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> Sounds like the kind of system small companies can't implement and large companies won't care to implement. This is true. Which is of a piece with EFF's gen

by ajross 1y ago

> Sounds like the kind of system small companies can't implement and large companies won't care to implement. This is true. Which is of a piece with EFF's general bent these days. They stopped caring about big issues of internet freedom long ago and are now just a parade of Big Tech Bad headlines. And in an era where (1) Big Tech continues, after several decades, of being really quite a benign steward of society's information and (2) we have a bunch of unsupervised 20-something MAGA bros loading the entirety of the Federal government onto their Macbooks, that seems extremely tone deaf to me. The tech privacy apocalypse is upon us. And the %!@#! EFF is still whining about Meta and ByteDance for its click stream, because like everyone else on the internet that's what they really care about.

cvz 1y ago
I don't understand this comment. The fine article is about a proposed law that would allegedly require the implementation of half-baked censorship systems along the same lines as the DMCA. Are you saying that's not a real issue because the EFF also whines about big tech?
- ajross 1y ago
  I'm saying I'm fed up with the EFF for their silence in the face of genuine disaster, and am treating them like the click farm they've become. Is NO FAKES a bad law? Probably. Do I trust the EFF to tell me that? Not anymore. They were a genuine beacon of rationality and justice in the early internet. They're junk-tier blog spam now. And I find that upsetting, irrespective of the status of AI legislation.
  - Analemma_ 1y ago
    When you find yourself getting more angry at people saying “hey, this is a really bad law” than at the really bad law, I think you need to step back and take some deep breaths, maybe get off the internet for a while. This philosophy is yours is bad for a number of reasons, but I’ll start with the fact that you have essentially constructed a loophole for arbitrarily bad laws to be passed. If you just rage yourself into not caring about bad laws because you’re mad at the people talking about them instead, then when will you ever oppose the bad laws, instead of “getting mad at randos online”? This quickly turns into cynicism and apathy in the face of unlimited cruelty and expansion of government power.
    - dredmorbius 1y ago
      <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9944753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9944753> (Regardless of my agreement with either you or ajross. "Get off the Internet for a while" reads close to "touch grass", which dang's specifically addressed: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40851991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40851991>.)
      - BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
        Your latter source was “you sound like a basket case… touch grass” which has a completely different tone and somewhat different content.
        dredmorbius 1y ago
        I'd strongly recommend people read through mods' "no personal attacks" admonishments and the comments to which they're responding to. These often make the point that even a very mild (and unintentional) barb can read far more biting than it was written: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25982286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25982286> This case is borderline, but I suspect mods would find it on the far side of that border. The original comment reads better without the swipe.
        BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
        Eh actually, on review of all the material, I fall more on your side. The original comment did have a (very mild) personal attack in it at the end of the day.
        dredmorbius 1y ago
        Thanks, and yes it can be quite subtle.
kmeisthax 1y ago
> Big Tech continues, after several decades, of being really quite a benign steward of society's information > we have a bunch of unsupervised 20-something MAGA bros loading the entirety of the Federal government onto their Macbooks, that seems extremely tone deaf to me. The latter is the direct and consequential result of the former. Elon Musk is Big Tech, and he specifically engineered Trump's second electoral victory to get back at Gavin Newsom not letting him run the California Tesla factory at full tilt during COVID. He also turned Twitter into a 24/7 far-right slop machine. Before that, under the latter half of the Jack Dorsey regime, Twitter was a 9-to-5 liberal slop machine. And before that it was so painfully "neutral" that it let all these far-right nutjobs get a foothold on the Internet to begin with. Remember Jack Dorsey rolling out the "world leaders" policy just to justify not enforcing the rules on Trump? Or Reddit vetoing moderators of far-right subs from shutting down their own hellholes? Big Tech's stewardship of public forums ranges from "asleep at the wheel" at best to "actively malicious and incompetent" at worst. And this is downstream of the broader disintegration of the liberal coalition. The operation of a large enterprise involves many inherently illiberal acts, and thus the business half of that coalition no longer acts as liberals. In fact, I would argue they fell away decades ago. We didn't notice because the business class had distracted us with a culture war, specifically using their stewardship of social media to amplify opposition and division. I have plenty of complaints about the EFF, but their lobbying against Big Tech is not part of them.
dredmorbius 1y ago
I'd argue quite strongly the opposite, that the EFF do care very deeply about internet freedom, but: 1. Have come to realise that Big Tech (including many substantial backers of the organisation, in the past if not presently) is itself a major threat and ... 2. That the problem is far more nuanced than early views (Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", <https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence> and Gilmore's "The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It", see <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/> in particular) suggested. Absolute freedom turns out to not be freedom, for many, shades of Popper's Paradox of Tolerance.
- ajross 1y ago
  The EFF has been yelling that Big Tech is a major threat for like three decades now. The dystopia seems not to have arrived. Until now, when it seems to be rolling out as offical administration policy. In point of fact, nonsense like "Big Tech Bad" became part of the general antiestablishment mania that got us into this mess! Google and Meta kept our stuff mostly private, it's the nuts we voted for who were the real threat, and we voted for them because the EFF and other thought leaders told us not to trust the people who turned out to have been the good guys. And I've mostly had it. The EFF turns out to have been a click farm milking sincere but mostly irrelevant outrage into an engine for social destruction. No thanks.
  - dredmorbius 1y ago
    Would you happen to have any notable examples of EFF's treating Big Tech as the enemy (or major threat if you prefer) during its first five or ten years? That would be 1994--1999 or 1994--2004, roughly. I ... was well aware of the EFF for at least the latter half of that period, and this doesn't seem to correspond well with my recollection, though I suppose one could argue that Jackson Games cast AT&T as Big Evil Tech. The defendant in the case however was the US Secret Service, a federal government entity. The Church of Scientology was of course another notable early non-government focus. But largely at least through 2000, and for much of the decade of the 2000s, EFF's principle focus was law and policy, not abusive tech giants. Rather than abandoning the former, the EFF seems now to consider both as significant concerns. Even key EFF staffers themselves (e.g., Doctorow, Cohn) acknowledge this shift.

by ajross 1y ago

cvz 1y ago

I don't understand this comment. The fine article is about a proposed law that would allegedly require the implementation of half-baked censorship systems along the same lines as the DMCA. Are you saying that's not a real issue because the EFF also whines about big tech?

ajross 1y ago
I'm saying I'm fed up with the EFF for their silence in the face of genuine disaster, and am treating them like the click farm they've become. Is NO FAKES a bad law? Probably. Do I trust the EFF to tell me that? Not anymore. They were a genuine beacon of rationality and justice in the early internet. They're junk-tier blog spam now. And I find that upsetting, irrespective of the status of AI legislation.
- Analemma_ 1y ago
  When you find yourself getting more angry at people saying “hey, this is a really bad law” than at the really bad law, I think you need to step back and take some deep breaths, maybe get off the internet for a while. This philosophy is yours is bad for a number of reasons, but I’ll start with the fact that you have essentially constructed a loophole for arbitrarily bad laws to be passed. If you just rage yourself into not caring about bad laws because you’re mad at the people talking about them instead, then when will you ever oppose the bad laws, instead of “getting mad at randos online”? This quickly turns into cynicism and apathy in the face of unlimited cruelty and expansion of government power.
  - dredmorbius 1y ago
    <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9944753 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9944753> (Regardless of my agreement with either you or ajross. "Get off the Internet for a while" reads close to "touch grass", which dang's specifically addressed: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40851991 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40851991>.)
    - BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
      Your latter source was “you sound like a basket case… touch grass” which has a completely different tone and somewhat different content.
      - dredmorbius 1y ago
        I'd strongly recommend people read through mods' "no personal attacks" admonishments and the comments to which they're responding to. These often make the point that even a very mild (and unintentional) barb can read far more biting than it was written: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25982286 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25982286> This case is borderline, but I suspect mods would find it on the far side of that border. The original comment reads better without the swipe.
        BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
        Eh actually, on review of all the material, I fall more on your side. The original comment did have a (very mild) personal attack in it at the end of the day.
        dredmorbius 1y ago
        Thanks, and yes it can be quite subtle.

kmeisthax 1y ago

> Big Tech continues, after several decades, of being really quite a benign steward of society's information > we have a bunch of unsupervised 20-something MAGA bros loading the entirety of the Federal government onto their Macbooks, that seems extremely tone deaf to me. The latter is the direct and consequential result of the former. Elon Musk is Big Tech, and he specifically engineered Trump's second electoral victory to get back at Gavin Newsom not letting him run the California Tesla factory at full tilt during COVID. He also turned Twitter into a 24/7 far-right slop machine. Before that, under the latter half of the Jack Dorsey regime, Twitter was a 9-to-5 liberal slop machine. And before that it was so painfully "neutral" that it let all these far-right nutjobs get a foothold on the Internet to begin with. Remember Jack Dorsey rolling out the "world leaders" policy just to justify not enforcing the rules on Trump? Or Reddit vetoing moderators of far-right subs from shutting down their own hellholes? Big Tech's stewardship of public forums ranges from "asleep at the wheel" at best to "actively malicious and incompetent" at worst. And this is downstream of the broader disintegration of the liberal coalition. The operation of a large enterprise involves many inherently illiberal acts, and thus the business half of that coalition no longer acts as liberals. In fact, I would argue they fell away decades ago. We didn't notice because the business class had distracted us with a culture war, specifically using their stewardship of social media to amplify opposition and division. I have plenty of complaints about the EFF, but their lobbying against Big Tech is not part of them.

dredmorbius 1y ago

I'd argue quite strongly the opposite, that the EFF do care very deeply about internet freedom, but: 1. Have come to realise that Big Tech (including many substantial backers of the organisation, in the past if not presently) is itself a major threat and ... 2. That the problem is far more nuanced than early views (Barlow's "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace", <https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence> and Gilmore's "The Net Interprets Censorship As Damage and Routes Around It", see <https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/07/12/censor/> in particular) suggested. Absolute freedom turns out to not be freedom, for many, shades of Popper's Paradox of Tolerance.

ajross 1y ago
The EFF has been yelling that Big Tech is a major threat for like three decades now. The dystopia seems not to have arrived. Until now, when it seems to be rolling out as offical administration policy. In point of fact, nonsense like "Big Tech Bad" became part of the general antiestablishment mania that got us into this mess! Google and Meta kept our stuff mostly private, it's the nuts we voted for who were the real threat, and we voted for them because the EFF and other thought leaders told us not to trust the people who turned out to have been the good guys. And I've mostly had it. The EFF turns out to have been a click farm milking sincere but mostly irrelevant outrage into an engine for social destruction. No thanks.
- dredmorbius 1y ago
  Would you happen to have any notable examples of EFF's treating Big Tech as the enemy (or major threat if you prefer) during its first five or ten years? That would be 1994--1999 or 1994--2004, roughly. I ... was well aware of the EFF for at least the latter half of that period, and this doesn't seem to correspond well with my recollection, though I suppose one could argue that Jackson Games cast AT&T as Big Evil Tech. The defendant in the case however was the US Secret Service, a federal government entity. The Church of Scientology was of course another notable early non-government focus. But largely at least through 2000, and for much of the decade of the 2000s, EFF's principle focus was law and policy, not abusive tech giants. Rather than abandoning the former, the EFF seems now to consider both as significant concerns. Even key EFF staffers themselves (e.g., Doctorow, Cohn) acknowledge this shift.