I don’t know this case or the site, I’m only commenting on this because, shouldn’t we be very concerned that anything can be silenced, globally, online? Where does it stop if we do it? Who gets the say? Who watches them? You see what I’m getting at?
Google started self censoring “Russian propaganda” and everyone was so distracted with the war itself that nobody seemed to take notice of what gears that type of thing set in motion. Sure, they’ve probably been doing stuff like that the whole time, but it was the first I’d ever seen them announce they were altering results publicly and giving us things they deem acceptable.
Most web users visit the same sites over and over, at a frequency of several times per month or even per week.
Few of these sites are changing their IP addresses with the same frequency. Some (most, based on personal experience) will go years without a change in address.
Yet people keep looking up the addresses every single day if not more frequently.
Google censors all the time. Search results are manipuated in ways that are optimised for advertising, not accesibility of information. Perhaps it's subtle enough that people do not notice. Popularity is not necessarily a proxy for truth. But for a so-called "tech" company, popularity is almost always the most important metric. Because advertising.
There are these things called authorative dns servers which if they no longer serve your domain due to being silenced then my self hosted recursive unbound setup won’t help anything.
Aside from that, this isn’t about relying on other systems. That’s literally the Internet. It’s distributed. It’s open. That’s why it runs on 13 root dns servers. This is about large players who control and manipulate vast amounts of users and traffic, forming a cartel to push their business interests in the name of more profits. Remember when ISPs wanted to strong arm Netflix for more money or cripple their bandwidth, effectively making their service so slow nobody would buy it? The tubes of the internet should be that, dumb, open, tubes. Anything else is no long an open internet. I fear we’re well past that now.
I run an authoritative server on the LAN that serves a custom root.zone. No need to use remote root servers. I get DNS data from a variety of sources, bulk recursive queries (pipelined over HTTPS/1.1) is only one of them. ICANN's DNS racket is as corrupt as any "cartel" of "large players". Why support it by renting "domain names".
On the contrary. Those sites are still free to say what they want. Google is not censoring their freedom of speech.
But freedom of speech also means you can't compel someone to say something they don't want to say. That's not censorship, that's freedom. You can't force Google to rebroadcast that message.
And if you think that's the first or only thing they choose not to show, you must be very new. Otherwise you'd've noticed by now that your search results aren't all full of child porn and other garbage. Google isn't forced to show that to you.
If you want to see things that Google doesn't show, you're free to find it by other means.
When does that freedom (which I agree they have) run afoul of Title II responsibilities that Google currently enjoys? When Google suppresses results for things that don’t align with their political or cultural perspective, are they still a common carrier?
the analogy to compelled speech is a little weak, since google doesn't claim ownership of any speech they display, and since google search is an effective monopoly on information discovery. it's more like an isp choosing not to serve certain traffic. but yeah, google isn't a common carrier. There are things that I would also censor, but I wouldn't prevent someone from saying russian propoganda on my street, because I can walk away. If anything individuals should have more ability to censor their own google results, because that's like, someone speaking inside my home.
This Quad9 case proves that all open resolvers are not necessarily "equal" in terms of the DNS data they will provide. From what I have seen most folks using third party DNS either do not choose a provider, i.e., accept the ISP default, or choose a provider based on "which one is the fastest", "which one is the most 'private'", "which one has family filters, blocks ads", or some other marketing. How many folks consider "which one offers the DNS data I want".
What stops Google from "self-censoring" DNS data so that the answers users get from 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 are optimised for advertising. It makes business sense.
Fortunately nothing in DNS protocol mandates using remote recursive DNS and caches shared with untrusted parties (including the so-called "tech" companies operating them). It is possible to query without the RD bit set and still get the DNS data from authoritative DNS servers instead of resolvers.
it does not even look like Quad9 has removed this domain from their cache. I just checked and it's still there, returning an IP address in Lithuania.
Small correction - I believe it’s 8.8.4.4 and not 4.4.4.4 for google dns. Mentioning this since I’m pretty sure I got this wrong myself in the past when setting up dns and I’m sure I’m not the only one.
> Google started self censoring “Russian propaganda” and everyone was so distracted with the war itself that nobody seemed to take notice of what gears that type of thing set in motion.
I recently found out that all of Russia Today is banned and blocked throughout the EU, and whilst I appreciate it’s pure propaganda, I don’t appreciate being told what I can and cannot read/watch/hear.
It’s entirely against everything I was told to believe we stood for, and I find it deeply offensive ans disturbing.
Please correct me if I'm misreading this, but are you saying bad actors have an inherent right to exercise their bad actions? It's on every individual to defend themselves against whatever harm is being inflicted, and society should stand by because, again, inherent right to be awful should be protected?
The idea is that people should have the skill of critically assessing the information they see, not trusting it by default, and knowing how to verify it. Like, check for conflicts of interest, historical precedents, correlate independent sources, etc.
This skill only develops if people have to deal with lies on a daily basis. If we delegate the function of telling what's a truth and what's a lie to a 3rd party, it quickly starts abusing it for its own gain and the quality of life starts sliding downhill.
> people should have the skill of critically assessing the information they see, not trusting it by default, and knowing how to verify it
Unfortunately, in America and I imagine abroad, those skills have been actively eroded so as to favor of consumerism. Moreover, the tools to pull one over on your fellow man have gotten more and more sophisticated such that you cannot trust recorded voices to be real, you cannot trust recorded video of people talking, and likely soon won't be able to trust recorded video at all.
There's a serious problem with that in its own. But it's compounded when people don't satisfy the very requirements you want of them.
There will always be lies out there. Sometimes the information is subjective to whomever is reading it. It's on the individual to determine first what he would like to read, and second, if it's true or false.
I care that everyone has a choice and blocking information has no place in a free society.
> This skill only develops if people have to deal with lies on a daily basis.
It's called critical thinking, and applies to every facet of life. A person can honestly believe what they are saying, but their belief is not, on its own, evidence that what they are saying is true.
I think schools in the US don't really teach critical thinking, so much as regurgitation. I almost wish schools required a full semester course of debate, pushing students to craft arguments both for and against various topics. I suspect our politics might look a lot different if people were generally more skeptical of the things they're told to just accept.
>Please correct me if I'm misreading this, but are you saying bad actors have an inherent right to exercise their bad actions? It's on every individual to defend themselves against whatever harm is being inflicted, and society should stand by because, again, inherent right to be awful should be protected?
Not GP, but the short answer is 'yes'. Because it is a slippery slope. I'm not in the EU and I can still reach rt.com. Presumably archive.org isn't banned in the EU, they can likely access such content if they wished to do so.
rt.com absolutely is a propaganda outlet for the Russian government, thinly disguised as a new site. But, IMHO, blocking them sets a terrible precedent as it's always the most reprehensible/unpopular/awful stuff that comes under fire first by the censors.
And if you allow that, what happens when those with power deem your expression to be unacceptable?
What's more, freedom of expression doesn't mean bad people can spew evil lies and we just have to suck it up. Rather, it means that we should have a robust debate and discussion, not because the liars/hate peddlers/etc. are right, but because defeating such garbage requires actually putting in the effort to rebuke and debunk it.
As Justice Brandeis put it[0], much more eloquently than I did, nearly 100 years ago:
If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to
avert the evil by the process of education, the remedy to be applied is more
speech, not enforced silence.
The trouble is that at scale, in a world where people's attention spans are already stretched to the breaking point and any kind of bullshit can be amplified to tens or hundreds of millions of eyeballs in minutes, the bullshit asymmetry principle comes into play.
I don't know what the answer is, because it's a genuinely new environment for the human brain.
> bad actors have an inherent right to exercise their bad actions? It's on every individual to defend themselves against whatever harm is being inflicted, and society should stand by because, again, inherent right to be awful should be protected?
I don't know about the right to be awful; but there is something deeply unsettling about governments not trusting their people to decide for themselves what kind of information they want to access. Centuries ago, people weren't trusted to read Wycliffe's translation of the Bible. In the Soviet Union, people weren't allowed to read The Gulag Archipelago. Now it's RT. It's preposterous.
If democratically elected governments don't trust the judgement of their constituents, then neither can they believe in the legitimacy of democratically elected governments.
I am reading my news by going to CNN, then RT and getting a sense of what the real news are in the empty space between them. Understanding the mentality, argumentation and dynamics of a bad actor are important. And I would assume decision makers in read their opponents propaganda. Blocking it gives the impression that whoever is blocking is not trusting our own maturity to filter and understand and make value and ethical judgements for ourselves. In that sense they are not punishing the blocked party but “protecting “ their people and I am not sure I need that protection.
I don't know what the first guy thinks, but yes. You shouldn't have your fundamental rights restricted because the government doesn't like what you're doing. The right to be awful should very much be protected, because one person's awful is another person's virtue and perspectives change in government all the time. Unambiguously bad now, doesn't guarantee the same in the future.
No I think he’s saying the government should not get to decide which speech should and shouldn’t be allowed. For example in the US the government attempted and was somewhat successful in banning speech that favored communism which was in no way justified.
I think it’s a reasonable criticism of these types of policies given how governments of the past have misused their power of censorship.
It's a limitation on the non-bad actors though. It only hurts the bad actor insofar that it's a little harder to willingly get access to them for innocent people.
given that rumble was ordered to remove what I can only assume is rt and decided to just stop serving the country instead, It's certainly banned at the very least in France itself.
When I open it incognito I am redirected to a Ziggo.nl page saying:
Deze website is geblokkeerd
Europese sancties
De Raad van Europa heeft besloten dat de websites van RT (voorheen Russia Today) en Sputnik News niet meer mogen worden doorgegeven. De website die je probeert te bezoeken, valt onder deze Europese sanctie.
Vodafone
Ziggo is verplicht de sanctie uit te voeren en heeft de website geblokkeerd.
Russia Today as a television network is banned because you need a license to broadcast and that license can be revoked when it is found that the network broadcasts only propaganda that has nothing to do with reality.
On the other hand, the website of Russia Today is not blocked though it does have some intermittent ddos problems.
I used to be a free speech absolutist, but now I believe phylosophical principles exist in service of humanity, not the other way around. If you consider that the goal of russian propaganda is to help Russia succeed in genocide of a 40 million nation, I think it should be fairly easy to handle some censorship, at least until genocide is stopped.
I think the typical rejoinder here is Germany's denazification. There's a difference between preemptively censoring things and deciding some things are just wrong and not worth debating for the umpteenth time.
FWIW we preemptively censor things all the time. Information is classified, we don't let you post plans to build nuclear or biological weapons, etc. And to broaden a little, we also have lots of speech restrictions and compulsions. Fraud is against the law and that's largely speech. Inciting imminent lawless action isn't allowed. We require nutrition facts on products, we require doctors to say things before performing abortions, we compel testimony, etc. I personally wouldn't like it if you posted my address and when I'm likely to be away.
Speech is complicated, it's powerful, fundamental, and there are a lot of competing interests and principles.
That was my whole original point, that if something is bad, it's if anything even more important not to censor information about it, not so thoroughly that it is actually removed from active and specific searches at least.
That absolutely includes things that advocate, because those very statements are the bad thing that needs to be seen to be believed and understood.
You can't just tell some kid who wasn't there "He rose to power and killed millions of Jews." It makes no sense and teaches no lesson. You have to show the crowd-pleasing speeches and other pro-nazi propaganda to show how attractive a bad thing can sound, to show how totally good and normal people just like you can end up cooperating with something wrong, to study and understand that aspect of the badness.
Some people will study that so they can then do it, but I don't see how that changes anything because we're right back to ignorance is no answer. Making everyone else ignorant is even worse. It creates even more victims than the one actually doing something bad.
> You have to show the crowd-pleasing speeches and other pro-nazi propaganda
They do. You just can't deny the holocaust, spread anti-semitism, etc. [0]
My point, which I admittedly obscured, is that while there are things we censor and compel (which we mostly agree on), there are weirdly some things we don't censor that we also mostly agree on.
Anti-semitism is a good example. There's no value in talking about it. Anti-semitic hate groups use the shield of freedom of speech to spread their lies and recruit members. Proponents will spam forums, WhatsApp groups, social media, etc in what is effectively a DDoS on fact checkers. The thing that fixes anti-semitism isn't letting them say whatever they want wherever they want, it's a Wikipedia page on anti-semitism and a ban everywhere else.
It's also worth saying that while we're having a relatively academic debate, Jewish people, Black people, trans people, etc get to wade through a morass of hate on the internet which every so often leads to a mass murder. What's the value of that?
I guess people are deciding that linking is saying rather than merely referencing.
Even if so, it just means that the need to be able to reference is more important than the need to hide a few of the unwanted things that manage to get said. Anything else is simply not sane, as in, not functional. Even if everyone agrees that some messages are offensive and some knowledge is undesired, that doesn't justify breaking the very concept of communication and knowledge.
I think you're arguing against a point no one is making, not even TFA. TFA is basically about piracy. Maybe you could stretch it into a broader "what can I as a private entity host on my platform/DNS" question, but this is about a music piracy site. We're not talking about fundamental history of humanity here, it's Foo Fighters and Oak Ridge Boys all the way down. And it's worth saying you are free to buy (most of) this music! It's not like it's being disappeared into a memory hole. The analog here would be like, I don't even know, the Hitler estate suing DNS providers for resolving the hostname of a site that hosted Adolf's speeches for free, when they sold them on CD for $25 each. I'm pretty good at bullshitting, but even I can't make the leap from that to censorship.
Further, private platforms have no obligation whatsoever to let you say whatever you want on them, and in fact have obligations to report certain speech to the cops (you can imagine the kinds of speech we're talking about here, i.e. crimes). But also I can run a forum and ban people and annihilate their posts with impunity as long as I don't do it because of their "race, color, religion, or national origin", [0] and this is assuming forums qualify as public accommodations, which isn't currently clear (it's at least possible if not likely my forum would be classified as a private club). Should I do so I will have violated none of their rights, and will have in no way censored them, no matter how many people use my forum, because I'm not a government and they're free to use other forums or even run their own. This also applies to more concrete things like restaurants: I'm free to run a restaurant and ban neo-Nazis, but I can't ban Catholics. It's worth saying I'm not wild about this law. I think it would better if it were more carefully delineated along the lines of ascribed (sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, nationality) vs. achieved (profession, political ideology, religion) statuses, and SCOTUS is chipping away at it like they do, but it's what we've got.
Finally, I just don't think what you're worried about happening is happening. You can reference and learn about anti-semitism on Twitter [1] (kind of, insofar as you can learn about anything there). You just can't go around spouting actual anti-semitic stuff like spamming "14 Words" or trying to argue that Oskar Dirlewanger was just misunderstood. There's a difference! There's no confusion! You can also go to ADL's website to learn about these things; in fact that's what I did.
Your argument seems to be that unless we let the worst, most vile speech infest our social networks, we'll at best be ignorant of history and at worst break some fundamental human law of knowledge. But there are other ways to learn about history that don't empower white nationalists (etc.). I mean, we knew about this stuff before Twitter; I think we'll be fine.
Governments are entrusted with great power. Enough power to decide an entire class of people no longer deserve to live. Without checks and balances that hold the people we put in government accountable, that power will be abused.
“It should be easy to handle some censorship” is where your point went off the rails.
When you trust your government with the power to control the flow of information, you trust them with the power to hide their own actions from you - including genocide. You trust them to censor people who vocally oppose an unjust war. You trust them to censor people who report on broken checks and balances. You trust them to censor people who question their accumulation of power.
History doesn’t care if you meant well. Our descendants who inherit these political systems won’t care if you meant well. They’ll remember the results of the system you build.
You are talking about hypotethicals and I'm talking about reality of today. If you let actual real innocent people die for your principles - you are not virtuous, the future you build and try to protect is not virtuous. It doesn't matter how correct your principles are.
I’m glad you can say I am only talking hypotheticals. I hope you don’t wait until your government is actively doing a genocide to decide that they shouldn’t have these powers. That’s something you should stop while it’s still a hypothetical.
It is not virtuous to hand the keys of tyranny to your leaders and then wash your hands of the consequences.
It doesn’t matter how correct my principles are. And it doesn’t matter which of the two of us walk away from this thread “feeling virtuous,” “correct,” or “right.” The downstream consequences of my beliefs are mine to bear, and yours are yours.
If my belief system permits the rise of atrocities in this world, history will remember it for that. Not for the principles. Not for the realities I was grappling with. You’ll be judged by future generations no differently.
I don’t disagree there are ongoing atrocities on this planet. I don’t disagree that it’s a moral imperative to try and stop them. But I do disagree with trying to solve these atrocities by eroding the protections that were put in place to prevent our governments from committing those very same atrocities.
Do you believe censorship saves lives? Is every country that is committing genocide to be censored (i apologize for my flippancy, unfortunately there's a lot). Are you sure your country isn't one of them? Stand by your principles and you will save lives and you get freedom too. Weaken them and you find the bad guys didn't even have to change the law to take over.
Again, it's not a hypothetical. The obvious goal of russian propaganda is to erode western support for Ukraine. Without western support Ukraine cannot fight country 4 times its size with infinite oil money. Armed Forces of Ukraine are the only thing standing between Ukrainan nation and its genocide. Russian propaganda succeeds - genocide completes. It's not that hard.
How big does a group of people acting in concert have to grow before we start slapping on the shackles because they've reached a mass indistinguishable from an act of governance?
Is it purely a factor rrqrqrawreeqEeaerrteutreeerqeeesrErxdrdrwtrsraArRerrrsrssrrerAars numbers? Anything below N is !government? Or is there a factor of impact? Can one person's decision effect so many and so much that we have to put on the brakes in spite of the fact it is just one person?
It's been no end of annoyance for me over the last few years, because I personally have had a fairly difficult time nailing down the sweet spot between collective action, and everyone needs to take a chill pill, cause this ain't right.
>When you trust your government with the power to control the flow of information, you trust them with the power to hide their own actions from you
I think this is as false dilemma - no one's advocating that any institution or system that can regulate the flow of known bad information can operate without any constraints, oversight, etc.
If we assume any exercise of power will ALWAYS be misused under any circumstance, then taken to the extreme we literally shouldn't let people exercise under the notion that they can and will use physical force to coerce people. So we can't run on that assumption; sometimes governments can use power over information to do good things, like prevent the spread of pro-genocide propaganda.
We need to have a far more nuanced discussion about whether or not THIS instance of censorship is more positive or more negative.
> that can regulate the flow of known bad information
> prevent the spread of pro-genocide propaganda
This is a Motte and Bailey.
Your introduction advocates for: regulating the spread of known bad information.
In your second to last paragraph you substitute it with: prevent the spread of pro-genocide propaganda
I’ll engage with your second point only if you yield that the _only_ form of information that is acceptable for a government to censor is speech that is directly and explicitly calling for genocide.
Otherwise we are talking about the “known bad information” from your first paragraph.
Does “bad” mean false? Or just malicious? Who decides it’s bad? How does it become “known.”
As a citizen, are you allowed to challenge the classification of “bad” or does challenging the classification of “bad” itself count as “bad information?”
What protections are there for keeping inconvenient truths about our government from being classified as “bad information?”
> no one's advocating that any institution or system that can regulate the flow of known bad information can operate without any constraints, oversight, etc.
I’m suggesting that’s exactly what people are advocating for. They may not know it. They may mean well.
No it isn't. The motte and bailey tactic is when you advocate for a very broad position, then retreat to something more defensible. I've stated that the broad statement (that all censorship is bad) is false, so as a result we need to have a more nuanced discussion about when it's appropriate to exercise this power and how we can de-fang potential abuses of it. Your position regarding all censorship being bad is your bailey, which quite frankly, I've razed to the ground. Your motte is the position that censorship can be used by a government to manipulate their citizenry, which is true, but significantly more limited in application than the original concept that all censorship is antisocial.
>I’ll engage with your second point only if you yield that the _only_ form of information that is acceptable for a government to censor is speech that is directly and explicitly calling for genocide.
I mean, I wouldn't concede that because I can think of a ton of situations in which banning speech is appropriate. We can start with the classic 'fire in a crowded theater', we can discuss automated scam-driven robocalls, we can look at email spam filter, content moderation on websites, restrictions on the spread of child pornography, etc. What about speech designed to disenfranchise people of their right to vote by lying about where they're supposed to vote? What about financial fraud or any form of censurable misrepresentation?
From a tech perspective, should you be able to DDOS domains without authorization? Does your
>therwise we are talking about the “known bad information” from your first paragraph.
>Does “bad” mean false? Or just malicious? Who decides it’s bad? How does it become “known.”
>As a citizen, are you allowed to challenge the classification of “bad” or does challenging the classification of “bad” itself count as “bad information?”
Great questions. This is where real debates about how legislation and law intersect with censorship occur. Different jurisdictions have different approaches, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. None are perfect, but if you're actually interested in this topic, you can look up review articles looking at comparative law on the subject and I think you'll find a lot of substantive meat to chew.
Even the United States, which values freedom of speech incredibly highly in it's hierarchy of rights have a very large panoply of situations in which speech is restricted.
>I’m suggesting that’s exactly what people are advocating for.
Yes, that's a strawman, which is why people who actually work on the issue don't take the argument seriously. It's the equivalent of someone outside tech saying 'you can't host a website because you can get DDOSed' then being mystified that the internet is still chugging along. The threat is real, but the value of taking action is important, and finding out how to mitigate the threat in real world is where the actual complexity is; identifying a threat everyone knows exists isn't.
Anyways, this is boring. It's the same 101 level discussion every time on this topic and it really gets tiresome.
The “fire in a crowded theater” is an oft cited example that highlights this point. The phrase is a paraphrasing of a dictum from an opinion in Schenck v. United States, which held that the defendant's speech in opposition to the draft during World War I was not protected by the First Amendment.
Holmes argued, "the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."
It’s a great example of how governments abuse these powers to silence inconvenient speech.
From child pornography to robocalls, I’d suggest that you don’t need “speech” to be a crime - though it’d be convenient to many pro-censorship arguments if it were.
The production of pornography without consent is illegal and is not speech. The production and possession of child pornography is a crime. Transmission requires both, which are already crimes. Possession with intent to distribute and the distribution of this content are already crimes.
You don’t need a carve out for sending these over TCP/IP conflating it with speech any more than you need a carve out for sending the photos through the U.S. postal service. It was a crime before you sent the photos, still a crime after. Free speech doesn’t wash the crime away and you don’t need to ask us to give up free speech to charge them with a crime.
Your rebuttal doesn't really address the substance of my point, but to put a fine point on it, "It's a crime, therefore it isn't speech" isn't a good argument - if anything it demolishes your own position that speech should never be restricted by government.
The very substance of your original argument is that the power to restrict these things is inherently dangerous, yet you don't seem to apply that standard in current cases where the acts of communication are criminalized.
Accordingly, your original argument falls flat based upon your own argument; the government can criminalize some speech and you don't seem to have an issue with it where it's obviously pro-social to do so.
So, again, work a little harder on refining the original position - the absolutist approach of complete governmental restriction doesn't exist in real life.
If you want to try redefining speech to only include vocal discussion between two people (which very much is not what freedom of speech entails), you'd still fall flat on almost all of the fraud related restrictions mentioned above in my previous post.
Anyways, that's all from me on the topic, the substance of the reply ignoring literally every area of nuance and actual productive conflict is just nauseating. It's like watching some tech guy tell a banker how bonds should work.
> the government can criminalize some speech and you don't seem to have an issue with it where it's obviously pro-social to do so.
I don’t think I believe this. You’ll need to explain a bit more why I do.
The best I can come up with is “photos are speech, no different than books or pamphlets. “Intellectual property” and pornography are already regulated and there’s no difference between that and other forms of speech. Taking a nude photo without the subject’s consent is speech and forcing someone to have their photo taken nude is speech. If you can’t take nude photographs of children, you don’t have free speech.” I’d have a problem with this argument but could agree with where it’s coming from.
I think what highlights the difference between “speech” and child pornography, for me, is best captured by loliporn and generative AI. I vehemently disagree with the depiction of minors in pornography. But, assuming the artist didn’t use actual child pornography as a reference (including in training the AI), I consider the content generated by those methods to be “speech.” I’d defend your right to produce and distribute it no matter how much I disagree with it. It was never about the “speech” part of the photo.
After reading your response, I’m left feeling like you missed the point of what I said. But maybe I originally missed yours?
I’m sorry for offending you. I assume your profession is law specializing in free speech. It must be exhausting having to engage with the general public on how they feel they feel they should be governed. You’re making me realize I treat my banker the same way, I try to understand (and I have opinions on) the financial instruments I put my savings into before I make the investment.
You must feel like an IT help desk clerk whose constantly burdened by users.
If you’d like me to withdraw from this conversation because I’m not worthy of having it with you, I’m okay with that.
I’ll leave with my general sentiment about your original Motte. I vehemently disagree with pro-genocide propaganda but I’ll defend an American’s right to post and read it.
Sadly the power hungry governments and corporations are getting worse, attempting to dictate what is approved speech. Sometimes they even label things not a lie, but "misinformation" because it's not what they would like you to know. I too find it deeply disturbing.
I think the title is actually incorrect. It’s not that it’s been blocked globally, just that a relatively small German dns resolver was ordered to block it wherever they acted.
Copyright infringement is not protected speech. Google is free to provide or not provide results however they see fit.
To me- freedom of speech is the right of citizens to criticize the government without reprisal.
This does not mean that adversaries have the right to flood our airwaves with propaganda, lies, and other bullshit under the guise of protected speech.
I'm sure this will be an absolutely abhorrent take to the HN audience, but I've been recently wondering if perhaps a bit of censorship could be a good thing.
Not complete censorship, of course, but not complete freedom of communication either.
In the past 25 years or so we've gone from being only able to freely communicate our ideas with people we know directly to being able to share anything with anyone all over the world. And it hasn't made life better.
It hasn't improved our wellbeing, it hasn't improved our democracy, it hasn't improved our relationships... Empirically, it just hasn't worked and maybe it would be a good thing to attempt to put the genie back into the bottle.
if a restaurant removes people if they stand on their tables and scream weird shit at the other diners, is this "censoring"?
if hackernews removes child porn or spam, is this "censoring"?
if a music venue, who has spent years building a reputation as an amazing place to see goth bands or metal bands or hyperpop bands, is it "censorship" if they don't book a country band?
if your email provider removes spam, are they "censoring"?
i've found this "who decides" things to be getting increasingly ridiculous. the restaurant owner decides. this isn't rocket science. the music venue owner decides. if a gathering place of humans has spent years cultivating a reputation for certain genres, again, goth music, electronic music, rock music, etc... or fine dining, fast food, bbq, etc.. we don't scream from the rooftops when mcdonalds doesn't serve foie gras. we don't run in panic circles and scream "censorship" when a goth club doesn't book nickelback.
we don't clutch our pearls when our email provider removes spam or child porn and proclaim "omg that dick enlargement pill email was removed! censorship! who decides. oh my who decides."
if you want to argue against centralization of services, im right there with you. no large city has 1 restaurant. there are hundreds if not thousands. no large city has 1 music venue, again there are hundreds. different places for different experiences. if you want to argue that having 1 gateway to the internet is an absolutely absurd and terrifying dystopia, ill be in the front of that line with you carrying my pitchfork. and if you want to argue that just a handful of centralized increasingly walled off social media sites is absolutely awful, again, im with you. we need hundreds or thousands of gateways to online experiences, not the small handful we have today. at this point the "who decides" thing becomes naturally irrelevant.
The false equivalence you're trying to establish between censoring child porn (illegal for very good reasons we hopefully all agree on), spam (something you opt-into and can opt out of at any time), and the censorship of individuals' free speech which happens to contain "bad" opinions is nothing short of remarkable.
> The false equivalence you're trying to establish between censoring child porn (illegal for very good reasons we hopefully all agree on)
im not drawing a false equivalence to anything. the article in which this entire comment section is linked surrounds piracy--which for better or worse is illegal, just like child porn. It is entirely and thoroughly relevant to discuss censoring illegal attributes *and* non-illegal attributes such as:
> spam (something you opt-into and can opt out of at any time)
and it is absolute non-sensical to argue that spam is something we opt into. if it were opted into, then by definition it isn't spam. and to even imply that people can opt-out of actual spam is wild. go ahead, set up your own email server, don't "censor" any spam, and attempt to opt-out. let us know how this goes--as someone who has administered many organization's email servers, i can confidently assure you that it will absolutely not go well and you will of course not be able to simply opt-out of it. you *will* censor it. remember, spam isn't illegal, but pretty much every organization in the world will "censor" spam. any crying about censorship which doesn't consider the question "why is it ok to block spam?" immediately shows how unserious and unnuanced the discussion will be--a literal waste of time.
if you can't distinguish between the organizations i listed (restaurants, bars, forums, etc...) curating their audience and some version of wholesale "individuals free speech" then obviously the nuance needed to talk about this in any meaningful manner doesn't exist.
if you are able to distinguish the nuances between those, then i absolutely welcome the discussion.
again, the "who decides" pearl-clutching boils down to the organization and the audience they're curating.
in terms of governments suppressing free-speech, i usually (but not always) agree with most arguments that the government should typically not be prosecuting for speech. sadly, im not shocked with how many of the free-speech internet screamers have suddenly gone quiet now that multiple actual state backed attacks on free-speech are happening across the country. from book bans in libraries, to book bans in schools, to silencing teachers, to drag shows. there have now been 100s (if not 1000s) of these instances and all of those pearl clutchers are now silent. their silence is wildly predictable tho, /shrug
again, there's no false-equivalence as the topic has been so muddied by disingenuous bad-faith actors for so long that many people can't even begin to distinguish between a government suppressing free-speech, websites or places curating an audience experience, and also freedom of association. most of the people crying about censorship don't even understand why the conversation must have at least those as a starting point or its not worth having.
> this entire comment section is linked surrounds piracy--which for better or worse is illegal, just like child porn
So is "jaywalking", but we don't bring them up in the same discussion because copyright infringement is not in any way comparable to exploitation of minors.
> and it is absolute non-sensical to argue that spam is something we opt into. [...] and to even imply that people can opt-out of actual spam is wild. go ahead, set up your own email server, don't "censor" any spam, and attempt to opt-out.
Firstly, I was obviously referring to spam filtering, not spam itself. Secondly, spam filtering is not censorship. If the government or private entity unilaterally decided to stop emails from <Political Party> from reaching your inbox, that would be censorship. When you yourself decide to use a spam filter, which you're free to customize to your liking - that's not censorship. There is no equivalence.
If you're equating content filtering which you have full control over, with censorship, then any discussion is indeed a waste of time.
> if you can't distinguish between the organizations i listed (restaurants, bars, forums, etc...) curating their audience and some version of wholesale "individuals free speech" then obviously the nuance needed to talk about this in any meaningful manner doesn't exist.
The person above the "Who gets to decide?" question was not talking about "censorship" at private in-person establishments, but wholesale censorship of communication because they perceive the entire concept of freedom of expression as a net negative to society. Perhaps you should read it again.
> now that multiple actual state backed attacks on free-speech are happening across the country. from book bans in libraries, to book bans in schools, to silencing teachers, to drag shows. there have now been 100s (if not 1000s) of these instances
I don't understand, you seemingly agree that "who decides" is an extremely important question when someone proposes "censorship", even though you just spent several paragraphs dismissing it as ridiculous.
It shouldn't be "them" deciding what gets censored, right? So if not them, do you get to decide what gets censored?
> again, there's no false-equivalence as the topic has been so muddied by disingenuous bad-faith actors
I agree, dragging user-controlled spam filters into the debate about government censorship of speech is disingenuous and bad faith.
This is feels like the Barbara Streisand Effect in action.
I had never heard about this Canna Power piracy website before. Probably a lot of other people haven’t either. But now, when Sony and their friends made this DNS block happen, media coverage has made more of us hear about the Canna Power piracy website.
I have been sailing the dark waters for everything - movies, tv shows, books, games, music, etc - since before the new millennium and I can tell you I've never heard of Canna Power until today. I usually get my content successfully off of the larger public torrent sites, so I guess there's no need, but it's good to have another bookmark in my arsenal! Definitely the Streisand Effect here.
I heard of it ages ago, but it was a terrible experience (constantly opened new browser windows with ads etc) compared to torrents and by the time I actually got interested in music the industry had come up with convenient legal means to buy it. Didn't know that site is still alive though.
The harder Sony screams, the better things are going in general. This effort was pathetic and ineffective, just like every attempt Sony has made to combat piracy. If only they spent all that effort and money improving the user experience when accessing their products instead of something doomed to failure.
it’s entertaining to watch Sony throw these tantrums after one of their prime complaints with the Activision + Microsoft merger was how it might give Microsoft exclusivity for CoD while forgetting how much they love exclusivity for Playstation titles.
Microsoft is the only company allowing piracy and it has done nothing but good for them ever since they implemented that strategy in 1995.
They compute how much the piracy costs them and then turn around and bill it to the big clients such as the Fortune 500 companies which are forced to get original licenses for Windows and Office.
Say what you want about Microsoft, but they knew the importance of getting their products into as many people's hands as possible, even if it meant accepting that some of them were going to steal it. On the other hand, Sony's appeal to consumers has greatly diminished because they focused more on protectionism than making their products a household name. Sure, they have the Playstation, but come on. Maybe they should go back to making movies that were actually good.
Question: why are torrent sites not generally run as a Tor hidden-site backend (that can therefore be accessed through any existing Tor public-web gateway, rather than needing to set up its own proxies) plus an IPFS-hosted SPA frontend (that can therefore rely on any IPFS web gateway, and can then point as many arbitrary human-readable DNSLink names at that IPFS CID as it wishes)?
Is it just because the web piracy community predates these technologies?
It is not sufficient to serve the torrent files (or magnet links) anonymously: you will leak your IP unless you also download the actual files through darknet. However, Tor project does not recommend to use Tor for that: https://support.torproject.org/#misc_misc-4.
The actual solution is torrenting through I2P: https://geti2p.net. They support it out of the box and there are a few good trackers.
I'm pretty sure sure pirate-bay is an onion site exposed via a cloudflare gateway. You can use the onion service directly (and presumably through whichever gateway you want).
Because it was veeeeeeeeery slow to me. As someone in East Asia, you are lucky if you can load a hidden service under 10 seconds.
First we should briefly talk about how hidden services work. You have a very long address encoding the portions of a HS public key, which is stored in a special directory (HSDir), and due to the P2P nature of Tor, that basically becomes a DHT/Torrent Tracker
which draws parallel to a DNS service.
Then you initiate a
rendezvous request in HSDir to request a contact with the hidden service.
The hidden service noticed the HSDir updated, then arranges a Tor circuit (of arbitrary length) and then write back to HSDir to tell the requesters to contact via that new circuit which this information will ultimately be signed with the hidden service's private key as a proof of identity so MITM is impossible (like bootleg TLS, or a mock PKI actually)
As you noticed there would be at least three user circuits involved: the hidden service to Tor itself, the Tor end user, and the hidden service relay circuits (I would like to call that a transit tunnel, the middleman).
The more the circuits and relays in between, the more likely your data will fly around the world, and too many circuits is the intrinsic reason why hidden services are very slow.
Recall that each circuit is a linked list and to decrypt the data cells you have to wait for the "pipe" to flow back and forth serially. A to B to C, and C to B to A on back. Due to this recursive relation, no relay preemption is allowed.
Keep in mind the real torspec is very complicated (that took me a few days) and I tried to make a gist for you, and in reality this may not be accurate up to date.
Adding insults to injury, the vast majority of Tor relays are dominantly located in US and EU, and there are barely any Asian Tor operators like me, let alone exit node operators. This caused a serious "geofragmentation"/"geopartition" where one group of people have degraded services over the others.
Fortunately, if your sites are mostly static or deterministic without any serverside dynamic and fancy UI (cough cough PHP and Ruby), given enough patient I would still got what I want. Just that it would have took it for me to be longer than others.
That is why I think SPA and PWA, both client-side oriented application on such a low rate network like Tor hidden service, and abstracting server interaction as low overhead APIs such as gRPC and ttrpc, would be very useful as I was experimenting it before, but most people uses Tor Browser, they would likely be disabling JS with NoScript for...security reasons. They are really afraid there will be 0days in the JS engine that would pop them a dropper. There are couple of heap spraying 0days in V8 but so far Greasemonkey is fine...
>Then you initiate a rendezvous request in HSDir to request a contact with the hidden service.
>The hidden service noticed the HSDir updated, then arranges a Tor circuit (of arbitrary length) and then write back to HSDir to tell the requesters to contact via that new circuit which this information will ultimately be signed with the hidden service's private key as a proof of identity so MITM is impossible (like bootleg TLS, or a mock PKI actually)
this sounds wrong. As far as I know the HS picks some nodes as introduction points and builds long losting circuits to them abd publishes them in ita descriptor.
when a client wants to connect it fetches the list of IPs, it picks a random node as rendezvous and, via the IP, tells the HS about it which connects to it to allow communication (basically you -> rendezvous <- HS (+ a bunch of other nodes that blindly carry traffic for anonimization as is customs with tor))
ah, looks like we got a Tor expert here. I realize I flipped the rendezvous relationship. Well, I got into Tor 5 years ago as a freshmen trying to replicate Tor in Rust, and I got to say my details are murky now.
onion service picks nodes which will act as introduction points, signs them and uploads the descriptor to the DHT
client finds that record on the DHT, picks a random node (from all of Tor) and gives it a secret, then encrypts a message to the hidden service (via one of those introduction points) with the key
hidden service makes its own circuit to the random node the person picked, tells the node the passphrase, and then the client & service do some E2EE communication (though, at the rendezvous point it's just the single handshake / one layer of encryption... so being a rendezvous node is a big job, just like HSdirs or guards)
> Adding insults to injury, the vast majority of Tor relays are dominantly located in US and EU, and there are barely any Asian Tor operators like me, let alone exit node operators.
Why does this matter? Wouldn't it just mean that you have one slow initial hop (AS client → EU/US exit node), and then a bunch of internal EU/US → EU/US hops that are fast?
> That is why I think SPA and PWA, both client-side oriented application on such a low rate network like Tor hidden service, and abstracting server interaction as low overhead APIs such as gRPC and ttrpc, would be very useful as I was experimenting it before, but most people uses Tor Browser, they would likely be disabling JS with NoScript for...security reasons.
Right, this is why I said "Tor with a public web gateway, plus an IPFS-hosted SPA." The site backend is hosted on Tor, but the user never realizes they're using Tor. And the site frontend doesn't need anonymity (it's just app code, there's nothing directly IP-infringing there, so nobody's going to actively purge/block the JS for it from their own IPFS node's cache) so it can and will end up widely p2p-cached.
IPFS also means you get DNSLink, which means you can take any DDNS provider CNAME it to any IPFS gateway and end up with a memorable domain name to visit, where the inevitable whack-a-mole occurs only on the DNS level, not on the level of needing to run actual HTTP proxies.
This will help Mozilla gain marketshare by being the goto browser for anyone wanting to access non-mainstream sites.
But I admit, that also makes firefox hostile to corporate environments. If only firefox obeyed windows system/gpo/registry settings like chrome. I have never seen a non-tech company even permit firefox in their IT policy for these and other reasons anyways.
If they really are for privacy for individuals, this is the way!
It would also be ideal if alternative root systems supported DoH well. But that's only half the problem, discovering a list or resolvers is a big pain because those can also be blocked.
My suggestion is for willing sites to frequently update their SRV records with new/current list of authoritative root IPs that support DoH. Supporting mainstream sites can also do that, so when you visit these sites you have the latest root list, and if that list is dynamic enough (have static root IPs but make them reachable with IPs that change all the time) blocking the system becomes a whack-a-mole and the difficulty is set by network size and how many new root resolver's can be added (DHT over https might help too).
>But I admit, that also makes firefox hostile to corporate environments. If only firefox obeyed windows system/gpo/registry settings like chrome. I have never seen a non-tech company even permit firefox in their IT policy for these and other reasons anyways.
Perhaps I'm missing your point, but Firefox does (and I use it in my own AD forest) provide Group Policy[0] management support.
Firefox requires special config but Chrome uses a lot of the same settings/policies set for IE and now Edge. But this isn't my area, mostly repeating what I've been told.it also lacks the equivalent of chrome enterprise telemetry/management. But pleae correct me if I am wrong there.
Why would to want my applications to use what my operating system does? I control both, but typically I have more control over the OS, and importantly it’s a single location to configure.
How could I possibly have more control over a browser?
I have multiple applications that resolve DNS, I want to configure their resolver in a single location. Maybe I want to run systemd-resolved, maybe I want to run dnsmasq, maybe I want to point to a central dns server on my network
I don’t want my browser independently ignoring my piguard, or ignoring my local dns entries.
Nor do I want to have to configure my browser separately from the majority of my software which obeys my instructions, life is too short.
DNS is a system level resource. I configure it with dhcp, giving me a single location to configure no matter told it’s my phone, desktop, laptop, other laptop, or any other device. All block certain sites for various reasons.
It is my softwares responsibility to listen to my instructions. Sadly it seems more common for browsers to ignore my instructions. Unsurprising when the most common browser is run by an ad company.
When I think of the historical development of the internet, events like this and the early recognition of "net neutrality" makes me grateful for the bullets we did dodge.
It's clear that we need to do some things better re: DNS, but this could have gone sideways so much earlier.
I don’t understand why ENS doesn’t support normal record types (A, AAAA, etc.) Support for these was in the original design for ENS. I hope we see more support for alternative roots in the future. Brave browser, which is already fairly crypto-friendly, could add an ENS resolver for example. Maybe this is something someone could build as a browser extension?
The web is hosted somewhere, the actual files are hosted somewhere (on a different site), yet they don’t go after either of these actual websites but after a DNS resolver? That’s just weird.
On the other hand my country now DNS-blocks Russia Today so I guess it’s just the minimal viable block
The DNS provider has some German presence, and the site and its hosting don't. The serving of torrent magnet links alone is not illegal in most Europe.
well good luck going after a website that is probably hosted in an offshore country where piracy is legal and they won't even bother to answer to you.
it's easy and enough effective to just block it dns level, most people outside here don't even know what dns is anyway so they won't bother finding a way around it
The actual nuke stayed in the silo. Privacy subversion + drm. If you can scan anybodies phone or pc and can categorize the contenting pirated and not pirated. Pirated content, is in theory one right holder lawsuit away from being pure profit. Thus such a scan result could be placed in the books as a sellable asset. But going for these assets would kill the privacy violation market forever..
Youtube serves the audio and video separately; yt-dlp (the successor to youtube-dl) can download only the audio part, so there isn't any extraction necessary.
Honestly, I don't understand "piracy" much anymore -- almost everything folks want is legally available on a streaming service for cheap or no-charge. If something has been censored or banned (or the owner refuses to sell it anymore), then that's a different story, but legal services are cheap and easy now.
> almost everything folks want is legally available on a streaming service for cheap or no-charge
The majority of TV shows and movies that I watch are unavailable on streaming services. I know there's some more specialty streaming services for film these days, but besides that, it seems like its mostly well-known classics, anything mainstream from the past 20 years, or new releases that are available.
I solely credit piracy for enabling my appreciation of film and TV. I was never a big fan of either until I got access to a huge catalog and started watching classics that are not popular enough for streaming services to pickup.
Streaming services WERE cheap and easy. Now all the content providers are starting their own crappy streaming services and you end up paying more than you would for cable, when pretty much everything they offer used to be available through one or two services tops.
I expect piracy to rise until there is a Spotify of TV/movies
For music I agree for the most part. Tons of music is both available on streaming services, and for sale as a DRM-free download. The rest of the entertainment industry hasn't figured that last part out yet, unfortunately.
"Piracy" is still a thing for classical music - if you look for a specific performance of a piece you'd often find that it is not only not available online, but also permanently out of stock in physical formats since 1998.
I pay for a whole long list of streaming services. Very often I want to watch something that isn't on any of them.
They don't carry old TV miniseries. They don't carry many older classic shows. They don't carry many old classic movies and especially not more obscure ones. They don't carry many artistic/indie movies. They don't carry many foreign movies. Sometimes when they do carry something it's edited all weirdly, unlike the original (perhaps because they didn't get the rights to use the music or other stuff in streaming).
I still like the streaming services for what they do carry and especially for the serendipity of browsing around and finding something I didn't even know existed and would've never thought to look for. But that's about all they're good for. When I'm actually looking for something, they're usually a failure. 9/10 it's available on a pirate site though.
Do streaming services provide 5.1 surround sound mixes? As someone who listens to a lot of classical music -- often with a spatial element where players are dispersed in the hall -- that keeps me buying physical media (SACDs etc.), or occasionally resorting to torrents when someobe could rip the SACD image.
this site is the most cyberpunk i've seen in quite a while. never heard about it. but i'm surprised the sharing isn't done via torrenting but via some commercial shareplace.org website where you pay with paypal - seems a bit dangerous in case they go bust and user data gets confiscated. also, not sure what the appeal is given that you get almost anything on spotify.
Google started self censoring “Russian propaganda” and everyone was so distracted with the war itself that nobody seemed to take notice of what gears that type of thing set in motion. Sure, they’ve probably been doing stuff like that the whole time, but it was the first I’d ever seen them announce they were altering results publicly and giving us things they deem acceptable.
We need to wake up