4 ms·

EFF is on the wrong side of this, just as they were on the wrong side of the debates about what to do about spam email back in the day. They're committed to the

EFF is on the wrong side of this, just as they were on the wrong side of the debates about what to do about spam email back in the day. They're committed to the view that the only acceptable place to block any flow of information (which they define very broadly) is at the receiving user's end and that the end user must personally opt-in. This is completely at odds with the last 30 years of experience on the internet and shows that they've learned very little about how bad actors will abuse systems of that sort and degrade the experience for everyone else.

brailsafe 3y ago
In what way is it at odds with the last 30 years of the internet? You seem to accept that as a fact, but I'd definitely agree with the eff.
ibizaman 3y ago
If it’s truly the first time Tier 1 blocking happens, I don’t see how the EFF can be at odds with history.
gorwell 3y ago
Censors made the same argument with the Printing Press and since time immemorial. Censorship has always been on the wrong side of history and it still is. Speaking of abusing systems, censors end up being the worst bad guys who imagine themselves as the good guys protecting you from the bad guys. EFF understands the long history of this issue.
- cmh89 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - drewcoo 3y ago
    I actually hope that AI can allow people to have "child" pornography without children being exploited. If anything, that should be encouraged and made legal. As the kiddie porn crusaders like to say, "think of the children."
    - cmh89 3y ago
      That's not really the question I asked, and I'm not sure how your response is relevant.
  - r3trohack3r 3y ago
    Renditions of extreme violence are legal, and common in cinema. I find them repulsive, but I support people's right to free speech; they should be allowed to produce renditions of extreme violence and distribute them. The movie Texas Chainsaw Massacre is legal, and I support that. Doing a real life Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not legal. Recording a real life Texas Chainsaw Massacre and distributing the recordings should not be legal. I do not support that. I do not believe the speech part of Texas Chainsaw Massacre should be illegal, no matter how repulsive I find that genre of entertainment to be. I do believe the non-speech parts of those acts should absolutely be illegal - for obvious reasons. I personally do not believe I have to yield my absolutionist stance on free speech to say that content downstream of those actions can't be distributed and possessed. There is no way for that content to have been legally produced, therefor there is no way for that content to be legally possessed and distributed.
  - dotnet00 3y ago
    Child pornography, where real children are involved in any way, is/should be illegal because of the crime that has to occur to produce it. Any CSAM which is fully divorced from real children (or any sort of crime in general) in all ways should be legal, as gross as it is.
    - cmh89 3y ago
      You aren't OP but that's my poin. OP made the absolutist statement that: "Censorship has always been on the wrong side of history and it still is." which is obviously absurd because there are very obvious situations where censorship is clearly a good idea, like in banning not just the creation of child pornography but the possession. When the feds strengthen laws against child porn in the 70s and 80s, that same free speech argument played out. Free speech advocates argued that having recorded evidence of a crime shouldn't be a crime in of itself. You can have pictures of murder victims after all, and there are plenty of recordings of illegal activity on the internet that are totally legal. Obviously the right side won and the feds passed laws censoring child pornography because the ends, punishing child porn consumers and creators, outweighed the cost, which was a small reduction in freedom of speech. Every society needs some limits on speech and free speech absolutism is just ideological weakness in thinking about how a society should actually work because in the real world, unlimited speech leads to a lot of people getting hurt.
  - pessimizer 3y ago
    Do you think that information about birth control should be illegal? Because that's what we used to go through the mail looking for.
- chonkerz 3y ago
  [flagged]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
vuavu 3y ago
Doesn't seem similar to this. You receive spam unwillingly, but you have to enter that forum and participate on purpose.
- wmf 3y ago
  Not if they're organizing attacks on you.
  - fentanyl_peyotl 3y ago
    [flagged]
toast0 3y ago
There's two issues here: a) should online speech be policed b) if so, who should do it? We don't let phone companies police the content of phone calls, and we don't let delivery services police the content of letters/packages, so why would we let ISPs police the content of network packets? Exceptions exist: you can't send most live animals by mail, packages are subject to inspection at customs borders, etc. But any sort of monitoring of content would need either clear evidence of danger, signs of abusing the network, or court involvement. If this content is so terrible that it deserves to be removed from the internet by any means necessary, shouldn't the process be that a court of competent jurisdiction should be able to issue an order requiring the site to be taken down. If the proprietors of the site bring it up through another ISP, not a party to the original order, a new order could be issued as well as holding the proprietors in contempt, presumably. Jurisdiction issues on content are hairy, but jurisdiction issues on ISP connections are easy, the connections happen in specific locations, and you can order the connection severed at either end of the connection (as well as in between the ends).
- Barrin92 3y ago
  >shouldn't the process be that a court of competent jurisdiction should be able to issue an order the same people who decry this will also decry the government taking charge of internet moderation at the ISP level, probably even louder. This entire discussion is bizarre and academic. The site in question has engaged in doxxing and other activities that has led to real world harm, including suicides, and content on there is already probably illegal. If I run a business, and I know a customer is doing something like that, I have an ethical obligation to not facilitate it. I don't start some ideological discussion about whether some hypothetical court can prevent it given that nobody apparently can be bothered to actually make that a reality. Imagine I have an axe shop and a known axe murderer walks through the door, and instead of not selling him an axe I propose we have a year long debate about the proper formal process of axe murder prevention supported by the Axe Rights Foundation. Granted this is how America actually (does not) deal with gun violence so I'm not surprised we are now in the pro-doxxer rights debate
  - toast0 3y ago
commandlinefan 3y ago
> how bad actors will abuse systems I’ve seen both ends of the spectrum - I remember Usenet, that had no moderation at all, and having to wade through a sea of spam, wishing somebody would get rid of it. But then I saw what reddit moderation turned into… I’ll take the spam, thanks. The spammers are bad actors, but moderators actually become evil actors.
- xmprt 3y ago
  > But then I saw what reddit moderation turned into People like the harp on how bad reddit moderation is but I personally haven't seen it. Maybe I'm just in smaller communities or I choose the subreddits I follow more carefully, but I haven't seen cases of moderator abuse and if I ever do (usually as an outside observer to some drama in a different community) then I take a mental note to not follow that subreddit in the future.
  - drak0n1c 3y ago
    In the last year or so I've received two strikes from Reddit Admins (employees) for report abuse when I reported two separate instances of explicit calls to violence in left-wing comments. One more "report abuse strike" and my since-Digg-era account is banned, so I've stopped caring. I've also seen first-hand and second-hand how the big default subreddit powermods (volunteers) over the last 10 years have silently banned users for non-inflammatory articulate dissenting posts and comments (while leaving up ones that are poorly written and easy targets). Combine that user shedding with botted upvotes on Rising (partisan-angle posts getting 10-20x the upvote average of other higher-quality posts from the same subreddit), the net effect is clear. Ultimately, the best way to use Reddit is the way you do - keep it to small subs specifically devoted to a genuine interest, unsub from the defaults, and only browse it from the Home (your subs) page.
- chonkerz 3y ago
  [flagged]

brailsafe 3y ago

In what way is it at odds with the last 30 years of the internet? You seem to accept that as a fact, but I'd definitely agree with the eff.

ibizaman 3y ago

If it’s truly the first time Tier 1 blocking happens, I don’t see how the EFF can be at odds with history.

gorwell 3y ago

Censors made the same argument with the Printing Press and since time immemorial. Censorship has always been on the wrong side of history and it still is. Speaking of abusing systems, censors end up being the worst bad guys who imagine themselves as the good guys protecting you from the bad guys. EFF understands the long history of this issue.

cmh89 3y ago
[flagged]
- drewcoo 3y ago
  I actually hope that AI can allow people to have "child" pornography without children being exploited. If anything, that should be encouraged and made legal. As the kiddie porn crusaders like to say, "think of the children."
  - cmh89 3y ago
    That's not really the question I asked, and I'm not sure how your response is relevant.
- r3trohack3r 3y ago
  Renditions of extreme violence are legal, and common in cinema. I find them repulsive, but I support people's right to free speech; they should be allowed to produce renditions of extreme violence and distribute them. The movie Texas Chainsaw Massacre is legal, and I support that. Doing a real life Texas Chainsaw Massacre is not legal. Recording a real life Texas Chainsaw Massacre and distributing the recordings should not be legal. I do not support that. I do not believe the speech part of Texas Chainsaw Massacre should be illegal, no matter how repulsive I find that genre of entertainment to be. I do believe the non-speech parts of those acts should absolutely be illegal - for obvious reasons. I personally do not believe I have to yield my absolutionist stance on free speech to say that content downstream of those actions can't be distributed and possessed. There is no way for that content to have been legally produced, therefor there is no way for that content to be legally possessed and distributed.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  Child pornography, where real children are involved in any way, is/should be illegal because of the crime that has to occur to produce it. Any CSAM which is fully divorced from real children (or any sort of crime in general) in all ways should be legal, as gross as it is.
  - cmh89 3y ago
    You aren't OP but that's my poin. OP made the absolutist statement that: "Censorship has always been on the wrong side of history and it still is." which is obviously absurd because there are very obvious situations where censorship is clearly a good idea, like in banning not just the creation of child pornography but the possession. When the feds strengthen laws against child porn in the 70s and 80s, that same free speech argument played out. Free speech advocates argued that having recorded evidence of a crime shouldn't be a crime in of itself. You can have pictures of murder victims after all, and there are plenty of recordings of illegal activity on the internet that are totally legal. Obviously the right side won and the feds passed laws censoring child pornography because the ends, punishing child porn consumers and creators, outweighed the cost, which was a small reduction in freedom of speech. Every society needs some limits on speech and free speech absolutism is just ideological weakness in thinking about how a society should actually work because in the real world, unlimited speech leads to a lot of people getting hurt.
- pessimizer 3y ago
  Do you think that information about birth control should be illegal? Because that's what we used to go through the mail looking for.
chonkerz 3y ago
[flagged]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

vuavu 3y ago

Doesn't seem similar to this. You receive spam unwillingly, but you have to enter that forum and participate on purpose.

wmf 3y ago
Not if they're organizing attacks on you.
- fentanyl_peyotl 3y ago
  [flagged]

toast0 3y ago

There's two issues here: a) should online speech be policed b) if so, who should do it? We don't let phone companies police the content of phone calls, and we don't let delivery services police the content of letters/packages, so why would we let ISPs police the content of network packets? Exceptions exist: you can't send most live animals by mail, packages are subject to inspection at customs borders, etc. But any sort of monitoring of content would need either clear evidence of danger, signs of abusing the network, or court involvement. If this content is so terrible that it deserves to be removed from the internet by any means necessary, shouldn't the process be that a court of competent jurisdiction should be able to issue an order requiring the site to be taken down. If the proprietors of the site bring it up through another ISP, not a party to the original order, a new order could be issued as well as holding the proprietors in contempt, presumably. Jurisdiction issues on content are hairy, but jurisdiction issues on ISP connections are easy, the connections happen in specific locations, and you can order the connection severed at either end of the connection (as well as in between the ends).

Barrin92 3y ago
>shouldn't the process be that a court of competent jurisdiction should be able to issue an order the same people who decry this will also decry the government taking charge of internet moderation at the ISP level, probably even louder. This entire discussion is bizarre and academic. The site in question has engaged in doxxing and other activities that has led to real world harm, including suicides, and content on there is already probably illegal. If I run a business, and I know a customer is doing something like that, I have an ethical obligation to not facilitate it. I don't start some ideological discussion about whether some hypothetical court can prevent it given that nobody apparently can be bothered to actually make that a reality. Imagine I have an axe shop and a known axe murderer walks through the door, and instead of not selling him an axe I propose we have a year long debate about the proper formal process of axe murder prevention supported by the Axe Rights Foundation. Granted this is how America actually (does not) deal with gun violence so I'm not surprised we are now in the pro-doxxer rights debate
- toast0 3y ago

commandlinefan 3y ago

> how bad actors will abuse systems I’ve seen both ends of the spectrum - I remember Usenet, that had no moderation at all, and having to wade through a sea of spam, wishing somebody would get rid of it. But then I saw what reddit moderation turned into… I’ll take the spam, thanks. The spammers are bad actors, but moderators actually become evil actors.

xmprt 3y ago
> But then I saw what reddit moderation turned into People like the harp on how bad reddit moderation is but I personally haven't seen it. Maybe I'm just in smaller communities or I choose the subreddits I follow more carefully, but I haven't seen cases of moderator abuse and if I ever do (usually as an outside observer to some drama in a different community) then I take a mental note to not follow that subreddit in the future.
- drak0n1c 3y ago
  In the last year or so I've received two strikes from Reddit Admins (employees) for report abuse when I reported two separate instances of explicit calls to violence in left-wing comments. One more "report abuse strike" and my since-Digg-era account is banned, so I've stopped caring. I've also seen first-hand and second-hand how the big default subreddit powermods (volunteers) over the last 10 years have silently banned users for non-inflammatory articulate dissenting posts and comments (while leaving up ones that are poorly written and easy targets). Combine that user shedding with botted upvotes on Rising (partisan-angle posts getting 10-20x the upvote average of other higher-quality posts from the same subreddit), the net effect is clear. Ultimately, the best way to use Reddit is the way you do - keep it to small subs specifically devoted to a genuine interest, unsub from the defaults, and only browse it from the Home (your subs) page.
chonkerz 3y ago
[flagged]