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Comment by 0x_rs | Hacker News Reader

The war on the free internet is accelerating. Without real push-back to these dystopian laws and consequences for the people proposing and lobbying for them, you'll miss what will ultimately end up being a temporary anomaly of mostly unrestrained free flow of information. It's not an hypothetical scenario or something that will develop down the line, it's happening today, worldwide.

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I heard from a friend last night that they were unable to see posts on X about current protests in their country because those were considered "adult" content which can now only be viewed after submitting to an ID check. Not porn, video of a protest.

You're 100% right that it's happening today.

Sadly the old guard of free speech and privacy activists on the internet has long gone, drowned by a sea of unprincipled populist reactionaries - if their team decided that the content is "problematic", then they are entirely justified in censoring and punishing the speakers for daring to speak it, and entirely justified in protecting everybody else from having to suffer the horror of reading/seeing/hearing it, and it matters not whether the mechanisms are legal or ethical because the ends justify the means.

>the old guard of free speech and privacy activists on the internet has long gone, drowned by a sea of unprincipled populist reactionaries

which is an unnecessary ideological divide if your concern is free speech and privacy; too bad the old guard of activists chose sides and alienated additional support for their cause.

> >the old guard of free speech and privacy activists on the internet has long gone, drowned by a sea of unprincipled populist reactionaries

> which is an unnecessary ideological divide if your concern is free speech and privacy;

What do you mean by this, an unnecessary ideological divide?

> too bad the old guard of activists chose sides and alienated additional support for their cause.

What sides did they choose and whose additional support did they alienate?

I guess "The old guard of free speech" went to be rightie libertarians

As a group, those who bang the free speech and privacy drum be seen as being more to the right than 20 years ago, but I doubt it is significantly because individuals changed their other political opinions. More because some of the group dropped out as they have been silenced by fear or just changed their outlook on it as political landscape has changed. Also in some part because those remaining in the group are just viewed as being more to one side of the political spectrum than they used to be simply because of this view.

I parsed this entirety as a single noun cluster: "the old guard of free speech and privacy activists on the internet"

and to me that can be summed up as "the EFF", and the EFF is decidedly left whinge, and does not attract the support of others who are concerned about free speech.

free speech on the pre-web internet didn't really need a group, it was a given and generally accepted by all parties

But in that case, the EFF didn't go to be rightie libertarians. They if anything may have gone further left, it's just that they no longer champion free speech. Which is basically what I said, just applied to the group rather than individuals.

If the "rightie libertarians" from sibling is correct, then it actually describe the dynamic I have noticed.

It is free speech as long as you are politically right, no matter how far extreme right you are or what you are saying. But, if you are left or oppose the far right, then criticizing those is not free speech, but rather a restriction on it. Suddenly you should shut up, all sorts of additional rules apply to you. It is wrong to argue with far right, to say things that are uncomfortable for them or call them names, call them nazi even when it is clearly the case. But if you are just a little radical feminist, you are valid target for any amount of abuse which suddenly counts as free speech. Your leftist or feminist speech does not count as valid free speech.

Eventually, it started to look like "free speech" is tactically used expression to create an asymmetry and applies only to certain ideas. Or certain people ideas.

I don't understand what you're getting at.

You're saying some "dynamic" of people you have noticed do not really support free speech in some cases?

Lots of people don't support free speech. My original post bemoaned exactly that.

I am saying that "I support free speech" ended up associated with "I am pro far right, but do not want to openly admit so, but I will gladly accept suppression of left, progressives, liberals and anyone who criticizes right".

And that eventually we realized that "old school free speech groups" just wanted to shut up opposition to far right.

It ended up associated with the far right, by people on the left who are against free speech I suppose, yes.

> And that eventually we realized that "old school free speech groups" just wanted to shut up opposition to far right.

That's untrue.

It ended up associated with the far right, because poster child for "defending speech" was only and exclusively far right. Really.

It was never "I strongly disagree with an annoying progressive, but I will defend their right to say it". It was always "how dare you criticize far right or call someone far right, you are preventing their speech by opposing them".

> people on the left who are against free speech I suppose, yes.

Funny enough, far right and conservatives were openly against free speech again and again and again. Including in very practical ways. And we see that right now with Trump, Thiel, Musk, Vance and the rest.

People "on the right" nor self styled free speech advocates never minded that. There was never any fascist movement for freedom, the openly stated goal was always to remove the freedom. But if you are not one of them say so and mean it as a criticism, you are somehow supposedly preventing their free speech.

> It ended up associated with the far right, because poster child for "defending speech" was only and exclusively far right. Really.

It ended up being associated with the far right by far leftists. Really. Go outside internet bubbles and ask normal people on the street. People don't think free speech is "far right". Really.

> It was never "I strongly disagree with an annoying progressive, but I will defend their right to say it". It was always "how dare you criticize far right or call someone far right, you are preventing their speech by opposing them".

I've heard that a lot, so that's false.

> Funny enough, far right and conservatives were openly against free speech again and again and again. Including in very practical ways. And we see that right now with Trump, Thiel, Musk, Vance and the rest.

I'm not seeing where the humor is.

> People "on the right" nor self styled free speech advocates never minded that.

Also wrong, many free speech advocates have greatly minded conservative efforts to censor speech in the past.

> There was never any fascist movement for freedom,

No, but that appears to be a strawman of your own construction by equating free speech advocates with fascists.

At least the old guard never spoke in riddles.

It’s really important to remember in this context that “the purpose of a system is what it does.”

Do not think for a moment that ID verification primarily protects children and only incidentally enables authoritarian restrictions on speech. Do not think for a second that verification initiatives are designed without anticipating this outcome.

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

> "the purpose of a system is what it does"

So then the purpose of the internet was to share cat pics? This quote is so wrong in every way.

> Do not think for a moment

I will decide what I think thank you. It's very ironic when arguments against "censorship" go this way.

That's a typical "reductio absurdum"

The purpose of a system is not what it does.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/come-on-obviously-the-purpo...

I think you're taking it too literally. A more generous interpretation would be "what it does can be a better indicator of what the true hidden motive was for nefarious state programs".

I have to agree that this is problematic in the sense of ascribing malicious intent, but it is actually a useful concept when performing an honest/truthful analysis and trying to acquire new knowledge and perspectives so you can compare them. i.e. the analysis of what it ought to do versus what it actually does.

Given a software product, there are often marketers/advertisers telling you what use cases they envisioned for their product, but you as the customer actually know more about your core business and your own needs. Hence you choose the products not based on what the vendor claims about the product i.e. the intended/prescribed purpose, you care more about what the product can do for your business and that includes discovering ways to use the product that the vendor could have never imagined in the first place.

The phrase does not mean that you can pick any single effect of a system and claim that is its purpose, as your linked article does in its examples. (Ironically, a form of reducto as absurdum.) It is a heuristic, a pattern of thought to attempt to overcome the bias towards judging systems based on the intentions behind them instead of the outcomes they produce. The point is that when you choose a course of action, you are implicitly choosing its negative effects as well, and the choice should be judged on all its effects. You are making a cost / benefit analysis, and if that is not explicit, it can easily be wrong.

So the purpose of a hospital is to kill people?

Does your hospital kill more people than it saves? If so, you might be describing the 19th century Vienna General Hospital, which had two maternal wards: one staffed by trained physicians, suffering up to 30% mortality, the other by midwives, only experiencing 2~10% rates. The difference was so pronounced, local women desperately avoided the first ward, begging to give birth in the streets rather than be admitted there. Ignaz Semmelweis later attributed the disparity to doctors having performed autopsies before attending births without disinfecting their clothes, hands, or tools, dropping to only a few percent with disinfection.

Or if you limit your demographics, perhaps you might be thinking of the Tuskegee syphilis study, where treatment was intentionally withheld for a progressive, life-threatening disease without the consent of the patients, making its purpose to slowly kill the participants by its own admission?

Yes, if your hospital does seem to kill more people than most and there's no alternative explanation like accepting more severe cases, then its purpose might be inverse or orthogonal to its stated goal.

Hospitals save orders and orders of magnitude more people than they accidently kill.

Infant mortality for hospital babies is what, well under 1/1000? Infant mortality was 25% for the vast majority of human history.

Modern medicine is legitimately indistinguishable from magic.

> Not porn, video of a protest

Not commenting on ID checks but depending on the protest, some images can be violent and definitely "adult".

I never understood why we go out of our way to "protect" children against seeing naked people, but real people in a pool of blood, nah, no problem. I think that people bloodily fighting each other for causes that I have a hard time understanding even as an adult may not be what we want children to be exposed to without control. Images of violence create a visceral reaction and I don't think it is how we should approach political problems, in the same way that porn may not be the best approach to sex, the same argument for why we don't let children access porn applies to political violence too.

The point I wanted to make is that whatever your opinion is on ID checks to access to adult content, "adult" doesn't and shouldn't just mean "porn".

Well that's kind of exactly my point, really.

Ostensibly these laws are to protect kids from porn, but that isn't really the case. They instantly expand to everything else "adult", and it's very easy to argue that talking about politics, or discussing evidence of war crimes or genocide, or apparently showing a real and current protest, are "adult" conversations.

And with laws like this, people, adults, everyone, lose the ability to participate in those conversations without doxxing themselves. Some of these things are difficult to discuss when you fear retribution.

It's not about the porn. It was never actually about the porn. The porn is just the difficult-to-defend-without-looking-like-a-pervert smokescreen. It's designed to curtail the free flow of information and expression in far more areas. The people behind these laws are liars.

We are approaching a time when most of that free flowing information is LLM generated propaganda and advertising. The average person can no longer go on the internet and trust any of the things they see or read, so what's the value of such information? I would prefer the free internet of the 90s and 00s, but we're losing it even without these laws.

> We are approaching a time when most of that free flowing information is LLM generated propaganda and advertising. The average person can no longer go on the internet and trust the things they see or read

The average person could never do that; critical evaluation was always needed (and it was needed for the material people encountered before the internet, too.) The only thing that is a change from the status quo ante in the first sentence is “LLM generated”.

Actually I think with LLM, the average person is more likely to be critical of anything they see now than ever before, as they know that it could be AI generated. In my non IT circle, now even genuine content is being doubted as being AI generated.

This state is not going to last long because LLMs are getting better and the people who write prompts are getting better. Soon the vast majority of content on the net is going to be generated by LLMs to influence you in one way or another, be that politically or as a consumer, and the content is going to be indistinguishable from human writing. And you can be virtually certain that the groups and people with the lowest moral standards will use it the most to sway public opinion.

Maybe, but it's not possible to critically evaluate everything you see and read. For sure most people don't, and probably no one does all the time. So if before 10% of information was lies and manipulation, most of the information was still good, or at least something that a real person thought was good. Now, or soon, anything you read or watch has a 99% chance of being generated by someone who wants to manipulate you, because those who want to manipulate have something to gain from it, and are willing to spend more money to do it than those who want to share the truth.

There's still messaging between groups of people who already know each other and can verify each others' online identities offline.

It's in the UK, EU and soon to the US.

The west is going to be less and less free.

I'm sorry I feel the chill writing this, but I hope the hackers keep the flame alive.

Hackers: keep giving the finger to regulators when they overreach. They don't get to make the future.

This reliance on hackers and other antisocial snowflakes in FOSS world is one of the reason we are where we are.

Political problems cannot be solved through technology or yet another forked FOSS project. They require political power, numbers and threat of violence to those in charge.

It's not a war.

The population (especially the youth) is anesthetized by social media, shorts, fear-inducing news, economic hopelessness, climate extremes..

In the meantime, everything is getting integrated - banks, tax systems, tech platforms. Now this age verification.. And of course, AI is being implemented everywhere so that no one can evade the big brother.

As it stands now, this Internet is no longer salvageable imo.

> Without real push-back to these dystopian laws and consequences for the people proposing and lobbying for them

If anything, I’m seeing more calls for internet regulation on HN and other tech places than in the past.

Every time something is shared about topics like kids spending too much time on phones or LLMs producing incorrect output, the comments attract a lot of demands for government regulation as the solution. Regulation is viewed as the way to push back on technological and social problems.

The closer regulations come to reality, the less popular they are. Regulation seems most attractive in the abstract, before people have to consider the unintended consequences.

The most common example I can think of is age verification: Every thread about smartphone addiction come with calls for strict age-based regulation all over the place.

Yet the calls for strict age-based internet regulation generally fail to realize that you can’t only do age verifications on kids and you can’t do it anonymously. The only way to do age verification is to verify everyone, and the only way to verify that the age verification matches the user is to remove the possibility of anonymity.

The calls for regulation always imagine it happening to other people and other companies. Few people demanding internet age verification for things like social media seem to realize that it would also apply to sites like HN. Nobody likes the idea of having to prove your identity for an age check to sign up for HN, they just want to imagine Facebook users going through that trouble because they don’t use Facebook and therefore it’s not a problem.

Engineers want some kind of regulation because they feel like computer systems, which they nominally control, are out of control, because of the business people's demands. They want the right to say no without having to have the consequences of saying no. But then when regulations come in, they're not about regulating business, they're about regulated interactions between people and business. And whereas the idealist sees a regulation as a chance to change things for the better, a regulator sees a regulation as a chance to preserve things as they were just before they became bad. (It takes a politician, not a regulator, to change things.)

They always start with "think of the children", but that's just the opening salvo. The wild west days of the internet are definitely behind us. We'll be lucky if we still have private personal computing in the future, or any semblance of free speech.

If we're to regain any ground here we need to adjust the messaging wrt terms like "wild west" - that's precisely the kind of terminology that scares the average voter into thinking the government needs to do something about this whole internet thing. We need to use patriotic and inspiring language, like "free" as in "free speech for the internet," or "safe and private" etc

There wont be any consequences if you expect them to legislate against themselves, or handcuff themselves and throw themselves into a cage.

Let's stop beating around the bush. We all know this doesn't make any sense.

I'm not sure this old horror story still works. The things to be afraid of have changed too much and at a far larger scale than people then could comprehend.

The "temporary anomaly" is one of perception. It was individuals talking to individuals. In terms of volume the world has never had this much free flow of information, and its never been easier to transmit encrypted data within a group.

At the same time the problem with letting the internet be without government means it pushes digital crack to all children, and an oligarchy of (natural) monopolies tightly control certain powers through systems like "sign in with Google".

The options for companies to instead use a government backed digital identity seems like an obvious step forward if designed carefully enough.

That requires the right mindfullness of people's rights, eg the right story. I just don't think the war on the free-internet narrative from 30 years ago is up for it.

But the "digital crack" isn't what the government wants to restrict from children.

They want to stop children from accessing porn, which really isn't all that bad. Certainly it's not nearly as bad as wasting hours on perfectly legal social media and streaming sites

It's not accelerating, it's over. We lost.

We didn't quite yet. We're still here, pretty anonymous, I'm sure your real name is not deadbabe :) IRC still exists where you can just pick a nickname from thin air. And most of these things will stay, underground. It's the commercial mainstream that will bow to this, sadly.

Unfortunately, the expert in debugging Arduino electrical errors, or in numpy, or in evaluating what the burn pattern on your spark plugs means, or in identifying that strange object in your telescope, won't be on IRC. He'll be on Reddit, where you'll need a government-provided ID _and sanctioned device_ to participate. Or on Facebook, where you'll need a government-provided ID _and sanctioned device_ to participate. Or on whatever large, popular platform replaces them, where you'll need a government-provided ID _and sanctioned device_ to participate.

But rest assured, so long as you want to discuss privacy and nostalgia of the pre-invasionary internet, you'll find a knowledgeable expert on IRC.

There are more free alternatives. We need to move to these platforms. We need the network effect here for sure.

There's lots of experts like that on Libera IRC. It's still a big hub for support of FOSS project.

So is Matrix which doesn't have the capability for this kind of checks (and is federated so you can add your own server without it).

Maybe there is an astronomy channel, maybe there isn't. The official page [1] requires longer to install the client to even know which channels exist. That's arguably worse than Reddit, which requires no software nor registration to know which communities exist.

[1] https://libera.chat/guides/findingchannels

What do you mean? The webchat client is linked right there in the second paragraph, doesn't require you to install anything and let's you connect and list channels as a guest without registering. It took me like 30 seconds to find out that there is indeed an astronomy channel.

It was not clear to me that was a web browser interface, because it listed system requirements - none of which were an actual web browser.

Uhh, I'm not seeing any system requirements, am I blind? It just warns against using the /list command if you have a very slow internet connection since it produces rather voluminous output. If you scroll down a bit further they also link to a third-party website that has a searchable index of all publicly visible channels.

In Germany, before I can send an anonymous message on HN, I have to send a picture of my passport to some government agency and have a video call with them, so that my phone is allowed to attach to the internet.

Could you elaborate? I lived in Germany for a while and I never had to send a picture to a government agency and have a video call with them to access the internet. Phone, laptop, and desktop.

Never heard anything like that from many people I know in Germany.

I feel like there is a huge chunk of context missing here.

Sure. The difference is probably that you had a contract assigned to your home address, so they had your identity and your banking coordinates already, no need to ask.

I'm referring to sim cards bought in a supermarket. Prepaid, no contract. The activation process, regardless of the brand (I've tried many!) involves those video calls.

Oh that sucks deeply. In Spain they have something like that too. But in Holland you can still buy one in the supermarket without registering anything (though you'll have to top up by cash every single time if you really don't want to be traced).

I think Ireland still doesn't require registration either.

That’s insane! Dystopian!

No you don't. You can get a prepaid SIM card.

Can you in Germany? In Italy you can't.

Most of the European countries require registering prepaid SIM cards for about 10 years now.

Amusingly, one of the prepaid sim card that i got in an airport required as a first step that i install an app on my phone (with my previous sim since internet was needed) just so that the app could refuse to proceed because that sim was not German...

I’ve literally never used IRC, wouldn’t know where to begin.

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