Amazon to remove more content that violates rules from cloud service – sources
reuters.com
reuters.com
It’s the digital equivalent of having cocaine stuffed in your cars’ back seat. Doesn’t matter how it got there.
The so called "equal" justice truly sucks. I once saw government trying to deny legal aid to person X on a basis that the offence is minor and the risk to be imprisoned is low, never mind the fact that having criminal record can completely screw person's life later on.
I served on a jury where a driver was being prosecuted for possession with intent to distribute for reasons nobody understood. The passenger, who wasn’t known to the driver, in the back seat confessed at the scene and plead guilty months earlier. It was obvious that something hinky was up.
In this case, the jurors were all disgusted and found the guy not guilty. One of the jurors was a retired US Attorney who was upset enough that he submitted a complaint to the bar association.
Justice was served, but going through a trial is a life altering experience.
(previously worked there, not speaking on their behalf or from private knowledge)
Tricky part is everyone fills in the blank differently.
You are absolutely right. My comment was ment as a joke.
Also, I worked as a vendor for Walmart, too. They made it clear they didn't do business with vendors who were on AWS... so we "became multi cloud", but the stuff we hosted for them was TOTALLY on AWS.
The laws that are passed today to “protect your from terrorists” will help the government, tomorrow, to control you, and the corporations, the day after, to extract more money from you.
So please be careful what laws you advocate for.
Back to multiple offline hard disks stored in different locations.
Keeping offline disk backup in sync is inconvenient, neither is more durable or secure than cloud (assuming encryption and distant off-site copies).
If Tahoe-LAFS or SiaCoin was much easier to use, e.g. with phone backup setup in a few clicks, then simple family/community distributed "clouds" would be no-brainer.
Maybe we should stop trying to silence people we disagree with.
In reality, the Talibans main export is heroine, and they get that heroine by enslaving local populaces in rural southern Afghanistan where it can grow easily and the people are defenseless economically much less educationally or physically. They do so to attain power and spread their influence to one day establish a wider Sharia based Islamic State.
And of course, one day, it will be abused.
But I get one company may want to avoid being the one hosting it.
Note, though, that the correct idea you expressed that the Taliban are a terrorist organization would be self-contradictory to anyone who defines terrorism ahistorically as non-state or unlawful violence to achieve political aims, since now the Taliban are the Afghan state and are legalizing their terrorism.
In case a citation is needed for the content of any of my comments on this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban
> Amazon made headlines in the Washington Post last week for shutting down a website hosted on AWS that featured propaganda from Islamic State that celebrated the suicide bombing that killed an estimated 170 Afghans and 13 U.S. troops in Kabul last Thursday. They did so after the news organization contacted Amazon, according to the Post.
The problem is not to remove those, the problem is to do that outside of a proper legal process.
Because it's easy to say "yeah, ISIS are terrorists, remove their forum", but the word "terrorist" has been abused to much you pretty much guaranteed it's going to be the justification to remove "content we don't like".
Data protection software has flagged me and caused major headaches because I have been in posesssion of "Canadian social security numbers". Blatantly false of course, my datasets with gigabytes of telco data contains many number combinations with an unfathomable number of permutations. Those false positives have been extremely annoying and a huge work to clear my name from at work. Needless to say I noped the fuck out of that company after enough of it.
Will this AWS functionality become similar? Are they going to inspect all data at rest?
Okay what about if I encrypt all data at rest then? RDS, Postgres can encrypt for instance.
I have many questions.
Start buying hardware.
From TFA :
> When AWS Trust & Safety is made aware of abusive or illegal behavior on AWS services, they act quickly to investigate and engage with customers to take appropriate actions," AWS said in a statement.
> "AWS Trust & Safety does not pre-review content hosted by our customers. As AWS continues to expand, we expect this team to continue to grow," it added.
My bet is that they'll end up banning the wrong customer(s) and gain a reputation for being an unreliable partner compared to other hosts, excited to watch that happen. There's also a huge risk in my mind that catering to Twitter mobs and politicians making regulatory threats will become normal as a result of this, but who knows what the zeitgeist will be in 5 years. I'll be remembering this forever though.
If the Vikings in Essex had a well-developed liberal theory, for example, we'd have no idea of it, because none of their writings survive. (There were lots of slave graves, though, so they probably didn't put it into practice any more than Jefferson did, if they did have it.) There are some less depressing archaeological finds like Çatal Höyük, whose setup suggests hunter-gatherer-like egalitarianism, but we really have no idea what their philosophy was or what kinds of freedoms they enjoyed or valued; by the time cuneiform was invented, Çatal Höyük had been abandoned for 2500 years, after 2200 years of prosperity.
But there's really nothing resembling liberalism in classical Rome or Greece or medieval Islam or ancient Egypt or the Vedas, and it's quite a stretch to read liberalism into the Mozi or the Laozi.
I don't think it's such a sudden collapse, though. Liberalism has always been just one ideological current among many in the US, and there has never been a time when the US fully lived up to its ideals. Indentured servitude, chattel slavery, the Trail of Tears, the Comstock Act, Prohibition, imprisoning people for pacifism, the Indian schools, J. Edgar Hoover's deep state, the draft, Jim Crow, the imperialist conquest of the Philippines, the Chinese Exclusion Act, mass imprisonment, the Sonny Bono copyright extension act, the plea-bargaining system, Obama's mass deportations, the Comics Code, civil forfeiture, the FCC granting local media oligopolies, and the MPAA ratings system are all incompatible with liberalism, as I see it.
But I do think the last 25 years have seen a decisive turn to the Right in this sense; the main political debate in the US is no longer between liberalism and conservatism, but between progressivism and conservatism, both of which are opposed to liberalism.
In a liberal society, people can find information about birth control, move to the city, and escape bad marriages, three factors that seem to substantially cut down on procreation. Historically, liberalization has been closely associated with reductions in birth rates, though not exclusively so (Iran and PRC being two illiberal countries that achieved low birth rates recently.)
And it's one where you can go BASE jumping, try to invent new kinds of flying machine, put a pulsejet on your bicycle, improvise your own shotgun, or take the medicines that you think will be best for you, all of which are pretty bad for survival if you make a lot of bad decisions. Like me.
Moreover, it's not clear that liberalism is compatible with democracy; democracy might inevitably succumb to a Pisistratus or a Robespierre, which certainly isn't liberal. Ultimately, i think, liberalism cannot survive the existence of unlimited government power, even if it is democratic. Sooner or later it's two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner. (Though, as the handling of the covid epidemic in the US demonstrates, sometimes all three vote to huff spray paint for dinner.) The Mozi begins:
> To enter upon rulership of a country but not preserve its scholars will result in the downfall of the country. To see the worthy but not hasten to them will make the country's ruler less able to perform his duties. To the unworthy is due no attention. The ignorant should remain without inclusion in the state's affairs. To impede the virtuous and neglect the scholarly and still maintain the survival of the state has yet to be, indeed.
Finally, most of idiocy is non-genetic. Idiots have always outnumbered the smart and always will, because humans are just sort of inherently pretty idiotic. So it doesn't matter that much who's doing the procreating.
Either they pandered to the masses or realized that there's no way a liberal society with an uneven mix of tolerant and intolerant people can survive.
I like to hope the future of humanity is good, I help individuals, but I would really not mind if millions die in a nuclear fire.
Including me, of course - if anyone wants, you can kill me anytime. Alternatively, I have some ideas about a certain type of drone.
I am old enough to remember in the 1990's that a lot of people believed that video games promoted violence.
I believe that once a technology becomes widespread enough to become infrastructure it needs to be regulated to allow fair access to it. See examples of railroads, phone lines, etc.
Would SMS providers like twilio be considered the same, built on top of a regulated industry?
This isn't quite like citizens lobbying the government to restrict media. This is a private storage company adjusting their policies on what they allow to be stored on their servers.
- VM hosting
- DNS hosting
- ISP
Where do we draw the line? I'd rather none of the above to be able to refuse service based on thought policing.
People who didn't like twitter's policies were smugly told "go start your own twitter". So now we had these Parler guys on AWS, they actually did it, oops, turns out starting your own twitter is also not ok.
I hate to defend Parler, but like you said, first they come for..
I really don't see how there could have been any other response. Twitter is a private company holding private assets and letting people use them in exchange for showing those people ads. What kind of free society would tell them that they can't decide what kind of content people get to put on their stuff? Should I be allowed to write KKK speeches on my work computer?
Unless we're going to declare social media a utility[0], what people are asking for is basically to have the government tell you what to put on your website.
[0] Which I personally think is ridiculous and entitled, but I'm open to the argument.
I personally would prefer that they didn't all live on Twitter, but they do and so here we are.
The powers used to cease it was emergency powers granted two years earlier to stop terrorist content from circulation online.
The domain was released eventually but the damage had already been done.
4k plus new users a day loose access their health information.
Before this I always assumed the DNS layer was untouchable considering many deplorable websites still have a domain. But this protection only applies to certain top level domains. .org for example
Did that lobby actually achieve anything? Like, one peer reviewed study that demonstrate causality?
It's been what, 30 years now.
> Like, one peer reviewed study that demonstrate causality?
Evidence is only weakly relevant to policy.
And you know what happened? Exactly what Amazon is doing now. The industry moved to regulate itself. Games now have ratings on them. Amazon is taking those steps right now. I wouldn't be surprised if you don't soon see the same standards applies to most other providers.
I'll preface this with the fact that I served in the war on terror. I don't think AWS should. The government is the arbiter of what is legal and not legal. This whole concept that people have built on over decades that "free speech means you won't be oppressed by the government but not that you won't face 'consequences'" is an absolute farce. If our "values" were ever equally enforced then the day Trump was thrown off of Twitter for his amping of radical right wingers that caused an insurrection then Malang Khostay would've been thrown off as well for being the actual spokesperson of the Taliban.
It is the government's job to determine minimally viable standards and attempt to compel enforcement, as soon as you make "values" the arbiter people stop baking cakes for gay people and think it's okay.
By that definition there is free speech in North Korea.
It's called "pulling up the ladder behind you". The US did it with patents - for tens of decades the US just ignored patent law (read up on why Hollywood was founded). Once they had enough patents, they started rigorously enforcing it around the world so other countries would have to pay a tax for using knowledge.
Most large corporations today are where they are because they were not tightly regulated when small, once they got big they pushed for regulations that were onerous for small companies, hence introducing an artificial barrier that prevents competitors to them from starting off the same way they did.
The "#MeToo" movement looked like much of the same as well - a lot of young men and women in Hollywood got their start from the casting couch. By taking away that option (not that they succeeded, as far as I know) they ensure that there are fewer younger and more attractive competitors.
"Pull up the ladder behind you" is an old and viable strategy that applies almost anywhere there is competition, and the intention is to reduce competition by making sure that future competition cannot use the same easy channels to success that the ladder-puller did.
What, no, that's insane.
The theory I hear on here often is that they're trying to avoid regulation. I don't know if that's true but whatever they're doing, it's to avoid exposure potential costs. They've calculated that the lost business is worth less than the cost of whatever risks they forsee. Either that or they have some extremely powerful ideologues in control.
F-ck no. It's because they don't want to end up in the news, getting called out for hosting that stuff. From the OP:
> Activists and human rights groups are increasingly holding not just websites and apps accountable for harmful content, but also the underlying tech infrastructure that enables those sites to operate, while political conservatives decry the curtailing of free speech.
Last week there was a Washington Post article about how they were hosting an ISIS website that celebrated the recent Kabul suicide bombing, and earlier this year they were getting flak for hosting Parler. They probably want to prevent that from happening again, or at least have something better to say when they get in the news for it.
“ Better preparation against certain types of content could help Amazon avoid legal and public relations risk.
"If (Amazon) can get some of this stuff off proactively before it's discovered and becomes a big news story, there's value in avoiding that reputational damage,"
That said from the article it says they're primarily going to be focused on proactively identifying things like terrorist groups versus sifting through customer data. That doesn't sound too bad but we'll see how it plays out.
If you choose to decide what stays on your platform and what is removed, you should be responsible for the stuff that stays there. If you want to offload the liability to users/posters/commenters/..., then you should not be able to have agendas and decide what is removed (except for illegal stuff of course).
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/12/publisher-or-platform-...
> We’ll say it plainly here: there is no legal significance to labeling an online service a “platform” as opposed to a “publisher.” Yes. That’s right. There is no legal significance to labeling an online service a “platform.” Nor does the law treat online services differently based on their ideological “neutrality” or lack thereof.
Imagine if Amazon actually does start using political criteria for hosting services, and bans journalists speaking out against torture? Or suppresses sites hosting videos of police brutality? How high on the horse would the EFF be in this position?
The EFF is correct to point out the legal situation in that there's no difference between a publisher and a platform etc. but this is going to get out of hand quickly as corporations start abusing their ability to filter data willy nilly.
I think it also runs counter to the spirit of Net Neutrality and frankly hypocritical in this context.
I don't trust for a moment that Verizon and A&T won't get into the business of messing with information as well to the extent that they have the power to do this.
Our roads and infrastructure generally remain free of interference unless there's something very illegal going on, we ought to maintain some of these practices on the internet itself.
Section 230 protections enhance free speech on the internet, via the safe harbor provisions that allow places like Twitter and HN to function. Without it, you'd have vastly fewer places to publish your thoughts.
Codifying a distinction between platform and publisher would require a place like HN to consider either shutting down comments and submissions entirely or abandoning any efforts at moderation. It would suck, royally.
This is just false.
'Codifying' distinctions between various services would give places like HN even more clear protections by defining the terms in which they operate.
230 is a recipe for disaster, it's completely the opposite of Net Neutrality and is creating a cold war for information control.
It gives cover for Verizon, Amazon etc. to do whatever they like whenever they like.
'Codifying' the status of the various systems would mean ensuring those in the 'Verizon' category could not filter for anything other than QoS, clarifying terms for those like Amazon, and even distinguishing between different kinds of platforms like Facebook/Twitter an HN.
If the tables were turned on the types of information banned by Amazon, there would be outrage. I can only imagine if Bezos were 'an old Trump buddy' fudding with various customers here and there, what the loudest voices would be saying.
There's nothing arbitrary about these various forms of content and information distribution platforms, it wouldn't be that hard at all to clear things up and ensure fair access.
Combined with a 'User Bill of Rights' (aka right to delete accounts, full transparency on data usage etc.) it would be tremendous progress.
The "freedom of speech means any and all speech has to be allowed" strawman doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It's perfectly possible to build a platform / publisher distinction where:
- Illegal speech is still illegal and can be rejected
- Speech irrelevant to the platform, like spam, verbal abuse, or demonstrably off-topic speech, can still be rejected by moderators while still permitting deplorable but legitimate speech.
So, no, it wouldn't be the ghastly, no moderation free-for-all that the anti-liberalism advocates try to scare people with.
A "platform" is the common name for a provider of an "interactive computer service" which is in fact contrasted with being a publisher.
Which isn't just a label you can accept or not, but a thing that you either are or aren't based on what you do.
The objection that they're pretending isn't valid, is that excessive editorial control sure looks like it violates the spirit of that distinction.
I suppose it's a great move if you hate science. They'll base their decisions on what some 'authority' has to say about it, and the whole point of science is the belief that some authority may not actually know the truth.
Also, I think, worth taking the sort of sceptical stance expressed in a Wired article [4] from 2019, What’s a Digital Bill of Rights Without Enforcement?, which points out that some players ostensibly backing digital rights are possibly wolves in sheep's clothing.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/28/americ...
[2] https://neeva.com/digital-bill-of-rights
[4] https://www.wired.com/story/whats-digital-bill-rights-withou...
What would be in such a digital bill of rights? (This is a bit vague for me to understand what you're necessarily advocating for)
I think such a thing is actually more important than the monopolizing issues of the FAANGS. Breaking them up might be a little nice, but as individuals we're beholden to the incredible gatekeeping of industry.
Your social graph should be yours.
Your photos should be yours
And recently, your health should be yours
The main pillars of a digital bill of rights would be the freedom to choose and portability.
Personal data is defined as any information related to an identified or identifiable natural person, i.e. much wider than your identity. photos, health and probably also social graph fall under it.
It was hard to understand just how much of it was pure hate for what the law represented or just people realizing that GDPR will affect their bottom line.
I block them all, and I've heard the British government is getting shot of them soon. They will not be missed.
There are limits to each of these. If you are suggesting that your vaccination status is yours alone to share, quite a few people will disagree with you, and for good reason. Even the bill of rights we do have has its limits when your rights encroach on the rights of others.
Due to regulations patients’ health data is very much still kept on paper or by individual doctors. Eventually we’ll have a single source- who gets to own that?
If a newspaper didn't want to publish your letter to the editor, they aren't forced to
Or if the largest ink and paper manufacturers collude to deny your newspaper the resources needed for printing? If the delivery unions refuse to deliver your newspaper?
You're right, it's not the being digital that's special about this.
I’m curious. I can see them not wanting to provide assistance to an illegal business, but what the reasoning behind denying a personal account?
Banks are terrified of gambling companies: they are one of the very few businesses where it is perfectly normal for a notable fraction of downstream customers to withdraw more money than they put in. Without ever having delivered any goods or billable services(!)
Is it any wonder online gambling has been such a magnet for money laundering?
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibits discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status, and disability. Are you saying the FHA is "dangerous to a free society" as others in that era did to try to overturn it? I certainly hope not.
It's sad to see a new generation of people unwittingly repeating old, discredited arguments once made by bigots.
I'm a fan of the FHA and its follow-ups. I'm also a fan of being able to decline to build a website for, say, the KKK.
Just have to accept that once in a while one of them will do something bad and the majority will vote to further restrict your and their own freedoms in hopes of better security, not realizing it wasn't a security issue in the first place.
This actually happened here in Argentina; Papel Prensa is the only newsprint company, so if they don't want to sell you newsprint, you aren't going to print a newspaper.
In my own experience, I am glad more and more social media are silencing conservative voices. We get to move to newer platforms where we don't need to put up with the brigading. Eventually the old ones will go the way of myspace.
I see Amazon web services going the same way.
Silencing voices is generally a big part of what conservatism is all about: in order to securely establish inherited privileges, it must silence whoever credibly criticizes them.
The same can be said for the modern Marxist movement, progressivism, and the social justice movement. Trying to paint the loss of liberty and liberalism as the fault of only one of the two big political parties is folly.
It is also remarkable that anywhere where the punishment isn't immediate death or concentration camp, some people will try to push back against silencing of other people, even at a risk to themselves.
To be conservative in america means to have progressive ideals but not woke ones.
In other words moderate.
When will it end?
Preventing someone from thoughts that violate?
Now we need to get the banks to close the accounts of the creators, the computer makers to stop selling hardware to them or brick it remotely and the utilities to disconnect them.
This would be much simpler if we had a list to put people on so that we could automate the steps.
Also, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
I remember from a few years ago a well-regarded BASE jumper's passionate post on Facebook about wingsuits killing people, after the wingsuit-related death of another well-regarded BASE jumper he knew. IIRC he used the earnest rhetorical device of saying that he was glad his friend died so publicly, because it would stop young people getting into the sport from using wingsuits, because they were unreasonably dangerous. There was a lot of debate back and forth about wingsuits stimulated by the post (which was its purpose), but I was shocked for a different reason.
Facebook deleted it, for saying that he was glad someone died. So now, the entire internet governed by the owner of the Washington Post.
The idea that the west is intrinsically superior to China in terms of freedom and censorship is a joke. Our army of censors is as big as theirs, and we share technologies and methods.
The best I can gather is that you're implying that _in practice_ the same level of censorship exists considering all actors involved? If that's the correct interpretation there is still a notable difference between what the government can coerce you to do, and what Facebook can coerce you. Isn't this why constitutional tenants (of freedom of speech) are important?
How is this a "solution"?
It's a solution to keep corporations that grow big enough to cause societal issues, having grown that big through utilizing society's resources, somewhat more accountable. There might be issues, but I'd suspect there to be more issues with the current solution: being "nothing."
Also firmly in bounds to insist we stay there and do it on a nightly basis, forever. Majority opinion of people with microphones.
But the other guys? On the other side of the fight? Completely unconscionable to host any of their speech. We don't encourage violence.