They added "sex" to the title of the bill. I knew this would pass the first time I heard of it when they were discussing it as a separate bill. Stopping people from having sex is clearly high on the agenda for both parties as is getting information without a warrant.
everyone that I know in tech that was involved in this one, with half a brain, just walked out of discussions. left was the corrupt, lobbists and idiots-puppets-think-of-the-children.
really, early on nobody thought this could ever be taken seriously. guess engineers suck at politics. (still have to see what the lawyers that were involved are saying now).
Every time there is an unpopular bill they cannot get passed but their financial backers do shit like this happens. They keep trying to pass variations of it in various shady ways until compassion fatigue sets in.
You have a group of people and organizations who are paid very well to make this crap their job.
In significant part, they're being paid by many of us (using revenue generated from us) who are opposed to what they are doing but held hostage -- or quasi-extorted -- by oligopoly.
People's individual efforts -- just to keep up with the news and endless initiatives, much less continue to actively respond to them in effective fashions -- tire out.
Want it to end? Then you need to put the people behind these things -- commercial and political -- out of business.
But they fight us on that, too. No municipal broadband for you! Years of wrangling with Google Fiber (who arguably could go bad at any time, themselves) over pole access. Etc.
Musk's nascent satellite network is in the news, currently. Who's going to control that, and what agendas will they bring with them?
It's because most of the left shuts down critical thinking if you say a bill is for ending sex trafficking. It ends their ability to think rationally or challenge the rest of it. It's the reason politicians use the: "it's for the children," bullshit - it ends debate & challenges. That same contingent, mostly the left, were the ones protesting ending net neutrality.
You had the NY Times and Washington Post both supporting the Cloud Act as a good idea, by pushing pro opinion pieces.
At first I felt insulted for implying the left is easy to manipulated, but then I realized I'd be more insulted if I was in the right wing because you imply the right-wing doesn't care about the sexual molestation and exploitation of children nearly as much.
The same thing that happens any time the oligarchy wants legislation... they just took the losses and kept trying until one time we weren't paying attention. I have seen this coming for a while now. Once the oligarchy understood the internet is the last bastion of anarchistic fredom of thought they immediately wanted to take control over it somehow.
Also embedded in the spending bill[0] is the CLOUD Act:[1]
> The CLOUD Act (S. 2383 and H.R. 4943) has two major components. First, it empowers U.S. law enforcement to grab data stored anywhere in the world, without following foreign data privacy rules. Second, it empowers the president to unilaterally enter executive agreements with any nation on earth, even known human rights abusers. Under such executive agreements, foreign law enforcement officials could grab data stored in the United States, directly from U.S. companies, without following U.S. privacy rules like the Fourth Amendment, so long as the foreign police are not targeting a U.S. person or a person in the United States.
Correct. That's up to that country, if they cant handle outside influence that's bad, and they and only they can fix it. We have our own trouble with it here... I am doing everything I can to stop us from meddling in other countries, and you wont see us going to war any time soon (despite the BS media owned by the war party).
What else do you want? This law violates my 4th Amendment, and as far as that goes, it's highly likely that it gets struck down given the chance, our latest SC appointment makes that even more likely.
Maybe it would have been more clear if I had quoted the "foreign law enforcement officials could grab data stored in the United States" part.
Sorry, I'm from Australia and sometimes find tracking US internal nomenclature confusing. Which party is "the war party"? Both major parties seem to have been happy to support ongoing military action over the last few decades so maybe I'm missing something.
Once again, I'm legitimately asking for clarification in order to put your comment in context. No judgement!
No, you have it correct. Both major parties pretend to fight when they have the same goal (which is basically to finish the NWO project, it's a huge problem having powerful individuals, very inconvenient for the rest of the global power structures). Outliers not in the club are rare, recent examples are Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, Rand Paul, and (seriously f-ing major huge USA-saving-I'm-not-even-remotely-kidding) Donald J. Trump.
TPP/ISIS/Iran/NK these are all TLA perma-state order-out-of-chaos creations and tools. We haven't even got to the good stuff yet. A third to half of the US has no idea we just went through a soft anti-coo all the way from 2001.
Ted Cruz gets an honorable mention, Devin Nunez, Chavez, Gowdy, Grassley along with a bunch of house members, Thomas Massie, Justin Amash (sometimes... he's still learning the ropes). Worst of the worst are the crew surrounding my home state's senators of Arizona. Which is weird, people here know what's up. The 18th amendment is not a good thing. I'm leaving out a bunch if the good dems because I don't track them as closely, but that's the basics. Feinstien gets major flack (imho rightly) from the right, but she is an honest outlier too. DC is (really) a cult, but not everyone is in it.
If you get people a bit out of their guard they are honest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO4DuMcrVpE (I was looking for just the CM full clip, but this will do, YT is quite the memory hole, didnt check that chan, but it's _extremely_ common to poison the well by mixing something like that with flat earth or whatever turns people off. CM knows he's been played, he knows about #7 and will bring it up, he wants out.)
I'm not doing myself any favors posting this. It's so easy to set off the "CT" bells and people just tune out. Watch the vid link in my profile and read up on the disinformation page in the mediawiki link if you think it's interesting.
First, it empowers U.S. law enforcement to grab data stored anywhere in the world, without following foreign data privacy rules.
Spy agencies have already done this for decades with impunity and provided the data to law enforcement agencies, so this is probably just trying to provide them with legal cover.
Power wanted "net neutrality". It's a stepping stone to the same ends, more rules regulating the internet. Once you convince people it should be regulated, the sky is the limit. Standard incrementalism tactic. I mean... who likes "hate speech" anyway?
No it’s the other way around. Net neutrality is itself a regulation. Removing the government regulation turns it into a Wild West with less rules and allows other powers to slap us around.
Correct, that's exactly what I said. NN is gov enforced regs. This thread is about bad _gov_ regulation. Companies cant make or enforce law. Gov can. Gov is therefore much more powerful, as we see here. You can leave FB, you cant leave your gov (well... easily).
From the perspective of Joe & Jane Average, there is no difference between a contract and a civil (rather than criminal) law: Break the rules you didn’t read and you get a fine you might not be able to afford.
Contracts are civil law... I'm not sure what you are getting at. What contracts are you thinking about? If you are thinking about TOS, that's not a contract. The uni-party would love to change that though. I forget which one it was... SOPA/PIPA/ACTA/CISPA/TPP etc etc. NN is civil law since it's FCC regs, but that's not all that important since large corps cant hide from the process server. They would follow it regardless or get their accounts "directed un-deposited" from eventually.
There’s a reason I wrote “From the perspective of Joe & Jane Average” rather than omitting it.
Surveys have shown some people think they have access to Facebook but not the internet. You and I know they’re wrong, but makes no difference to their experience: if they lose their Facebook account for a rules violation, they suffer for it. From their POV, Facebook rules are civil laws.
Remember that normal people record clips of their favourite shows to YouTube with descriptions like “no copyright intended”. Normal people don’t know how the law works in their own country, never mind internationally like the websites themselves. They might not know what a civil law is, but I expect they would describe categories that roughly match criminal and civil laws, and put EULAs, bank account overdraft fees, etc. into the later.
So treat them like fools? That never works. It makes them fools. I disagree with your "average Joe" assessment, it's pretty typical of the elitist mindset we technical folk seem to have a problem with. I guarantee my dead grandpa could easily understand this in heartbeat, and I know my elderly neighbor already does.
Surveys are often garbage. I would be happy to look at them, but I make good money betting against polls.
Feedback teaches, remove the feedback and... next thing you know you are arguing against free speech.
No, I propse the system is simplified. I want the legal system to be simple enough that almost everyone knows almost all of their rights and obligations. Without that, I claim that although ignorance of the law must not be an excuse, it de-facto is an excuse.
This isn’t just a problem for Joe & Jane Average, it’s a problem for The Elites, too: I asked a lawyer if anyone knew all of UK law, he just laughed. From the way they act, I don’t even have reason to believe lawmakers understand the laws they pass (for example, the Australian government accidentally made half of itself ineligible for office without noticing).
The average person might be able to understand a decent subset of the laws if they are explained to them, but firstly they are not explained, and secondly there are too many for any human to understand all of them. Most people do not read EULAs, based on how long they spend on that screen — they should be simple and clear enough that people chose to do so.
We should go for decentralized platforms that are harder to control. We should go for local. One Facebook is easier to shut down than 10.000 chat rooms.
Are they? A chat room with 1/10,000th the income of Facebook is “only” $1.5 million profit per year. Is that enough to avoid being made an example of? And would the first set a precedent for the rest?
I was thinking about insurance as I wrote my previous comment. All it takes is one that doesn’t have it when the risk is a new precedent. Government would just go after them. (And that’s assuming the government doesn’t just pass a new law, which is non-zero risk, but which I will overlook for now because sometimes one bit of a government will do things against the interests of another bit, such as a recent case in the UK where a specialist was recruited for the NHS and kicked out by the Home Office).
If any government cared enough (except perhaps the American one), it could ban the the protocol. They don’t care, and the people who do care are satisfied with the existing options for suing copyright infringers.
TOR is much more likely to be regulated than bittorrent, given the whole point of the latter is to remove control from governments.
I don't understand the panic about this law. Mens rea is appropriately considered in the law. Unless they can prove that you built your site with the intention of facilitating sex trafficking, you still aren't on the hook for what your users do.
And, if you become aware of sex trafficking on your website and you don't do anything about it, you are absolutely complicit. This is hardly rocket science, and it doesn't seem to overreach the way everyone is screaming that it does.
I could be wrong but I think mens rea can encompass acting recklessly or acting negligently, not just acting purposely. An example of something people have been convicted of that may fall there is involuntary manslaughter.
A famous example of such a defense being denied occurred in In re Aimster Copyright Litigation, in which the defendants argued that the file-swapping technology was designed in such a way that they had no way of monitoring the content of swapped files. They suggested that their inability to monitor the activities of users meant that they could not be contributing to copyright infringement by the users. The court held that this was willful blindness on the defendant's part and would not constitute a defense to a claim of contributory infringement.
It would seem ridiculous for courts to start charging e-mail providers, for example, as facilitating sex trafficking though, even if they must suspect their services are used for such activity. I wonder how it will play out.
> Unless they can prove that you built your site with the intention of facilitating sex trafficking, you still aren't on the hook for what your users do.
I suggest you read previous threads on this from a couple of days ago. They had detailed discussion on the changes in the wording, from being "participant in sex trafficking", where you somehow benefit by actively encouraging the activity, to "facilitate sex trafficking", which is not fully defined.
Basically, the concern is that if Craigslist knew that their site was used to deal with trafficked persons, even only in theory, they are facilitating. Any open forum will thus require enormous resources to actively police, or you can't have an open forum.
So, do you think it is right that craigslist decided to pull the personal section?
They were certainly aware there was prostitution there, some of which was the result of sex-trafficking. So, by your reasoning, they should do something about it. Which would support just removing the section.
However, the wording of this law suggests that less extreme measures, such as an automatic filtering system and user-report functionality, would leave craigslist liable.
Note that the personal section was (probably) not majority prostitution. It was a place where prostitution would happen.
It seems to me the situation were different if the personal section was 50% prostitution or more.
Question is, does section 230 still protect those who operate a site where 50% of user-generated content is illegal?
Because if not, I don't see how this law is necessary.
What is your proposal for craigslist to continue their personals/mixed connections and comply with the law? Stopping is an easy solution to eliminate liability.
> Unless they can prove that you built your site with the intention of facilitating sex trafficking, you still aren't on the hook for what your users do.
As long as you're willing to risk paying requisite attorney fees. Craigslist apparently wasn't.
This could be just a short-term demonstration. The ads are still there, just inaccessible -- if you go to Renew an existing ad via your account, it appears normal from the account side and gives no error.
A genuine ad's "hidden" URL gets rerouted to a FOSTA message. Change the ad number, and you get a 404 instead.
Not necessarily. The backend system still has to be there in order to support all the countries where personals are still available. It's possible they just haven't finished disabling it in the US properly yet.
I know this is likely to be an unpopular opinion here, but I'm not sure that websites ought to scale in the way we've been building them to. One of the biggest causes of frustration and concerns is that websites that are operated by only a handful of people are used by millions of people, with no serious way to seek relief if problems emerge. Think of how disastrous security oversights have been, from companies too small to adequately compensate those who have been wronged. Or think of how disastrous technical glitches or mistakes can be (such as deleted Google accounts or Facebook privacy setting glitches). Or think of how Uber seems to have rushed to reduced the human oversight of their autonomous cars before they were ready. We are giving far more responsibility and social power to companies than they are truly capable of handling.
The power of computers to make transactions and interactions more efficient is great. But I'm not sure that efficiency needs to come at the limit of our technological capacity instead of at the limit of human attention.
You’re hinting at a deep problem with our current economic system. It really does produce monopolies or oligopolies with far too much concentration. History documents this functionality: the Trust Busting of the late 1800s was a reaction to clearly concentrated markets, for instance.
The solution is clearly to produce more things closer to the demand source. But I don’t see many examples of that.
As a crude suggestion, maybe carbon adjusted energy costs would incentive local production with shipped-in raw materials.
3D printing. We gotta win the DRM/RightToRepair fight. It's the anti "dangerous objects" people who are the biggest obstacle, until it's pointed out, they don't realize they are on the wrong side of the GPC/CRYPTO/Copyright fight.
Being against violence isn’t being on the wrong side of anything. If you want to head resistance for 3D printing off from anti dangerous object people, as you call them, work toward eliminating the factors that make people print dangerous objects.
Togetherness. You said that I’m statistically against feet and knives. You’re suggesting I can only be for or against 3D printing. There’s no room for actually dealing with a violence issue through an alternate means in your dichotomy.
If society wants to decrease its incidence of violence then it needs to learn to both let people “be” and reinforce positive social situations. Violence begets violence. Victims of verbal attacks may get overcome with the attacks and strike out against them physically. Violence can escalate to the point of, literally, the annihilation of all life on earth.
Or, people can try and find ways to let each other be and work together. Provide all people with a basic human respect and dignity. Not everyone deserves a mansion, but they all should be able to seek “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
For the record, I’m all for 3D printing. I want everyone to be able to print a gun but not feel the need to ever use it to kill another. We can do that if we move past the divisive, bipolar rhetoric and address our actual problems.
"Victims of verbal attacks may get overcome with the attacks and strike out against them physically."
So restrict free speech? With what? Violence? It's OK to offend people. That's life. If someone wants to get violent because of words, they are the real problem.
I value the speech that I disagree with the most. Sure, there are limits, you cant threaten someone because you don't like what they said, but that's about it.
On the technical point, either you decide what can be printed with DRM or you don't. It's as binary as it gets. It's the war on general purpose computing distilled. Either way, the "hackers" (now criminals if DRM wins) will still be able to print whatever they want.
Large factor is that few companise being able to give away product for free kills competition. Gmail being free (and good) and without ads made competition of many smaller companies impossible. Few companies being able to operate products at loss for years makes competition impossible for smaller players.
It was ever decreasing prices that got Alcoa into lots of scrutiny from regulators in the late 1800s. It’s taken as a tactic to push competition out of the market.
Google is dying. They bubbled themselves. Trading "free" for market share only works for a finite time. See FB. Their pivot to skynet will only accelerate it. If google wants to survive, they better shape up and put their awesome software contributions front and center, remove the broken pillars, and stop trying to weaponize their 3 letter control grid. Everyone knows they are social engineering the search results, all the way down to their stupid doodles. It's an open joke.
Yes, but in the meantime smaller companies can't compete. And meantime here is over dozen years.
There is also something to be said about (looking back) astonishing naivete of tech people who bought the whole "don't be evil" motto and who sincererly believed that since founders are tech school graduates, they are guaranteed to be ethical unlike those evil business majors.
> If google wants to survive, they better shape up and put their awesome software contributions front and center, remove the broken pillars, and stop trying to weaponize their 3 letter control grid.
Would it be possible to restate this in explicit humanese, please?
Pillars (I should have said columns) is slang for the management from back when JFK took on the CIA. The president's first visit after his election was to the CIA, he made that reference, obviously people unaware of these things thought he was talking about the columns in the room;)
Brand destruction. People already make jokes about "google it; but don't actually". I cant remember the last time I clicked an ad. How about you? Google is not "the web". In "conservative" circles it's more than dead. Only it's bubble prevents you from knowing that. It's doodles are like the bad joke of the day. People love to see what the next one is, but not for reasons goog would like.
I got annoyed enough that I made https://github.com/jakeogh/dnsgate and as you know, there are plenty of similar things. It's only a matter of time.
I hope you take don't this the wrong way. I'm being as honest as I can. Google has done amazing things. Android won the mobile market for linux. Google video lit an entire subculture, and youtube for all it's recent problems is an amazing platform. Their software contributions and open source scientific progress are wonderful things. But, I fear it's too late. They took the social engineering too far, and the owners are too invested in it to fix it.
Um, no: Google maps, apps, hosting and X/waymo. Each are very large businesses using b2b business models and growing quickly to someday stand side by side with websearch/ads/YouTube.
Hahahahahaha. All those doofuses who hate the Google brand still end up reading articles on websites that pay some company that nobody realizes is a Google subsidiary to manage their ads, and they click on those ads.
If that's not a strong moat (in the morningstar financial sense) I don't know what is!
Speak for yourself. I know who owns the "news" I read. Funny enough the fake news you elude to has made me (for me) a bunch of money. People are so polarized, and half them have no idea who owns their news outlets. In the US we have very few options other than betting on the stock market, but there is Predictit, and it's an awesome reality check. I was buying the right side of the prez election for 15c on the dollar when the Billy Bush (yep that Bush) tape hit.
Google is a perfect example, you are very right, most people only "kinda" know it's goog machine that decided what they found.
Except the government employs 2.7+ million people.
If Google ran the DMV there'd be no one working at the building, no support email, no customer service, and you'd have to get answers to questions from other pedestrians on unofficial forums.
You choose a funny example. I can't imagine the hellish nightmare that would be trying to email the DMV for support.
If Google ran the DMV we'd get our drivers licenses instantly delivered in digital form to our Android phones. We wouldn't have to stand in line or "take a number" and waste a day in a filthy office building packed to the brim with disgruntled bureaucrats.
Similar experience here, but with different area of the NY state government. Last year our company had a screw-up with a part-time employee that resulted in us getting a workers comp penalty of a few thousand dollars for not carrying the proper amount of insurance. We sent the workers comp board a letter explaining the screw-up, and how we've rectified the issue promptly (we fixed it as soon as we were notified by NY state). After two months, they had adjusted most of the penalties down to almost nothing and had resolved the whole issue to our complete satisfaction. The whole process was completely fair and just. We also never had any issue getting someone on the phone to talk to, and the NY state web site was very easy to use in terms of tracking our situation and getting updates.
Does not matter. My point was not that all DMV or government is great. My point was some is good some is bad. The OP seemed (to me anyway) to be saying it's almost always bad, and that stereotype ("lol government is sooolo inefficient eberyone knows it lol") is in fact a common one. It was worth showing its falsehood, but that doesn't mean the polar opposite is true either.
I've also had good and bad govt agency experiences in other states. I seem to remember the Arkansas "DMV" (they don't even have a real DMV exactly, its duties are or were back then split among a few other agencies) being simple and not particularly frustrating to deal with.
Or does that not count either cause Arkansas is such a similar state to new York? /s
In-The-Sticks experience with the DMV shows the same experience, down to the signs asking you to speak to a supervisor.
This tells me that perhaps your experience with DMVs is out of date. I do remember when the DMV was hours of waiting in uncomfortable plastic chairs, but that's no longer the case.
It's possible. Last I went was a few years ago in California and it was really terrible (many hour wait, not clean...). Good to hear that's not the case everywhere though.
Ronald Reagan liked to describe the sequence of actions that government typically takes toward private business: "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it."
Ironically it’s just these kinds of laws which may finally create a broader popular drive to re-decentralize. Those people looking for sex and drugs and whatever else aren’t going to just say, “well shit, the government said no, let’s head to church.” They’re going to look for alternatives, and alternatives will be there for them. It won’t be glossy Java-heavy “Web 2.0” of course, it will be Tor, Mastadon, and encrypted communications.
That’s the real strength of the internet, you cut of
F a head and two more grow back. If more stringent laws are passed, that just creates more drive for alternatives. It’s going to be ugly, but I remember when the internet was ugly, but worked. It won’t make people filthy rich overnight, but that’s not the net either. People still want to hook up, buy guns and weed, and just talk without Big Brother breathing down their neck. It will start small, and grow fast; after all we have a few decades worth of roadmap.
People who’ve moaned about people needing to look past a handful of sites are possibly going to get their wish. The total inability for governments to field sustainable technical solutions to shutting down commas has not changed.
"It won’t be glossy Java-heavy "Web 2.0" of course, it will be Tor, Mastadon, and encrypted communications."
The problem is that unless these alternatives are made brain-dead easy to use securely, they won't be used by the majority, or they'll be misused.
It's the same problem as with PGP, which is too complicated and too much of a pain for most people to use -- even for relatively computer savvy people to bother with.
Without many people using them, they won't be very effective or appealing alternatives.
The adaptation can just as easily be sour grapes (“I can’t get it therefore it is undesirable”) as anything else. People don’t always yearn for freedom, just as they don’t always yearn for a strong leader to take control.
Keep in mind the goal of the internet, decentralization initially.
ARPANET Definition. ARPANET was a pioneering wide area network (WAN) that was created by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (ARPA) in 1969. ... In order to provide reliable communication in the face of equipment failure, ARPANET was designed so that no one point or link was more critical than any other.
We have only partially implemented this at a systems level but have centralized at the information level. The internet can bring information to free people and allow people to live in 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' but it is being twisted to limit those things due to edge cases and extremes. The battle continues...
And if laws like this take down stuff that enough people care about, there will be alternatives. Given that Google, Facebook, Reddit and so on are vulnerable, they may be unable to provide them. But that just disrupts stuff to the next level.
They can find out who's running a node, send the cops and put them in prison. It's not hard. Look at China. The idea that we can technologically solve political problems is a bit of a fantasy. If the government wants to get you, they will.
everyone's OPSEC is weak. It is incredibly hard, if not impossible to have good OPSEC with the level of surveillance and tracking performed by companies like facebook and google.
Which is easier said than done. All it takes is one slip up for your hard work to be undone. One tiny mistake.
Advertisers are looking to de-annoymise you, three letter agencies are trying to de-annoymise you and all it takes is one minor slip upper being too unique (i.e. your combination of web browser, addons, screen size, IP address, etc).
It is almost impossible for a regular user to be anonymous, to have good opsec, for extended periods of time.
Sure, people screw up. So systems must fail nonfunctional/closed. Whonix is an excellent example. Tor runs in one VM, and user apps run in another VM. The Tor VM is not a router. There's no forwarding. It merely exposes Tor ports on a private network. So apps can have no Internet access except through Tor.
Regarding uniqueness, using personas that must remain unlinked on the same physical machine is very risky. Given the risk of guest-to-host breakout. And because hardware signatures may be visible remotely. If WebGL is enabled in VMs, Internet sites can link VMs on a given host (graphics card) that use the same virtual graphics driver. In particular, ones meatspace identity should never share a physical machine with any personas that's at all risky. They should also be compartmentalized on separate LANs.
So Debian and the Ubuntu family have the same signature. But Windows, OS X, Centos/Fedora, Arch/Manjaro and PC-BSD have different signatures. So one can use VMs with different WebGL signatures on the same hardware. But only for personas where linkage would be survivable.
In the US and most Western countries, it takes a lot of work to do what you’re describing, and there would be pushback. Going after a few people is no problem, but a whole population? No. China can do it because it’s an autocracy, with a long history of autocratic rule, strong central government and weak institutions. In the US politicians have to get re-elected.
