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Comment by jdrc | Hacker News Reader

musk also twitted that he won't block russian media as requested. Starlink is probably a great intelligence tool and obviously will never be turned off, on or anything . He s basically utilizing the importance of starlink to US army to promote his absolutist free speech view. not bad

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ISPs absolutely should not be in the business of filtering content. At least, not in any country that respects even basic free speech.

If starlink is to be successful, I see it pivoting to being a service provider for ISP's. Then the ISP's can apply whatever filtering or prioritization they require to meet local laws or their business requirements. But the customer would be free to move to another ISP which has different rules.

Call me old fashioned yet known CSAM sites in my opinion should be blocked at the ISP level.

To the best of my knowledge, dedicated CSAM sites in the clearnet have all but gone - every hoster in the world will cut you off for that, even the "bulletproof" hosters that claim to ignore piracy and dealing in stolen credentials all ban CSAM and legal-but-close content like "lolita" etc. simply because of the attention it draws from law enforcement.

They're all on TOR now, and even there they get regularly busted due to shoddy opsec.

There's plenty of drawn lolita imagery easily publicly available on the clear net. Primarily because it's legal in many countries. Often times it's only filtered behind going into a settings menu and hitting a checkbox, but usually not even that.

Example: Almost any of the various image booru sites have it, usually behind a checkbox.

Who considers CSAM protect free speech?

Who considers Russian disinformation protected free speech?

The US Constitution. Or better, the usual interpretation thereof.

Personally I don't. It's not speech from an American but rather a foreign country (or sometimes not even a human).

And it incites harm, which is one of the restrictions that can be placed on speech.

You support freedom of speech, but only for citizens of your country?

I support other countries establishing free speech laws. And in general the protection of non-US citizen speech within the US, especially foreign reporters.

But that doesn't have anything to do with constitutionally protecting 3rd party nations using platforms/speech for propaganda in our (or any other opposing) country.

Seems ridiculous on its face to try to confuse or equate the two and argue the point.

You're not old fashioned, you're just pro-censorship.

I'll take that criticism. If preventing people from having websites as easily available to them to watch kids being raped is as easily available as watching YouTube is then I am pro-censorship.

I put it to you that most fair minded people are also pro-censorship.

yep, I grew up with the birth of the Internet and total free speech ideology but agree with you now.

There aren't "known CSAM sites" lol... If they were known they'd already be taken down. There aren't big scary CSAM sites on the public internet hosted in foreign countries that need blocking.

Most of those sites are run by the FBI... gotta have a source for those "multi-state kiddie porn bust" stories they like to trot out every year or so.

You sound reasonable, but the same tech which can censor one thing can censor other things. It's the thin edge of a wedge.

the tech is there either way

The ISP is not the place to enforce censorship, if you think censorship is warranted: courts and police are.

It's a powerful tool (which I personally vehemently oppose) but even if you think censorship has its place, it should be somewhere with oversight, due process, et c. ISPs are not that.

The obvious failure mode can be observed presently in Russia.

In my country my ISP acts as a censor by poisoning my DNS look ups because of a court ruling.

The ISPs have no choice in this.

True, but in war they could add a warning to the website.

The best bet is to train end users to use the internet effectively. BigTech has spent the past 15 years laboriously dumbing down its users to become scrolling monkeys.

I wish this where true, but I disagree. I think you drastically over-estimate the average (particularly non tech) person's will and ability to learn such things.

That's because we never adapted and used people's emotional biases to make money. Just because some friend says something doesn't mean it's true - but pointing this out would cost a lot of money

We scrolled less (thanks Aza), but were the same monkeys before. People wildly overestimate their critical thinking faculties and how impervious they are to propaganda.

and warning is a step forward.

> promote his absolutist free speech view

Musk is not anything like a free speech absolutist. He makes extensive use of NDAs and other speech restriction agreements for non-security non-trade secret reasons, and one time it seems he swatted a whistle-blower.

He’s a free speech absolutist who agreed with the SEC to have his tweets pre-screened by lawyers. It’s funny how much people on this site eat up anything remotely contrarian sounding from this guy.

I'm really surprised by this move. Starlink will need as many customers as it can get all over the world, and there're too many countries, even some in EU, who'd want to filter some content, or otherwise would ban terminals. Some are huge, like India. For those declaring that all traffic would go to the in-country land station could work. With that arrangement even China wouldn't totally out of the question. Making spacex free-speech outpost is nice and would create some contraband market for terminals, but...

I assume starlink was strategically important to the US from the start. The demand for satellite internet is probably exaggerated

Show me proof the US military is using Starlink in a significant manner.

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