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Comment by dghlsakjg | Hacker News Reader

I hate slippery slope arguments, but....

How long until media players and display devices are hashing all of our media to check for copyright violations. Right now it is effectively impossible for a consumer to buy a TV that doesn't include a computer capable of this.

CSAM is one thing, and from reports it sounds like checking hashes isn't really that effective. However, this paves the way for hash checks for a variety of scary things.

What happens when governments start distributing lists of hashes belonging to "subversive" material (this isn't pipe dream, numerous large countries already block subversive material on the internet).

View on HN

"I hate slippery slope arguments, but...."

Slippery slope is vastly oversold as a logical fallacy. It is only a fallacy in the absence of evidence that there is a slope. If there's a multi-decade trend of which this is only a single step, and there's no visible mechanism for making it stop here and go no farther, then the logical fallacy is in believing with no reason that the trend line will stop here.

It is not a fallacy to speak as if this is only the beginning of a huge push into intrusive monitoring. It is a fallacy to pretend otherwise.

Slippery slope is also a fallacy if you take one instance of a trend and then logically project it to an absurd extreme, but this is not what we're doing here. We're simply looking at the next obvious, logical, well-evidenced step, with plenty of people who obviously want this even if they are a bit too discreet to come right out and say it in public.

But it's not a hard leap to see that our rulers today would like to be in full control of everything bit of data we receive and every bit of data we produce and the only things stopping them are technical possibilities and whether or not we'd put up with it. I see nothing else stopping them; not scruples, not morality, no existential awareness of the sheer staggering amount of responsibility they would be pushing on to themselves, no concerns about how it may hurt anyone, nothing.

Ahh yes, the slippery slope fallacy fallacy: assuming that all slippery slope arguments are fallacious.

https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/987274961659232256...

> assuming that all slippery slope arguments are fallacious.

They literally stated when it is and isn't a fallacy with differentiating conditions...

> Slippery slope fallacy fallacy

I believe the poster you’re responding to is making a joke.

Ops. Sometimes those things don't come across as well over text. My mistake.

As in all things, it's important to seek out evidence elsewhere that it might exist. For example, the US is already significantly "behind" many other developed nations in terms of not just how much surveillance and censorship is tolerated, but also in other freedom-oriented areas like choice to own firearms, choice of whether to have medical insurance, etc.

So it shouldn't really be necessary to have any of these arguments based on speculated future scenarios when you can look to Canada, the UK, Australia, etc, and see that slight increases in surveillance, censorship, gun regulation, health care availability, etc might actually have some benefits and certainly don't necessarily put you in the instant quicksand toward fascism/communism/scary scenario X.

> So it shouldn't really be necessary to have any of these arguments based on speculated future scenarios when you can look to Canada, the UK, Australia, etc, and see that slight increases in surveillance, censorship, gun regulation, health care availability, etc might actually have some benefits and certainly don't necessarily put you in the instant quicksand toward fascism/communism/scary scenario X.

There are a lot of benefits to living in countries with different governance approaches from the in many ways ultra-laissez faire approach taken in the US, but I don't think you'll find many takers here for the idea that the physical and internet surveillance of the UK and Australia are a model to which to look forward.

Oh I know. I'm being downvoted to oblivion already— that's the reality of HN being US-centric (I'm Canadian).

But my point is less about taking a stand on any of one of those issues and more just that US-based advocates making slippery-slope arguments often resort to wide-eyed speculation about the future rather than evidence because they're unaware of or unwilling to acknowledge what the realities are elsewhere in the world.

To play devils advocate for a bit, London is an incredibly safe city at night compared to say Paris or Rome or Madrid or Amsterdam. I’m pretty sure part of that is down to the staggering amount of cameras

How is Madrid unsafe? Have you even been there?

As if London didn't have its own and huge pack of chavs...

I was in Madrid a few years ago— it was just for a weekend conference, but my flight was 12h delayed leaving, so I ended up getting a pretty long unplanned walk around the city.

I felt very safe there, though I think the biggest thing was how insanely courteous the motorists were. Compared to North America where even when the signal is on your side you have to watch for a gap in turning cars and dart across the street, in Madrid I would just be walking up to a crosswalk and cars would already be voluntarily coming to a complete stop to wait for me to begin and then fully finish crossing. Night and day difference.

I've traveled the world, the place I felt the least safe was London. Perhaps it was because they have signs all over the place warning you about pickpockets.

Source?

Conversely, if you actually do get attacked in London, you better be real careful to not accidentally hurt your attacker:

"There are products which squirt a relatively safe, brightly coloured dye (as opposed to a pepper spray). A properly designed product of this nature, used in the way it is intended, should not be able to cause an injury. However, if injury does occur, this may be assault. ... The only fully legal self defence product at the moment is a rape alarm. "

(https://www.askthe.police.uk/content/Q589.htm)

Not true. What is true that you cannot use products designed to hurt, ie weapons.

So pepper spray would be illegal? That’s insane.

It looks like they explicitly call out pepper spray in your GP's quote (emphasis mine):

> There are products which squirt a relatively safe, brightly coloured dye (as opposed to a pepper spray).

It is an illegal "offensive weapon", yes.

The way UK defines "offensive weapon", literally anything is one if you have intent to use it against somebody, even in self-defense:

"any article made or adapted for use for causing injury to the person, or intended by the person having it with him for such use by him or by some other person ... even if they have some other legitimate use e.g. car keys held between the knuckles"

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offensive_weapon#England_and_W...)

It is illegal. It probably does sound insane if you believe that carrying weapons can improve safety and not simply escalate violence. To me it’s a pretty sound policy.

So, someone being attacked should just let it happen instead of fight back?

You can fight back. You just can't (legally) bring implements to help you with it.

So, if you are physically weaker, you must accept the abuse. Wow.

Or run away. Or hope that a bystander intervenes.

> I don't think you'll find many takers here for the idea that the physical and internet surveillance of the UK and Australia are a model to which to look forward.

Given the binary choice I would rather have the surveillance instead of the outrage-driven anti-science hordes that have been empowered by those US gifts to society Facebook and Twitter.

Not a fan of binary choices myself, I'd like to consider these options:

1 - everyone believes every single thing they see on fbk feed. 2 - everyone is well versed in how to highlight, one-click / tap search ggle,ddg, bing - for more info about highlighted thing (taught how to determine what a good source is).

See, the first way can work mostly, but many problems emerge in short while. The second way empowers people to think before acting and to learn more and not buy what X is selling automatically.

(I have witnessed first hand the damage done by 'fact checking' on fbook - people 100 believe a false post because fbk has not labled it as misinfo - for three days)

At this point, there is a sizable population who has internalized the message that "MSM == lies", like, it has to come from some guy's garage YouTube channel for it to be credible.

So yes, there's an issue with people not knowing what a "good source" is, but it's hard to know how much education could inoculated this population to a message like that. Especially when in many cases it was a treadmill of Fox News telling people that CNN is lies, and then OAN and Newsmax telling them that Fox is lies, and then internet sources telling them that anything on TV is lies. The thrill was never the truth; the thrill was in thinking you were getting some kind of unique insider scoop.

>have been empowered by those US gifts to society Facebook and Twitter.

Hope you are kidding to us...

FB and Twtr are huge turds full of anti-science mobs composed anti-vaxxers sharing fake news everywhere.

There is more science in all the IRC and Usenet subnets today than in the whole FB network...

Personally, I find Australian censorship and UK surveillance have already crossed the line. I'm not convinced that censorship ever has benefits, so any cost seems too much. Surveillance helps catch more criminals, but the US hardly has a problem finding people to put behind bars.

I don't hate Australian gun control- it is a little overzealous but within reason imo. I'm not someone who values gun ownership, so others might disagree. In the UK, however, https://twitter.com/mayoroflondon/status/982906526334668800 is a line crossed for me.

Even if there is a slippery slope that just ends at those levels, I think we should be fighting it. And it's not clear to me whether the slope does actually stop there, and that the UK and Australia aren't still sliding.

What happens in practice, is that police stop investigating most crimes where there isn't good CCTV coverage. The cost-benefit tradeoff is much more favourable in surveillance conditions. After a while, the public learns that if they want the police to do something about thefts and robbery, they need to support more cameras.

(Victim of one motorbike-jacking, one attempted motorbike jacking and 5 separate motorcycle thefts in London.)

I guess I've never been a victim of a major crime, but to the extent that I've been a victim of minor ones (like being harassed or swerved at by drivers while on my bike commute), I've never had success getting an action out of the police even when I can supply helmet cam footage clearly showing the incident.

So I can imagine that a person without CCTV footage on their side might be especially inclined to despair, but these experiences have led me to question the worthwhileness of crime-reporting in general.

This is a bit special, because you are not real traffic, and in general a nuisance to real traffic. Many police officials still hate bikes.

Yeah, definitely. And a number of the cases I've tried to report have indeed been scenarios where a bike lane actually exists but cars are using it for various purposes— to park in, as a right-side passing lane, as a right-turn lane.

Most of which I wouldn't even mind; it's actually correct behaviour to block the bike lane when making a right turn so that you don't accidentally clip a cyclist when making your turn— but it's not correct behaviour to honk at a bike in the bike lane to get out of the way so you can make your right turn, nor is it correct to drive one off the road so you can swerve into the bike lane and use it to pass a column of five cars before your right turn.

> What happens in practice, is that police stop investigating most crimes where there isn't good CCTV coverage.

The police straight-up don't investigate property crime committed against private individuals, regardless of whether or not CCTV was involved. They write you up a report that you can take to your insurer.

This process saves everyone time and money - you, the cops, the courts, the criminal...

Third party insurance, since theft insurance was too expensive. It's not like a claim would make the insurance cheaper. There's no upside in making the yearly premium £1000+ for a bike worth £2000 or so.

It's not quite true that they did nothing. A couple of times they dusted for prints, leaving silvery powder residue. After they found some of my bikes, they moved them into compounds where I had to pay a vehicle transport to get them back.

Mostly what they do is write up advice on how to contact Victim Support.

> "In the UK, however, https://twitter.com/mayoroflondon/status/982906526334668800 is a line crossed for me."

"“For too long, we have been a passively tolerant society, saying to our citizens 'as long as you obey the law, we will leave you alone',”" - said UK Prime Minister David Cameron in 2016. ( https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/britain-too-t... )

UK is far worse than that, actually:

https://twitter.com/mpsregentspark/status/974645778558980096...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Powers_of_the_police_in_Englan...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_and_Public_Or...

https://www.bbc.com/news/explainers-47475566

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-social_behaviour_order

As for Australian gun control, they banned all semi-autos - that's hardly within reason. But even if it were, now the goalposts are being moved, and there's talk of banning lever-action and pump-action shotguns, on the basis that they're "almost assault weapons".

If you want to see a country with reasonable gun control, take a look at Czechia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law_in_the_Czech_Republic#...

And to be clear, the reason why I call it "reasonable" is not just because it's very liberal, but also because they don't have problems with gun violence regardless - which, IMO, shows just how much all the bans are security theater that doesn't actually address the root causes of such violence.

Correct, the availability of guns does not equal violence with guns, one example is Switzerland where nearly every 18-30 yo male has a full automatic assault rifle (aka sturm-gewehr) under his bed, ammunition can be easily obtained at the shooting-range, and nearly no crime is done with it, the illegal obtained handguns are the much bigger problem, and talking about suicide (which i don't see as a criminal act, but a lost chance to help) i think it's much better to shoot you at home then to jump in front of trains.

Switzerland is a common talking point, but the practice and culture of gun ownership there is very different, just one small example:

"People who've been convicted of a crime or have an alcohol or drug addiction aren't allowed to buy guns in Switzerland.

The law also states that anyone who 'expresses a violent or dangerous attitude' won't be permitted to own a gun.

Gun owners who want to carry their weapon for 'defensive purposes' also have to prove they can properly load, unload, and shoot their weapon and must pass a test to get a license."

https://www.businessinsider.com/switzerland-gun-laws-rates-o...

https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2018/0307/Switzerland...

Do these sound like the kinds of regulations that the NRA and typical 2A types could get behind? If not, then it seems to me they're not really interested in following a "Swiss model" and are just making a bad-faith argument based on the top line numbers.

FWIW, people who have been convicted of a felony, or are addicted to illegal drugs, are not allowed to buy guns in US, either.

But yes, they're generally more strict about who can own a firearm, as opposed to what firearms can be owned. Czechia is pretty similar. That was kinda my point.

I also have to note that "the NRA and typical 2A types" do not represent all pro-gun-minded people in US. For example: https://theliberalgunclub.com/about-us/stances-regarding-reg...

I wish that the non-NRA pro-gun people and organizations were a lot more vocal and got more airtime. In the absence of a clear "we like our guns but dislike the NRA and its politics" message, it's easy to wonder if there may be a sizable gun-owning population who doesn't actively support the NRA, but are perhaps privately grateful that it exists in a bad cop, end-justifies-the-means kind of way.

Well your are talking about the US, there is just pro or contra...let's change that first...like having NOT a 2 party system ;)

I wish we got more airtime! I think the reason why organizations like LGC do not, is because they don't really have much if any political clout in Democratic politics - primaries etc - the way NRA does on the right (Republican politicians jokingly refer to it as Never Re-elected Again, because of how much influence it has on the primaries).

>People who've been convicted of a crime or have an alcohol or drug addiction aren't allowed to buy guns in Switzerland.

Just the crime thing (more if your a driver etc) is being tested when entering military service..and in your service time you don't own the rifle, after service you can obtain it but it's getting refitted to half-auto. And yes the culture to guns is different and that was exactly my point, it's not the availability of guns but the culture too it, is it a sports thing like a bow and not a status/might/cowboy/survival-symbol.

BTW: It pretty much impossible to have a gun for self defense, the training is pretty hard (like police/security..i mean you shoot in public space...that's a bit more responsibility then to load/unload correctly) and you need a real point, like being a prosecutor for organized crime and being already threatened...otherwise impossible. BUT i remember in the past >20 years, nearly every jeweler had a license.

>As for Australian gun control, they banned all semi-autos - that's hardly within reason.

I'm Australian and I support a ban on semi-automatic guns, except for certain people (pest control, etc). I don't see why it's too much of a burden for a civilian with a gun to have to spend a second to cock it.

Maybe you've heard of Port Arthur, the event that motivated the ban?

>From the first shot, all of these events took approximately fifteen seconds, during which Bryant fired seventeen shots, killed twelve people, and wounded ten more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Port_Arthur_massacre_(Australi...

Maybe some of them would have survived if we slowed him down a bit.

"Slippery slope" is so overused that we forget the original analogy. It needs to have a pressure in one direction and very little to resist that pressure. That is, it has to have a slope and that slope has to be slippery.

In this particular case, it's a slipper slope on which we already have a ton of momentum.

It’s not a fallacy at all under Bayesian reasoning; it’s a very powerful heuristic.

One of the blog posts I'd like to write but probably never will is an examination of the logical fallacies that are fallacies under an Aristotelian, true/false view of the world, but are valid under a Bayesian point of view.

A simple one is that absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It's a "fallacy" because absence of evidence is correctly not proof of absence, so in an Aristotelian framework where something is either true or false, it is indeed a fallacy to claim that absence of evidence proves absence. However, from a Bayesian perspective it is indeed evidence, though one must be careful in how ones works the math to determine how strong that evidence is. Sometimes it's so weak as to be irrelevant, but sometimes it can be overwhelming.

Political leaders feel compelled to provide a “service” in which they “solve” societal problems. Not all problems can be solved across the board, however, so what happens is a sideways motion into violations of privacy in exchange for a visible “difference” in handling illegal behavior which was previously beyond the reach of law enforcement.

This fallacy is a direct result of the technologies developed and discussed here, so we’re all culpable for what has been already laid down. Maybe keeping this in mind with AI will help, but given corporate stakeholders, probably not.

Getting rid of patents would probably help.

With stuff like phones there's probably plenty of options for mass production of open source hardware modules purchasable from electronic hobbyist stores anonymously with cash which would allow anyone to build their own personal communicator with radio, SIM, wifi, quantum, etc modules.

The issue is that competitive mass production of many independent compatible modules would required a public description of an applied system that everyone can debate and discuss and agree to on technical merits, but people self-censor and don't want to share ideas for such applied systems online because they think some monopolist is going to patent everything in order to arbitrarily halt development for 20 years.

In order to achieve such a cultural shift it might be necessary to reform the religions.

There's no reason to assume that political actors pushing for this are acting in honest, mistaken good faith.

> Slippery slope is also a fallacy if you take one instance of a trend and then logically project it to an absurd extreme, but this is not what we're doing here. We're simply looking at the next obvious, logical, well-evidenced step, with plenty of people who obviously want this even if they are a bit too discreet to come right out and say it in public.

What makes it easy to oversell as a fallacy is that everything you described that defines it is subjective, and easily argued about. People disagree a lot on what's "absurd" or "obvious" or "well-evidenced."

I think Scott Alexander’s piece on slippery slopes and Schelling fences [1] does a nice job delineating between good- and bad-faith slippery slope arguments.

“Slippery slopes legitimately exist wherever a policy not only affects the world directly, but affects people's willingness or ability to oppose future policies.”

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Kbm6QnJv9dgWsPHQP/schelling-...

Another good reference is Eugene Volokh's "The Mechanisms of the Slippery Slope": https://www2.law.ucla.edu/volokh/slippery.pdf

Thank you; this was catharsis.

The amount of times someone decries any argument as a slippery slope fallacy based only on the merit that we are trying to figure out a trend is... far too common and it just really upsets you, yah know?

Great post.

Connecting motive and opportunity is not a fallacy

It's not a fallacy as we have the whole human history of governance to point at and show how similar overreaches for power have always happened with governments and why the bill of rights should present in spirit even in day to to day goings on where privacy is a concern. Apple acting as a proxy for government is just as bad as the government doing it. Slipery slope indeed.

Agree. People, especially from what I see, less socially savy people who need a fool-proof way of trying to win by force any discussion, nowadays have been using logical fallacies and logical soundness of an argument as the ultimate way to win an argument which is BS. There is a reason why our brain evolved to use probability and make logical fallacies to form judgements. Granted, it doesn't work all the time, but it does work A LOT.

Example: Ad hominem - true, often people start attacking the person in order to escape the argument altogether, and because they have no good counterpoint. But again, this just shows lack of social intelligence. Maybe, we cannot counter-argument that person, but we show that they have ulterior motives, that they are a bad person, and whatever they're cooking, even if it seems ok by their current words, and I can't refute their well thought out position and explain my intuition, he's going to do something bad really soon. So, don't listen to him.

Logical fallacies are useful to be known, but they lately tend to be overused as the end all of "you're making a logical fallacy therefore you fail."

Any logical argument which is inductive is technically fallacy. The way people use the phrase "fallacy" as a checkmate in online discussions, but this ignores the fact that all empirical study is fallacious strictly.

It's right to be critical of the slippery slope argument, except that you can take a look at history and see how even in western governments in "free" societies have spied on those who challenge the status quo. I think we're right to be skeptical of surveillance as there is a proven track record of this kind of behavior from governments and corporations.

Take a look at a law that's being proposed in Canada right now. It includes allowing the government to request take downs for a broad number of reasons including otherwise legal speech that they consider to be offensive, data retention, what essentially amounts to a national firewall etc.

Cory Doctorow, who is from Canada originally, has a good write up on it: https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/11/the-canada-variant/#no-ca...

It is coming, and there is nothing we can do about it.

There's a chilling feeling watching this all unfold, as our freedoms get taken away and we're powerless to do anything other than complain on a programming themed social media website.

We'll be labelled as conspiracy theorists, wackos, nutjobs, unintegratable people.

That meme you shared with your friend in a private chat? Sorry, was a bit too anti-establishment for our tastes.

Alternatives are already being built and released, both hardware and software.

There will simply be more divide between know-how people who can save their freedom (tech people, friends, family) and the rest who get left behind.

Now, if we get to China and North Korea levels of authoritarianism and people start snitching on each other, then that's a whole other problem :-)

Until Jeri Ellsworth MacGyvers together a way to make Ryzens with some sand and an Easy-Bake Oven, we are at the mercy of the chip manufacturers, all of whom would gladly add spyware to their chips' must-have-in-order-to-boot firmware with minimal arm twisting from the USG/CCP, if that.

And President Biden has already started urging people to report extremists to the goverment.

That isn't going to happen. Jeri Ellsworth is fantastic at what she does but there are some hard to get around physical limits in terms of material purity and once you get to a certain degree of integration that pretty much guarantees a yield of 0 until you spend a very large amount of money.

Then we will always be beholden to large chipmakers who will crumple to governments at the drop of a hat and implement whatever spyware they desire on-die.

Not necessarily. But it is a hard problem to solve. If you can't trust complex hardware your options are limited to using simpler systems where a part that behaves in an undefined way could still be detected.

It's incredible to me that what's unfolding in the crypto and decentralization worlds is met with such harsh criticism on HN.

There are absolutely establishment forces at work on HN, both overtly and covertly.

Even in crypto. Most crypto is not anonymous.

I think that "nothing we can do" is an overstatement.

Open-source media players do exist. Projects like VLC have seen worse times when they were banned because of the DVD-decoding ability, for instance.

Hardware is harder, but dumb enough devices keep existing. Industrial displays, simple audio tracts on hobbyist computer boards, etc. Such devices either has no ability to host surveillance processing, or at least can't do so covertly.

Of course, mass consumer devices are not like that. Well, know your risks.

> and there is nothing we can do about it

Have a look at the website where the article is published.

Display devices do this, but for advertising targeting, not copyright violation right now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_content_recognition

Detecting copyright violation would need some sort of license info side channel so your TV knew what subscriptions, what digital copies, what BluRays, etc, you owned. Fortunately that's basically an impossible thing to wrangle currently, but if things like Blu-Rays go away it starts to be more feasible ("Oh, you're watching this show in 8K? Please connect your Netflix account to verify your access.")

Once the technical capability is there, how can we best stop it? That's where I don't have good answers.

Possibly the only thing unique about what Apple is doing is that they announced it.

> Detecting copyright violation would need some sort of license info side channel so your TV knew what subscriptions, what digital copies, what BluRays, etc, you owned.

An anti-piracy scheme that respected legitimate use would need this. History suggests that breaking existing media so that you have to buy (or rent) new copies of the same content over and over may be seen as a feature rather than a bug.

There is a DRM scheme that uses fingerprinting to detect unauthorized play (Cinavia), but it requires the player to implement the detection.

In practice this just means you can't play ripped movies using blu-ray players or Sony devices like Playstations.

You don't need a licensing side channel if you just detect watermarks from pirated/leaked recordings.

> Detecting copyright violation would need some sort of license info side channel so your TV knew what subscriptions, what digital copies, what BluRays, etc, you owned.

Did you know that there is ethernet running over HDMI already?

As this blocklist issue gains increased contemplation lets not forget that this is a "new feature". Lets consider the silent remote access subterfuge that has become known as "software updates".

Therefore, as this is a "new feature", 1. it does not apply to older computers, particularly ones that are not remotely acessible by others to install their opaque "updates" and 2. on newer computers these lists can only be dynamic if the owner allows "software updates".

The moral of the story is (a) not all "new features" are ones the computer owner may want, and (b) older computers have value, if only becoause they lack the bad stuff that greedy, manipulative, overreaching "tech companies" are building into new ones.

There is nothing wrong with updates so long as they are granular1, transparent and optional2. It is the owner's computer and the owner has a license to the software installed on it at the time of purchase. Any party wishing to install new software on the owner's computers should need the owner's permission. Owners should have a reasonable option to deny such permission and to review and install updates themselves, or to reject individual proposed "new features".

1 Here "granular" means avoiding a situation where the user has to install a feature that she does not want in order to get a feature she does want.

2 Manual installation of updates should always be possible.

This assumes the base software and its updates are both secure. Considering the velocity of development and complexity of modern software I don't think that's ever true of general purpose devices.

Why do you hate slippery slope arguments? They tend to be right. It’s why we have the saying - the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Edit: rather than “tend to be right”, I should have said can be right given the right argument and evidence.

The problem is that one man's hell is another man's paradise.

Gun-free America, strong covid public health policies, "hate speech", device surveillance, etc ... you name the slippery slope and you'll find at the bottom of the slope that it's hell for some people and paradise for others. Some people prefer highly authoritarian governments that manage (and minimize) life risk and others prefer hands off governments with self-managed risk.

The GOOD news is that there is no One World Government, so people are able to buy their transfer to another country to better fit their definition of paradise.

The BAD news is that there are so many government options that it will be hard to find a country that will fit you perfectly and some countries tend to overreach their borders very far so that you cannot escape their tyranny even if you move. The WORSE news is that even if they're able to find a country that fits them better, they still need to invest a lot of money and time to move (if they get in at all) and leave their family, friends and home behind.

Seriously, moving to a different country is hardly an option. In nearly all cases, fighting to keep your country good is your best bet.

Some people are born in societies that overwhelmingly hold opposite views to their own. In these cases, escaping outweighs staying since they have no chance of seeing them change during their lifetimes

I specifically didn't say it's never an option - if you don't have anything to hold you back or if your country is no longer livable, escaping might be your only option. My point is, this is more of a very last resort rather than something you just do.

For the vast bulk of people, you may as well suggest they move to a different planet.

The even worse problem with this line of thought is the econ-101 conclusion - that they must be OK with things if they don't demonstrate otherwise by voting with their feet. (Not ascribing that assertion to the parent.)

Yep. You’ve found one of the true purposes of immigration law. As with barriers to free competition among employers in the market for employees acting to suppress wages to benefit companies, so with nation states in their control of citizens immigration allowing for higher repression and exploitation of various forms.

As a native English speaker, I'm having a lot of trouble parsing your comment.

This is an interesting theory, but it falls apart upon contact with reality.

The vastly overwhelming majority of immigration barriers in the world keep people out of other countries, not keep people in them.

The motivation behind those barriers is, broadly speaking, in keeping out moochers and undesirables, not "Actively helping some country on the other side of the world repress its citizenry."

You'll be hard-pressed to find people who support strict immigration controls for the latter reason. You don't have to look hard to find supporters of them for the former reason.

You don’t think both reasons have been important? How about the eastern block during the Cold War?

I bet my rulers in the USA are happy that the EU makes it difficult for our people to move there. On the other hand I am certain our populace mostly thinks about keeping “the other out” sure.

Cannot both things hold on their own time and place, and depending on where the person holding the view sits?

Mexico’s ruling class is likely glad for our immigration law, as it keeps their populace pinned in. Economic issues always cut two ways, and the press will stoke emotion about only one of the two, for some reason.

We might not have a world government on paper, but governments around the world tend to be largely on the same page. Those that aren't following the lead of the world hegemony have an unfortunate tendency to get invaded, have uprisings of dubious origins, or other inconveniences like assassination[1]. Considering how long that list is, I don't think it's unfair to assume there's many more subtle instances where foreign governments decided to cooperate that we don't even know about.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...

Authoritarianism doesn't only swing in the liberal direction. Until the last generation most authoritarian policies were of the conservative sort.

And with regards to this specific debate, being tough on crime and (largely unnecessary conspiracy level) fear over pedophilia are both conservative darlings.

The 2nd amendment has typically been the only love of conservatives.

Where were they when the police illegally searched us in dozens of ways, or when free speech was limited to easy to ignore "free speech zones"?

They've only clamoured to defend free speech once the right to freely abuse weaker social classes was at risk of being taken away.

What's at risk of being taken away is the right of weaker groups to abuse stronger ones, at least to some degree.

Stronger ones always have and always will abuse weaker ones. It's pretty much a tautology. Freedom of speech and classical liberalism in general is the only defense the weak have.

You can choose gun control, universal healthcare and fight device surveillance.

You know, that's called... Europe.

Europe's privacy protections only seem to apply to what companies can do. Their governments seem to be perfectly happy with your privacy being invaded as long as they're the ones doing it.

Democratic governments doing sucks, because they shouldn't. In the cade of a democracy we still have elections as a way to change policy.

Im case of companies based in other countries there is not even that, there is basically nothing I can do, as a EU citizen, to prevent companies from spying at me. Not even voting. I can refuse using that companies hardware or services, which is hard enough with the likes of FANG or MS.

This is absolutely not true. The privacy protections in Europe apply to companies and governments alike, to the great chagrin of our police forces and the intelligence services.

False. Not even the goverment can snoop on comms unless a judge orders it.

> Right now it is effectively impossible for a consumer to buy a TV that doesn't include a computer capable of this.

Digital Signage Displays come to the rescue, although they cost more and some are starting to put Android inside, which however can be kept offline as the device would work merely as a display. The upside is that they're designed to work 18/7 to 24/7 and won't easily break like cheaper Smart TVs; setting up a wall of screens in a mall can be a real pain in the ass if every month some guy needs to climb up there and swap the one that died because of bad capacitors etc. That stuff must last or it becomes a huge waste of money.

Then the necessary tuner can be either bought stand alone (and kept unconnected), or enclosed in a Linux/Kodi mini-PC in the form of a cheap USB dongle. https://linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB-T2_USB_Devices

The result can be bulky and probably Grandpa wouldn't welcome it, but for technical inclined users, the level of freedom and security that can be achieved is worth the effort.

And, even beyond the improved quality, they'll cost a lot more than a "smart" TV, because the "smart" TV is (likely?) subsidized by whomever gains access to your media stream.

This is possible, although economies of scale also play a role here; they probably sell like a thousand Smart TVs for each signage display. I like to think however that for that higher price I'm actually buying a better durable product that will pay in the long run: 4K will last for a while, and by keeping things separated, other potential weak points (incompatibility with new formats or standards) are left to the tuner/mini PC, which would cost a lot less than the screen to change, or possibly nothing in case of software update.

> If we forget, no other forgetting will ever happen. Everything will be remembered. Everything you read, all through life, everything you listened to, everything you watched, everything you searched for.

-- Eben Moglen, https://benjamin.sonntag.fr/en/2012/moglen-at-republica-free...

Sadly the “display devices” ship sailed a long time ago. Smart TVs were phoning this stuff home way back in 2013: https://doctorbeet.blogspot.com/2013/11/lg-smart-tvs-logging...

Of course that was just file names and TV tuner/input metadata like channel numbers, not even MusicBrainz/Shazam-style fingerprinting like they would probably be capable of these days with beefier SoCs and more widespread always-on connectivity. Files-on-USB are no longer “en vogue” anyway with everyone and everything moving to streaming services where the surveillance is built right in by definition. Every time I watch something on Netflix/Hulu/Disney they’re watching me right back even if it’s ostensibly for my benefit e.g. for more accurate recommendations.

Well, the good news is that the vast majority of those monitors and TVs need a WIFI connection, which is optional to set up. However, unfortunately, we're on the cusp of devices having their own permanent mobile phone network connection. Rozzie can confirm.

All they need is flip a few bytes in the software and all newly sold screens only work if they're registered with an active, unbanned and non-anonymous account and were online in the last 12 hours.

And then you won't just get randomly banned from Facebook or Google with no human support staff to talk to, you'll also lose access to half your media devices. This is already true for Oculus/Facebook (and probably some others).

> all newly sold screens only work if they're registered

The other side of this pincer movement is to mandate that all devices which access the internet must send a remote attestation of their boot process, to check that you haven't "tampered" with them by installing your own OS or jailbreaking them.

No, they 100% have services that buy data from SmartTV manufacturers like Vizio and sells this data to advertisers to help track attribution and campaign effectiveness.

A big one is iSpot.tv, the TV will use a fingerprint of your commercial and determine when/where it was watched, and help you tie back the attribution of a customer that visited your site.

> slippery slope arguments

There is a stronger 2nd argument, but it's buried towards the end:

> Now imagine an Internet of Snitches doing it badly. It’s easy if you try. Some vendors already do a bad job of keeping customer data private and will continue that track record, so you can expect public leaks of databases that have flagged suspected criminals. Other vendors will write bad machine learning algorithms (or biased ones) leading to false positives and ruined lives.

No slippery slope is needed, CSAM alone is extremely sensitive, a false accusation is ruinous... if automated client side CSAM scanning becomes a wide spread practice with Apple leading the way, it will be an "AI" of the flies... Apple has also demonstrated that it's willing to use ML as an unquestionable source of truth before with it's in store security, using facial recognition which is blatantly wrong to prosecute the innocent.

I had a pretty shocking moment recently. I bought a cheap simple Chinese 55" TV when I moved into my new place in Hong Kong recently. Worked fine for 6 months. I don't connect it to the internet or cable, it's just a screen in front of a few HDMI devices (Roku + Switch). It recently started randomly playing 30s video ads every time I turn it on. I can't figure out how it's getting them, because I've never connected it to the wifi (nor would I even know how to given the menus are all in Chinese). Does it have its own LTE connection?

Anyways, this has got me pretty annoyed and I'm thinking of tossing it on principle.

Some devices will scan for open wifi networks in the area and connect to those if you don't give them your own network. It's also entirely possible they have deals with ISPs to use the router you rent from them on a separate network (some routers in the US broadcast a 'public' paid wifi network that's separate from yours that anyone can connect to and doesn't count toward your data).

It probably has a built in WiFi unity, before tossing it you could open it up and try to find the antennae, they are usually just short bits of wire. Snip those off and see if there is a factory reset option, that should 'cure' it.

> it's just a screen in front of a few HDMI devices

Internet over HDMI.

Governments already are. The question is what safeguards you have against your own government doing this.

If we weren’t worried about government overreach, we wouldn’t be worried about CSAM scanning.

In another thread someone suggested that the 4th Amendment might be a protection in the US. I am doubtful about this, but I am interested in what actual law might help. Breaking up large companies doesn’t seem likely to protect us from the government.

> What happens when governments start distributing lists of hashes belonging to "subversive" material

Soon for any device containing a computer: "We are just including this hash check feature so we can do business with China, don't worry it'll be disabled by default for western countries"

It’s not a fallacy when we can see the slope being actively oiled up right now. Hate speech laws and policies being used to target dissenting political opinions, tech companies using their power to put their thumb on the scale in elections, health emergencies to curb basic civil liberties, etc.

And generally any law and policy should be looked at with the optic of how is it going to be used in the worst possible bad faith because ultimately it will. I remember the UK using its anti-terrorist act powers against Iceland during the 2008 financial crisis.

I wouldn't worry about purely display devices like TVs sending hashes. They don't retrieve the entire file, and hashing streamed data has challenges that tend to break the active stream. They would need to have a large enough sample of the streamed media, and most importantly it isn't illegal to watch pirated materials, only to distribute or publicly show them.

The television manufacturers simply don't have an economic interest in trying to do so when they can easily collect data regarding subscription based app use. The cops asking them to do so wouldn't change the fact it would cost the company money to implement and maintain, and no real pay off.

There certainly is a slope to worry about here, but the slope is in the direction of corporate profits. Anything that doesn't result in profits is a slope up hill and nobody wants to be the one pushing that particular rock up hill.

This has already been happening since 2012, just for blu ray players so far rather than within the TV itself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia

> How long until media players and display devices are hashing all of our media to check for copyright violations.

Heard Sony TVs doing it right NOW.

That's not even a slippery slope, the ps3 already did that (refused to play video files of Sony pictures movies)

Got any more info on that? I don't recall the PS3 refusing to play movies.

It seems the system is called cinavia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinavia

I specifically remember it refusing to play an mp4 of a spiderman movie.

Your Smart TV is already doing this to sell targeted adverts aimed at you based on what you watch.

A friendly reminder/suggestion to people looking for a TV:

Sceptre makes consumer 4K "dumb" TVs upto 75". Walmart sells them.

Thank you so much!

I remember reddit being stumped by this question years ago.

I heard in some other HN thread that the quality isn't that great on these. Was that an issue for you? I looked into NEC monitors, but they're a bit pricey. Does anyone know of other options?

I don't own one, sorry :-/

I bought a Sceptre TV. Quality seems fine, but I'm no videophile. It could be that when displaying certain shades of blue, the display is four or five nits dimmer than spec, but I wouldn't know if it was.

Iiyama? Assuming monitor cuts it.

Their TV-sized screens are filed under "large format display".

We have five of these in the office. They're pretty good, and work well from a reliability perspective. These have seen some pretty heavy use in the last two years, one had a power supply issue in the first 90 days that was fixed under warranty, and otherwise they all worked flawlessly.

They're 4K, pretty large and the price was surprisingly low for a screen this large and of this quality.

Sadly, "dumb" TV's are more expensive.

You can also get a "smart" TV, and use it as a dumb one - i.e. never connect it to anything, and only use its AV inputs.

If you buy a "smart" TV, then you're just supporting the market for "smart" TVs.

I prefer to support the market for "dumb" TVs.

Also, if you purchase a "smart" TV, then you either have to open it up and remove the WiFi card (and deal with any anoying messages), or hope no guest ever connects it to anything.

The problem is that if you want 4K, you pretty much don't get any "dumb" TV options of decent quality.

It is only a slippery slope fallacy if your argument relies on sure escalation alone.

But if you have other factors, like obvious corporate ambitions to fight piracy or to protect their industry and states ambitions to fight memes that exposes or embarrasses their policies, it isn't a fallacy at all and just another indication.

I'm reminded of that story of how airline ticketing systems assumed names ending with the suffix "*MR" had an honorific appended and so cleverly stripped it.

Cue the Arabic name "Amr"

The thing is with this types of systems that are deeply ingrained in our lives, we create the possibility to make people's live profoundly miserable because of an "edge case"

And for that individual who is many times removed from the reason why their life is being wrecked by software it can be next to impossible to even feed back that their life is a misery, let alone get recourse.

WRT to copyright violations, I expect the same thing that has always happened will continue happening. Pirates will stay 3 steps ahead and only legal consumers will be harmed.

> How long until media players and display devices are hashing all of our media to check for copyright violations. Right now it is effectively impossible for a consumer to buy a TV that doesn't include a computer capable of this.

Not my area, but wasn't this part of the point of HDMI... So, the slope seems slippery and pretty vertical to me

You can just not connect your TV to the internet. If you must, you can firewall it to prevent it from connecting to unwanted hosts.

Regarding media players, VLC is open source. Is anyone even using proprietary media players any more?

It's pretty easy to build a device that connects to the internet without you knowing about it, with all the mobile networks around us..

It's also pretty easy to take it apart and remove the SIM card and/or disconnect the antenna. Also mobile data is expensive. Even more expensive if you want something that works in more than one country.

I think the only reason we haven't seen the MPAA/RIAA suing people already, is the backlash from the crazy p2p lawsuits a while ago.

Just search HN for TV, and you'll see plenty of companies uploading screen shots and file lists and who knows what else.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Slippery slope argument are a very good thing when talking about abuse of power, because history proved again and again that potential very often becomes reality: humans are opportunistic greedy creatures.

We absolutely need to address slipery slopes for all things that are related to freedom and democracy.

>How long until media players and display devices are hashing all of our media to check for copyright violations.

It has been rumored back in the day that WMP 10-12 would be like that.

I can easily imagine American Media rubbing their hands with glee as they hash every pirate torrent and get it on the "to scan for" list for Microsoft.

> Right now it is effectively impossible for a consumer to buy a TV that doesn't include a computer capable of this.

I buy monitors or projectors, no TVs for me.

Playing a file without a license is not a copyright violation though

Maybe you should stop buying devices that undermine your freedom.

Smart TVs are already doing that for viewership metrics

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