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Comment by shevy-java | Hacker News Reader

We need to preserve data. The FBI is trying to kill data.

We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here. I actually think there should be a human right to data. With that I mean, primarily, knowledge, not to data about a single human being as such (e. g. "doxxing" or any such crap - I mean knowledge).

Knowledge itself should become a human right. I understand that the current law is very favourable to mega-corporations milking mankind dry, but the law should also be changed. (I am not anti-business per se, mind you - I just think the law should not become a tool to contain human rights, including access to knowledge and information at all times.)

Wikipedia is somewhat ok, but it also misses a TON of stuff, and unfortunately it only has one primary view, whereas many things need some explanation before one can understand it. When I read up on a (to me) new topic, I try to focus on simple things and master these first. Some wikipedia articles are so complicated that even after staring at them for several minutes, and reading it, I still haven't the slightest clue what this is about. This is also a problem of wikipedia - as so many different people write things, it is sometimes super-hard to understand what wikipedia is trying to convey here.

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> We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here

Historically speaking I can't see this as even being in the top 100 evil things the FBI has done.

> Historically speaking I can't see this as even being in the top 100 evil things the FBI has done.

Perhaps, but we can't change the past: we can only fight against what is happening in the present to try to get a better future.

Ok then. This, while bad, is not even in the top 50 of evil deeds the FBI is CURRENTLY doing ...

List not fifty, but just ten of those, I'd like to know.

If you're in public denial about the FBI not being the righteous force for "peace, justice & the american way (whatever the heck that is)", despite the copious publically available evidence & reporting (by independent journalists) to the contrary, then ... no, you really don't want to know.

(all this, over what was mostly a tongue in cheek response anyway ...)

I think neither "righteous" nor "evil" are appropriate words in this context. It's a real-world institution with the expected biases, missteps of authority, episodes of getting embroiled in political machination, etc. Demonizing it is just as naive as idealizing it. And there's probably much more of the former than the latter today, when a lot of unearned, easy cynicism is either unconsciously performative, or even worse, the outcome of a caricatural conspirative worldview.

i’m not entirely sure what you’re implying here.

i could absolutely be wrong since your post was kinda vague, so forgive me if i’m wrong, but are you implying we shouldn’t attempt mitigation of bad things because other bad things are happening elsewhere?

If you read the chain of posts I directly responded to, then there's nothing vague about what I said. Here, I'll help you out:

That chain was in response to:

    >> We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here

    > Historically speaking I can't see this as even being in the top 100 evil things the FBI has done.

    Perhaps, but we can't change the past: we can only fight against what is happening in the present to try to get a better future.

So in that context, there's nothing "vague" about my somewhat tongue-in-cheek response. Neither, you'll find, is there any attempt by me to say that one SHOULDNT stop the FBI from doing anything bad.

The pushback, by other chap & me, is about quantifying this particular misdeed as "evil", showing a remarkable lack of acknowledgement about the many, many, many other things the FBI has done (from its inception as a personal blackmailing operation by Hoover against US politicians - ring any bells?) and is doing, which are far, far worse than this "bad thing".

Probably a bit of a 'baby with the bathwater' situation here. At almost no point has that institution been a net positive - at times snooping on 'political dissidents' (like MLK Jr.), and at others bungling cases so bad they become moments of national shame (Ruby Ridge).

You're never going to get a system with a clandestine domestic service running ethically for long, esp. not with qualified immunity. It's simply too attractive to dumb psychopaths with delusions of grandeur and concurrently not of interest to people with a strong sense of community or morals.

> At almost no point has that institution been a net positive

The FBI's anticorruption work is good and necessary.

I assume that’s why the original argument is that it’s not been a net positive. I.e. the assumption is that lots of work can be good and necessary, while even more that is evil and excessive can end up with a net negative.

Like that's happening under this administration, see tom Homan.

Or the Trump coin crypto rugpull and money laundering scheme. Or the open insider trading. Or the $400 million jet "gifted" from Qatar. This year has been one grift after another.

Anticorruption work is good and necessary. If the FBI's work was any good, they would be investigating the funding of the destruction of the White House, or AIPAC and Qatari influence in DC, not Comey and Obama. Right now, they are working for Evil.

And before January 2025 they investigated the events of January 2021. And for their troubles many agents have now been gotten rid of.

> At almost no point has that institution been a net positive

Hard to measure, isn't it. In the eyes of the millions of americans who have at some point in their life been victims or related to or friends of victims of some kind of serious crime, the FBI has often times been helpful and/or the prospect of being caught has been a deterrent for crimes.

You contrast that with all the bad that has come from there, of which there is surely plenty, but how come you claim thay the bad obviously must outweigh the good?

Well, when you hear a knock on the door and someone say "FBI, open up", do you think "thank god, some extra protection", or "oh fuck"?

If you choose to engage law enforcement personnel, it's "thank god, some extra protection" (hopefully!), but if there is a situation where law enforcement personnel engage you, it's either "huh?" or "oh fuck". This isn't different for the FBI than for local or state-level police.

If some law enforcement personnel show up that you didn't invite, they could be there for a large number of reasons. How worried you'll be depends on how likely you think they are to do what they're supposed to do instead of what they're not.

If they're canvassing for witnesses, are they going to charge through your yard and shoot your dog? If they're investigating someone else, how likely are they to try to come up with something unreasonable to charge you with for leverage and then make you plead it down to a penalty that still isn't zero in exchange for giving them information you might not even have and would then be forced to choose between fabricating to get the deal and "not cooperating" and getting a serious prison sentence?

If someone is attempting to SWAT you, how likely are they to ascertain the situation instead of shooting first and asking questions later?

If their investigation has led them to you for some reason even though you're innocent, do you expect them to care about the truth or just railroad you?

If you hear the name of a particular law enforcement agency unexpectedly when you don't have any reason to think you've done anything wrong and your instinct still has to be "oh fuck" then they're bad at their jobs.

I think most people would have essentially the same reaction to either FBI or state/local police showing up at their door with "[Police|FBI], open up!", and it depends more on whether they believe they've done something illegal than the reputation of the agency. This was my disagreement with GP(stavros).

Depending on how you expect the reader to answer all your questions, we could still be in full agreement, but my sense is that you're asking them rhetorically?

You can ask the same questions about a local law enforcement agency but the answers won't be the same for every one of them.

And then in terms of literal sentiment, most people aren't familiar with any given local law enforcement agency because there are so many of them, so they wouldn't know what to think, and some of them are quite bad. But the knowledge of the average person it isn't really the point.

Suppose you actually were familiar with the record of whatever specific agency just showed up. If you would still have to think "oh fuck" then they suck.

If this was true, the Miranda rights would read something like “anything you say will be used to obtain justice” rather than “anything you say can and WILL be used AGAINST you.” The police and justice system are never your friend. They are always your adversary, and should be treated as such. Under a different regime, they could be your ally if you’re innocent, (and this is the case in many countries) but in the US, they are always hostile to everyone, including innocent people. Even if individuals in that system don’t fancy themselves in that light.

I engaged law enforcement personnel as the victim of a violent (unarmed) home invasion robbery by people I knew. What did they do? Debate whether I should have been arrested instead on a technicality. That would look good for their stats, right? At least the criminals had to repay 90% of my lawyer's fees.

You're right that I'm taking a bit of a shortcut - my assessment is based on what I know to be true in both directions, the things they've done right versus the things they've done wrong. The CARD program, stopping the times square bomber, Don C. Miller, Zazi versus COINTELPRO, Stingray, MLK, Ruby Ridge, basically everything J Edgar Hoover ever touched (like the Palmer Raids), Steven Hatfill and Brandon Mayfield.

If you ask me, I'd trade the good for enduring the bad.

My shortcut is admittedly a sloppy heuristic (because what else do you have for unknowns like this); for the unmeasurable effects, my bet is that they skew roughly the same as the measurables. For every serial killer who thought twice, there have probably been many political activists who have also thought twice. The deterrent effect cuts both ways if your actions cut both ways. We also know about enough falsely accused / imprisoned that we can assume we ain't figured them all out. For every family that feels safer with the FBI around, there are families that feel less safe, because people "like them" have been framed, murdered, snooped on, suppressed, and criminalized.

So yeah, it is hard to measure - but not impossible to come to a conclusion, as far as I'm concerned.

Another way to look at it is this; if you're going to hand the mandate of violence and skullduggery to an institution, you should be damn sure that they have standards and practices that solidly enforce competence and ethics - and even considering the good, we know pretty conclusively that they have failed in this regard. I don't want to play russian roulette with law enforcement - they should get it right almost all of the time or step aside so someone who knows what they're doing can handle it.

And?

the phrasing makes it sound like historically the FBI does not work for evil. which is somewhat annoying to someone who believes the FBI has been primarily a tool of evil.

It being #101 or #275 in a ranking doesn’t make it not evil though.

No, but it can make it unworthy of concern, same how an egg gone bad on the kitchen counter is not very important when the house is on fire

If one is naive to the fire in the house, the egg on the counter, as something worthy of concern, might get them to look around and see that their house is not actually suitable for use as shelter. People who are trying to put out the fire (or who are simply concerned about it while watching from a distance) might decide to point to the spoiled egg to spread awareness of the fire to the people inside.

I think you have to change or abandon the metaphor to make your point. These are not true statements of spoiled eggs and house fires, and so much so as to make a reasonable claim about institutions and malfeasance look absurd.

> These are not true statements of spoiled eggs and house fires, and so much so as to make a reasonable claim about institutions and malfeasance look absurd.

True, but I disagree with the conclusion. When I try to map it back to reality and it doesn't make sense, it is indeed an indictment of the analogy. But the fact I have to abuse the analogy to make that mapping coherent is not my problem; it's not my analogy.

However, within the context of the analogy, and if one can imagine that absolutely insane scenario, the logic holds.

An egg gone bad and a house fire are not the same sort of concern. A government agency doing two types of evil thing is more akin to ranking whether the small fire in the living room is more important than the slightly larger fire in the media room. It’s all fire in your house.

Well, being ranked #275 on the list of 5 things I'm going to care about today means that I'm going to go "hmm that's interesting" and then move on with life.

The tendency to do evil things should be the overriding concern, not the relative ranking of them.

We shouldn't let people get away with doing minor bad things just because they're not as bad as other bad things we let them get away with.

Who is "we"? I have bills to pay and my own family to take care of and generally a thousand more important things to worry about.

Since you apparently have none of these things, you go get em tiger.

We as a society. If everyone just thought about their own pod because they can't be bothered about govt corruption then that's how dictatorship wins. MLK had a family too. We can't all be MLK but it doesn't mean we need to be okay with shitty things happening just because they're not as shitty as other things we let happen.

But once FBI has the power to erase knowledge, the other 100 evil things will be rounded to zero.

Deletion of data is the most permanent thing most people will ever do. The burning of the library of Alexandria and the razing of Baghdad left a long, long shadow on history.

But after that we got to pretend everything was invented in Western Europe.

you jest but it is wild how often people declare “if it was ‘advanced’ and outside of Europe, it was probably aliens. not the people, it was aliens, obviously.”

Most of the time when I see this snark, and look it up, it turns out that the "original" inventor did only the most basic step or vague foundations and never refined it further or explored any potential applications.

Most often it happens with China since they spend a lot of propganda to present themselves as the true inventor of everything.

The joke was that we can't know after burning the library.

People can't even agree what goes on today. To what degree history is fiction I have no idea but it's probably worse.

Will probably make my life personally worse than the others.

I just wish the default way people used archive.is was to generate their long form link instead of their short link, as, if the site ever goes down, all of the links people have posted where they don't change the setting and thereby paste the default inscrutable code link will be destroyed... building a service with a pernicious behavior like that is ALSO not okay in its own way.

where can you change the setting? I was not aware of this.

At the top click "share" and then select the "long link".

http://archive.today/2023.11.30-020758/https://www.theverge....

This actually seems like a big design flaw in resource locators. Perhaps someone here can make an alt DNS that resolves to new homes for content when the Canary dies.

> Knowledge itself should become a human right.

IMO the natural right is for humans to share what they've learned up to and including verbatim reproductions of works by others. I also think that abridging this right to grant some exclusivity for artists (the broader "art" meaning scientists/writers/authors/musicians/coders/etc) is suitable. Copyright is/was a good idea. Its fair use clause is a good idea. The duration of exclusivity under current laws, however, seems excessive and beyond mere encouraging art.

Per the constitution copyright was meant to encourage the progress of the arts and sciences. Whenever and if ever it does the opposite it has failed.

Many rights holders would very much like us to forget this.

That happened when Congress made copyrights last more than 10 years.

I agree. Knowledge should belong to all of humanity.

But then also don’t be angry at big corporations when they scrape the entire internet.

Big corporations aren't humans.

they are persons under US law.

But US law isn't even the law of the world, let alone the definition of reality.

How are you planning on doing anything about it?

Does it need to be? Trump has been assasinating people in boats with no evidence whatsoever.

Only in a couple of very specific and narrow ways. They are not considered persons generally under US law. They are legal fictions that have been granted a subset of rights that people have.

And that subset of rights keeps expanding.

US law only applies in the US. Plus, the company in question seems to be based in Canada, so outside the FBI jurisdiction

So was Kim Dot Com. Biden went after him anyway at the behest of big media.

I mean, its not like it was just Biden. His extradition proceedings took place during three different US presidential administrations. You might as well include Trump and Obama in there as well.

that's just wishful thinking. US law applies world wide as long as Trump is willing to reach out and nab you. ask the Venezuelan fishermen.

That's not even US law, it's straight up murder outside of the law.

> US law only applies in the US.

Where US law applies varies by which law it is; there are US laws that apply only outside of the US [0], as well as US laws which have application both inside and outside the US.

[0] e.g., the federal torture statute, 18 U.S. Code § 2340A(a), “Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.”

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2340A

People pretend the GDPR applies to everyone, so why not the DMCA?

GDPR applies to you if you come to the EU to peddle your wares.

DCMA absolutely does apply to European firms selling their goods and services in the US.

It would solve a lot if that was taken to the extreme. Sorry Amazon, but your working conditions killed five people. Your business licens is going to jail for 40 years, good luck getting contracts with other companies with murder on your records when you get out.

If you're looking to US law to discern who is a person and who is not you are deeply lost.

the argument really wasn't about human persons, it was about legal persons. the distinction was only brought up to derail the conversation.

Then one should be able to put them on death row under US law.

I imagine there's a whole lot of snarky epitaphs which the remnants of the humankind could place on this civilization's gravestone, but citing this exact law might make for the best one.

Corporations large and small don't do anything. It's always a person. The question you are answering, even if you don't think you are, is whether a few people can get together and act in concert and still retain their rights.

While it's true people are upset at AI companies profiting off of artist creations with no compensation, I know a lot of people are also reacting to how the recent AI companies have been scraping the web. The reason folks are using Anubis and other methods is because unlike Google which did have archiving of sites for a long time (which was actually a great service), these new companies do not respect robots.txt, do not crawl at a reasonable rate (for us, thousands of hits a minute from their botnets - usually baidu/tencent, but also plenty of US IPs), hit the same resource repeatedly, ignoring headers intended to give cache hints, stupidly hitting thousands of variations of a page when crawling search results with no detection that they are getting basically the same thing... And when you ban them, they then switch to residential ranges. It really is malicious.

> AI companies profiting

Are they?

If you boil it down to the AI companies are making money (subscriptions, etc.) based on content they did not pay to produce, then they are profiting from someone else's hard work.

Revenue is not profit.

'stealing is fine if you lose money when reselling'

I don't believe I wrote anything of the sort.

I didn't say it was. I understand that profit = revenue - cost.

I said they're profiting from other people's hard work, a separate concept.

profiting != profit

Do you use google search for work? Then you are profiting from someone else's hard work!

The difference is that when you search on Google - at least before AI overviews - you end up at the source site.

Also Google respects robots.txt. Every site that Google surfaces chose to be in the index.

Thats not entirely true. Google might or might not hide your pages from index. They'll definitely going to scrape it anyway. They also display summarized info from your page (famous "what is scrapping" joke showing wikipedias summary). Finally, you might just get your answer without visiting - just by skimming result description.

If you boil it down anyone on this planet can access ChatGPT (and other for profit LLMs) for free to answer any question they might have.

Knowledge is shared among humanity at a rapid speed. Everyone benefits.

It’s mind boggling how anyone could be opposed to that.

People at these companies are receiving a salary to do these things that the person you're responding to is opposed to.

While not all the companies in question may or may not be profiting from these things some of them are, and most if not all of their employees certainly are as well.

Well, don't we have enough Acme Corporations in the world that were unprofitable and existed purely on VC life support before they killed off all the competition by dumping the prices, and then made them skyrocket to recoup investments and become profitable after becoming monopolists?

A lot of the outrage isn't at scraping, it is at the disruptive techniques used to do so. Like web-scraping whole websites that already provide convenient images of their content for download.

Feels like now we're just redefining our rules so that the people we don't like are out and the people we like are in. Does the content creator have the right to determine how their work is used or not?

I have a right to my copyrighted work, and I also have a right to set and enforce access rules to a server I operate to grant people access to it.

It's not that they're scraping the internet, it's that they're scraping the internet, profiting off the data they take, and still using the copyright regime to go after others who do unto them.

Well, as long as they pursue a "copyright for me but not for thee" regime, you can.

One thing is not the other. A corporation is not a human (and no I don't care what Citizens United says). A corporation has no inherent rights.

This is a false equivalency I'm surprised no one else has brought up. An archive of a site preserves attribution inherently, the scraping and training are not.

Is it? I thought it was ridiculous at first, but the more I think of it... both are scenarios where a corporation is scraping billions of webpages. We like the reason archive.is does it, but unless it's some kind of charity, I think it's a reasonable comparison.

archive.is is a charity no? Or at least they take donations, it seems the legal entity behind it is nebulous, but they don't have ads and have no paid product or offering.

They sure as shit do have ads. Have you ever accidentally followed a link using a browser profile that has no ad blocking enabled?

I only rarely browse without some form of content blocking (usually privacy-focused... that takes care of enough ads for me, most of the time). I keep a browser profile that's got no customizations at all, though, for verifying that bugs I see/want to report are not related to one of my extensions.

Every once in a while, I'll accidentally open a link to a news site (or to an archive of such a site) in that vanilla profile. I'm shocked at how many ads you see if you don't take some counter measures.

I just confirmed in that profile: archive.is definitely puts ads around the sites they've archived.

I stand corrected, maybe it's because I have ad-blocks that I never noticed.

And arguably I used to think it was the Internet Archive.

It does make this case seem problematic now that I know the details.

So if OpenAI or <AI scraper of the day> adds attribution to their AI-generated answers, everything is OK?

It would be closer to okay.

There's no contradiction in wanting an abolition (or at least substantial curtailment) of copyright while also being upset that mass violations of copyright magically become legal if you've got enough money.

Enforcement being unjustly balanced in favor of the rich & powerful is a separate issue from whether there should be enforcement in the first place—"if we must do this, it should at least be fair, and if it's not going to be fair, it at least shouldn't be unfair in favor of the already-powerful" is a totally valid position to hold, while also believing, "however, ideally, we should just not do this in the first place".

> There's no contradiction in wanting an abolition (or at least substantial curtailment) of copyright while also being upset that mass violations of copyright magically become legal if you've got enough money.

Why can't you just be happy for those few who are lucky enough to be able to violate copyright with no consequences? Yes, I know you'd want everyone to be able to violate copyright, but we're not there yet.

You're assuming way too much with "not there yet". The point is the corpos will violate copyright with impunity today, and then in a few years sign a bunch of settlement agreements and pull the ladder up behind them.

I'd love to see copyright slowly become irrelevant, but even with that goal we should expect to see large corpos being the last to stop respecting it.

Because we’d like the powerful to feel the crunch from bad law rather than get a backdoor, so they have to use their power to change things for everyone instead of just getting it changed for themselves.

More often than not the rich just codify the "backdoor" for themselves in such case. A rich man can buy the $30,000 registered machinegun and pay the $200 NFA stamp and be 100% legal, the poor man who 3d prints a $0.50 of plastic to do the same thing goes to jail for 15 years.

"Why can't we just be happy" that individuals and smaller companies get sued into oblivion over copyright violations, while large AI companies can scrape everyone's data and use it for training and completely ignore copyright while generating code and images and text and music based on all that that displaces the demand for the originals? Is that what you're asking?

The entities training AI are not anti-copyright, or anti-intellectual-property. If I were to steal their AI models they would sue me into the ground and probably win. Furthermore, even if you are anti-copyright, you probably still don't want your shit scraped by AI trainers since the bots are extremely aggressive, almost like a bona fide DDoS attack.

AI is not an attack on copyright, it is an attempt to replace it with something worse.

He might be happy for them and also sad because there is no rule of law.

Its the rule of bribery quite frankly. Name it lobbying and nobody bats an eye on it.

It's not so simple.

There are violations of copyright which are ethically fine, i.e. pirating an old movie to watch.

Then there are violations of copyright which are ethically problematic, i.e. pirating an old movie to sell.

When a big company violates copyright the nature of the violation is always much closer to the latter.

Pirating an old movie to sell is not considered ethically problematic everywhere. In many, many countries on earth pirated DVDs were sold at the marketplace, and no one – buyer or seller – had qualms about it. When the authorities shut down such sales, it was almost entirely because they were being pressured by the USA and a handful of other Western governments, not because the local ethical perspective on this changed.

This genre of comment is so tedious. We aren't talking about everywhere, the FBI is a US agency, the big companies we're discussing have won in US court. This thread is about the US.

The FBI and courts are enforcing the law that exists solely because the Founding Fathers enshrined it, but that says nothing about the ethical views that might exist among Americans. There are plenty of Americans who don’t find selling pirated media ethically problematic and would like to see the kind of marketplace sales and wide use of Bittorrent boxes that people in other countries have enjoyed.

That's a bad take, just like open source code is available to all, it's not the case you can always resell it or repackage it for your own profit.

Information can be made available to all, and at the same time, we can make it so others cannot resell or repackage it for profit like what AI companies are doing.

You can sell open source code for profit.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.en.html

You linked to the meaning of free software. I said open source.

Hot take here, I know, but some of us believe the law should treat large corporations differently than it treats individuals when it comes to their rights and privileges.

This seems like an incredible disingenuous take. There's a marked difference between collecting information to freely share with the rest of humanity, and collecting information to feed into algorithms under the guise of "artificial intelligence" with the pretense of enriching their finances and putting others out of work.

Anyone on this planet can access ChatGPT (and other for profit LLMs) for free to answer any question they might have.

This is true knowledge socialism.

we (all of us) do not own chatgpt; we (all of us) do not share in the profit from chatgpt; this is not what socialism is.

- ChatGPT is not about knowledge.

- ChatGPT is in the "bait" phase of "bait and switch" plan. It is trying to make us dependent on it, so that it can extract maximum profit later.

> But then also don’t be angry at big corporations when they scrape the entire internet.

I'm only angry with them when they pay hush money to IP extortionists.

I don't care that they scrape my website.

I DO care that nearly 2M different IPs are used to try to pull 42k commits out of a git repo one by one when they could just git clone it ...

I wish the companies would just pay a few technically-competent companies to do the scraping. Pay two so you can check their work, maybe, but let's get past the point in time when dozens (or more?) of companies are all simultaneously hammering the web.

There’s perfectly good LLM’s built specifically to shit out swaths of mediocre code to do that, why would you pay anyone?

My pie in the sky pitch is the US Government (and others) should solve this, the legality and the compensation problems in a single swoop. Make submission of your work to a federal model data set a requirement for obtaining copyright protection. License the data set (and heck maybe even charge for making custom models) for nominal fees to anyone who want it, with indemnification against copyright lawsuits for works deriving from the licensed model. Pay copyright owners a limited time royalty from these licensing fees. Everyone wins and we can stop needing a billion bots scraping a billion sites billion times a day.

While I would like to see it abolished entirely (including patents) I do have to compliment how you've described a formula that is actually possible to implement.

To deny people access to things is one thing, wanting to do it by impossible means is quite something else. Who even has time to scavage the universe looking for possible infringement on their works and also the money to deal with it?

Anything which does that should be legal, and anything that stifles those advances should not.

> We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here.

It's not up to us to tell the FBI what to do, that's a fatal misunderstanding about how power works. You can demand to see the FBI's manager, but I doubt it will get you anywhere. You can choose between two candidates offered by the privately owned and run political parties for whom the FBI works, but I don't think that will help either.

> Knowledge itself should become a human right.

Human rights are created by legislation. Unless you own a legislator (or rather, many legislators), you will not be involved in this. The people who own (and parcel out) knowledge itself, however, will be involved.

It would be better if we stopped making pronouncements about what people more powerful than us should be doing. It's like prisoners talking about what the jail should be doing. You should talk about what you should be doing. And don't mistake demanding for doing, or walking in the street with your friends for activism (unless you're violating curfew and are prepared to defend yourselves.)

Be brave. Put forward a program that might fail. Ask people to help you with it, ask them to follow you, tell them where to show up. Join someone else and help with their program. Don't demand, then whine when they say "of course not." The FBI is not your daddy, and the people running it are not running it on your behalf.

I don't mean to be personal, but this type of talk is empty. The way how to do things is decided is through power; and the way weak people exercise power is collectively, through discussion and coordinated action. Anybody can talk about what they would do if they were dictator of the world.

> I actually think there should be a human right to data. With that I mean, primarily, knowledge, not to data about a single human being as such

How do you suggest we fund the difficult work needed to investigate, research, and produce such data?

Remember that facts are not copyrightable, and as such, can't be restricted by copyright. Creative expression of those facts, on the other hand, can be.

> The FBI is trying to kill data.

For you. I'm sure they love data as long as only they can access it.

> Wikipedia is somewhat ok, but it also misses a TON of stuff, and unfortunately it only has one primary view, whereas many things need some explanation before one can understand it.

Last I checked, they had archive.is blacklisted; the people with power there had (as far as I can tell) come to the conclusion that people using that site to prove that websites had stated X on date Y were the bad guys. Of course, they still have archive.org sources everywhere, so the objection is not actually to archiving page content.

Tons of claims also seem to be sourced ultimately to thinly-disguised promotional material (e.g. claims of the prevalence of a problem backed up by the sites of companies offering products to combat the problem) and opinion pieces that happen to mention an objective (but not verified) claim in passing.

Where did you check this? While neither are listed on WP:RSP, I know many cites are changed into web.archive.org links once they go down.

> Last I checked, they had archive.is blacklisted; the people with power there had (as far as I can tell) come to the conclusion that people using that site to prove that websites had stated X on date Y were the bad guys.

Or they're worried about the paywall by-passing functionality (which is probably what a good portion of people use it for) and copyright claims against archive.today potentially having it taken down and thus breaking a lot of links.

I heard stories of incriminating stuff for higher-ups disappearing from archive.org.

I heard stories about a potential Oracle data breach (I think mainly affecting their customers) being removed from Archive.org too. It’s because in general, they comply with requests to remove stuff, which is understandable from an ethical perspective. But do they at least try to explain the reason for the takedown? Is it just not feasible to do that?

Archive.org honors robots.txt retroactively. So anybody can take down their own stuff by adding a link to their robots.txt file.

This is no longer true. They changed their policy to ignore robots.txt in 2017. I seem to recall that they still respected robots.txt later, though I can’t find any more information on it and may be misremembering. Currently, they do not.

Oh. Did not know that.

Does it mean archive.org works for any sites?

My main use for archive.is is for sites that somehow cannot be archived (a message will show up mentioning this site cannot be archive or something along these lines).

archive.is is generally pretty good in forcibly attempting to get an archive, if the HTML doesn't work, the screenshot will work fine. Although archive.is doesn't seem to handle gifs/videos.

> Does it mean archive.org works for any sites?

They respected exclusion requests after they stopped to respect robots.txt. I don't know their policy for new exclusion requests.

The difference is that we know who's running archive.org. We don't know who's running archive.is. That's perfectly fine for private use but unacceptable for a site like Wikipedia.

It's not that difficult.

I never concluded that but this actually allows someone, the anonymous here to change the history/info backwards if needed. For russians as an example this would be powerfull tool to manipulate narrative, which is cultural there at this point. Pretty smart and dangerous if it is really operated by them.

Such practices are by no means limited to Russia.

Absolutely. They we're just example which came to my mind first.

Also happens to likely be where the site owner is based

https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-...

Ignoring the fact that one of this service's primary reason for existing is that corporations and governments are already abusing their ability to retroactively change history.

If this is truly a concern then the answer is to have more than one publicly-accessible independent archive service. Archivebro has never taken any steps towards securing a monopoly on archiving things. The FBI are the only ones doing that.

Also not everybody in Russia is on the FSB payroll. News media always stops investigating as soon as there is credible information that somebody or their server is located in Russia because if they learn too much then it becomes difficult to discredit them as "possibly being linked to the kremlin". If you used any other nationality to imply that somebody is acting in bad faith on behalf of a hostile foreign government without additional evidence those same journos would call you a racist and try to get you canceled.

Are there examples of archive.is falsifying information? I care more about "what you do" than "who you are".

When you don't know who runs archive.is, you can also never know if he sold it to someone else (except if either party publically announces it).

And when the information on archive.is starts getting corrupted, those links can be adjusted or removed.

Who will catch it, when and how?

This type of possibility really worries me. Archive.is is much closer to actual history in many ways. If the data there starts getting corrupted or biased, there’s no way to know if what was truly there.

The idea that the permanent record of the internet could hinge on the ethics of one stranger behind a server rack is deeply unsettling.

This happens on .gov websites a lot now, and it is deeply unsettling.

Knowing the current owner of archive.is doesn't help; we need more full, independent Internet mirrors that can be compared against each other.

Archive.is does not archive the page exactly as is.

I never said there are examples. However, "who you are" matters, even if you don't care. At least when the who is known, we can guage the trustworthiness and what bias exists, because there's always a bias. When who is not known, you don't know what bias to account for. That's not trustworthy and not reliable. And when the site is closed source and you have no idea how it's being run, nor by whom, you don't know "what you do" either.

Does wiki only allow people to vote sources where the owner is known?

"wiki"?

We also know archive.org has removed pages some "important" people didn't like.

> they had archive.is blacklisted

What do you mean by this? Wikipedia actively encourages people to use archive.is links in citations:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Archiving_a_source#Archiv...

Well, it was last I checked, which may have been some time ago (I couldn't easily find the changes with the WikiBlame tool).

That would be 7 years ago. It indeed was blacklisted on 2014 but restored on 2016.

2016 was 9 years ago, but thanks for the heads-up.

"I actually think there should be a human right to data."

Interesting tagline, but probably has far too many side effects.

If it were me, I would try to boil this down to some negative right, those usually have less side effects, and even then I would be very careful.

I've been thinking the Library of Congress should buy Archive.org

It should become part of an entity that is very difficult to kill, and will exist for a long time.

Although I guess that's a function of culture, and I think respect for libraries is rapidly declining.

I’d rather not rely on a government owning it that has been very open about their desire to control what people perceive as true

If the last 9 months have shown us anything, it's that long-running government institutions are a lot easier to kill than we thought. And the idea of archive.org being under the control an administration like the current one in the US is pretty frightening. They would have absolutely zero qualms about deleting and changing that data.

Ditto for the other side of the aisle. We still don't know who was really the president, while everyone pretended Biden was not a dementia patient.

Totally agreed. They are just less obvious about it.

Frankly, I envy people who still have sides and that don't see the world as cynically as I do. For me, Clinton, Obama, Bush, Trump, don't matter, just different slave masters for the same system.

Don't make it another American echo pool. Nobody needs more of that

All right, one of the other countries that cares about free speech can buy it ;)

How about no country needs to own something like this. And if one does there are dozen of western countries with better freedom of speech record.

"Knowledge", for the most part is. What I see archive.is get used for most frequently is circumventing paywalls on paid-for media websites, which is journalism. And while freedom of the press is a constitutional right in functioning democracies, freedom of access isn't enshrined as much. But most of the things are background articles, the actual news is freely available to all still.

I'm all for archiving open webpages though. And I'm honestly surprised the Internet Archive is still standing. Their decision to opening up their book library was a dangerous mistake.

Archive dot org deleted a lot of stuff during their "hack" a while back. I'm convinced it's already been compromised. The US/EU/every government wants the ability to rewrite history.

Look up the article "Who Archives the Archivist?" (it's difficult to find. Use quotes. Don't link it; the site is banned here).

We tried making knowledge free and available to every online. Capitalists came and gobbled it up to sell back to us as "AI". Unfortunately we can't have nice things with people taking advantage of it.

> We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here.

The whole US is evil.

All you are guarding against here is some bits in a machine. Knowledge can be embedded in other substrate, other medium. Acquired by more actions than reading social media.

IMO what you really mean is "I should be free to sit and surf the web secure in my belief others are acting properly, while subsisting on externalized labor that props up my biology".

Asimov and countless others highlight this difference between being a passive reader of others ideas as orthogonal to knowledge acquisition. If you aren't conducting the experiments you acquired nothing but memory of someone else telling a story.

4% in the US hunt now. So to get people living rather than acquiescing, all you office drones are going to have to learn your way out of helplessness. Go acquire knowledge of how to grow a potato.

You won't because you don't want to acquire knowledge. You want the world to gift you knowledge and experience through as little effort of your own as possible. Typical American capitalist. 8 billion across the globe aren't that impressed by 300 millions obvious grift.

> We need to preserve data. ... I actually think there should be a human right to data.

I'm not going to simp for the FBI here, but come on: do you have a human right to preserve my private photos leaked by a stalker or a hacker? Because archive.is is famously unwilling to play nice here.

I don't know if this case is about that, or about pirated content, or about the administration trying to scrub something embarrassing off the internet. But the fact that archive.is cheerfully enables all three "use cases" should probably give you a pause.

It's a delicate line to walk because takedown processes can be abused to do things we don't like. But "lol, tough luck, information wants to be free" is not a sensible blanket response in a polite society.

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