Why would you think that? Lobbying organizations exist to advance the interests of their members. Their members in this case are businesses. This will restrict the control businesses have over their former employees. Therefore, they don’t like it.
If the SCOTUS overturns the Chevron doctrine, then this rule and probably all of the FTC's authority is on thin ice until Congress passes an act that says something more substantial and significantly less vague that "unfair business practices".
Which would be great. These agencies and bureaus have grown to an enormous scope, completely without the consent of the governed. Doesn't sound like a republic to me.
It would be catastrophic, because Congress as it stands is utterly incapable of legislating. This is why the little stuff gets delegated to unilateral decision-making withing the executive branch: If making new rules was left to congress, they could never keep up. The world moves fast, congress moves slow.
Instead, they delegate powers to agencies that can make rules within some tight purview and pursuant to some defined purpose, and if they step out of line Congress is completely within their power to legislate their preferred stance into law.
It'll be interesting to see what happens. It does sound like this clearly falls under interstate commerce, so within the scope of Fed action. Is there something that makes you think otherwise? Beyond court composition, that is.
This was something passed by a Democratic administration. Therefore Republicans hate it, and since 2/3 of the Supreme Court is Republican, it's likely to be struck down.
The actual reasoning comes later. Something-something-Federalist-Papers-something. I'm sure they'll have no trouble digging up some Founding Father who said something that sounds like banning this, if you squint right.
I know a great many lawyers, of both parties, who have more respect for the Supreme Court than I do. They are more informed and better educated than I am, so you should take my cynicism with a grain of salt. But in my experience, treating the Supreme Court as a partisanship machine yields extremely accurate predictions.
I'm sure they'll have no trouble digging up some Founding Father who said something that sounds like banning this, if you squint right.
When this country was founded, a lot of its residents were slaves, so I'm sure Thomas and Alito will find plenty of fodder in that for their "originalist" stance denying workers rights.
I'm pretty sure the constitution was not written for slaves and no "originalist" stance would consider them. This is a silly "gotcha" that you just made up so you can get mad.
The 3/5th clause has been used by prior SCOTUSs to justify decisions, so it is not a gotcha. It's history...
On that note, Alito and Thomas had to use a pre-U.S. colonial law as their grounds to overturn Roe, so there is no limit to how far they will go to use "orignalism" to further their ideology.
Interstate commerce would allow congress to make such a law. However, the real question will be if congress gave or intended to give the FTC the authority to perform this action.
This supreme court has been very down on federal powers, so it really would not be surprising if they pulled "the major questions doctrine" to ultimately kill this off.
> Interstate commerce would allow congress to make such a law. However, the real question will be if congress gave or intended to give the FTC the authority to perform this action.
That's my take as well. There is almost certainly no doubt that the commerce clause (under current precedents since the 30s) gives Congress the authority to make legal rules like this one. If there be doubt here then it will be about a) the ability of Congress to delegate this power with b) such a vague and all-encompassing term as "unfair" to describe the practices that the FTC may regulate, and/or c) whether this particular rule violates the "major questions" doctrine found in the recent W. Virginia vs. EPA case.
Sure, but FTC was authorized by congress (FTC Act 1914) to "prevent unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices in or affecting commerce" which seems pretty cut and dried? I may be missing something, this just feels pretty reasonable.
Yup, this is very much the key to why I think this will be killed.
This supreme court is very much on track to eliminate any authority federal agencies have that aren't explicitly written into law. Effectively destroying federal agencies ability to make rules.
> This supreme court is very much on track to eliminate any authority federal agencies have that aren't explicitly written into law. Effectively destroying federal agencies ability to make rules.
Very dramatic. Really, it's a reaction to Federal Agencies — unelected governmental representatives — unilaterally making their own rules out of the gray areas.
> it's a reaction to Federal Agencies — unelected governmental representatives — unilaterally making their own rules out of the gray areas.
Eliminating Chevron will trade "unelected governmental representatives" who work at Federal Agencies like the FTC with "unelected governmental representatives" who are work for Federal Agencies that are the US Courts. Progress?
> Eliminating Chevron will trade "unelected governmental representatives" who work at e.g. the FTC with "unelected governmental representatives" who are paid by the US Court system. Progress?
Where do you get that from?
Reversing Chevron will mean that Congress will have to work harder to get the regulations that it and the Executive want. If Congress were not disfunctional that would be a very good thing. And heck, reversing Chevron might well function to help Congress function more normally.
Congress won’t instantly have written laws to cover every regulation currently enforced by the federal government. Reasonably, it could take many years for those gaps to get filled. In the meanwhile, that means the courts are the key decision makers for large areas of government policy.
Did they? I wasn't there. But a reversal of Chevron doesn't necessarily mean that the courts get to do what they like. It may mean that the courts simply get to gut the bureaucratic state and kick the can to Congress -- that what's not forbidden by statute is allowed rather than that the courts act as regulators. There will be lower courts who will want to push their role as regulators, but the SCOTUS seems uninterested in playing that game given its "major questions" doctrine.
It would be very strange for the court to create the major questions doctrine then impanel itself as the ultimate regulator.
Someone has to fill in the multitude of gaps that exist between a law and its enforcement. Chevron moved much of that decision-making authority out of the court system into the executive branch.
Even a fully-functional representative body can't write laws that are explicit enough to cover every possibility. And the U.S. Congress is far from functional.
This is a key point that gets overlooked so often.
The Court accepts that governments outsource regulation to e.g. the private developers of building codes. Similarly, we don’t benefit from a Congress mired in details over the minutae managed by many areas of the federal government.
It's not though. The only people that can apply it are the supreme court and the only time they'll apply it is when precedence and the letter of the law goes against their own political ideologies. In short, it's lazy judicial activism.
It's anti-textualist, anti-originalist, anti-legal theory. It's a rule that the Supreme court has to invoke to achieve their objectives because they have no other avenue. The law was clear, the intent clear, and what congress desired was clear. Major questions should be solved by congress passing a revision to the law. The supreme court invoking it robs congress of their power because "we know better".
The reason it's such a bad rule is no lower court or litigant can really invoke it. It is only something the supreme court can use because it's undefined what qualifies as a "major question". Boiled down, it's "we don't like the law congress passed but we can't come up with a constitutional, textual, or historic reason why that law or it's application is invalid".
They would not use "major questions" if there were any other legal reasoning to go to.
> The only people that can apply it are the supreme court and the only time they'll apply it is when precedence and the letter of the law goes against their own political ideologies.
Not really. First, any inferior court can also apply the major questions doctrine -- the SCOTUS is merely the final arbiter, but presumably in many cases either there will be no case (because the Executive will preemptively go to Congress) or the Executive will accept a lower court's decision w/o having to go all the way to the SCOTUS. Second, the doctrine is pretty clear: if the impact of a regulation is politically very controversial and its impact on the economy or liberty is quite large by comparison to more mundane regulations, then it belongs to Congress.
Since "major questions" has no concrete definition, this means each minor point can/will be litigated until the court determines whether that individual point is a "major question."
Quite arguably, Congress deemed the precipitating questions were not "major questions" and expressed as much by delegating to agencies.
> Quite arguably, Congress deemed the precipitating questions were not "major questions" and expressed as much by delegating to agencies.
That's a tremendous stretch because Congress can be very vague in its delegation of authority and decades later the agencies it delegated power to can interpret anything they want into that language and -because of the oft-repeated point about Congress' disfunction- the agencies can't be stopped.
> Since "major questions" has no concrete definition,
It's like obscenity: you know it when you see it. But it's simpler: if there's a controversy, there's a chance that the issue is a major powers issue, and then you have to look at whether the liberty/economic impact of the regulation is extreme enough that Congress must decide it.
I feel like this is a circular argument. On the one hand, Congress isn't allowed to delegate to the executive (agencies) because the agencies then act as delegates (by interpreting their mandates), so Congress must explicitly legislate everything.
But then on the other hand, Congress is dysfunctional and is incapable of legislating.
This feels like a recipe for the unelected branch (the courts) to run everything.
- Congress is allowed to delegate to the executive (agencies)
- but if an agency goes so far in beyond the original understanding of its delegation as to cause a major political controversy, then it has overstepped its mandate
For example, if Congress were to delegate to the EPA the power to ban internal combustion engines at the EPA's choice, then the EPA could absolutely do that. (Perhaps Congress couldn't if the court revisits Wickard, who knows, but if Congress could, then so could EPA). But if Congress were to pass a bill regarding clean air and decades later the EPA decides that a clean air mandate means the EPA can ban ICEs, then that would clearly be a major question (well, today it would be; maybe in another two decades it wouldn't be), the courts would not (today) allow such a regulation, and EPA would have to go ask Congress to ban ICEs or to delegate that authority to the EPA.
> This feels like a recipe for the unelected branch (the courts) to run everything.
If the courts were to decide that EPA can't ban ICEs under the Clean Air Act but that the courts can, that would be pretty insane. Perhaps before Chevron the courts sometimes did that sort of thing, but they wouldn't now if Chevron is reversed because this SCOTUS absolutely does not want that and will write an opinion that reflects that -- that much is clear. So I think this is hyperbole. Instead if Chevron is reversed, and together with W. Virginia vs. EPA, "major questions" will not be decided by the courts -- major questions would go undecided as long as Congress leaves them undecided, with the status quo preserved. That would not be a bad outcome!
> if an agency goes so far in beyond the original understanding of its delegation as to cause a major political controversy
Because "major political controversy" is very subjective and subject to manipulation (we had a "major political controversy" over the name of French fries in the 2002 era), the "then" part of your clause governs in most cases. That is "it has overstepped its mandate."
Congressional oversight of the executive agencies involves the two elected branches working together to govern. Delegating more power to the unelected branch is not a healthy way for a republic to operate.
The Chevron scheme essentially leads a disfunctional Congress to abdicate all its regulatory power slowly but surely and to never claw it back. Why even have a Congress? Reversing Chevron might or might not help Congress get its pants back on, but it's worth a try, and I hope the SCOTUS does it. If it doesn't work, then we'll have to confront the possibility that the Founders' design no longer works and some serious reform is needed (though what that would be I've no idea).
If Congress is disfunctional then every vague delegation of power can be abused by the Executive because Congress will not be able to say no after the fact. That means Congress stays disfuncitonal. That's not a good recipe.
Which is what Congress created them to do. And they are appointed, which the appointers are elected. In essence, they are elected, through the elected representatives which themselves are elected.
This is like saying that the US President is an unelected governmental representative. The population actually votes on a Representative for the Electoral College (EC). The Representatives in the EC then vote for President and Vice President. And yes, the EC Representatives are voted for because they say they will vote for a particular candidate (and as we figured out in 2012, many states have laws penalizing EC Representatives who don't vote how they committed to).
> This is like saying that the US President is an unelected governmental representative
No, that's not how that works, ironically because in the name — Electoral College — the President is, elected. Regardless by the populous or not.
Appointees are politically chosen, yes by a representative, but usually with major political leanings built into the rules they make, with little to no oversight.
The SCOTUS had its "federalism revolution" in the 90s, and it ended in the Raich case when Scalia decided that leaving drug policy to the States was too much.
Under current precedents all the State decriminalization of marijuana and other drugs that we've seen are all unconstitutional. It was the liberal justices + Scalia who made it so. Those State laws decriminalizing various drugs are being tolerated by the feds -- for now.
The federalism revolution and its opposite both cut both ways.
On the whole I would prefer that the court resume its federalist revolution, even though some results I wouldn't like.
You argument is that this case demonstrates there isn't any problem and that companies don't have actually have a significant power advantage? Not very convincing.
> Poaching all the staff away from a company is illegal in CA, it's called raiding. This change will not create laws out of thin air.
This is only true in the specific narrow situation where there is intent to harm the company. There is nothing wrong with the general case where you simply want to hire those workers.
I believe it will die more because of the originalist/textualism of the supreme court rather than considerations to which big businesses benefit (or are harmed by) this the most.
The question will ultimately arise "by what authority can the FTC make such a sweeping judgement" and it would not surprise me to hear the SC rule that this is an overstep of the authority they were given by the laws creating and maintaining the FTC.
Previously, the FTC could have argued that the chevron doctrine gives them this right. However, that is almost certainly about to be completely abolished this term.
The right of contract is almost certainly going to be more important to most members of the supreme court than any other considerations. That's my 2 cents.
"Unfair" is an awfully vague term. This rule might be a test of the recent "major questions" doctrine. The SCOTUS appears poised to reverse the Chevron doctrine, which would have given the FTC a great deal of cover here. There are a lot of reasons that the Court might reject this rule or even the FTC's authority in general.
Given that these rules are very similar to those in California, and California has a big enough economy to be a good representative sample, I don't see this being a real issue.
Otherwise, why aren't well capitalized competitors in California hiring up the best people at their competitors and crippling competition, as it were? We just don't see this happen on a large scale like this suggestions.
Now, that's my take on it at charitably. My honest opinion about it is simply: who cares. If you want people to stay, give them reasons to stay that aren't the legal equivalent of holding a gun to their head
>> Given that these rules are very similar to those in California...
CA has a corresponding law that prevents this. The last time I looked the FTC wasnt creating at NEW law to prevent the other side of this coin:
Rule 3: Workforce “Raids” Are Illegal in California
Technically, poaching employees is not illegal in California, but restrictions on workplace raids are mentioned in the legislation. In fact, state law prohibits companies from acting in bad faith to solicit a mass amount of employees from their competitors to intentionally hurt their business. This is called “raiding,” and when your competitor does it, you can file a tortious interference claim against them. Most of these cases require an employment contract to be successful in pursuit of damages.
I did say similar, not exactly. There may or may not be some effective law preventing this type of thing specifically, but in my mind, this is an edge case[0] and doesn't detract from my overall point, which is that eliminating non competes will overwhelming not end up with this being a plausible scenario.
[0]: that the California government anticipated and defined, to their credit
I doubt you are that valuable. Sure software developers are high priced, but without even knowing what company you work for I bet I can do your job at a competitor and after 3 years I'd be just as good - that is worst case when I have to learn a new programming language to expert level as well as the domain. There are only a few people who have special skills that it is even worth thinking about protected. Someone who hires you away from a competitor gains at most a couple months vs hiring someone with similar skill who doesn't work for a competitor (and thus doesn't have domain knowledge).
So employers end up competing with higher wages putting more money in the hands of employees, and talent goes to where it produces the most value, yeah that’s the point.
Yes, it was started by Taft as a business 'union' that the government could deal with. Now they're funded primarily by multinationals and so they place the concerns of those large corporations first and well before upstart startups.
I have heard the name "US Chamber of Commerce" before, and as someone who isn't a politics/government nerd, I always assumed that was some kind of government organization responsible for something...commerce related.
Clicking through to the website and seeing the kind of articles on there makes it pretty obvious that's not the case though, even ignoring the .com domain.
It's the largest lobbying group in the USA. It was created by Taft to fight organized labor. It's a core part of the Republican party, though it will diverge in the interests of capitalism. They denied climate change until 2019.
I do a similar thing [1]. One of the great advantages to formally namespaced IDs is including a systematic conversion into strong types in your code. It's harder to accidentally mix things up when coding; function parameters and return tuples are more 'self documented' (and enforced by compiler where applicable).
> you definitely cannot rely on clocks to determine (reliable) ordering across machines
You can if you consider "unknown/possibly concurrent" also a valid outcome: for any 2 events A and B, True Time can definitely answers whether A is before B, A is after B, or A is possibly concurrent with B.
Agree, and the timestamp comparisons you can make when the windows do not overlap are the basis of the ordering guarantees (across machines, even globally).
ordering is a logical property which can be informed by physical timestamps, but those timestamps aren't accurately described as "the basis" of that ordering
I don't see how it isn't based on time. They use GPS and atomic clocks to establish the time, establish an uncertainty window, and in Spanner's case will have transactions wait out that uncertainty to guarantee an ordering (globally).
Look up the case where two transactions affecting the same record share a timestamp (or have overlapping error ranges). An non-timestamp tiebreaker determines the order between the two overlapping commits. It is not unlike the pre-agreement on conflict resolution mechanisms for CRDTs.
The context to my first comment included "timestamps within the same window"
Could be an alias, I have a limited set of aliases for each type of system. But I keep a repository of hundreds of personal shell scripts and it fit better there.
The author is pointing out that someone who clicks an RSS/Atom link and gets a page of gibberish is not going to understand all that XML, and they will likely just go back to the site confused.
Instead, you can have a readable page with a message like the one in the post: "This is an RSS feed. Subscribe by copying the URL from the address bar into your newsreader. Visit About Feeds to learn more and get started. It’s free."
I can see some value in redirecting people towards a page that explain what RSS is. Not entire sure about the first part about letting people know how to subscribe to an rss feed because people who decide to use an RSS reader probably know already how to use it since it's a somewhat technical tool but still, probably doesn't hurt to provide extra info.
There are a lot of feeds now with titles and maybe a short paragraph of text, like the beginning of the article or a summary.
There is a world of difference between sites maintaining those feeds vs. nothing at all. Having a signal that an article is there with even the slightest amount of context is so much better than the alternative.
It's mildly annoying to visit a site for the full text (with your ad blocker), but signing up for newsletters etc. from each site one-by-one is really painful.
If I'm going to take 5+ minutes to really read something, it's OK to visit the site. That means something is interesting or relevant enough to invest my time in. That signal can usually be gleaned from a title and short paragraph. Compared to the number of new things published every day, it's relatively rare to find things worth those 5+ minutes.
From what I can gather, many people use RSS readers to follow 5-10 feeds, and they slowly look through and read most of the articles. It serves as a convenient way to follow their top few sites and maybe a few aggregators like HN. Other people track 100s of feeds and quickly scan what's happening, only diving into something if it's interesting or important.
I'm building a service for the second type of person (mainly because I'm that type of person, TBH). No idea what the ratio of "completionists" vs. "scanners" is. Having title-only feeds is not ideal for the latter group, but it's usually fine.
I’ve found some respite in email-to-RSS, but its still not great.
I’m definitely interested in a (hopefully FOSS) service for us “scanners”. I average around 300~ articles in my RSS daily, and I’m always hungry for more information. Though I should probably see about re-organizing it all so I’m not as consistently overwhelmed.
I want to make a FOSS reader that we can run on our own machines. It would poll on demand and be really good at archiving sites/posts. A combination of feed reader and scraping/archiving from residential IPs (at a low rate) where it will almost always be successful.
I want to pair that with an (opt-in) service for syncing feed subscriptions and handing off a stream of things worth archiving (it's often not urgent that this happens, you just want to make sure it happens soon so the content is not lost in a few years). That service could be a very low cost monthly subscription thing plus a FOSS option that you could run on a cheap VPS, etc.
24/7 services are also essential for generating notifications when something in a filter is spotted, being able to have an email gateway, doing things like POSTing items to other sites automatically, etc.
Making that "full" service FOSS is not in the near term plans, though. This is a distributed system that has run 100s of millions of jobs already, has a very specific security and monitoring setup, uses a number of queues and databases, etc. From my past experience, it's really hard to support people with on-premises distributed systems software like this (FOSS or not). I couldn't do this part alone (bootstrapping and can't afford to hire anyone yet).
Reddit is creating an exemption to its unpopular new API pricing terms for makers of accessibility apps, which could come as a big relief for some developers worried about how to afford the potentially expensive fees and the users that rely on the apps to browse Reddit. As long as those apps are noncommercial and “address accessibility needs,” they won’t have to pay to access Reddit’s data.
“We’ve connected with select developers of non-commercial apps that address accessibility needs and offered them exemptions from our large-scale pricing terms,” Reddit spokesperson Tim Rathschmidt says in a statement to The Verge.
There is no unambiguous single definition of commercial activity in the law: some parts of the law define it one way, some jurisdictions differ as to what is and isn't commercial, and some parts of the law explicitly deny the existence of noncommercial activity (e.g. copyright law). So Reddit has promised literally nothing here.
Furthermore, their explicit goal is to prevent scraping by ML training companies. This is inherently opposed to accessibility. If you add accessibility to copy protection, you weaken the copy protection[0]. So Reddit can either tell blind people to go fuck themselves, or they can accept that there's always going to be at least some backdoor for AI to scrape Reddit.
Whatever blind dev is making a living providing an app (or other software) as an accessibility layer for the blind over reddit will now have to potentially do so for free.
The hypocrisy of companies that live on user content is pretty amazing. They want to act like we’re all just vibing. And then hey, really sorry, we gotta put a few ads up to keep the servers up and pay the devs ($424mm worth last year). But you wanna get paid for making an app for blind people to use our site? Helllll no.
Also fuck those of us who are visually impaired but not blind because I bet their definition of 'accessibility needs' is going to result in a Reddit so limited it's useless to those who need anything other than text only.
I'm visually impaired (on the mild side) and I have a lot of neuro-visual issues. I have a lot of problems with visual crowding, visual sensitivity to stimuli (bright colors, movement, etc.), and have ~ 20/50 vision when corrected. (Or 20/80ish in my glasses at night time which is also when I use Reddit). I use third party apps because I need a lot of their 'cosmetic' features: I can set the colors to not be too much to process (pure white on black or black on white sucks for me), I can set images and videos to hide by default so they don't distract/tire me browsing but I can easily see them if I want to, I can avoid ads (which tend to flash/move or be very glaringly colored and can easily result in headaches), and I can have more fine grain control over text size, where information is located, etc.
Separate “accessibility” apps for people with disabilities always lag behind in features compared to apps that target a wider audience while still being accessible. Basically relegating people with disabilities to a second class experience.
I agree, but I think you misread the comment you're replying to. They were referring to "dark patterns," a design feature used to trick users into taking actions they otherwise wouldn't. Much harder to flag :P
Some of those UX dark patterns would qualify as making the site inaccessible to people with add and adhd, others make it inaccessible to people with autism.
engagement driving bullshit could very easy become banned under ADA if the right public servant gave it enough thought.
I actually completely agree with this, but I didn't bring that up specifically because, as an autistic person with ADHD, I have gotten pretty poor responses in the past from saying my needs should be considered by UI/UX designers. There's not a lot of public will to consider autism and ADHD to be "real" disabilities and I'd love to see that change.
It sounds like being accessibility tools wouldn't be enough because they would also need to be non-commercial, which excludes most of (all of?) the popular third party apps.
>One of our moderators, u/itsthejoker, has had multiple hour-long calls with various Reddit employees. However, as of the current time, our concerns have gone unheard, and Reddit remains firm.
Doublespeak from reddit's management is not exactly uncommon, and it seems like something is mismatched between what they communicated in that article and what's related in the thread.
The AskHistorian's mods put together a small list of reddit admin promises to moderators that were broken:
Admins have promised minimal disruption; however, over the years they’ve made a number of promises to support moderators that they did not, or could not follow up on, and at times even reneged on:
In 2015, in response to widespread protests on the sub, the admins promised they would build tools and improve communication with mods.
In 2019 the admins promised that chat would always be an opt-in feature. However, a year later an unmoderated chat feature was made a default feature on most subs
In 2020, in response to moderators protesting racism on Reddit, admin promised to support mods in combating hate
In 2021, again, in response to protests, Reddit’s admin promised a feature to report malicious interference by subreddits promoting Covid denial.
I don't have that mentality that this must be the case, for what it's worth. It's just what is most attractive to the end-users usually. And it's what many products do to attract them.
I did not like that limitation either and get around it by using the Yubico Authenticator app with three separate hardware tokens configured with the same shared TOTP seed. There's also path to reset your root account access, btw.
It all depends on your constraints and who needs SSH access, but if you're like me, you (1) have a number of personal VM instances on major cloud providers and (2) don't want to deal with anything but 'vanilla' Linux and sshd. No customizing kernels, no portknocking, no TCP wrappers, no fail2ban, no VPNs (not even tailscale which is very nice).
The approach that I've been using for about a decade is a script that gets your current (internet facing) IP and then uses a cloud API credential to add that IP to the cloud provider's firewall as a valid source IP to port 22. The API security and cloud firewall implementation is left to the major cloud providers (and they are very good at these things).
I run it manually whenever I'm in a new location or in the rare cases my home IPs change. You can add the IP to the list or replace the list each time. Or clean it up after a trip with a separate CLI flag. I figured one day I would automate it to track IPs, run constantly, and trigger the change if it detected a new IP - but that day never came because it never annoyed me (ymmv).
This approach could be extended to teams, but there are more details to think through about API permissions, etc.
Can I ask why you don't trust running fail2ban on 'cloud' based VMs? The defaults for how long it will ban failed ssh attempts are quite sensible, and short enough to prevent you from accidentally locking yourself out for a very long period of time (automatic unban time to remove iptables rules).
If nothing else, it serves the useful purpose of stopping the log files from being cluttered up with various botnets' fully automated ssh username/password attempts that are out there, trying to gain access via well known factory default credentials.
It's not really about trust, it's about the hassle of adding and maintaining things (including keeping up with their changelogs and security issues).
As for log clutter, my approach comprehensively stops the logs files from being cluttered with failed attempts; that's one of the main reasons I do it.
That is a good point but I should also add that fail2ban as a daemon and its default configuration to watch log files for other popular daemons (example: a postfix smtp traffic log) has changed very, very little in the past 5-6 years. It's not very much of a concern in terms of keeping track of configuration changes in major system upgrades.
