9 ms·

The capacity for abuse is huge, way beyong the potential benefits. From the USA, we get news of banned book in some states. When I read that, my head goes back

The capacity for abuse is huge, way beyong the potential benefits. From the USA, we get news of banned book in some states. When I read that, my head goes back to my european history, and I reach the Godwin point very quickly. Those kind of people will abuse such system to prevent things to be shared. It will be used for putting DRM on everything and create a more and more closed web. It will be used by corporations and govs to prevent wisthleblowers and journalists to do their job. Or to prevent employees to get evidences of mistreatments in case they need to sue. Because if you look at it, it's basically just a system for information control. And bad actors love that. And of course it will be "for security reasons". Trusting people with a terrible track record to not abuse a massive power in the future, espacially one that can be scaled up with the push of a button once the infrastructure is in place, is not a good bet.

aaronbrethorst 4y ago
Ron DeSantis doesn't need hardware-level DRM to ban math books. https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-bans-more-than-40--oif-math-books-after-review https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-ba... If you're worried about book bannings in states like Florida, DeSantis is up for reelection in just over 3 months. Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie Crist).
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  Have you read the books being banned?
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  And we don't need guns to do a genocide. We managed to kill a good chunk of the american natives with mostly blades. Yet, you probably don't want to give willingly a nuke to a dictator. In the same way, giving this kind of power to people that have shown in the past to abuse information control is like banking on the wolf to behave in the hen this time. > Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie Crist). I'm not in the US. I just read those crazy news, compare it to my grandfather stories, and worry.
  - aaronbrethorst 4y ago
    And we don't need guns to do a genocide. We managed to kill most marican native with blades To be pedantic, it was diseases and outright, explicit murder. (which is not an excuse. Biological warfare is a modern war crime, after all.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas#Depopulation_from_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_Indigeno... banking on the wolf to behave in the hen [house] this time Fair point, but the United States is rapidly moving towards authoritarian governance right now. There are steps that every U.S. citizen who reads my comment can take to help stop this decline immediately. I don't like the idea of this sort of TPM 3.0 module in my computer's hardware, but it's a 'day after tomorrow' problem for me, not a 'right now' problem.
    - tzs 4y ago
      A good illustration of how devastating epidemics in North America among the natives were is that when the first European explorers reached the coast on the west side of what is now the United States they found that part of the continent to be highly populated. That was in the early 1500s. It was another couple hundred years before Europeans started colonizing and conquering those areas. By the time that started those populations were already reduced by around 90% from diseases that has spread across the continent from the Europeans on the east side. Before those diseases wiped out so many natives no European colonists were able to survive in what is now the US and Canada without the approval and help of the natives. If the local natives didn't want a colony there, they removed it. Yes, the colonists had guns and the natives then did not but the guns in those times weren't actually superior to bows and arrows. The guns might have better range, but their accuracy was much worse and they took longer to reload. Before diseases that the colonists (unintentionally) brought greatly weakened the native tribes pretty much the only colonists that did OK were those that allied with a native tribe. There were a bazillion tribes, and there was a lot of conflict between them including warfare. Some smaller tribes that were losing their wars with bigger tribes allied with some of the colonies to try to get help against the bigger tribes. Those were the colonies that were allowed the stay and thrive. For a great look at what life was like in the New World before Europe became widely aware of it, and what happened afterwards the book "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles C Mann is quite good.
- sascha_sl 4y ago
  Technologists often have such tunnel vision that limits their concerns to tyranny driven by technology when there's plenty of low tech attacks on open society all the time. It reminds me of the good old "my password takes 2 billion years to crack, but my kneecaps only take a few seconds" metaphor about people in tech forgetting that physical coercion is, in fact, a possible attack vector for your IT security.
  - aaronbrethorst 4y ago
    Indeed, the XKCD $5 wrench attack vector. https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
  - gitanovic 4y ago
    While this is true for a few people, applying coercion on a mass scale using the kind of tech described in the article makes it much more convenient... so IMO the argument still holds
  - BiteCode_dev 4y ago
    This is not an Xor proposition. It's like saying "don't worry about gun control because car accidents kill way more people right now".
    - sascha_sl 4y ago
      But I never said it's not a problem. I said the priorities are wrong. Establishing technical means to do something (limiting access to files via DRM) is not as urgent as actually doing it (Florida carting books out of school libraries). And technology is not a monolith. Pluton specifically is far from being a universal requirement on Windows, and the entire PC platform is open enough to support alternatives for a very long time. It's possibly worrying (though it looks like Microsoft's intention is confidentiality management in enterprises for now), but far from "turnkey tyranny".
  - Frost1x 4y ago
    The low tech attacks often have low tech workarounds. DeSantis may "ban" a math book but there's nothing stopping a Florida resident from buying it and giving it to a child. There's plenty of other marketplaces and similar publishers I can pull from. When computing is controlled at a hardware level, you have far fewer competitors and market places. Working around things can be significantly more difficult and you may be stuck with scrapping up old less capable tech trying to do something you should have better options for. This is the reason technologists fear technology control, not so much because of tunnel vision but because the general population can't work around it, even experts may not be able to work around such protections. Low tech always has easy work arounds--the option exists even if you may fear the consequences.
- ajvs 4y ago
  Mein Kampf is a banned book which I don't think many would disagree with. There are many other such books filled with propaganda that are rightly banned. I don't see why other propaganda-filled books that are being pushed on unsuspecting children shouldn't be banned too, unless the only reason is that you dislike the direction of the propaganda.
  - rockemsockem 4y ago
    If you're in the US there are not really any truly banned books. There are books that are banned from certain libraries (mostly school libraries). But, imagine that a school adopts the DRM processes described in the article and requires this study level of control even on personal devices that are used for school. Suddenly those book bans can be enforced digitally by the school and will totally cut off access to certain books that the school chooses. You might say that it's within the school's rights to do this for a device that is used for school and if you don't like it then use a different device. Now that's a system where there is a class-divide on the information that one is physically able to consume on their devices. You might think Mein Kampf is ban-worthy, but the whole point is actually that you should not ban any book at all, because once you start banning books it becomes far too easy for more books to be banned. All it will take is one regime change in a school district's PTA for new books, that you maybe think should not be banned, to be added to the list. It's worth considering the most banned books in America. His Dark Materials. A fantastic young adult fantasy novel that pokes harder at religion than some Christians can bear.
    - shagie 4y ago
      > But, imagine that a school adopts the DRM processes described in the article and requires this study level of control even on personal devices that are used for school. The prerequisite for this to happen is that the school removes all physical editions of the books and has digital editions for all content, and a lending program for the books that is sufficient to satisfy publishers... and all students have digital book readers able to access the school library. I don't see this happening in the near (or even within the decade) future. There is far too much content that is physical only, publishers haven't embraced digital editions for libraries, school libraries don't have the technical resources (physical or in many cases human) to convert their collections to digital. The hypothetical school book ban for digital editions is needlessly alarmist. When those resources are available to schools, then yes - lets talk about it... though the school banning books will continue to mean "that resource isn't in our collection" and a student can go to another library (or in many cases book store) and get a copy of that book for themselves. This is no different than today.
- RedComet 4y ago
  - geysersam 4y ago
    > pornographic examples in it I can't fathom a math textbook with pornographic examples. Is this a thing in the US?
    - RedComet 4y ago
      Not that I'm aware of. I said that is the _future_ there. Judging by all of the convenient misreading and straw manning in the replies, many of you must know it is coming too.
    - nobody9999 4y ago
      >> pornographic examples in it >I can't fathom a math textbook with pornographic examples. Is this a thing in the US? I've been out of school for quite a while, but AFAIK while there is plenty of porn out there, it's not in our math books. No, it's just Florida politicos pandering to their base[0]. I'm guessing that what GP is going on about (please do correct me if I'm wrong) is probably some word problems that include references to non-heterosexual/non-binary folks, which seems to trigger the intolerant among us. Which is a result of decades of attempts to put christian dogma and ideology back into US public schools, and failing that, destroy the public school system. And more's the pity. [0] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/05/fldoe-releases-math-textbook-reviews-00030503 https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/05/fldoe-releases-math... Edit: Added the missing link.
      - unixhero 4y ago
        Music videos are now porn!
      - autoexec 4y ago
        according to an article linked elsewhere (https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-bans-more-than-40--oif-math-books-after-review https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-ba...) it was because they had too many black people depicted as athletes and they had word problems that treated scientific facts as if they were scientific facts. The one example that I thought might have been somewhat improper was "Multiple exercises related to a debate between Al Gore and Rush Limbaugh, where the publisher was in favor of Al Gore's arguments based on the questions in the exercises." If the debate in question was fictional, I'd be tempted to agree it would have been better to avoid using the names of real people although I'd disagree that is enough to ban the use of the textbooks. If the debate was actual and the textbook pointed out very real flaws with Rush Limbaugh's logic (especially if they were a real world example of bad math) I'd say that it makes perfect sense to include it in a math text book.
- 4bpp 4y ago
  Did they actually ban the books, or did they merely ban their usage in K-12 instruction with the news outlet rounding that up to a book ban for dramaturgical reasons? Not that a ban in school instruction is necessarily good (though, I would guess, not nearly as rare), but the actual full-fledged ban that DRM could aid in enforcing, which would prevent you as an individual from reading a book you want to read in _any_ plausible context, is on a different level.
  - Covzire 4y ago
    All Florida did was add a criteria to their selection process to disallow books that include Critical Theory/Critical Race Theory or their praxis in the teaching of math, etc. Every state selects which text books can be used by their schools so if Florida "burns books" then by definition every single other state does too. Where are the text books in California that teach math using Biblical stories and imagery? Obviously California burned all those books if we accept the argument being put forth with Florida.
    - welshwelsh 4y ago
      Of course, bible stories would be inappropriate because superstition and religion have no place in schools. We're supposed to educate students about reality. But there's nothing wrong with teaching students how they can use math to understand social problems and complex real-world issues. Math is a great tool for thinking about things like income inequality, climate change and economics.
      - Covzire 4y ago
        Well since you opened that can of worms, CT/CRT is just another religion, and not a nice one. Ibram X. Kendi, in his book “How to Be an Antiracist” states, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” The whole movement is predicated, explicitly, on instilling hatred and animosity on some out-group, it's a viscous ideology masquerading as compassion.
- 9TRHEsEdDwZAySX 4y ago
  Deciding which textbooks that are going to be used in public schools isn't banning books. If you don't want the government to decide which books are used to teach your children then homeschooling or private schooling are what you should be focused on.
- ori_b 4y ago
  > Ron DeSantis doesn't need hardware-level DRM to ban math books. Enforcement is a different issue.
password1 4y ago
retcon 4y ago
In the UK movie screening used to be and probably still is decided at the smallest municipal level of town councils, see The Life of Brian.
- pmyteh 4y ago
  District councils (so the second 'lowest' of the possible tiers) but yes. In practice, they've all deferred to the judgement of the British Board of Film Classification (née ...Film Censorship) for nearly every film since it was set up.
dx034 4y ago
> From the USA, we get news of banned book in some states. When I read that, my head goes back to my european history, and I reach the Godwin point very quickly. Books are not banned, just not used in the classroom anymore. While the reasons for it may be wrong, it's something that happens constantly all over the world. No one prevents children or adults to read those books at home. Banning books could mean that owning them is illegal and that just hasn't happened.
- ramblenode 4y ago
  > Banning books could mean that owning them is illegal and that just hasn't happened. Just within the last century it was illegal to send a copy of Ulyesses or The Canturbury Tales through US mail.
  - simonh 4y ago
    In context I think it’s clear the comment was talking specifically about the books banned from classroom teaching in certain US states.
- sandworm101 4y ago
  Books are just information. Information gets banned all the time. Old-timers will remember this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag
- acdha 4y ago
  Banning their use in classrooms is lesser but still a step on that path, and the same Republicans trying to do that are not going to stop at schools after they win but will rather see that as an invigorating first step in a long campaign. For example, book sellers in Virginia are currently fighting a lawsuit against an attempt which would ban private sales: https://www.virginiamercury.com/2022/07/06/free-speech-groups-book-world-fight-back-in-virginia-obscenity-case/ https://www.virginiamercury.com/2022/07/06/free-speech-group...
  - axblount 4y ago
_23sd 4y ago
If you want to use the OS to ban a book or program or whatever, you don't need fancy hardware features, just a database of hashes pushed down via a software update. Apple wanted to do a version of this for CSAM images, it only didn't happen because they chose to tell users about it and got massive backlash. The implication that governments need more powerful DRM features to do something similar just obscures the fact that they could do it tomorrow if the US government gave up their free speech stances.
- raxxorraxor 4y ago
  The EU just mandated chats to be scanned for content. Of course just for CSAM just as the meta data collection is only used for terrorism. Problem is that the latter is also used for parking tickets. They really try to hit the definition of a totalitarian state by the letter.
  - _23sd 4y ago
    Wider E2EE adoption was the only hope for clawing back some privacy for users who do everything on cloud services. If the EU bans E2EE and starts mandating all kinds of scanning of data stored on third party servers, it would be a massive loss.
  - fariszr 4y ago
    The law has yet to be passed. And its facing immense backlash, even from governments like Germany.
    - raxxorraxor 4y ago
      I doubt backlash will do anything. Regardless, the EU also mass collected personal data and made this behavior legal retroactively for authorities like Europol. The course for ever increasing surveillance has long been chosen. Government often disavows such decisions but that is exactly their strategy to implement such laws while evading criticism themselves.
- reedjosh 4y ago

aaronbrethorst 4y ago

Ron DeSantis doesn't need hardware-level DRM to ban math books. https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-bans-more-than-40--oif-math-books-after-review https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-ba... If you're worried about book bannings in states like Florida, DeSantis is up for reelection in just over 3 months. Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie Crist).

29athrowaway 4y ago
Have you read the books being banned?
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
And we don't need guns to do a genocide. We managed to kill a good chunk of the american natives with mostly blades. Yet, you probably don't want to give willingly a nuke to a dictator. In the same way, giving this kind of power to people that have shown in the past to abuse information control is like banking on the wolf to behave in the hen this time. > Go volunteer or donate money to his opponent (probably Charlie Crist). I'm not in the US. I just read those crazy news, compare it to my grandfather stories, and worry.
- aaronbrethorst 4y ago
  And we don't need guns to do a genocide. We managed to kill most marican native with blades To be pedantic, it was diseases and outright, explicit murder. (which is not an excuse. Biological warfare is a modern war crime, after all.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas#Depopulation_from_disease https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_Indigeno... banking on the wolf to behave in the hen [house] this time Fair point, but the United States is rapidly moving towards authoritarian governance right now. There are steps that every U.S. citizen who reads my comment can take to help stop this decline immediately. I don't like the idea of this sort of TPM 3.0 module in my computer's hardware, but it's a 'day after tomorrow' problem for me, not a 'right now' problem.
  - tzs 4y ago
    A good illustration of how devastating epidemics in North America among the natives were is that when the first European explorers reached the coast on the west side of what is now the United States they found that part of the continent to be highly populated. That was in the early 1500s. It was another couple hundred years before Europeans started colonizing and conquering those areas. By the time that started those populations were already reduced by around 90% from diseases that has spread across the continent from the Europeans on the east side. Before those diseases wiped out so many natives no European colonists were able to survive in what is now the US and Canada without the approval and help of the natives. If the local natives didn't want a colony there, they removed it. Yes, the colonists had guns and the natives then did not but the guns in those times weren't actually superior to bows and arrows. The guns might have better range, but their accuracy was much worse and they took longer to reload. Before diseases that the colonists (unintentionally) brought greatly weakened the native tribes pretty much the only colonists that did OK were those that allied with a native tribe. There were a bazillion tribes, and there was a lot of conflict between them including warfare. Some smaller tribes that were losing their wars with bigger tribes allied with some of the colonies to try to get help against the bigger tribes. Those were the colonies that were allowed the stay and thrive. For a great look at what life was like in the New World before Europe became widely aware of it, and what happened afterwards the book "1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus" by Charles C Mann is quite good.
sascha_sl 4y ago
Technologists often have such tunnel vision that limits their concerns to tyranny driven by technology when there's plenty of low tech attacks on open society all the time. It reminds me of the good old "my password takes 2 billion years to crack, but my kneecaps only take a few seconds" metaphor about people in tech forgetting that physical coercion is, in fact, a possible attack vector for your IT security.
- aaronbrethorst 4y ago
  Indeed, the XKCD $5 wrench attack vector. https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- gitanovic 4y ago
  While this is true for a few people, applying coercion on a mass scale using the kind of tech described in the article makes it much more convenient... so IMO the argument still holds
- BiteCode_dev 4y ago
  This is not an Xor proposition. It's like saying "don't worry about gun control because car accidents kill way more people right now".
  - sascha_sl 4y ago
    But I never said it's not a problem. I said the priorities are wrong. Establishing technical means to do something (limiting access to files via DRM) is not as urgent as actually doing it (Florida carting books out of school libraries). And technology is not a monolith. Pluton specifically is far from being a universal requirement on Windows, and the entire PC platform is open enough to support alternatives for a very long time. It's possibly worrying (though it looks like Microsoft's intention is confidentiality management in enterprises for now), but far from "turnkey tyranny".
- Frost1x 4y ago
  The low tech attacks often have low tech workarounds. DeSantis may "ban" a math book but there's nothing stopping a Florida resident from buying it and giving it to a child. There's plenty of other marketplaces and similar publishers I can pull from. When computing is controlled at a hardware level, you have far fewer competitors and market places. Working around things can be significantly more difficult and you may be stuck with scrapping up old less capable tech trying to do something you should have better options for. This is the reason technologists fear technology control, not so much because of tunnel vision but because the general population can't work around it, even experts may not be able to work around such protections. Low tech always has easy work arounds--the option exists even if you may fear the consequences.
ajvs 4y ago
Mein Kampf is a banned book which I don't think many would disagree with. There are many other such books filled with propaganda that are rightly banned. I don't see why other propaganda-filled books that are being pushed on unsuspecting children shouldn't be banned too, unless the only reason is that you dislike the direction of the propaganda.
- rockemsockem 4y ago
  If you're in the US there are not really any truly banned books. There are books that are banned from certain libraries (mostly school libraries). But, imagine that a school adopts the DRM processes described in the article and requires this study level of control even on personal devices that are used for school. Suddenly those book bans can be enforced digitally by the school and will totally cut off access to certain books that the school chooses. You might say that it's within the school's rights to do this for a device that is used for school and if you don't like it then use a different device. Now that's a system where there is a class-divide on the information that one is physically able to consume on their devices. You might think Mein Kampf is ban-worthy, but the whole point is actually that you should not ban any book at all, because once you start banning books it becomes far too easy for more books to be banned. All it will take is one regime change in a school district's PTA for new books, that you maybe think should not be banned, to be added to the list. It's worth considering the most banned books in America. His Dark Materials. A fantastic young adult fantasy novel that pokes harder at religion than some Christians can bear.
  - shagie 4y ago
    > But, imagine that a school adopts the DRM processes described in the article and requires this study level of control even on personal devices that are used for school. The prerequisite for this to happen is that the school removes all physical editions of the books and has digital editions for all content, and a lending program for the books that is sufficient to satisfy publishers... and all students have digital book readers able to access the school library. I don't see this happening in the near (or even within the decade) future. There is far too much content that is physical only, publishers haven't embraced digital editions for libraries, school libraries don't have the technical resources (physical or in many cases human) to convert their collections to digital. The hypothetical school book ban for digital editions is needlessly alarmist. When those resources are available to schools, then yes - lets talk about it... though the school banning books will continue to mean "that resource isn't in our collection" and a student can go to another library (or in many cases book store) and get a copy of that book for themselves. This is no different than today.
RedComet 4y ago
- geysersam 4y ago
  > pornographic examples in it I can't fathom a math textbook with pornographic examples. Is this a thing in the US?
  - RedComet 4y ago
    Not that I'm aware of. I said that is the _future_ there. Judging by all of the convenient misreading and straw manning in the replies, many of you must know it is coming too.
  - nobody9999 4y ago
    >> pornographic examples in it >I can't fathom a math textbook with pornographic examples. Is this a thing in the US? I've been out of school for quite a while, but AFAIK while there is plenty of porn out there, it's not in our math books. No, it's just Florida politicos pandering to their base[0]. I'm guessing that what GP is going on about (please do correct me if I'm wrong) is probably some word problems that include references to non-heterosexual/non-binary folks, which seems to trigger the intolerant among us. Which is a result of decades of attempts to put christian dogma and ideology back into US public schools, and failing that, destroy the public school system. And more's the pity. [0] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/05/fldoe-releases-math-textbook-reviews-00030503 https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/05/fldoe-releases-math... Edit: Added the missing link.
    - unixhero 4y ago
      Music videos are now porn!
    - autoexec 4y ago
      according to an article linked elsewhere (https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-bans-more-than-40--oif-math-books-after-review https://www.baynews9.com/fl/tampa/news/2022/05/06/florida-ba...) it was because they had too many black people depicted as athletes and they had word problems that treated scientific facts as if they were scientific facts. The one example that I thought might have been somewhat improper was "Multiple exercises related to a debate between Al Gore and Rush Limbaugh, where the publisher was in favor of Al Gore's arguments based on the questions in the exercises." If the debate in question was fictional, I'd be tempted to agree it would have been better to avoid using the names of real people although I'd disagree that is enough to ban the use of the textbooks. If the debate was actual and the textbook pointed out very real flaws with Rush Limbaugh's logic (especially if they were a real world example of bad math) I'd say that it makes perfect sense to include it in a math text book.
4bpp 4y ago
Did they actually ban the books, or did they merely ban their usage in K-12 instruction with the news outlet rounding that up to a book ban for dramaturgical reasons? Not that a ban in school instruction is necessarily good (though, I would guess, not nearly as rare), but the actual full-fledged ban that DRM could aid in enforcing, which would prevent you as an individual from reading a book you want to read in _any_ plausible context, is on a different level.
- Covzire 4y ago
  All Florida did was add a criteria to their selection process to disallow books that include Critical Theory/Critical Race Theory or their praxis in the teaching of math, etc. Every state selects which text books can be used by their schools so if Florida "burns books" then by definition every single other state does too. Where are the text books in California that teach math using Biblical stories and imagery? Obviously California burned all those books if we accept the argument being put forth with Florida.
  - welshwelsh 4y ago
    Of course, bible stories would be inappropriate because superstition and religion have no place in schools. We're supposed to educate students about reality. But there's nothing wrong with teaching students how they can use math to understand social problems and complex real-world issues. Math is a great tool for thinking about things like income inequality, climate change and economics.
    - Covzire 4y ago
      Well since you opened that can of worms, CT/CRT is just another religion, and not a nice one. Ibram X. Kendi, in his book “How to Be an Antiracist” states, “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” The whole movement is predicated, explicitly, on instilling hatred and animosity on some out-group, it's a viscous ideology masquerading as compassion.
9TRHEsEdDwZAySX 4y ago
Deciding which textbooks that are going to be used in public schools isn't banning books. If you don't want the government to decide which books are used to teach your children then homeschooling or private schooling are what you should be focused on.
ori_b 4y ago
> Ron DeSantis doesn't need hardware-level DRM to ban math books. Enforcement is a different issue.

password1 4y ago

retcon 4y ago

In the UK movie screening used to be and probably still is decided at the smallest municipal level of town councils, see The Life of Brian.

pmyteh 4y ago
District councils (so the second 'lowest' of the possible tiers) but yes. In practice, they've all deferred to the judgement of the British Board of Film Classification (née ...Film Censorship) for nearly every film since it was set up.

dx034 4y ago

> From the USA, we get news of banned book in some states. When I read that, my head goes back to my european history, and I reach the Godwin point very quickly. Books are not banned, just not used in the classroom anymore. While the reasons for it may be wrong, it's something that happens constantly all over the world. No one prevents children or adults to read those books at home. Banning books could mean that owning them is illegal and that just hasn't happened.

ramblenode 4y ago
> Banning books could mean that owning them is illegal and that just hasn't happened. Just within the last century it was illegal to send a copy of Ulyesses or The Canturbury Tales through US mail.
- simonh 4y ago
  In context I think it’s clear the comment was talking specifically about the books banned from classroom teaching in certain US states.
sandworm101 4y ago
Books are just information. Information gets banned all the time. Old-timers will remember this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Flag
acdha 4y ago
Banning their use in classrooms is lesser but still a step on that path, and the same Republicans trying to do that are not going to stop at schools after they win but will rather see that as an invigorating first step in a long campaign. For example, book sellers in Virginia are currently fighting a lawsuit against an attempt which would ban private sales: https://www.virginiamercury.com/2022/07/06/free-speech-groups-book-world-fight-back-in-virginia-obscenity-case/ https://www.virginiamercury.com/2022/07/06/free-speech-group...
- axblount 4y ago

_23sd 4y ago

If you want to use the OS to ban a book or program or whatever, you don't need fancy hardware features, just a database of hashes pushed down via a software update. Apple wanted to do a version of this for CSAM images, it only didn't happen because they chose to tell users about it and got massive backlash. The implication that governments need more powerful DRM features to do something similar just obscures the fact that they could do it tomorrow if the US government gave up their free speech stances.

raxxorraxor 4y ago
The EU just mandated chats to be scanned for content. Of course just for CSAM just as the meta data collection is only used for terrorism. Problem is that the latter is also used for parking tickets. They really try to hit the definition of a totalitarian state by the letter.
- _23sd 4y ago
  Wider E2EE adoption was the only hope for clawing back some privacy for users who do everything on cloud services. If the EU bans E2EE and starts mandating all kinds of scanning of data stored on third party servers, it would be a massive loss.
- fariszr 4y ago
  The law has yet to be passed. And its facing immense backlash, even from governments like Germany.
  - raxxorraxor 4y ago
    I doubt backlash will do anything. Regardless, the EU also mass collected personal data and made this behavior legal retroactively for authorities like Europol. The course for ever increasing surveillance has long been chosen. Government often disavows such decisions but that is exactly their strategy to implement such laws while evading criticism themselves.
reedjosh 4y ago