> Is it censorship when your email provider removes spam?

No, but only in situations where it is user controlled. In other words, tools that empower a user to control what they read is not censorship. In the case of spam, false positives and false negatives can be addressed by the user by adding/removing email from a spam folder. If the user does not have this kind of control, then it can be argued that this is censorship because, after all, who decides what is spam?

If the publisher is prevented from publishing despite having an audience that wants to read them, that is censorship.

Exactly. If Alice wants to talk but Bob doesn't want to listen, it's not censorship to keep him from having to. But if he does want to listen, it is censorship to keep him from being able to.

yeah.. the problem is that you are forgetting about charlie...

Alice want to talk and bob want to listen, but they need charlie to grab tapes recorded by alice with what she said recorded on them and transport them all the way to bob so he can listen to whatever alice said in those recordings..

The problem is that charlie find alice to be assholes and do not want anything to do with her, and thus is refusing to transport the tapes she record..

Now, Alice can still record the tapes and she can even go and deliver the tapes herself and bob can listen to those tapes when he get those, but neither of then can force charlies to transport the tapes for them..

The question is if Charlie is some poor guy drafted to carry people's tapes... or if he's like a billionaire owning the street and forbidding Bob from stepping out to walk down to the other end of the street where Alice lives.

Charlie can be a billionaire and own his own private street, but neither alice or bob can walk into charlie private street, they need to deliver their tapes to charlie and charlie will have to physically transport those packages to the other end of the street to be delivered from alice to bob.. and that is what charlie is refusing to do because he find alice an asshole..

Now alice and bob are not being prevented from meeting in person somewhere else.. hell alice can even build her own street all the way to bob house if she can afford it..

To make the analogy work, consider that Alice and Bob are 2 miles apart, but Charlie owns so much of the land around them that the shortest path between them that doesn't cross his property is 200 miles long.

no, the distance is irrelevant..

the point is they want to use someone else existing structure to communicate while not following the rules from that third-party..

either you follow the rules or you built your own infra..

> No, but only in situations where it is user controlled. In other words, tools that empower a user to control what they read is not censorship.

That makes no sense. A paper supplier is not censoring anyone if they can't or won't provide printing paper.

You're somehow conflating not actively supporting a cause with censoring someone. It's ok if you feel yo have something to say to the world, but that does not give you the right to coerce everyone around you to support your personal project.

> You're somehow conflating not actively supporting a cause with censoring someone.

No, I'm merely making the argument that spam control tools are not censorship because the user decides. I'm not sure how the paper supplier fits in to this argument. Perhaps it is a good analogy for the original topic.

> No, I'm merely making the argument that spam control tools are not censorship because the user decides.

You stated no point.

You're trying to ignore the fact that businesse relationships require all parts to participate voluntarily.

If one part tries to abuse the terms of those services then service providers are free to not continue with the business arrangement.

Not continuing a business arrangement is not censorship.

Are we supposed to feign ignorance and claim terms of service don't exist anymore?

Again, I'm merely saying that spam control is not censorship. Your argument about participating in business relationships might have merit, but it is a different argument.

> Are we supposed to feign ignorance and claim terms of service don't exist anymore?

Terms of service usually are vague bullshit which boils down to "we can drop you whenever we feel like it". And if it's an oligopoly? Well, too bad I guess. It's hilarious leftists support oligopolies now.

Lots of spam filtering happens long before the user has any control.

You ever try to set up your own email server and then have it be able to send to Gmail addresses? Very very difficult.

As an aside, this is only true if the paper supplier has no market power. Generally, if the next best supplier of paper is significantly worse than the one refusing to supply you then yes, they are definitely censoring you.Your position is correct in a competitive market because there are lots of other sellers willing to give the same terms but in the real world it's mostly oligopolies and monopolies with significant market power across broad swaths of the economy who definitely can suppress speech by choosing to not do business with someone.

I've updated my post to address this. While some of that is in the user's control lots of this happens behind the scenes ie: AWS banning users of SES who send out spam emails, GMail banning the spam accounts, hosting providers removing domains or infra that host malware/C2 infra, etc. This is all happening constantly behind the scenes to stop what is very literally "speech", what might even be legally protected speech (certainly you can put the source code for malware online, you can even write and deploy malware - people do it all the time for pentesting).

"What if this entirely different situation that is in no way comparable, huh? Bet you didn't think about that, huh?"

I've justified why it's comparable.

You've attempted to and failed because it isn't comparable, yes.

You can say that I've failed but it doesn't make it so.

Censorship is different from email spam filters and antivirus software because the recipient can choose to bypass the latter for individual emails or files if they want to. And that ability is important, since both have false positives a lot.

That's true in the case of email. Malware hosting services get removed all of the time, none of the people they were targeting "consented" to that or were even aware.

Can the targets of Kiwifarms opt-out from being harassed as a result of being listed alongside their address on the site?

Two wrongs don't make a right. If Kiwifarms is acting illegally, sue them in court. If there are no laws, lobby to make them.

ISPs are not police, elected representatives or courts; they shouldn't be allowed to usurp that role.

> Two wrongs don't make a right. If Kiwifarms is acting illegally, sue them in court. If there are no laws, lobby to make them.

No ISP is compelled to provide services to the likes of kiwi farms. If there are no laws, lobby to make them.

You have no right to force others to cater to your personal whims, specially if they are objectionable.

Fair enough. That said, consider my comment part of this process. :)

edit: I guess my disagreement with the idea of "forcing others" is primarily that I don't consider companies past a certain size worthy of having a right of free expression.

Yeah but I can still get fired for misgendering a coworker who decided last week that his name was "Sally". It works both ways.

I'm not sure what reality you live in, but I had decided long before I told anyone at work and they still kept misgendering and deadnaming me regularly without me magically getting them fired. The only solution really is to switch jobs and never tell them your prior name.

The only exception to this is very obvious malice. Everything else is more likely to get you fired if you complain to HR than them.

You're acting like "lobbying to make them" is as easy as following a 3-step how to guide.

Think about trans people as a demographic for a second.

We have very little economic power or numbers worth mobilizing for votes. Absolutely nobody has any interest in lobbying for us, corporations posturing to appeal to idealistic liberals (and then doing nothing) aside.

The only resemblance of institutional power trans people have is to appeal to those that have the actual power.

Why would anyone living outside of New Zealand care about New Zealand laws? Why the hell would (should?) he hand over private data of some people to the police?

He's an American citizen, and the Kiwi Farms is hosted in America. What law did he break by telling the New Zealand police to fuck off?

Like who?

Whenever Kiwi Farms comes up, I see these claims made about it - that people were threatened with violence, that the forum was used to coordinate harassment campaigns, that home addresses were posted, etc etc - but never with any specific examples shown of any of that happening.

Come on now. This is common knowledge and you can easily research it yourself. What you're doing right now is the moral equivalent of saying "nobody has shown me evidence that germs exist" on a COVID-19 thread.

in fact, they actually do do this, don't they? Quite a lot of COVID-19 deniers demanded proof of "isolation" i.e. they demanded someone to show them a vial of pure COVID-19 virus and then somehow prove that's really what's in the vial. And they demanded proof of "Koch's postulates" i.e. that injecting people with the stuff in the vial gives them COVID-19, etc etc.

e.g. this FOIA request: https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...

Is this false equivalence or whataboutism? I'm not very familiar with debate terms.

There's a fundamental difference between being spoken to and being spoken about. You have a right to prevent others from speaking to you but not about you (at least in the USA).

Yes, stop posting your personal information online.

Do you think perfect opsec is a realistic target for your average human being (especially outside the tech bubble) or did you just want to victim blame?

The fact that twitch streamers still regularly get their addresses leaked despite taking appropriate measures shows how impossible of a standard this is.

Using your analogy with malware and spam, the users that do not want to read kiwifarms can choose not to by.. just not reading it. Or blocking it in their firewall or browser. Seems like it's a bad analogy.

Not really. Those who host malware and spam domains have them taken down. It's not just about a user receiving a spam email, it's also the fact that when a domain is being used to distribute malware the hosting provider will remove them.

That's not the case. There are a lot of hosting providers and reverse proxies that will gladly host malware and their upstream ISPs (which this thread is about, not hosting) will not block them. But what happens instead is they (either domains or IPs) get added to lists of phishing or malware enabled by default on most clients (browsers). Google has Safe Browsing and SpamHaus is probably the most popular spam list.

In contrast, nobody accidentally visits KiwiFarms. And there is nothing done to you (malware to download or your information being stolen) if you accidentally do.

Malicious domains, users of email services for spam purposes, etc, get removed by their hosts all the time. That's simply a fact, I have made or been involved with the process as I work in security. There are some providers that are more cooperative than others, and certainly lists like Safe Browsing exists as well to deal with that + they can be more false positive tolerant.

My point is that these providers make choices about the content that they host all the time. They do this because some content is just bad. Kiwifarms tipped too far into "bad" and got removed, just like malware would get removed, just like spammers get removed.

Visiting a site, accidental or otherwise, isn't relevant.

I've previously reported phishing and scams to sendgrid, aws and azure. Neither took the domains down.

I'm not sure what your anecdote is supposed to contribute. Are you trying to say that because of your experience you don't believe that hosting providers take malicious content down? That doesn't even seem worth responding to, if so, especially as I have given anecdotes to the contrary.

They certainly don't do it reliably. You might have different access to them, and they listen to reports from you, or it's an "you need this many Twitter followers before we take reports from you".

Them removing malicious content "all the time" is certainly not something I've seen. I disagree with an argument that goes towards "they care and that's why they do it this way today".

It doesn't matter if they do it sometimes or all the time or 90% of the time or whatever. The point is that they do it, they already take those actions and no one cries "censorship" because it's obviously a good thing that a malware C2 gets taken down.

>Malicious domains, users of email services for spam purposes, etc, get removed by their hosts all the time. That's simply a fact, I have made or been involved with the process as I work in security.

Yes because it's illegal. Deadnaming a transperson might be mean but it's not illegal. If there are countries where it is illegal, then they could just do like China does to "protect people from offensive material" by banning sites in those locales.

> Yes because it's illegal.

What exactly is illegal? None of what I have described goes through a legal process, there is no official judge saying "yep, that's spam" or "yep, that's malware". In general things are very murky with regards to what the legality around malware is - if it has not been used to access another system maliciously you're really going to have to stretch the CFAA (partly why the CFAA is so vague).

Beyond that, just because something is not legally required does not mean that it's wrong to do it, so I don't see why the distinction even matters.

>just because something is not legally required does not mean that it's wrong to do it, so I don't see why the distinction even matters.

Define "wrong" though. That's the problem, and why the distinction matters.

My point is that the distinction already doesn't exist. This is because it really doesn't need to exist for most cases - no one worth talking to is on the "actually malware should be legal and providers should be forced to host it" side of the argument. Where things get murky is the "Potentially Unwanted Program" ie: programs that really really suck, are kinda sketchy, but don't cross over into malware territory.

That's to say that there are grey areas, but there are also black and white areas, or areas that are so far on the fringes of grey that it's fine to just treat them as black or white. We do that all the time.

In the case of Kiwifarms we have what I think is a very straightforward case. A website that exists for the sole purpose of organizing malicious acts falls well into the "maybe it's not illegal, but it's blatantly unethical".

For decades, we've had a pretty consistent notion of what constitutes "network abuse". It's traffic that threatens the stability of the network itself (such as spam and worm traffic). Obviously illegal stuff can be taken down by law enforcement. But stuff that's simply "bad for society" is generally given a free pass. If you don't like it, your options should be:

1. Don't visit them. 2. Sue them. 3. Get law enforcement involved.

Note that there is no #4 that says "harass everyone they depend on in an attempt to get them taken offline".

I guess I don’t understand the argument that it’s ok for Kiwifarms to harass everyone in an attempt to get them taken offline, arguably criminally, but not for other people to harass Kiwifarms or their web hosts. If Kiwifarms doesn’t like it, can’t they

1. Stop patronizing Cloudflare 2. Sue Cloudflare or the people speaking out 3. Get law enforcement involved?

From Cloudflare’s statement:

> However, as the pressure campaign escalated, so did the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site. Feeling attacked, users of Kiwifarms became even more aggressive. Over the last two weeks, we have proactively reached out to law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions highlighting what we believe are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site.

Kiwifarms is a forum, it doesn't itself harass anyone, it does as much as Facebook or Twitter do (they don't, their users might be). Facebook wasn't taken down when the Christchurch event was streamed there.

> However, as the pressure campaign escalated, so did the rhetoric on the Kiwifarms site. Feeling attacked, users of Kiwifarms became even more aggressive. Over the last two weeks, we have proactively reached out to law enforcement in multiple jurisdictions highlighting what we believe are potential criminal acts and imminent threats to human life that were posted to the site.

I don't think you've heard the other side of the story.

Although not mentioned, I am pretty sure they are referring to this post https://i.imgur.com/S1z3Po2.jpg which was taken down in under 30 minutes - as soon as the admin saw it. Making the comparison to Facebook again, the shooting stream was 36 minutes, they claim "no reports" until 12 minutes after it ended (which I doubt, 200 people were watching it live and 4000 watched it afterwards [0]) and no indication of time to reaction for a company with so much resources.

There are some theories that people that wanted the forum taken down made that post; even if that is not the case, does it mean that making a threat on any platform that allows UGC (for example, HN) and takes more than 30 minutes to get it taken down means that platform has to be taken down?

Again, this post is not talking about any web hosts, it's about an ISP. It's the same as if every bottling company was pressured into stopping to do business with you so you made your own bottling company. Then, your water spring was pressured into stopping to sell water to your bottling company because that bottling company sells bottled water to bad people. Springs are probably easier to find or buy though.

[0] https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/19/18272342/facebook-christc...

It sounds like your beef is with Cloudflare though, no? As the argument is that harassing people online is free speech that Cloudflare could have ignored, sued to stop, or complained to law enforcement about, had they chosen?

My "beef" is with companies that are not directly hosting the legal user generated content on KiwiFarms - that's the case with Zayo as an upstream ISP and Cloudflare as a reverse proxy. Harassment, if any, can't happen on the forum as I assume the people that are harassed don't visit it. Though that 3-step solution comment was made by someone else, Cloudflare chooses to ignore various illegal things with the argument "we are not hosting it." I don't think Cloudflare can sue Kiwifarms. And I think the process usually goes the other way around - law enforcement complains to Cloudflare to get something taken down. My point is law is above any AUPs or ToS and it's hypocritical for a company to claim "we don't host content" or no responsibility when it comes to illegal content but take down legal content because of pressure or political beliefs as if they now have some responsibility.

> For decades, we've had a pretty consistent notion of what constitutes "network abuse".

Not at all the case. We still rely on the CFAA, which is extremely vague.

> It's traffic that threatens the stability of the network itself (such as spam and worm traffic).

Definitely not that.

> Obviously illegal stuff can be taken down by law enforcement.

Not really, no.

a) Jurisdiction can be unclear

b) There is no "shut down website" button that the government has. They have the ability to take over physical infrastructure if it is located in the US or they can request seizure of domain names (may or may not work!)

The point being that there are actually limitations to what the government is able to do to respond, even in cases where they would like to.

> But stuff that's simply "bad for society" is generally given a free pass.

Indeed it is the opposite. Most of the "policing" on the internet is done with very basic common sense. Software that exists to trick you into paying someone for "AV" software? Not actually illegal (mostly - the malware itself is not illegal, there may be wire fraud charges as part of the payment etc), but it's malware and it gets removed by hosting providers all the time.

> 1. Don't visit them.

No one who wants Kiwifarms taken down visits Kiwifarms. The issue is that Kiwifarms is a site dedicated to a community that attacks others. This isn't an issue of user consent.

> 2. Sue them.

Sue who? Again, you're talking about international issues, you may not even know who is involved because people use pseudonyms.

> Note that there is no #4 that says "harass everyone they depend on in an attempt to get them taken offline".

"harass" is a really disingenuous way to put it. Again, deeply ironic given that it was Kiwifarms who harassed Cloudflare. Tweeting "Fuck you for not taking them down" is not harassment (although Twitter would be within their rights to moderate such content!).

Beyond that, you haven't really made any argument for why the system you have described (which does not exist) is better. You haven't made a case for why it's important that we abide by your system, or why there's "no #4". I don't care, to be clear, but I see the argument a lot that "well it should be handled through the legal system" as if we have no agency in this world except to live to the fullest extent of the law's mercy and exactly no more or less.

Hosting providers are free to moderate their content. Diners are free to turn away customers who are not protected. Dang can delete message on HN. Google and ban spammers. AWS can disable accounts that abuse SES. And so on.

> Visiting a site, accidental or otherwise, isn't relevant.

Might not be relevant to your point but it is relevant to the discussion.

How do you choose not to be infected with the malware?

If you're the recipient of a DDoS from malware, how do you choose not to receive the DDoS? Is it a violation of the malware author's free speech if you take down its C&C server to stop the DDoS?

Kiwifarms users do the real-life moral equivalent of DDoS, and Kiwifarms is a C&C server.

Spam is not speech. You haven't found a gotcha in the argument.

Spam is a form of harrassment.

If it's an attack, harrassment, violence, an initiation of force, etc. then it isn't speech. Which is why yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater is also not speech (despite people also thinking that's another gotcha example to free speech), it's an act of violence or attempted violence. Free speech doesn't exist in the context of violence being applied or threatened, an actor is not free if they're being threatened or attacked, they're under duress, which is a particular impingement of the mind.

> So it is censorship. We just all agree it's a good thing.

It's not censorship.

I think you're confusing speech with protected speech. Those are all examples of speech, they are just not protected.

> Which is why yelling "FIRE!" in a crowded theater is also not speech (despite people also thinking that's another gotcha example to free speech)

Next, you’ll be telling us that it’s OK for the government to arrest socialists for passing out anti-war flyers.

Sure. And soon the argument devolves into 'just run your own ISP'.

Yep. And even that ends up not working, because even when you are an ISP, you need to peer with or get transit from other ISPs.

Is municipal fiber the solution to this problem? The government cannot arbitrarily deny services or crack down on lawful speech.

I am getting SMSes from (D) governor candidate in the inbox and the ones from (R) are going into the "Spam". If my telco decided to delete those it would be censorship.