> But we can't build free and open source tools that protect journalists, human rights activists, and ordinary people around the world if we also control who uses those tools. Tor is designed to defend human rights and privacy by preventing anyone from censoring things, even us.
I feel like this is what cloudflare should have said. I understand they changed their mind after TDS claimed CloudFlare supported them - but based on the internal memos it seemed to be more of a "I was grumpy and they're jerks" decision.
The major problem with that being that once you make one decision like that - even if you're well-intentioned, the next person that comes after you might do it to the wrong people.
Maybe letting racists have a platform isn't great, but it's better than hand-by-hand justification of what is and isn't "appropriate" to host.
One significant difference between CloudFlare and Tor is that Tor has no choice. Tor's technology is explicitly designed to prevent censorship. Any change to that would make it fundamentally a different product/project altogether.
CloudFlare on the other hand has no such limitations and has many stakeholders exerting varying levels of influence over who they accept as customers. From adhering to various laws to terms of service violations to more fuzzy reasons for terminating an account, these are decisions every business has to make quite often using a wide variety of inputs.
And this is the merit of Tor, that is content neutral because it has no other choice. This is good design.
When you're in an incredibly emotional place, you'll wish you had infinite power to crush the demons. But once the emotions subside, you'll remember that there are no demons, just other emotional people (like yourself) and be glad your calm-minded self put barriers around what extreme-emotion-you can do.
In a sense, it's worth asking if extreme-emotion is the root cause of modern violence (nationalism, us-vs-them, victimhood rhetoric [Nazi's perceived themselves victims of Jews]).
When we lean-in to our emotional reactions, it's easy for the emotional reaction (e.g. War in Iraq) to be worse than the original spark (9/11).
War in Iraq was absolutely a nonsense response to 9/11.
At the same time, the ghosts of 6 million dead Jews and untold numbers of dead allied soldiers would like a word with you about whether or not they died in vain or if we maybe did learn a lesson.
That's my exact point, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but we all got so emotional we couldn't question. If you look at the civilian deaths it really becomes a big "Wait... are we the baddies?" situation.
(According to estimates over 30 times more innocent civilians died in the Iraq conflict than died in 9/11 attacks [1])
As for the holocaust, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. My point is that allowing yourself to get emotional, even when you think you're right, is how all of the tragedies of the world happened (including the Holocaust). Those German soldiers thought they were doing the right thing, because they were swept up in emotion. Not because millions of evil people were all born at once in Germany in the 1900s.
> That's my exact point, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but we all got so emotional we couldn't question.
Well, we could and we did but invading Iraq was something that was still on GWB's bucket list and so he did.
What people thought didn't really matter.
> If you look at the civilian deaths it really becomes a big "Wait... are we the baddies?" situation.
It was pretty bloody obvious. See Dr. Kelly.
> As for the holocaust, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
The point I'm trying to make, and I'll spell it out, just so that it is absolutely clear is that Neo Nazis are one step worse than the Nazis of old in that they are knowingly and willingly participating in a re-run of history that we should avoid at all costs, especially because we already know how that particular movie ends.
> My point is that allowing yourself to get emotional, even when you think you're right, is how all of the tragedies of the world happened
No, emotion has fuck all to do with this. It's simply logic. Nazis : bad.
> Those German soldiers thought they were doing the right thing, because they were swept up in emotion.
They were lied to and they were conscripted. Many of them would have backed out if that would not have led to a bullet to the head.
> Not because millions of evil people were all born at once in Germany in the 1900s.
No, but it only took a relatively small amount of those evil people to take over the country. Note how the GOP and all the other presidents men are standing by as Trump is destroying America as we know it and have come to cherish and respect it while we're watching.
How far it will be allowed to go down will be a big factor in how many casualties this round will bring. 10's, 1000's, millions? Who is to know as long as all the good little people are standing by the side it might go very far indeed.
> That's my exact point, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, but we all got so emotional we couldn't question.
No, we all didn't, especially those of us who had already been pointing out, before 9/11 and even before the 2000 election, that Cheney, as well as others in the campaign and later administration, had been pushing for war with Iraq under a variety of different pretexts for years. And not the 127 Representatives and 23 Senators who voted against even conditional authority for the war. And, arguably, not many of the representatives and senators who voted for the conditions regarding determinations that had to be made for the war.
> Maybe letting racists have a platform [is] better than hand-by-hand justification of what is and isn't "appropriate" to host.
Or, maybe it's not? I don't see that that follows. Yes, there's the slippery slope argument that someday a host could make a decision we don't agree with. But (1) hosts do that anyway, all the time, and (2) if fucking white power racism isn't on solid, level ground above the slope, then what else could be?
The solution to private sector choice about hosting and distribution of controversial content can't be a blanket protection for all speech. The first amendment is about public law, because of the reach of the government and the potential damage from abuse.
The solution in the end really can only be a case-by-case determination, individually by every host, as to what they are comfortable seeing on their systems. Which is exactly what we have here, even if CloudFlare's internal process was exposed as messier than we'd like to see.
Or, the internet has matured enough that we consider it a public utility and seriously form legislation that protects peoples' constitutional rights even on the internet. I literally don't see how anything TDS says is physically harming anyone. I've never been to the site, I don't give them my traffic, money, anything.. If you don't like them and find them so vile it's causing you mental stress then just navigate away and ignore the vile scum.
Works for well-adjusted, rational adults (hopefully). Not so much for children. It's moral pornography.
The idea that public utilities (e.g. public broadcast spectrums) must conform to a negotiated standard of decency is well-established even at the court level. It wouldn't necessarily be protected free speech, even if the publically-accessible internet were a public utility (which it isn't), especially if private alternatives exist (which they do, e.g. tor).
This is why well adjusted rational adults are responsible for raising children. You teach a child what is right and what is wrong and then hope beyond all else that when they set out on their own you've given them a strong moral compass. You don't neglect the responsibility and blame the government for not censoring all the bad things on the internet from them when they screw up later in adulthood. Are you really arguing society should be 100% childproof? We can't put anything on the internet that someone might find objectionable to a child.
The answer is that this is, in fact, a slippery slope, because though TDS seem to be something that could be reasonably called actual Nazis (I honestly haven't investigated them to determine the validity of the accusation), we've also got an enormous cottage industry with a thriving amateur sideline of political activists calling anyone they disagree with Nazis. And it's entirely possible for the "X is a Nazi" narrative to get off the ground and self-perpetuate without any actual truth to it, with no one involved actually examining the claim. A lie can run around the world, &c.
If you agree to censor any category of thing, then you'll immediately have a large group of unscrupulous people attempting to cast all their enemies as that thing. The only general countermeasure is to not censor anything.
This would be great. Unfortunately, people especially in large groups don't seem to have the emotional strength to withhold from doing that.
These mass conversations quickly devolve from debates to name-calling and the click-incentivized media is quick to encourage it (more outrage = more clicks = more ads = more $)
Given that this is the first time in several decades that white racism and "neo-nazi" beliefs have broken through into a national news story, I'm going to say that you're flat wrong on this.
Being called e.g. a feminazi by right wing nutjobs happens every day. I don't believe CloudFlare has ever canceled the registration of a feminist site because of it.
This situation was different. It was more serious. The crimes were more obvious, and more hateful. And it's simply not about the name-calling that you think you see against whoever your favorite group (gonna guess "not feminists") on the internet is.
And when serious evil shit happens, I want to live in a world where I can trust moral people to agree that it's serious and evil, and not equivocate to make a bunch of glibertarians feel better.
I'm not saying Charlottesville wasn't bad. I'm saying that the practice of calling everyone who doesn't agree with you a "nazi" dilutes the meaning with bad stuff actually happens (like Charlottesville). As bad as that was, there's only 4,000 KKK members in the US. That's a lot of people, but that's a crazy small percentage of people in general overall. At a certain population number, you'll have a set # of people that have hold terrible beliefs. That doesn't mean it's okay, but it might just be reality. Given that, I still think the best way to engage with those people is to engage with them - not to name call. Case in point[1].
You don't need to infer who my "favorite groups" are. I'm more interested in actual discussion than playing team games. Some of my favorite people in the world to talk with have complete opposite viewpoints from me. We may not agree, but being able to hold a civilized discussion helps each of us learn. That would never happen if we didn't talk and just called each other names.
Sorry, the notion of farcically inappropriate analogy to Nazi Germany is so common and pervasive that we literally have a meme for it.
It honestly seems like you're saying that companies like CloudFlare can't take a stand against real-life, actual nazis because Godwin's Law happened.
And that's why folks like me are so utterly horrified by the behavior of our seemingly moral counterparts on the right. We watched political discourse go off a cliff in the past few days and you guys all want to just wave it off as no big deal and have an argument about statues and domain hosting and stuff. It's a big deal. Not something to Godwin about.
> a thriving amateur sideline of political activists calling anyone they disagree with Nazis
Sorry, who has lost domain hosting because of an unfounded accusation of nazism? This sounds like a straw man to me, informed more from a tribal allegiance than an actual concern.
No one has lost domain hosting, that I'm aware of. But at least one person got pepper-sprayed, more have been beaten in the street and others have had people going after their jobs based on mistaken identity.
This doesn't address the fundamental point: that if you declare a willingness to censor anyone, then you'll immediately have a whole lot of people trying to convince you that their personal enemies fall in the censor-worthy category. I don't trust domain registrars or CDNs to be the final arbiters of Who Really Is a Nazi.
How is that what happened, though? This is explicitly an internal decision. CloudFlare made it on its own, without input. They didn't "declare" themselves "willing" to do anything.
Isn't their behavior exactly the solution to the problem you're straw-manning? You allow individuals in the private sector to make their own moral decisions about hosting. Problem solved.
I mean, I'll just say it again: if you can't trust a hosting/distribution agent to make their own decision about white power racism, then you live in a bleak world without any effective morality. That might work within your safe spaces on the internet, but those of us in the real world need to trust each other to get stuff done.
Cloudflare lost in the long run. Especially as a host of DDoS protections, which many websites with significant opposition and threats require. Next time a controversial site decides to find itself DDoS protection, I hope it will think twice before going to cloudflare. Because how will you tell if that when the next internet shitstorm comes and focus on your website, cloudflare will stand there for you. Internet is all about freedom of speech. Every one will have his stage, with or without your help. I would've somewhat tolerated cloudflare if they had never hosted TDS in the first place and just disagreed to do that. But this is just a disgusting populist U turn, led by the current internet trend.
I would write a disclaimer about how I think TDS is horrible, but I honestly have never opened that website once, and I feel like the need to apologize for defending freedom of speech is absurd.
The right to free speech comes with the cost of a minority of people using it to say and promote hateful, hurtful, even evil things.
The right to bear arms comes with the cost of a minority using them to murder and commit suicide.
So on and so forth with lots of other freedoms we enjoy (driving, flying drones, 3d printers, etc).
It seems like it is trendy now to trade freedoms in order to reduce those costs I've listed. It's a shame though, because it's very difficult to go the other direction and gain more freedom in exchange for increased costs.
I read up on this a little yesterday. What do you think about this site getting dropped from GoDaddy, then Google for T.O.S. violations?
I could just be ill informed, but it seemed like Cloudflare could have simply just done the exact same thing quietly. But instead they at first did nothing, after some criticism in the press did the CEO wake up in a bad mood to remove their protection. His blog and email read almost noble, then I caught up on the days prior and it made me think much less of them as a company, him as a leader.
Feels like you as a company should be able to do business with whoever you want, and will face judgment for it in the public eye, I have no issue with that. I have no idea where I'm going with this so I will stop now.
> What do you think about this site getting dropped from GoDaddy, then Google for T.O.S. violations?
I think it's a little disturbing. On the one hand, I vehemently disagree with TDS and what they are saying. On the other, what if the political tide turns against my religion and my church's website is knocked off the web for being "anti-LGBT"?
I personally would prefer if domain registrars remained politically neutral. I'm hoping this is just an extreme case and that they won't do it on a wide-scale in the future.
> what if the political tide turns against my religion and my church's website is knocked off the web for being "anti-LGBT"?
Yes, what then? Shall we solve that problem when we have it?
Because you can fantasize and theorize until the cows come home about how your religion and your church will be knocked off the web but in the meantime that never happened and it very likely never will and if and when it does you will find a lot of voices sympathetic to your cause, including mine.
Or are we somehow beyond being able to evaluate things on merit?
> I'm hoping this is just an extreme case and that they won't do it on a wide-scale in the future.
Yes, it is an extreme case. And no, it most likely - you can't deal in absolutes - won't be done on a wide scale in the future.
So the message is that we are all okay silencing TDS in this case because they're pretty bad. I'm not okay with that. It is too intellectually dishonest for my taste (among other things).
Slippery slopes are alive and well, particularly in this domain. Go back to 2006 or so and tell them that in a decade, bakeries would be getting sued for not catering gay weddings.
It is entirely right and proper to consider the likely future implications of an act before you decide it's a good idea. Even if it feels really good to stick it to $OUTGROUP just this one time.
> Go back to 2006 or so and tell them that in a decade, bakeries would be getting sued for not catering gay weddings.
Why would I do that? I'm fine with bakeries getting sued for not catering gay weddings, that's one of the advantages of living in a normal society: the ability to petition the courts to seek redress.
> Go back to 2006 or so and tell them that in a decade, bakeries would be getting sued for not catering gay weddings.
Public accommodation laws for sexual orientation were passed in some states before then, and it's a fairly trivial and obvious application of those laws.
AFAIK the TOS violations were because of TDS actively stalking and harassing people, not because they're terrible people. I may be wrong though, so take what I say with a grain of salt.
Don't be the person that thinks "let's ban Nazis" is going to lead to everything in the world turning into Orwell's 1984.
You just don't have enough information about society to make your slippery-slope argument valid.
The world is a lot more complicated than what your simplistic slippery-slope model predicts. Deal with the problem at hand, not some distant theoretical problem based on your simplistic models of life.
You can ban Nazi expression now, and everything will be fine, because society has a lot of safeguards to prevent other bad things from happening.
Don't be the person that thinks the world will turn into Orwell's 1984 in a blink-of-an-eye, it happens gradually, bit by bit over time.
Would you like me to list all the freedoms we've already lost? Or are you able to sufficiently navel-gaze and ignore them b/c of your simplistic view of how slippery-slopes work?
This is a brilliant response. We must value Privacy and Security above all else. Once we open the door to oppress a group's voice we unanimously despise: we allow our own voices to be oppresssd in the future.
It's not quite so simple. A tool that can protect privacy and provide security can be used to take privacy and security away from someone else. For example doxxing someone on a hidden service protects the doxxer's privacy but removes the target's privacy.
I'm not trying to make a moral judgement about Tor. I just feel it's important to acknowledge the best way to protect privacy is not always obvious and is rarely if ever simple.
I had to ban all Tor exit node IP's from my service because of a single bad actor causing problems for a large group of people on a small service I maintain.
The Daily Stormer moving to Tor has very little to do with Privacy and Security.
And who are the 'we' that are oppressing a groups voice, they simply find it hard to get commercial entities to provide them with a vehicle for their hateful bits. Note that Aurenheimer is the guy who single handedly managed to drive a very large number of people away from Slashdot and who tends to come across as a man who relishes to watch the world burn.
Providing a service to such a character or not is the kind of decision a company should be allowed to make.
Although I agree in some ways, I don't think "oppress" is the correct word when companies and others are choosing not to implicitly support a particular viewpoint and exercising their own right to free speech to oppose it in an organized fashion. Oppression suggests actions more authoritarian, and targets much more vulnerable, than what we're seeing. I think it is inaccurate to say that white supremacists are being oppressed.
I think the argument would be that TDS is operating at a scale where they cannot have the same reach they do without a CDN service. So a CDN to terminating their accounts is effectively silencing them. It would be the similar if Google decided to censor their results.
Every expansion of "just for terrorists and child porn" to "well drug cartels too" to "well maybe drug users" and "people that have the wrong opinion" seem to disagree with you. Asset seizure is "ok" with people as long as it was only going to target Scarface-like people. But now you can be stopped and have your cash taken. Slippery slopes are alive and well.
And really, these TDS morons do more harm to their cause than support. Acting like idiots in public, hijacking a pro-white demonstration to start going off on the disproportionate representation of Jews in in the US -- it's a bad tactic. Silencing these low-credence trolls isn't gonna help, only make crappy martyrs.
Blocking TDS will probably be a net benefit for white nationalism and will do exactly nothing to stop "hate".
White supremacists talk about killing jews and blacks, but so far it's only talk. The few which actually did kill somebody, like the car driver, got arrested. So why not let the police deal with the problem at hand instead of talking about how the
white supremacists will kill many in the distant future.
Why is it not a slippery slope to say that allowing marches today will lead to genocides tomorrow?
Total non-sequitur, but here's a great example of the problem with AMP. Instead of linking to slate (the original source), dragonwriter linked to google. Slate loses a backlink, and I can't even tell who the publisher is without following the truncated URL.
Yeah, I try to remember not to use the AMP link (I don't see this as fundamentally an AMP problem as a UI problem with using bare hyperlinks in text that is exacerbated by AMP, but we use the message boards we have, not the message boards we wish we had.) I've corrected it.
It's because Nazis have already declared war on the US and committed to acts of violence. As a response, America literally declared war against them, and killed them wholesale.
Remember, we're talking about self-declared Nazis, not your average racist.
How else would you deal with a group that says "I'm going to kill you"?
Don't be the idealistic engineering nerd that only acts on theory. Be the practical socialized person that knows how the real world works.
If you want to be practical, why do you think they have such a huge swell of their ranks?
I never in my life had watched a neo-nazi talk before last week. Since last week I've watched about an hour of their talk, first on Vice and then searching for one of the guys on Youtube. Streisand effect. How many vulnerable minds will be turned by this exposure? If they had their little march
and the left ignored them, or even better, laughed at them for how silly they look with their nazi flags, they wouldn't be on all TV's and we wouldn't be discussing them.
Not to mention the paid violence anti Trump protests/riots executed by members of the Democratic left. The recent case is in the realm of 3rd degree murder. The premeditated paid violence is far more troubling.
edit
I mean troubling at a social/political level. The death of a non-violent protester is no less sad or serious.
How about you you go back and reassess your bad previous assumption about what book I was referring to. I'm not into conspiracy stuff at all and don't understand how you think a crackpot book about 9/11 is relevant to this thread at all. IMO you're trying to find reasons to vilify me because I'm expressing a dissenting opinion.
"Two top Democratic strategists have exited the presidential campaign after explosive undercover videos showed them discussing voter fraud and their roles in planting paid agitators at campaign events for Republican candidate Donald Trump.
Robert Creamer, founder of Democracy Advocates and the husband of Rep. Janice D. Schakowsky, Illinois Democrat, stepped down from the campaign Tuesday, a day after Scott Foval was fired from his post as national field director of Americans United for Change."
I was trying to support the comment against slippery slope rhetoric by citing an example of "the left" inciting violence. I wanted to make the point that we might already be slipping down a slope that the parent parent comment seems to only attribute to being problematic for the neo-nazi group.
Far more blacks died to state (or any other) violence during free democratic South Africa than during apartheid South Africa. It is simply dishonest to categorise apartheid South Africa with Nazi Germany.
It's not about who died it is about why people died.
Your argument is roughly analogous to people saying that Hitler had the trains running on time.
Sure under apartheid there was less overt violence and you could easily argue that South Africa was safer and altogether a better place to live back then than it is today. But that would be entirely missing the point of why Apartheid is wrong.
I was just applying their argument against their own logic.
The world is not what it was 70 years ago.
Today when a genocide happens somewhere on Earth the UN quickly intervenes. The US is not some weak-ass state like Germany was in the 30s, even if Trump would order some sort of genocide today it would quickly be blocked at many levels.
Indeed, it is worse in many respects, better in others.
For instance: 70 years ago it took a couple of days to organize something involving ten thousand people. Now you can do that in 10 minutes with a social media post in the right spot.
> Today when a genocide happens somewhere on Earth the UN quickly intervenes.
You do realize that the largest participant in such peacekeeping missions has decided to abdicate?
> The US is not some weak-ass state like Germany was in the 30s
You are significantly under-estimating the strength of pre-war Germany in spite of having been beaten in World War I. In fact, you could easily argue that it was specifically this kind of under-estimation that directly led to World War II.
> even if Trump would order some sort of genocide today it would quickly be blocked at many levels.
It would never play out like that. Trump is not going to order some sort of genocide directly. He'll simply stand aside while others do the dirty work and he'll lament at how terrible it is that they are resisting causing violence on both sides.
One of my theories about why the GOP does not want to throw Trump out is that they are - rightfully - scared of what kind of backlash that will cause and that they hope against hope that they will be voted out in 2018 so others will be seen as responsible for throwing the lit fuse into the armory.
> It would never play out like that. Trump is not going to order some sort of genocide directly. He'll simply stand aside while others do the dirty work and he'll lament at how terrible it is that they are resisting causing violence on both sides.
I think you'll agree that a systematic genocide like the ones you mention where you go into a city and round people up cannot happen. That would require the police, national guard, army to stand down and allow it.
So we are left with small scale attacks, the kind terrorists do. We need to fight and guard against those, infiltrate the cells and arrest anyone actually planning such thing, but they are not in the category of genocide, especially because in a genocide the killers walk away with nothing happening to them (because they are protected by the state), but in a terrorist attack you either die or are quickly caught.
> I think you'll agree that a systematic genocide like the ones you mention where you go into a city and round people up cannot happen.
Oh, but we already have a small precursor to that, the ICE raids on immigrants. There will always be people willing to ride the trains and to man the guard towers, good Christians too.
Let's hope it does not go further than it has already done.
> So we are left with small scale attacks, the kind terrorists do.
I'm not sure of that. The whole 'unite the right' movement is about connecting all the little dots into a wave large enough that it would be hard to put down without the national guard or the army stepping in, who could very well have sympathizers in their own ranks.
> We need to fight and guard against those, infiltrate the cells and arrest anyone actually planning such thing, but they are not in the category of genocide.
Yes, that is exactly what they said in 1933 about Hitler and his merry band of followers.
And then in 1934 the tables were turned and suddenly there was no way back, from that point forward WWII was inevitable.
Edit: I've taken some time to find this article in Der Spiegel, I read it long ago and I found it to be quite informative about Hitlers rise to power:
That's not fair. Humanity is not yet at the stage where it can allow anybody to live wherever they want. I also can't move to the US without a visa, not legally at least. And if I do it illegally, I can't complain if I get raided one day. It's not a human right yet to live in the US.
BTW, those kind of raids also happen in Europe. Yes, they make be feel bad, but unless we go for radical taxation and basic income (including for immigrants), I don't see how we could not have them.
Also, what would be the unifying sentiment that the white supremacists would unite the whole country around, like this:
> For the vast majority of Germans, the restoration of
national pride and military strength, the overthrowing of the Versailles Treaty and the expansion of the Reich to incorporate ethnic Germans from Austria and the Sudetenland were goals in themselves
> It says he had total control over the media, and that he had huge approval. Neither is true today.
This was not the case when Hitler first became Chancellor or, even moreso, when his faction first took undisputed control of the Nazi Party.
It was true sometime after he'd done both, and used the propaganda power (and coercive power) of both the state and party to secure his hold on the public. (One clear difference, whatever parallels there might be, is that Trump only really started the fight for undisputed control of the GOP after becoming President; that makes the internal fight much more visible to outsiders, but also wants if he wins it, he won't have as many other barriers to cross to implement his plans as Hitler did after taking over the Nazis.)
> Today when a genocide happens somewhere on Earth the UN quickly intervenes.
No, it doesn't, and it only intervenes, at all, in fairly weak states, or where geopolitical interests of the sole superpower align with the intervention.
> The US is not some weak-ass state
Which is why a violent racist faction rising to power in the US is particularly frightening, globally as well as locally.
I actually had a discussion about this last night. We came to the conclusion that you can't invalidate an argument solely because it might be biased. Otherwise you'd probably invalidate all arguments due to some bias found somewhere. We agreed you must take biased arguments with a grain of salt, recognize and assess bias, etc. but the presence of bias does not alone invalidate an argument. Even "scientific research" is biased, ask Kuhn.
> I actually had a discussion about this last night. We came to the conclusion that you can't invalidate an argument solely because it might be biased.
Clearly. That's well-known. I'm just saying that the argument from authority being made actually was supported by evidence of ideology, not authority.
I'm saying the premise “the author is a Hoover Institution fellow” offered to support the intermediate conclusion “the author is a credible authority that it is worth spending time listening to” does not support that conclusion, and therefore the further conclusion “one should read this book”.
I’m not speculating on the quality of the work, based on the identity of the author or any other information, only stating that (aside from a clue as to it's likely ideological bias, which might be relevant to some) no reason has been presented to overcome pre-existing skepticism about the value of the book noted upthread by a different commenter.
So every time someone recommends a book I must find some 3rd party out of band means of validating an author's credibility? Authors' credentials are often listed right on the work. If you don't respect them then unfortunately it will be impossible to validate a work in your eyes (in isolation). But that's where the whole human to human social thing comes in: I'm recommending the book because I think it's relevant to the thread. If the posted credentials and my recommendation are still not enough you might ask why I know of the book in the first place, and as I indicated it's bestselling on amazon right now. There are at least other people who are interested in it. Anyway that doesn't really matter someone who don't respect my recommendation or the Author's creds will be unlikely to ever entertain the work. I can't fix closed minds, sorry.
Because you just mentioned the title and that's what popped up.
> I mean the currently bestselling:
That it is bestselling does not make it true and that particular author has a stench around him you can smell from a mile away. The last thing I'll do is send the cretin my $.
Ironically, and I'm saying this without having read the book as you already know, but I would not be surprised if for once the title actually accurately conveyed the contents of the book.
In my opinion, it's telling that the Tor Project has decided to post about this.
It's an open secret -- in other words, not even a secret -- that Tor and various other darknet and overlay networks contain, among other kinds of material, content that has been driven underground because of the risks it presents to its promulgators on the aboveground net. Depictions of actual child sex abuse, one of the most widely condemned sorts of material in a way that's nearly universal across societies, has been present on Tor-reachable hidden services for years, and the Tor Project seldom writes about this; it's simply accepted as a risk of the style of technology, much to the chagrin and moral unease of people everwhere.
Clearly they are addressing a recent development about a particular website, with relevance to the United States and its current struggle that was brought to forefront in the past week. The Project sought to publicize their stance to leave no doubts, but was this not something that ought to have been abundantly clear to a sufficiently objective observer? Doesn't the fact that a US nonprofit tending to a piece of networking software decides to weigh in on the matter of a single hidden service currently in the spotlight reveal something troubling about the pressures of public opinion in the US today?
It is a poor reflection on tech's echochamber when Tor has to re-explain the principles of free speech for the millionth time. We've already had this debate about Monarchists, witches, real Nazis, Commies, Satanists, Anarchists, blacks, gays, Muslims, and every other group at the center of a moral panic. And EVERY time afterward, when the hysteria ceases, we look back and think how absurd people were for thinking we need to undermine basic liberties in order to prevent the atheists from turning our kids gay or whatever. Yet every few years there is a new absurd moral panic that opportunists jump on to grant themselves authoritarian powers and there is a new set of gullible idiots that are eager to cede their rights to them. The world will be able to function fine with a few racist wingnuts writing on their loser blog. The world will not function when we start arbitrarily silencing people and granting fringe groups the greatest recruiting propaganda they could ask for.
I never understood the restriction on presidents being born US citizens until recently. What we've observed of late is a perversion of the basic liberties and freedoms that America was founded on. My hypothesis is that in part this is due to an influx of individuals who were not raised to value those freedoms and liberties within quite the same cultural context. (I'm trying to be very careful here please don't pervert my words.) This is by no means bad but my point is that it certainly is at odds with our own American cultural values. It is also supprising how many Americans I've met so easily prefer personal safety or cater to anecdotal passion and empathy. What's so ironic is ther it's these very values that have allowed us to become what we are today. Why are we so eager to throw those out the minute we realize just how powerful they are? But that's not the point. My point is that it's fine to entertain and exchange all cultures and ideas, but we've built a system of geverning people that depends to some degree on our own cultural identity. The key to true diversity is tolerance--the ability to firmly retain your own identity whilst co-existing with all the other ones. We cannot value freedom of expression if we are not willing to tolerate ideas that are different from our own. There's a word for a shared political/social worldview: uniformity.
People say roughly the same thing about Tor that they used to say about the printing press: bad people can use it to spread seditious lies, pornography, anonymous accusations against upright people. I suppose the defenses are about the same, too.
I wonder if they find it in their hearts to denounce the purveyors of child porn who have been using Tor extensively and for many years. One of the reasons I will never run a Tor exit node: it is almost certain to at some point help them access the vilest shit imaginable, with impunity.
Obviously people having opinions in an internet forum is much more important.
On a more serious note, Tor was meant to be used by people that want to say something that may run counter to the general, approved, discourse. That was a very ironic statement.
I support this decision by the Tor Project and also the one made by CloudFlare. This is an excellent example of the need for both profit-driven/corporate software and open-source, voluneteer driven software. They serve different purposes.
Tor has similar constraints with the design of the TOR service as the US government has with the Constitution. Which I suppose is why you have groups like ANTIFA ready to trade blows and hackers ready to take down sites. You have the right to post the message, but then you have to face the response.
You do not have to face the response, if the response is violence or hacking, because those activities are illegal.
Talking on the internet and organizing legal, peaceful, rallies, is fine in my book.
The US really doesn't care about freedom of speech anymore, which is spreading to the internet, and everyone is giddy to deal the last nail in the coffin.
I don't have the right to punch a Nazi, but the law doesn't stop me from doing so. It may be a deterrent and I may get punished, but the law doesn't create a physically insurmountable barrier.
>You have the right to post the message, but then you have to face the response.
Actually, not being physically assaulted is a right, not the other way around. You can't just go around screaming "VIGILANTE JUSTICE!" just because someone you dislike got the shit beaten out of them, and then defend that by saying "It's my right to make you face the consequences".
By your own logic, somebody could literally torture you for posting this if they disagreed, and it would be okay because you're just facing the consequences.
We are getting tripped up on language here. I don't have the right to punch a Nazi, but the law doesn't stop me from doing so. It may be a deterrent and I may get punished, but the law doesn't create a physically insurmountable barrier.
In other words, you have the right to declare yourself a Nazi, but then you may become a target for people who punch Nazis. That's not an opinion or a belief, this actually happens.
We're also getting tripped up on assumptions. I didn't suggest that I support violence or hacking. I didn't suggest that violence or hacking is justified, let alone a legal right.
I was speculating that shows of resistance which escalate into unlawful action may be a result of groups which feel threatened but see no legal option to oppose that threat (actually, I didn't even say that much).
>We are getting tripped up on language here. I don't have the right to punch a Nazi, but the law doesn't stop me from doing so. It may be a deterrent and I may get punished, but the law doesn't create a physically insurmountable barrier.
Then your statement is literally meaningless.
>In other words, you have the right to declare yourself a Nazi, but then you may become a target for people who punch Nazis.
Yes. Those people are fucking stupid, and telling people they have the right to beat the shit out of people they dislike is also fucking stupid. That logic is so fucked up, it would take several paragraphs to thoroughly explain why it's bad logic.
>We're also getting tripped up on assumptions. I didn't suggest that I support violence or hacking. I didn't suggest that violence or hacking is justified, let alone a legal right.
You literally said people have the right to get the shit kicked out of them, with the implication it's deserved. The actual literal statement you made is an argument used by antifa to attack people they dislike. If you're going to use statements made to defend violence, you need to understand people will assume you support the groups espousing said statements, for the same reason people chanting "Blood and soil" are called Nazis.
Between the title-case and the omitted "that", I had a bit of trouble parsing the title: "The Tor Project defends the human rights that racists oppose."
Why would you expect them to do anything? Racism is one of the least vile things of the vile things that Tor makes possible, and it isn't even illegal.
(Edit: Wording slightly changed to reflect point raised below.)
To make it clear that they dislike the fact that their work is being used in this way, but, as the article states, that they are technically unable to do anything about it without completely compromising the entire reason Tor exists.
TOR project announces Tor still works as intended and gives more visibility to themselves and to hidden services.
The fact that Neo Nazis, Journalists and human rights activists all use the same service (though I suspect that all three of them are drowned out by copyright violation and illicit pornography) does not say much about the service itself, especially not when that service has been designed from the ground up to achieve that effect.
Cloudflare as a corporate entity with shareholders and customers is in an entirely different position than a not-for-profit entity such as the Tor project. Both are acting roughly as one would expect given their background.
> We are disgusted, angered, and appalled by everything these racists stand for and do.
Let's back up a second.
What's the mapping of online avatars on that site to human beings?
If it's 1:1 then I should continue reading Tor's statement.
1:1-times-N for any N other than 1 is quite unlikely so we can throw out that possibility.
1-times-N:1 for N = 10 or even N = 20 are likely and cheap. An echo chamber of ten racists doesn't warrant a response from Tor, while an echo chamber of hundreds might.
1:N:1 for N = 20+ is possible especially by state actors. A small group of paid scammers simulating activites of 1000+ racists is enough to cause noticeable social disruption.
So the next question is: does Tor devbase have a way to map medusa heads to torsos?
I think the answer is "no". Not only for Tor, but also Wall Street Journal, Breitbart News, The Guardian, and possibly even Reddit, Twitter, Snapchat, etc.
If I'm right about that, then I read Tor's statement as essentially eating the cost of having no way to effectively separate signal from noise and simply rolling up their sleeves and treating all noise as potential signal. That's as wasteful as it was in the 90s & early 2000s to simply eat the cost of reading everything in the email inbox and deleting the spam manually. But here it's more than loss of productivity-- its potentially confusing a large portion of reality with a simulation. And unlike the widespread cynicism that came with tv broadcast, people seem to have convinced themselves that social media and random sites/comment sections are an earnest and democratic reflection of some meaningful segment of the general population.
I feel like this is what cloudflare should have said. I understand they changed their mind after TDS claimed CloudFlare supported them - but based on the internal memos it seemed to be more of a "I was grumpy and they're jerks" decision.
The major problem with that being that once you make one decision like that - even if you're well-intentioned, the next person that comes after you might do it to the wrong people.
Maybe letting racists have a platform isn't great, but it's better than hand-by-hand justification of what is and isn't "appropriate" to host.