The pressure to censor all layers of the legacy Internet stack is intense | Hacker News Reader

The pressure to censor all layers of the legacy Internet stack is intense

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28 pointsmemish16 comments

Censorship is a necessity for a functioning system. Even by voting in a democratic system, you're "censoring" the losers for a period of time... in that their ability to act out their principles or interests are limited.

Hackernews works by flagging and downvoting, just as much as it does due to its algorithm and upvoting.

"Free speech" is an outdated concept. When it was useful back in the day, anti-establishment propaganda could be blocked through physical means (stop the guy talking, stop the person bringing the newspaper)... and dissidents could be targeted using force. Even after that in the days of legacy media, the media houses that didn't comply with major economic interests could be easily targeted and silenced... which is why the illusion of free speech could be maintained. None of that is possible in the digital world... so content needs to be moderated/censored.

Those who control the censors have a lot of power. That is not going to change... and various interests will continue to fight for that power.

Technically, every internet application is uncensorable if you can get the word out about IP changes.

Until ISPs and the backbone connections start banning the IP addresses

No. Check the concept of Deep packet inspection.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_packet_inspection

Can someone provide some context? This tweet is pretty decontextualized.

He didn't get invites to do talks at fancy tech meetups in some time so he needed to do some unsubstantiated hot take again. It's also probably a shill for some web3 service he is "working" on we'll see in 2-3 days. That dude is all about other peoples money and other peoples ideas for at least 20 years now...

This tweet is hot garbage.

The entire stack? WTF?

Responded to with worry about NFT's being able to express themselves.

LOL.

The forward march of technology is now censorship of speech.

We’ve been here before with DND, comic books and music. It didn’t really change much.

How do they censor something like a Linux kernel with built in VPN and containers, and distributed source control? At this point what of those old layers really matter?

They’ll target the boogeyman they know but numerous replacement stacks already exist.

Social science research suggests Gen Z has not shed its progressiveness as it ages out of its 20s like previous generations.

The traditions have been washed out of the youth. A bunch of scared politicians and elites are welcome to push their luck and make predictions city-states will take over the role of the federal government more probable.

People need to know how to connect to a system or service. Once it becomes large enough to be the target of censorship the technologies used are relatively moot. This is much easier with the financial system since the on ramps are so tightly controlled. Crypto currency has not helped with this.

I agree but suspect this is some setup to explain how "web3" is the answer, which is just silly.

Could you expand on why it's silly?

It's trivial to build an uncensorable Twitter clone on an EVM-based chain. You could even have a DAO determine the rules for content moderation. The fact that writes cost gas also reduces incentives for the spamming endemic to social media today.

The only part that still is cebtralised is DNS but you don't need it, you could just pass about the address or use ENS.

Either way the technology makes this sort of uncensorable application quite easy to build. Why do you feel it's silly?

> Client-side & server-side ISPs, cloud platforms, CDNs, payment networks, client OSs, browsers, email clients

Every single one of these things can still censor your access to content on the network whenever it wants. I do not believe the presence of a blockchain changes anything there. All it does is make speech cost money.

Payment networks are entirely irrelevant, client side ISP would need to use a port number given it's P2P which seems error prone and prohibitive. Email irrelevant. Browsers not possible given opensource chrome forks / brave.

DNS isn't centralized. It is and always has been distributed. De facto under central control, but so is all the infrastructure.

> the fact that writes cost gas

You realize that if free speech has a price, it's no longer free, right? Like it's only "free" if you can afford it.

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