But then also don’t be angry at big corporations when they scrape the entire internet.
Are they?
Also Google respects robots.txt. Every site that Google surfaces chose to be in the index.
I said they're profiting from other people's hard work, a separate concept.
Knowledge is shared among humanity at a rapid speed. Everyone benefits.
It’s mind boggling how anyone could be opposed to that.
While not all the companies in question may or may not be profiting from these things some of them are, and most if not all of their employees certainly are as well.
Where US law applies varies by which law it is; there are US laws that apply only outside of the US [0], as well as US laws which have application both inside and outside the US.
[0] e.g., the federal torture statute, 18 U.S. Code § 2340A(a), “Whoever outside the United States commits or attempts to commit torture shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than 20 years, or both, and if death results to any person from conduct prohibited by this subsection, shall be punished by death or imprisoned for any term of years or for life.”
DCMA absolutely does apply to European firms selling their goods and services in the US.
I only rarely browse without some form of content blocking (usually privacy-focused... that takes care of enough ads for me, most of the time). I keep a browser profile that's got no customizations at all, though, for verifying that bugs I see/want to report are not related to one of my extensions.
Every once in a while, I'll accidentally open a link to a news site (or to an archive of such a site) in that vanilla profile. I'm shocked at how many ads you see if you don't take some counter measures.
I just confirmed in that profile: archive.is definitely puts ads around the sites they've archived.
And arguably I used to think it was the Internet Archive.
It does make this case seem problematic now that I know the details.
Enforcement being unjustly balanced in favor of the rich & powerful is a separate issue from whether there should be enforcement in the first place—"if we must do this, it should at least be fair, and if it's not going to be fair, it at least shouldn't be unfair in favor of the already-powerful" is a totally valid position to hold, while also believing, "however, ideally, we should just not do this in the first place".
Why can't you just be happy for those few who are lucky enough to be able to violate copyright with no consequences? Yes, I know you'd want everyone to be able to violate copyright, but we're not there yet.
AI is not an attack on copyright, it is an attempt to replace it with something worse.
I'd love to see copyright slowly become irrelevant, but even with that goal we should expect to see large corpos being the last to stop respecting it.
There are violations of copyright which are ethically fine, i.e. pirating an old movie to watch.
Then there are violations of copyright which are ethically problematic, i.e. pirating an old movie to sell.
When a big company violates copyright the nature of the violation is always much closer to the latter.
Information can be made available to all, and at the same time, we can make it so others cannot resell or repackage it for profit like what AI companies are doing.
This is true knowledge socialism.
- ChatGPT is in the "bait" phase of "bait and switch" plan. It is trying to make us dependent on it, so that it can extract maximum profit later.
I'm only angry with them when they pay hush money to IP extortionists.
I DO care that nearly 2M different IPs are used to try to pull 42k commits out of a git repo one by one when they could just git clone it ...
To deny people access to things is one thing, wanting to do it by impossible means is quite something else. Who even has time to scavage the universe looking for possible infringement on their works and also the money to deal with it?
Anything which does that should be legal, and anything that stifles those advances should not.
Last I checked, they had archive.is blacklisted; the people with power there had (as far as I can tell) come to the conclusion that people using that site to prove that websites had stated X on date Y were the bad guys. Of course, they still have archive.org sources everywhere, so the objection is not actually to archiving page content.
Tons of claims also seem to be sourced ultimately to thinly-disguised promotional material (e.g. claims of the prevalence of a problem backed up by the sites of companies offering products to combat the problem) and opinion pieces that happen to mention an objective (but not verified) claim in passing.
What do you mean by this? Wikipedia actively encourages people to use archive.is links in citations:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:Archiving_a_source#Archiv...
It's not that difficult.
The idea that the permanent record of the internet could hinge on the ethics of one stranger behind a server rack is deeply unsettling.
Knowing the current owner of archive.is doesn't help; we need more full, independent Internet mirrors that can be compared against each other.
https://gyrovague.com/2023/08/05/archive-today-on-the-trail-...
If this is truly a concern then the answer is to have more than one publicly-accessible independent archive service. Archivebro has never taken any steps towards securing a monopoly on archiving things. The FBI are the only ones doing that.
Also not everybody in Russia is on the FSB payroll. News media always stops investigating as soon as there is credible information that somebody or their server is located in Russia because if they learn too much then it becomes difficult to discredit them as "possibly being linked to the kremlin". If you used any other nationality to imply that somebody is acting in bad faith on behalf of a hostile foreign government without additional evidence those same journos would call you a racist and try to get you canceled.
I always assumed it was officially sanctioned by the Israeli government, for some unspecified (but almost certainly nefarious) purpose.
My main use for archive.is is for sites that somehow cannot be archived (a message will show up mentioning this site cannot be archive or something along these lines).
archive.is is generally pretty good in forcibly attempting to get an archive, if the HTML doesn't work, the screenshot will work fine. Although archive.is doesn't seem to handle gifs/videos.
They respected exclusion requests after they stopped to respect robots.txt. I don't know their policy for new exclusion requests.
Or they're worried about the paywall by-passing functionality (which is probably what a good portion of people use it for) and copyright claims against archive.today potentially having it taken down and thus breaking a lot of links.
How do you suggest we fund the difficult work needed to investigate, research, and produce such data?
Remember that facts are not copyrightable, and as such, can't be restricted by copyright. Creative expression of those facts, on the other hand, can be.
It's not up to us to tell the FBI what to do, that's a fatal misunderstanding about how power works. You can demand to see the FBI's manager, but I doubt it will get you anywhere. You can choose between two candidates offered by the privately owned and run political parties for whom the FBI works, but I don't think that will help either.
> Knowledge itself should become a human right.
Human rights are created by legislation. Unless you own a legislator (or rather, many legislators), you will not be involved in this. The people who own (and parcel out) knowledge itself, however, will be involved.
It would be better if we stopped making pronouncements about what people more powerful than us should be doing. It's like prisoners talking about what the jail should be doing. You should talk about what you should be doing. And don't mistake demanding for doing, or walking in the street with your friends for activism (unless you're violating curfew and are prepared to defend yourselves.)
Be brave. Put forward a program that might fail. Ask people to help you with it, ask them to follow you, tell them where to show up. Join someone else and help with their program. Don't demand, then whine when they say "of course not." The FBI is not your daddy, and the people running it are not running it on your behalf.
I don't mean to be personal, but this type of talk is empty. The way how to do things is decided is through power; and the way weak people exercise power is collectively, through discussion and coordinated action. Anybody can talk about what they would do if they were dictator of the world.
Historically speaking I can't see this as even being in the top 100 evil things the FBI has done.
Perhaps, but we can't change the past: we can only fight against what is happening in the present to try to get a better future.
You're never going to get a system with a clandestine domestic service running ethically for long, esp. not with qualified immunity. It's simply too attractive to dumb psychopaths with delusions of grandeur and concurrently not of interest to people with a strong sense of community or morals.
The FBI's anticorruption work is good and necessary.
Have you ever worked in LE, in any capacity?
What a laughable thing to say.
Despite topping the world with incarcerations and arrests and law enforcement funding, the US is not a particularly safe place, so obviously US law enforcement isn't focused on safety and justice, which leaves the monetary factor.
If you arrest someone for a drug crime and get a plea deal out of them they get jail fees, processing fees, court minimum fees plus any additional court costs, probation costs and fees, multiple "X state specialty tax fee", plus kickbacks from the mandatory court ordered drug/anger/traffic class, cost of drug test fees, etc. If you arrest someone from murder and imprison them for life, sure you can claim to charge them those fees, but they will never be free of prison to ever pay them. So it should be no surprise that cops are incentivized to go for easy drug charges from non-dangerous citizens that puts money in their pockets over actual dangerous criminals who will only reduce department revenue.
Whatever the US problem is, it's not net negative cops (or guns, for that matter).
un-nuanced and intellectually lazy.
Hard to measure, isn't it. In the eyes of the millions of americans who have at some point in their life been victims or related to or friends of victims of some kind of serious crime, the FBI has often times been helpful and/or the prospect of being caught has been a deterrent for crimes.
You contrast that with all the bad that has come from there, of which there is surely plenty, but how come you claim thay the bad obviously must outweigh the good?
If they're canvassing for witnesses, are they going to charge through your yard and shoot your dog? If they're investigating someone else, how likely are they to try to come up with something unreasonable to charge you with for leverage and then make you plead it down to a penalty that still isn't zero in exchange for giving them information you might not even have and would then be forced to choose between fabricating to get the deal and "not cooperating" and getting a serious prison sentence?
If someone is attempting to SWAT you, how likely are they to ascertain the situation instead of shooting first and asking questions later?
If their investigation has led them to you for some reason even though you're innocent, do you expect them to care about the truth or just railroad you?
If you hear the name of a particular law enforcement agency unexpectedly when you don't have any reason to think you've done anything wrong and your instinct still has to be "oh fuck" then they're bad at their jobs.
Depending on how you expect the reader to answer all your questions, we could still be in full agreement, but my sense is that you're asking them rhetorically?
And then in terms of literal sentiment, most people aren't familiar with any given local law enforcement agency because there are so many of them, so they wouldn't know what to think, and some of them are quite bad. But the knowledge of the average person it isn't really the point.
Suppose you actually were familiar with the record of whatever specific agency just showed up. If you would still have to think "oh fuck" then they suck.
If you ask me, I'd trade the good for enduring the bad.
My shortcut is admittedly a sloppy heuristic (because what else do you have for unknowns like this); for the unmeasurable effects, my bet is that they skew roughly the same as the measurables. For every serial killer who thought twice, there have probably been many political activists who have also thought twice. The deterrent effect cuts both ways if your actions cut both ways. We also know about enough falsely accused / imprisoned that we can assume we ain't figured them all out. For every family that feels safer with the FBI around, there are families that feel less safe, because people "like them" have been framed, murdered, snooped on, suppressed, and criminalized.
So yeah, it is hard to measure - but not impossible to come to a conclusion, as far as I'm concerned.
Another way to look at it is this; if you're going to hand the mandate of violence and skullduggery to an institution, you should be damn sure that they have standards and practices that solidly enforce competence and ethics - and even considering the good, we know pretty conclusively that they have failed in this regard. I don't want to play russian roulette with law enforcement - they should get it right almost all of the time or step aside so someone who knows what they're doing can handle it.
(all this, over what was mostly a tongue in cheek response anyway ...)
i could absolutely be wrong since your post was kinda vague, so forgive me if i’m wrong, but are you implying we shouldn’t attempt mitigation of bad things because other bad things are happening elsewhere?
That chain was in response to:
>> We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here
> Historically speaking I can't see this as even being in the top 100 evil things the FBI has done.
Perhaps, but we can't change the past: we can only fight against what is happening in the present to try to get a better future.
The pushback, by other chap & me, is about quantifying this particular misdeed as "evil", showing a remarkable lack of acknowledgement about the many, many, many other things the FBI has done (from its inception as a personal blackmailing operation by Hoover against US politicians - ring any bells?) and is doing, which are far, far worse than this "bad thing".
Since you apparently have none of these things, you go get em tiger.
True, but I disagree with the conclusion. When I try to map it back to reality and it doesn't make sense, it is indeed an indictment of the analogy. But the fact I have to abuse the analogy to make that mapping coherent is not my problem; it's not my analogy.
However, within the context of the analogy, and if one can imagine that absolutely insane scenario, the logic holds.
Most often it happens with China since they spend a lot of propganda to present themselves as the true inventor of everything.
People can't even agree what goes on today. To what degree history is fiction I have no idea but it's probably worse.
I'm not going to simp for the FBI here, but come on: do you have a human right to preserve my private photos leaked by a stalker or a hacker? Because archive.is is famously unwilling to play nice here.
I don't know if this case is about that, or about pirated content, or about the administration trying to scrub something embarrassing off the internet. But the fact that archive.is cheerfully enables all three "use cases" should probably give you a pause.
It's a delicate line to walk because takedown processes can be abused to do things we don't like. But "lol, tough luck, information wants to be free" is not a sensible blanket response in a polite society.
Interesting tagline, but probably has far too many side effects.
If it were me, I would try to boil this down to some negative right, those usually have less side effects, and even then I would be very careful.
IMO what you really mean is "I should be free to sit and surf the web secure in my belief others are acting properly, while subsisting on externalized labor that props up my biology".
Asimov and countless others highlight this difference between being a passive reader of others ideas as orthogonal to knowledge acquisition. If you aren't conducting the experiments you acquired nothing but memory of someone else telling a story.
4% in the US hunt now. So to get people living rather than acquiescing, all you office drones are going to have to learn your way out of helplessness. Go acquire knowledge of how to grow a potato.
You won't because you don't want to acquire knowledge. You want the world to gift you knowledge and experience through as little effort of your own as possible. Typical American capitalist. 8 billion across the globe aren't that impressed by 300 millions obvious grift.
http://archive.today/2023.11.30-020758/https://www.theverge....
It should become part of an entity that is very difficult to kill, and will exist for a long time.
Although I guess that's a function of culture, and I think respect for libraries is rapidly declining.
For you. I'm sure they love data as long as only they can access it.
IMO the natural right is for humans to share what they've learned up to and including verbatim reproductions of works by others. I also think that abridging this right to grant some exclusivity for artists (the broader "art" meaning scientists/writers/authors/musicians/coders/etc) is suitable. Copyright is/was a good idea. Its fair use clause is a good idea. The duration of exclusivity under current laws, however, seems excessive and beyond mere encouraging art.
Many rights holders would very much like us to forget this.
You made your bed. Now lie in it.
I no longer support the freedom of speech for people and groups that actively call for the removal of these righta from people they don't like.
I read the discussion on HN when this all went down. I won't forget.
That's fine, but your opinion is just a fraction of what people feel and a stark minority at that.
Look up the article "Who Archives the Archivist?" (it's difficult to find. Use quotes. Don't link it; the site is banned here).
The whole US is evil.
I'm all for archiving open webpages though. And I'm honestly surprised the Internet Archive is still standing. Their decision to opening up their book library was a dangerous mistake.
We can not allow the FBI to work for Evil here. I actually think there should be a human right to data. With that I mean, primarily, knowledge, not to data about a single human being as such (e. g. "doxxing" or any such crap - I mean knowledge).
Knowledge itself should become a human right. I understand that the current law is very favourable to mega-corporations milking mankind dry, but the law should also be changed. (I am not anti-business per se, mind you - I just think the law should not become a tool to contain human rights, including access to knowledge and information at all times.)
Wikipedia is somewhat ok, but it also misses a TON of stuff, and unfortunately it only has one primary view, whereas many things need some explanation before one can understand it. When I read up on a (to me) new topic, I try to focus on simple things and master these first. Some wikipedia articles are so complicated that even after staring at them for several minutes, and reading it, I still haven't the slightest clue what this is about. This is also a problem of wikipedia - as so many different people write things, it is sometimes super-hard to understand what wikipedia is trying to convey here.