These aren't dumb people. They know exactly what they're asking for. Privacy and security of the public's data is not a priority to them, surveillance and power is. Politicians would much prefer all communication in plaintext, to hell with individual freedoms and privacy, especially European politicians that don't come from the same traditions of freedom as the anglophone countries.
What politician do you expect to openly confess the above in public. These are world-leading politicians, i.e., professional athletes of lying and obfuscation.
>especially European politicians that don't come from the same traditions of freedom as the anglophone countries.
Have you been reading English-language news? Attempts at limiting privacy and advancing surveillance have been nonstop in the anglophone world over the past decades. What may even have been the first attempt at having a backdoor mandate was American: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip
The UK and Australia are ahead of countries like France in restricting freedom, so this sounds like a poor attempt to avoid complimenting the US specifically.
Yes, they absolutely are. I agree with the rest of your comment, they aren't interested in privacy or security, want generalized surveillance, and are world-class liars.
But they are also pretty dumb and extremely ignorant of anything technical.
I sort of agree with them. I want all privacy abolished for politicians. Think about it, if we live stream them in the shower we might get some much needed young people to take the job. Let them keep the ad revenue. Only fans suggests it should be the best paid job out there and the workers are all about public approval.
That is not how it works. Politicians will vote for special measures for themselves, but citizens need to have their data easily presentable for inspection by government agencies. Think of the children/terrorists.
they are, most tech worker didn't know how cryptography works under the hood and yet you expect politician to know it??? nah its just intelligence agency make a request to parlement of some shit
In the context of a discussion where the two propositions are "they take bad decisions because they don't understand" or "they take those decisions by malice", I think the parent is trying to say "they most probably don't understand cryptography, given that most tech workers don't either and those politicians are less into tech than tech workers".
OpenSSL built on Canada was fine. Get NetBSD from US mirrors and you got a TLS-challenged OS until the 00's when the restriction exports on tech 'as weapons' were nonsense.
No dumb perhaps, but very very short sighted and it pretty clear how other decisions can be so very wrong, once you hear them get quizzed on encryption.
"We should have a backdoor for law enforcement", okay but what if that abused by some regime that doesn't like Jews, Muslims, Christians, homosexuals, communists, authors, journalists... you? Obviously THOSE people shouldn't have access to a backdoor. Okay, but if you do it EU wide then Hungary will have access to it. Okay, only Western European nations should have access. What if AFD wins in Germany or Groupe Rassemblement National in France? Okay, in THAT case the backdoor access should be revoked. Who decides that?
It's very clear that politicians want backdoors in encryption, but only under a very specific set of circumstances. Those circumstances are almost completely tied to their own parliamentary seats. If questioned long enough, most of them will see it issue, they probably won't admit it though.
So no, not dumb, just incredibly short sighted on almost irreversible decisions that can and will hurt the wrong people.
I ran a very similar service for years. And yes it will be abused. I stopped when russian and chinese bots where sending many messages per seconds containing AI generated marketing bullshit with links to scammy sites in various format (html, bb code, markdown, …) and it became GB of text… :/. I still haven't finish to clean things up. The service is now discontinued because of this: https://paste.fulltxt.net/
It will be. Any time you offer something that allows anonymous uploads & shares (hell, sometimes even if you don't allow share, people will share accounts), it will be a silo 95% full of material that's illegal in practically every corner of the world.
If you play the good citizen and encrypt the files, giving the key to the owners, then you also don't have any means to preemptively detect and delete that stuff, you just keep waiting on some law agency knocking at your door. Also, if you openly say "hey I'll peek into your files to see if they are legal", then they will be the ones encrypting. Disallow that? It's a nightmare to detect and abusers are really, really creative! So much dedication too!
And it's not just CSAM, there will be detailed instructions on practically any illegal thing you couldn't even imagine.
It's bad, really bad, and I've grown to accept that small, closed community services (best with real-world connections) are the only way forward.
I wrote something similar as a toy project a while back, it's open source, and I host a "demo" version of it, but for fear of all of this, I limited it to only kilobytes of data and have the links expire after an hour.
I run it on my LAN for my own use, which is what I think it's best for, but I really don't like having something like this on the web.
Luckily, I've never advertised or shown it off so nobody but myself uses it, but I'll probably take down the demo site too, soon.
It's sad that you don't have Internet friends that you trust enough to share that with after writing all that code. Maybe open source it but don't link to your demo instance? It's more sad that the Internet is like that. There are a couple of really neat quirky projects out there that I only know about through word of mouth because the open Internet is not to be trusted. The projects are behind a login wall, so it's not like they're discoverable either.
The name of the project is its domain so I'd have to separate them out, which is why I've kept the demo site online for years now, despite basically no usage, I'm also a big fan of being able to try something before you go through the effort of deploying it yourself.
The project is already open-source on Github, but I don't actively link to it in public forums because I don't want to have to deal with it being used for questionable/illegal content, which is also the reason I haven't added some of the features I'd like to, and severely limited the size and duration for the demo site.
It's been a nice toy project, I added multiple architectures support for the Docker image builds when I was working out how to do that, manifests to deploy it in Kubernetes when I was first learning that and even made it a Nix flake when I first started playing with NixOS; The code itself is written in Go with a goal of using zero external (outside of standard library) dependencies, keeping the code small and clean for non-programmers to be able to understand and uses some Go features that were new/interesting to me at the time they were added.
It'd need to grow a lot and forgo some of those goals for me to add the features I would like to see, but for something nobody will use, and I use quite sparingly myself, there's no need.
This. The reason why we don't have an un-siloed, general-purpose means of file transfer after 40 years of internet is probably more a legal than a technical one...
Usually youll find vendor lock ins because the actual hard part of this isn’t legal, it’s building a user base from non-technical users. And that usually requires having your standard included with platforms they already use.
This is why (for example) Google Drive and OneDrive have become so popular despite Dropbox being first to market.
There’s plenty of other file transfer solutions out there too but you’ll find the un-siloed ones will be lesser known than the siloed ones simply because of the power of $$$
I would personally suggest that this site probably "wants" accounts. Yes, with CAPTCHAs (on registration.) If you want to be able to ban people who abuse your service, you'll need some thing-that-is-costly-to-get-multiple-of to ban them by. Otherwise they just keep coming back.
To still be a "console-friendly pastebin", the result of doing that costly registration process, could just be a page that gives you a (private) URL, that works like the base URL does now. https://paste.c-net.org/b/{bucket} or something, where {bucket} is a UUIDv4, or anything else with enough entropy to not be able to brute-force enumerate your way into someone else's account URL.
The uploaded files themselves could still have short human-writable top-level paths, for ease of repeating them over the phone.
Though, I notice that when you upload a file, you get a "delete key" as well as a URL. IMHO the "delete key" shouldn't be a weird nonstandard header you send with an HTTP DELETE; it should just be a URL — e.g. https://paste.c-net.org/b/{bucket}/{delete_key} — that you can HTTP DELETE directly.
In other words, make /b/{bucket}/{delete_key} the file's "true name", and /{link} a "read-only view" of the file.
When you say abused, I assume you mean either CSAM or copyrighted material?
Is there a hash database or something that could be queried to block known bad stuff? (would probably fail in the face of compression or encryption, but catching the low-hanging fruit would at least probably handle any potential legal liability?) Seems like something useful AI would actually work well for, if FBI/publishers/etc., would train a model and release it or host a service with an API.
You live in a society where almost everyone goes to work to produce something that they will not directly consume.
Humans figured out a way to organise everyone and get them to work cooperatively, it's the free market.
In fact, it couldn't work any other way. Suppose you had 100% altruism and everyone wanted to promote the "greater good". You wouldn't ever know how to direct people towards that greater good. You need prices to drive production.
I doubt that free market drives people toward "greater good". What is "greater good" anyway? Can you give some examples of "greater good" and how the free market achieved it?
BTW, no market is truly free, not unless it allows fakes, quack medicine, child labor, selling humans, or other horrors of the past.
Like how the creation of the cotton gin totally freed up the time that laborers previously had to spend separating cottonseeds out to do more fun things. Things really improved for laborers in general after such inventions flowed through the free market.
Your "greater good" is not that great. Let me give some counterexamples:
- Sanitation: it's still done with public funding, no free marker will ever build a new sewer or water treatment plant.
- Medicine & vaccines: they're still developed by public funding and the incentives are the prestige and altruism of the researchers, not their income.
- Electricity: public investments everywhere.
- Roads & rail: No free market will ever create a highway, or even a secondary road. May I laugh about the rail "free market" / private investments?
- Food safety: achieved with laws and public funded inspection agencies.
You may argue that the free market expanded the internet. It seems small, doesn't it?
To be clear, I agree with you. I was sarcastically hinting at slavery to highlight that increases in productivity may not actually be for the greater good.
Every 'free' market is regulated. There is no such thing as a totally free market. The essential point is that "The Free Market" is a bullshirt concept.
The closest thing to a totally free market is the dark web, where you can buy/sell almost anything, but even that market starts to self-regulate with vigilantes highlighting & punishing fraud, etc.
More realistic markets start by banning many kinds of goids and services, and ways to do business - just because it seems obvious you can't sell murder services doesn't mean the market is unregulated.
Similarly, can't sell addictive drugs; still serms free, right? Ok, I've come uo with a great cheap way to make Insulin; it'll save thousands of lives and take over the market, but nope, can't sell it without proper licenses and inspections, etc. Market is still free, right?
Now I have a great gardening method to make cheap & nutritious vegetables without pesticides - I want to label it "Organic"; nope, in many markets, need proper certification to use that label, and i certainly need to meet food sales standards to sell it at all. Sparkling Wine? Can't call it "Champagne" unless it is certified from a certain region in France. At a farmstand in England, they cannot sell anything not made within a 25km radius. Investment Banks in the US are currently forbidden to take retail / individual personsv deposits, and banks that do are barred from many types of investment activities. Etc. etc., etc.
The point is that ALL actual markets are regulated, the question (and arguments) are about who regulates the markets and what kinds of regulations are appropriate.
The "Free Market" is a nonsense theoretical construct that does more harm than good.
Its not runtime enforceable though. Personally whilst I do provide type hints (I have a the linter setup to remind me) They are only really useful as a documentation tool.
As they are not enforced at runtime, you can easily return bollocks and not know.
I really like how c# does it, which is have strict typing on by default, but allowing you to turn it off for things where you're wanting to be loosey goosey. Not having to do a bunch of type checks on every operation would also speed up a bunch of things inside python
However, that would make it a different language. perhaps python 4? (ducks)
It would be nice to have typing in the core language/interpreter, including runtime type errors, instead of this weird add-on approach. I constantly run into situation where the code is fine and mypy complains or the code is broken and mypy says it's fine. It all just feels like one gigantic fragile workaround instead of a proper type system that you can depend on.
That is the case for most typesystem considered safe, save for introspection use cases. For instance, haskell, a language with strong type guarantees, does erase types for runtime.
In fact, people should see Typescript as a linter / bundler tool than a programming language by itself, ignoring the design mistakes of how enums and namespaces came to be.
If Cuba were a free society instead of being run by communists they would have an economy that worked. This is the destruction caused by ~¾ of a century of central economic planning and Marxist ideology.
I think the reason is different. Some languages have official bodies that decree how a language works. For example the French have the French Academy.
English has no "boss" in charge of how the language works and who decides what the correct anything for the language is. The closest are style guides, but they come from multiple organisations and each often different to each other. So, it's harder to just decide that something will be spelt differently.
> I think the reason is different. Some languages have official bodies that decree how a language works. For example the French have the French Academy.
Well, they like to pretend they have that kind of authority, those languages don't actually have a "boss" in charge of how the language works either.
English had multiple attempted spelling reforms, but that mostly resulted in differences between American and British spellings of the same words. There was no central power to enforce a single English spelling because America had successfully broken off from the British Empire whose coercive force backed the English language.
In contrast, France was extremely good at putting down revolutionaries in their colonies. Even when they gained nominal independence France would invent debts to impoverish their former colonies. France was also extremely good at putting down local languages, even within France itself. France waged a century-long campaign to hunt its own minority languages to extinction[0] and the language regulators are themselves part of the same infrastructure.
In other words, "regular spelling" is a colonial atrocity and English's incomprehensible spelling rules are a demonstration of freedom.
This can even be demonstrated in each language's attitude towards loanwords. English stole huge swaths of Latin, Greek, and French vocabulary. Text even a few centuries old is difficult to read and anything older than Shakespeare is completely inscrutable[1] as there's too many Germanic root words for this ostensibly Germanic language. Meanwhile in France, their language regulators fight tirelessly to invent new calques for English loanwords to stop the "Anglicization of French", as if that were a thing that needed to be stopped.
Well, I suppose there is one reason why you'd want to stop it: loanwords make it far harder to regularize spelling. Think about, say, all the Japanese loanwords in English. Hepburn romanization[2] tried to make them readable to English speakers, but didn't do a great job, so now English has to accommodate spellings like karaoke, tsundere, or sakura alongside spellings like pleonasm, beef, or Olympic. Good luck inventing a spelling system that can both faithfully represent the "correct" sounds for all of those words, while also remaining legible to present English readers, and being adopted in every country that speaks English to some degree - off the top of my head that includes America, Canada, the UK, Australia, India, Nigeria, and South Africa.
[0] Which I suspect may have also inspired analogous atrocities in Canada against indigenous Canadians
[1] As I put it to a native Japanese speaker: "You can read Genji, I can't read Beowolf."
[2] Which itself isn't used by native speakers since you can't round-trip Hepburn to Romaji. Japan itself uses Kunrei-shiki romanization, it's the one that spells つ as tu instead of tsu.
> Meanwhile in France, their language regulators fight tirelessly to invent new calques for English loanwords to stop the "Anglicization of French", as if that were a thing that needed to be stopped.
That's something one hears quite often from English speakers but I don't really know where this myth comes from.
French is a quite decentralised language with each country having its own "regulator" but none of them have legal power. They are all just advisory organisations. Many the one with the most power is the OQLF in Québec. The French ministry of education decides what is taught in France and some of its reforms are sometimes followed by the other countries, but they don't deal with vocabulary itself, mostly orthography.
The Académie Française does invent words, but they have no official value or power. Their main occupation is documenting actual usage.
Most other European languages do have international, language wide regulators though, often with actual legal value, but French doesn't have anything like this.
I think it all comes down to English speakers knowing even less about the other languages than they know about French.
I'm not sure I agree with your second footnote. Beowulf is written in Old English, which is quite hard for modern English speakers to read on account of being German. Middle English, however, I think you'd find fairly palatable. For example, the Peterborough Chronicle (https://adoneilson.com/eme/texts/peterborough_40.html) is _roughly_ contemporaneous with the Tale of Genji and is readable by modern English speakers.
This looked as incomprehensible to me (a native English speaker) as a foreign language, albeit one with a bunch of scattered words I recognized…until I figured out that þ meant th and all the sudden I could mostly read it fine.
The letter “thorn” is still alive and well in Icelandic.
It's also (AIUI) pretty funny, in that it's the reason many people seem to think that the word “the” used to be pronounced as “ye”: The letter fell out of fashion at around the same time as printing became popular. So many printers didn't have types – you know, the little mirror-image single-letter lead stamps you compose the page you want to print out of; typesetting – for it. But since the capital “Thorn” apparently looks a bit like the capital Y, they used that in stead. That's where all the “Ye Olde Shoppe” come from: People never said “ye”; it was just a kludge attempt to spell “the”.
