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How healthy is the internet?
- funkythingsss 7y agoI fundamentally disagree with Mozillas notion of "openness". The internet always was open to LGBTQI+ people. The internet does not discriminate. Get an account named X. Done. Problems only arise when professional activists try to change existing communities. E.g. the new linux kernel code of conduct and it's, let's say "questionable", author.
- rage-factor 7y agoBut that wouldn't feed the rage factor. We need people sufficiently angry, to divide the world. In order to stoke the flames of anger, you need an unquenchable holy war, and crusaders unleashed into to fray for suicide attacks. You can't accomplish those goals by saying everything's fine. The two minute hate finds its origins in a fear of persecution. Find the minorities and radicalize them with a fear of alienation. BE AFRAID. BE VERY AFRAID.
- DanBC 7y ago> The internet does not discriminate. Get an account named X. We don't discriminate against you, but you have to hide every aspect of who you are otherwise we're going to threaten to rape you to death.
- rape-rape-rape 7y agoI'm beyond the point of wrapping my words in a cushion that's laser sculpted to fit your ears. I'm just going to dump the words I want into yet another text field, and call it a day. You know why? Because it isn't a violent crime and we're probably thousands of miles away from one another.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- otabdeveloper1 7y agoNon-discrimination and acceptance isn't the same thing. You can't force people to like you, and you shouldn't.
- Ensorceled 7y agoDo you really believe explicit, credible death and/or rape threats for being a woman with opinions on Marvel movies or games or being LGBQ are examples of a non-discriminatory environment?
- Phenix88be 7y agoInternet is a tool to communicate freely and regardless of the message. Internet isn't "people". If someone harass you with your phone, you don't blame the phone, you blame the harasser. The phone is fine.
- mtberatwork 7y agoThe murkiness is that the tool shields the harasser from any sort of consequences that would occur if the exchange happened in the physical world.
- Phenix88be 7y agoThe same way journalist and activist are protected. Should you blame the mailman if he deliver some harassing anonymous letter ? The physical mail offer the same sort of protection if it's done properly.
- woodruffw 7y agoIf someone harassed me with anonymous letters, I would open a police report. The point is that no equivalent recourse exists online. Edit: The point being that the mailman is a red herring. If the internet is really an extension of public space as (presumably) claimed, let's treat it like one.
- rape-U2-death 7y agoEmpty threats at best. The reality is that words, words, words on the internet are only worth so much. Meanwhile, IRL it's much more likely to wind up in jail mostly by virtue of having a penis, than it is to ever get brutally raped by a total stranger. Internet or not. And then there's that whole thing about man ass rape in prison, which is basically laughed at. So who's really getting victimized by society.
- mindslight 7y agoAs somebody who wants to hide every aspect of who I am regardless, I don't find this a particularly compelling argument. I'll admit it's easy for me to say, but I'm less concerned about receiving stateless baseless threats than to have my entire life cataloged and foreseen by surveillance machines. I suspect this is a big part of the divide between the old guard "nobody knows you're a dog" and the new "broadcast your identity". I turn to the Internet to not be participating in the monkeysphere. Any trace I leave behind is due to laziness rather than intent. I do have to wonder how much this is just inevitable "normie" human behavior, and how much it has been stoked by companies pushing realname policies and profile selfies.
- dang 7y agoAnyone threatening other users here would soon get banned. You surely know that as well as anyone. Would you please stop upping the inflammation like this in HN comments? You've been doing it a lot, and we've been cutting you a lot of slack because you've been a good contributor over the years, but this is not cool, and I can feel my roll of slack running out. If your taste for ideological warfare is growing, please gratify it elsewhere, not here. This comment violates numerous site guidelines, including: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." "Eschew flamebait." "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- DanBC 7y agoThere are women who post to HN but who hide the fact that they're women, because of the attitudes displayed in this thread. There are a bunch of women who don't post to HN at all. I'll dial it back a bit, but you need to regain control from the misogynists who are making this place hostile to others. Parent post is literally telling women not to identify as women, yet you didn't say anything to them. Respectfully, you need better aim.
- dang 7y agoIf you're concerned about that, you need to stop pumping aggression into this place, by which you're contributing to making it more hostile and less safe. A war zone can never be safe and welcoming. First stop making HN more of a war zone (which you've done a lot over the years, routinely calling people cunts and all the rest of it—which as I said, we've cut you a ton of slack for when we would have banned others), and we'll be interested in your ideas about how to make HN less hostile to others.
- pmlnr 7y agoOn IRC still nobody knows you're a dog. Nobody cares. What write is what matters.
- ForHackernews 7y agoIt's really ironic to see HN posters staking out bold claims about the value of totally "uncensored" platforms...in a thread with dozens of dead, hidden comments, on a message board subject to heavy-handed, arbitrary and unaccountable moderation.
- chasd00 7y agoModeration isn't really censorship IMO, if a comment was deleted that would be censorship. Or, if you were prevented from reading downvoted comments then I would qualify that as censorship as well. It's subjective in some ways which makes the discussion complicated.
- ForHackernews 7y agoHN moderators absolutely remove comments and threads.
- Mirioron 7y agoSure, but HN isn't a large part of the internet. Wanting some uncensored places doesn't mean there shouldn't be curated places.
- chasd00 7y agothat qualifies as censorship in my book.
- dang 7y agoThat's a slippery statement to respond to because "remove" can mean a lot of different things. chasd00 used the clearer word "deleted", which is actually precisely what we don't do. I can think of four removeyish things that happen to comments and threads: (1) downweighting of rank; (2) collapsing by default; (3) killing (marking [dead]); (4) deleting altogether. Moderators and software do the first three. We never do #4, except when the author asks us to, or—exceedingly rarely—when our attorneys tell us we have to (less than half a dozen times in ten years, and we push to avoid it, except one time when an HN user was exposed). In cases 1, 2, and 3, nothing is deleted. Anybody can still read everything if they want to. They can read #1 by scrolling; #2 by expanding a subthread; #3 by setting "showdead" to "yes" in their profile. Are those removal? censorship? Sure, if you like—people use those words to express a feeling. But deletion, in the sense of "you used to be able to read something but now you can't", is a question not of feeling but of fact, and the fact is we don't do that.
- anon1000 7y agoA lot of the problems came about when sites began mandating "Real Names". People began to assume that online is somehow analogous to real life (it isn't). Combined with the nonsense claim that "hateful/rude/unpleasant speech and violence are the same", we're hurtling down a dangerous path.
- sbwmk 7y agohttps://internethealthreport.org/2019/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2019/03/Liz-Fong-Jones--1600x1080.jpg https://internethealthreport.org/2019/wp-content/uploads/sit...
- anc84 7y agoA opinionated, non-technological, political, negative and very social justice-ish compilation of: - Is it safe? The internet is where we could live, love, learn and communicate freely. To be ourselves, we need to be able to trust the systems that protect us. - How open is it? The internet is transformative because it is open: everyone can participate and innovate. But openness is not guaranteed – it’s always under attack. - Who is welcome? It’s not just about how many people have access to the internet, but whether that access is safe and meaningful for all of us. - Who can succeed? Getting online isn’t enough on its own. Everyone needs skills to read, write and participate in the digital world. - Who controls it? A few large players dominate much of the online world, but the internet is healthier when it is controlled by many.
- zzzcpan 7y agoAlso hypocritical. Mozilla should take responsibility for its part in centralization of the online world, being one of those players with control and pushing even more of centralization into its browser.
- omnimus 7y agoCould you elaborate on what you mean? Firefox has become ~5% browser i don't understand what "pushing even more centralisation on Firefox" means. It looks to me that currently more firefox users = decentralisation more than centralisation. Do you mean the past when it was major browser?
- J_tt 7y agoFirefox even allows you to host your own history/tab syncing, Mozilla had very little choice besides adding these centralised features in order to even attempt to compete with chrome.
- Jonnax 7y agoIt's really weird. Firefox has such a tiny marketshare now where WebKit based browsers dictate what happens. Also whenever there's any positive news about the browser people always like to bring up pocket, that ARG misstep or how their CEO is a victim (Use brave!!!)
- z92 7y agoBy health of the Internet, the numbers that I look for is how "stressed" is it when it comes to resource management. Like bandwidth or dns. And how much "free" is it, still?
- pmlnr 7y agofree as in beer, free as in freedom (libre), free as in DRM free, free as in freemium... ?
- z92 7y agoFree as in speech. What are permitted and what not. How much of the net is banned or blocked in which regions of the world. DRM isn't a problem as long as non-DRM isn't forcefully eliminated by it.
- inetknght 7y agoDRM and non-DRM are effectively polar opposites of each other. DRM is a problem for free speech.
- rocqua 7y agoDRM is more about free listening than free speech. The existence of DRM does not limit your speech. It does limit what speech you can consume but the author (presumably) wants to be limited in their speech.
- tgragnato 7y agoThe OONI Project tries to map blockades, per as and cc. > OONI Explorer serves as a resource for researchers, journalists, lawyers, activists, advocates and anyone interested in exploring network anomalies, such as censorship, surveillance and traffic manipulation, and how the internet works in general. https://explorer.ooni.io/ https://explorer.ooni.io/
- ThePadawan 7y agoAre we ready for something like the Doomsday Clock [0]? Something as simple as https://status.dropbox.com/ https://status.dropbox.com/, but for all of the Internet. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock
- GuB-42 7y agoThe Doomsday Clock is a joke now. It made sense during the cold war when the threat was clearly identified: a nuclear war between the USA and USSR. It is now a game of finding new unrelated threats to make sure the clock doesn't tick backwards. We could make the same useless "clock" for the internet, advancing it every time a website is blocked or a new backdoor is discovered. Making sure new threat categories are added when things get better. "Oh, it looks like https is becoming the norm, that's good, make sure to add fake news in the mix to make it look like things are getting worse..." By comparison, the Dropbox status page provides useful technical information. A similar page for all of the internet would include things like the states of root DNS servers, tier 1 networks, etc... That could be useful.
- PhasmaFelis 7y agoIt last ticked back in 2010. It doesn't only go forwards.
- lifeisstillgood 7y agoI think it would be possible to make a clock that does not rely on judgments as inputs (although has judgements as rules) You mention a couple - Status of root DNSServers But we could come up with more (I suspect around 50 metrics would be comprehensive) - Ratio of servers reachable by http vs https - Ratio of servers hosted in countries with mature legal frameworks (needs work) - Ratio of devices able to reach "representative servers" (ie can your device in beijing reach bbc news and WeChat and Russian newspaper) - Ratio of devices in areas with "24 hour" electricity supply - ratio of servers that do not have basic security holes plugged - ratio of devices that have uptodate security patches - current volume of DDOS attacks - Number of successful ransomware attacks per day - number of networks only reachable through N pipes (ie resilience to network failure) I would be interested in any thoughts / extras / improvements
- sbwmk 7y agohttps://internethealthreport.org/2019/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2019/03/Liz-Fong-Jones--1600x1080.jpg https://internethealthreport.org/2019/wp-content/uploads/sit...
- microcolonel 7y agoI yearn for a day when Mozilla approached tractable problems with practical solutions, like improving their web browser, or integrating new fancy technology like RSS, or making people feel welcome the old fashioned way on the bug tracker and the IRC. It's no wonder that Brendan Eich's new browser is Chromium based. ;- )
- moneytells 7y agoSimply saying that the world won't run without Internet. Today's world is based on Digital Technology. Thanks Saran https://moneytells.com/ https://moneytells.com/
- HNKingpin 7y agoMozilla has no business speaking about internet health. I mean they criticize China for censoring social media, when they have a freaking "Mozilla Information Trust Initiative" which does the same thing - https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/08/08/mozilla-information-trust-initiative-building-movement-fight-misinformation-online/ https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2017/08/08/mozilla-information.... Please.
- ForHackernews 7y agoIt only "does the same thing" if you consider the Mozilla foundation to be the moral equivalent of the authoritarian regime ruling China. I submit that most reasonable observers would not.
- oytis 7y agoAn it's an education program, not a censorship initiative. I hope Mozilla is not going to bring users to re-education camps.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- r3bl 7y agoCensorship implies something is being blocked. Please point me to what exactly is Mozilla blocking.
- jaabe 7y agoI’m amazed that it’s 2019, and we still haven’t figured out a good way to share interesting content. The portals worked for a while, then came google and Facebook, and now we have nothing. I mean, if HN stopped how would you find anything interesting on the internet?
- adrianN 7y agoIn the same way you find interesting things in real life. You talk to your friends what they like and collect RSS feeds starting from that nucleus of websites.
- Aeolun 7y agoSwitch back to Reddit? Start a copy of HN and wait patiently?
- landhar 7y agoWebrings?
- Theodores 7y agoAnother thing that has failed: journalists. They get sent press releases and do the filtering. Something like 80% of 'news' is PR. But they don't want you leaving their news website. That would be bad for revenue, allegedly. Imagine a 'newsworthy' story about a budgerigar that can dance to jazz music. The source could be on a website that has all kinds of fascinating stuff about budgerigars. But this you would never know, perhaps you might get a link to the original tweet but that would be it, no link to the website that gave rise to the one thing that went 'viral'.
- oliwarner 7y agoThere's some absurd irony here in that the report about the health of the Internet is an omnishambles of the absolute worst practices on the modern internet. I could not grok the web version. I got headers and those took me to tiles and those took me to blog posts? I was lost. In the end, I downloaded the PDF to read this. And that's a lie. To start with I had to tell NoScript to allow their third party domain scripts because the content did not work without javascript. They make some interesting points, but the standard scientific paper format vastly outperforms Web 4.0 routers and widgets for conveying it.
- dredmorbius 7y agoThe real being reported is complex and subjective. The presentation isn't up to the task. That said, the "README" helps at least to frame the project: https://internethealthreport.org/2019/about/ https://internethealthreport.org/2019/about/ And OMFG the 2018 report. Ow my balls! https://internethealthreport.org/2018/ https://internethealthreport.org/2018/ 2017 is the best of the bunch: https://internethealthreport.org/v01/about/ https://internethealthreport.org/v01/about/
- sbwmk 7y agohttps://internethealthreport.org/2019/wp-content/uploads/sites/7/2019/03/Liz-Fong-Jones--1600x1080.jpg https://internethealthreport.org/2019/wp-content/uploads/sit...
- paul7986 7y agoDon’t see how much of the Internet is fake? If over 60 percent and increasing that’s very detrimental to the Internet as we know it today.
- qwsxyh 7y agoI find it ironic to be holding an absolutist free speech view on a website that automatically deletes opinions the community doesn't like.
- stelfer 7y agoWake me up when it's dead and we can start working on what comes next.
- dredmorbius 7y agoAs unclear and uncommunicative as the 2019 report is, it's at least not the 2018 version: https://internethealthreport.org/2018/ https://internethealthreport.org/2018/ I've sugested to Mozilla that unclear labels, vague stock photos, and acres of whitespace are a poor choice of media for conveying a complex, and yes, truly important, story. But at least it's not animated floating balls. The page wants more clear relevant text. The first iteration remains the best to date: https://internethealthreport.org/v01/about/ https://internethealthreport.org/v01/about/
- jmichaelhudson 7y agoThe internet is not healthy. edit: self censoring myself even I'm afraid to say that here someone is trying to erase the entire history of the events of Tianmnen Square involving Tank Man. The United States, defending freedom and multicultuarlism supposedly, is recording basically all internet traffic and sharing it with the most racist country in the world while they create hordes of refugees due to their never-allowed-to-be-spoken plans for aggressive expansion in violation of the very United Nations that created them. Processors will be made in this country and shipped all over the world. Routers, microwaves, all phones, plagued with endemic backdoors. Auditing capacity is overwhelmed and results seldom in any changes, see iratemonk seagate events. Social media has basically given TPTB the easy capability to harass and interfere with all of the next generation of anything, while placing their agents in 'key positions' all over the place. It's a bad situation, the real internet is not the public one anymore. Power exists, and the physical structure of power is, as always, hard at work trying to regulate the ideological structures. Make us forget Tiananmen, and who knows what else we'll forget. Wasn't there something that happened in Las Vegas a few monthyears ago? hmmmmmmmmm The internet is being used, successfully, to attack the human mind on a global scale and the people with the most money are doing it while a bunch of really bright people think they are just solving math problems and making good money. The situation is bad, I don't need algorighms and network maps to tell me that. The internet has lost China and Russia, and is running away from The United States of America.