>Alleged defects not barred by Section 230 include: not providing effective parental controls; not providing options for young users to self-restrict time used on the platform; [...]
It seems excessively burdensome to require websites to provide "effective" (interpret that as you will) parental controls. There is only so much you can do as a website owner to restrict children from misusing your platform without resorting to extremely intrusive methods (i.e. requesting some form of ID). Because at the end of the day, anyone can create a gmail account and sign up for Facebook while pretending they're 21.
The comments section on the article discuss this at some length.
Personally, I think most governments will eventually decide to legislate both safety and privacy together. The argument will be that requiring ID is acceptable when the data tied to that ID has privacy protections. The EU seems headed in this direction.
I expect keeping that compact will be next to impossible, but governments work with the tools they have—legislation and regulation—and expect the industry involved to solve the implementation details.
>"The researchers traced the keys they compromised to devices that used custom, closed-source SSH implementations that didn’t implement the countermeasures found in OpenSSH and other widely used open source code libraries. The devices came from four manufacturers: Cisco, Zyxel, Hillstone Networks, and Mocana. Both Cisco and Zyxel responded to the researchers’ notification of the test results before the completion of the study. Hillstone responded afterward."
One thing (perhaps the thing) that makes Wikipedia great is that it doesn't seek the truth. Instead, it seeks verifiability. This means that editors don't have to be experts to write articles, which is the main reason the site is useful at all.
The truth can be very elusive. So it makes sense to move that burden to the sources.
I'd expand that: Wikipedia's greatness is due to its policies and guidelines in general. It is not surprising that they were drafted by a second-time encyclopedist and PhD in epistemology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger
The next best thought out knowledge-based site is StackExchange.
Larry Sanger is now a conspiracy theorist [1], believing gems including:
- Antifa did the coup.
- Face masks are harmful.
- There have been "almost zero" deaths from COVID-19.
- Soros may have paid people to riot for George Floyd.
- The Ten Commandments were God's words: not "inspired", but precisely dictated. [2]
Since Wikipedia is hostile to conspiracy theories and religious woo, Larry has in the ensuing years tried (without success) to make a Wikipedia-equivalent site that will be friendly to his nuttery.
Your source on [2] does not quite support your interpretation: if you follow the Twitter thread from the beginning, or read Sanger's linked blog post [0], he makes no claims about his own beliefs. He's explicitly considering what one would conclude about Biblical inspiration _if_ one believed what the Bible says about itself. No faith is necessary to consider that question.
[0] https://larrysanger.org/2023/10/on-biblical-inspiration/
Every time I read 'rationalwiki' its just a bunch of personal drama about people the writers don't like. Never seen a single good article on there, it's just a bunch of circle jerking politics pretending to be a "rational wiki" like calling it the ministry of truth.
He pretty much sums it up in one sentence. I don't care about Sanger or his politics. These writers have no lives, all they do is criticize things that don't matter.
> Besides being the cofounder of one of the biggest websites on the Internet, he is mostly known for two things; criticising Wikipedia, and having created many failed WikiProjects to fix said criticisms.
This writing is fine penmanship for a 2nd grader about why I hate Kevin and his Pokemon cards.
I think I am confused by your comment in the context of Larry Sanger: are you suggesting that rationalwiki is incorrect and that Larry did not say any of the things quoted?
Only thing I know is a group of limp wristed keyboard warriors hate some people write a wall of text and try to "rationalize" why. The facts don't matter, only the tone does and it's full of impotent anger.
This is a natural product of how power works on the internet. Barring an algo that downgrades time spent, the people with the most power are proportionally the people who do the least things elsewhere.
I was clued into this when the BLM protests happened. When I poked into all the names of the protesters I could find who were present on-site, very few of them had day jobs.
It's just a secular leftist response to Conservapedia that mostly focuses on debunking (mostly far-right) pseudoscience and conspiracy theories. I think you're taking the name a bit too literally and the concept a bit too seriously.
Conservapedia and Wikipedia don't call themselves "rational" and the other guy took it seriously, not me. I know its just a bunch of whiny losers. What if conservapedia called itself the unbiased wiki and everyone quoted it?
Searching that sentence verbatim on Google produces, as a first result, a paper on the National Library of Medicine [1] that states in its abstract:
> Extended mask-wearing by the general population could lead to relevant effects and consequences in many medical fields.
How is that a conspiracy theory? At most, you can argue that it's not absolutely conclusive or that other studies reach different conclusions. But that's far from declaring something a conspiracy theory.
I think some people consider information contrary to that communicated by government officials to be conspiracy theory: If the government didn't tell us the truth about something, they conspired to tell us something untrue.
By this definition of conspiracy theory, anybody who is not a conspiracy theorist is credulous. I proudly call myself a conspiracy theorist AKA skeptic.
You should really read your sources a little more closely:
> As a library, NLM provides access to scientific literature. Inclusion in an NLM database does not imply endorsement of, or agreement with, the contents by NLM or the National Institutes of Health.
> These symptoms were accompanied by a sensation of heat (p < 0.0001) and itching (p < 0.01) due to moisture penetration of the masks (p < 0.0001) in 10 healthy volunteers of both sexes after only 90 min of physical activity.
Heaven forbid! It's almost comical how certain people furrow for the tiniest of cherries to support their antivaxx, antimask knee jerking while their bodies get submitted to a gauntlet of health risks from contracting COVID.
Wikipedia actually/also inherited a lot of original "policy" from Ward Cunninghams WikiWikiWeb [1] . So right at the start, there's some overlap between wikis, design patterns, and agile development (from back when those terms actually meant something). A big lost opportunity in the history of wikipedia was to name the body of best practices the "Policy"/"Guideline"/"Essay" system, as opposed to "Community Patterns". In reality they do function closer to patterns anyway, which should be unsurprising seeing the original source(s).
There's also the whole way the software works. So that's twice that Wikipedia owes Ward Cunningham.
Well, that and the most important exchange of all of course:
"My question, to this esteemed Wiki community, is this: Do you think that a Wiki could successfully generate a useful encyclopedia? -- JimboWales [a]
Yes, but in the end it wouldn't be an encyclopedia. It would be a wiki. -- WardCunningham [b]" [2]
I guess that's one reason I can't fully trust Wikipedia. Because of its beauracracy, primary sources can't make much headway. If I had an entry and they got my birthday wrong, I can show them my birth certificate and they wouldn't accept it. But if I talked to Fox News and said I was born in X, suddenly it's "a good source for wikipedia".
I think it's a good rule of thumb to not have people edit articles too close to them, but for some objective facts you may as well let it in (and remember: "facts" means "can be proven OR disproven". I can make a fake birth certifricate but you can objecively prove through later talks that I lied. Or the hospital realizes they messed up and my own birthday is a lie to begin with. Much easier to reason with than "am I a good person?")
2. A mainstream publication republishes this because wikipedia is generally trustworthy
3. Someone else at wikipedia notices nonsense and removes article
4. Article gets reinstated using a referense to publication at (2)
It may sound weird but it has happened a few times. Wikipedia could probably do more to avoid circular references, but there's really no simple answer.
For an amusing but harmless example, see the Amelia Bedelia article. It's been long since reverted, but I'm sure there are many similar prank edits that survive to this day
1. make sure the primary source is publicly viewable and archiveable (be it a blog, acedemic profile, about us on a news site, or even a social media post).
2. ensure that there's some way to verify this as a primary source. This one pains me the most, but if we trust news sites to vet anonymous sources, may as well trust social media communities to vouch for a source really being that person. IME social media loves to call out lies, so them trusting a personality isn't as scary as it sounds.
3. be able to mark a source as "primary" to give a bit of distinction so we know there is some lack of vetting compared to a mainstream resource (which hopefully has such vetting built in). similar to [citation needed], it can be footnoted like [2, primary].
There is and always will be nonsense that penetrates through, but I don't think we should discount primary resources as much we do currently. That's not how real life reflects on such resources. Wikipedia has loosened up and started to use more social media as ciations, so this isn't a radical direction.
I don't think the avoidance of primary sources is due to bureaucracy. It's long been a policy in the guidelines. I can sort of see the reason if you look at something like say vaccine safety, primary sources would be papers and the like, secondary articles in the nyt and the like. The trouble with papers is there are loads and hard to understand for non specialist and you can find one saying they caused problems in this instance or not in that according to your biases. Whereas nyt articles etc are written for the public and try to be kinda balanced.
Not quite sure what the birthday problem was about.
Also, there are enough people meticulous enough to follow up on the sources. When a source is not freely available online that often involves going to the library and looking things up; there are people who spend many hours a week doing this, unpaid as a hobby.
> Also, there are enough people meticulous enough to follow up on the sources.
There's an insidious aspect to Wikipedia's reliance on verifiability: any wild claim can be posted, repeated by third parties, and afterwards have Wikipedia refer to those third parties as sources. I know this to be a fact because I read a Wikipedia article on the subject.
This really isn't true. There are references hidden around Wikipedia which link to a report for proof, but the report was actually linking to the Wiki page to begin with. It becomes circular proof, and it's pretty tough to spot.
For me, it's that such a high traffic site can operate on a budget and infrastructure that is so much less than the mega-sized websites full of other peoples' work product called "Big Tech". Those "Big Tech" companies then turn around and use Wikipedia's work to capture their audience, e.g., in search results. It cuts through any myth that it takes a trillion dollar company with tens of thousands of employees to run a high traffic website.
[Accessing Wikipedia from command line I never see the nags for donations.]
So when the sources contain inaccurate information then Wikipedia does so as well. I don't see how that is a good thing people view Wikipedia as the online version of the Encyclopedia Britannica which was curated by experts. Wikipedia should strive for the truth since finding truthful and factual information is becoming increasingly more difficult online.
Pre-Wikipedia encyclopedias could be worse! And their inaccuracies could last a long time since not everyone could afford or wanted to update their entire set. You also had no way to see the discussion behind claims to help inform your interpretation.
> "The truth can be very elusive"
no shit, this must be the understatement of the day.
not sure if people care much about truth these days, maybe rather just for validation of their biases.
having said that, wikipedia is the site i turn to most often for information so i agree - it is the last good place...
Yes, but running a Snowflake doesn't expose your IP to the website being visited, and therefore you're safe from abuse complaints/prosecution, unlike the people who run the exit nodes.
It's a shame it took this long to go after such a blatant Ponzi.
There is even an ad for this scheme painted on a wall near my home (in Mexico), so one would hope that the US will not be the only country where he will face charges.
It's crazy how many crypto natives were warning "hexicans" about hex and pointing out the most obvious indicator that it's a scam, namely Richard Heart defrauding them, yet most of his fanboys were not even willing to listen or evaluate the evidence with an open mind.
I liked local "Italian restaurant ad" Ponzi. I mean it still looked like scam to me, but I can understand why people fell for it. Scheme can only last for few months, a year at most, so the organizer must be ready to GTFO as soon as it reaches the peak. Participants are offered $1k/months for placing the restaurant ad on their car (banner behind rear windshield) but asked for $3k or $4k "security deposit". Of course the "restaurant ad" actually only said "I make $1k/month with this ad, call xxx to learn how".
It seems excessively burdensome to require websites to provide "effective" (interpret that as you will) parental controls. There is only so much you can do as a website owner to restrict children from misusing your platform without resorting to extremely intrusive methods (i.e. requesting some form of ID). Because at the end of the day, anyone can create a gmail account and sign up for Facebook while pretending they're 21.