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304 pointswatchdogtimer153 comments

I love the Internet Archive, but they’re fighting the last war here. There will never be any scary, Orwellian ministry of truth in our timeline, because there’s no need for one when all the power is concentrated in a few oligopolistic platform providers whose risk appetite is such that deplatforming is the only acceptable measure when that appetite is exceeded.

Furthermore, the calls (for censorship) are coming from inside the house at this point. In a rush to combat genuine issues like health misinformation, even organizations like the ACLU have come to support platforms clamping down on speech - and certainly they have a point; these are private companies, not the government.

I don’t have any solutions to this, but the future to worry about is not what’s dramatized here. It’s something much tidier, less threatening, and more insidious.

Never is a long time, and the US is not the only country in the world.

"Australia gave police power to compel sysadmins into assisting account takeovers – so they plan to use it" https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/14/identify_and_disrupt_...

It’s surprising how many US citizens I meet throughout the world whose talking points are filled worth US solipsism. A recent example was a few days ago when, I had a discussion with a Texas “communist” who wanted to butt heads against the police force in a European city due to police brutality. I asked the person if he had checked up on police brutality cases in the city and he hadn’t. I’m amazed at their self confidence and world view.

I was in total disbelief when I found out that majority of British police force does not even carry a weapon. I am now watching British police drama “Line of Duty” and they show their “SWAT” outings and the amount of procedure around this is insane. The cherry on top is how they chase an extremely dangerous suspect in a Mercedes van. A van! Such a stark contrast with militarized SWAT teams in North America, their weapons, tactics, and vehicles.

Not only that but the police have refused to carry weapons multiple times here. Recent governments have attempted to approach the subject (with rumours of lobbying from large arms companies) but every time it's been taken to the police they have rejected the idea.

Yep. And while in the US we have coward cops who shoot people because they're "afraid," the UK has officers like the guy who charged multiple knife-wielding assailants with only a baton, while the armed response was en route.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/jun/28/policeman-fo...

I thought that was a stark contrast at the time, and that was before the current wave of protests over police violence in the US...

It is not, but US run services dominate in much of the western world, so western internet users have to abide by US rules.

China has a somewhat ministry like building https://archive.ph/ivtGK where "news reporting about topics which are sensitive to the CCP is distorted and often used as a weapon against the party's perceived enemies" according to Wikipedia.

You’re missing the point. Or perhaps, the messaging from this page on the Internet Archive is missing the point. The Archive saves and serves the content even after the deplatforming has occurred, regardless of whether the removal occurred due to a governmental thoughtcrime department or an oligopolistic private company. The fact that a private company (or companies) can do so in the first place with such great impact is an opportunity for disruption. The fact that is has already occurred is an opportunity for libraries like the Internet Archive.

ACLU should be granted copyright to all the badthink so they can DCMA places like TIA. There’s probably a bunch of president tweets on there causing indirection right now.

> The fact that a private company (or companies) can do so in the first place with such great impact is an opportunity for disruption. The fact that is has already occurred is an opportunity for libraries like the Internet Archive.

No, it isn't. What IA stores long-term is relevant to future generations, less so to us now. What matters for us is that you can censor anything on IA, retroactively, by updating robots.txt.

IA won't be able to capitalize on this opportunity for disruption until copyright law gets completely overhauled. I don't see this happening soon, as powers that be - both public and private - are all aligned in their interest to make IP protection even stronger.

Archvial libraries have rights under copyright law.

> that you can censor anything on IA, retroactively, by updating robots.txt.

IA claims to have fixed that, and it's been a couple years since I've caught them respecting robots.txt. If you have examples of them respecting robots.txt more recent than, say, 2018... citation please? This was a serious problem in the past, but I had hoped (and believed) it was no longer a thing.

(I'm deliberately avoiding saying "They don't do that anymore.", since it's a low-probability, high-impact event, and I may just not have encountered it, but complying with robots.txt would be a really vile thing for a supposed library to do.)

This.

Using robots.txt to retroactively block content is no longer effective.

IA will unpublish (but not delete) content on request. Email info@archive.org, the process is largely painless.

> IA will unpublish (but not delete) content on request.

As I said, I have yet to see that happen, and that would be a really vile thing for a supposed library to do.

Regardless of whether or not you personally have witnessed this, it is the Internet Archive's stated content removal policy:

Do you collect all the sites on the Web?

No, the Archive collects web pages that are publicly available. We do not archive pages that require a password to access, pages that are only accessible when a person types into and sends a form, or pages on secure servers. Pages may not be archived due to robots exclusions and some sites are excluded by direct site owner request.

...

What is the Wayback Machine's Copyright Policy?

The Internet Archive respects the intellectual property rights and other proprietary rights of others. The Internet Archive may, in appropriate circumstances and at its discretion, remove certain content or disable access to content that appears to infringe the copyright or other intellectual property rights of others. If you believe that your copyright has been violated by material available through the Internet Archive, please provide the Internet Archive Copyright Agent with the following information:...

https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360004716091-Wayb...

> and certainly they have a point; these are private companies, not the government.

No they do not. This 'argument' comes about because everyone's forgotten about why it is that we don't want government to infringe upon certain rights. It's not because governments have been granted some particular characterization by God, it's because government's are powerful, centralized organizations, with power most people, or small grassroots groups of people, cannot achieve.

In that sense, most corporations of today are way more powerful than governments of the past. Thus, they ought to be treated the same way, and we ought to demand the same rights from them as the government.

Just because you fill out articles of incorporation, doesn't make you suddenly immune to respecting individual rights.

> In that sense, most corporations of today are way more powerful than governments of the past. Thus, they ought to be treated the same way, and we ought to demand the same rights from them as the government.

This is one of the main reasons antitrust law was created. They ought not to be treated the same as government, they ought to be broken up and not allowed to be as powerful as government.

The power differential between govt and industry doesn’t seem to address the root issue, which is the power differential between individual humans and industry and/or govt.

If you imagine individuals at less power than government and industry today, then you take industry and cut their power in half, their power now sits closer to that of individuals than it did before.

That depends. What happens to the industry power? Does it go back to individuals or does it accrue to the government?

I agree. It's strange to me that a common reaction to the premise that Facebook is more powerful than government is to say, "welp, guess we need to codify our free speech rights within our new Facebook government" rather than "Facebook can't be allowed to be that powerful."

Well I agree with you, but considering the corporate state merger we are seeing today (we now know elected can officials directly instructed Facebook as to whose accounts to ban), we have to do some real politik.

I am 100% behind any attempt to break up Facebook and Google, but given that they are de facto the government (just see how many ex googlers have high bureaucratic office), this seems as likely as the feds voting to reduce their influence.

Because what many people making that argument want is for Facebook (et al.) to remain as powerful as they are, but be compelled by law to use that power to publish speech against their will.

I would prefer if Facebook and its properties withered away from disuse but regardless, if the new public squares are privately owned digital spaces, it is still important to maintain the principles of free speech. Disinformation as a weapon complicates things as well.

Saying "can't be allowed" is easy. Actually fixing it - without making the situation worse by making the government even more powerful and intrusive and not actually achieving any increase in freedom - is much harder, and nobody offered how to actually do that yet.

As far as I’m aware, Facebook and Apple do not have a standing army yet.

Because they don't need to?

The argument that social media companies are more powerful than governments is fundamentally undermined if social media companies don't actually have any of the powers traditionally ascribed to governments (such as a monopoly on violence) and are, themselves, subject to the authority of governments.

Twitter banning Donald Trump's account doesn't make them more powerful than the US government, for instance. MacDonald's serves billions every day, but no one calls them a superpower.

The power to censor speech and control the spread of information is one of these traditional government powers and these companies routinely use it. In a democracy, control of information is as good if not better than an army. Installing a new government by force would get the international community pissed at you - the UN might even wag a finger at you angrily. Winning a democratic election because the people's beliefs were groomed by an algorithm in full control of which information they see and which they don't is something nobody will even know happened. Your government is as legitimate as any other and your power isn't much less absolute than any military dictatorship.

I'm not saying this will happen - it surely won't. But it could.

What will and already does happen is that companies won't replace governments with their puppets, but use their power over information to extract more and more value from the people and to get existing governments to make it easier for them.

Violence is a crude tool used by empires of the past. Even governments are starting to abandon it. Access to and control of information is the name of the game now. Governments need to hack, deceive and threaten to get information, but we've already voluntarily put these tech companies in control of ours. Governments have already lost on that front.

Neither does the Supreme Court, but that doesn’t make it any less powerful.

Framing FAANGs as entities contra governments as a whole doesn’t really capture the relationship, which has evolved something more akin to the checks and balances that exist between branches of government.

They do... The united States of America's army. The federal government is slowly becoming an arm of big tech. Look at how many ex googlers and Facebook execs are taking government positions. Look at how califorinia officials are instructing Facebook what to do.

This is like claiming the epa has no army ... technically true but completely missing the larger context

It's okay to go protest on the street.

It's not okay to clone yourself thousands of times and generate constant new protest speeches.

Misinformation works faster and different online vs the real world. I'm not against all opinions and viewpoints being taken away, that's obviously a scary route. But clear misinformation has dangerous impacts at the speed it's produced, shared, and consumed.

>clear misinformation

You say that like such a thing is clearly defined.

Does it depend on intent? If I say something that you consider to be incorrect but I understand it to be correct is that misinformation? Or do I need to know it's false? If the former we need an arbiter of what is true, which is not a trivial thing. If the latter we need an arbiter of what i believe which is basically a good chunk of what the legal system does.

Does it have to be demonstrably harmful? What is the threshold of harm? There are plenty of things that might be wrong and minimally harmful to say, but some that are more medium level harmful. If it doesn't have to be demonstrably harmful then what you've just done is literally just oppressing someone you disagree with for no real reason.

There is a reason that we tilt toward freedom of speech with governments. Doing otherwise doesn't scale and tends to devolve into people in power censoring opinions and topics they don't like.

Agreed.

Also "truth" isn't exactly static. Just look at the change in the "science" of mask best practices; or the Hunter laptop that has now been verified.

How do we handle that?

Do we compensate those that were punished prematurely (when they turned out to be right)?

Do we punish platforms that censored people? (when people turned out to be right)?

The issue right now is that the platforms do not have the same standards as the people using them. The incentive is just to censor content that isn't backed by power or money.

This is the problem for arguing for free speech. You get lumped in with loonies. I will gladly defend your right to be misinformed on the internet, though.

Misinformation does not imply any untruthful intent or knowledge of error. The word for that is disinformation or simply lieing.

No, mortenjorck had it right. There is a clear distinction between government and private enterprise--governments have the force of law to back them up. That's the critical threat. Yes, it's a problem if power is centralized in organizations, but you always have the option to walk away from Facebook, Twitter, etc., or even start a competitor. There's a huge difference between "Facebook jail" and actual jail.

There are similarly powerful industries and they are regulated strictly. Take banking, as an example: In theory, you can "choose" not to use a bank, but realistically, you won't be able to and still live a normal live in modern society. That's why we regulate them and disallow them to simply take your money for no reason, impose insane fees etc.. I don't see why Facebook should be given a cop-out given how essential many of their services are to a normal live.

What service by Facebook is essential? Is posting and commenting on Facebook essential? Because that's what most people complain about when it comes to censorship from Facebook.

My local politicians have closed their offices due to covid. The phones do not work because they go to the offices. The only official way to contact them is via email. The only way people seem to successfully get a response is via Facebook.

Facebook has willingly inserted itelf as the arbiter of all social and governmental actions in our brave new world. Stop pretending.

OK. So that's a case for forcing Facebook to allow people to contact politicians, not a case for forcing it to allow people to make posts or comments.

Ah, the famous "you can build your own twitter" (which is "you can build your own Internet" now, thanks Parler) argument. Turns out, it's not that easy to build your own internet. You can walk away from Facebook, but if Facebook can control who gets elected to control the jails, then the distance between Facebook jail and real jail is not as big as you might have thought.

> This 'argument' comes about because everyone's forgotten about why it is that we don't want government to infringe upon certain rights.

I think the argument comes about because it’s first amendment case law with plenty of Supreme Court opinions.

What’s ignored is the flip side, that even governments (meaning federal, state, county, city, etc…) can regulate speech.

But let’s pretend that the case law was different and it were somehow unconstitutional for businesses to make rules that restricted your speech. I have never heard a proposed legal framework for how that might work.

If you have a brick and mortar and ask me to wear a mask, then fuck you and your rules I’m entitled to go into your store without a mask? And yes, wearing a mask or not is speech. Or what if I want to come to your store with a bullhorn and preach, you can’t remove me? Are your store hours a violation of my speech because I want to appear and protest in your store in the middle of the night when you are closed? These are not extreme examples, there are cases with similar facts which SCOTUS has dealt with when it is government and not private business with similar rules. Is Joe Rogan violating my free speech because I can’t go on his podcast when I want? If you have a website, can I sue you for not hosting my content on your website when/where I want? It just becomes a exercise in saying “I know it when I see it” and Twitter can’t moderate user content on its own platform but the law will not be applied equally to all businesses. The aim of the law should be to remove those kinds of discretionary standards in favor of plain letter law with bright line rules.

I don’t know about all that, but clearly there is a difference between a business that sells clothes and a business that has imposed itself as a middleman in private social interactions between friends and family.

Families are free to choose to not use the middleman.

Did you hear about network effect?

If you consider the first amendment a mistake, you won't want to replicate it in the quasi-governmental institutions of the future

The first amendment applies to individuals not publicly traded half public-half private entities.

Facebook is the government. The white house under the current regie and state of California both admit that they have backdoors into Facebooks bureaucracy they use to ban content. Facebook is already merged with the Chinese state apparatus in china.

As such they ought to be regulated as a government agency. Those do not enjoy first amendment rights. Ones first amendment rights end the moment they accept being part of the government.

Yes, your best defence in a mobocracy is other mobs.

Worse yet, almost nobody of the people who say "these are private companies, they can do anything they want" actually believes that. If Google said one day they are stopping hiring women in technical positions, because men are superior technically, they'd cry for government regulators to step in in a second. If any grocery store decided to refuse service to people of certain race, them being a private business wouldn't stop the regulators from coming in, and everybody from calling that to happen, and none of those people would stand in the way.

In fact, we already have a myriad of regulations restricting private companies in hiring, firing, conducting business, negotiating with workforce, managing working conditions, and pretty much any interactions with the public and other businesses. There's not a single company that is not bound by dozens if not hundreds of these regulations. Those companies being private companies never prevented it. You may welcome it or you may lament it, but it's undeniably how things are done in the US - private companies are subject to public regulation. It's not something we're just introducing, it's something that existed since forever.

There are true libertarians that consistently oppose any regulation of private business. About 2% of them, judging by election results, and about 0% represented in any legislative or executive body above the tiniest of city councils. The other 98% should lay the "private companies" argument aside because they're just embarrassing themselves with it. That argument has been dead for centuries, and if you want to resuscitate it, you have to deal with hundreds of years history of regulation first, before you can wield it again.

Exactly. Government and the State are not synonymous. Churches, states, and corporations all govern. We don't worry about churches as much, as their power has been curtailed by a lot compared to the past. But both States and Corporations having far too much power is a large and difficult problem. When they are in cahoots as much as they are now you know we're up the creek.

> calls (for censorship) are coming from inside the house at this point

They would in any orwellian society, the denial is in the assumption that people aligned with you are the "good guys", when it turns out the people who seemed to be for a free and open society will turn to thought control whenever it's "on their side".

This is a very US-centric point of view.

What many of us in the US have yet to realize is that while our country was front and center in the 90's and 00's due to our explosive tech sector, the genie has left the bottle.

Every country is now growing domestic talent, earning venture dollars, and growing capabilities to match or exceed. Fintech, logistics, social media, game and film production studios, you name it.

The US only has 330M people. The world has a whole lot more talent.

Deplatforming isn't taking away the right to free speech... it's taking away the privilege of using someone else's megaphone to be heard.

Giving one person a megaphone gives them large advantage over everyone else. Giving everyone access to megaphones leaves everyone as well off as before- save for their hearing.

Giving everyone access to megaphones save one person is a good way to silence that person. I a world of megaphones, who can listen to a mere voice?

Hm. It's a good point and it maybe it requires a more formal expression. We're kind of in the middle of a conversation about whether regulating your privilege to use other people's private networks to disseminate your speech is actually a curtailment of speech, or whether it's just those network owners expressing their own speech. But what is the relationship or the ratio of importance between freedom to speak and the ability to ve heard? If it's like you say, then denying someone use of your megaphone is tantamount to cutting out their tongue. But since I was born before any of these megaphones existed, and I know plenty of people who've built their own megaphones, I'm reluctant to say it's anyone's right to use one against its owners'/builders' wishes, regardless of how ubiquitous it has become.

Deplatforming is anti-competitive behavior in the marketplace of ideas. We all think some should not be allowed to compete, but we all are impacted negatively by the emergent monopoly.

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting misinformation. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work.

( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business

( ) Assumes that you can use textual metrics to determine if a claim is true or not

( ) Assumes that pictures can’t be faked

(X) Assumes that popularity equals truth

( ) Assumes that you can tell whether something’s true by where the web server hosting it is located

( ) Any social network that tries to adopt it won’t get used

( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

( ) Requires fake news to opt into additional scrutiny

( ) Requires mind reading

( ) Puts additional strain on already underfunded and understaffed organizations

( ) Big Tech won’t put up with it

( ) ISPs won’t put up with it

( ) By the time you took it down, the damage would already be done

( ) Good luck finding a neutral third party on major political controversies

( ) Would just move the problem from Facebook to Signal

(X) “Trust No One” is not a solution

( ) The surveillance state already has more data than they know what to do with

—

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Readers failing to notice “this is a joke” disclaimers

(X) The existence of Schelling points other than the truth

(X) Black Hat SEO tactics

( ) “Residential IP” proxies

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it

( ) Legitimate disagreement

( ) Context

( ) Bias

( ) Asshats

( ) Dog-whistle politics

( ) Jurisdictional problems

( ) Linguistic drift

(X) Asymmetry of information

(X) Asymmetry of available resources

( ) The time it takes to verify a claim being far longer than the time it takes to write it

( ) New information coming out after a story has been published

( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches

( ) Extreme profitability of fake news

(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who literally believe in magic

( ) Technical illiteracy

( ) Hacking

(X) Astroturfing

(X) People with valuable information, but no capital

( ) Laziness

( ) Dishonesty on the part of fake news pushers

—

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) It would violate Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

( ) Technically, that’s how it already works

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical

( ) Fake news was already a problem before Facebook; we called it “chain mail”

( ) Outlawing The Onion would be stupid

( ) Post ranking algorithms should not be the subject of legislation

( ) Any countermeasure that involves outlawing end-to-end encrypted private communication is unacceptable

( ) Any countermeasure that involves spear phishing is not going to work more than a couple of times

( ) We should be able to talk about the letter Q without being censored

( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually

( ) Who gave you the right to decide whether something is true?

( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem

(X) Anonymity does not destroy all class and power differences, and makes bad-faith participation more common

( ) The distinction between “political” and “apolitical” is not always clear-cut

( ) The distinction between “private” and “public” is not always clear-cut

( ) The distinction between “fact” and “opinion” is not always clear-cut

( ) People who can’t afford lawyers would be de facto excluded from the internet

( ) People who can’t afford bodyguards would be de facto excluded from the internet

( ) Your scheme would have made it illegal to share a video of police brutality without consulting the very institutions that benefit most from police brutality

( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

—

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry, but I don't think it would work.

( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.

( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

—

This is a very, very old meme. Here’s a few older versions of it.

https://qntm.org/calendar

https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

Your post advocates a

(X) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting misinformation. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won’t work.

( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else’s career or business

( ) Assumes that you can use textual metrics to determine if a claim is true or not

( ) Assumes that pictures can’t be faked

(X) Assumes that popularity equals truth

( ) Assumes that you can tell whether something’s true by where the web server hosting it is located

( ) Any social network that tries to adopt it won’t get used

( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once

( ) Requires fake news to opt into additional scrutiny

( ) Requires mind reading

( ) Puts additional strain on already underfunded and understaffed organizations

( ) Big Tech won’t put up with it

( ) ISPs won’t put up with it

( ) By the time you took it down, the damage would already be done

(X) Good luck finding a neutral third party on major political controversies

( ) Would just move the problem from Facebook to Signal

( ) “Trust No One” is not a solution

( ) The surveillance state already has more data than they know what to do with

—

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Readers failing to notice “this is a joke” disclaimers

( ) The existence of Schelling points other than the truth

( ) Black Hat SEO tactics

( ) “Residential IP” proxies

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it

( ) Legitimate disagreement

(X) Context

( ) Bias

( ) Asshats

( ) Dog-whistle politics

( ) Jurisdictional problems

( ) Linguistic drift

( ) Asymmetry of information

( ) Asymmetry of available resources

( ) The time it takes to verify a claim being far longer than the time it takes to write it

( ) New information coming out after a story has been published

( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches

( ) Extreme profitability of fake news

(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who literally believe in magic

( ) Technical illiteracy

( ) Hacking

( ) Astroturfing

(X) People with valuable information, but no capital

( ) Laziness

( ) Dishonesty on the part of fake news pushers

—

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) It would violate Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

( ) Technically, that’s how it already works

(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical

( ) Fake news was already a problem before Facebook; we called it “chain mail”

( ) Outlawing The Onion would be stupid

( ) Post ranking algorithms should not be the subject of legislation

( ) Any countermeasure that involves outlawing end-to-end encrypted private communication is unacceptable

( ) Any countermeasure that involves spear phishing is not going to work more than a couple of times

( ) We should be able to talk about the letter Q without being censored

( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually

( ) Who gave you the right to decide whether something is true?

( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem

( ) Anonymity does not destroy all class and power differences, and makes bad-faith participation more common

( ) The distinction between “political” and “apolitical” is not always clear-cut

( ) The distinction between “private” and “public” is not always clear-cut

( ) The distinction between “fact” and “opinion” is not always clear-cut

( ) People who can’t afford lawyers would be de facto excluded from the internet

( ) People who can’t afford bodyguards would be de facto excluded from the internet

( ) Your scheme would have made it illegal to share a video of police brutality without consulting the very institutions that benefit most from police brutality

( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

—

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(X) Sorry, but I don't think it would work.

( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.

( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

(X) Next time try understanding reading my comment.

—

Right back at you.

In other words, there is a ministry of truth, only it evolved to take a form which doesn't scare most of us - in fact, for most of the people not going specifically to look for it, it's completely imperceptible.

> In a rush to combat genuine issues like health misinformation

And this is how you learned to love the Big Brother.

Came across this too the other day. For a moment I was hoping that they'd trained some machine learning algorithm on the past evolution of the sites in their archive in order to extrapolate how sites may change in the future, and that they'd have thrown in some futuristic design elements in the mix.

But the way that this thing works is pretty satisfying too. In terms of conveying a message about our future I mean.

I like the idea of having a model look at a page and then rework the look and style to be simple and free of ads or JavaScript.

This is a great idea

reader mode

I hoped it was something that fanciful, but didn't expect it.

Your comment brought to kind something. I wonder if GPT3 et al could be used to invent or predict futures. I know AI is being used to work on domains in science and having some success. It seems like those spaces have rules that can be followed to make new discoveries. Could we set an AI on certain social/economic/technological simulations and have it spit out various possible outcomes?

One sort of simulation that comes to mind is the Transition Integrity Project. Could an AI have arrived at realistic conclusions given the right rules?

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

GPT3 and other deep models cannot predict the future. They can only generate alternative presents.

Why not? It is trained to guess the next word, and giving it a few lines of dialogue makes it continue the conversation.

The only reason would be hitting the hardcoded input length limit.

What you call the « next word » is actually the next word it has already seen in a similar context in the training set.

The novelty does no go beyond the variability of the training data.

And so deep learning cannot generate futures that are both surprising and general.

In the context of conversations, no doubt that it can generate realistic answers. They will just be regurgitations of the training data. They might seem novel to you because you haven’t experienced all the discussions of the training set. But they won’t be novel to humankind and won’t project it into an actual future.

Yeah I thought it was going to be that too. They certainly have the data for it. Although that model would probably predict that almost every site just disappears in its future. Speaking of which, to imagine a world where information is inaccessible, I don't need to imagine a dystopian authoritarian future, just the shitty haphazard one we have now, where things just disappear from the internet - which was the original battle archive.org was fighting.

Every URL eventually decays to pointing to a parked domain loaded with ads.

Is that a theorem with name to it attached already? I feel it should be.

imagining Google.com pointing to a parked domain with junk search results in 2065 brings a smile to my face.

I went in expecting Devs.

That's a way more interesting idea. As it is it feels like a forward from grandma from 2002.

Given it's working on generic popups alone with no connection to the URL provided, it seems unnecessary to ask the user to enter a URL at all for the sake of a blurred background image.

You'd get a greater impact if you presented a search engine front page with some suggested "trending" search terms then show how they can be misconstrued and get you put onto the relevant thought crime fixated persons list while showing the user "filtered" and "approved" results from the central bureaucracy. A search engine with its 1st results page only listing .gov TLDs should get a few people thinking.

- Put in URL

- It loads for a bit, then shows some fake ads.

- "Imagine a future without access to knowledge..."

And then some blurbs on campaigning for 'Open access to knowledge'.

Archive.org - including the Wayback Machine - is already blocked by many major UK ISPs and has been for many years: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/internet-archive-...

Not sure if that's ironic or not, in light of the warnings on "The Wayforward Machine" page.

That's surprising, thanks for mentioning it.

Those ISPs mentioned are mobile phone service providers, not fixed-line home/biz ISPs, and different (but still dumb) regs apply to those. The situation needs improvement, but it isn’t as bad as I think you’re making it sound.

It's blocked because it contains adult content. I just checked and archive.org indeed does archive adult content, unsurprisingly. In the UK, anyone can walk in to a shop and buy a phone and SIM card without ID or proof of age, so internet plans by default have a filter enabled.

I don't really see this as a problem... I'd rather we do that than require ID to buy a SIM?

Can you disable the filter easily?

Takes a couple minutes if you're willing to input your credit card number (which you probably already do to top it up), or you can go into the shop with photo ID. At the moment, those are the only two ways of proving your age in the UK.

> I'd rather we do that than require ID to buy a SIM?

Is that really the only choice? The United States has many faults, but one can buy a phone and SIM card here without ID or proof of age, yet our ISPs typically do not filter websites.

I don't want to be all "think of the children" - but is it really a good thing that kids can go into a shop, unbeknownst to their parents, and buy a tiny, hideable device with full internet access?

I'm far from a prude, but there is a lot of really objectionable stuff on the internet that I certainly wouldn't want a 10 year old kid having access to. We're not just talking porn here.

As an adult, I have never once been inconvenienced by these filters. When signing up for a contract, you just untick the adult content filter option and get on with your day.

Some people here might defend exposing children to pornography as a good thing, but I am not one of those people.

However, blocking a ten‐year‐old from accessing the entirety of the Internet Archive simply because some of it happens to be pornographic… that’s exactly the kind of collateral damage that makes me resistant to such filters in the first place. I mean, imagine if children—presumably meaning not just young children, but “anyone under 18”—were prohibited from the adult section of a library. It seems antithetical to growth.

The problem with allowing something like the internet archive is that it lets you access a cached version of essentially any website, thus defeating the filter. Obviously a motivated kid will work that out and share it with their friends, and soon enough everyone will know about it. Same reason most adult/corporate filters block proxies.

Perhaps if archive.org offered a "safe mode" of some kind that can be activated at a network level (as Google/Bing/YouTube and others do) then it would be possible for ISPs to allow access to archive while still limiting adult content.

You can, of course, unblock your children's phone if you want, and install another filter or none at all. But I think as a default configuration it's not the worst thing in the world.

Regarding the library thing, I've not been to one in decades but I'm guessing most libraries don't have porn, snuff films and ISIS recruitment videos... but sure there is collateral damage sometimes. In school, the overly aggressive filters would sometimes stop us researching anything to do with Nazis or biology.

> Perhaps if archive.org offered a "safe mode" of some kind that can be activated at a network level (as Google/Bing/YouTube and others do)

Nobody should be making it easier to perform censorship. I wish Google/Bing/YouTube would all drop that "feature".

>but is it really a good thing that kids can go into a shop, unbeknownst to their parents, and buy a tiny, hideable device with full internet access?

It's not "a good thing" but it is far, far better than the alternative and the current restrictions.

Or we could do neither, and let parents be in charge of keeping their kids from seeing adult content.

And how do they do that if their kids buy a phone or SIM at the shop?

As already noted, it's blocked because adult content filters were imposed by the largest ISPs and mobile phone networks to avoid having the government putting legislation in place to make it mandatory.

Wow. That was a really long wait for some really lame popups.

This is a great not-so-subtle look at the direction we're heading - the only thing that was missed is continuously and invisibly reloading the page so that I can't use my browser history to get back to HN.

I just get "loading" Is it meant to be a commentary that future websites will have so much javascript they will take an infinite time to load?

Ok. That was anticlimactic

(And in general, the web archive is a bit hypothetical since downloading saved websites is disallowed according to their tos)

It's not as if they invented copyright law. Even if their ToS didn't say that it would still effectively be disallowed

But it is not their content. Their whole goal is to save other people's content. But then they won't allow 9ther people to download this content.

This seems very likely extrapolating from current trends.

Pffffft, the popups are really bogus—in twenty, or more likely ten years nobody will need them. There will be a standard protocol for the ISP to present the user's identity to the website. Case closed.

De-anonymization of the web solves (or ‘solves’) plenty of current annoyances, like comment spam and likely email spam too; foreign trolls skewing the national agenda, or just stupid people spreading various bullshit or bullying someone; perhaps also some security attacks. So it's practically inevitable that it will keep bobbling on the tips of people's tongues, just waiting for some kind of web 9/11 to happen.

It probably won't even start as a government thing, but a thing for Google to prove to Amazon that the user is not some shady schmuck. Then perhaps the government will step in and say that this time Google really tries to do too much—why not just let the ISPs do that instead.

This is a lot of effort to express opposition to repealing section 230. Their timeline starts with that event.

I thought this was going to be a deep learning AI that took the history of a website like Apple.com, and tried to predict what it would look like in the future. Like, would it figure out to put out an iPhone 14 announcement right around when Apple would releases such a thing? And would it have new features, like being thinner and having a longer battery than predecessors? Would be pretty neat.

If you type in www.google.com, it says "Loading the internet of the future", and in the background there's a Google 404 page.

Conclusion: In the future, Google will have some service outage :-P

----

If you type in "news.ycombinator.com", you get a recent HN main page snapshot in the background while "loading the internet of the future". Then you get prompted to prove that you are over 18... but really, who would be dumb enough to upload their driver's license to some untrusted website for this purpose?

Conclusion: In the future, 18-year-olds will be less intelligent than they are today (or I have an overly high expectation of people's intelligence).

In Germany, a law was proposed some time ago that would require websites with "adult content" to do a biometric age verification. They even discussed forcing OS developers to implement this on OS level.

> who would be dumb enough to upload their driver's license to some untrusted website ...

Facebook has blocked an account of mine before, requesting government issued photo ID. I never gave any, so my account is now deactivated. But I suspect many people do cave so they can get access to Facebook again.

And, if, in the future it's a common requirement, then sure, people would do it, since it's the only way to use useful(or fun, or work-related) websites.

I what about China's system - Since the government ID is tied to almost everything, I'm sure it's common over there to give out your government ID to get access to websites. (I don't know any of that for sure - I don't live there).

> Facebook

You got me there I guess... I mean, I could suggest not using Facebook, but I suppose that's not very realistic.

Still, Facebook and the WayforwardMachine aren't of the same caliber.

I will clarify, to be fair, that account wasn't under my real name. HOWEVER I thought requesting goddamn government ID was a bit much. Just let me have my burner FB account...

Cute. There is already a News Corp doing monopoly stuff and regulatory capture, so that doesn’t seem too far fetched.

Clenched fist? Seriously? I'd better buy shares in these scary "fact copyrighting corporations"

Maybe this could be called "The move to PRC machine" since blocks by the GFW are already a thing.

between this trend and the gemini opposite, I sense some overall negative sentiment around the webs.

I did not expect that the search for XSLT would be behind the content truth gateway.

Does not look significantly more intrusive than the Internet in 2021.

I can't get Twisted Eye to install, anyone have any luck?

Site’s overloaded. Anyone got a screenshot?

Ughh how ironic:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210930161453/https://wayforwar...

I can get that far; the site isn’t responding beyond the point in that capture.

Do you have JS enabled for archive.org?

Seems that's necessary, sadly.

In the future all stories about 2 + 2 = 4 are banned. 2+2 = whatever the party says it is.

Wait, are we expected to trust the chat popup that refers to us as "comrade"?

Wild! I didn’t think anything of it since in my social circle being ironically not-ironically communist is totally normal. Using lingo like “comrade” or more extremely stuff like “Daddy Stalin” is just counterreactionary and an attempt to “own the label” when people accuse you of being a communist or socialist for wanting the mildest of progressive policies.

Edit: Not sure why the downvotes for what is basically a candid, “hey if you’re confused about the wording it’s because it’s a very specific political activism shibboleth.”

The Chinese equivalent to comrade also fills the role queer does in modern English in Hong Kong.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongzhi_(term)#Usage_in_contem...

That’s really cool, I love it!

I would guess the downvotes are because talking about how you and your friends “ironically” praise one of the worst mass murderers in history is not as cute as you apparently think it is.

It’s not really meant to be cute exactly, it’s more meant to take away the power of silencing tactics like, “oh so you’re a communist then?” by leaning into it and responding with absurdity. Nobody who calls you a socialist like that is trying to have a rational reasoned argument — they’re trying to put you on the defensive and shut down your argument using some mouth sounds they’ve memorized. But the trick and why these silencing tactics work is because if you try to take the high road and engage with them intellectually at all you lose. You spend all your energy on the defensive trying to explain why that’s so wrong it’s not even funny and it looks like they win because nobody is paying any attention after the snappy communist quip.

But if you lean into it and say something like “yeah obviously, I want that big Mao Zedong” observers know that you’re being absurd but the accusation just rolls off and now you control the direction of the argument.

This is basically how to publicly engage with people who argue in bad faith 101.

What’s wrong with “comrade” ?

that word has some loaded baggage with it in the US. It's rarely used outside the context of it being coopted by the communist movement-- at least in the US. Considering the multiple "red scares" in the US, the Palmer raids, etc... 100 years of history have linked the connotation in US usage as a reference to supporters of communism, stemming from a time when that support was also fairly closely linked with a Soviet Union very belligerent towards the US. Although it has been used more generically in the communist political scene without a linkage to (and with a criticism of) Soviet-style communism.

I highly doubt archive.org intended that association, it merely explains why a person would view it as an odd choice if words.

Not just in the US. I wouldn't recommend using it in a non-ironic manner in the countries that experienced Soviet occupation either.

I get called "friend" now. You broke it!

I find the fact that it is a fake chat pop-up a lot more untrustworthy.

The Internet Archive is collective action...in action. Why would they use any other word? It's an example of people successfully working together for a common goal.

I'm a huge fan of collective action. That's what communities are. I still never use "comrade" in a non-ironic or non-sarcastic manner. Voluntary power with people is different than authoritarian power over people.

Can someone please tell me about blobcity cloud?

We offer Jupyter Notebooks on the cloud. We share infra across users, thereby allowing for unlimited runtime on GPUs at a starting price of $75/m.

This is brilliant.

lol

You can get around the paywall with incognito. Pretty lax security here.

Bitcoin fixes this.

Few understand this.

How does a decentralized currency prevent websites doing what this page suggests? Maybe Namecoin or similar, but Bitcoin?

> HTTP Version Not Supported > Your browser is using HTTP version HTTP/1.1. We only support version 2.0 or newer.

The future runs on HTTP/1.1?

This is very strange. Just tried it, and I got a message flashed on the screen supposedly from the Ministry of Truth.

  This site contains information that is currently classified as Thought Crime in your region.
  If you are the owner of this site, please contact your local Ministry of Truth at your earliest convenience.

I am the owner! And I believe currently = 2046? This is hilarious, so contact now or in 2046?

Website: https://blobcity.com

This will literally happens if you try to open some site with the in-app browser in WeChat.

Yeah, but that is not what I did. I tried on Safari on Mac.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com