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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

That makes no sense.

By that logic, what are firefighters doing but censoring homes? What are koalas but a form of eucalyptus censorship? What is locking your front door but a form of censoring burglars?

No, just no. Censorship is preventing the transmission of ideas, nothing more, nothing less.

Deleting a file has nothing to do with transmission, and it's being done in response to a perceived threat, not its communicative meaning. (Like how you lock your house to protect from burglars.)

It's important not to abuse the term "censorship" -- if it means everything then it ceases to mean anything at all.

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...I'm less sure of this.

If Windows Defender was deleting any file named "Animal Farm.txt", that would be a form of censorship, right? It's preventing the transmission of a piece of political literature.

Now, what if it was deleting "Animal Farm - The Video Game.exe"?

Now, what if it was deleting the keygen for "Animal Farm - The Video Game"? What if the activation server for that game had gone offline, and this keygen was now the only way to play it?

My point being, software (and especially games) can absolutely be a way of expressing ideas, and if you block the software, that seems like censorship to me. I also think that some forms of censorship are fine and even necessary—I don't particularly like stumbling across porn unprepared—but it should be optional.

No, it depends on the intent.

If the intent is to prevent the transmission of ideas, then yes it's censorship.

If the intent is to protect from harm -- totally unconnected to ideas -- then no it's not censorship.

The reason Defender deletes keygens is that they're statistically associated with malware and viruses, as any Google search will terrifyingly immediately reveal. It clearly is falling under the "protect from harm" category as it's designed to do.

But so to answer your question clearly: deleting "Animal Farm.txt" because of the ideas inside is censorship (prevents it being transmitted). The video game would similarly be censorship if based on its content. But if it's deleting all keygens, regardless of content of their associated video games, then clearly not censorship.

Isn't the stated intent of most censorship to protect from harm?

I think the distinction is pretty clear.

But if it needs to be clearer: in censorship the harm is in the ideas themselves, the perspectives they spread.

In prohibitions that are non-censorship, it doesn't have anything to do with ideas. You aren't locking your door to prevent the idea of burglars entering your house.

But nearly every instance of censorship is framed as non-political and purely to protect people from harm.

Stated intent maybe yes, but that's only optics. Censorship is just meant to preserve the powers in control, be they good or bad.

What is political censorship?

Amazon literally deleted Animal Farm off of people's Kindle readers because of copyright[1]. We are so immersed in our ideology that we don't see that copyright is ideological and political.

Would it have really been better if it was because the text of it was considered problematic?

[1]: https://www.mercurynews.com/2009/07/17/amazon-deletes-kindle...

If Windows Defender was deleting any file named "Animal Farm.txt", that would be a form of censorship, right? It's preventing the transmission of a piece of political literature.

I guess, in some ways, you could consider it censorship. But without evidence that its being done specifically to target certain types of speech, as opposed to a side effect from some other goal, I'm not sure it's a particularly useful label.

What is anti-virus software in general but "censorship" of people's abilities to distribute viruses to whoever they want? What is an adblocker but software that "censors" someone's ability to advertise in the most effective way possible?

I think you are holding far too strict a definition of the word related to "transmission". If I am prevented from reading data I want to read, because some entity has decided they don't want me to read it, how is that not censorship?

Also, where are you even getting that defintion anyway? Looking up nearly every form of the word 'censor' I can think of, nothing speaks specifically to the transmission of ideas. Rather, every definition I can find that makes sense focuses on deletion.

You could even argue that anti-virus is a form of voluntary censhorship.

Come on, whitelist the folder where you keep your keygens, and windows defender won't interfere.

"Censorship, the changing or the suppression or prohibition of speech or writing that is deemed subversive of the common good" (Britannica). Voluntarily enabling a program to filter incoming data for personal convenience and safety is the opposite of the censorship. Like following self-imposed rules and restrictions is not a lesser freedom.

For less tech savvy users wiping keygens might be a safer default approach. I am pretty sure that keygens are an attack vector.

That will work... until you plug that drive into a fresh OS. Or you reformat and forget to unplug the drive before you set up the whitelist. Or it's spotted on a network drive by another PC running Windows Defender.

The filesaä are quarantined, not removed. You can restore them on the other OS as well.

> If I am prevented from reading data I want to read... how is that not censorship?

Of course it's censorship, they're preventing it from being transmitted to you. That's what I said.

> Also, where are you even getting that defintion anyway?

Literally the first sentence of the Wikipedia article [1]:

"Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information."

Speech and communication are transmission. There's no such thing as speech or communication with only a single party involved, as generally understood.

And no -- anti-virus is not voluntary censorship because it's not censorship at all. It's protection from harm, not a shield from comunicative ideas. If anti-virus were "voluntary censorship" then locking your home from burglars would be too. And that twists the word beyond any recognizable or useful meaning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship

Oxford Languages defines censorship as "the suppression or prohibition of any parts of books, films, news, etc. that are considered obscene, politically unacceptable, or a threat to security."

Mirriam-Webster defines a censor as "a person who supervises conduct and morals," adding a subdefinition as "an official who examines materials (such as publications or films) for objectionable matter." The relevant definition for "censorship" simply points at the word "censor," so it was not useful for my argument.

In any case, I think wiki is not 100% right according to the actual language authorities. MS deliberately categorizes otherwise-harmless piracy-related software as deletion-worthy, and that isn't censorship? When they clearly have a conflict of interest in that some of that software represents a direct threat to their revenue stream? C'mon dude.

> And no -- anti-virus is not voluntary censorship because it's not censorship at all. It's protection from harm, not a shield from comunicative ideas. If anti-virus were "voluntary censorship" then locking your home from burglars would be too. And that twists the word beyond any recognizable or useful meaning.

And what exactly is harm? Microsoft is making subjective judgements, which can not help but be political. Microsoft has decided that historical and obsolete keygens and ansi art are harmful. It would not surprise me if they deemed software to circumvent obsolete abandonware encryption harmful as well, since it violates the DMCA.

A better analogy would be if you let a third party security company examine the items in your home and remove what they deemed to be "harmful" to you.

> By that logic, what are firefighters doing but censoring homes?

Not inherently, but a disparity in which fires get prevented and put out and with which priority might constitute censorship, just as a disparity in which types of programs are identified as malware might. Many historical examples for the former instantly come to mind, from one library in alexandria to a sexual research institute in nazi germany. Not to imply that this is comparable to those in magnitude of course.

(On second thought, that also applies to systems of explicit censorship, where all media has to be approved but media that exhalts the government line has a higher chance of being approved than media that does not comment. As well as our system of implicit censorship, where every film company has to make money, but a movie produced with approval and material support of the US military has a significantly higher chance of being financially viable.)

Defender is deleting the app as a "potentially" unwanted application, a better analogy would be if firefighters went to every home and confiscated every "potential" source of ignition.

You can't transmit what you don't have.

Also, fwiw "transmission" is literally the name of torrenting software. Would your argument change if that was the package being removed instead of qbittorrent?

Most people use windows, windows comes with defender on by default, what's stopping the govt/some company from getting msft to remove programs and files they don't like?

> what's stopping the govt/some company from getting msft to remove programs and files they don't like?

Literally the capitalistic profit motive?

You know, companies generally try to avoid pissing off their customers and driving them to competitors for no good reason. If Microsoft started politically censoring users' content, that's probably the easiest thing they could do to send users away from Windows and Office over to Macs and Google Docs en masse.

That would be nice, wouldn't it? But consumers have never held msft to such a standard so far, so I wouldn't expect it to start now. Sure a small number of people trying to spread the files will care, but if it's implemented right 99.999% of users won't even know the censor exists.

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