Hacker News Reader

Comment by jackgavigan | Hacker News Reader

> Imagine, Facebook asking you to upload your passport before you do a live stream.

It wouldn't surprise me if a Western government (probably the UK's) considers introducing legislation to require exactly this in the not-too-distant future, most likely under the guise of preventing the spread of extremist propaganda.

If they do, companies like Facebook and YouTube will face a choice between acceding to the new regulation or incurring punitive fines. Guess which option most of them will choose?

The only way we can prevent George Orwell's vision from becoming a reality is if we build a more decentralised web. However, that also threatens the walled gardens' revenue streams.

View on HN

Also under the guise of child porn. Terrorism and "won't anybody think of the children" are a winning combo for people looking to restrict liberties.

It's been known for ages of course, there's always been a bogeyman, I like how there's some older articles out there that have predicted which bogeyman it was going to be today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...

Wikipedia cites this term being coined in 1988 ;).

If it's right-wingers, it'll be terrorism and "think of the children".

If it's left-wingers, it'll be hate speech and "think of the women/minorities".

Same outcome, of course.

I've yet to see any proposals from the latter camp whereas I've seen dozens of pieces of legislation successfully passed and attempt to pass from the former.

Are you aware of how the only people in the US to ever be successfully censored from the public internet for political (as opposed to legal) reasons are far-right websites? This literally happened in the last week; domain registrars (the only gateway the public has to critical public DNS infrastructure) decided to voluntarily censor various far-right websites citing "hate speech" as their justification.

There is, evidently, a fairly powerful and far-reaching population of left-leaning people who believe and are willing to act on the idea that the internet should be politically controlled. I've never heard of this being done successfully against, say, a communist website.

I find it very interesting that your comment was down-voted.

I also found this surprising. Cloudflare specifically always took the stance that it's not their place to censor the internet, which is why they permitted extremist/terrorist content[1] that people were pressuring them to remove. It amazes me that they kept that, but deleted the alt-right stuff. Now I think these alt-right websites are disgusting, but worse than ISIS?

[1]https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/18/cloudflare_ceo_rubb...

ISIS is a bad example. Antifa however? CloudFlare (and domain registrars) should either exile the extremes on either side, or allow either side. The situation right now is stupendously lopsided.

I don't see Antifa mowing down protesters in cars and spewing Nazi hate speech at Nazi rallies they organized though, so I'd say that's a false equivalency.

That's because the media has insanely lopsided coverage of recent attacks. It's a miracle no one's died from antifa attacks yet. Look up Eric Clanton. I also encourage you to watch actual footage of events starting with the Milo protest in berkely; the stuff I've been seeing on my news feed has nothing to do with reality.

Lopsided or not, Antifa protesters have not driven a car into 'the other side' have they.

I haven't seen any Nazis completely ripping up a town like Antifa did to Hamburg, so yes, actually, Antifa is shit and we should be rid of them sooner rather than later.

Cool, but that's not what I asked was it.

Also: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/12/german-police-...

Took me 2 seconds to find that. Your lack of knowledge isn't proof of something not existing.

Where Antifa discharging firearms at peaceful protesters? Or was that the neo-nazis?

'Violence is okay as long as my kind of people do it'.

I have nothing more to say to you.

No where did I say or imply that. No violence is okay. However classing the Antifa bogeyman in the same league as the group that fired guns into protesters and ran down people in a car does a massive disservice to yourself and your country.

Okay, and Antifa have seriously hurt multiple police offers. I seriously don't get how you can ham on the alt-right but defend Antifa, they're both fringe groups that shit over society's rules.

See anigbrowl's comment below for a well thought out response.

I'm also not defending Antifa, I'm commenting on your equivalence between the two groups. Sure, in the broadest of strokes they are the same, but so are all criminals. But one would not say a shoplifter is the same as a murderer.

> I seriously don't get how you can ham on the murderers but defend shoplifters, they're both fringe groups that shit over society's rules.

You're right, they have not done that particular, very specific, arbitrarily chosen thing. What is your point?

Having abundant first-hand experience of such events, I don't think your comment has anything to do with reality either. Poor as the quality of the coverage by the professional news media is, that by the amateur news media is just as bad or worse - framed and edited for maximum sensation with no attempt at fact-checking.

Yes, there has been some violence from the anti-fascist side, such as Eric Clanton being hit with a bicycle lock. But you are overlooking the fact that fight-wing activists have initiated more and more deadly violence in similar contexts: a stabbing at a rally in Sacramento last year; a shooting Washington state earlier this year; and of course the deliberate driving of a car into a crowd at Charlotteville a couple of weeks ago. Screenshots from Discord suggest that particular tactic was discussed in advance by RW activists.

I don't want to go on a Gish gallop or we'd be here all day, but I'd also encourage you to reflect on the fact that while Antifa supporters endorse the idea of punching nazis, popular figures with a public following on the far right have publicly and formally expressed the desire for civil war and even genocide. It's not possible to have a reasonable discussion without addressing that dichotomy.

Right, there was nothing political at all about the supression of wikileaks and torrent sites, it was just legal proceedings...

Wikileaks hasn't been censored at all; they're even still present on Twitter (unlike any far-right-leaning personality).

Wikileaks has been immorally persecuted in many ways, but direct censorship is not one of them.

Wikileaks is left-wing? I did not know this. The narrative, of late, has been that Assange is a fan of Trump and aided Putin's goal during the election.

Wings have lost all meaning.

I'm under the impression that the Daily Stormer was at least somewhat widely known. Is there a website of similar reach that, say, calls for a Communist revolution or sabotage of power plants in the name of environmentalism?

I get my only news about US politics from HN, so I genuinely have no idea.

> Are you aware of how the only people in the US to ever be successfully censored from the public internet for political (as opposed to legal) reasons are far-right websites?

It wasn't the GOVERNMENT that did this. That's the only thing that freedom of speech laws give you freedom from.

And, those sites weren't suppressed because they impacted politics; they were suppressed because they impacted profitability.

It's almost like the right needs some sort of "neutrality" laws that guarantee that internet websites and internet traffic they need can't be restricted.

I'm pretty far left in my politics, and I find the idea that these websites got kicked off quite worrying. However, I also find the centralization of internet services quite worrying.

I'm still old school enough that I run my own servers for exactly this reason.

I agree. I did not claim this is the government's doing.

I agree censorship of political content on private infrastructure is (and should be) legal; I also believe it's plainly immoral and should alarm people. I also believe that, given that the public DNS is government-controlled, it nominally belongs to the public and private entities like cloudflare should not be gatekeepers to it.

Of course, the best solution is for everyone to switch to some sort of crypto-based truly public DNS system like Namecoin, but that's not happening for a while.

Communists don't advocate genocide as a matter of dogma.

There is nowadays a great deal of censorship from the left in America. For example, shutting down of talks like

https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/07/21/richard-...

And there is plenty of opposition from "the left" itself against that kind of censorship

Whereas there's no opposition from "the right" against the Nazis for examples?

Obviously most of the right is against Nazis, but the modern conservative faction seems to draw a much higher ratio of violence and fascist rhetoric than the left.

When something happens, the media gives right-wing fascists the benefit of the doubt; "we don't know who he is", "he doesn't represent the movement", "he was scared", "he was attacked", "he's crazy", and once the proof is out they tend to draw false equivalencies with left.

That doesn't happen as much on the left - it's stigmatized full stop, no excuses. CNN's clickbait news will drag it out

>When something happens, the media gives right-wing fascists the benefit of the doubt; "we don't know who he is", "he doesn't represent the movement", "he was scared", "he was attacked", "he's crazy", and once the proof is out they tend to draw false equivalencies with left.

Does it though? Because I found the majority of the media except niche-oriented ones like FOX and Breibart do not fit that profile.

I should have said conservative media.

CNN had no problems attacking with everything they knew, but they avoided excess speculation and treated the Charlottesville attacker the same as Hodgkinson... which was my point.

I wouldn't classify "think of the children" as a right-wingers' club - Tipper Gore co-founded the PMRC.

It works because people actually do care about kids. The hard part is figuring out what will help them.

I wouldn't classify Tipper Gore as left wing either.

Whether Democrats are they are hardly left wing, and somebody who would found PMRC even less so...

Don't forget the "we have to stop online harassment" hysteria.

Don't forget neo-nazi "threat". The entire establishment media/propaganda apparatus coordinated their attack together to institute censorship regime on the internet.

They bind our hands and tape our mouths all under the guise of protecting us.

Germany has recently started requiring identity verification of this sort to obtain prepaid phone service. I was shocked to learn that, and find it frighteningly close to what China is doing.

The perps in the Paris attacks used Hungarian prepaid SIM cards. Of course the national defense agencies were so dumb they haven't noticed that a few guys registered hudreds of thoudands of accounts.

So making phones more traceable doesn't really work against terrorists, when there are so many incompetent people watching us :(

> Of course the national defense agencies were so dumb they haven't noticed that a few guys registered hudreds of thoudands of accounts.

Would you elaborate more on the background of this? Were the SIM cards sold and registered with a private company? I would suspect it is (or they were, if more than one). Which national defense agencies are you referring to? Did the national defense agencies search these records? Do you assume the agencies have access to this information by default? If it's through a private company, should the agencies have access by default? Do you think the private companies should have contacted the agencies if they didn't have access?

There are answers to these questions, some of them factual, some of them ethical or legal, and up for debate. In only a few situations I think it would be fair to call the agencies "so dumb". What leads you to use those words?

They are not dumb, they just don't work for the people and terrorism is not even a threat they care about. On the contrary, they consider the people a threat and consider terrorism a form of propaganda, that is useful to trick people into accepting all kinds of crap.

After learning a bit of Latin American history and what's goin on in Yemen, Syria, it'd seem appropriate to rethink our definition of 'terrorist'

http://budapestbeacon.com/news-in-brief/counter-terrorism-ce...

https://english.atlatszo.hu/2016/11/08/illegal-trade-of-burn...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-05/deutsche-...

In the communications act there was a provision about suspicious registrations reporting requirement.

The big providers (like Telekom, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telecom) have a well established working relationship with the defense agencies (they are called national security services, there are a few of them in Hungary, some are focusing on Internal Affairs (counter intelligence), some are on conspiracies, etc.

Thanks for the links. Assuming close cooperation between the telecom companies and the national security agencies is the direction you want things to go, there's definitely room for improvement. In the Bloomberg article, improvement is what's happening.

Expecting perfection out of the gate--or even at any given time--is setting someone up for failure. If this is something you care about, what you can focus on is that they're making changes to improve the situation: they're actively responding to correcting and preventing these kinds of mistakes in the future. Unless they're omniscient and omnipotent, it's really all they can do. This applies to work in general, not just security.

That "improvement" has been the only thing coughed up after staying silent for 3 full days. And of course no one ever loses their job in the Hungarian government for not delivering.

Eventually they'll fix this "security hole", but they won't magically become hyper-competent :/

In Russia, where there is a similar regulation, the solution is simple: find a homeless person with a passport, pay him to register a new mobile phone number under his name. There are also companies selling already registered phone numbers.

The same was(probably is?) true in India. I couldn't get a prepaid SIM without identification.

I would be pretty surprised. Not everyone in the UK has ID, and since the NIC scheme failure, it's less likely than ever to happen. ID isn't even required to vote at the moment...

That is a minor oversight that will probably be rectified at some point — other countries are doing it, it is already required in Northern Ireland, and in 2018 a pilot will be held introducing the requirement in a number of districts¹.

People likely won't resist it too much. We've had this identification requirement imposed upon us in the Netherlands a few years ago, and while there is valid criticism on this requirement, it passed. So to vote now you need to bring a valid ID. If the British government wants to do this with a minimum of fuss, they'll do what our government did and make the driver's licence a valid identity card. That way the majority of adults will already have their ID on them as a matter of habit (and won't complain).

Of course mentioning that it is needed to prevent Muslim voters from committing voting fraud (see¹…) will help push the bill trough.

1: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/27/voters-will-have-...

What is the objection to keeping track of who voted?

Its supposed to be a secret ballot.

Of course, most people tell their friends which way they voted, but that's their choice.

You mean you count not showing up to vote as an active vote choice that should be protected by secrecy? Because the secrecy of the physical votes is produced by the mixing of large numbers of indistinguishable containers prior to reading, not by the votes being handed in by strangers.

It has been tried, and on the whole, it wasn't a success at all: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_Cards_Act_2006

Only an extraordinarily confident and popular government would have another go (and it's not what the UK has now).

As for the voting scheme you describe, it's entirely voluntary, for 2018, and no council has signed up yet.

Things may move in that direction slowly, but to suggest that the UK is particularly close to requiring ID for internet accounts is downright silly I'm afraid.

> However, that also threatens the walled gardens' revenue streams.

However? Don't you mean, "as an added benefit"?

You can't fix this with tech.

No amount of decentralized web will help if ID is legally required to post things. Torrenting, encryption, and similar will simply be made illegal, since that's required for enforcement. Many of the established lobbies would support that, for the usual justifications.

You can only fix this by not letting the law start on this crazy slippery slope.

While I agree that it's critically important to not get on the slippery slope of laws that restrict internet freedom, I think a decentralized internet infrastructure would make censorship significantly more difficult for governments to impose.

Without centralised gatekeepers, the only viable way to censor the internet is to enforce laws on end-users, which is a daunting task for any government.

And technologically, at least two of the necessary elements for a global meshnet are here: protocols for decentralized addressing and routing, like cjdns >1, and protocols for peer-to-peer electronic value transfer between nodes, like Raiden >2. The only major missing piece of the technological puzzle, AFAICS, is a technology for cheaply deploying telecommunication backbone links.

>1 https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/blob/master/doc/Whitepape...

>2 https://github.com/raiden-network/raiden/blob/master/README....

DISCLAIMER: I am by no means a bonafide cryptopunk. I have contributed very little code and other meaningful technical work to privacy tech projects.

If it comes to having the same legislation in the UK, it'd likely ban decentralized web as well, perhaps requiring submitting your ID upon connecting to Internet every single time.

I think in the far future, cloud computing and the web will morph into a single entity where you will login to your cloud. This idea of identifying yourself prior to accessing your resources and having your resources connect to others doesn't seem far fetched anymore.

Especially with the way we are moving. Most people today are happy to use sso with services like facebook or google. Most people also have their real identify tied to their core profile they use to sign on to other services. The abstraction between the internet and the cloud is becoming more blurry to a internetizen that is technologically ignorant.

you do have to provide your ID to connect to the Internet, except for the prepaid anonymous sim cards paid for in cash.

Which are unavailable in many EU countries already.

Practically the only way of connecting anonymously to the Internet is the old-fashioned wardriving, or getting lucky and finding a "free wifi" which is not limited to the Web only.

NSTIC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Strategy_for_Trusted_...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com