This a pretty rude comment. My comment didn't make an argument either way; it just added some context to the thread. You're arguing so aggressively that you've hijacked it in order to slam him.
Could you maybe delete that comment and make it a top-level comment instead? Then I'll delete this one, and the thread will be cleaner.
When the context and information you posted is so obviously a one-sided ad-hominem list of information (that includes the argument of "OMFG, he might have connections to some state intelligence agency"), its quite rude IMO.
Look, if as per the article you need an army of lawyers to fix your tractor, that should be your first—no probably 10th—clue that your problem is not copyright law, but the idea that copyright law is something that you need to respect and obey.
You are always free to withdraw your consent from having your life be ruled by what a handful of people you've never met (and whose names you don't even know) have decided about how you and your community needs to conduct itself.
My life is markedly better for having those handful of people make those decisions. It is just that in a few cases, like repairing tractors, they get it wrong. That doesn't mean I want them gone, that just means I want them to stop being wrong, or at most I want different people to make those decisions and have that power over my life.
Rejecting the entire concept of having leadership and structure because these particular leaders aren't perfect is like writing in assembly for the rest of your life because C compilers optimize out unexpected things sometimes.
> Rejecting the entire concept of having leadership and structure because these particular leaders aren't perfect...
That's not what I'm suggesting at all.
I'm saying pick a structure and leaders that really do represent you. That's a very different thing from voting for pre-selected candidates whom you've never met and don't interact with, and then crossing your fingers.
> That's a very different thing from voting for pre-selected candidates whom you've never met and don't interact with, and then crossing your fingers.
I'm a bit sick right now, thus either my math or my formulas might be off. I welcome any corrections. :)
So.
Copyright policy is decided at the Federal level. The people in charge of setting that policy are elected members of Congress.
Let's assume that you can declare someone "met and interacted with" with a single five-minute conversation.
According to Wikipedia, California is the most populous state and Wyoming is the least populous state.
The CA Secretary of State reports that ~17 million voters were registered to vote as of the date of the 2014 general election. The WY Secretary of State reports that ~240 thousand voters were registered to vote as of that same date.
There are 124,800 minutes in a standard 40-hour-per-week, no-vacations-or-holidays work year. (60x40x52)
For Wyoming, each Senatorial challenger would need to spend 48,000 minutes per election cycle speaking to each registered voter. (240,000/5) That's doable.
For California, a challenger would spend 3,400,000 minutes per election cycle on the same task. (17,000,000/5) For California, what you propose is not possible for Senatorial challengers... they'd have to do nothing but hold conferences for 27 years to get this task done. (3,400,000/124,800)
So, what's the largest state where this is feasible?
This might be South Dakota (the 46th most populous state) (with -I think- ~514,000 voters). [0] If it's not, it's definitely Alaska (the 48th) (with ~509,000 voters).
So, it is physically impossible to even pay lip service to what you propose in either fourty-six, or fourty-eight of the states in the US.
Before you get too cranky, I do acknowledge that the situation changes when one meets with one's Representative:
In California the 27-year workload would -roughly- be divided over 53 representatives, meaning that they'd only have to spend just over half of a year meeting every registered voter in the state. But... this assumes a five-minute meeting. If that constituent meeting balloons to ten minutes, we're right back in the realm of impossibility.
While the workload might be smaller in the smallest states, Representatives are apportioned by population, so I don't expect that the picture would vary very much from state to state.
In short, your idea is promising, and would be really great to do... but there just aren't enough hours in the day to make it happen. [1]
[0] I'm having a fuck of a time finding historical voter registration numbers for SD. So, that voter registration number is based off of what I'm pretty sure is current voter registration data. :/ (North Dakota doesn't even have voter registration!).
[1] Yes, my analysis ignores the fact that a campaign could conceivably be a multi-year thing. It's difficult to get good numbers on the length of an average Congressional campaign, but it's... difficult to believe that a campaign would run for longer than two years.
all the more reasons why there should be a structure to not let our representatives make all the decisions for us. I'm sure we all had times when our representative is not actually representing our interests.
think tank mode:
what if the current system is restructured in a way so that we will let them take decisions for us. But when we don't agree with his/her view point we can readily bypass it if the majority wants a different thing, like may be diagree button near to a decision and proposed alternative, which everyone can vote on or propose another alternative(only one alternative can be picked by a person). Its democratic, practical and doable right now. The alternative with which highest number of people agree is a clear win. This can be applied in all countries and any form of govt.
Its way better than any alternatives we currently have, like having to spend big time and effort on making petitions, or rally for cause, etc. Now a days even peaceful gathering gets violet due to govt mishandling the situation.
California has statewide referendums, which are generally pretty awful: state law is (for better or worse) pretty complex, and referendums never handle that complexity well. If successful, they'll impose some requirement without much regard for existing law in the area, and certainly without any regard for future laws. They're heavily lobbied, perhaps more so than regular laws, because easy appeals to regular people's sense of how government probably works are effective, regardless of the accuracy. Referendums can't be overturned except with another referendum. And you can fairly easily have conflicting referendums, which has given rise to court cases about which one prevails.
Here's the Economist complaining about it in 2009: http://www.economist.com/node/13649050 I can anecdotally confirm that my reaction to most of the referendums, a few years later, was "How should I know?"
This is not to say that such an approach won't work. You just need some mechanism for managing complexity. That could involve trusted organizations that like-minded people delegate these decisions to (sort of a cross between lobbying/activism organizations and political parties), which could work very well or could just turn out like an actually corporate version of the current party system. You could alternatively try to limit the inherent complexity of governing, but that seems very experimental.
> So, it is physically impossible to even pay lip service to what you propose in either fourty-six, or fourty-eight of the states in the US.
lol, that is the opposite of my proposal, and your post (thank you for it btw) just further solidifies my point.
When math says it's impossible for your representative to represent you, perhaps at that point we realize that the system has reached the end of its shelf life.
See the rest of my comments in this thread for a clearer understanding of what I'm saying (and my apologies for the comments that HN makes difficult to read due to downvotes ;).
> When math says it's impossible for your representative to represent you...
That's not at all what I said, and it's a dramatic misinterpretation of my words. There are substantially better mechanisms available to us to figure out what people want and what they need than for a decision maker to ask them, one-on-one.
From what I understand, there's a whole raft of really good, reproducible research on how to tease out what people mean from what they say; people are surprisingly bad at both knowing what they want, and -even if they do happen to know- surprisingly bad at expressing that information coherently. It's trivial to structure queries in such a way to give different answers to what is effectively the same question. [0]
> ...perhaps at that point we realize that the system has reached the end of its shelf life.
This is narrow-minded. Based on this comment, you appear to be proposing that we dramatically increase the number of Federal representatives per citizen. [1] Go pick a country that you think is well run at the highest levels. Go look at their representative to constituent ratios. If they're like 10x or 100x greater than the US's ratios, [4] then you might have a point. If they're only 2x or 5x greater, you probably don't.
[0] A researcher wishes to discover what Presidential candidate a given person intends to vote for. He asks them "What Presidential candidate do you intend to vote for?". Most of the time, the answer to that question does not match what candidate that person actually votes for. The question to ask to get that information -most of the time- is actually "What Presidential candidate do you expect that most people will vote for?". Polling is full of crazy pitfalls like this!
[1] The other possible interpretation is either advocacy of voluntary expatriation of people who disagree with their Congressional representatives [2], or dismantlement of the Federal government. [3]
[2] Okay, sure. You do have the trouble of both finding a country that's governed in a way that you agree with, and will accept you as an immigrant, though.
[3] Ha. See the rest of the paragraph to which footnote #1 is attached.
[4] I'm fairly sure that's in the right direction. Again, I'm sick, sorry if my math is off.
Apologies, reading your comment was like going down a choose-your-own-adventure maze.
For footnote [3] my reply is that representative democracy is one of a vast variety of possible systems you could use. That ratio of yours becomes much less meaningful in say, a liquid democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy
> ...reading your comment was like going down a choose-your-own-adventure maze.
I guess you don't read many academic or technical papers. My ratio of words to footnotes is very, very high. :)
From your linked comment:
> This is not entirely accurate, you can certainly opt-out by leaving Canada.
Right. You're advocating expatriation (whether through emigration or secession). This is exactly as I said in footnote #1, and is a plan that is made substantially more difficult by the issues in footnote #2.
To apply the first bullet point at the end of the essay [0] would necessarily mean the end of the US's Federal Republic. Do you disagree?
In addition to that, let me ask a pointed question, along with two follow-up questions: Is there a national government on Earth that you feel is well-run and adequately represents its citizens? If there is such a government, what is the representative-to-constituent ratio in that nation? If there is not such a government, what are the top five [1] problems with the way the most reasonable national governments of the world govern?
> That ratio of yours becomes much less meaningful in say, a liquid democracy...
You should really read [2]. People are surprisingly incompetent. People are also often easily manipulated into acting dramatically against their own interests.
[0] The relevant pull quote is: "Systems that explicitly allow such secession are called voluntary systems"
[1] Pick any reasonable ranking that you like to determine ordering
> To apply the first bullet point at the end of the essay [0] would necessarily mean the end of the US's Federal Republic. Do you disagree?
It totally depends on whether groups/states decide to remain part of it. To the extent that they do it will continue to be, and to the extent they don't it will cease to be.
> Is there a national government on Earth that you feel is well-run and adequately represents its citizens? If there is such a government, what is the representative-to-constituent ratio in that nation?
Heh, believe it or not that is a project I'd already set for myself.
It's not something I can answer for you in five minutes right now, but I will point out that Switzerland tops many charts and it actually employs direct democracy.
> If there is not such a government, what are the top five [1] problems with the way the most reasonable national governments of the world govern?
Ignoring for the moment the (non)existence of such a government, I'll rattle off a couple:
- Group rules do not represent the interests of group members. Most governments instead represent either the interests of the most wealthy (plutocracy) or the most vicious (dictatorships), and few (if any) provide explicit mechanisms for secession.
- Member votes are not properly weighed based on their understanding and knowledge of the issue they are voting on.
> ...to the extent they don't it will cease to be.
So, it sounds like the answer to my question is "No, I do not disagree.". It's abundantly clear that you're advocating for secession as the answer to perceived flaws in the US's Federal government. It's also abundantly clear there are at least several hundred thousand people who are similarly dissatisfied with the Federal government. If there are no real barriers to emigration via formation of a new Nation-State (however small) within the borders of the old, then the chronically dissatisfied, immensely stupid, and/or foolishly impassioned will be sure to do just that at the slightest provocation.
The thing about a Federation of States is that the group gains a lot of strength and stability if its member states are in it for good.
> It's not something I can answer for you in five minutes right now...
Oh sure. I didn't expect an immediate answer to the question. I do hope you get back to me on this, though. :)
> ...Switzerland tops many charts and it actually employs direct democracy.
There are a couple of things to note here:
* Despite Switzerland's "direct democracy", you don't consider it a shining example of a government that is well run. (I didn't expect that you would, I'm just noting it. :) )
* This "direct democracy" has -presumably elected- intermediaries, and (from what I gather) the vast majority of federal actions don't originate from the citizenry, and the majority of the real discussion that goes into shaping them is not open to the public. [0]
* The Swiss people must not be voting to decide even a tiny portion of what the Swiss government does. From Wikipedia: "Between January 1995 and June 2005, Swiss citizens voted 31 times, on 103 federal questions besides many more cantonal and municipal questions." That's three votes per year, on ten issues per year. I'm fairly certain that there is no state in the US that does so little. [1] I don't believe for a second that the Swiss people truly consider a significant fraction of the acts of their Federal government.
* The percentage of the population required to bring up an issue for reconsideration by the citizenry appears to be just over %1. [0] Coincidence?!? ;)
> That last issue could be addressed by liquid democracy...
How do you prevent the tyranny of the majority when any given government -or even a portion of a governed population- can splinter at a whim? How do you address the manipulation of voters to act against their best interests when everyone, regardless of understanding or expertise on the matter at hand has an equal say in how to address a matter at issue?
If your answer to that last one is "weight votes based on a person's understanding and knowledge on an issue", (as you mentioned in your comment) then my question is "How -exactly- do you plan to do this?".
Any reliable method will take substantially more effort than the vast majority of a given population will be willing to spend, [2] and many people are sure to disagree with an evaluation that means that their voting power on an issue they care about is less than a fellow citizen with whom they disagree. This gets even more complicated when such a person exercises their option to perform zero-effort secession.
Moreover, doing the research required to arrive at a suitable solution for real-world issues is really tough, and often very time consuming. I spent an hour or so digging around for those stats in my opening comment. I've spent probably another hour or two reading your comments and typing up all of my comments. This is all to kinda-vaguely-address one issue at a really high level! Real issues take days, months, or years of dedicated study to understand and come to an informed decision on. Some guy who's working two jobs (or one job, and caring for kids) isn't likely to spend his very limited leisure time actually learning about the issues that he cares about.
[1] Given Switzerland's size and population, comparing it to many US states is entirely appropriate. :)
[2] To elaborate: Weeding out the nearly-completely-ignorant is easy. However, it takes between days and months to rank the knowledge and understanding of medium-to-high-performing individuals. [3] If you're really serious about weighting based on knowledge and expertise, then you really have to go the extra mile to try to distinguish between those who are merely very knowledgeable, and those who are the equivalent of a Gauss or a Newton when it comes to the topic at hand, no?
[3] HN is full of "Man, hiring is so hard!" and/or "Everyone does hiring wrong! Here's how you should do it!" posts that demonstrate this fact.
> Oh sure. I didn't expect an immediate answer to the question. I do hope you get back to me on this, though. :)
Sure, I can do that off of HN if you contact me via email or twitter. My contact info can be found on that site I linked you to.
> This gets even more complicated when such a person exercises their option to perform zero-effort secession.
Who said anything about "zero-effort"? No need to interpret my words in the most absurd way to make it easy on yourself. ;)
> I spent an hour or so digging around for those stats in my opening comment. I've spent probably another hour or two reading your comments and typing up all of my comments.
People do not need to be green on the issues they choose to vote on. Having prior knowledge and expertise is what makes an expert an expert.
Liquid democracy, from every indication, appears to be vastly superior at fairly selecting experts to vote on issues than the silliness we're using right now. Since experts can have legitimate philosophical disagreements it's only part of the solution. A mechanism for the establishment of city-states to create a market of legal systems is one of the other important pieces.
Er, one of the specific values of the current system is that the people who (theoretically) represent me and make rules I must abide by also do so for millions of other people. This is genuinely advantageous, even for, perhaps especially for, copyright law. Things are in-copyright or out-of-copyright in a consistent way nationwide, fair use exceptions are defined the same way nationwide, public domain and author's rights exist or don't exist nationwide, etc.
If I have myself and a small number of people represented and ruled by a group of folks, the only way to get this result is for my group of people to form federations with other groups of people, and those federations to form meta-federations, and so forth, and have each group willingly delegate most of its authority upwards. But that's really similar to how I live now.
Whether it changes anything likely depends how you do it. For example, writing a letter to the editor may not change much, while renouncing citizenship would likely change a lot in practice.
But to renounce your citizenship you have to have another place to live. Unless you create your own country, or go meet the entire government, you're still "ruled by what a handful of people you've never met".
One could emigrate to or create a micronation or microstate. Sealand is a fairly well known micronation. The Conch Republic [0] is another, and is an example of (on multiple occasions) withdrawing consent from being ruled by the outside government.
lol @ HN downvoters who can't handle reality. That's OK, I understand and respect that you've chosen to subject yourself to rules you don't like. Just less whining and complaining, OK?
Could you clarify what your thought is? Are you basically suggesting civil disobedience as a form of protest? That has had some effect in the past, however it took a large coordinated effort, plus it took enough people from outside the movements to recognize the non-moral nature of the laws that were being protested, and finally it also caused a lot of sacrifice for those conducting the civil disobedience.
I am saying that if a large group of people feel they are being abused by a system that does not represent them, they are always free to reject that system and adopt another one that does work for them.
If you walk into a casino and notice that the rules appear to be rigged against you, do you try to work within the casino's system, perhaps petitioning the staff to change the rules to be more in your favor?
You have other options: (1) Leave the casino, (2) attempt to cheat the casino, (3) fight the casino using either violent or (preferably) non-violent means, (4) create a new establishment that you and your group are happy with.
Your other choice is to continue to play the slots and vent online when you keep losing, and although that might make you feel better it won't change the reality of the game.
I'd like this to succeed (really), but as far as we know, right now, you're choosing option 5 (venting online) while trying to convince us that 1, 2, 3, 4 are better. Show us what you've done.
And I mean what you've done about withdrawing the consent, not about tech projects.
> And I mean what you've done about withdrawing the consent, not about tech projects.
Tech projects can fall under (4). Tor, BitTorrent, Bitcoin, Silk Road, etc. were all tech projects representing withdrawal of consent through the creation of "new establishments". Creating a new country (if that's what you're referring to) also falls under (4) but requires a more cohesive community that does not knee-jerk downvote when told they have options. ;)
"Withdrawal of consent" isn't merely "creating things to skirt around the rules I don't like". Withdrawing consent is withdrawing from the system to which you no longer consent.
You do not get to reap the benefits of living in a society without subscribing to its rules and mores. You can work to change them from within, or you can walk. Pretending you can reap the rights of participation in society without shouldering your share of the responsibilities concomitant to those rights is spectacularly delusional.
> Withdrawing consent is withdrawing from the system to which you no longer consent.
You haven't actually defined "withdrawing consent" there, you've just repeated the phrase "withdrawing consent".
> Pretending you can reap the rights of participation in society without shouldering your share of the responsibilities concomitant to those rights is spectacularly delusional.
So tell me what would constitute "withdrawing consent" that doesn't mean "itistoday2 gets to participate in modern society without having to play by its rules", because AFAICT, those are the choices: play the game everyone else agrees to play and reap the benefits, or play your own game and forfeit them.
> The system is forced onto Canadian Citizens, there is no way to opt out.
This is not entirely accurate, you can certainly opt-out by leaving Canada.
Canada is a group that has chosen to play by these rules.
So long as the rules reflect the interests of the group members, there is no problem.
The problem occurs when a substantial portion of the group membership feels no longer represented by the rules and wants to play by a different set of rules (and mass-migration is not an option).
It is not about making taxes voluntary per se, but about allowing new groups to form. If a portion of Canadians wish to form a new group, separate from Canada, then they should be allowed to. They can opt-out of paying Canadian taxes, but they will lose all of the benefits that you refer to, and I'm sure they will miss them and therefore decide to implement their own taxation system that they feel represents their interests.
Perfectly, thank you. It seems we're rather in agreement: play along, or don't — where "don't" isn't just a matter of not paying taxes, but still using the roads, or whatever. I'm, personally, not interested in going back and forth on the notion or merits of internal secession, or "home rule" or any of that; that's orthogonal to the point I was trying to make, and with which you appear to concur.
EDIT: But, for the record, I agree that it should, in principle, be possible. In practice, I think it's a far bigger deal than pretty much anyone who'd want to undertake it is probably prepared for, and that's likely part of why it's not allowed. Vanishingly few people have the resources to start their own wholly self-sufficient society.
Further, I submit that many, if not most, of the people who would want to would be doing so in order to perpetuate some prejudice or other. Witness the neo-Nazi group that tried to take over a town in North Dakota as an existence proof of the phenomenon. That's the kind of thing you'd explicitly have to allow, if you pursue the concept to fruition.
> Witness the neo-Nazi group that tried to take over a town in North Dakota as an existence proof of the phenomenon. That's the kind of thing you'd explicitly have to allow, if you pursue the concept to fruition.
If you are referring to a military takeover-type situation, the concept does not endorse that as in that instance the group members are not being represented.
On the other hand, yes, if the group members choose a set of rules that you (an outsider) disagree with, they should still be allowed to do so. To quote from the post itself:
Through awareness of the mortality of all systems (including our own), we should ensure a means by which any group is able to abandon our system in a conflict-free manner if its members want to adopt something else—even if we might disagree with their choice. Systems that explicitly allow such secession are called voluntary systems.
No, it was a fully "democratic" takeover, in that they saw a small town, much of which was for sale, and tried to buy up enough of the town that they'd have a majority, and be able to vote in whatever hateful nonsense they deemed fit. What do you suppose the town's original, non-neo-Nazi inhabitants should have done if they'd succeeded? They aren't exactly being represented in this case, either.
I guess, as long as you're cognizant of the fact that the system you're espousing offers potential institutionalized hate as a means of conflict avoidance, I don't think there's much else to say.
EDIT: Or, hell, let's just take it straight to ludicrous-land. Imagine a group that believes it should be able to practice virgin sacrifice, and raises their sacrificial virgins from birth to believe that it's in their, and their society's interest to be placed upon the altar, so they aren't inclined to leave the society that believes it needs their mortal blood for its upkeep. Do the rest of us just sit by and say, "Well, they're over there in West Whack-a-doo. Nothin' to be done about it", and let them go about their business?
Why do you have "democratic" in scare-quotes? That action is completely democratic. If a bunch of jerks buy up 60% of a town and move in, and now comprise a majority of the population, then they have every right to vote for horrible new laws (assuming they don't get trumped by state or federal laws of course). That's the nature of democracy. If you're opposed to that, then you're by definition opposed to democracy.
Luckily, modern democracies involve multiple layers of government (town/city, county, state, federal) to serve as a moderating effect to prevent some little town full of jerks legislating blatantly horrible stuff, but those jerks do have the right to move where they want, buy property, and to vote. To deny them those rights is undemocratic.
>Imagine a group that believes it should be able to practice virgin sacrifice, ..... Do the rest of us just sit by and say, .....
Well, it depends. Are they in a town within your country? Then obviously higher-level laws are going to prevent that kind of thing, and the feds have the right to send in the National Guard and take over the place for violating state and federal laws so blatantly, then prosecute everyone involved. However, if they're a separate country (and the group is the country; i.e. the country as a whole believes in this crap), then it's a little trickier. What is your proposal about how to deal with this screwed-up society? Invade, and install a puppet government? When has that ever gone well in the past? Not recently. Turn it into an imperial possession where the citizens there have no rights except what the imperial governor decrees? Maybe, but this also means you opposed democracy. Apply pressure from outside with things like sanctions? That seems to be the modern method, and doesn't seem to work too well either (look at the wonders it's done for North Korea). Honestly, this is something you could debate all day long, there's no easy answer.
That's a fair point, but from what you've shared it sounds more like an invasion of sorts than an actual secession movement. Do you know how much of a majority they had? If it was on the order of 51% of a tiny town that just doesn't seem sufficient.
As you say, it helps for the place to be self-sufficient.
A good example actually are the Amish. Their towns are almost completely composed of Amish and they're entirely self-sufficient except for the standing army part.
For this they actually pay fewer taxes than most Americans, but they still do pay taxes.
The formation of a country seems to require at least two things then:
1. Self-sufficiency in terms of resources
2. Self-sufficiency in terms of defense
(EDIT2: A friend points out that it's a bit more nuanced than this since many existing countries do not satisfy these criteria given the nature of modern trade. So these requirements can be filled by-proxy.)
On that last point, it doesn't necessarily have to imply a superior military. As long as you have some sort of leverage over neighboring countries (like trade agreements), you can arrange to have a truce or even an alliance between yourselves.
An example would be if Silicon Valley and neighboring farming regions banded together and said, "No more tech unless you give us autonomy."
Paying fines and/or avoiding jail (within the system) are not free as in beer. Likewise, leaving the country and relocating is also not free (e.g. there's a few to renounce US citizenship).
Whether we're free as in speech to withdraw consent from the social contract (by which I do not mean to speak to its validity or lack thereof) is more of a grey area. As with freedom of speech, the freedom to withdraw from the social contract is not without its (ominous) ramifications. See, e.g. Aaron Swartz.
> Paying fines and/or avoiding jail (within the system) are not free as in beer.
Well, in terms of copyright law it really depends. People violate copyright law all the time (see torrents) and vast majority don't pay anything for doing so.
Sometimes people do have to face consequences, but one of the reasons that is so is because of the folks who disagree with and vehemently complain about ridiculous laws that do not represent their views, while simultaneously taking actions to re-enforce the system that gives them those laws (like downvoting comments on HN that remind them they actually do have a voice and a choice in the matter).
Yes, torrents (and photocopiers, etc) are nearly free, except for the unlucky few who may be caught for purpose of example. And yes, this is in part due to uninformed, unmotivated, and/or repressed dissenters, regardless of where the first or largest blame may rest.
I may be mistaken, but I don't believe there's yet a torrent for tractor software, and my impression from other articles is that John Deere et al are more suit-happy at the moment than are the music, film, and publishing companies.
With Mark, saying and doing are two completely different things.
Example: "Helping poor people in third world countries get online" turned out to be: "Deceiving poor people in third world countries into using something called 'Internet' that's actually 'Facebook with apps', and depriving them of real online access."
That whole thing ended up being an attack on the free and open web.
"Share with friends only" is short for "Share with friends and FB employees and PRISM-subscribers while we decide who gets to see what you shared."
I could go on for quite some time.
Somehow all the "help" he tries to provide ends up increasing his control over other people's lives while disempowering them.
The last time I checked, using Facebook was entirely voluntary. The existence of it takes away nothing. You have everything you had before, and also the option to use Facebook or not. There's nothing disempowering about that.
Thankfully you're right, Facebook is not—yet—capable of disempowering the entire world by its mere existence. But it does disempower its users, and the more users it gets, the more it disempowers even those who don't use the system thanks to those "network effects" that everyone is after.
It's not inconceivable that at some point some country (perhaps very close to home) might decide that having a Facebook profile is mandatory in order to operate a business. With their Real Name™ policy it might even be useful for registering citizens. You can see this already happening on a smaller scale with some companies requiring Facebook login in order to use their product or service. I see others calling Facebook a "public utility", seemingly unconscious of where that road leads.
Sure, you can say all of that is still "voluntary". You don't need to use that product and you don't need to even be a citizen of the United States. You could move to some part of Africa where Facebook has not yet commandeered the social infrastructure. But, somewhere around that point I think most would agree that the word "voluntary" ceases to have any real meaning.
The key to refraining from interfering with other's lives is to refrain from interfering with other's lives even that other is trying to interfere with us. Or we would end up just like them.
They can monitor, that's fine, and the correct/ethical thing would be to inform the employees about it and show them a little thing in Chrome to indicate they're being monitored.
> However, it is not possible for a low-privilege application to defend against the platform it runs on, if the platform is intent on undermining the application’s expectations. To try would be futile, and would necessarily also violate a crucial digital rights principle: The computer’s owner should get to decide how the computer behaves. Dell and Lenovo let their customers down in that way, but for better and for worse, it’s not something that a web browser can fix.
To which the response from the original article is:
>One of the most fundamental principles of information security is reducing the attack surface, meaning that when something is unnecessary and can lead to a vulnerability, it must be removed. Is anything Google could do to make it more difficult for Dell to compromise their customers? Yes, there is. The most obvious thing would be to not allow roots within the local trust store to override HPKP pins. Had Google removed the red carpet to disabling all of its safeguards, where would that have left Dell? Sure, they could still compromise Chrome, but there would be no “Google Approved” method of doing so. Dell would either: Have to give up, or: Literally install malware on their computers. Dell’s stock would plummet.
Thus fixing this would:
1) Reduce the attack surface created by 'accidentaly' publishing a private key for root certificate (especially when removing those certs is beyond the technical ability of the majority of users)
2) Improve the ability of the computer OWNER to decide how the computer behaves since they would be aware when HPKP pins are being overiden.
3) Force OEMs that wish to compromise Chrome to write explicit Malware that will be much harder to handwave away and thus be a bigger risk to their reputation.
"3) Force OEMs that wish to compromise Chrome to write explicit Malware that will be much harder to handwave away and thus be a bigger risk to their reputation."
THIS. Shame on you, Google, for allowing anyone to defeat the certificate pinning you advocated for in the first place!
IRC simply lacks important desirable features, making it poor for community building (given the existence of better alternatives). The two biggest missing features are persistence and search.
Other important missing features are ease of use in terms of creation of topic-focused channels, private channels, and high quality mobile and desktop clients.
> IRC simply lacks important desirable features, making it poor for community building (given the existence of better alternatives). The two biggest missing features are persistence and search.
A channel stays a channel until nobody's in it.
It's trivial to make a bot that sits in a channel and logs it. And it's trivial to hook up a search engine to that bot.
> Other important missing features are ease of use in terms of creation of topic-focused channels, private channels, and high quality mobile and desktop clients.
Like on freenode #reprap , #3dscanning , and thousands of other topic based channels?
And setting private bit is easy as a channel operator to limit who shows up.
And with completely public and open protocols, anyone can make an awesome IRC client. I have one already on my phone.
And there's also bots that can store and send files via http or ftp. I could also make one that saves/retrieves via Box, Dropbox, or any other storage medium trivially. Node-red makes that easy.
Searching wouldn't be too difficult. That's just loading the data up in a Hadoop and then regurgitating it. The only 'doop cluster I have now is a semi-production one. Working on getting a 150 node set up at the hackerspace.
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Edit: Added time date stamps, and indication/handling for private messages to the bot.
Privs now allow me to extend the functionality of the bot to do all sorts of things, like upload to MongoDB, email all logs, kick users, save to BOX, or manipulate the neopixel strip in my room.
Let me know how I can do that just by signing up, because my my job is to work on company problems, not emulate Slack in IRC all day long.
No matter how much you push and say that everything Slack offers is doable in IRC, doesn't change the fact that you still have to go through the troubles of setting that stuff up.
While I agree that setting up a bot isn't hard, I've done it for the IRC channel I created and still sit in daily, but fact of the matter is Slack is a matter of signing up and enabling a couple of features.
My job for my company is to build our product, not an internal chat tool. That's what Slack is for.
Oh please. The tools I use rapidly allow me to chain all sorts of stuff together to create things that surpass even Slack and other apps.
Where is a Slack that can do "sensitivity calculation" to alert users of possibly hostile tone? That's right. Not created yet. Give me a half hour and I could have the beginning of that. I also could get translation facilities built in so that English/French/German/Spanish could be seamlessly translatable.
The sky's the limit. And your negativity diminishes your ideas.
Yeah, I had that mentality once. "Why should I use 3rd party stuff when I am a developer and can do it all myself?!?!" Then I realized I was wasting time working on stuff that don't matter, instead of working on stuff that mattered.
If that's your thing, that's your thing and go do it. But it's not a lot of peoples, and that's why Slack is so popular.
> "Why should I use 3rd party stuff when I am a developer and can do it all myself?!?!"
But that's not what I'm doing.
Company A does really good semantic analysis.
Company B does chat, say Slack.
Company C file storage.
Company D does search.
Now, I'm spinning up or using a current server. In this case, lets do IRC to Company Chat, B (bidi bridge). I connect to Company B with my user, and a user on IRC. Logging is turned on and saved, to Company C.
Whenever messages are sent, they are run through API from company A, checking semantics and feel. Score applied personally to help devs be more humane.
While all this is happening, search D is going through files presented and making a searchable DB of date/time, channel, user, and text.
I do a great deal of R&D and work with emerging technologies.
I'm also one of the leads for IoT rollout. In essence, I look at many sectors and areas at the same time, and determine how it can be used in our org.
I was looking at message passing using IRC as a form of command and control. The hackers have used it successfully for controlling a force of DDoS clients; why not a server farm? I know that Ansible, chef, and others exist. But IRC is human readable, meaning status messages can be passively read.
Pretty much, I have a dream job. I can get funding for pretty much anything I want, have access to petabyte FS, access to 3 supers(HPC, not clusters), multiple clusters, and more. And then I'm asked, "what can you make with that?"
You know that you can write bots for Slack just like you can write bots for IRC, right? This isn't a point on the side of IRC. Slack starts out with more features, but is just as extensible.
It's a fools errand to extend a private platform like Slack. They're already adding IRC features to their system, along with running a modified IRC bouncer.
Why play catch-up or copy-target when I can just use IRC directly?
Hell, I could do what they're doing for $1/user/month just by hooking a RADIUS server up to my nickserv. Easy peasy.
It certainly wouldn't be trivial for me, but I can't discount kefka saying it's trivial. There are lots of developers better than I am, and their trivial tasks are my extremely difficult challenges.
Go talk to the hundreds of FOSS communities that use IRC. they have all fixed the persistence / search problem, and there is quite a few high quality mobile and desktop clients for IRC.
Our company (a three-letter megacorp) uses Slack with a 1000+-sized team just fine. However, that "team" represents our whole division; there are then hundreds of channels within it for different individual teams, prefixed with department names. Thus, no individual channel (#dept-team) has more than ~100 subscribers. Slack scales just fine when run this way.
So the team size isn't itself the problem; instead, it's the idea of wanting 8000 active subscribers in the same single channel that doesn't scale. Doesn't work on Slack; doesn't work on IRC, either.
At the scale of 8000 "viewers", you need the sort of specialized "presentation" software used for managing MOOC lectures and corporate shareholder calls, with fan-out servers, voting indicators, and the ability to "raise your hand" to ask the presiding officer to grant you a temporary +v.
> eh... slack has consistently said that large communities shouldn't use its services.
That has nothing to do with Slack-like apps, and everything to do with Slack.
> Go talk to the hundreds of FOSS communities that use IRC. they have all fixed the persistence / search problem
I am part of many FOSS communities on IRC. None of them have "fixed" that problem. There might be one or two that archive the channel somewhere. That is no substitute for real in-app persistence and search.
There is a reason slack has a problem with that - scaling is hard.
There is also the advantage of not having silos - if I have a problem with a dependant library I can "/j #libname" and ask a question, instead of searching for what slack, or slack like tool they use, signing up, installing whatever app is needed to access it, and asking the question (and remembering what app they used, so I can keep it open for issues that run over a few days.)
Frankly, itistoday2 is right - the fact that I have to open an external website and open the multiple pages for the days I've been away, instead of simply scrolling up and continuing the discussion, makes for a terrible experience.
Detachable screen sessions make up somewhat for it, but they're still pretty limited (you might have /joined the channel only later), and it requires a personal service running, that must be attended to & etc.
Does your mobile IRC client notify you (push message) when you're mentioned or receive a private message, but only when you're idle or offline on your desktop client?
I looked in to it after that answer. Colloquy[1] was the top hit for my search, and yeah, it does it, but (of course) you've got to have a bouncer[2] running all the time and connected to any channels you want to monitor. Probably pretty nice once it's set up, assuming there's a way to run it on a cheap VM or Raspi or something rather than your workstation or laptop. Looks like their mobile client attempts to register its device ID with bouncers in a channel when it connects, so that's automatic. Not exactly a competitor with what Slack and similar are doing—not having to set up and manage this sort of thing to achieve those services' features is exactly why people pay them—but seems like a nice solution if you prefer IRC.
> The two biggest missing features are persistence and search.
At very least for the persistence part, there is a proposal to add CHATHISTORY batch type[1] to IRCv3 which should allow the server to replay chat history on join (or on request). Search is something else that probably need a little bit more work (especially for a server-side search), though.
https://lobste.rs/s/82pz7r/curated_links_to_understand_dange...