It wouldn't surprise me if a Western government (probably the UK's) considers introducing legislation to require exactly this in the not-too-distant future, most likely under the guise of preventing the spread of extremist propaganda.
If they do, companies like Facebook and YouTube will face a choice between acceding to the new regulation or incurring punitive fines. Guess which option most of them will choose?
The only way we can prevent George Orwell's vision from becoming a reality is if we build a more decentralised web. However, that also threatens the walled gardens' revenue streams.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Horsemen_of_the_Infocalyp...
Wikipedia cites this term being coined in 1988 ;).
If it's left-wingers, it'll be hate speech and "think of the women/minorities".
Same outcome, of course.
Whether Democrats are they are hardly left wing, and somebody who would found PMRC even less so...
There is, evidently, a fairly powerful and far-reaching population of left-leaning people who believe and are willing to act on the idea that the internet should be politically controlled. I've never heard of this being done successfully against, say, a communist website.
[1]https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/18/cloudflare_ceo_rubb...
Yes, there has been some violence from the anti-fascist side, such as Eric Clanton being hit with a bicycle lock. But you are overlooking the fact that fight-wing activists have initiated more and more deadly violence in similar contexts: a stabbing at a rally in Sacramento last year; a shooting Washington state earlier this year; and of course the deliberate driving of a car into a crowd at Charlotteville a couple of weeks ago. Screenshots from Discord suggest that particular tactic was discussed in advance by RW activists.
I don't want to go on a Gish gallop or we'd be here all day, but I'd also encourage you to reflect on the fact that while Antifa supporters endorse the idea of punching nazis, popular figures with a public following on the far right have publicly and formally expressed the desire for civil war and even genocide. It's not possible to have a reasonable discussion without addressing that dichotomy.
Also: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/12/german-police-...
Took me 2 seconds to find that. Your lack of knowledge isn't proof of something not existing.
Where Antifa discharging firearms at peaceful protesters? Or was that the neo-nazis?
I have nothing more to say to you.
I'm also not defending Antifa, I'm commenting on your equivalence between the two groups. Sure, in the broadest of strokes they are the same, but so are all criminals. But one would not say a shoplifter is the same as a murderer.
> I seriously don't get how you can ham on the murderers but defend shoplifters, they're both fringe groups that shit over society's rules.
It wasn't the GOVERNMENT that did this. That's the only thing that freedom of speech laws give you freedom from.
And, those sites weren't suppressed because they impacted politics; they were suppressed because they impacted profitability.
It's almost like the right needs some sort of "neutrality" laws that guarantee that internet websites and internet traffic they need can't be restricted.
I'm pretty far left in my politics, and I find the idea that these websites got kicked off quite worrying. However, I also find the centralization of internet services quite worrying.
I'm still old school enough that I run my own servers for exactly this reason.
I agree censorship of political content on private infrastructure is (and should be) legal; I also believe it's plainly immoral and should alarm people. I also believe that, given that the public DNS is government-controlled, it nominally belongs to the public and private entities like cloudflare should not be gatekeepers to it.
Of course, the best solution is for everyone to switch to some sort of crypto-based truly public DNS system like Namecoin, but that's not happening for a while.
I get my only news about US politics from HN, so I genuinely have no idea.
Wikileaks has been immorally persecuted in many ways, but direct censorship is not one of them.
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2017/07/21/richard-...
When something happens, the media gives right-wing fascists the benefit of the doubt; "we don't know who he is", "he doesn't represent the movement", "he was scared", "he was attacked", "he's crazy", and once the proof is out they tend to draw false equivalencies with left.
That doesn't happen as much on the left - it's stigmatized full stop, no excuses. CNN's clickbait news will drag it out
Does it though? Because I found the majority of the media except niche-oriented ones like FOX and Breibart do not fit that profile.
CNN had no problems attacking with everything they knew, but they avoided excess speculation and treated the Charlottesville attacker the same as Hodgkinson... which was my point.
They bind our hands and tape our mouths all under the guise of protecting us.
So making phones more traceable doesn't really work against terrorists, when there are so many incompetent people watching us :(
Would you elaborate more on the background of this? Were the SIM cards sold and registered with a private company? I would suspect it is (or they were, if more than one). Which national defense agencies are you referring to? Did the national defense agencies search these records? Do you assume the agencies have access to this information by default? If it's through a private company, should the agencies have access by default? Do you think the private companies should have contacted the agencies if they didn't have access?
There are answers to these questions, some of them factual, some of them ethical or legal, and up for debate. In only a few situations I think it would be fair to call the agencies "so dumb". What leads you to use those words?
https://english.atlatszo.hu/2016/11/08/illegal-trade-of-burn...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-05/deutsche-...
In the communications act there was a provision about suspicious registrations reporting requirement.
The big providers (like Telekom, a subsidiary of Deutsche Telecom) have a well established working relationship with the defense agencies (they are called national security services, there are a few of them in Hungary, some are focusing on Internal Affairs (counter intelligence), some are on conspiracies, etc.
Expecting perfection out of the gate--or even at any given time--is setting someone up for failure. If this is something you care about, what you can focus on is that they're making changes to improve the situation: they're actively responding to correcting and preventing these kinds of mistakes in the future. Unless they're omniscient and omnipotent, it's really all they can do. This applies to work in general, not just security.
Eventually they'll fix this "security hole", but they won't magically become hyper-competent :/
People likely won't resist it too much. We've had this identification requirement imposed upon us in the Netherlands a few years ago, and while there is valid criticism on this requirement, it passed. So to vote now you need to bring a valid ID. If the British government wants to do this with a minimum of fuss, they'll do what our government did and make the driver's licence a valid identity card. That way the majority of adults will already have their ID on them as a matter of habit (and won't complain).
Of course mentioning that it is needed to prevent Muslim voters from committing voting fraud (see¹…) will help push the bill trough.
1: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/12/27/voters-will-have-...
Only an extraordinarily confident and popular government would have another go (and it's not what the UK has now).
As for the voting scheme you describe, it's entirely voluntary, for 2018, and no council has signed up yet.
Things may move in that direction slowly, but to suggest that the UK is particularly close to requiring ID for internet accounts is downright silly I'm afraid.
Of course, most people tell their friends which way they voted, but that's their choice.
However? Don't you mean, "as an added benefit"?
No amount of decentralized web will help if ID is legally required to post things. Torrenting, encryption, and similar will simply be made illegal, since that's required for enforcement. Many of the established lobbies would support that, for the usual justifications.
You can only fix this by not letting the law start on this crazy slippery slope.
Without centralised gatekeepers, the only viable way to censor the internet is to enforce laws on end-users, which is a daunting task for any government.
And technologically, at least two of the necessary elements for a global meshnet are here: protocols for decentralized addressing and routing, like cjdns >1, and protocols for peer-to-peer electronic value transfer between nodes, like Raiden >2. The only major missing piece of the technological puzzle, AFAICS, is a technology for cheaply deploying telecommunication backbone links.
>1 https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns/blob/master/doc/Whitepape...
>2 https://github.com/raiden-network/raiden/blob/master/README....
DISCLAIMER: I am by no means a bonafide cryptopunk. I have contributed very little code and other meaningful technical work to privacy tech projects.
Especially with the way we are moving. Most people today are happy to use sso with services like facebook or google. Most people also have their real identify tied to their core profile they use to sign on to other services. The abstraction between the internet and the cloud is becoming more blurry to a internetizen that is technologically ignorant.
Practically the only way of connecting anonymously to the Internet is the old-fashioned wardriving, or getting lucky and finding a "free wifi" which is not limited to the Web only.
When I created an account with AirBnB I had to upload government-issued ID documents and a photo of myself [1]. Their Android app even asked me to scan the chip in my UK passport via NFC.
[1] https://www.airbnb.co.uk/help/article/1237/how-does-providin...
In cases like this, where anonymity allows users to cause serious damage without repercussions, I don't think identity requirements are problematic. However, extending this to harmless actions like commenting online is a completely different thing.
The only difference is that it is not physical damage.
I support anonymity, I hated what Airbnb made me do in terms of insecure exposing of my identify to them (and then had I use an empty gmail account to verify in the end).
Many countries do. To watch certain youtube videos in south korea you need to provide your social security number or something like that.
South korea also strictly censors any publicly visible posting relating to elections and requires something like social-security number, or a faxed and verified passport for foreigners[0]. I guess that's meant to stop subversive groups from swaying elections.
Oh snap. Because in the mean time, government security agents were using the internet to propagandise for their preferred electoral candidate and manipulate the outcome of elections. Which only switched to direct vote pretty recently, and even then, merely elect a president with near dictatorial powers over all major government appointments.
Anyway, they're an ally, so there's no need for outpourings of scorn like there is in the case of china or russia.
[0]. wiki Internet_censorship_in_South_Korea [1]. guardian "South Korea spy agency admits trying to rig 2012 presidential election"
Edit: it actually redirects to a police warning, so presumably it's illegal to even access it.
See if you can figure out why Q_qoHCd3iuQ is age-restricted.
Many Western messengers try to obtain your phone number and phone contact list when installing the app, and some of them (Whatsapp, Telegram) require you to provide a phone number to register.
Private companies and democratic governments are no less curious than Chinese government. They also want you to save your data into their "cloud" so NSA can look at any time.
Russian major social network Vkontakte requires a phone number to register an account. Russia is also developing a legislation requiring all messenger apps to identify their users with a phone number.
And by the way (I have read it somewhere) if you are trying to access pornhub from Russia it requires you to sign in with Vkontakte (social network with real names policy) account to prove that you are adult. So even if you want just to watch video you have to identify yourself first. I wonder, what are they going to do with that information? Will they post "videos you might like" to user's wall in Vkontakte? Or will they show who of your friends likes the same genre?
I love most asian things so I could gladly list much many things I liked from China. Even after that happy introduction, the discussion went into "you know China is not all good" then listing a few problems. So far nothing surprising. But then a weird silence occured and all of a sudden, the other user started to nervously type "nono, forget it, I said nothing; oh my god .." * user disconnected *
that's what real lack of freedom of speech is.
Thats only half of it. For the other half : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
To have an email, you still need a mobile phone number to register for gmail (the most popular choice).
To have a mobile phone number, you need your passport or ID.
Yes, in some cases you can get phone numbers without passport, but then again you can also get IDs and fake passports easily in China if you want.
Not in the UK you don't. I can order a bunch of free sims with fake names and addresses and get them. I've got about 20 from EE, gifgaff, Vodafone, NanoSim, O2, etc.
So by your logic. I can create fake facebook and email from a free SIM of a number that has no connection to me.
Every system has a weakspot. You just need to know how to exploit it.
> but then you again can also get IDs and fake passports easily in China if you want.
I agree to a certain extent that your passport is indirectly linked to these online services.
Where I don't agree is that you can still use an email service that doesn't require you to provide your phone numbers and you can use it to sign up for Facebook (not a legal offence, there is still a way to access the service).
Use of fake passports is a criminal offence (And there isn't a viable alternative to use the service without committing a criminal offence).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_real-name_policy_cont...
So don't use gmail?
That wasn't hard, was it?
It is one thing to have alternatives, but to actually execute the switch to alternatives seems near impossible. Breaking away from Google is already hard, breaking away from Google + Facebook (which has your phone number on WhatsApp) seems impossible.
Not to sound too personal, but I thought everyone pretty much gave in to Google already.
A lot of us use services like Fastmail, Protonmail for email and simply do not use Facebook. Gmail is so bad it's not even usable for me in comparison to how it was several years ago.
Changing your email account is easier than you think, especially if you already use Password Managers like most of HN will be doing. You can redirect email from Gmail to your new email address, and at your new email provider put a footer into your every sent email which states you've switched to this new email address. I advise backing up your email from Gmail using Thunderbird just in case, but personally I've never had to access the backup, it's really much easier than you imagine.
Actually I'm talking about Google account and services in general, not just gmail. Google account also exists as an IAM service for various Google branded products, such as YouTube, and a lot of other external services, which use Google account as the preferred or only authentication method. It is much harder to break those once you are locked in.
I suspect it will ultimately be upended through a deeper change, likely with agent based computation.
If I may draw another parallel:
There are also loads of people out there who can migrate out of the system (China/Google) if they don't like. And those who stay with the system (China/Google) seems to be fine with the system knowing their identity.
People on HN are terrible with email. How on earth is it possible to think Gmail is the only option for email, a decentralized, standardized service? How ignorant do you have to be to make that assumption?
I've lived in China for 7 years, and your statement surprised me. Care to share more information to support this claim? I'm genuinely curious.
Or at least you used to be able to. As with other commerce, I think this is all done online now.
It sounds hard to fake a 身份证 because there are systems to validate their info. You'd get caught pretty quickly.
There was something about how Wen Jiabao's mom's ID number must have been stolen to drive a billion dollar empire...so, at least as far as the government officials are concerned, it happens (or to say, they use it as an excuse).
http://www.salon.com/2017/08/23/mark-zuckerberg-might-be-the...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/when-si...
http://prepaid-data-sim-card.wikia.com/wiki/France
Belgium, Spain, Italy, Greece:
https://www.miteksystems.com/blog/mobile-identity-verificati...
US maybe soon:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/4886
No. For what it's worth a very famous French website dedicated to FPS started asking for ID card scan before registering new members and to keep your account active.
I don't know if they still do that though, at that point I stopped visiting the website as much as I used to. It was like ten years ago.
> Imagine, Facebook asking you to upload your passport before you do a live stream.
I seem to remember in some case they are asking for it.
No need to imagine anything. Right after Facebook started their war on fake news, my FB acount was locked and the only way to unlock it is to provide my ID/passport to prove the name of the account is my real name.
Btw same thing happened on G+ few years ago.
I can imagine it very well. Just like most countries require an ID to purchase a mobile account / SIM card.
So, essentially, you can't even watch porn without an id now.
The reason, in my opinion, is that the Chinese leadership is about to change recently, the 19th party meeting, Those who currently control the power just want everything under control. So the do not CARE about what the civilians care about. POWER is above all of that.
"Soon Aadhar will solve all the world's problems." /s
The US and EU have tons of those sort of things. Patriot Act? Mass surveillance programs? Required ID to get a mobile connection? UK's largest number of CCTVs on any place on earth?
Heck, in the US they can trial you as an adult at 15 and send you to war at 17 but you need to be over 21 and show ID to drink a beer at a bar...
This isn't some western media propaganda. I tried one of them very recently (I don't want to give them any undeserved marketing), they allowed me to sign up and the moment I clicked on my camera button it took me to a page asking me to "verify" my profile as apparently it was Chinese government's new regulation. Guess what? They asked me for my passport before I could upload a damn thing on their app.
Imagine, Facebook asking you to upload your passport before you do a live stream. Only the Chinese government can get away with something unbelievable like these regulations, while still gaining loyalty from their citizens to the point where these supporters will even defend the govt. everywhere online trying to explain how normal it is to submit your passport and your real identity to some random app company because you know, you just wanted to try it out and it's totally normal.