Network connections are getting faster... Peoples typing/reading speeds are not...
One day it will be feasible for someone's phone to receive all messages sent by every other person on earth. They can then try to decode every message till they find one that their private key can decode.
You've now made the perfect privacy messaging system - by sending all messages to all users, no quantity of network packet sniffing/timing analysis/evil nodes can figure out who is talking to who.
This is exactly how bitmessage worked. The problem was that spammers would be able to flood the network with crap so to counter that it was added that proof of work must be completed to have your message forwarded on. The problem with this is it means you could not send a message from a mobile device because the PoW required was too high.
Also a method to reduce the amount of traffic required was called streams. Instead of reviving all messages, you would be able to know what stream the receiver is on and then the receiver would just listen to all messages on stream 5. This scales up infinitely since you can just balance the network so all streams have hundreds of thousands of users on them.
> spammers would be able to flood the network with crap
Would there be a legit motivation to do that? I get that it's a threat, but would it be possible to gain anything from DDOSing that network?
Seems like either a) you come up with a system for banning spam IPs, or b) the spammers improve the anonymity of the rest of the network by creating more noise for the messages to hide in.
If its easy and annoying then there does not need to be a motivation. Someone somewhere in the world will pump out terabytes of junk just to ruin the system for others.
And banning spam IPs is a kind of crap solution. Spammers would be running on home network IP spaces mostly so as those addresses shuffle around you end up banning most legitimate users as well.
I have found my self banned from many sites I am only visiting for the first time due to someone else who was on my IP address before.
Any state actors who like to snoop would be incentivized to cripple the snooping-free network for the low low price of a few high capacity links. (Or better yet very many low capacity links)
When you design a system for users to send short messages for free, there is always someone who says "I could split my hard drive into billions of tiny pieces and send them all!".
Thought experiment: There are 7e9 people on earth. Say they send 10, 100 byte messages per day, but that compresses 10x (modern text compression using big neural networks is amazing).
That works out to 7e11 bytes per day, or 8 Megabytes per second. That is nearly feasible today...
Battery life is a problem though. Your phone running hot the entire time trying to decrypt every message in the stream becomes the new limiting factor.
However, that's also 21 Terabytes per month. It'll be a while before that's feasible. Hopefully the population doesn't grow with our bandwidth capabilities.
I wouldn’t call that perfect because if your private key is ever compromised, all of your communication ever is compromised. Ideally data would be destroyed after a while, which isn’t really possible to do if everyone ever has the data. Broadcasting all messages everywhere would also be an incredible waste of resources, even if it was theoretically possible.
I think Signal should do something similar to this, just at a smaller scale. I've messed around making a game using this concept... An infinite 2D open world where people's chat messages appear over their heads. If they're speaking using the encrypted chat and they haven't shared their private key with you, it's gibberish. All messages and player locations are sent to all players, and you can zoom visibility in and out so you can't correlate location to find out who's talking to whom since everyone can theoretically see the whole map.
How does peer discovery work? Im assuming there must be some central server(s) to handle the bootstrap? I had a quick scan through the github projects, but couldnt see any high level documentation explaining the architecture. Would appreciate some insight!
Oh yeah, I understand that bit - but how does it connect to the DHT in the first place. I couldnt see any information on where it connects when you arent yet peered (i.e. how does it bootstrap).
I think "hackable" is an unfortunate description for a messaging platform as it can convey a lack of security/privacy.
Fwiw, the concept of a strictly insecure/zero-privacy messaging platform is interesting, but the word "hackable" wouldn't really help get the message across in that setting either. :)
Briar only works on Android so it's inherently flawed.
Of course, Cabal being written in javascript is also a major minus. As an oldschool Unix hacker, I don't really get the node.js fixation for command line tools. It's a certainty that they'll never be used by a significant chunk of knowledgeable, expert Unix users that want nothing to do with node.
Finally, there is no protocol documentation anywhere that I can see. This is yet another way that these modern tools fail spectacularly. In the golden age of the Internet, published protocol documentation that allowed for multiple clients to be developed was the norm rather than the exception. Which led to robust, long living protocols and services (e.g. IRC).
Even though we're being drowned in apps, this isn't happening today and we're worse off for it.
I don't brush aside Node programs just because they're Node. I brush them aside because they usually drag in a few MB of dependencies, and melt my (mid-level) computer with compilation (often OOM-killing everything else I'm doing on the machine, before dying to the OOM-killer itself) – but for all that, I then need to keep the entire thing on my hard drive because the compilation was mere caching, and hasn't given me an executable; I've still got the runtime overhead of Node, and everything that comes with it.
There are a few Python programs I also brush aside for this reason, though substantially fewer. Virtually every Node project I've seen is a spidery mess of dependencies bringing in dependencies bringing in yet more un-auditable dependencies; the worst Python tends to get is Tensorflow, and it's ready to run immediately (compiling C modules aside – though pip does that at installation time, making that a one-time annoyance for all but obscure C packages).
Melt your computer with compilation? A Node program?
More to the point, did you audit Tensorflow? If no, then what's your point to begin with? If yes, what made you conclude that auditing Tensorflow is doable, but usually simple NPM modules are "un-auditable"?
I didn't audit Tensorflow. But I don't install Tensorflow programs, anyway, because I don't have the resources.
The point isn't auditing, though; it's auditability. If it's auditable, then somebody's probably done it – but if it's not, you can't rely on just a spot check of a few dice-picked dependencies.
There are hundreds of them, and they are very large, and many have no clear purpose, and they keep getting new versions that change seemingly nothing, but actually change a lot.
I wouldn't describe myself as that, but I think I'm a little bit past noob at this point.
I don't "brush aside" a program because it's node, but it's definitely a strike against it. I don't like dealing with the massive amount of dependencies that always seems to follow along with it.
I can't speak for Perl or Python, but for Ruby I have never seen a single Ruby tool that pulls in anything close to the same order of magnitude of discrete dependencies that some JS tools end up doing. I of course stand to be corrected.
I don't mind installing tools like Rollup and TypeScript. I do very much mind installing tools like Webpack and Babel.
> If anything, lots of small dependencies is more Unix-y than one big dependency.
Of course, as evidenced by much-used programs such as curl and git having 400 dependencies each and OpenSSL being shipped as separate libraries for every single crypto function.
We've all taken some git precommit hook that a coworker has helpfully provided, and rewritten it in bash so you don't need the entire node runtime to append a ticket number to a string.
> I don't really get the node.js fixation for command line tools.
It's simply because most developers are web developers. They use the programming language and tooling they're familiar with. I do also wish that there wasn't so much of a move to webify everything, particularly since web dev is so prone to constantly changing fads and dependency sprawl. It tends to lead to code/software that breaks all the time.
I’d say that JS desktop/web applications are becoming more prevalent due to most alternative GUI frameworks not being as simple and feature rich. I’d also say that this is most likely a side effect of most UI resources being targeted towards JS and therefore reducing the attention all other GUI tooling receives.
I'm glad to see people care and engineer new, more resilient platforms like this. Nevertheless, despite being generally anti-centralization and pro-free speech I have to conclude:
Large-scale social networks political bias should not be fixed by making social networks more free, it has be fixed by making social networks less free.
When "conservatives" call for violence or actual hatred (not just antipathy or disagreement) they must be stopped.
When "liberals" storm people and destroy their careers and lives for merely using wrong vocabulary or having and expressing an unpopular (even plain wrong) opinion they should be stopped too.
Large-scale social networks meant for general audience, those websites which have serious effects on off-line lives, are the new streets and they have to be policed the same way streets are. We don't want to live where street violence is a norm.
Multimedia, end-to-end encryption, offline chat history, and having all those features actually available and usable by the average user (just having a persistent identity is something IRC makes trickier than it needs to). You may decide those are misfeatures, but most people don't.
IRC servers are peer to peer, so it's a kind of archipelago architecture. But they trust each other so it has to be coordinated and built on trusted relationships.
Does IRC have "conversation threads?" To me a conversation thread necessarily entails a hierarchical chain of posts and the replies to those posts as "child nodes". All conversations are inherently "tree structures" if done right, imo.
That's tentative I feel. Anyone can go to https://webchat.freenode.net/ and join a channel someone posted the name of, "join ##channel_name_here on Freenode". Registering with the nickserv and what not? For some I'd agree but it's not entirely obscure.
Downside: It doesn't support Tor and they don't seem to have any plan for that. So it's trusted-friends-only, IPs are always visible. Which is pointless for me, as a person trying to build healthy online friendships from behind Tor.
Upside: I was afraid it's a reaction to Parler being deplatformed. And then I thought maybe it was a side-project of Urbit. But looking at the Values page: "No nazis, no TERFs, no alt-right—or anyone friendly with them"
What part of "peer-to-peer" and "off-grid" is made better by allowing a third party to choose which people can and cannot use the platform?
You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either you build a fully decentralised platform where humans self-moderate by selecting which communities they participate in, or you create a walled garden that you moderate but that becomes more centralised when you do so.
Why would anyone care about using a p2p nonstandard messenger except for free speech? This app implies it will moderate certain groups. If you’re saying something uncontroversial you can just use a bigtech app.
I like cabal because I can read & write messages when I'm offline or there's no internet. It's also nice because I can start a private chat room for my friends without anyone needing to host and maintain any servers or infrastructure.
This is disgusting - it implies that you should pick and choose your friends based on political affiliation, which not only is extremely (and intentionally) divisive, but also provides no room for guiding these individuals back to a more moderate political stance.
Without being friends (or at least interacting with) with those who have been ostracized by society, how, exactly, do you propose to try to get them to change their minds?
I'm also curious as to how they plan to enforce this constraint - Cabal appears to be completely decentralized, correct?
> pick and choose your friends based on political affiliation
I think this is the saddest part of what's been happening recently. We don't need to separate ourselves from people with different viewpoints. I'm lucky enough to be friends with people on the left and the right, but I think that's only because we stay away from politics. In fact, it's something that used to be a Christian ideal - to be able to maintain a courteous friendship with someone you are fundamentally at odds with (See: Song of Roland, Christian & "Saracen" Knights).
It's not often something I see folks right of center doing, but it seems like a ton of people left of center have been distancing themselves from people with whom they disagree too strongly. It's too bad. We need to open up to more discourse, not less.
Is there a difference? The reasons we hold our opinions are fundamentally just another set of opinions. Unless you're talking about something more fundamental - in that case, yes, we can still be friends when our first principles are opposed. It's just harder.
I think it comes down to just how tolerant we're willing to be. It's easy to be tolerant when the stakes are low; who cares if someone is doing something somewhere else that makes us uncomfortable? The Christian ideal is to be tolerant of someone who is actively doing us harm.
> The Christian ideal is to be tolerant of someone who is actively doing us harm.
That seems like a foolish ideal that has the end result of you being marginalized, with people who would do harm to you and others gaining control of society. Frankly, it sounds like just another system of control invented by religious leaders.
People who actively do us harm should be swiftly and firmly disabused of the notion that what they're doing will ever be tolerated. Anything less is folly.
Tolerance doesn't mean you never resist. Tolerance means you're willing to have a conversation, and you can be friends in spite of fundamental differences.
Christians who live up to the ideal are willing to have a civil relationship with anyone. That's the point. That's tolerance.
It means you actually know the other person, and you're not making (possibly misinformed) assumptions about them. The next step in the relationship may very well be to 'firmly disabuse them', but it's not the first step.
I don't think that's the definition of "tolerance" that most people think of. To me, it means to allow someone to do something that you don't agree with or thing is harmful. Not to get to know them and then convince them not to do it.
Getting to know them and convincing them not to do it implies that you will not tolerate their actions, but have wisely decided that a soft touch is likely to get you better results.
> yes, we can still be friends when our first principles are opposed. It's just harder.
If someone tells me they think I’m fundamentally a lesser person than them because of skin color, just because that’s how god made us, that’s not a fruitful base for a good relationship.
Keep in mind the quote was about Nazis. Being able to stay friends with a Nazi is not something many people can do, such as non-whites and non-christians.
Trying to change the mind of someone who believes you deserve to die is painful at best and not worth the time.
They also don't give "alt-right" a voice, and that is a term that is often just a perjorative for "conservative." We also know how many people use something like "fascist" to mean "person I don't like" rather than its historical meaning. Even for Nazi's, it's extended to mean white supremacists of all kinds and even white supremacy can mean different things depending on how far left you are. Imagine the reverse, a platform where the right bans "socialists, antifa, and communists" and you see the issues. If people were a lot less loose with their definitions it would be less of an issue.
Also its's a little funny to see these platforms rise up that are censorship resistant...whose intended audience is the least likely to be censored for their ideas on the mainstream platforms. Part of the reason all these alt platforms get the Nazis is because of this...its like building an alternative for Reddit because it censors leftists.
>I love the idea of a site that doesn't give Nazis a voice. This is apparently somehow a controversial idea.
Given that actual Nazi's were a historical phenomenon that ended in 1945, and that bona fide neonazis are few and far between), this is code for:
"I love the idea of a site that doesn't give people I disagree with a voice. This is apparently somehow a controversial idea."
Yes. It always has been. Orwell called it even back in 1944 (where real Nazi's still existed):
"It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else."
Oh come on. There was a rioter wearing a "Camp Auschwitz" sweatshirt in the Capitol this week. Nazis are very much still around and they were there in DC.
>Oh come on. There was a rioter wearing a "Camp Auschwitz" sweatshirt in the Capitol this week.
Yeah, so? What part of this is not already covered by my "few and far between" comment?
And what part of that anecdotal isolated example proves that Nazis are anything like a real presense in US politics, or that the people deplatformed and silenced are kept to Nazis or people of that kind?
Would you point to some persons wearing a "class war", "kill the rich" or some questionable communist leader (e.g. Stalin or Mao), or "Camp Gulag" t-shirt in a liberal rally as excuse to deplatform people?
(And I say that as a European, sympathetic to communism, leftie - just one that can't stant cant).
Was Donald Trump - a ho-hum president compared to Reagan as concerning the social damage his Reaganomics did, and less hawkish compared to Clinton, Bush, and Obama - a nazi (and thus 40% voting for him Nazi supporters)? Or is it just either hysteria or a code for "people we disagree with politically" (and can use the real-world equivalent of Godwin's law to to yield political wins over)?
I'm trying to understand how to channel what you said. Are you saying that being extremely against Nazis is bad because being extremely anything is bad and we should only have non-extreme feelings?
My problem is with those who stand against "extremists" (ZOMG Those silly Nazi's) while supporting "extremists" (AntiFA/BLM groups responsible for dozens of riots, hundreds of millions in damage, many dead and federal buildings ransacked/burned, etc...)...
Why is it hard to understand how hypocritical it is of most groups screaming about the DC riots when those same groups are tactly supportive of worse over longer periods of time?
At no point did I say "being anti nazi" is bad... I said being anti-extremist while being pro-extremist is... questionable.
> My problem is with those who stand against "extremists" while supporting "extremists"
It sounds like you see an equivalence between "rioting" and "rioting". I get what you're saying, but I'm also pretty sure that the people you're calling hypocrites have a more nuanced view than that and differentiate based on context and cause and don't consider "white supremacist Q-conspiracy-lie-believers rioting" (which this was) to be equal to "people rioting because police officers keep killing in circumstances that don't warrant it without serious repercussion" (which the BLM riots were).
We can also note that many of the BLM riots only turned violent _after_ local police started shooting gas, pepper balls, and rubber bullets at crowds. But even if that weren't the case, the causes and contexts would still be different.
It seems to me like the people you're talking about are in fact neither anti-extremist nor pro-extremist. They're anti-white-supremacists and anti-police-getting-away-with-murder. Those are not contradictory positions.
> groups screaming about the DC riots
I haven't seen anyone screaming about context-free "DC riots". I see people screaming about "white supremacist Q-anon-lie-conspiracy-believers rioting in DC trying to capture or kill congresspersons and overthrow a (mostly-if-you-ignore-voter-suppression) fair democratic election" and I think that makes a big difference.
It's not the riots that these people are worried about. It's the reason for the riots, and the reasons are not equal.
What's nuanced about supporting violence/rioting/looting/etc while fighting violence being hypocritical? My main point remains "you were silent while 100's of millions in damage was done and now you're mad about 6 hours of less violent protests and a single building being damaged?"
> reasons aren't equal
Reasons aren't equal... but there is plenty of reason to pick apart the hypocrisy WAY beyond DC vs Portland riots. I can point out many "police brutality" stories that aren't really when facts come out. (IE: "hands up, don't shoot"). I can do the same to most of the 'non contradictory' positions.
It's important to stand up for what you believe in peacefully... it's also important to try and not be a hypocrite while doing so.
I stand against the hypocrisy in the other positions you mentioned as well even if not mentioned in detail. The hypocrisy destroys the message.
This is a slippery slope that people somehow either conveniently forget the nature of; are willfully ignorant of; or don't see over the horizon of roses for.
Let's take eugenics as an example (intentionally controversial given you brought up the Nazis); and in this example all we're doing is replacing "voice/free speech" with "eugenics". Everyone agrees someone policing who gets to reproduce or not is a bad idea because such policing is impossible to do objectively/fairly/morally/ethically.
Why is such policing any easier or less important for political views and discussion? It's not. Policing people's opinions and silencing, censoring, or removing content is just as impossible. Is some message a very out of taste troll, sarcasm, some inside joke, intentional smearing, discussion of a controversial topic? Well, any sense of objective discussion there goes out of the window because a _human_ has to police it and until we can quantify with exact precision and accuracy through a machine the meaning behind human communication (we can't yet(?)) this is an impossible (for now) problem to solve.
We cannot even ask Siri/Alexa to do complicated tasks.
All Nazi books should be burnt since we don't want certain information existing in the world. I actually think rounding up all Nazis and putting them in labor camps might be okay. Heck, what about actually killing nazis? Is there some kind of political idealogy where taking these actions against minorities is supported and allowed?
(a) what is "hate speech" is a vague term to be filled by whoever yields the power to define it (could be anything from talk against religion, to conservative worldviews, to class-war ideas, to racist beliefs, to complaints against politicians, and so on).
(b) what is a minority can also be vague and politically determined as opposed through raw numbers, and the power of a minority could be more than its size tells us (e.g. the 1% is a class-based minority, but most don't have an issue with going against them. Similarly, in certain cases it's one or more minorities that have the power against the majority - e.g. the fewer white-spanish descendants over indians and mulatos in some Latin American countries, or the white 20% against the blacks 80% in appartheid South Africa).
So, no, it's not clear cut that it's "in a society's interest to limit hate speech against minorities".
Hate speech is when you promote violence or persecution in some other way against any of the groups you mentioned. I am not sure what point A has to do with what hate speech is.
That is not what I am discussing. I am making a statement about how to design a stable society with humane values. From the perspective of the society. Instead you went to make judgements about my personal beliefs.
Please stop taking HN threads further into flamewar. It's not what this site is for and we ban accounts that do it, regardless of what they're arguing.
Only on a tech site would it be considered flamewar to suggest that not all XX issues need to be subordinated to XY issues. Remember this next time a GamerGate or similar issue arises. Our community has a serious problem with sexism and I'm sad to see this conversation go this way.
I agree that cis women and trans women (and trans men!) have distinct problems but I've never heard of the concept of "female erasure" outside of people claiming that it exists (usually accompanied by other opinions that are definitely transphobic). Trans people are usually very mindful of the differences between them and cis people of their gender, sometimes so much that it causes them self-doubt.
plenty of transmen that many of us are trying to empower too.........
the non-sexist trans inclusivity movement overlapped with the female inclusivity movement
trans exclusionary feminism is considered radical, its what the R in Terf stands for. It means it doesn't have consensus.
yes, some positions and status will go to males that are transwoman instead of females. I don't think there is any coordination or plot in this to "erase females".
(I feel like this concept is different across English speaking countries, in America the movement has landed on the concept that we have separated sex and gender, so there are two sexes which remains binary: male and female, and there are non-binary genders which includes but it not limited to man and woman designations, and they don't have to match the sex. Sometimes I see people in the UK getting into semantics issues with an American audience, whether they are purposefully being insensitive or not.)
>All traffic is encrypted using a symmetric key, meaning that anybody who has the cabal://abcdef key can read cabal network traffic.
If you're even considering this, look at https://tox.chat/ instead. That one's been around for a while (thus mature) and actually has full forward secrecy.
tox was accused of having a poor crypto implementation / playing silly buggers with libsodium. I've tried it on android, works ok but most apps at the time seemed older. not sure where tox stands re community liveliness but its certainly a good start on p2p messaging, my claims notwitshtanding.
>tox was accused of having a poor crypto implementation
The actual flaw: If _your_ *private* key is stolen, your friends can be impersonated to you.
Hardly worth the infamy.
There's a bug open on this, the solution is known, the opportunity for a fix, and when it will be made live, will be the next time a protocol break ("flag day") is necessary for other reasons.
Problem with forward secrecy is that it doesn't really work well for a use case like cabal. You want to be able to join a cabal and read all the past conversations.
According to the FAQ there is a prototype implementation of it in one of the clients, and apparently once that stabilizes they will standardize it on other clients. Looks like it’s a work in progress, not an oversight
I downloaded the windows zip of cabal-cli, unzipped and tried to run the executable but nothing happens. Forgive me but this looks crappy, not even amateuristic.
Part of what the world needs is not just the "app", but an app that's Open Source MIT License, so everyone has complete freedom, rather than the original authors being able to dictate certain terms going forward, and maintain control.
I've done 90% of the difficult coding in https://quanta.wiki, which is MIT License. I just need to add the P2P part. Maybe I'm sounding like Ali G. when he invented the "flying skateboard" and had everything solved except for the "physics". :)
Oh wow! I must have missed that somehow! Very interesting!
I have been a fan of Matrix for a long time and have been very excited by all of the progress made recently! Particularly, the new UI experience for E2E encrypted channels is amazing! You managed to get solid security without sacrificing usability.
Thank you for your dedication to Matrix and its community!
this is why i resist new chat apps....signal is tiding me over until p2p capable, e2e by default matrix is ready to go on desktop, android and ios...then i will be ready to use, donate, buy vector hosting, and evangelize oodles.
That seems fair. Though, personally, as long as it can federate, I am less concerned about p2p. Some very nice features are a lot harder (impossible?) to make work in a pure p2p setup whereas federation seems to give you the best of both worlds. (AKA the benefits of an always-available server without the vender lock.)
That is actually the big thing I don't like about Signal. If Open Wisper Systems decides tomorrow to turn off their server, everyones' Signal client are broke...
If you want the best Web App in the world take my codebase (quanta.wiki) and built on top of it. The whole thing is a simple tree structure, on MongoDB, using a 'path-based' tree so you don't even have to learn a specific relational database structuring, and you can put something else on the back end to replace MongoDB. If you like Java+TypeScript+React then I've given you a 250,000 loc head start.
The User Guide and screencasts only show about 10% of the functionality, so you really don't have any way to judge it, but you can still guess can't you.
There has been a number of HN submissions about decentralization and Internet freedom today, probably as a reaction to the deplatforming of Parler: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25706993
But if architected for openness without central censorship chokepoints, such affinity declarations can’t alone prevent participation. Mastodon’s tech is used by Gab, for example.
At best this can:
* influence the observable qualities of the closely-collaborating dev community – who’ll have to outwardly project these values.
* lead to the prioritization of decentralized user-driven moderation features, which still allow the disfavored groups to communicate with other willing audiences, with minimized impact on unwilling audiences.
> Saving grace is most are probably too stupid to read hacker news.
I wouldn’t make this assumption. I have seen plenty of modern conservative opinion around here, and some of it really does align with ideas of white male supremacy and support for fascist authoritarian leadership. It’s easier to find on “new” on posts that aren’t strictly technology related. They are definitely here.
Of course, people are entitled to their opinions. 99.9% of normal liberal or conservative Americans aren’t going to get violent or take part in an insurrection. Nothing wrong with a having and expressing opinions.
But to me, the concern here isn’t even what happened a few days ago at the Capitol. My concern is the mass radicalization of the right wing of politics, and therefore people, in America. This radicalization is mainstream because the media outlets pushing the ideas are themselves mainstream, more mainstream than you think.
E.g. my family members, who are not deep down anything truly radical like the Q rabbit hole, but still believe it’s okay for Trump to be “joking” about 12 more years, running contrary to elementary school civics lessons that were supposed to be universal common ground. They got these ideas from America’s number one cable news channel, not some obscure Internet forum.
QAnon, as malignant as it is, is a relatively small movement even among Trump supporters - probably around 1/4 of his followers.
Don't believe me? Go read thedonald.win. After you recover from the shock of realizing that many of them are planning/hoping for another assault on democracy on the 17th, you'll see that the attitude toward QAnon is not one of approval .
And I've never seen a QAnon-related or -influenced post on HN. Clearly, there are Trump supporters, although they're a very small minority here.
So yes, (Trump|QAnon) evaluates true on HN, but only because of the first term in the expression.
> QAnon, as malignant as it is, is a relatively small movement even among Trump supporters - probably around 1/4 of his followers.
I have, very much to the destruction of my soul, looked thedonald.win. It's filled to the brim with Q'isms. Donald trump himself has repeated Q'isms, and has retweeted Qanon-based tweets on numerous occasions(https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/12/trump-tweeting-qano...). At this point, you can not separate Trump supporters from the QAnon crowd, they are virtually the same crowd, not with the big T himself retweeting (well not anymore, I give you that) QAnon bunk.
I also have to say, for somebody that was clamoring for me to show the very specific amounts of very specific evidence, you counter claim now has nothing of the sort of rigor you expected of me.
Agreed, context here is timely for sure. Large groups perhaps trying to secretly coordinate online to stage an '' event''?
Web technologies for this are abundant; and yet so very easily infiltrated.
End to end encryption is redundant if you've no idea who to trust.
Beware evolution's pruning. It optimises for survival (and as a consequence, reproduction and ruthlessness), which is often at odds with what people value.
On the other hand, the chat system that "survives" is probably the best one to use in the long-term.
Features, integrations, and a slick UI are great, but without a stable community of maintainers the project if probably not a good candidate for long-term use.
An open, federate-able messaging protocol is also a good thing to have! (email, XMPP, Matrix)
It got so popular because it was the only available language to do web scripting. It's not that complicated. It's easy to "win" when no competition is allowed. You can argue that there's CoffeeScript, etc, but every other language is still a second-class citizen in the web ecosystem. WebAssembly may change that once it's stable and mature enough, though again, you have the problem that the DOM APIs were designed for JavaScript, which will create an impedance mismatch with other languages.
> WebAssembly may change that once it's stable and mature enough, though again, you have the problem that the DOM APIs were designed for JavaScript, which will create an impedance mismatch with other languages.
Although the DOM itself likely isn't going anywhere unless you manage to swap out HTML, an alternate set of APIs might be achievable.
That said, the impedance mismatch would have to be particularly painful for a domain targeted by another language for such a set to gain traction.
IMO, JavaScript became the most popular language in the world because:
1) Everyone with a modern, full-featured browser already has it. There's nothing to install. It's the modern equivalent of the built-in BASIC in the early microcomputers.
2) "View Source" lets you see exactly how something was done at the click of a mouse. This is invaluable for learning.
3) Writing it and debugging it just requires a text editor and the browser mentioned before, not some baroque toolchain. You can even modify it and rerun it from directly within the browser, most of which have fairly sophisticated JS debuggers built in nowadays.
4) Rich text, GUI widgets, networking...all that stuff is already baked into the browser cake. You don't need to fool around with a separate libraries.
5) Interpreted, so iterative development is fast.
6) Forgiving (some would say "sloppy"), so beginners don't get overwhelmed with type systems and similar shizzle ("Why can't I just add 1 and 0.5? WTF?") Of course, this also brings problems along with it. No free lunches.
Some other languages, on some platforms, have some of these features, but none to my knowledge has all of them.
For example, Linux systems do come with C, and do have the source code available, but looking up the line of source that produced exactly what you're seeing on the screen in, say, an X program, is a far more involved process than just right-clicking it and choosing "View Source".
Node, in turn, became popular because JavaScript is popular.
Probably not. JavaScript's so popular because the web is the universal cross-platform target, and Node.JS has a slightly lower barrier-to-entry to Hello World than learning a new language. You'll want to study energetics to understand that.
> Only about a third of the way through, but I've picked up some great insights in general. Nothing about JavaScript (yet).
The next book you might want to read looking for the same sort of insights ought to be "The Plausibility of Life", which explores the mechanisms of evolution's generativity.
I get your point, but a product is only bought or used if people value it in some way (whether for good reasons or bad reasons), so product evolution has people’s values built into the process.
People’s actions reflect their true values. The sad truth is that people paying $1000 for digital sheep value the immediate gratification of the game more than other uses of that money at the moment of purchase.
Addictive products designed to exploit our baser instincts are dangerous, so again, I get and agree with your point, but I think it’s important to remember that voluntarily purchased products are by definition valued by the people who purchase them. The values of the people purchasing products are an intrinsic part of product evolution.
Not sure what you mean by non-federated... Qbix can support many protocols including foaf, matrix, scuttlebutt, DID and so on. You can make it as federated as you wish.
I am not really a big fan of end-to-end encryption for solving society’s main communication problems, I think people (pseudonymous or not) should be accountable for their speech. But I do believe in empowering people and uniting communities. If you want to run your own social network out of your own servers, you should be able to. The fact that the software to power user friendly communication platforms is scarce is a big problem. They extract rents. They cut you off if they don’t like what you have to say. And worst of all, they concentrate power in the hands of a few people regarding what decisions are to be made. That is actually the source of all this arguing.
If you’re arguing whether we should have Title I or Title II, or whether we should use Facebook or Google, Microsoft or Amazon, Democrat and Republican, you’ve already lost. Open source collaboration beats closed source competition every time in the end. Everyone can host their own network and label the map however they want, and so on. No fighting over flags or one size fits all policies!
> I think people ... should be accountable for their speech.
There is certainly some speech which is and should be illegal, but if you optimize communication systems for "accountability" you might end up in a situation which is worse than what we have now.
“There is freedom of speech, but I cannot guarantee freedom after speech.” ― Idi Amin
>I am not really a big fan of end-to-end encryption for solving society’s main communication problems, I think people (pseudonymous or not) should be accountable for their speech.
I think there ought to be an on-line analogue to two consenting adults talking in a private room in one of their homes. Unless I misunderstand you, it doesn't sound like that on-line capability is compatible with your statement.
This site doesn't render properly on mobile. Many of the blocks flow off the screen to the left and right.
I was intrigued, but like many projects, the first impression I got was of sloppy development unable to even test one of the most common ways to view their site and it drove me away.
Do you use edge on mobile? I haven’t heard of anyone using that before, so was curious if you missed the mobile part of the post or if you do use it mobile.
One problem is that if you're not on the extremes, why do you need a new p2p chat app? If I have mainstream opinions then mainstream apps probably work just fine.
There's plenty of reasons to avoid the "mainstream" apps that have nothing to do with your political views. Decentralization, control over your own data, lack of intrusive advertising, informational hygiene, and privacy are good enough reasons by themselves.
I'm a Sanders supporter and as Left as it gets but there is serious denial about the past 6 months of coordinated violence in major city cores from militant groups that claimed to speak for me. We have a problem with Big Tech and sectarian violence in this country no matter which way you look at it.
>even moreso his largely-White and not >particularly race conscious base of support
This is baseless and such a slap in the face to the massive Latino, Middle Eastern, and Asian constituency in the Sanders coalition who worked their butts off to deliver him multiple states. I won't engage with any comments designed to inflame racial conflict and have flagged your post.
Why is excluding the far-right a thing associated specifically with the far-left? Would politically moderate people not also want to exclude eg. Nazis?
Because the definition of Nazi is applied so liberally that Winston Churchill himself would receive the label from those who use it in today's discourse.
I don't trust that your definition of an "actual nazi" isn't significantly colored by your own prejudices. That we could actually agree on who are the extremists in society who are equally damaging.
> Would politically moderate people not also want to exclude eg. Nazis?
They do.
But I would say take a look at dating apps in California, for example, and see just how many people are telling Moderates and Independents to stay the hell away from them.
Being in the middle is great for lobbying because your ideas are bipartisan and nothing else is getting through Congress, but for real life right now, its extremes only.
Please don't cross into personal attack in HN threads. That's not cool here. Also, please don't bring in someone's personal details like that. That's a form of personal attack and we're trying to avoid the online callout/shaming culture here.
The namespace is pretty cluttered at this point. Most posts on HN about a new app/project/library/etc have at least one "name is already taken by ...." post under them.
The word Cabal comes from Hebrew. It probably grew about because outsiders perceived the people who studied Jewish mysticism as being part of some secret society.
The 1st amendment ensures that the government may not stop you from saying what you want.
This is a separate issue from private companies removing/banning you. Each company has their own right and freedom to be as dickish as they want with regard to deleting your account etc - but that is not related to the 1st.
I’d like to address this, since it’s a common retort meant to shutdown discussion on censorship. It’s disingenuous , because “First amendment” is so essential to American culture, that it means both the literal First Amendment to the constitution AND more importantly, the American principle of free expression.
Ether you are aware that people are appealing to free expression as a principle, or you are unaware that free expression is more American than apple pie. That’s why I say this retort is disingenuous.
So the legal scope of the literal first amendment doesn’t help the discussion on what people and companies should be doing.
The discussion is about American values and if people, companies and the government should be living up to them. And that’s what people are trying to debate when they say “first amendment”.
This. The companies are behaving in an un-American manner. What they are doing is deeply selfish and cynical. They should be criticized for their behavior and shamed for it. We should not excommunicate members of our society even if the things they say are reprehensible. And yes, the companies have a right to do it, but there are plenty of things you can do, but should nevertheless be shamed for doing.
> The companies are behaving in an un-American manner.
Those are transnational private companies. What is stopping others from claiming they have been behaving in an un-Chinese manner or an un-European manner or an un-Russian manner so far? How is a naive notion of nationalism of capital an argument of how such entities should behave when they operate in most recognized nations with different ideological and regulatory frameworks?
If you're going to sell your services and goods here, you need to comport to the cultural norms HERE.
> What is stopping others from claiming they have been behaving in an un-Chinese manner or an un-European manner or an un-Russian manner so far?
Nothing.
> How is a naive notion of nationalism of capital an argument of how such entities should behave when they operate in most recognized nations with different ideological and regulatory frameworks?
They can and do change business practices to fit the region.
> They have and do change their practices to fit the global region they operate in so the "un-american" critique would be moot.
I'm not sure what this means. They are behaving poorly HERE. I am not criticizing them for the crazy stuff they do elsewhere. That's an entirely different conversation.
That a critique of their behavior should not depend on the locality (an ideological statement) much less a locality that represents about 1.9% of the world area and 4.2% of the population.
> So the legal scope of the literal first amendment doesn’t help the discussion on what people and companies should be doing.
If you're going to go down this road, then you must address government compelled speech, and the limits on the control of private property. I've found that the "private corporations are censoring me" crowd, don't want to engage with this obvious outcome, or pay lip service by saying, "Make [insert big tech company here] is a utility!", again without thinking through the implications.
The compelled speech problem is obvious. Give me your car, I want to put a bumper sticker on it. If you don't let me, or you take it off, you're censoring me.
This is an absurd request, it's your car, you can control what goes on it. Same if I demand to have a book club meet in your living room. It's your living room. Just because you invite some people over, doesn't mean that everyone has a right to come in. It's private property, and you can express yourself by who you let in, and who you don't. Twitter, Facebook, etc are no different. They're private property. No one has a right to have an account and demand an audience.
Now let's take the utility argument, since a utility would mean that everyone needs to be allowed right? Well, a utility is a highly regulated government monopoly. These regulations increase the barrier to entry into these spaces, and effectively eliminate all competition. In fact, protected monopoly status is often the trade for utility status.
These concerns of expression versus private property rights are new, they've existed from very beginning. While the prohibitions on government, but not private actions, may sometimes be frustrating, it's a workable, and consistent, solution.
So you accept that I can control your private property?
I’m easy to contact on the internet. I’ll be expecting all your social media credentials emailed to me by the end of of the day. Failure to do so, will be censoring me.
Freedom of speech is a guiding principle that predates the United States, and the first amendment, by a few millennia.
And yet every discussion about free speech online contains a few comments about the first amendment’s narrow legal scope. Sure, that’s right, but freedom of speech does not have a narrow legal scope; it’s a much broader concept, and it is global in nature.
In almost every case online, the discussion is about the global ideal of freedom of speech, not about US law.
> In almost every case online, the discussion is about the global ideal of freedom of speech, not about US law.
In the recent events in the US, a lot of people have (mistakenly, IMO) cited the first amendment for protection of speech many others don't like. But those protections afford no help against private actors. In that context GP makes a lot of sense bringing up this point.
Bringing it back to the context of the original reply: it applies to protection from the government, not protection from private individuals when you make speech which offends those individuals.
That's why I linked the book case. Hawley cites the first amendment, but he's in a contract with a private entity to publish the book. Barring contract disputes, there is no first amendment case that the publisher must distribute his book.
Let's say an Amazon warehouse worker speaks with the local newspaper about unsafe work conditions. Amazon decides to fire him for this.
Was this a violation of the first amendment? No.
Was this a violation of the principle of freedom of speech? Maybe.
Saying, "well this wasn't protected by the first amendment, so this is a non-issue" wouldn't be fair. Yes, it's not a first amendment issue, but it's still a freedom of speech issue.
> Hence free speech initially drove whistleblowing protection, and whilst it has been irrelevant for establishing whistleblowing protection, free speech is still driving whistleblower protection.
No, it isn't. There's already precedents for what businesses can and cannot prevent you from doing. If, for instance, you think a business should be compelled to bake a cake with a certain message on it, then you can't make the argument that there should be no regulation on how much a business can censor its users.
That's not the only example. There's extensive case law that establishes how both governments and businesses have to either allow or curtail speech under certain conditions. A business can't legally compel you to do say something or wear a piece of clothing in a way that discriminates against you. A sex shop can't just open anywhere because, while it's been argued that they should be allowed as a form of free expression, they tend not to be considered as such under the spirit of the law. A person can be held responsible for the aftermath of shouting "fire" in a crowded room, even though this speech is superficially supported by the first amendment. Point being, we make decisions about freedom of speech that don't necessarily follow the letter of the constitution or stay within the bounds of the government.
Freedom of speech isn't just a law. It's a social principle upon which America was founded. If all meaningful communication is dominated by too-big-to-fail businesses with AI that can scour all correspondence, a reality we are rapidly approaching, then freedom of speech becomes meaningless. The situation becomes worse when these companies are all politically aligned with the regime. This is why we can't ignore how private companies regulate communication through their systems.
> Freedom of speech isn’t just a law. It’s a social principle upon which America was founded.
Yes, and that principal is specifically that the proper way to advance in ideas is for them to have to compete for the favor of private actors without public authorities intervening, and that the freedom of private actors to choose on their own to promote or relay messages, most critically political messages, including the free choice to decline to do so is essential for free society.
> a business should be compelled to bake a cake with a certain message on it
That is a misrepresentation of the case:
> Craig and Mullins filed a complaint to the Colorado Civil Rights Commission under the state's public accommodations law, the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act, which prohibits businesses open to the public from discriminating against their customers on the basis of race, religion, gender, or sexual orientation.
The complain was under a _state law_ specifically to address sexual orientation discrimination and it has been acknowledged that such law doesn't force a business to make cakes with arbitrary messages.
> If all meaningful communication is dominated by too-big-to-fail businesses with AI that can scour all correspondence, a reality we are rapidly approaching, then freedom of speech becomes meaningless.
I agree that monopolies and centralization are a threat to freedom. Though would argue that it should be addressed both via decentralization (and specifically through counter-anti-desintermediation as discussed in the P2P Foundation: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Counter-Anti-Disintermediatio...) and anti-trust enforcement.
It used to be true that companies could be dickish to you, but now thanks to the 13th amendment (and the courts interpretation thereof), there are specific ways that they cannot be dickish to you. Either way you are right that it's not related to the 1st amendment though.
Are you replying to a comment? This appears to me, right now, as the top one in the thread and is unconnected to any others and seems to me to be orphaned.
If it's in direct response to the submission, I cannot find anything in the submission that might give rise to a clarification
Does anyone need this clarification? I feel like this is like trying to stop a discussion on self driving cars and bringing up the trolley problem. Everyone knows it. No one (serious) is saying that private companies have a legal responsibility to host everyone's speech lest they be guilty of violating the first amendment.
Free speech and censorship are issues that go far beyond just the First Amendment. This has always been the case, and recent efforts to narrow the scope of the term are actually part of the battle to reduce free speech (and increase censorship) that's going on right in the culture now.
Try duck typing "the government" sometime. I think you'll find the paperwork doesn't match the power centers, and that the most powerful parts of "the government" are completely unaccountable to voters, and in fact, aren't even listed on the founding documents…
It's a nice way to be in power if you can manage it.
> The 1st amendment ensures that the government may not stop you from saying what you want.
> This is a separate issue from private companies removing/banning you. Each company has their own right and freedom to be as dickish as they want with regard to deleting your account etc - but that is not related to the 1st.
It isn't quite as cut and dried as that.
"Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one." - H. L. Mencken
An illuminating analogy may be thinking about what would happen to people's freedom of movement (which, BTW, isn't explicitly enumerated in the US Constitution, though it was in the Articles of Confederation) if most roads were privately owned and operated and/or most cars were rentals.
To some extent, this legal territory was explored WRT transportation as the common law concept of a common carrier, and then applied to communications through Title II of the Telecommunications Act, and then applied to ISPs in 2015 but revoked in 2017.
The question we then need to ask is to what extent do the strong network effects of social media justify similar constraints upon the rights of owners to exclude users as the natural monopolies of physical infrastructure constrain their owners.
All that said, it is clear (to me anyway) is that the situation WRT Trump et al. being excluded from these platforms blows WAY past all such nuance and lands right in the middle of "falsely yelling fire in a theater" territory, frankly justifying outright bans on some speech not merely by the platform owners, but by the government as well (IOW censorship). This is not a conclusion that I am particularly comfortable with as I am sure it will be abused, but I have reached it nonetheless.
Cool, we've jumped right into "if you want to be independent from FaceAppAmaGooMicroTwitBookTube, it's just because you're a right-wing fascist plotting an attack." Way to go everyone.
It kind of is, even if it is not intended to be. Here’s how it works.
Deplatforming by the major social platforms is actually a way for them to create a moat. The field is now salted with toxic lunatics looking for a platform. Anyone who tries to stand up another social will instantly be inundated by them, and their presence will drive everyone else away and back into the arms of the incumbents.
Social is now like a zombie flick. There are walled gardens where it is safe, but outside stalk the walking dead. Trying to build another shelter is an exercise in repelling the undead long enough to get some walls up.
To be fair, at this moment in time, the vast majority of likely users for a project like this, *are* the Trump/Qanon crowd that feel dejected that they will be held to any sort of accountability for their inflammatory rhetoric, lies and conspiracy theories.
> To be fair, at this moment in time, the vast majority of likely users for a project like this, are the Trump/Qanon crowd that feel dejected that they will be held to any sort of accountability for their inflammatory rhetoric, lies and conspiracy theories.
There are a few other social niches that could be addressed without catering specifically to that crowd, and a few even have attractive enterprise-y plays attached that leverage various privacy-focused value propositions. Pseudonymity, for example, isn't usually given enough attention IMO (SecureDrop is a notable exception to this).
If the above happens for a certain amount of time, think about what the extremists are going to use when they finally realise they need to "build their own" stuff?
The next one after Mastodon will probably be Matrix and by then it's already too late.
But bitcoin is open source (logiciel libre), and its pretty capitalist: look at how it enables people to put market value on really-hard-to-find prime numbers. What's needed to counter any 'open source is communist' rhetoric seems to be an awareness of how much private enterprise and entrepreneurial activity depends on open source.
I've developed a great social media system that's basically a centralized system, although I added Fediverse capability to it recently. It's here: https://quanta.wiki.
I'm looking for a way to leverage Quanta's power on top of some kind of true peer-to-peer architecture to make it censorship resistant, because BigTech has just now gone nuclear in their censorship efforts.
So I'm currently trying to find the right peer-to-peer (won't be ActivityPub) infrastructure, to let Quanta instances network better.
This has been and is being discussed in so many HN threads right now that this is not a great place to re-rehearse the same flamewars. Let's not let the generic drown out the specific—that's the main thing that reduces intellectual curiosity on the site.
The best analogy to help low-information people understand this is to just remind them that AT&T owns the hardware and can shut down people too. Do we want powerful companies to be allowed to censor Americans at their whim is the question. I say no.
Sure, but the parent poster seems to imply that banning people who incite violence on social media is somehow a new thing or "going nuclear" with censorship.
Trump got clapped not because of censorship, but because social media platforms decided to no longer exempt him from their TOS because of his position. Any normal person posting similar content would have been banned ages ago. Besides, he is the POTUS who can go on TV any time he wants. Thinking that he cannot get his message out there is ridiculous.
Trump never called for any violence. However there are lots of left wing people on Twitter calling for violence and the left-wing operated BigTech think that's just fine, while they will ban any right wing person at the drop of a hat for completely made-up reasons like saying something wrong about gender pronouns. Look the Joe Rogan podcast with Tim Pool and Jack Dorsey, and try to educate yourself.
Alright, so finally after a few seemingly innocuous arguments you took your mask off. A person who believes storming the Capitol was not organized by Trump at this point would be able to find a justification to anything he says or does.
This is an example of black-and-white logic, tribalism, and an inability to comprehend nuance. I can state any number of the 100s of lies and hoaxes told about Trump and the only thing Democrats can hear is a "praise" of Trump, rather than a statement of fact.
Trump was also great advertising for Twitter, just like he was
great for the news media. I'd argue that Big Media, Inc. is deeply complicit
in the rise of Donald Trump. He was the goose that laid the golden egg.
Additionally, the media mergers of the 80s and 90s gave us right-wing talk radio on
the AM band, sewing the spores of hate from which the vile toadstool
of Trumpism bloomed.
Big Tech, Inc., with its algorithms that promote radical right-wing content,
also seems suspect.
To me the solution to all of these problems is to break up conglomerates
and monopolies. Let's have more decentralization and more "small is beautiful"
tech, like the chat system presented here. Let a million flowers blossom,
smothering the aforementioned toadstool.
(Wandering off to look at installing Cabal).
Also, yes, you would not be provided water/electricity/cable/internet/pudding if you broke their terms of service. Apart from not paying your bill and perhaps willful destruction of their equipment, I'm having a hard time trying to come up with how else one breaks the terms of service for utility services. That sounds completely normal to me.
Additionally, people do go without certain utilities in times of economic hardship - this is nothing new. We're not guaranteed access any such services.
Well if big companies get to just set arbitrary rules that discriminate against one set of political beliefs, what does that say about "Civil Rights" then? I guess you're not a big fan of civil rights...
Or, more likely, is it only when companies are doing things you agree with that you'll claim they have absolute power and authority? If you understand history, you might see the flaw in this logic.
These companies are not "discriminating" against any particular political view. Calls for political violence and extremism/terrorism have and continue to be moderated on these platforms from both sides.
It is unfortunate that you don't understand the distinction between inciting violence via either direct calls for such or indirectly by repeating the same unfounded lies of "a stolen election" VS political speech/civil rights, which have not been abrogated (there are plenty of conservative commentators on Twitter, some of whom I follow).
As for my background, I am an immigrant from a post-communist Eastern European country, live in the US in the South and finished with political science and journalism degrees. Can assure you my appreciation of civil rights is intact.
As a general rule, even when situations like this occur, I lean on the side of caution, so I understand the slippery slope argument you're making. There will continue to be a national discussion about what the limits are in the still-uncharted world of social media and the limits of expression vs. platform and publisher rights, but your alarmist view is, IMO, over the top.
Congress has held numerous hearings about censorship starting way back when the first nose-ring wearing, openly socialist, 20-something overlords in Silicon Valley started censoring heads of state, and government officials for clearly and blatantly partisan political reasons.
I mean after the election a poll showed 68% of voters had never even heard of the Hunter Laptop, because BigTech started banning anyone who dare even mention it. So don't be fooled that the censorship is to stop violence, it's to achieve political goals, and has been ratcheting up for the past 6 years. Twitter was canceling people for life even for daring to say such crazy things as "There's only two sexes."
Cancel culture has been getting out of hand for a long long time now, and people have had all they're going to take of it.
Now the left has gotten so brazen they're conspiring to shut down entire internet companies under these same false pretenses. And you have the audacity to call this "alarmist". Wow.
Having your message broadcasted through Twitter is not a human right or essential to your survival. Also, what kind of TOS would a water company have that you can break? This example is ridiculous.
The obvious point is that both internet and water are public services, and the minute we let companies start cutting off services for political reasons we no longer have a democracy.
Sorry, but since the water company is privately owned they can do whatever they please. If you don't like it, you can build your own water company. Thanks!
...now you know how it feels for anyone on the opposite side of your argument.
Please post a link to the terms of service of your water company.
I'm doubtful there is no clause in your city's/county's/municipality's/state's, etc. that allows them to interrupt service without cause. That's why terms of service exist.
Now I'm genuinely curious to find out what terms of service you agreed to with the private water company. What type of settlement do you live in?
Nah. The water infrastructure at my home isn't owned by a private company. I live in a state that has this radical policy that water is a human right and should not be commoditized.
On a related note: The Governor of California was cutting off electricity and water to homes for the crime of "peaceful assembly", recently... so it's not just free speech that's under assault, but probably you could say most rights, at this point.
The good ol' democrat mantra: "Never let a good crisis go to waste."
>If internet service providers can shut down speech they disagree with, by going after the servers, then we're no longer living in a democracy.
You present this as if Parler is being shut down because people there have the wrong opinion on tax rates.
People on Parler are planning violent fascist overthrow of government, which is illegal. Why would Amazon be obligated to host sites that cater to terrorists?
The social media purge began long before Parler even existed. Yes people are getting banned from Twitter for life for having the wrong political opinions. It you deny that everyone knows you're either dishonest or uninformed.
People on the left are allowed to call for violence and say all kinds of racist things hate filled things, but if someone on the right even says something like "There are only two sexes" that's enough to get banned for life. The only reason the democrats all deny the existence of any double-standard is because MSM and BigTech happen to be in their tribe, so they all dare not call out one of their own.
"BigTech has gone nuclear with censorship" immediately after a coup attempt is a wildly different statement than "there is a long-running political double standard that exists in tech companies when it comes to enforcing their TOS". Should I take take it that you have conceded your previous statement?
I would like to complete the discussion on the previous point before moving on to another topic of discussion.
Trump organized a demonstration. That's the American way of voicing political dissent.
If a politician organizes a peaceful rally and violent people show up and do violent things, and you blame the politician for the violence, then I'm curious about something.... Do you hold the Democrats responsible for all the violence of 2020 when we had cities burning down, and the MSM saying things like "Who ever said protests had to be peaceful"
The Democrats calling the capitol mob a "coup de tat attempt" is absolutely hilarious and just shows their complete lunacy in their attempt to vilify the other side, even when they're clearly just being absurd. It was a mob who were let into a building. Hell they didn't even damage any of the priceless paintings. If anyone's to blame is was the security who let the doors get breached when their job was to guard the building with machine guns.
If you really believe the social media purge is about stopping violence then you've been hoodwinked. People who haven been watching this censorship battle for years know this is purely about taking down political adversaries.
It's more akin to "no shirt no service". Parler can continue using Amazon if they moderate their platform, you can put on a shirt to get a cake. You cannot change your sexuality or skin color.
You can't moderate a platform if there's millions of people posting and only a handful of moderators.
Remember, AT&T is also incapable of stopping criminals from conspiring using text/telephone messages...and based on your logic the Feds could just shut down AT&T and blame AT&T for being "complicit". No obviously that's moronic. Wake up and stop giving our rights away. Eventually you're going to loose your own.
It’s incredibly disheartening to see how quickly people are warming to the practice of coordinated top-down gagging of certain individuals and groups.
You won’t be so happy to cheer on such behavior and policies when in the future the one silenced turns out to be you.
The power to censor should be given solely to the individual to curate their own information diet; it should never belong to the medium itself (whether government, private company, autonomous network, etc).
I used to think that way until I learned about the illusory truth effect, which basically states that being exposed to information multiple times makes you more likely to believe it to be true. The consequence of this is that attempting to curate information might "infect" you with ideas that you never wanted in your brain in the first place.
If you started in the wrong way," I said in answer to the investigator's questions, "everything that happened
would be a proof of the conspiracy against you. It would all be self−validating. You couldn't draw a breath
without knowing it was part of the plot."
"So you think you know where madness lies?"
My answer was a convinced and heartfelt, "Yes."
"And you couldn't control it?"
"No I couldn't control it. If one began with fear and hate as the major premise, one would have to go on the
conclusion."
"Would you be able," my wife asked, " to fix your attention on what The Tibetan Book of the Dead calls the
Clear Light?"
I was doubtful.
"Would it keep the evil away, if you could hold it? Or would you not be able to hold it?"
I considered the question for some time. "Perhaps," I answered at last, "perhaps I could − but only if there were
somebody there to tell me about the Clear Light. One couldn't do it by oneself. That's the point, I suppose, of the Tibetan ritual − somebody sitting there all the time and telling you what's what."
[Doors of Perception, 57−58]
I agree the problem is two-fold: One being the Big Tech overreaching in the name of "our safety". The other being the overly vocal minority who clap hands for them and come up with excuses defending them, as if they were propagandists.
This is fear speaking, stand up for free speech that isn't inciting violence, racism, etc - like everyone else - and we'll all be safe, and we can all fight against tyranny when it shows itself. There's a nuance to understand as well that these people deplatformed aren't victims: they still have their freedom of speech, just not on these private platforms. It's inconvenient for them, yes, that they depended on them, but their TOS were always clear from the beginning if they actually read or cared about their contents. This scenario isn't akin to the Nazis going after one group, then another, then another - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_... - violence isn't a group even if a mob forms a group, and understandably they're an angry mob who believe to some degree that the election was fraudulent (but hypocritically it wouldn't have been fraudulent if their pick one) - which all signs point to that it wasn't - but because they're not accessible to talk to and their media channels are perpetuating the lies and lack of critical thinking, it's manifesting how expected, and why Trump et al have been inciting violence. January 6th could have ended with many more dead, could have been much more tragic had they been better organized.
If your child started saying racist things, would you just let them? I assume not. I assume you would escalate punishment until they understood and behaved with what's appropriate, and if they didn't, you'd probably kick them out of your house once you're legally allowed to if for some reason they've become a terrible person; people won't change until they're ready to or there's an impetus - sometimes, if not most of the time, all it takes is a parent saying you won't get dessert if you don't behave.
Sounds like you're fundamentally opposed to free speech. Maybe we can coin a new term something like "non-dangerous speech" or "mostly free speech". I'm glad we'll get Apple and Amazon to figure out what dangerous is too.
Not at all. Free speech but with consequences. And there is free speech in America and free speech on the internet in America - however the moment you're on private property of a technology company's property (website or app or other) - it's their rules you follow.
People easily, and they are doing it, post to thedonald.win to say whatever the fuck they want there because the moderators are allowing it. So I don't accept your premise that these people playing victim role, behaving as if they're being persecuted and claiming they're blocked from free speech - because they're not.
I presume you don't just let anyone into your house whenever they want to, and to say whatever they want anytime?
I don't know where you got the impression that private property means the first amendment no longer applies. The Supreme Court has been very clear if a person or company opens up there property sufficiently they no longer get to ignore it.
> ... noting that ownership "does not always mean absolute dominion." The court pointed out that the more an owner opens his property up to the public in general, the more his rights are circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who are invited in.
You're grasping at straws here. Are you genuinely trying to compare a private corporation to the sidewalk of a city/town? Cities/towns are registered private entities for organizational purposes, however in good faith and spirit they are owned indirectly by the citizens of that place. Private corporations like Google, Apple, are not the same - and to think a ruling from the 40s applies is interesting. Another point is you must become a registered user, which arguably removes you from the group of general public.
Besides that a ruling doesn't mean it's in the correct direction. Slavery used to be legal and abortion - a woman having choice - is trying to be made illegal again - as two examples. The general public distributing religious flyers on a sidewalk freely open to the public sounds like a reasonable ruling, that wouldn't allow a person to do the same thing say at a gated community though where the public is generally allowed access to - which could be considered akin to requiring users are registered.
one consequence of objectionable speech is that anyone who gave you a platform rescinds it.
that's what happened here, nothing more nothing less.
I am a zealous advocate for the first amendment, but that doesn't mean I'm going to let a random person advocate violence (or exercise speech which actually led to violence) on my platform.
One day it will be feasible for someone's phone to receive all messages sent by every other person on earth. They can then try to decode every message till they find one that their private key can decode.
You've now made the perfect privacy messaging system - by sending all messages to all users, no quantity of network packet sniffing/timing analysis/evil nodes can figure out who is talking to who.