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Where the Sidewalk Ends: The Death of the Internet (2021)
- HereIGoAgain 4y agoNot just of the internet but free speech as a whole now given the nature of how it's used.
- pseudo0 4y agoDupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33399753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33399753
- bullen 4y agoYou don't need to spend all that much money. Just buy a Raspberry, install some HTTP server and forward port 80 to it, then use some free dynamic DNS provider: $100 + $10/year. Everyone should do this.
- constantcrying 4y agoYour ISP can stop you from doing that whenever they want. Also: I really want to do this, but I have no idea how. The technical aspect is straight forward, the legal aspect is far beyond me. I have no Idea how I could legally host a website in my country.
- ehnto 4y agoWhat are the legal implications you're concerned about? Are there some laws explicitly outlawing or regulating speech or communication?
- constantcrying 4y agoWhat do I have to do to comply with the GDPR. Even if I have e.g. no user accounts, access logs probably count as "user data", do I have to preserve them in any way? Do I have to secure them? What can/can't I do with them? Do I need to present a "cookie warning", how should that cookie warning be worded, what requirement does it need to fulfill, what cookies can I set under these circumstance? How does this change if I do not use cookies? What personal Information do I need to include, are real name+address+email enough? How do they need to be included? Do I have a legal requirement to respond to communications over that address, in what time frame? Surely there are more things to consider here. Do I need to register this website, do I need to register it under a buisiness? I really do not know. But to be honest the obligation to dox myself is pretty much enough for me not to give it a try. This is before putting anything on the website. The concerns about speech restrictions are a completely different topic.
- stonogo 4y agoPersonal activities are explicitly exempted from the GDPR. You have to be engaged in "economic activity" for these requirements to apply to you. https://gdpr.eu/Recital-18-Not-applicable-to-personal-or-household-activities/ https://gdpr.eu/Recital-18-Not-applicable-to-personal-or-hou...
- constantcrying 4y ago>However, this Regulation applies to controllers or processors which provide the means for processing personal data for such personal or household activities. But hosting a website means processing personal data. This very much reads to me like the user is exempt. But the moment I am hosting a blog, I am providing a service which processes personal data. I fail to see how I would be exempt. And even if, at what point am I not? If I am taking donations? If I have a comment section? If I have accounts?
- stonogo 4y agoAll of these things are defined in the GDPR, even the on-the-face-of-it term "economic activity," which is what differentiates "enterprise" from "household and personal." You just have to keep reading. You can process all the personal data you want as long as you're not a business entity selling goods or services. The thresholds involved are also defined.
- yourusername 4y agoEasiest way is to not place any cookies and not keep any logs. You don't have to show a cookie warning if you don't place any cookies and you're not processing any user data if you don't keep logs.
- constantcrying 4y agoIs it legal to not keep logs?
- 4y ago
- bullen 4y agoThey can't stop you if they don't know what you are doing.
- constantcrying 4y agoSure. I can host illegally. And I suspect, many, many websites are knowingly or unknowingly doing this. But this can not really be a real solution to the problem.
- bullen 4y agoI never said anything about illegal, just front with VPN to your own physical hardware. But apparently he tried that and the VPN then shut him down, and ultimately he got DDoSed. My take is distributed if not decentralized network.
- Gigachad 4y agoThe people attacking him have time to track down every single infrastructure host behind the site, bully the company, hack their stuff and ddos their network. The attack on kiwifarms has shown the internet is no longer free.
- Gigachad 4y agoThe author of this post runs kiwi farms. He has had just about every bit of infrastructure in existence deplatformed including his phone number. The end of the road is the ISPs stared blocking his site and when that happens it’s basically game over.
- bullen 4y agook, well you then need to hide your hardware behind VPS proxies. That's another $10/month.
- nl 4y agoTo quote the article: > Just as moving VPS companies kicked the can to the next VPS company. Just as getting my own IPs kicked the can to upstream. Just as getting a stable upstream kicked the can to DDoS mitigation.
- bullen 4y agook, then maybe we need http://radiomesh.org http://radiomesh.org after all? My point is if everyone hosts all their production from home they can't control it, you cannot DDoS all IPs at the same time.
- Gigachad 4y agoHe is able to run the site on Tor just fine. The problem is that without being a normal clearnet site, your community will die off.
- boredhedgehog 4y agoThat's a bit of a chicken-egg problem, as Tor still lacks a killer app. A popular Tor-only forum might just be what it takes to drive wider adoption.
- 4y ago
- wwweston 4y agoThe Internet is people. Those who tread on the values, interests, or safety of enough people will find certain kinds of cooperation are withdrawn. Technical solutions to this problem are difficult if not impossible, and it's quite possible they should be, because they'd likely involve the privilege to tread on the values, interests, or safety of enough people and/or compelling the cooperation of people who don't want to cooperate. And "Free speech" is not the right to compel people to repeat or carry someone else's speech. I just finished _Kingdom of Nauvoo_, which is about an early Mormon civic experiment in 19th century Illinois. Mormon history in the US is interesting; you can read it as it's regularly presented in the LDS church, a narrative of a persecuted religious minority hounded at every attempt to settle somewhere. Nauvoo was the "well, we'll build our own city, where we'll use municipal law + state politics to make sure we're self-governed and don't have to answer to other people" stage (before moving on to the "well, we'll build our own state far enough away from anybody else we won't have answer to other people" stage and settling the US mountain west). You can also read in Mormon history a kind of tragic insistence on supremacy of values and interests. You might make your neighbors mildly nervous by saying "the kingdom of God is at hand and our faith will inherit/run everything." You'll make your neighbors more nervous and upset if you do that and vote as a bloc under religious direction, granting the religious leaders enormous political power / influence. You'll make your neighbors very upset indeed if you wield municipal courts you created to rule that no other court proceedings can hold you accountable when you're charged with a crime. What human being doesn't insist their values (and sometimes even interests) are supreme? Most of us naturally believe our value systems are superior, for Reasons™, some better examined than others, but all founded in the naturally self-confident convictions arising from places difficult to introspect about. But every value system that insists it shouldn't have to deal with the trouble of encountering or accounting for tension with others carries with it inevitable conflict. The modern period of democratic nation states have afforded an unusual amount of peace and freedom because we've tried to carve out maximal personal autonomy while providing institutions for mediating conflict. In this situation, individual rights and autonomy are maintained in part because no individual rights and autonomy are absolute. It's a balance, not a simple banner. The Internet is people, and cooperation with people. Certain kinds of non-cooperation -- no matter how burning the conviction behind them, and in fact often magnified by the conviction -- will call forth non-cooperation in response.
- throwaway_fkf 4y agoCry me a river. For people who aren't aware, the author of this piece is the founder of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms The idea that the internet was at some previous point a free-for-all has never been true. Even before the web was a thing SysAdmins would regularly block NNTP newgroups from being available on their servers. It doesn't surprise me that a site that taunts people about reposting the Christchurch shooter's livestream should have trouble getting service. The fact I'm writing this from a throwaway shows the reality of the harrassment some people I know have suffered from this group. Censorship is bad. But battles should be fought for people who need protection against it, not for people who try to exploit tolerant societies' carve-outs for free speech. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance is important: > The paradox of tolerance states that if a society is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant is eventually seized or destroyed by the intolerant. Karl Popper described it as the seemingly self-contradictory idea that in order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must retain the right to be intolerant of intolerance.
- boredhedgehog 4y agoNote Popper's definition of the intolerant in this context: those who do not engage in rational argument, and those who forbid their followers to listen to rational argument. Neither applies here.
- AlexandrB 4y agoHow so? The harassment campaigns launched from Kiwifarms seem like the opposite of rational argument. Do you imagine that going into Kiwifarms and engaging the users in rational debate about the basic humanity and dignity of their targets would be a fruitful endeavor?
- philippejara 4y agoThe harrassment campaigns that have no* paper trail back to kiwifarms, the forum that is public and anyone can archive at any time? Ever since i've started to pay attention to kiwifarms from cloudflare dropping them i've been trying to get the evidence of any harassment coming from there and not being extremely looked down upon/banned and have come out almost empty handed. The scraps i've got are from chris chan in like 2013/2014? This is the kind of dangerous "everyone knows that it is clear they do X thing hence there is no need for evidence". Now to be fair I don't doubt harassment comes from individual kiwifarms users, maybe even organizing with other people somewhere else, but taking down the website will not change that, and guilt by association is a dangerous thing. *none that I could find in the previous threads/most articles about it that is. I'm happy to be proven wrong.
- fullstackchris 4y ago> The Internet is also very fragile. It has many moving parts and drives the politics of our world today. For this reason, it will die, and it will die very soon. Hah, another doomsdayer to add to the bucket which has been growing since basically the internet came into existance.
- concordDance 4y agoIt has actually been dying slowly. More and more I encounter "this website/video is nor available in your country".
- blacklight 4y ago> ColoCrossing in Buffalo physically unplugged my servers in 2019 for hosting the Kiwi Farms and Encyclopedia Dramatica. I stopped reading the article after reading this sentence - and I agreed with everything the author stated until then. Mass shootings, suicides and rapes have happened because of the content of KF and ED. If you provide shelter for the racist, misogynist, homophobic, Nazi and automated weapons fanatic, then you deserve to be censored. Let's not forget that the explicit purpose of KF is to run harassment and doxxing campaigns. I believe that, as a society, we need to deal with people that, for a variety of reasons, have been isolated and pushed to the extremes, instead of further isolating them. But handing them a loudhailer to spread their hate and misanthropy isn't the right way of dealing with them. Your freedom of speech ends when your words cause the murder, rape, beating or harassment of another human being. And, more generally, your freedom ends when it harms somebody else's freedom. If we lose this principle, then we have lost civilization. Building communities around ideas that damage the society as a whole and justify people's most extreme beliefs is just wrong. When too much momentum builds around these ideas, they stop being a virtual pastime for trolls with plenty of time to waste and they spill into the real world. Real people die. Real lives are ruined. And a civilized society ought to draw a clear boundary to prevent these things from happening. We have to deal with the marginalized and the mentally shaky by including them back into society. Not by providing them with a platform to connect with others in the same state, consolidate their extremism, and create individuals that are even more unsuitable for being reintegrated into society than they were before. Granted, it's not always easy for regulators to draw this line, there are a lot of shades of gray, and we need to keep those in charge accountable for unfair censorship. But there's really no gray area for KF and ED. If you host them, then you deserve to be unplugged.
- concordDance 4y ago> Building communities around ideas that damage the society as a whole and justify people's most extreme beliefs is just wrong. The issue is that determining what is wrong isn't something we know how to do. Capitalism and communism have both killed many many orders of magnitude more people than incels or trans hate, but we don't censor groups that advocate for communism even though it lead to tens of millions of deaths. Sure, if we let them continue to speak they may convince everyone to stage a communist revolution and mass death results... But letting them speak is required to be able to tell whether actually they've finally figured out how to safely do communism and by banning them we may be causing needless suffering when we could be in the workers paradise! One of the things so many fail to grasp is that speech and politics is actually really high stakes! Any given question like what the central bank interest rates should be for 2023 will lead to thousands of deaths at the scale of a big country! And yes, if you're completely convinced that they should definitely be 1.4% then censoring everyone who disagrees may save many lives... but implementing a mass censorship scheme on all high stakes conversation prevents you finding out the true and counterintuitive ideas.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cnelsenmilt 4y agoWeird, why is this year-old article reposted twice in 12 hours? Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33399753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33399753
- bitwize 4y agoIt's Liz Fong-Jones's internet now, we just use it when we can. Liz is perhaps the single most powerful person online right now. She is a talented network engineer with connections deep in many tech companies and network providers. And she's wealthy enough to not have to work, and devote her time to activism and campaigning. And with a new ruler come new rules. To wit: the net is not neutral. It is not a dumb pipe or common carrier. If your intent is to spew hate, harassment, or misinformation, your provider is not obligated to relay hate, harassment, or misinformation. They will be asked, nicely, to not relay your packets or otherwise allow your hate, harassment, or misinformation to cross their network. And if they do not comply, their providers will be contacted, and those providers' providers, and so on, and so on. Any provider in the chain who does not silence hate, harassment, or misinformation will be considered complicit in those activities, deemed a rogue provider, and put on a shitlist. They may be considered fair game -- no one will come to their aid if their infra is hacked or DDoSed. If you want to stay off the shitlist, block the hate content. Close their hosting accounts. Ban them from social media. Blackhole their IPs or delink their ASNs if they self-host. Do not provide them with ancillary services like VPN or DDoS protection. Oh, and one more thing, the trans community is one you do NOT want to piss off. Be nice, don't be a TERF, and watch what you say online -- everywhere online.
- trtronic 4y agoHe's certainly a man of influence, that's for sure.