Platforms should, like how we had to shut down our shit posting community for CSAM.
ISPs are a privatized infrastructure and should really be run as utilities. Like trains or water should be.
The world has been treated as a for-profit endeavor and this has many regrettable consequences.
exactly. switch my packets, and shut the fuck up.
the water company isnt trying to upsell me on premium water services, i would like the same from my isp thankyouverymuch.
I’d say “don’t give them ideas”, but they only have a few they like and that’s one of them already
Nestle: “Write that down, write that down!”
think of how much money could be saved not having to advertise alone.
we literally have a pretend market for who owns the last mile to force competition into a market that shouldnt exist. insane
Check out the company Aqua, they have been buying public water companies across the country and running them into the ground with no government oversight since they are a private company.
It’s an unpopular opinion, but crippling platforms due to CSAM is a lot more harmful than what would happen if we did not have such draconian laws around it. Do people think there would be some dramatic explosion of CSAM? I don’t buy that for a second and the act of producing such material has always and will always be illegal, so like everything else, it seems ridiculous to prosecute the particular crime of posession.
Seize all funds received for distributing it, throw anyone involved in producing it in prison and throw away the key, and stop holding threat of social death over anybody’s head if some idiots throw a bunch of digital gunk at them.
it seems ridiculous to prosecute the particular crime of posession
what does this even mean? you mean with people hoarding CSAM shouldn’t be charged because they’re not distributing it?
Do people think there would be some dramatic explosion of CSAM?
Yes, this is not your local backwater town where you know there are a few visibly shitty & disgusting people and people tell their kids to stay away and everyone becomes safe. And if you think shit doesn’t explode on the internet, you might be living under a rock last 2 decades.
That’s stupid on a whole new level and your made up scenario doesn’t make it any better. No one is threatened for having been sent some questionable content. The person who sent those however might be and the tech today makes it incredibly easy to prove where anything came from since everyone is being tracked.
Seize all funds received for distributing it, throw anyone involved in producing it in prison and throw away the key,
How about we prevent such things from happening by discouraging it in the firat place? Sure, they won’t be down to 0, but your solution starting after the distribution has already started is highly disturbing.
what does this even mean? you mean with people hoarding CSAM shouldn’t be charged because they’re not distributing it?
This means that current prosecution violates principles of criminal prosecution: namely requirement of intent.
Fuck off, you’re just a pedo.
Edit: I angered at least 6 pedos!
Edit 2: We’re up to 8 angry pedos now!
ISPs shouldn’t be doing anything other than providing internet service.
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ISPs are to me like infrastructure. They are like roads or power lines. If you ask the ISPs to block malicious activity it’s like asking the electrical poweregrid to be responsible for stopping their electricity being used for illegal activity. Asking the ISPs to block malicious activity is like asking the road builders to be responsible for bankrobbers and murdere driving on the roads. It’s simply just ridiculous to put the responsibility like that.
Then ISPs should be public corporations, until that happens then they’re not equivalent to pubic infrastructures.
Well said. It’s really the endpoints where the burden is.
Yup. To many people don’t get it. They are all for heavy regulations so long as it’s their side doing the regulation, then five years later they’re crying about being regulated.
I understand that censorship can be misused, but I also understand trying to fight faschistic right-wing propaganda and demagoguery is more important than trying to stick to general liberal ideals like “free speach”, if radically following those ideals lead to bad outcomes.
So yes, I am in favor of not giving people that are against democracy a platform to push their lies and propaganda. With the current level of education and media literacy in the broad population, lies are much easier spread than that countered. Ignoring that means giving them their victories.
Facts are boring and feelings can easily be abused and misled.
I don’t have an answer where the line is, and where and how censorship/blocking/deplatforming is effective. I just think that this isn’t a simple issue.
But I would mostly agree that this shouldn’t be decided by ISP companies. They probably shouldn’t have a TOS. And if you ask me, they are infrastructure providers, so they have a monopoly, and therefore they should be non-commercial and under democratic control. Because democracy has proven to be a good way to handle monopolies.
I agree the situation looks helpless regarding fighting missinformation but conversation is the only viable tool. Failing that, when the topic is important enough, then only the tool of violence remains. A person about to blow themselves up in a crowd likely can’t be talked out of it. Hopefully the situation isn’t so bad that a lot of people are like that. I think it’s better to promote education rather than trusting anyone to draw a line on what speech I can’t hear (or say).
You can have conversations with people, but first you have to somehow stop the constant onslaught of propaganda meant to keep people in an easy to manipulate mental state.
You need to give them room to breath first, then you can start working with them to take their fear away and let them reflect on their preconceptions.
I think improving people’s well-being is the best bet to give people the time to potentially become innoculated against manipulation. Stopping propoganda reaching people may contribute to that. Does getting caught censoring not backfire to a high degree (“they’re trying to hide the truth”)?
Yes, improving the well being is the best way, but doing that is very difficult and takes time. There are so may reasons why people are unwell in the US: suburbia, car centric infrastructure, housing, education, …
If you are transparent about what is censored and why, your aren’t hiding it.
After WW2, Germany created a law against Volksverhetzung and later expanded this into laws against hate speech, which was adopted in similar ways in other countries as well.
The law seems to work well, it is not perfect, but at least the right needs to be much more careful in what they utter. Of course free speach absolutists where concered about it, with slippery-slope arguments, but their concerns where unsubstaniated so far.
When it comes to government instead of a business then I am more certain and am of the free speech absolitish kind. Even though I believe speech can hurt, indeed has killed (e.g. driven to suicide my fellow LGBT people), there is simply no one I can trust to decide what speech I can hear.
I have little faith that any holocast deniers has anything worth hearing but I wouldn’t say they could never have even a grain of truth. What effect are those laws having switch social backlash does not?
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This was literally the Net Neutrality debate from 2013-2016ish… And yall can correct me if im mis-remembering what the argument was. IIRC it was if an ISP wanted to be classified as a public utility or private service and the outcome was something along the lines of.
Public utility > protection under title 2 of The Communications Act of 1934 (ammended in 1996, its not that old, and could NOT be sued for the content they transmitted) > they could not police the content, otherwise they were liable for what their customers used it for.
The reasoning was you could not sue a public utility for someone using them to do something illegal. However if it was a private service.
Private service > not protected under title 2 > could police content as it was private infrastructure. The fear was if Time Warner or someone throttled connections to streaming platforms to ruin the expirence so people would go back to watching cable. This was kicked off when Netflix, Level 3 and Comcast all got into a spat over content usage, data volumes and who was responsible for paying for hardware upgrades.
The issue was that they were poorly classified at the time (unsure if that changed) and had a habbit of flip-flopping classifications as they saw fit in different cases (ISPs claimed to be both and would only argue in favor of the classification that was more useful at the time). I dont think this was ever resolved as it was on chairman Wheelers to-do list but 45s nominee to the FCC was a wet blanket and intentionally did nothing. Now the seat is empty because congressional approval is required for appointees and were doing the “think of the kids/ruin the internet” bill again… /Sigh.
Y’all know the drill, call your congress critter n’ shit, remind them not to break the internet again. And if your in a red state, just fart loudly into the phone, its funny and they wont do anything constructive anyway, even if you asked nicely. (Sorry, im just tired of this cycle of regulatory lights on, lights off)
Thank you for coming to my TEDtalk.
Man, this is so wierd reading from post-soviet country. Here red state/region meant in 90-ies region with communists majority. And they probably would be for public utility.
Anyway now it doesn’t matter in personalist resource autocracy.
Thats the part that makes this double frustrating, it by all accounts should be a public. Back in the early 00’s the US federal government basicly gave all these companies a blank check to provide “broadband internet” to every home in America (See the US Postal Service as them doing shit like this before).
They (ISPs) have since taken the money and done some of the work (with the promise to get it done some day, eventually maybe never) and the term “broadband” is borderline useless in terms of an acceptable internet connection. Every few years there is some skuttlebutt to increase the standard of what “broadband” means, but the last update set it at 25mb down / 3mb up… Which in 2023 is pretty emberassing.
Downlink speed itself is not as embarassing as assymetrical channel.
And not everybody receiving it also embarassing. To the point of articles 19 and 27.1 of DoHR. AFAIK the only country in the world that does not have to be embarassed is Finland.
I don’t want my local ISP to be making judgments about whether my neighbor is pirating movies or posting hate speech.
But I do want my local ISP to be able to cut off connectivity to a house that is directly abusing neighborhood-level network resources; in order to protect the availability of the network to my house and the rest of the neighborhood.
Back in the early 2000s there was a spate of Windows worms known as “flash worms” or "Warhol worms"¹, which could flood out whole network segments with malware traffic. If an end-user machine is infected by something like this, it’s causing a problem for everyone in the neighborhood.
And the ISP should get to cut them off as a defensive measure. Worm traffic isn’t speech; it’s fully-automated malware activity.
¹ From Andy Warhol’s aphorism that “in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes”, a Warhol worm is a worm that can take over a large swath of vulnerable machines across the Internet in 15 minutes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhol_worm
Yeah ok, that’s like a gas leak from the gas Co. They come over and help you fix it.
that is directly abusing neighborhood-level network resources
First question: how?
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I can’t believe people are still making this argument in 2023.
I went to the library and copied a book.
Digital piracy is not theft. There is nothing stolen.
That doesn’t make it right, but stop trying to conflate it with larceny. It is NOT analogous.
I went to the library and copied a book.
And in Europe it is perfectly legal for last thousand of years.
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Here’s a scenario: I’m a wizard with the magical ability to clone any object I point at. I see a person with a Rolex watch on their wrist. I point to it and instantly a perfect copy of that Rolex appears on my wrist.
What got stolen? Who got robbed? Who is deprived of anything? And don’t say Rolex got deprived of money, because they still have exactly as much money as before, and nobody is “owed” profit.
If people could be owed profit just because they did work, then I could run around parking lots all day cleaning off people’s cars and then forcing them to pay for my services when they got back.
If people could be owed profit just for creating things, I could go around town singing my original music to people passing by and then forcing them to pay for listening to it.
Both of those scenarios are obviously ridiculous.
Pirating digital media is wrong in the same way that poaching unicorns is wrong. It’s not, because unicorns don’t actually exist, and neither does intellectual property, it’s a myth, a fable, a fabrication that is enforced by powerful corpos in order to forcefully extract undeserved profits from a market of artificial scarcity that they created in the first place.
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Respond to my scenario I proposed, if I magically cloned an object like a Rolex, what got stolen? Who is deprived of something? What are they deprived of and how?
The difference being, those people didn’t ask for your music, but you needed that software, otherwise you wouldn’t use it.
Nope, I didn’t necessarily need the software. The point of that illustration is that people and companies aren’t owed profit on something merely because they created it. Money is owned in a mutual social contract, and I don’t agree to that contract for purchase. The reason why that’s not theft though in the case of digital “piracy” is because Nobody Is Being Deprived Of Anything.
Until you can show me clearly what Rolex or the person wearing the Rolex is being deprived of in that example I gave, theft hasn’t been demonstrated because theft means depriving somebody of something against their will or desire. Copying Is Not Theft.
Lol, so basically confirming my last paragraph then, “doesn’t actually exist” because its digital, what a take.
Nope, wrong again. Read what I said more carefully, intellectual property, not just digital. If I go to the library, grab a textbook and hand copy that book onto my own paper, that is totally fine.
If Intellectual property is real, please explain to me how somebody can have an idea “stolen” from them? How would a person be “robbed” of a concept? Here’s an idea I’m making up: “Zixatubayponawa” which is a far away land where the rivers are purple sugar water. Tell me how you would “steal” that from me.
Out of curiosity, what are you’re thoughts on the below scenarios:
- attempted robbery If you go to a bank and attempt to steal money, but you were unsuccessful in doing so, there wouldn’t be any loss, but you’d still go to jail and it’s widely accepted as wrong.
- getting a service, e.g going to the barbers and running out of the store before paying There wouldn’t be a loss again
Those aren’t really good equivalents since in the first example, you’re trying to take something away from someone but you fail. The law is not concerned with your skill, just your intent. Attempted murder is illegal even if the victim is still alive.
In the second example, there is absolutely a loss. The barber would have spent time and used resources in order to provide you with that service that they wouldn’t get compensated for. Your involvement directly costs them money and time, unlike with piracy where even a billion people pirating won’t cost the developer any more money than if those people just never played it to begin with.
Your involvement directly costs them money and time, unlike with piracy where even a billion people pirating won’t cost the developer any more money than if those people just never played it to begin with.
Sometimes “legal” is even worse for developers than pirated:
You can legally go to the library, xerox every page in a book and leave. Legally. The publishers and author don’t get a penny. What is the difference between that and pirating something online other than it being easier and more convenient?
attempted robbery
If you go to a bank and attempt to steal money, but you were unsuccessful in doing so, there wouldn’t be any loss, but you’d still go to jail and it’s widely accepted as wrong.Unsuccessful attempt to take away? Well, you can point out who was loosing files.
you’re leeching off someone else’s time and resources, and taking away money that could have been paid to them, for your own selfish desires.
Except saud developers were fired 10 years ago. If you were truly pro-copyright, you would make it personal and inalienable.
Ahoy matey, come aboard the good ship I don’t give a fuck
If you go to a bank and attempt to steal money, but you were unsuccessful in doing so, there wouldn’t be any loss, but you’d still go to jail and it’s widely accepted as wrong.
Theft is taking property with the intention to permanently deprive the owner of it, which you were attempting to do
getting a service, e.g going to the barbers and running out of the store before paying
Technically fraud not theft.
And recordable cassette tapes are going to kill the music industry.
The ordinary court system is quite adequate to resolve that sort of thing.
It begins by showing evidence under penalty of perjury that a crime has actually been committed. Then you can get warrants and subpoenas and so on. You don’t get to demand that an ISP shut off a customer just on your say-so.
Many years ago, I was the designated recipient for abuse reports for a large network. We frequently got very firmly-worded demands that we shut off the terrible pirates who were smuggling bootleg copies of The Matrix through various IP addresses on our network.
The problem was … the IP addresses the complaints mentioned, had never been routed. They had never been connected to the Internet. Those IP addresses had never received so much as a ping packet. They certainly were not sharing copies of The Matrix on Kazaa.
The complaints were not only false, but obviously false to anyone who had even basic technical competence to investigate them.
The “copyright industry” have never even tried to behave as law-abiding citizens with honest legal complaints about other people’s conduct. They have consistently perjured themselves, lied to the public, committed felonies against their own customers, demanded dictatorial control over things they don’t own (including your own hard drive), and generally acted like a band of clownish goons.
They don’t get the benefit of the doubt on anything related to Internet technology, ever.
Copying👏 data👏 is👏 not👏 theft.
Because it is quasi-infinitely replicable. There is nuance and debate to be made, but that’s the difference at its core.
You trollin’ bruh?
Putting aside the argument that privacy is NOT theft. The argument that piracy hurts creators has been shown to be largely false.
Most of the time the people who pirate software or media wouldn’t convert to real sales if the piracy option wasn’t there. Those people simply wouldn’t buy the product. And even if some of those did convert to real sales, it wouldn’t be enough to make or break profits.
Secondly, there’s a knock-on benefit to having more people use the product regardless of legitimacy, as it increases word of mouth sales. The more people that talk positively about a product, the more people hear about it, and consequently the more sales you’ll make.
Microsoft learned that lesson with Windows licenses. They really don’t care if someone has a legitimate license or not. The more people they keep on their platform the more it translates to sales in other ways. I still meet people that have never heard of Linux, because there’s a network effect of “everyone uses Windows”, despite Linux accounting for around 5% of global desktop marketshare.
Quick edit: this isn’t an argument to say that piracy is fine. The point I’m making is that from a logistics perspective, it can actually increase sales in some instances.
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If you ask me (and nobody ever does for good reason), one of the only times an ISP should be pulling the plug on online speech is when you start linking actual malicious links that have a good chance of your grandma losing her retirement funds or your tech illiterate uncle getting a crypto miner installed on his laptop or something equally destructive.
I don’t know why people are disagreeing with you.
This is like someone setting up a fake stop on a public road to mug people.
You’re telling me that the state shouldn’t have the right to police the road to prevent that from happening?
Lemmy.people, are you high?
A fascinating read. I’m sure there will be plenty of people complaining about their “centralists / fence sitting” takes, but what they’re saying it’s perfectly valid. These top level providers shouldn’t be interfering in arguably critical infrastructure.
We keep seeing Moral Guardians create more problems than they solve
Users need more control over the kind of content they want to see. The problem Lemmy has is very similar to the main problem with the internet as a whole: the current model is that of a “regulator” who controls the flow of information for us.
What I’d like to see is giving users the tools to filter for themselves, which means the internet as a whole. Not interested in sports, let me filter it all out by myself, instead of blocking individual parts piecemeal.
The problem is that no company has an incentive to work on something like that, and I wouldn’t even know where to start designing such interface tools on my own, but there is, for example, a keyword blocker for YouTube that prevents video that contain said terms from appearing on my timeline. I’ve used it to block everything “Trump”, for example. I’d like to see more of that.
The idea sounds nice in theory, but there is a reason people bring their car to a shop instead of changing their own oil. There are a lot of things we could/should take responsibility for directly but they are far too numerous for us to take responsibility for everyone of them. Sometimes we just have to place trust in groups we loosely vetted (if at all) and hope for the best. We all do it every day in all sorts of capacities.
To put it another way: do you think we should have the FDA? Or do you think everybody should have to test everything they eat and put on their skin?
I’m talking about internet content. Maybe this is where personal assistants can come into play at some point.
To put it another way: do you think we should have the FDA? Or do you think everybody should have to test everything they eat and put on their skin?
There is a middle ground. The FDA shouldn’t have the power to ban a product from the market. They should be able to publish their recommendations, however, and people who trust them can choose to follow those recommendations. Others should be free to publish their own recommendations, and some people will choose to follow those instead.
Applied to online content: Rather than having no filter at all, or relying on a controversial, centralized content policy, users would subscribe to “reputation servers” which would score content based on where it comes from. Anyone could participate in moderation and their moderation actions (positive or negative) would be shared publicly; servers would weight each action according to their own policies to determine an overall score to present to their followers. Users could choose a third-party reputation server to suit their own preferences or run their own, either from scratch or blending recommendations from one or more other servers.
That isn’t a middle ground. You’re just saying the state can publish a recommendation, which it always has been able to. That’s absolutely in the “unregulated” / “no safety nets” camp. It’s caveat emptor as a status quo and takes us back to the gilded age.
To put it another way: The middle ground between “the state has no authority here” and “the state can regulate away a product” isn’t “the state can suggest we don’t buy it.” It still puts the burden on the consumer in an unreasonable way. We can’t assess literally everything we consume. If I go to a grocery store and buy apples, I can reasonably assume they won’t poison me. Without basic regulations this is not possible. You can’t feed 8 billion people without some rules.
Let me be clear, I agree with the EFF on this particular issue. ISP’s should not regulate speech and what sites I browse. But it’s not the same as having the FDA. For starters, ISP’s are private corporations.
You misunderstood. It’s not a middle ground between “can regulate” and “cannot regulate”. That would indeed be idiotic. It’s a middle ground between “must judge everything for yourself” and “someone else determines what you have access to”. Someone else does the evaluation and tells you whether they think it’s worthwhile, but you choose whose recommendations to listen to (or ignore, if you please).
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It takes me several dozen hours every 6-12mo to keep up with the arms race that is privacy. I can’t imagine what it’s like for people who are less technically inclined. It must be a completely impenetrable problem.
4 years ago everybody told me to get on Brave. Look what happened lol
Arguably the most well known VPN is Nord. Yet you can find dozens of posts on HackerNews and other sites saying not to use it.
It’s one thing to diagnose and try to solve the problem, but then you need a bunch of technical knowledge and knowledge of where to find good answers to even know what solutions are viable or are just a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It’s a total minefield sometimes, it’s hard to not simply land with someone else who wants to take all your data and strip away your privacy.
It doesn’t help that the ISPs are run by media companies, who put the content on the Internet…
That’s why the policing is even happening in the first place.
the EFF seems to be suggesting that the private sector is policing itself via censorship because law enforcement doesn’t fucking do anything. yea bro
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Well they specifically calls out ISP’s, rather than the media companies running forums or social media, etc.
The latter SHOULD be policing their platforms to some extent, but ISP’s can’t even do so without being pretty invasive/authoritarian, so they should stick to providing internet service.
No. It’s like expecting construction companies to enforce traffic laws because they build the roads.
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The owners of…the sites. How they do that, is up to them. But again, I’ll go back to my construction analogy: There’s a burgaler entering your house, who do you call and why? Not the people that built it.
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You didn’t read the article, did you?
ISPs are private, they can do whatever they want with their service. Create a state run ISP if you want to impose free speech on an ISP.
Also fuck USA’s definition of free speech that lets people share hate.
Bring in the downvotes!
Agreed, ISPs should be public services. The Internet is an essential service these days. Shouldn’t be left in private hands.
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Free speech is guaranteed in public space, not private space.
Just because you get to a public park in a privately operated taxi doesn’t mean the park is suddenly private. It would also be absurd for the taxi to have a say in how you spend your time in the park.
I also refuse to trust that any private corporation would have my best interests at heart, or that they would not use the excuse of policing hate speech to also interfere with discussion against their corporate interests.
The taxi has a say in how you spend your time in the taxi, however
If you enter the taxi and the driver sees that you’ve got a shirt with a swastika the driver can tell you they’re not taking you for this reason.
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When did I say I didn’t want it? Just stating a fact.
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Because you’re asking a question that’s irrelevant.
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