.
The ultimate reason people pay electricians is liability. Unlicensed work is an easy way to invalidate your homeowner's insurance, lose everything, and get sued for any damage to your neighbors' property (by their insurance company, no less).
Nobody's interests are less aligned with your own than an insurance company's. There are lots of legitimate reasons to hire an electrician, but making decisions solely based on what someone who wants you to perpetually give them money whole finding reasons to never give it back is never good practice.
Investigating a case is expensive, let alone litigating one against someone with their life's assets on the line, so it's in their best interest to prevent the event they're insuring against from occurring. They have the most accurate up to date data on real world outcomes so especially in professional circumstances, it usually pays to follow their advice.
Yup. They know having an electrician do all the work minimizes the risk of you needing to get payed out, so they want it so.
But the insurance doesn't care about your additional cost, since it's your cost, not theirs.
They don't go "cost of professional < additional risk * potential damages", they go "additional risk * potential damages > 0".
Then again, electrical work can be life threatening, so the potential damage is rather high.
As a DIYer, I was shocked to find what the previously hired professional electrician left for me: a secondary panel for the whole structure that controls exactly one outlet. The sub panel was apparently not fed from the main panel, but rather from a panel in a different building, so simply switching the main breaker of the breaker panel to off did not turn off that one specific outlet, you know the one I was trying to replace. Why that one outlet (GCFI in the bathroom) required it’s own sub panel was not clear at all but my left hand was numb for a few hours. Thankfully it didn’t go further than that (maybe a few copies of me in the multiverse died but not this one).
This is why you always test an outlet with a lightbulb before doing electrical work.
Honestly it didn’t actually do much beyond just small muscle twitches in my hand. I only realized what happened after I let go of it and my hand still felt a little funny. Definitely do not recommend but at least it was a 240V outlet or anything like that.
On insurance, as you say their interests are opposite, and you need to be defensive about how to deal with them. Not having insurance on a house is not an option, so making sure you have a standing ground when shit hits the fan is pretty reasonable in my opinion.
Home electric is one of those things that many people claim to know and understand. The reality is that most people are clueless, and can and do make mistakes. If you ever bought an old house, you get this — there’s always some dangerous cob job hiding somewhere.
The evil insurance company doesn’t want to pay when you are seriously injured in a fire. You probably don’t want to get injured. In the end, interests are aligned.
In this situation, I am paying someone else to assume risk for me. That is, I suppose, a type of insurance, in a very broad sense.
However, I am not in any way relying on my interests and the other person's to be aligned, except in the sense of performing the work they are legally contracted to perform. All I am doing is asking this person to assume some risk for me, in exchange for which I provide them a fee.
Short of "take on all the risk yourself", which, even if perhaps desirable (I'm not sure …), is often not feasible, what is a better approach here?
Its specifically the "do it this way because insurance wont cover you otherwise" that I'm reacting too, because I think that had caused a lot of damage to society. Effectively nobody is taking on risk under the model insurance companies push - insurance won't let you do anything risky, and won't pay if you do. That's why I say it's a losing proposition to have your behavior dictated by an insurer. (Probably a prisoner's dilemma really, because inevitably some group gives in, then makes to worse for everyone)
If your company gets banned by visa/mastercard for dealing with porn, you’ll steer away for anything porn related.
You know banks won’t give you a loan for growing legal weed, if your goal is actually to make money you’ll grow other fancy aromatic plants instead, etc.
You still can push through, but getting nudged is not new, will never stop, and most of the time reflects your societies values anyway.
This is the part that is outright fraud. A legitimate insurance policy is literally a cheque; if something happens, you deposit it in the bank and get you money, and it's the insurance company's responsibility to prove that your claim is not covered by the policy written on the cheque. The insurance company does not make a decision about whether to pay.
I am aware of that; I'm pointing out that their being able to say no (rather than the cheque being valid by default and claim being paid out without the insurer's involvement, and the insurance company having to go to court to recover the money after the fact) is fraud, precisely because it enables them to "say no to as much as they can".
Not really.
People pay electricians for their experience and knowledge that give them the tools to solve complex problems, simply, without messing up your wiring, causing a fire, or blowing something up.
Removing a link on Google, on the other hand, involves clicking on a link and filling out a form. You don't need state licensing or problem solving abilities to fill out that form. Any "reputation managers" out there that are doing this are essentially defrauding people, and it's shameful.
People pay because they're afraid of at least one of (a) their ability to be sure they're getting the right instructions, or (b) their ability to execute. In the electrician example, (b) could be substantial if you don't understand electricity. "Electricity can kill you" is basically the home-maintenance version of "the internet is confusing" that would prevent someone from wanting to find this Google form themselves.
In the "reputation manager" example, (a) is going to come into play more, I bet. A good "reputation manager" probably isn't going to just fill out one form on google, I imagine there's a lot you could do to cover Bing, wikipedia, and various other sites and services. I don't know where employees go to get background checks, for instance, but maybe I need to have that covered, too. So now the problem still parallels working with an electrician - how do you know if you found a good one? Lots of handyman/contractor horror stories and scams out there too!
Over time a boiler that isn't meaningfully "leaking" will still gradually lose internal pressure. Once the pressure inside the boiler is less than outside the boiler even when the water inside is hotter, that's not good. Eventually the system won't work and shuts down for safety, but before that it'll make a lot of noise while running. There's a pressure meter so you can see what's wrong if you don't understand boilers. My meter said about 0.4 bar. So that's too low, now I just needed to re-pressurize it.
The regulations here say that, to avoid mistakes resulting in stagnant water flowing back from a boiler tank into the fresh water system, the two mustn't be permanently connected. So there'd logically be an input, you connect a temporary hose, re-pressurize.
In practice, nobody does that, the installers will run a permanent line, in defiance of the rules, and use a tap, now you can re-pressurize by turning the tap.
Except, many years after moving in and setting up I'd forgotten where that tap could be. It wasn't where I expected to find it, and I could not think there else they'd have put it. So after sleeping on it and still not remembering I called a plumber. Not an emergency plumber, but still plumbers aren't cheap.
The plumber also couldn't immediately find it, it wasn't where he first looked either. But I can't actually tell how much time he spent "pretending" to look versus how long it really took him to discover it. Because it's embarrassing right? Even if the customer is up-front about the nature of the task, "It's under the kitchen sink - behind this panel, here" (yes, that's where it actually is) doesn't feel like a real job worth £80 or whatever it was.
My Grandfather used to tell a story about an old aeroplane that wouldn't start. They found a retired engineer who agreed to come out and look. Did so, had a listen when they tried, And nodded to himself.
From his toolbox he removed a hammer and smacked the engine once sharply. Suddenly it started right up. Magic
He presented them with a bill for £205. "That's absurd, all you did was hit it with a hammer!".
"Ah yes", the engineer replied. "It is £5 to hit the engine, the other £200 is for knowing where to strike"
(This would typically be as part of a discussion of the meaning of "knowledge is power")
[1] https://www.iccsafe.org/products-and-services/i-codes/2018-i...
'ALL THEY DO' is what anyone does in a similar way. You are paying for what they know that you don't know how to do. There is nothing wrong or deceptive about making money in this way. (use of 'all they do' seems to imply this). Plenty of people are busy and willing to pay for things to have someone else handle the details. Google could easily publicize this but they choose not to.
Here is the thing. Someone charging $500 (or any amount) has already filtered people that feel they have a real need from everyone attempting to do similar. Now you could argue the fee should be less but the friction caused by that higher fee (for those who can afford it) is worth it. And those that can't can do research and effort (like with anything) to find a way to achieve the same.
People often expect everything to be free and nobody to make money off of knowledge. By the way if reputation managers are charging $500 nothing to prevent someone from doing the same for less and changing the market price. Also I'd image the rep managers possibly massage some things to get the job done something many people wouldn't know or want to do.
Absolutely incorrect. It's more complicated and insidious than your reductive argument suggests.
These reputation "management" companies are also the ones who scrape public records on a massive scale and DELIBERATELY place this data really high up in search rankings. So, casual searches for someone's name often end up returning vague negative results like "xxx has a criminal record, find out more!". They ALSO spam people at internet scale and warn them about their "reputation" and how they can "fix" it.
In other words, they provide the "cure" for the "injury" which they've caused.
One of the worst and biggest of these piece of sh*t companies is mylife.com. They do the web-scraping and the SEO to get their results up high, AND ALSO charge money to "clean up" reputations. It happens to be legal in the USA because we're in a downward spiral of techno-feudalism, but it's a vile and dishonorable practice.
The founder of mylife.com, Jeffery Tinsely, has become wealthy from these deceptive practices. He faces regular lawsuits (eg https://www.aarp.org/money/scams-fraud/info-2020/website-sue...). But somehow mylife.com continues to survive presumably by raking in the cash as well as VC investment (not sure if it was mylife or one of the other slimy companies run by Tinsely).
FWIW, it is possible to remove your results from mylife.com. I did it. It requires a phone call and some firm persistence and patience. You call them on the phone and talk to someone at an Indian call center. Just say that you want to remove your name from mylife.com searches. It costs nothing but they WILL try to sell you their junk reputation management service with boiler-room-like intensity (worse than Verizon or Comcast), just decline for the 2 dozen times they ask. In the end it worked, I am no longer searchable on mylife.com and no mylife.com results show up on google under my name, but I get several emails a day from these MF's telling me that my reputation needs fixing and that "other people can see it".
There's other companies like this. Mylife is particularly slimy but it's the biggest.
Anyone knowing the 'right form and place to find it' can charge a price and offer a service. This is quite different than what you are describing that reputation management companies do.
[disclosure: I'm a googler, but no clue about this service]
Mugshots.com was doing exactly this until they got hit with extortion charges: https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-mugshot-websi...
I don't believe anyone has an obligation to remove if someone found not guilty. The arrest happened, that's a fact. The information is public was made public by the government, that's also a fact.
From my understanding once something is made public you can't put it back in the bag. The government may do so on their own databases (Ie. Expungement, removal from government databases) but that doesn't apply to the public and especially not to publications who have first amendment right to publish public records.
I looked up the case you mentioned, it's still pending and the arguments made by the government are questionable
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180523/10224639892/calif...
That should be wholly obvious from the fact that these sites exist, out in the open. And from the fact that nobody argued what you're refuting.
(It's wrong, obviously, and such practices should be illegal, as they are in every civilised country and then some. But that's a separate matter)
And while expungement is a complicated thing, it generally means that legally, it never happened. That has tons and tons of different legal interpretations even within one jurisdiction, depending on the who/what/why.
For instance you might be legally protected to claim you were never arrested when getting your driver's license, or applying for a job, but not on a concealed-carry permit application.
Depending on how a 3rd party distributes that expunged info, it could be considered libel or slander, especially once the publisher/speaker is made aware of the falsehood, or given a court order, yet persists.
Judges don't usually bother ordering newspapers to try and collect and destroy what's already been distributed, but...
Papers are certainly not allowed to reprint it or continue to publish/distribute after they've been given whatever constitutes legal notice. At least some jurisdictions will award punitive-damage-multipliers for continuing to distribute those falsehoods after some point where they should have known not to.
So if you're sending out an email newsletter, you might be ok by not sending that issue to anyone else.
But leaving the same content on a website would probably be considered "continuing to publish."
Which basically means: it's complicated.
And that doesn't even touch the blackmail or extortion elements.
No, libel/slander/defamation has nothing to do with distributing factual information, including expunged records.
Judges can't order you not to publish factual information. If they do, it's against the constitution and your First Amendment rights.
While a person can claim the event never happened, it doesn't change the fact that it did, and doesn't take your constitutional rights from talking about it.
On the extortion note, see the techdirt link.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/legal-removal-reques...
It's like I tell my boss: "You don't pay me to push buttons. You pay me to know which buttons to push."
(I think I stole it from the plumbing industry.)
> One day Denise Griffin got a call from Eric Schmidt’s assistant. “There’s this information about Eric in the indexes,” she told Griffin. “And we want it out.” In Griffin’s recollection, it dealt with donor information from a political campaign, exactly the type of public information that Google dedicated itself to making accessible. Griffin explained that it wasn’t Google policy to take things like that out of the index just because people didn’t want it there. Principles always make sense until it’s personal,” she says.
> Then in July 2005, a CNET reporter used Schmidt as an example of how much personal information Google search could expose. Though she used only information that anyone would see if they typed Schmidt’s name into his company’s search box, Schmidt was so furious that he blackballed the news organization for a year.
> “My personal view is that private information that is really private, you should be able to delete from history,” Schmidt once said. But that wasn’t Google’s policy...
I guess they've since changed the policy a bit?
[^1]: https://www.amazon.com/Plex-Google-Thinks-Works-Shapes/dp/14...
[0] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/google-ceo-on-privacy-if_n_38...
Still, good to provide some visibility about it. I certainly never knew this was a thing.
The answer is almost below the fold on my 13" macbook pro
How does the notion of a purely distributed, unregulated, uncensorable, blockchain-backed internet handle "revenge porn" or other genuinely harmful content?
An argument I hear from the crypto community is that blockchain is good because it enables freedom of speech that can't be banned by governments or other central authorities.
The crypto community needs to address the other side of that coin too. Are there circumstances when something should be banned, and how does that work on a blockchain?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nth_room_case
Everyone, please DO NOT underestimate people's malicious will to abuse weak minority groups having un-moderated platforms as their primary tool. Due to lack of Telegram's basic moderation, those victims had been severely abused to the unrecoverable level, more than two years. This could've been at least mitigated if they simply closed the room based on user reporting, which they refused to do so.
My answer is No.
The "genuinely harmful content" is minimally harmful compared to the damage censorship can do.
The problem is always with people being dicks, not the information. E.g. a jilted lover posting porn videoes of an ex is only a problem because the lover will deliberately attempt to show them to the ex and the ex's social contacts (and even that is only harmful because some people are judgemental bastards. Yes, some people like scat, get over it), so target the lover with harassment charges rather than making the information distribution illegal.
I'm a bit of a freedom of information purist, I think a world with 0 censorship would be better than the current one, as the censors will always be tempted to censor more and more things to advance their interests. The maximum badness from zero censorship is much much lower than the maximum badness with censorship.
It's not about people being dicks it's about information as weapons laying around forever.
Humans have built-in forgetness but modern days tech does not. Since we are evolving at nature rate, technology must be rein in from time to time.
However, people are quite capable of being very unpleasant to eachother without sex videos, if it wasn't that the person seeing red would have done something else (keyed car, sabotage, malicious lies... plenty of options). Regardless they should be disciplined, probably fired outright.
Since none of us are the operator in the matrix, we're not looking at the raw bytes of the blockchain, we're always using some view layer over the data. So the view layer can choose to not see the content of some block.
This could be done by having community operated blocklists to the effect of "you don't want to know what's at these locations" - you can't take back what's been said on chain, but you can cover your ears.
I seem to lean quite far on the freedom side of most arguments, but I do acknowledge there are times when action may need to be taken in the interest of the public. My objection is that I neither want it to be impossible to take action or for a foreign company to unilaterally decide what action to take.
What we need in situations like this is a legal process. If one doesn't exist, it's not for companies to start deciding what information the public should have access to and what is "harmful", but for democratic countries to pass laws with the consent of their local electorates to decide what legal protections and processes need to be put in place.
The problem we have today is that there are too many foreign companies deciding what we can and can't say or do. Crypto has the exact opposite problem, but unless our governments step up and regulates these companies in the interests of the public our only option (if you don't agree with the censorship) is to create something uncensorable.
The legal system has its own faults of course. It's administered by fallible governments and can have individual bad actors. But could a legal system expect to exert control over a decentralized system like a blockchain?
Put another way, if there was a "crypto twitter" clone, and someone posted revenge porn or personal information about someone (home address, let's say), wouldn't that post be forever embedded into the blockchain? Would a legal system ever be able to remove it?
Ultimately a legal system is how a society controls a governments monopoly on violence. A legal system can remove almost anything if it really want too, by virtue of the fact that it can send big men with guns to destroy whatever physical manifestations of the thing exists.
Of course there are practical limits to this power. But that’s never stopped a government before.
I don't know of any situation where someone has used this to dox someone, but nothing prevents it.
>What we need in situations like this is a legal process. If one doesn't exist, it's not for companies to start deciding what information the public should have access to and what is "harmful", but for democratic countries to pass laws with the consent of their local electorates to decide what legal protections and processes need to be put in place.
What is interesting is that I wouldn't even have to change a single word here and I can equally apply this reasoning to encryption. It is almost always unpopular on HN to suggest that universal end-to-end encryption might not be a great idea or that encryption backdoors are something that need to be seriously discussed, but those opinions are born out of the same underlying logic.
Free speech is good, but no society wants universal free speech since there are legitimately evil people who will use their speech for malicious means. Same is true about encryption. Why are we ok with removing revenge porn from Google results but need to just accept that we are allowing child porn to be shared via easily encrypted channels?
Selective censorship by central authorities can be granular, choosing to create a legal process for selective censorship doesn’t suddenly allow any person on the internet to potentially censor any thing they want. Weak encryption however allows anyone, anywhere, with enough effort to break all encryption everywhere, and do so without without detection or needing to expose themselves via a legal system.
Also there aren’t “central encryption authorities” that all encryption passes through. Anyone can implement modern crypto wherever, so banning it makes no sense. It’s like trying to ban the concept of Pi.
This is always stated as a universal truth of the technology, but this mostly seems like a people and organizational problem. We already have encryption algorithms that can encrypt content for decryption by multiple optional keys. Why couldn't we fragment and distribute one set of those keys among multiple legal entities? That would require coordination and agreement to decrypt anything. That wouldn't be a true backdoor anymore than the original key is a backdoor, it would simply be overhead on the existing encrypted content to allow it to be decrypted by multiple keys.
>Also there aren’t “central encryption authorities” that all encryption passes through. Anyone can implement modern crypto wherever, so banning it makes no sense. It’s like trying to ban the concept of Pi.
This is true, but defaults matter. If the US makes a law regarding encryption, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc are all going to follow it. You still might be able to roll your own encryption, but the people who do that will be a tiny share of overall communication. Laws like this aren't meant to completely stop something. Putting in financial regulations to crack down on money laundering doesn't stop money laundering. The goal is to make it more difficult and prevent the most egregious cases.
There would be thousands if not millions of legitimate decryptions every year. At each instance all of the fragments will need to be put together, creating an opportunity for the data to be exfiltrated.
Additionally your making the assumption that legal agencies will be able to securely store these keys long term (I.e forever). Regardless of your view on the operational and security competency of these agencies, it’s extreme difficulty to keep cryptographic keys secure long term if you need to be able to access them on a regular basis.
Even if you don’t think most criminal organisations will manage this, you can pretty much guarantee that large nation state actors like China and Russia will find a way to get hold of these keys. You then give your largest competitors the ability to seriously damage your economy or steal secrets by either using the keys themselves, or leaking them on the internet. Suddenly every single message sent by every citizen, politician, bank, weapons company etc becomes public for all to see.
> This is true, but defaults matter. If the US makes a law regarding encryption, Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, etc are all going to follow it. You still might be able to roll your own encryption
You will 100% be able to roll your own, and trivially too. You’ll just need to go to GitHub and grab the source code, or pre-built binaries for a working crypto system, of which there are many. Banning the big companies from using crypto isn’t enough, you also need to ban anyone from talking about crypto as well.
This is very different to money laundering rules. Realistically you can’t opt out of the modern financial system, regardless of what blockchain proponents say, so introducing rules to gatekeep money flows at system choke points makes sense. Also one ability to censor money at choke points doesn’t also create an opportunity for enemies to exploit those same choke points.
The money laundering equivalent of crypto censorship would be like the US deciding that it was going to switch to Bitcoin so that all transactions are public and accessible to law enforcement. Then just kinda hoping that a country like China isn’t going to launch a 51% attack.
>You will 100% be able to roll your own, and trivially too. You’ll just need to go to GitHub and grab the source code...
Github is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft won't let you host code that is designed specifically to break the law. That is the point. You would need to jump through a variety of hoops in order to avoid this. It wouldn't be impossible, but it won't be the default and most people won't go through the effort to do it.
I think the flaws are so large, and fixing them so impractical (especially anything involving direct human involvement), that the problem is essentially impossible.
In theory traffic laws should prevent 100% of car accidents. Yet people die every day in traffic accidents.
In theory the judicial system should never execute an innocent person. Yet the US sends people later proven innocent to the electric chair on a semi regular basis.
In theory everyone should have a strong interest is keeping planet earth healthy enough to support human life, yet we’re on a course to cataclysmic climate change.
Alcohol addiction should have ended during prohibition, and weed should be impossible to buy in the US. Yet neither is true.
What on earth makes you think we’ll solve the structural issues with government key escrow for all encryption, when all the evidence suggest that we’re unable to perfectly solve these issues as a species?
> Github is owned by Microsoft. Microsoft won't let you host code that is designed specifically to break the law.
Cool we’ll host it on Gitlab then, or one of many no US hosting providers. We can’t even stop people pirating movies despite the media industry throwing billions at the problem. Do you honestly think we’ll have better luck with crypto?
You wanna see how this story ends? Read up on prohibition America, or just the war on drugs. We’ve been down this road many times, with many different vices, it’s ends the same way every time. Normal people get criminalised, illicit behaviour continues regardless. Organised crime profits from facilitating illicit behaviour. Please explain why you thing crypto is going to be the exception?
Because crypto is implemented in software and it’s trivial to remove the part that encrypts for the government’s key.
Additionally, a from scratch implementation of AES in JavaScript or any other modern programming language is a junior level task. Unless you propose trying to ban every copy of the AES algorithm, it will be trivially implemented and passed around regardless of what FAANG does.
Money laundering restrictions work because everything goes through a fairly centralized banking system. Crypto has no such equivalent.
The encryption example is about being able to intercept private communication (never mind outlawing math) because someone could use that private communication for something illegal.
The two examples have nothing to do with each other IMO.
But to your point, if the sharing of child porn or other illegal content ever got so bad that something urgently needed to be done I would personally be open to limiting the use E2EE (if there truly was no better option) and I'd assume most people here would agree, although I would argue in many cases it's E2EE that prevents you from becoming a victim of things like revenge porn in the first place.
Besides, there would be quite a few people who'd be actively circumventing any such law if it were enacted, e.g. by hosting the apps in other jurisdictions. And I think that's a good thing! There should be fundamental limits on the power of governance, regardless of how democratic said governance is; and democracies can be no less abusive than other forms when it comes to minorities etc. Or even majorities, when established public mores essentially require widespread hypocrisy - the Prohibition comes to mind. "Think of the children" (or terrorists, or whatever is the go-to political excuse at any particular moment) is not a valid exception.
I agree with your general point except most people in the tech community are not willing to even have these debates. It is often treated as an issue with a single right answer and that encryption can never be compromised.
Removing ourselves from the debate is only going to end up with the decision being made without our input.
The power to ban information is too great to be entrusted to any authority at all. Depending on how thorough the "ban" (web text filter at the ISP level? mandatory AR implants at birth filtering banned content? worse?), it's anywhere from an abhorrent violation of human rights and the principles behind free exchange and scientific inquiry all the way up through literally the most powerful weapon which could even theoretically be designed.
This is not a road worth going down, for any amount of harm reduction. The cost today may be worth it. The cost long term is potentially too great to even consider risking. There is no guarantee of who holds the ban hammer tomorrow.
I appreciate the take that the future harm isn’t worth the benefit today, since we’d enable future arbiters to control what is available.
There’s nuance in determining what is a public sphere vs. a privately controlled platform. The places with the most distribution are currently private, but crypto could change that to where we collectively own the platform, effectively making it publicly owned. Does that change your thoughts on when censorship is appropriate?
But I would not trust any corporation (sometimes it's profitable to remove something so they retain control of some market) or government (sometimes it secures their power to keep people unaware of some facts about their actions) to do the same. Would you?
So I guess the question is, how does the use of this new power to suppress abuses of speech weigh against other forms of abuse that become available to those who wield this power?
For clarity: this shouldn't apply to information that a corporation produces, because corporations aren't people and shouldn't have the same freedoms. Open source is still good, and controlling information that you discover, not that you invent, is unreasonable.
Overall, my issue is less with control over information (because if you believe all control is bad, then you have to say that revenge porn isn't too big an issue, and that's not a position I'm personally willing to take) and more capital's control over information because of all the cases when capital is misaligned with the interests of the people who need it. All of these cases feel like they define technology. Lots of the history of technology can be understood as large companies (bourgeoisie) trying to keep information hidden fighting a decreasing population of 'hackers' (the proletariat), and that fight's legacy is found here, on Google's hidden page gatekeeping what should be known.
...but that's not always the case. If your information has been copied against your will in a way that removes that key (which is incredibly hard to prevent, see the "analog hole" problem in video DRM), you have to have some sort of central authority or master key to be able to remove it, and then you're again falling right back into trusting that central authority with the power to remove whatever they deem fit. What if the central authority decides you don't own the information and not to remove it? What if they claim ownership of something they want removed that isn't theirs?
It just doesn't work. Information removal is a superpower I do not trust any large organization to wield responsibly.
The "private business right of refusal" argument has some merits, but also substantial equity and justice problems.
Indexing the web is an old tradition.
You would get users to sign the social contract with some online entity and that entity would censor the blockchain for their ideological/legal jurisdiction. For example, you could sign the Christian fundamentalist social contract and have all blasphemy removed from your search results. In exchange, you would receive community support, access to their content, etc. If they found out you were browsing blasphemous material they would revoke the particular social contract you signed.
Just spitballing here, but I wonder if the nofap guys could start something like this to block all nsfw content on whatever distributed blockchain thing was out there. Then they could offer some special forum as a benefit. You could use a DAO for governance conflicts, etc.
The victim would contact the organizations and ask that they remove the material citing their mission and bylaws. Maybe they would form a hierarchy with the most generally agreed upon rules being shared, like a treaty, between blockchains.
No? We're just gonna relitigate it all from scratch again - relearning the same naive lessons over and over? (Shockingly people in this space do indeed understand the implications of censorship-resistant platforms.)
What would happen if someone encoded something horrible and illegal like child porn into a blockchain? Is everyone who operates on that chain guilty of possession? Does that make a specific crypto "illegal" if its blockchain contains illegal content?
Which is a fancy way of saying that they haven't. The only images in the bitcoin blockchain are ascii art.
There are plenty of hashes of different types of data in the bitcoin blockchain, but hashes are not the hash function's input data.
Schneier himself repeated this bogus "there's illegal content in the bitcoin blockchain already!" claim, which shows the legs this false meme has on it.
Please stop repeating this falsehood.
JPG of Nelson Mandela encoded into bitcoin blockchain: http://www.righto.com/2014/02/ascii-bernanke-wikileaks-photo...
Illegal porn and classified documents embedded in the blockchain (page 3): https://www.accenture.com/_acnmedia/pdf-33/accenture-editing...
Original research source: https://fc18.ifca.ai/preproceedings/6.pdf
By that definition, however, every file could be transformed into an illegal one through a suitable cipher and key.
Then there's the concept of steganography.
Digital data is interesting for sure.
(Unless you’re saying that the bits 0 and 1 already exist in the blockchain, which is reaaaaallllyyy stretching the definition.)
There’s the concept of “illegal numbers”, which means that there are technically numeric representations of images or copyrighted material that you can’t know/possess without breaking a law. But the law is subjective which is why we have judges and juries to apply judgement to whether having a large number written on a piece of paper is equivalent to possessing illegal material.
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There’s the concept of “illegal numbers”, which means that there are technically numeric representations of images or copyrighted material that you can’t know/possess without breaking a law. But the law is subjective which is why we have judges and juries to apply judgement to whether having a large number written on a piece of paper is equivalent to possessions illegal material.
There is no person they can throw in jail, no corporation that can be sued, no servers that can be seized, domains taken over, etc, that will result in that data no longer being available to those that know where to look for it.
The data just remains online until such a time that the coins of a given chain are worth $0.0 and coin holders no longer have a financial incentive to keep the ledger online.
FWIW the ones I talked to where more of the door kicking variety, not the 'cyber' type.
The point wasnt that I put their logo on a chain, its that I could put a photo online that the states monopoly on violence was entirely incapable of removing.
The FBI doesn't give a single damn hoot about "data exfiltration" via blockchain metadata. Anyone with half an understanding of any of those terms knows what an absurd implication that is.
For concerns about "data exfiltration", discussing blockchain doesn't even make a single damn bit of sense. Blockchain is about impermanence and publishing, not about "exfiltration".
I'm not sure which is more amusing, thinking that the FBI would give a hoot about b64-encoded data in the metadata of a transaction, or that this person wrote that comment on HN to try and seem cool. LOL, what, the FBI reached out to them (how?/why? nothing about this makes sense)?
Lots of distasteful outcomes possible.
Do they? Nothing is ever _really_ deleted on the good old-fashioned internet either.
We can't have our cake and eat it too. Having a centralized arbiter of truth is more dangerous to the truth than bad people who do bad things.
Tell that to folks doing web archival.
There was never a way to undo porn video you made when you were younger.
The situation we have today does allow you to address such a problem: Google can remove search results. It's not possible to do that on the blockchain.
Google prevents new searches or tries to but if you have the link you can visit without google. Same as the blockchain you would need to know where to look.
And as someone who has worked in the blockchain space for a long time, it’s pretty much unanimously agreed in the space that the cost of inevitably protecting bad actors is worth the value in protecting good actors. Good and bad are subjective there, but for better or worse the blockchain isn’t.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25972121
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/technology/change-my-goog...
The story focuses on a software engineer who discovered that he was the slander target of someone who had been fired by his father 30 years ago. He found her identity and took her to court in 2018. But the libelous Google results didn't change. The NYT story even ends with this:
> Yet even that hasn’t solved the problem. See for yourself: Do a Google search for “Guy Babcock.”
A day after the NYT story, those results disappeared. Here's what they looked like: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25973045
If a software engineer with the resources to find and take an anonymous libeler didn't know that Google could manually intervene and remove results that listed him as a pedophile, I'm assuming the vast majority of people are equally unaware.
No wonder few people know it. On the "until recently" checking the Internet Archive[0], removal of any personal information was introduced to their page at end of 2019. Before then the only way was removing the information from the sites to which the result link pointed.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20191229062036/https://support.g...
They run the index, they get to decide what's in it or not.
Can someone be a complete dirtbag and request that legitimate criticism be removed simply because they don't want folks to know they're a dirtbag?
Can convicts request the results be removed? How about sex offenders? How about people convicted of domestic violence assaults or similar?
Disclaimer: Work at Google in this area.
You can still go to individual services or your local municipality and ask.
https://www.bpi.co.uk/news-analysis/bpi-sends-500-millionth-...
https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/reporters/18...;
It raises the question of how they can find that many hits to be removed, they must be spamming the hell out of the index, and Google must be allowing it/providing an API.
"It is Google’s understanding that the information about you on this URL - with regard to all the circumstances of the case we are aware of - is still relevant in relation to the purposes of data processing, and therefore the reference to this document in our search results is justified by the public interest.
Based on the information available to us at this time, Google LLC has decided not to take action on this URL."
I've now tried the other URL, but I doubt this will help.
https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004716091-Wayb...
In practice, IA will unpublish content on request to info@archive.org AFAIU
Anecdotally I remember a fine example from a few years ago when Matt Cutts proclaimed they had algorithmically solved spam for queries such as payday loans. A day later, one appeared with Mr Cutts selling payday loans. It was removed within 24 hours.
[0] https://www.seroundtable.com/google-payday-loan-cutts-16940....
Google probably just wants to prevent criticism of Google employees and get one step closer to preventing criticism of themselves.
Google will return only content that tells you why that opinion is wrong e.g. "why you should care about gender identity"
Whereas duckduckgo will return stuff that actually matches your search.
Google always errs on the side of left wing political platform.
Its actually really egregious once you start testing it out. To the point that google actually completely buries really valuable information such as primary sources for controversial events, scientific studies etc and instead promotes shitty wapo articles ans the like that tell you how to think about the thing you are actually searching for.
google top: reddit post about "What are you if you just don't give a fuck about gender and you have no kind of dysphoria?"
DDG top: blog post titled "Don’t care about gender Self-ID? Here’s why you should"
Both normal and incognito on Google return similar results to what was returned to you.
• You have phrased the search in a way that people expressing that view wouldn't be likely to use, yet is similar to how people holding contrary views would express theirs. I think that's the case here. If you search for “gender does not exist” or so, you may get the results you want.
• Google's results are customised based on what they think you would be interested in.
• Content from one side of a contentious topic may be less popular online and/or not linked to as many authoritative sites, and thus have a lower PageRank.
2) so I am clearly of a more conservative bent, yet google frequently gives articles which are hostile to conservative views. So if its doing this its doing a terrible job.
3) agreed. And that is, imo, problematic. Or at least really fucking obnoxious and kneecaps the utility of google.
One upon a time Google was a really cool search engine. Entire books were written about how to use it wisely. E.g.
Google Hacks
100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools
Now, it's impossible to properly qualify searches. Quotes don't mean shit. Appending "&tbs=li:1" to get verbatim results doesn't mean shit.
Google just does whatever the hell it wants to. Which is probably great for the unwashed masses but really sucks for advanced users.
I remember when you could finesse google for really odd or specific shit and its damn near impossible now.
Reminds me that yesterday I tried googling around the topic of how covid affects fertility (eg. "covid fertility") and nearly every result that comes back is about vaccines not affecting fertility. Okay, thanks Google, but how about the actual disease? Results were a fair bit more relevant by adding "disease" to the query, but still got one or two about vaccines.
I don't think you can call that behaviour favouring left. It feels as though they're creating vaccine hesitancy.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=COVI...
It's entirely possible that such a disproportionate number of persons is more likely to access links about vaccines and such politics than what you searched for that the machine, not the man, has elected to favor those without having any real political motive.
I wish google was more concerned with accuracy of matches rather than populatrity
Covid side effects -> covid vaccine side effects
Best burgers -> McDonald's
Best coffee -> Starbucks
Best way to sort a list -> bubble sort
I don't see what you are describing at all.
On the other hand, the top Google results go to The Guardian, Wikipedia, Time, the BBC, etc., discussing the topic -- hugely popular sites.
Google's meant to find popular relevant pages for your search terms. Remember, that's what PageRank was all about. So seems to be working as expected.
Personally, I have yet to see any “credible” news source and the adage remains that every news article about anything I have even the most minor inside knowledge of seems completely inaccurate, especially the politically laden ones.
No matter what mechanism Google uses to assign such ranking: be it their own judgement or simply an agnostic a.i. that lets the masses decide, I cannot see anything good coming from it and there will always be a bias not based in factuality, but politics.
Well, Google isn't omnipotent and thus it only echos back results which are popular with people, which is basically politics, so yes. If everyone tomorrow instantly started thinking the world was flat (and previous flat earthers start saying the world is round) Google's results would shift pretty dramatically to whatever is the most popular side.
...that it's incentivized to return the results that the most people are looking for? As measured by clicks?
If you don't believe the news and you don't find popularity useful either then I honestly can't imagine what you're even looking for then.
Google returns a list of left leaning sources down playing it, DDG returns a list of right leaning sources condemning it.
The results are night and day different.
Also your username gave me a chuckle
I just Googled "I don't care about gender identity" and the top results are all agreeing with that statement.
The search is working perfectly. Google isn't inserting any kind of left-wing bias whatsoever. It's finding the same types of pages as DuckDuckGo does as well.
So why are you spreading this misinformation?
The example further down about the moon landing is a much better example though. Its a lot worse right when some political event happens. Like if trump said sonething really controversial and you search for more context around it, on google top results would all be articles about how shitty the thing he said was whereas on DDG youd have a greater probability of actually getting some context.
Like when pandemic was in full swing trying to get information that was against the mainstream narrative was impossible on google but was doable on ddg.
This might not be like an active decision by google but their results do skew really heavy left. It might just be a function of popularity rankings. But id imagine ddg uses a similar ranming system so not sure what makes the difference.
There are times tho when ive searched for something I know exists like word for word and it still wont come up on google but will on ddg so, go figure.
So, the one example you provided you hadn't taken the 10 seconds to validate?
You're not providing value here. Please make an effort to make meaningful and additive comments instead of spewing misinformation or made up anecdotes.
My point stands shitty example or not.
You have no point if you have to make things up to make it.
Hard to feel there's a compelling interest in supporting bigotry when knowledge is best advanced by open inquiry and the net result of bigotry is a suppression of voices which will lead to less knowledge.
As to conspiracies and lies? Very little truth value there, unclear why Google would want to uprank that kind of content.
Were there real debates about truth with actors in good faith on both sides, I might be more open to your framing of the problem as left wing vs right wing.
So thats my point : I don't want google to give me the truth, I want it to give me the internet, warts and all. I don't want google to gatekeep the information I have access to. Lol I remember everyone being in a tizzy when net neutrality gor the axe cause ISPs would start gatekeeping. But if a wholesome company like google does it its in pursuit of truth.
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
> As an example which illustrates the use of PageRank, anchor text, and proximity, Figure 4 shows Google's results for a search on "bill clinton". These results demonstrates some of Google's features. The results are clustered by server. This helps considerably when sifting through result sets. A number of results are from the whitehouse.gov domain which is what one may reasonably expect from such a search. Currently, most major commercial search engines do not return any results from whitehouse.gov, much less the right ones.
> ...The biggest problem facing users of web search engines today is the quality of the results they get back. While the results are often amusing and expand users' horizons, they are often frustrating and consume precious time. For example, the top result for a search for "Bill Clinton" on one of the most popular commercial search engines was the Bill Clinton Joke of the Day: April 14, 1997. Google is designed to provide higher quality search so as the Web continues to grow rapidly, information can be found easily.
You used to be able to find all kinds of weird ass fucked up shit on google but now its all internet based news media. I miss the raw shit.
"Yes, we do use PageRank internally, among many, many other signals. It's not quite the same as the original paper, there are lots of quirks (eg, disavowed links, ignored links, etc.), and, again, we use a lot of other signals that can be much stronger." [1]
[1] https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1232014208180592641 John Mu, Search Advocate at Google.
Well, yes, that's the basis of the anti-trans campaign: obsession. It ends up taking over people and causing them to become mono maniac posters on the subject, sometimes to the detriment of their careers. It's worse than scientology.
People not caring about gender identity would in many cases be a huge improvement.
Also, google has always personalized their search results (personalized pagerank) and maybe that's impacting you?
Search any modern hot topic on Google. Do the same on one of the various alternative search engines (duckduckgo, for example). Compare the results. It's educational.
My goal, in case it's not clear, was to find out more about how dates are commonly used in Cambodia (for some localisation code I was writing). DDG just gave me "uncensored" spam sites about dating Cambodian women (I didn't check any of them out, but I'd wager quite a few, if not all, are just scams, if not worse). And while the Google results also weren't quite what I was looking for, it sure was a hell of a lot more relevant.
And this is with safe-search on.