Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

On January 18 2012, Wikipedia went black to draw attention to SOPA [0], a bill they described as one that "could fatally damage the free and open Internet".

Since then, we've seen a slow and steady march in the direction we all dreaded. Country after country has decided that they have the right to block content on the "free and open Internet", and business after business (even those who joined the SOPA protests) has complied. Someone looking ahead from 2012 would barely recognize the internet today as being the same thing, the way we just roll over to the threats that used to cause global outrage and defiance.

Were we naive even at the time? Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PI...

View on HN

As more normies got on the web more of it becomes about how to herd them.

In the early days there was less gain from authoritarian actions, because you are more likely to be resisted by the users of any service.

The current users don't know how to bypass restrictions, and are generally more numerous. Making authoritarian actions more valuable.

Unfortunately this leads to previously useful sites declining.

The solution is to move to the dark web and make your site unpalatable to normies.

The posison slug strategy.

Dividing the world into normies and others is a very odd way to characterise widespread adoption of anything. I hesitate to use the neckbeard word, but it's got overtones.

There are as many usefully curated sites, as sites where state actors curate content to hide the reptile led barcode truth from the normies.

The nomenclature could use some polish, but on HN we know they mean ability to bypass technological restrictions .

I am probably not part of the "we" you are talking about, but I had no idea "normie" means that, and I couldn't infer it from the comment. In fact I inferred a completely wrong meaning from that comment (something like "unenlightened").

Isn't "normie" a pejorative word (genuine question)?

This was the basis of my response too. It's almost never said by people in contexts where it's not pejorative, to my understanding. It's a staple of incels and the elite Mensa types. It dismisses the average lived experience because iamveryspecial.

I dont think it dismisses or invalidates their lived experiences, it just recognizes that differences in interests and adoption exists.

> Isn't "normie" a pejorative word (genuine question)?

It depends on the context. It can be a synonym for "average" (mostly neutral) or "mediocre" (pejorative).

I suspect that ‘Normie’ is the normie-friendly version of an earlier 4chan-derived term, which was absolutely a pejorative.

It generally refers to a group of “normal” people. E.g in some context they are an “out” group that does not have some specialized knowledge or understanding that the “in” group would have. So it can be negative, but it generally just means someone inexperienced with the given topic area. There is an implication of otherness to using the term “normie” for the group using it but it is generally a pretty common term now. For example, imagine a bunch of policy wonks debating something in highly specific language and then someone asks “how would the normies react?” They mean, “how would people unfamiliar with the inner workings of political policy react?” Stuff like that.

It does have a negative connotation for that group in some contexts, but the usage is pretty common and softened now.

If you want to split the categories between normies and neckbeards that's good enough a model of the world to understand the issue.

The part that I miss is we had things in public, collaborations between everyone who was interested in spending the time to access the space. This barrier was enough to keep things feeling like a community, with most of the things like this that came up being able to be addressed by internal arguments.

Now everything has to be robust to the idea that you will have neckbeards and normies interacting, and that curation is required. You have passive users, who's eyes are valuable... contributors, with divergent motivation, some pure for the joy of the project, some who want to put their agenda in front of the first group... And even external state actors pushing things at a scale that's hard to understand.

Why? It’s a salient distinction when talking about mass-adoption of technology. Social dynamics change dramatically when the ratio of neckbeards to normies is upset. I don’t like these terms either, but “neckbeards and normies” has a nice alliterative quality.

It's not just the newer generations. I have multiple friends who are literally afraid of using ad blockers and sideloading apps on their Macs in fear of some imaginary boogeyman out to get them. And VPNs are exclusively the domain of criminals, apparently. There are a dominating amount of people who have turned into the caricature of the perfect CONSUMER. It is so frustrating.

It might make more sense/be more palatable if you think of it as manifestations of particular inter-societal evolutionary strategies.

And that people actually have less control over their actions than anyone is willing to acknowledge or believe.

It's like the humans turned into cattle in the seventh season of Supernatural, except they are doing it to themselves.

Normies were an adaptation for social cohesion of followers of chieftain, it wasn't supposed to scale beyond, say, thousand people, MSM just parasitize on this instinct.

To be fair, adblockers have an inordinate amount of access. We all trust uBlock’s creator but I’ve never met him. So it’s a realistic risk but we (hope) not a threat

If adblockers have a huge amount of access, then consider how much access ads themselves have.

uBlock Origin is open source.

They have less access? When I visit my national healthcare website extensions can look at my traffic, but there are no ads.

I'm not saying ad blockers are bad, but it's not like we didn't have extensions being subverted in the past.

You're taking about access you're afraid an extension might be exploited to expose versus ad networks and social media plugins that are known to expose.

I'll take the potential bogeyman over the real one, thanks.

Since you missed it: theyre talking about extensions having access to portals where no ads exist

I didn't miss it. That exposure is only a problem if the ad blocker extension misbehaves. It's a theoretical problem.

I am pretty sure most extensions (or at least ublock) can be set to stay off on specific websites? The extension can have an extra list of known safe sites that don't have ads where the extension stays off by default (should still be turn on-able because the list might be outdated).

In uBlock's case, when you first install it on Firefox you are peomoted to give it permission to "Access data for all websites that you visit". Even if you disable adblocking on a specific website Unlock still has access to it and can see it.

If you go to your government’s office and they give you a list of names of known advertisers, then walk along your merry way and use the list to not engage those advertisers, the only trust you need is the source of the information on that list, not the list or your observance to it.

Your observance of it is open source in the case of ublock. The list should still be scrutinized, it’s a local system with an unverified source. That’s all.

You can disable your adblocker on any site you wish. If you're paranoid, you have control

You can disable your ad blocker on sites that have no ads.

The eff makes privacy badger if you trust that organisation more

>To be fair, chromium has an inordinate amount of access. We all trust chromium’s developers but I’ve never met them. So it’s a realistic risk but we (hope) not a threat.

>To be fair, Windows has an inordinate amount of access. We all trust Microsoft developers but I’ve never met them. So it’s a realistic risk but we (hope) not a threat.

I can keep going to point out how flawed this line of reasoning is, especially the second one with forced push for Recall.

It’s weakly worse to trust your OS + Browser + third party, than just OS + Browser.

Moreover, small projects can be purchased more easily. See PIA. Users need to stay updated about ownership changes. It might be viable for us, but not for everyone.

Uh oh. What do I need to know about PIA and do I need to cancel my subscription?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21679682

You’re comparison is flawed as its two ends of a spectrum

The ones using declarative blocking (like everything compatible with Safari or newer Manifest V3 web extensions for Chrome and Firefox) don't need access to your browsing context.

They're not as powerful as the ones that are able to inject content into visited pages or programmatically inspect and block/alter HTTP requests, but personally I think it's a reasonable tradeoff for the reasons you mentioned.

Chrome/Google got a very bad rep for pushing this change, and I don't want to speculate about their actual motivations, but the security aspect of it seems sound to me.

With uBlock Lite (which uses MV3), it's also possible to additionally grant "full site access" on a site by site base in case the rules-based blocking alone isn't enough; that seems ideal to me.

I'll believe Google cares about extension security when they allow the user to trivially disable auto-updates.

That would be the express road to long-term unpatched vulnerabilities.

There's basically two ways to have safe web extensions: Carefully control their entire supply chain (which could easily cause big antitrust problems for Google as the vendor of the most popular browser), or minimize the things they have access to.

It is the better road, and the road chosen by most other things that aren't SaaS, including Google's other most popular thing, Android. Keep the default to auto-update, fine, but let me disable that, as the Android app store does. Attacks from previously trusted extensions (and apps) being updated and then doing malicious things (requesting new permissions to do them is not significant friction) are worse and more frequent than old unpatched extensions being vulnerable to something. (That "something" likely being in the realm of XSS or click-jacking from a malicious page, much harder to widely exploit.)

I'm sure it's happened, but I haven't heard of an extension suffering from a significant "unpatched vulnerability" and being exploited in the wild -- I have heard of things like this click-jacking issue in Privacy Badger: https://blog.lizzie.io/clickjacking-privacy-badger.html No wild exploits afaik, just the PoC, and the ultimate worst-case impact was just (reversibly) disabling the extension for the page or a site, which isn't very severe. Perhaps a more advanced extension like Ruffle that uses Rust and WASM has a more severe attack surface than the majority of extensions written in JavaScript, but even if it does, it must be exploited by a malicious page targeting it, vs. the alternative of auto-updating to a malicious version and doing whatever it can get away with immediately.

Extensions getting taken over or just transferred to new owners and updating to do something new and malicious is quite routine and multiple examples come readily to my mind. The first to come to mind is Stylish, several years ago: https://robertheaton.com/2018/07/02/stylish-browser-extensio... (I was not impacted because I didn't update the extension during its vulnerable window, which was months, and apparently over a year for Chrome.)

The safe way to handle these issues is to let users turn off auto-updating, and to have actual policies to mitigate the damages from malicious extensions. Firefox itself will disable extensions that become known to be defective in someway, this can be independent of whether the issue is an unpatched vulnerability, whether there's a patch/update to address it, whether the extension isn't just bugged but doing something malicious, whether it always was malicious from first install or just suddenly became malicious... See https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/add-ons-cause-issues-ar...

It really is not a reasonable tradeoff because it effectively freezes the tools the blockers have in the ongoing arms race while the advertisers are able to adopt new tricks. Which is also why advertising companies (which includes all major browser makers) would like to pass it off a reasonable tradeoff.

Have you ever met the Chrome developers? Why would you trust them more than gorhill?

I, for example , i'm scared of using YouTube alternative clients like re(vanced) et simila, i'm personality scared to have my youtube/gmail account banned.

In case you watch on an Android phone: Newpipe doesn't even use your account, so the possibility of getting banned for it is much smaller.

You can make playlists in it and track your history (locally), so I don't think it's inferior to the official app. On the contrary.

Also, these new Android phones have the option to modify which app opens youtube links by default, so it's easy to just list Newpipe instead of the official app.

The only downside are downtimes a few times per year when YT changes something and Newpipe devs are making a fix, which never took more than a few days.

If you make a new account, they'll only ban that one.

I've been permanently banned from Reddit for really dumb reasons more times than I can count. The first time, I was sad. Now, I know it's a war between users and admins, and an individual account isn't worth very much.

Reddit bans are one thing, but your Gmail/Google Drive account getting banned? Not worth it, not over fucking Youtube ads. Remember, you don't have any recourse against Google bans.

So don't use google products then.

Why do you assume you can only have one Google account?

Seems like the better solution would be to get off Gmail and Google Drive if you are otherwise unable to manage that risk. Having your digital life depend on the whims of some company with a TOS that boils down to "we can do whatever we want and you have no recourse" is irresponsible. Watching youtube without ads is hardly the biggest risk factor here.

Better to have no Google account at all. (Actually I have multiple, using each only for very limited, non-essential purposes.)

make a tv movie called the craigslist killer and get every news program and social media troll room to hype it.

change began with smartphone release and accelerated.

the old internet with only the top half of the iq chart participating was better.

It can go the other way, too. I’m a computer programmer and I don’t use an ad-blocker, one of the reasons being that the presence of add is a very good indicator of websites that I should avoid. That strategy makes me actuality consume less content on the web, which I find as a big plus, and that’s because the great majority of today’s websites are filled with ads.

Related, the same goes for TV, where I don’t try to avoid them by purchasing an even more exclusive access to TV content (such as streaming), I just choose not to watch it because mainstream TV has become infested by ads. So the idea is not to play the game, just to ignore it.

That's not a very useful approach unless you go full Ted Kaczynski and disconnect entirely. For those of us living in a society, not seing ads when vising websites you effectively have to visit to do that is the preferable option.

Nothing about an ad blocker stops you from limiting your exposure to ad-supported media but it makes it more bearable in the cases where avoiding it would be even worse.

While I understand the motivation, decent ad blockers such as uBlock Origin do a lot more than just block visible conventional advertisements. So by not running an ad block, unfortunately there might be a great deal of private data about your browser habits that are being exfiltrated without your knowledge.

"With software, either the users control the program, or the program controls the users."

- Richard M. Stallman, 2011, writing in Der Spiegel

He was right. He was always right. About all of it. People didn't listen, or perhaps were never introduced to his ideas. Software grew faster than the idea of free software (on some level this was inevitable, since the latter is by definition a subset of the former).

And so, the noose tightened a little more every year.

The remedy has never changed: you must explain to people why freedom is important, and what the terrible consequences are of non-freedom. Refer them to the free software ecosystem, Linux and the FSF. Many will not listen. But whether they listen is to some extent irrelevant. Life is more fulfilling when it is lived ethically. By doing your part to advocate for freedom and against its enemies, you are at least making your own welfare better, and hopefully someone else's too.

You must have missed the other news this week. Linux has joined the dark side too. Banning people based on nationality is certainly against freedom and any kind of ethics worthy of being called that.

I missed it, apparently. Link?

They banned people employed by sanctioned organisations from being maintainers. This one worked for a company making hardware for the Russian military.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41932225

This is obviously unfortunate but I think the issue is a lot bigger than Linux. It should serve as a reminder that there are no liberals in war.

The civil liberties you take for granted, in a major war, they will be gone. They will die in one day and it will take decades to get them back if ever. Remember that in WW2 America was throwing Japanese citizens into internment camps and the other side was doing far worse. Things that are unfathomable today but in a war with sufficiently high stakes they will happen again and more.

Even at war, the USA was still much more "liberal" than Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan: for starters, they didn't put any German citizens / German descendants in a concentration camp.

The Japanese descendants/citizens living in the USA were treated different because of racism. You can argue that having a racist government isn't compatible with being "liberal", but it's a matter of degree. Having a democracy that doesn't allow non whites to vote is still more "liberal" than having a monarchy / dictatorship

> for starters, they didn't put any German citizens / German descendants in a concentration camp

False: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_German_America...

Define "concentration camp".

If you mean "a place where many of a certain category of people are held", then yes, we did. If you mean "place where many of a certain category of people are held and killed", then no, we didn't.

Technically, the first definition is at least as correct as the second one. But colloquially, the second one is what many people understand.

You cannot compare the camps that German citizens were held in by the US to Dachau.

I actually agree with you that the term “concentration camp” is inflammatory and misleading when applied to the internment camps used to hold Axis citizens and Japanese-Americans. But the comment I was replying to was attempting to draw a contrast between the Japanese internment and the treatment of German citizens, when in fact German and Italian citizens were interned during the war. In fact I’ve actually visited one of the internment camps, in Montana.

The company in question entered bankruptcy in August 2023

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baikal_CPU#Bankruptcy

I'm not arguing for/against the exclusions due to sanctions. I think the benefit of banning people who used to work for a banned entity is minimal, but after all, if they are still using an email address provided by that sanctioned entity (alumni access?) of course they haven't disentangled themselves fully from that entity

This is not true and you know it. Re-read Linus' comment if you think this is about sanctioned organizations.

And in any case, the leader of an open project should do everything to keep the project open, including defying an immoral and unjust law, or at the very least doing bare minimum compliance. They certainly shouldn't happily jump on the bandwagon.

> Linux has joined the dark side too. Banning people based on nationality

"Linux" is not banning anybody. They must comply with the sanctions against Putin regime that many governments in the world raised, in response to insane Putin's behavior.

Linux is not banning people based on nationality, is banning people based on their employers that is a different question. Linux has every right to ban somebody that would be working for a cartel, for example. This is a win-win for the people banned also, because protects them to be targeted and forced by the Russian regime to participate on war crimes.

Calling about "mafreedom!" and "your lack of ethics" just looks deranged and out of the reality. "mafreedom to kill you (and you must help me to build the bombs or are a very bad guy)" is preschool level material. Not even funny as a joke. They really think that we are so stupid?

> Linux lacks ethics

Since 2022 the Russian president is sending 1000 Russians a day to a sure death, could stop the carnage at any time, and couldn't care less about it. Most Russians support him and don't care also. I will not accept any lesson on ethics.

> This is a win-win for the people banned also, because they are in a vulnerable position to be forced by the Russian regime to commit crimes.

Nonsense.

If your concern is that a maintainer might be strongarmed into getting surreptitious changes in the linux kernel, that's a misplaced concern because:

1- the maintainer in question didn't have access to approve changes across the whole linux kernel, but only on the drivers that they were maintaining (mainly Baikal electronics hardware, I assume. I.e. the Russian government could sabotage the drivers for hardware developed inside Russia itself, not exactly something that we'd truly have to worry about)

2- just because an individual, working in the open and with a clear/known identity (and association with a bankrupt Russian hardware design firm) has been excluded, it doesn't mean that a government might give up trying to sneak in changes. They can just create new personas (just like with "Jia Tan" of xz fame)

I understand that the Linux kernel got their hand forced, but this is just stopping a volunteer from contributing (and feeling welcome), in an open source project in which they had been involved for several years. It's a win for the Linux kernel (because they are not going to get a slap on their wrists), but it's not a win for the affected individuals

To elaborate, if you're genuinely thinking that:

1- the affected maintainer has any concern of potentially being strongarmed

2- the affected maintainer appreciates being excluded from a project in which they worked on for several years

Just read their goodbye message in lkml:

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/2m53bmuzemamzc4jzk2bj7tli22ruaa...

> Since 2022 the Russian president is sending 1000 Russians a day to a sure death, could stop the carnage at any time, and couldn't care less about it. Most Russians support him and don't care also. I will not accept any lesson on ethics.

Could you spell out the exact relevant conditions that you believe disqualify someone from delivering a "lesson on ethics"? It seems a priori unlikely that you could find criteria that are not obviously tortured and self-serving while also granting this qualification to a typical US citizen, especially one who has worked for any major tech company (as is the case for many posters here).

Maybe you should be banned from this discussion forum? After all, you are from the same country that dropped atomic bombs on civilians and remains the only country in history to have done so. Any lesson on ethics from an American is by definition facetious, right?

Cry me a river.

Lots of comments here remind me of another rms quote: "They seem to have learned the habit of cowering before authority even when not actually threatened. How very nice for authority. I decided not to learn this particular lesson."

Those friends are why I own AAPL. Limit buy order for one more share of AAPL added to my IB before posting!

The reason I use iPhone is because it's not a Google product. Coincidentally, iPhone is the only realistic alternative.

Do you really think it mattered whether the people in Jonestown drank Kool Aid or Flavour Aid? What matters is the poison and both Apple and Google ship plenty of it.

What options do I have? Not be a member of society?

bwahaha what. sad.

Mac apps have never bern restricted to the App Store, so I’m not sure the idea of “sideloading” makes sense to apply there. I still know what you mean though.

By default they are restricted since several years ago. Let's remember we are a minority, most people leave defaults as they come.

They really aren't. Anything signed will load, whether you download it from the App Store or not.

Yes, there are some extra steps involved in loading unsigned programs, and the process is designed to make it sound a bit scary. I think that's the right tradeoff, reasonable people may differ.

But we're talking about the App Store vs. not-the-App-Store, and again, there is nothing which could reasonably be described as a restriction involved in installing the same binary from either of those sources. The only difference is the details of where it comes from and how to install it, and clicking on a dmg or pkg is still a fully-supported workflow with no warnings or other interference.

As a wikipedia contributor (aroound 10-13 year old account) but not really serious, i have no kind words for wikipedia.

The trolling and brigading is alive and well there.

Thats the reason i stopped contributing.

As my name would suggest, I live in a hotly contested part of the world and I have hundreds of pages in my watchlist.

The amount of "bjp it cell" work they put in to portray their world view on Wikipedia is astounding.

Ithought naively for a few years I could fight them but I simply couldnt.

They just March across pages, make edits with their clear intentions and make you the enemy.

I remember a time when I had a particular "pronoun" ish word on certain pages and that was swiftly being edited out as soon as I changed it.

It became hopeless.

Besides, they just go "Well since this is "Indian" page, we are responsible to maintaing it in our image".

I dont really use Wikipedia these days because of their hate.

It’s the same on Reddit. I wouldn’t confirm if it costs of ‘teams’, since it could also include loosely organized organic behavior.

Reddit also has similar turfing efforts for Sino related news and content.

The only time this ever gets over turned, is when some news article gets traction during EU/US consumption hours, and gains its own following.

> bjp it cell

I'm not Indian, I have no specific interest, I'm reading to pick up PoVs outside my own:

BJP IT Cell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BJP_IT_Cell

    a department of the Indian political party BJP that manages social media campaigns for the party and its members.

    According to Washington Post, 150,000 social media workers spread posts aimed at exploiting the fears of India’s Hindu majority across a vast network of WhatsApp groups.

    BJP orchestrates online campaigns through its social media cell to intimidate perceived government critics. Sadhavi Khosla, a BJP cyber-volunteer in the BJP IT Cell said that the organisation disseminated misogyny, Islamophobia and hatred.

That's a hell of a propaganda machine you're dealing with there.

i.... am not dealing with it. i threw in the towel when it became unsustainable emotionally and physically.

edit: i had a relative who was borrowing a photographer friends camera and taking those news worthy shots for lulz and out of sheer boredom. next thing we know, he is on twitter doing some discussion and the was doxed, threatened with calling the cops and his past dug up just because he used a handle that had links to his afk name. it was terrible for him. and i would say it was all state sponsored.

he had to nuke a lot of his online presence and this was around 4years ago when he was around 20. you can imagine.

this was all thanks to that BJP it cell. these minions even say as much because they literally are the law. Paid for by the state so they do represent the power of the state in covering their asses and decimating their virtual opponents.

as i said, its hopeless

with regard to our local much smaller propaganda machines, I think (by the fact that I can't reply there) you implicitly received an answer on https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41953841

Wikipedia lost many good editors over a user named BrownHairedGirl. She single handedly removed extraordinary valuable editors and left a bunch of simps in her wake. The site has never recovered.

Without the full details of the edit war you were involved in, the scenario seems to be clash between your "world view" and those who reversed your edits. From your username, being from a region where a successful genocide/ethnic cleansing of a minority religious group was conducted by the majority local population only a couple of decades back, the possibility of your edits being controversial to others not necessarily the alleged "BJP it cell" is there.

>genocide/ethnic cleansing of a minority religious group

200 people of that minority were killed.

I do not deny there was a mass exodus but to say a minority was ethnic cleansing is disengenous.

Again, my comment was not about the exodus but regarding the politics regarding the last 500 years and more specifically the last 70-90 odd years of history. That has nothing minority-majority issue you are claiming it out to be.

On the topic of exodus, you know it was the governor who ordered that the minority to be removed from their homes ? I know because I was there. You might not.

Let us put this way. There were a particular group in a region which comprised around 5% of the population. In a year or two, it dropped to effectively 0%. Now the exact terminology to use for this can be taken as genocide or ethnic cleansing or the somewhat passive "mass exodus".

Regarding the edits, I wont attempt to assume that the other side are right. But there is a sensitivity around the politics and history there, with the backdrop of the secessionist movement and the genocide/ethnic cleansing. So can see possibility of differing views there, with conflicting narratives being pushed.

> On the topic of exodus, you know it was the governor who ordered that the minority to be removed from their homes ? I know because I was there. You might not.

Really! A whole population just packed their bags and left their livelihoods, homes and properties to go and live in refugee camps, just because a governor asked them to. And not because gun toting terrorists supported by the local population where roaming around targeting them for rape and murder ? I will take the words of the people who had to flee, rather than those who were complicit in the genocide/ethnic cleansing.

Mass exodus is also ethnic cleansing.

So lets unpack here :

You take the struggle of a region and turn it into a religious struggle (The indigenous movement in the 90's was your username.substring(2) movement), smartly the "majority" there drives out the "minority" and enjoys capture of their properties (oh just a few hundred people who moved out you know, they will not return.). Sadly, you also have the audacity to say only 200 of that minority

Blame it on the Governor (look ma..., a central government appointee did it, was not us). Super convenient. We were just informing peace loving friends from across the border where our neighbours lived. I was there and so I know

As Mahatma Gandhi said, the progress of a state is how it treats its minorities. Guess you made good "progress" treating them "....well...."

At the risk of sounding like a boomer, I blame smartphones.

Smartphones were the next stage evolution of the Eternal September effect.

Some users even support this these days. From "the law is the law" and "you shouldn't be in business if you can't follow the laws" to "serves them right for having X opinion!"

>Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?

Nah, this stuff has been going on forever. See the death of Socrates for example for 'corrupting the youth of Athens' by his speech. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Socrates)

Or more recent and a very good movie (imdb all time #61) is Lives of Others about trying to smuggle some info out of East Germany. And a million other examples.

The internet has made things much easier as the tech is hard to censor.

> Have governments become more authoritarian?

Judging by the various misinformation legislation they're rushing to adopt, yes. The free internet said too many things that powerful people didn't like.

An Australian example: https://x.com/SenatorRennick/status/1834455727764869593#m

Australia is an especially bad country in this regard.

It's all "beer and barbie on the beach" until you realise that's all illegal.

I'm already annoyed I have to wipe my devices whenever I travel there or risk a $5000 fine and maybe jail time if they want the password and I don't give it up.

Australia has to be the least free country in the anglosphere.

What kind of thing do you have on your PC they’d care about?

Actually, I guess if you don’t want them to know you won’t tell me now either xD

I don’t like the idea of handing out my password any more, but wiping my PC is too much effort.

> What kind of thing do you have on your PC they’d care about?

You get that's not the point, right?

This seemed to be a fairly explicit case of “I hate traveling to Australia because of so and so”.

Sure, it’s retarded in general, but that was not what I was talking/asking about.

They apparently both have a need to travel to Australia, _and_ data on their PC that requires wiping. That makes me curious what kind of data that could be.

> _and_ data on their PC that requires wiping.

All data requires wiping because no government has a right to it without a warrant or as part of an investigation, no matter what the data is.

Yeah, no. If my 5 year old can look at it without worry, so can random airport guy number 34.

You continue to miss the point. But if you're happy handing over your personal data, and your stance is representative of most Australians, that's probably why privacy protections are so weak in Australia - most don't understand why they should care.

This. The old "if you've got nothing to hide then you've got nothing to worry about".

It's all good until the leopards start eating their face, then suddenly they understand the problem.

How often do your devices get checked my immigration. Serious question.. I have never had anything stopped.

So far never, but it's the point they can request it and punish me if I refuse which is deeply concerning.

What? The US has been pulling this crap since 9/11, so I'm not sure what you're going on about IRT the Anglo-Sphere.

The US only has privacy rights for Americans. As a non-citizen traveler, they routinely belittle, humiliate, and violate such privacy, demanding access to people's phones at risk of detention (or at best being sent back home) being exactly one of the things they do. Ask almost any Canadian what they think about the border in the last 20 years.

I've also had them mock and belittle me for no reason ("what event are you going to?" "that sounds stupid."), just petty stuff.

I wipe my personal data when traveling to the US, which I pretty much only do for work. (And likely won't even do that anymore if Nov 5 goes to Trump)

> so I'm not sure what you're going on about IRT the Anglo-Sphere.

Australia is worse than the US for this, and worse than any other anglo country.

> The US only has privacy rights for Americans.

Yes, and Australia doesn't even have privacy rights for Australians. Hence worse.

> As a non-citizen traveler, they routinely belittle, humiliate, and violate such privacy, demanding access to people's phones at risk of detention (or at best being sent back home) being exactly one of the things they do. Ask almost any Canadian what they think about the border in the last 20 years.

The Australian border force isn't any better for this, you just don't see it because I presume you're an Australian citizen. The UK and Canada can be pretty bad as well. Shitty border personal are not unique to the US.

> I wipe my personal data when traveling to the US, which I pretty much only do for work.

The difference in the US is if you are a citizen or green card holder you can tell them to go suck eggs, and the worst they can do is confiscate your device.

In Australia, even if you're a citizen, you face IIRC a $5000 fine and possibly some jail time. So that's much worse.

They need a legal basis and they are required to cite that:

https://galballyparker.com.au/can-australian-border-force-se...

In my experience and by my reading of performance stats US Border force are far more intrusive and over bearing than Australian Border forces.

> They need a legal basis and they are required to cite that:

What is the bar for a legal basis? In practice it seems equivalent to the way cops claim to smell weed as grounds for a search.

> In my experience and by my reading of performance stats US Border force are far more intrusive and over bearing than Australian Border forces.

Anecdotes will be anecdotes, but I flew in and out of the US for years before becoming a citizen and never had issues. Honestly I found UK immigration to be the rudest and most intrusive but that was just my experience.

Also stats don't mean much since IIRC Australia stopped recording or at least making public the number of devices they search.

> What is the bar for a legal basis?

See link.

> In practice it seems equivalent to the way cops claim ...

How many times have you been asked to hand your phone over exactly? In any case, you're free to challenge, etc. See link.

> Anecdotes will be anecdotes, but I flew in and out of the US for years before becoming a citizen and never had issues.

Like most people then. Whether crossing US or Australian borders.

> I found UK immigration to be

So Australia's not the worst "anglo country" then?

> since IIRC Australia stopped recording or at least making public

Do you recall correctly? Did Australia stop? Are there Australians that have access to raw stats on health, border incidents, etc?

> See link.

A blog article from a law firm isn't a great source here, especially when contrasted with the numerous accounts of people that have been forced to unlock their devices without legal basis.

> In any case, you're free to challenge, etc. See link.

Not if a 'legal basis' is claimed.

> Like most people then. Whether crossing US or Australian borders.

Yup.

> So Australia's not the worst "anglo country" then?

Is the term anglosphere such an unfamiliar term you had to put anglo country in quotes?

Australia is the worst country when it comes to searching devices without justification, objectively going by laws and user experiences.

The UK is the worst country for being treated with a lack of respect and being asked intrusive questions in my experience.

> Do you recall correctly? Did Australia stop?

You're being overly defensive, lad.

Maybe put your patriotism/tribalism aside while having this discussion?

I read a few articles recently that said Australia had stopped recorded, so yes, fairly certain I am recalling correctly but not about to go and look it up either.

> And likely won't even do that anymore if Nov 5 goes to Trump

Lol you post was quite reasonable until that reveal.

The wider Anglosphere is pushing this too. One organization behind it in both the UK and the US is the UK Labour Party. Yes, you read that correctly - high level Labour party operatives formed a nonprofit in the US to lobby for misinformation legislation, to ban X, and to pressure various other websites into deleting content.

> CCDH also held meetings with federal legislators while pushing for “change in USA” toward a censorious proposal it calls the “STAR framework,” which would create an “independent digital regulator” that could “impose consequences for harmful content.” STAR’s core concepts are similar to Europe’s just-instituted Digital Services Act and Britain’s even more stringent Online Safety Act, which puts the national media regulator Ofcom in charge of determining fines for uncooperative platforms.

The whole article is worth a read, where many people were targeted for innocuous stuff or in at least one case, for reporting on an article in JAMA:

https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/election-excl...

Apologies for the Substack link, but it covers (and cites) material you otherwise need a dozen links to discover.

It's hardly the only especially bad country though. At this point the entire western world is pushing for it (and Russia/China are already one and two steps ahead respectively).

Misinformation is an actual problem, so I don't know what you expect the government to do about it.

Nothing at all? We saw how that idea worked out in the USA.

In a perfect world I would expect the government to stop deliberately spreading misinformation, but I know that isn’t realistic.

That wasn't the question.

You don't get to dictate the discussion no matter how inconvenient that may be, just like the government doesn't get to dictate the truth.

When I ask a question I expect the reply to be an answer to the question, not trolling.

I did answer the question. You just didn’t like my answer.

Yes, nothing. It's better than allowing the government to decide what is fact or lie, Ministry of Truth style.

Doing nothing is working fine in the USA so far. Not all problems need to be solved, and sometimes the solution is worse than the problem.

I think a lot of people in Europe would disagree with that notion of fine

There’s an image around the internet of a dog in a burning house saying ‘this is fine’. That’s the kind of fine I have in mind when I hear that.

Those europeans (and it definitely is not all europeans or even close to it if that is what you are insinuating) should first look at what their own governments are doing.

I expect the government to enable people to think critically and make their own deicisions, primarily through adequate education.

Beyond that, no, "misinformation" is only a problem for those who want to control others.

> Have governments become more authoritarian?

It's not just governments. It's people that support grandiose efforts against "misinformation", "disinformation" and "malinformation".

> Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?

People don't have energy to hear wrong and dangerous opinions anymore. Everything dangerous to the current order should be banned, otherwise fascism is inevitable.

Do you think that there's a link between an extreme proliferation of misinformation and people wanting to control it?

No.

Media has always been salacious nonsense — at least, judging from the 1880s English newspapers I’ve read as part of a research writing class: they’re full of complete lies about Jack the Ripper, for instance.

Most of the discussion from government is using that perennial fact to justify suppressing true information — eg, suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story or people’s personal experiences with the COVID vaccine. Even though that collapsed both trust in media and trust in medical institutions.

The chain of custody issues alone render the laptop story incredible

Tell that to the courts, I guess.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/11/business/media/hunter-bid...

Excerpt:

> The laptop and some of its contents played a visible role in federal prosecutors’ case against the president’s son, who was charged with lying on a firearm application in 2018 by not disclosing his drug use. A prosecutor briefly held up the laptop before the jury in Delaware, and an F.B.I. agent later testified that messages and photos on it and in personal data that Mr. Biden had saved in cloud computing servers had made his drug use clear.

iCloud isn’t the laptop, let’s be clear

Incredible that in this comment thread there are suggestions the Biden government is fascist, even though Biden allowed his son to be prosecuted but if the reverse happened Trump would obviously interfere.

Federal prosecutors tried to make an extremely favorable plea deal with Hunter Biden that granted immunity to a host of crimes he wasn’t charged with. The judges ended up throwing it out.

Don’t rule out a lame duck pardon, either. Both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton pardoned their ne’er-do-well relatives, and it’s very common for Presidents to issue pardons during their final days in office.

>Don’t rule out a lame duck pardon, either.

Biden was asked if he would pardon his son, and he said no. But this is entirely beside the point, because Trump would pardon his son without a second thought and Trump supporters wouldn't blink.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-tells-muir-wouldnt-par... https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/06/politics/biden-will-not-p... https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c133mdjkl7go

He also said he wouldn’t drop out of the election.

Yeah the party spent weeks arguing with him to put the country before his desire to be a two term president. Something Trump is far too egotistical to do. But this is entirely beside the point, because the Democrat politicians are held to a far higher standard than the Republicans politicians are, especially Trump.

To add to the sibling comment about the courts, from Wiki:

> Starting in 2021, news outlets began to authenticate some of the contents of the laptop. In 2021, Politico verified two key emails used in the Post's initial reporting by cross-referencing emails with other datasets and contacting their recipients. CBS News published a forensic analysis which examined a "clean" copy of the data obtained directly from Mac Isaac. It concluded that the "clean" data, including over 120,000 emails, originated with Hunter Biden and had not been altered

This whole thing is sounding alot like the one about Bill Murray, the son of famous atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair (not the famous one from SNL).

His mom really influenced his behavior, so it has to be a conspiracy: William J. Murray III is an American Baptist minister, and social conservative lobbyist. Murray serves as the chairman of the Religious Freedom Coalition, a non-profit organization in Washington, D.C. that lobbies Congress on issues related to aiding Christians in Islamic and Communist countries.

It's fascinating to see the true believer. It's like those cult members that stayed in the cult when the day of the end of the world came and passed and nothing happened. They just said "well, it's probably going to happen next year". It's both sad and fascinating - there's literally nothing too ridiculous that people couldn't believe given the opportunity.

It's weird how every single example of supposed suppression of information is something like "hunter Biden laptop" that has been reported in news ad nauseam.

The comment you are replying to has two examples, only one of which has to do with Hunter Biden.

The Hunter Biden laptop story is highly improbable and has many typical hallmarks of Russian Disinformation. It also happens to be true. That is all there is to it.

Yes. People who want to control the information want to distribute misinformation freely and be guaranteed nobody can contest them. That's the link. The censors always will be the liars, because once you can control who can say what, it is impossible to resist the temptation to lie a little bit for a good cause. And then a little bit more. We have seen it happen many, many times.

> We have seen it happen many, many times.

Have we? I can only think of wartime censorship (which, even if it was sold for protection from enemy propaganda, was always about morale, so doesn't apply here), and authoritarian regimes, which also don't apply here.

Yes, we have. Those same people who whine about "misinformation" are repeatedly caught lying to the public - for the public's benefit, of course, which they get to define. Which only makes sense - if you think the public is not smart enough to be trusted with figuring what is true and what is false by themselves, and needs a gatekeeper class to define it for them, then it's only a little step from that to deciding the public is not smart enough to make correct decisions based on facts, and needs to be manipulated by the same gatekeeper class by telling them what they need to hear, for their own good. Again, this happened many times just in the recent years.

> Again, this happened many times just in the recent years.

Again, when? Concrete examples if there are so many!

> if you think the public is not smart enough to be trusted with figuring what is true and what is false by themselve

I mean, whatever one thinks of censorship this is objectively true. We have flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, people who drank bleach against Covid, people who believe Ukraine started the war against Russia, the pizzagate nonsense, people who believe in the magical powers of rhino horns and shark fin soups and on and on and on. There are, objectively, a lot of very stupid and/or impressionable people out there in the world.

> Concrete examples if there are so many!

We were told mass surveillance against US citizens doesn't happen. It did and still is. We were told healthcare reform will not force people to change their insurance coverage and healthcare providers. It turned out to be "a lie of the year". We were told US law enforcement supplying guns to drug cartels is crazy talk. It was true. We were told FBI, CIA and DOJ heads would never lie to the Congress. They did, and suffered no consequences. We were told the inflation is a temporary phenomenon that is going to go away very quickly, and is insignificant. It never did, and was very significant. We were told the hypothesis of COVID originating from Wuhan lab leaks is insane fantasy which no scientists have ever believed and it has no evidence at all behind it. It turned out to be not so. We were told migration restrictions as a way to reduce the impact of the pandemic is a racist bigotry. Then in a short time it became a mandatory policy. We were told masks are useless and nobody but medical workers should use them. Then there were mandated for everyone. We were told COVID is nothing to worry about and is less dangerous than the flu. Then 2020-21 happened. We were told lockdowns are vital and even sole person daring to go to an empty beach should be arrested because it is necessary to prevent millions of deaths. Then the same people endorsed mass protests where thousands of people gathered together. We were told 2020 protests were "mostly peaceful". They were anything but. We were told we need just a two week lockdown to flatten the curve. It turned to be many months. We were told closing the schools is absolutely necessary or our kids will die. It turned out not to be so. We were told COVID vaccines prevent the spread of the virus. They did not. We were told Hunter laptop is a Russian disinformation operation. It wasn't. We were told rumors of US government working with social media companies to censor dissenting opinions are total lies. Until the documents confirmed that's exactly what happened. We were told rumors of Joe Biden being unfit to rule are absolutely false and he's never going to be replaced as a candidate. He was.

These are just some random examples, only from recent years, I could have many more, especially if I dug deeper into the modern history. The press and the government are lying to us constantly, incessantly, brazenly. And the only way we even know they do and can challenge them on it is because they don't yet have the total control over the information. And that's why they want it.

> There are, objectively, a lot of very stupid and/or impressionable people out there in the world.

There are. But that doesn't mean some self-appointed guys that get paid for bloviating in public are now some magic geniuses that have the right to tell us all how it really is. They do not possess any such capacity and they are just as fallible as the rest of us. Except that they have been already caught, many times, lying to us.

I mean it's a pretty fundamental tenet of liberty that you have the freedom to do things only to the extent that you don't harm others.

And it's a simple consequence of scaling that the more massively you scale a communication system like the internet the more pathways there are for person A to harm person B.

So naturally there end up being more cases evaluating harm that involve the internet. Some of those cases will involve ordinary judicial things like injunctions.

And all of that is true regardless of whether you believe any one particular injunction is justified or unjustified. It's just a matter of what happens at scale.

You can, of course, try to give up the notion that liberty ends when you start causing harm, and many people have gone down that path. But for those of us who are still in the liberty camp, these questions are difficult and involve weighing a number of concerns and claims. And anyone who thinks they have easy answers is probably just deeply confused or high on rhetoric.

Most of these cases don't involve any actual harm beyond hurt feelings, so that's largely a red herring.

These days, causing hurt feelings is called violence by many people. Or sometimes, saying nothing at all is.

Not sure what cases you are referring to, but “Hurt feelings” in India have caused multiple riots, resulting in utter carnage, spilling over to years, decades longs strings of terrorism and reprisals against minorities.

Feelings are the reason people get up to live in the morning.

I get why we used to make that statement. In a way it’s about rationality mattering, and how feelings being hurt are different from actual hurt.

In the context of this conversation, I’ll argue its an un-pragmatic dismissal of a pertinent fact.

I’ll make this argument: “At the scales we are talking, and across the breath of human cultures, feelings end up mattering.”

That's the kind of lame excuse that fascists and elitists always resort to in order to increase their power and shut down speech they dislike. Freedom of expression is absolutely essential to the long-term future of humanity. If preserving that fundamental human right means that some emotionally fragile people start riots then so be it, that is an acceptable cost.

Your "fact" is merely a matter of opinion.

Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence.

Obviously we shouldn't start riots, but if you make hate speech, there may be consequences accordingly.

And I'm sure in your mind you or those you approve of will be the ones to define what is "hate speech"?

Freedom of speech absolutely does mean not being prosecuted for your speech.

Are you saying that hurt feelings aren't harm? Words can hurt too you know, e.g. popular black footballers getting racist abuse anytime they go online is harmful to their mental health; trans people being told to kill themselves because they're Satan's spawn and pedophiles and what not also take severe hits to their mental health.

you need to acknowledge the difference between telling you to kill yourself vs killing you. One is clearly more harmful than the other.

then imagine living with free speech vs with no free speech. One is clearly better.

combining the two ideas, there is always going to be a gray zone in the middle. It is not obvious at all that where you want to draw the line is optimal.

There is a critical principle in English common law: de minimus non curat lex.

Paraphrased, the law does not concern itself with trifles. Mean words causing hurt feelings qualify. I acknowledge that it can be a very big deal for the person on the receiving end: it's the sort of thing we should (and do) socially discourage, or moderate (or not) at the platform level.

But no, I don't think it rises to the level of harm, in that there should be no remedy under law, criminal nor tortuous.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/de_minimis_non_curat_lex

Pain is different from harm you know. When people's feelings are hurt by truth or even just my existence as a "white male" then sorry but that is not me harming you but you refusing to grow up.

Anyway, I'll believe that "progressives" actually care about how others feel when they start treating those not on board with their ideology with anything other than scorn or schadenfreude.

> When people's feelings are hurt by truth or even just my existence as a "white male" then sorry but that is not me harming you but you refusing to grow up

And this is of course not what anyone is talking about, thanks for the useless strawman. It's stuff like football players being told to die, compared to monkeys, and mannequins with their names being hanged from bridges (Vinicius Jr) only because their skin colour is black. Or monkey chants and bananas being thrown at them.

It's not a strawman but the kinds of views those calling to be tough on hate crimes often espouse.

And no, celebrities getting unwanted attention is not a harm or even an issue that anyone should care about. They can go wash away their tears with the stacks of cash they leech from forced public broadcast fees and other puplic funds for all I care. Or just go play for their own country.

The problem here is how you define harm. "Sticks and stones may break my bones But words shall never hurt me." used to be the commonly accepted Wisdom, and with that definition you don't need to controll what others are allowed to say. I don't think it's a coincidence that governments are all to happy to get rid of that sentiment for exposing their lies does harm them.

That's a nursery rhyme we tell kids to help them be brave though. It's not a principle of law.

Defamation and similar concepts are ancient. Ostracization, excommunication, etc are also harms committed primarily by using (or withholding) words that have been recognized throughout almost all of human history as ways to significantly harm someone.

So I think one would have to work pretty hard to come up with a theory where only bodily harm counts.

> Have governments become more authoritarian?

They were always like this. 20 years of state funded education doesn't go into depth on this topic though. 1984 is a warning about a possible future tyranny, right?

We must work to build an inter[dark]net which ideally fully divorces the user from the government and laws of the country the user is physically in (unless the user leaks his dox).

I can't imagine the kind of people it will attract. 5% of sane people and 95% doing the most hideous things in mankind.

Law and Govs are not so bad that we should get rid of it. They do add value to society compared to a fully lawless anarchic community/tools/etc. There is a place where freedom does have to stop and trespassing that frontier will have consequences.

We don't need to through all our laws and Gov (especially in Western countries where really it's not so bad). But instead, we need better law, law enforcement, etc... The key part is it's up to us to fight for it.

> They do add value to society compared to a fully lawless anarchic community/tools/etc.

Think it depends on how large you want your communities to be. It should be fine until some 200 people.

We already have that. Why are you commenting here?

In the end, the real service social networks offer is moderation.

It's just politics... Replace "open internet" with "land" and imagine countries (ie people) are attempting to block others access to some resource. It was naive to assume that the internet wouldn't adhere the nature of our reality.

That’s not a fair comparison: land is finite in a way that the open internet isn’t.

Human attention and energy is relatively limited though, and the medium of the Internet and its control is just for that

In fact, the most valuable resource on the internet is finite: atention with the possibility of influence those who give it to you. This is already a question of national security.

Yep. It's hard for us to un-learn the instincts taught by millions of years of evolution. We see scarcity in everything, even where there is none.

The problem isn't that we "see scarcity", it's that we intentionally introduce scarcity. You can make more money with scarcity. It's a lot harder to make any money without scarcity, even.

Instead of Napster letting you download any song anyone ever bothered to digitize, we now have a dozen different music streaming services giving you access to the music from whichever publishers they managed to sign deals with and you have to pay a monthly fee and can only use a number of devices at the same time and not share with friends and family unless they also pay for the access.

Yes, of course there are good reasons for this: without paying, the artists don't get paid and that means making music becomes no more than an expensive hobby and yadda yadda but that's my point: we may have corporeal justifications for the scarcity we impose on the Internet but the scarcity exists and we deliberately created it and use the police and military to enforce it.

Is it instinct at play here or is this what you are taught by those who depends on it?

In my experience people are more than happy to share if left to their own devices.

Clearly you miss the point or don't understand politics, if you think the matter or comparison I made has anything to do with finitism. Politics has everything to do with conflicts in wants. For example, some people want free speech, and other people don't want other people to be able to spread lies or what they perceive as lies. Do you see how these wants are at odds with each other, or that two people can have opposing wants? Such conflicts can arise wherever humans interact with each other, and the internet isn't different somehow because it is less finite. I mean, do you think there aren't people out there who don't want to police the internet?

Simply, put, politics is not limited to matters of finitism. And the example I gave, is a perfectly fitting example of where politics is evident.

>>> Were we naive even at the time? Have governments become more authoritarian? Or has our energy for resistance just been slowly whittled away?

Yes, naive to think that we could live in a world without fences. The internet makes it very cheap to tear down fences. Yet, good fences make for good neighbors. It was always naive to think that governments would let a torn-fences world, remain untouched.

Internet transitioned from a fun toy for nerds to a serious tool used by the masses, and needs to be regulated accordingly. Looking back, it was extremely naive to think that even though we regulate every single aspect of social life, the internet would remain the bastion of freedom just because it would be cool if it did. Think about all the rules we have about what can and what cannot be said not to break social cohesion on TV, or radio, or newspaper, or street sidewalk, or workplace, or family gathering - the internet is moving in the same direction. The anarchy was never meant to last.

"needs to be"

No it doesn't. And neither do we need regulation for what I can say at a family gathering or on the street.

Thought policing and other neo-puritanian movements can go fuck themselves.

> And neither do we need regulation for what I can say at a family gathering or on the street

It's slightly different, since you don't do your banking, taxes, business, information gathering at that family gathering; nor can malicious actor effortlessly spam misinformation/scams at every family gathering/street.

Especially considering we know multiple countries have extremely active operations online trying to sway opinions their way, it's naive to compare the internet to a neutral public place.

> Internet transitioned from a fun toy for nerds to a serious tool used by the masses, and needs to be regulated accordingly

Don't give in like that. Let those normies get hurt. It's their personal problem.

We don't regulate letters or phone calls (not to mention in-person meetings) in the way that today's governments want to regulate the internet.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com