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Comment by fleddr | Hacker News Reader

Never before was the open internet challenged this hard, and never before has it failed so hard. Under pressure, every single thing is subject to politics and cancellation: browsers, search engines, search results, social media, cloud infrastructure, payment systems and even money itself.

None pass the test of being open or neutral.

At this rate, your much hated crypto folks may actually start to have a point. Kind of like a lunatic sometimes being accidentally right.

Note the downvotes, for my sin of even mentioning the word "crypto".

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Yandex is hardly a politically neutral web service, though

A neutral web browser is not one that only lets me access politically neutral websites (all five of them), but one that doesn't care what I look at.

In fact, the few times that I've used Yandex were because it is not politically neutral. I was curious whether the results for some queries look different when they're not being filtered through the lens of the American empire. That use case should make Yandex more relevant these days, not less.

(Although, to be honest, the search results were quite boring and normal.)

It's the Russian-language news service that was crippled. First, they were forced to only use officially licensed media sources, then they were forced to add lots of junk “newspapers” chain-posting the propaganda, and so on, and so on. So the headlines on top of the search page have been total crap for years.

The search results are mostly affected by the usual blacklists: DMCA notices for pirate sites, right-to-be-forgotten requests, government blocked pages (supposedly based on client location). Note that this list is not complete. For example, western services silently ban sites presumably “used to share child porn, based on informed opinion” of this or that group that might not even have a legal right to force anyone to do anything. How informed is that opinion? If you look at what Russian censorship agency does in the same regard, you can only call them utterly mad. You can be sure it's not the only case when someone has a backdoor that lets them hide stuff “for the public good”. Remember those stories about third world grunts cleaning Facebook from “NSFW content”, and making first world users feel comfy there? The results of their work are probably shared between corporations, too, and applied in some way.

And yet somehow it was fine all this time?

Virtually nothing in "user land" is politically neutral but I would think/hope that the underlying technology and protocols have a large degree of neutrality.

Case in point, I'd see something like AWS as a neutral utility, kind of like electricity. You can do lots of bad stuff with electricity but your electricity provider doesn't care.

That idea of separation of concerns is now completely broken down, the entire stack, top to bottom, is political.

You "get along" until you don't. What better moment would be for that than a war?

We used to be able to say AP, Reuters, NYTimes aren't partisan, and we used to be able to joke about RU news being Pravda-style propaganda. Unfortunately, we can no longer really mock the Russians this way with a straight face, as we have now started to look more like Soviet Russia.

Please. Let me know when people start getting sent to gulags - or simply killed - for publicly rejecting the official (single) party line of the United States. The false equivalence is getting out of control.

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

This just happened. (In Canada, not the US, but similar countries.)

Here is a story about police rounding up protestors and sending them to jail.

https://news.yahoo.com/police-arrest-dozens-blockading-canad...

> Police chief: “Last night we began to take additional actions towards implementing our operation. We moved officers and equipment into key positions throughout the city and took up 100 checkpoints around the downtown core. We began making arrests of key individuals who were responsible for organizing these unlawful activities. (flash) As of 3pm today we’ve arrested 70 people. They’ve been charged with multiple various offenses including mischief.”

Here is a story about accounts of protestors being frozen, preventing them from paying bail to get out of jail.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/world/americas/canada-pro...

> But for one protest organizer who was arrested last week, the effect was more immediate. The organizer, Tamara Lich, said she had been frozen out of all of her accounts and could come up with only 5,000 Canadian dollars for bail.

Forgive me if I fail to see the connection to murdering journalists.

> We used to be able to say AP, Reuters, NYTimes aren't partisan

that must've been cool, but it was before my time...

> We used to be able to say AP, Reuters, NYTimes aren't partisan, and we used to be able to joke about RU news being Pravda-style propaganda.

Who is this "we"? I'm Canadian now, but understanding media bias was something I was taught in American public school, with example from historical American media, and discussions on how bias can be engineered by selective reporting, etc.

> Unfortunately, we can no longer really mock the Russians this way with a straight face, as we have now started to look more like Soviet Russia.

Please feel free to inform the appropriate western authorities that I am guilty of visiting the RT website just now. I'll await the consequences.

if i want to use it, why should my browser get the veto?

You can still use it. It's just not a default.

So why can't we just build our own infrastructure? It's not as though you need spectacular sums of money to run a search engine or a social media platform. You need a few decent engineers for sure and you probably won't get rich from it, but most of this is demonstrably doable even without clouds.

Well Parler tried to start their own social media and that didn't turn out to them. Three of the largest tech companies kicked them out. How do you compete when you aren't allowed to compete?

At the same time, sites like 8chan and kiwifarms manage to get hosting.

Perhaps the lesson is to stop dealing with big tech companies.

You pretty much have to deal with big tech to have an app and no social media site can really be big without it. (I know side loading exists on android).

Parler hosting on Amazon was an incredibly dumb decision though.

An app is basically just an HTML widget. Do you really need an app?

Like the main reason you typically build one is because it's much harder to spy on your users when they're in a browser.

I don't need an app, but the average person needs an app. The average person doesn't know how to set up a pwa and doesn't want to use a browser.

Eh, I honestly don't know about that. I think the average user struggles telling the difference between an app and a website.

The problem with a website is your cookies get deleted every once in a while. This is is inconvenient since you have to re login. Also, push notifications for a regular website isn't great (pwas might be better?)

Cookies get deleted when you explicitly delete them (most users don't know how to do that), or when you've set them to expire (which can decades into the future), or when you break your own code (which should be never).

Cookies should be set to session not a date. Many sites like HN don't do that presumably for convenience. I assume most social media sites set a date though.

go work for few years for a facilities-based last mile and middle mile ISP that runs things at the OSI layer 1 and 2 level of the internet and then tell me if you think your statement is accurate.

I don't mean we should build a parallel internet, I mean we should build enough redundancy into the Internet's public services that they become effectively impossible to exert control over.

how do you build all the underlying infra?

Barring a complete shut-down of the Internet, simply making these applications cheap enough to operate would make them virtually impossible to control or stamp out.

They've been trying to shut down BitTorrent almost two decades, without much failures. They nailed the TPB guys to a cross, but that did all of nothing to actually shut bit-torrent itself down.

How does crypto fix this? The problem is not with their claim that this is a vulnerability - people have been shouting about this vulnerability long before crypto was invented - the problem is the claim that they will somehow fix this with tokens or DAOs

Well, optimistically we can at least say that some crypto projects attempt to decentralize functionality and assets.

You're quite right though that the devil is in the details, and that most of the time, these projects are not immune to politics or ad hoc regulation.

It allows for decentralized payment systems. The problem is that the downsides so far make it not worth it, usually.

> The problem is that the downsides so far make it not worth it, usually.

How so?

Could you please elaborate? We already know that Bitcoin and Ethereum are not the only cryptocurrencies that exist for payments and there are better ones that are used for payments.

Feels like you're the one that should elaborate which ones and why ?

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