A number of these companies operate where I live, they are interesting to say the least. 6 months ago there were absolutely none, and now there are at least 4 companies with bikes in my neighborhood.
They do work on some pretty cool technology, QR codes, GPS, remote controlled ring locks, and the like. The bikes generally are heavy single gear cruiser things that have to give more than a bit of the welly to get it down the road.
They also spend most of their time parked. Or laying on the ground. Or dumped in a field. Or, as has happened, dumped in the river.
if they are using them to collect data, they would seem to be a failure. Most people I see using them at this point are parents who want to ride next to their young children on the bikes their parents bought them. So their destination is, well, wherever a 5 year old can ride his new two wheeler with the training wheels still on.
That, my friends, is powerful data.
I will say the one thing these bikes do exceptionally well is get in the way. They crowd up the sidewalks, get dumped on the edge of the road, in entranceways, at the bottoms of staircases and escalators (yup, we have those outdoors). Frustrated maintenance people pile them up like cord wood in useless piles, and the companies themselves can't seem to be bothered to collect them even after weeks of not moving except for people kicking them as they walk by.
The ISP market is maturing. With the vast majority of American homes having some sort of internet connection, we are now into the next phase, which is improving the network and offering new services. Telling an ISP that they cannot offer a music service internally on their own network that zero rates discourages them from trying. Innovative products that could be offered by the ISP are lost.
In discouraging the ISP from having their own "value added" or "market differentiation" services, you also take away some of the desire to improve their network to prove such services. Instead, you get Comcast's X1 project, which basically will hijack much of the bandwidth from the current IP network to provide cable service that isn't subject to NN.
"they are long-term goals that aren't going to happen soon"
They are long term goals because nobody is working on them. When you spend all your time fighting whatever current distraction is in front of you, you don't have energy left to fight the bigger fight.
With increased competition, the NN fight would be less important. You guys go on and on about how Google is dropping fiber because it's hard to install (legal issues). Well, fix that, and Google would probably roll out in every major city in short order. Other companies would likely do the same, if your assertions about local blocking is true.
"the goal is to keep the current players in check with simple rules to curb some of the more blatant excesses."
There were no real excesses to curb. The truth is for 20 plus years, the internet expanded rapidly without issue. Some of the best internet services exist in places with the least regulation. The ones with the most (like Australia) have the worst.
Moreover, and this is key: What excesses were happening that couldn't be handled by the FTC? What excesses were happening that couldn't be fixed with congress passing laws to address them?
The things are well know, I agree. But dealing with one like the end of the world (even if we didn't have it for the first 20 years of the internet, and things went mostly fine), and not really pushing for any action on the other seems, well, stupid.
NN is a band aid for a major wound. You may be able to make it stop bleeding a bit, but the overall problem remains. Get as upset and agressive about the real problem and you might find the band aid isn't needed at all
As others (including OldMugWump) has mentioned, it is a bit of a deck chairs on the Titanic issue.
The real problem is a lack of last mile competition. Your concerns entirely are focused on the idea that, if you only have one ISP choice, and that ISP decides to block something, then you have no access.
So is the problem blocking, or is the real probably a lack of choice? Moreover, when you fast forward 10 years from now, will that lack of choice still be an issue?
NN in it's own way cements in that lack of choice. It makes it so that the way ISPs can obtain maximum profits isn't to offer addtional or over the top services, but instead to bribe officials and launch lawsuits to keep others out of there territories, where they can charge monopoly rents for internet service.
If you had choice (say 3 to 5 ISPs) blocking would not be an issue. Any ISP stupid enough to block anything would lose customers quickly.
So the real problem is a lack of last mile competition. Limiting what the current ISPs can do (including their own music, video, and other services) in the name of a free market is to entirely miss the real problem and actually discourages innovation.
Imagine if you put all of this effort into pushing to have one touch make ready mandated nationwide. Imagine if local governments were mandated to install fiber in every home, and offer shared switch locations for all ISPs to operate from, giving those consumers a near endless choice of services?
Innovation is never found in restrictive regulations.
"Pushing the problem out of sight does not solve it, and both the girls who are caught up in sex trafficking, and those who try to combat it are against SESTA."
That's the point. It's not about solving the problem. It is exactly about removing the problem from the sight of people who are searching for the very service.
"Your claim that the existence of "alt.sex.." making them liable assumes that they look for such groups and block them, rather than just connect to other Usenet servers and relay the content. That is forcing people to either curate all groups, or not offer the service."
Let's put it in simple terms. Let's say you are a newsagent, you have a magazine and newspaper shop (old fashioned, I admit). You stock magazines that are created by, written by, published by, and distributed by others. You just toss them on the shelf and sell them on. You are just, to use your term, connecting people to the magazines they want.
Now, let's say someone sends you 100 copies of "paedo sex dating" magazine. If you sell it on, and someone twigs onto it, then you are very likely to get a visit from the cops. You are not the publisher, writer, creator, and you had absolutely no influence in the content - you aren't curating, you are just moving data, right?
Nobody wants to explain why a website operator should be less liable than a news agent.
" A better approach is for law enforcement to use the postings in such a group to catch the real criminals, rather than criminalizing someone who is only vaguely and incidentally associated with the actual crime."
The lack of nuance is key here.
Ask yourself a question of greater harm: If it takes hours, days, weeks, to "solve" a single case of prostitution, and many of them end up at dead ends with only a single girl and not much else, is that the best way to take money out of the game and make it less desirable to put girls in this position to start with?
Understand that, in the US, even if the police "know" that there is underage or sex trafficking going on, they need to build a case ("due process"). That means they just can't take a list of names and bust down doors.
Oh, and that even assumes they have a list of names. What they likely have is burner phone numbers, mastercard gift cards, and so on.
So they have to actually get in contact, try to get them to say something incriminating, send someone in with a wire, get the girl to say something incriminating, and then they can arrest HER, and not the pimp. If they are lucky, she will turn in her pimp and admit her situation, most won't because the pimp holds leverage over them (drugs, threats, family threats, etc).
Most girls of age, charged with prostitution, get a fine or "time served" that they spent overnight in jail waiting for arraignment. Beyond arraignment, the case might not get to trial for months.
On the other hand, you can work to make it much harder for the public to get access to the girls. You can make it so that they pimps have to be much more open and overt about trying to attract customers, in a manner that may expose them more. Making it so that they cannot easily and anonymously promote their hookers is a good start, don't you think?
Making it harder for the public to get access changes the economics and makes it less profitable to pimp. It makes the them have to have a bigger plan, one that will fail more often.
There is no one solution - but letting them run an open marketplace and keeping law enforcement tied down with long legal processes isn't a good mix.
Part of the problem of Usenet is "grouping". alt.sex.meet.minors.for.sex is a problem. It's a group created by someone somewhere in the world and propagated to your usenet server, where you effectively publish it again. You cannot easily control it.
Start a facebook group called "underaged hookers" and see how long it lasts.
Open a new blog on blogger or wordpress called "how to meet 14 year old sex slaves for low price fun", and see how long it lasts.
Open alt.sex.fuck.a.minor and it might still be there in 20 years.
SESTA goes after a very narrow group of people. Read the law. It doesn't even kick in until someone violates sex trafficking laws. It's not random.
It goes after those who, knowing or understanding that someone is violating the law, chooses to continue to maintain the posts and the posting area because it's good for their site, business, profit, whatever.
They aren't after a site because a spammer posted something stupid that you removed 12 hours later.
"You're conflating public and private OSI layer 2 networks to suggest that applying filtering on public networks isn't distinct from selling private virtual circuits. Private network products are not effected by title II. Your argument is completely irrelevant. "
You almost understood my point. People are pointing to Comcast upgrading their IP network and saying "look, they are still investing in the internet, NN hasn't stopped them", but the reality is that Comcast's investment in their IP network is to support their own products. They aren't upgrading for better internet (they might in passing achieve that, probably at a higher retail price) they are upgrading so they can ditch their legacy stuff over time,
"So how much do you get in your Packi shill center to make these bullshit claims? "
I can honestly say you are a racist pig. Hopefully everyone downvotes your racist comment into history.
"On appeal, it seems fairly likely to me SLCC could prevail"
Considering the judgement is only for $20,000 and basically "stop using Comic-Con for your event", I don't see much benefit in tossing another huge pile of money down the toilet for an appeal. They can just move along and not have to worry in the future.
Other events that have been using the Comic-Con moniker to describe their events will likely have to take steps to either obtain a license, or come up with some other term to describe their events. With a judgement in hand and any appeal process dragging out, almost every other event has to face the music in the next 12 months if they are yearly events.
If you run a Usenet server, you always run the risk of getting in trouble because you allow other people to choose what you publish and distribute. If you choose to accept all groups at all times, then you have made a fairly solid mistake. Even then, have you reached the level of actual knowledge? It's doubtful.
However, if you are distributing the group I mentioned before, and using it in your marketing material to attract new users, then you clearly have knowledge.
Read the two laws, and think about how it really applies. Take your own examples, and try running them down the list until you hit "guilty". The bar is a whole lot higher than you think.
"SESTA isn't about the speakers, it is about service providers. "
Actually, SESTA is about internet sites being able to profit from supporting sex trafficking and hiding behind section 230 to do it. It's about them having a protection that no other publisher or distributor has.
"But your right. I couldn't possibly have seen this kind of vain disregard for reality before. It will all be OK. Of course that's what they said to their kids when they were sewing stars of David on their coats in 1940. "It's all going to be OK.""
... and you went there. Took you long enough! Yes, clearly, by trying to stop websites from running ads for women being sold for sex against their will, everyone is Hitler. Awesome. Right. That's not just a slippery slope argument, thats a sheer cliff. Can you find a way to say that section 230 stops global warming and gets rid of pollution too?
Essentially, Russia is just trying to get into a situation where, even if every connection to the outside internet is dropped, that things inside their own country (or group) will not be easily disrupted.
It also gives them the longer term ability to block sites or make it harder at least to find them, imagine all traffic for whitehouse.gov getting redirected to a look-a-like site that has nothing but the rhetoric that Russia is pushing on it. It's citizens could be deceived by this sort of thing.
"f you run any kind of public service communications system you can get locked up. Usenet for example (which still exists) could easily be considered a criminal enterprise by this law. TOR could easily be covered by it as well. IRC too. MMORPG's admins could be looking at criminal charges. Not to mention torrents. "
Not really true.
Usenet? Most usenet lawsuits and legal action end up in a pile on the floor, the distributed nature of the whole thing makes it very difficult to figure out who is even the source service. However, with fewer players in the field, it might be more possible. At the same time, if you are the one propagating alt.sex.minors.for.hire don't you think you deserve just a little responsibility for it?
TOR? Not really. Like a VPN, TOR is not a content service, only a transport. Nothing in SESTA or other offered changes would suddenly make "transport" companies liable in any way.
MMORPG? Not really. See, part of the SESTA rules requires forms of knowledge and support. That someone happens to post a message on your service doesn't suddenly create either of those things.
However, if an MMORPG site had a forum and created a "Pedophile chat here" area, then yes, they would have knowledge and would be offering support.
"So Ajit declares war against the digital exercise of the 1st amendment. Congress follows up with an act of war against any non-mainstream communications service on the Internet."
You just rattled the tin foil a little too hard, I can hear it from here.
Seriously Ajit Pai isn't doing anything for or against the 1st amendment. You had free speech online before Title II, and you will have it after it's gone. Any ISP silly enough to start blocking broad swaths of legal speech will find themselves facing the FTC and consumer backlash. No local politician, no State office, and no congress critter would stand in the way of new competition to replace ISPs who fail to meet the minimum standards of free speech.
There is no problem supporting the 1st amendment. However, free speech never means "any speech", there are plenty of types of speech that are not generally protected by the first. Quite simply, the 1st amendment isn't an absolute, even it has limits.
Let's take your point of view and give it a good real world looking over.
Let's say you want to publish a news rag full of escort ads with photos and descriptions. You credit it, you edit it, and you give it to me, a printing company that also distributes newspapers to various point of sale locations, news boxes, and distributed them door to door.
Can the person printing and distributing your work be held blameless for the content, even if it's clearly promoting an illegal activity?
If notified by authorities that this material is illegal, should I, as the publisher, be able to say "some other guy gives it to me to print" and not disclose who that is? Should I be allowed to continue to print and distribute it, even knowing that the content it illegal, and that many of the ads are for paid sex with trafficked women, minors, or those who fall into both categories?
Should a website have more protection that the printer and distributor? Do you honestly think they would be able to stand in court and say "we aren't liable, we don't know who writes it and purposely delete or phone records hourly to assure that we don't"?
I think that the ratio of "smart people" to "flies" is such at this point that most of Silicon Valley has turned into a fly fest. (can't say fly-con, I gather).
Good ideas have been replaced with bad ideas, often referred to as jerk tech or what have you. "Not Hot Dog" is the sort of good idea that makes the place run, I guess.
For every good idea there are hundreds of really bad ones. The difference in the valley is that with a good enough pitch, you could get a few rounds of financing for just about anything. With the way IPOs go, they only have to hit maybe 1 in 1000 to still make a pot full of money. The other 999 solve problems nobody had to start with.
Silicon Valley of source isn't an instruction manual. It's observational humor, the type that is funny because it's generally true. The characters are slight exaggerations, but they are based on something we can relate to. That says it all.
First, it's not net censorship. Nobody will be denied their legal right to speak. Rather, it removes extra protection that exists only for websites and not for any other type of publisher in the US.
Second, and you have to pay attention here: There are not laws to catch sex traffickers. It's not the point.
The point is a little more sublime, perhaps a little to nuanced for everyone to catch. It's called "making it more difficult to turn sex trafficking into money", by making it harder for clients and providers to meet up and exchange money for "service".
Specifically, it's aimed at those who are not "in the know" having contacts to get this sort of thing without online help. Those people (mostly men, admittedly) who perhaps would never use a street hooker, but who might fall for an internet ad that makes it sound like a single girl offering her services for a few extra bucks, not realizing that it's just a sex slave controlled by a pimp who takes most or even all of the money.
When you remove the financial benefits of pimping, when you lower the consumer pool for the service, then you maybe make it less likely that girls get caught up in this sort of problem.
It doesn't catch any sex traffickers. It doesn't need to. We have laws for that already. We just need a small change to section 230 to stop allowing websites to promote the stuff (and profit indirectly from it) with impunity.
It's nuanced, and from what I can tell, the silicon valley types aren't really good with nuance.
I have already pointed out that Comcast is in the process of upgrading the IP network. They aren't doing it to make the internet faster, they are upgrading it to run the X1 IPTV boxes. What is important about this sort of technology is that it runs in it's own internal reserved lane, and is not part of the general internet traffic.
So, they can work to improve their cable TV style product, give greater choice, more pay per view, more optional programming, and still not be in any way in violation of the NN.
The reality is that in some cases, if enough consumers are using the sort of thing, it might actually limit the amount of bandwidth available on their network for internet users at peak times.
All of this, of course, not in violation of NN. Things that use the IP networking but are not "internet" aren't part of NN.
So you see, while you can say "well, that isn't NN, is it?" it's an explanation of why it appears a company like Comcast is still spending on their network when in fact it's not at all for internet users. For your reference (in case you are too laxy to look) all of the reports saying "look, they are still spending on their networks with NN" also show Comcast as one of the biggest spenders. Now you know why, and why it's not really a truthful conclusion.
NN basically says there cannot be slow and fast lanes, but it doesn't even start to cover how fast those lanes should be. It's a recipe for dragging feet and working to use your IP network for non-internet services.
It really doesn't matter if the user prioritizes something if the network itself cannot support it.
One of the things that NN doesn't address is things like connection ratios. Most ISPs use anywhere from 10 to 1 to 200 to 1 or more as a ratio between your connection speed and the rest of their upstream network. So as an example, they may run 100 meg to your neighborhood, and then sell 100 20 meg connections on it. That would be a 20 to 1 ratio. Most of the time and for most normal "web surfing" activity, 20 to 1 is not too horrible, especially at 20 meg per connection.
But then they may also do that again further up the ladder, taking 100 of their 100 meg connections and having them share a 1 gig connection. That is another 10 to 1 step, making your original connection now a 200 to 1 shot. Starting to get bad.
Then they peer. Well, if you happen to be heading where a lot of people are heading, and that peer is overused, then you may also see slow downs. So you are 20 to 1 times 10 to 1 times who knows what.
All of that is perfectly acceptable under Net Neutrality. As long as the ISP isn't specifically block sites, content, or protocols, they have not violated the letter of the rules (not law, it's only rules!).
So you could set your medical monitor to be your top priority on your router. It could get 100% of the bandwidth when it needs it, but it would still have to suffer the 20 to 1, 10 to 1, unknown congestion issues that all the other traffic has to face.
For what it's worth, NN makes it so that ISPs have little in the way of motivation to fix this. Comcast is spending a bundle to upgrade their network to support their X1 cable box, which will run "outside" of the internet in reserved space, without having to deal with congestion. It's not a violation of NN because it's not internet traffic and won't be part of your internet service.
Otherwise, they have little reason to upgrade their networks unless they can find a way to charge you significantly more for it.
On the post: Why Does China Love The 'Sharing Economy'? Not Because Of Communism...
They do work on some pretty cool technology, QR codes, GPS, remote controlled ring locks, and the like. The bikes generally are heavy single gear cruiser things that have to give more than a bit of the welly to get it down the road.
They also spend most of their time parked. Or laying on the ground. Or dumped in a field. Or, as has happened, dumped in the river.
if they are using them to collect data, they would seem to be a failure. Most people I see using them at this point are parents who want to ride next to their young children on the bikes their parents bought them. So their destination is, well, wherever a 5 year old can ride his new two wheeler with the training wheels still on.
That, my friends, is powerful data.
I will say the one thing these bikes do exceptionally well is get in the way. They crowd up the sidewalks, get dumped on the edge of the road, in entranceways, at the bottoms of staircases and escalators (yup, we have those outdoors). Frustrated maintenance people pile them up like cord wood in useless piles, and the companies themselves can't seem to be bothered to collect them even after weeks of not moving except for people kicking them as they walk by.
If this is the future, please give me some past.
On the post: The Free Market Argument For Net Neutrality
Re: Re: It's a good post, but...
The ISP market is maturing. With the vast majority of American homes having some sort of internet connection, we are now into the next phase, which is improving the network and offering new services. Telling an ISP that they cannot offer a music service internally on their own network that zero rates discourages them from trying. Innovative products that could be offered by the ISP are lost.
In discouraging the ISP from having their own "value added" or "market differentiation" services, you also take away some of the desire to improve their network to prove such services. Instead, you get Comcast's X1 project, which basically will hijack much of the bandwidth from the current IP network to provide cable service that isn't subject to NN.
"they are long-term goals that aren't going to happen soon"
They are long term goals because nobody is working on them. When you spend all your time fighting whatever current distraction is in front of you, you don't have energy left to fight the bigger fight.
With increased competition, the NN fight would be less important. You guys go on and on about how Google is dropping fiber because it's hard to install (legal issues). Well, fix that, and Google would probably roll out in every major city in short order. Other companies would likely do the same, if your assertions about local blocking is true.
"the goal is to keep the current players in check with simple rules to curb some of the more blatant excesses."
There were no real excesses to curb. The truth is for 20 plus years, the internet expanded rapidly without issue. Some of the best internet services exist in places with the least regulation. The ones with the most (like Australia) have the worst.
Moreover, and this is key: What excesses were happening that couldn't be handled by the FTC? What excesses were happening that couldn't be fixed with congress passing laws to address them?
On the post: The Free Market Argument For Net Neutrality
Re: Re: It's a good post, but...
The things are well know, I agree. But dealing with one like the end of the world (even if we didn't have it for the first 20 years of the internet, and things went mostly fine), and not really pushing for any action on the other seems, well, stupid.
NN is a band aid for a major wound. You may be able to make it stop bleeding a bit, but the overall problem remains. Get as upset and agressive about the real problem and you might find the band aid isn't needed at all
On the post: The Free Market Argument For Net Neutrality
It's a good post, but...
The real problem is a lack of last mile competition. Your concerns entirely are focused on the idea that, if you only have one ISP choice, and that ISP decides to block something, then you have no access.
So is the problem blocking, or is the real probably a lack of choice? Moreover, when you fast forward 10 years from now, will that lack of choice still be an issue?
NN in it's own way cements in that lack of choice. It makes it so that the way ISPs can obtain maximum profits isn't to offer addtional or over the top services, but instead to bribe officials and launch lawsuits to keep others out of there territories, where they can charge monopoly rents for internet service.
If you had choice (say 3 to 5 ISPs) blocking would not be an issue. Any ISP stupid enough to block anything would lose customers quickly.
So the real problem is a lack of last mile competition. Limiting what the current ISPs can do (including their own music, video, and other services) in the name of a free market is to entirely miss the real problem and actually discourages innovation.
Imagine if you put all of this effort into pushing to have one touch make ready mandated nationwide. Imagine if local governments were mandated to install fiber in every home, and offer shared switch locations for all ISPs to operate from, giving those consumers a near endless choice of services?
Innovation is never found in restrictive regulations.
On the post: Court Holds NYPD In Contempt For Refusing To Hand Over Documents Related To Black Live Matter Surveillance
Re: Re:
On the post: Court Holds NYPD In Contempt For Refusing To Hand Over Documents Related To Black Live Matter Surveillance
On the post: Internet Censorship Bills Won't Help Catch Sex Traffickers
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Classic
That's the point. It's not about solving the problem. It is exactly about removing the problem from the sight of people who are searching for the very service.
"Your claim that the existence of "alt.sex.." making them liable assumes that they look for such groups and block them, rather than just connect to other Usenet servers and relay the content. That is forcing people to either curate all groups, or not offer the service."
Let's put it in simple terms. Let's say you are a newsagent, you have a magazine and newspaper shop (old fashioned, I admit). You stock magazines that are created by, written by, published by, and distributed by others. You just toss them on the shelf and sell them on. You are just, to use your term, connecting people to the magazines they want.
Now, let's say someone sends you 100 copies of "paedo sex dating" magazine. If you sell it on, and someone twigs onto it, then you are very likely to get a visit from the cops. You are not the publisher, writer, creator, and you had absolutely no influence in the content - you aren't curating, you are just moving data, right?
Nobody wants to explain why a website operator should be less liable than a news agent.
On the post: Internet Censorship Bills Won't Help Catch Sex Traffickers
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Classic
The lack of nuance is key here.
Ask yourself a question of greater harm: If it takes hours, days, weeks, to "solve" a single case of prostitution, and many of them end up at dead ends with only a single girl and not much else, is that the best way to take money out of the game and make it less desirable to put girls in this position to start with?
Understand that, in the US, even if the police "know" that there is underage or sex trafficking going on, they need to build a case ("due process"). That means they just can't take a list of names and bust down doors.
Oh, and that even assumes they have a list of names. What they likely have is burner phone numbers, mastercard gift cards, and so on.
So they have to actually get in contact, try to get them to say something incriminating, send someone in with a wire, get the girl to say something incriminating, and then they can arrest HER, and not the pimp. If they are lucky, she will turn in her pimp and admit her situation, most won't because the pimp holds leverage over them (drugs, threats, family threats, etc).
Most girls of age, charged with prostitution, get a fine or "time served" that they spent overnight in jail waiting for arraignment. Beyond arraignment, the case might not get to trial for months.
On the other hand, you can work to make it much harder for the public to get access to the girls. You can make it so that they pimps have to be much more open and overt about trying to attract customers, in a manner that may expose them more. Making it so that they cannot easily and anonymously promote their hookers is a good start, don't you think?
Making it harder for the public to get access changes the economics and makes it less profitable to pimp. It makes the them have to have a bigger plan, one that will fail more often.
There is no one solution - but letting them run an open marketplace and keeping law enforcement tied down with long legal processes isn't a good mix.
On the post: Internet Censorship Bills Won't Help Catch Sex Traffickers
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Classic
Part of the problem of Usenet is "grouping". alt.sex.meet.minors.for.sex is a problem. It's a group created by someone somewhere in the world and propagated to your usenet server, where you effectively publish it again. You cannot easily control it.
Start a facebook group called "underaged hookers" and see how long it lasts.
Open a new blog on blogger or wordpress called "how to meet 14 year old sex slaves for low price fun", and see how long it lasts.
Open alt.sex.fuck.a.minor and it might still be there in 20 years.
SESTA goes after a very narrow group of people. Read the law. It doesn't even kick in until someone violates sex trafficking laws. It's not random.
It goes after those who, knowing or understanding that someone is violating the law, chooses to continue to maintain the posts and the posting area because it's good for their site, business, profit, whatever.
They aren't after a site because a spammer posted something stupid that you removed 12 hours later.
Read the law.
On the post: Why I Changed My Mind On Net Neutrality
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: eNFORCEMENT?
You almost understood my point. People are pointing to Comcast upgrading their IP network and saying "look, they are still investing in the internet, NN hasn't stopped them", but the reality is that Comcast's investment in their IP network is to support their own products. They aren't upgrading for better internet (they might in passing achieve that, probably at a higher retail price) they are upgrading so they can ditch their legacy stuff over time,
"So how much do you get in your Packi shill center to make these bullshit claims? "
I can honestly say you are a racist pig. Hopefully everyone downvotes your racist comment into history.
On the post: SLCC Rankles Judge With Social Media Posts As A Jury Prepares To Rule
Re: Re:
Considering the judgement is only for $20,000 and basically "stop using Comic-Con for your event", I don't see much benefit in tossing another huge pile of money down the toilet for an appeal. They can just move along and not have to worry in the future.
Other events that have been using the Comic-Con moniker to describe their events will likely have to take steps to either obtain a license, or come up with some other term to describe their events. With a judgement in hand and any appeal process dragging out, almost every other event has to face the music in the next 12 months if they are yearly events.
On the post: Internet Censorship Bills Won't Help Catch Sex Traffickers
Re: Re: Re: Re: Classic
If you run a Usenet server, you always run the risk of getting in trouble because you allow other people to choose what you publish and distribute. If you choose to accept all groups at all times, then you have made a fairly solid mistake. Even then, have you reached the level of actual knowledge? It's doubtful.
However, if you are distributing the group I mentioned before, and using it in your marketing material to attract new users, then you clearly have knowledge.
Read the two laws, and think about how it really applies. Take your own examples, and try running them down the list until you hit "guilty". The bar is a whole lot higher than you think.
"SESTA isn't about the speakers, it is about service providers. "
Actually, SESTA is about internet sites being able to profit from supporting sex trafficking and hiding behind section 230 to do it. It's about them having a protection that no other publisher or distributor has.
"But your right. I couldn't possibly have seen this kind of vain disregard for reality before. It will all be OK. Of course that's what they said to their kids when they were sewing stars of David on their coats in 1940. "It's all going to be OK.""
... and you went there. Took you long enough! Yes, clearly, by trying to stop websites from running ads for women being sold for sex against their will, everyone is Hitler. Awesome. Right. That's not just a slippery slope argument, thats a sheer cliff. Can you find a way to say that section 230 stops global warming and gets rid of pollution too?
On the post: Russia Says Disconnecting From The Rest Of The Net 'Out Of The Question', But Wants Alternative DNS Servers For BRICS Nations
It also gives them the longer term ability to block sites or make it harder at least to find them, imagine all traffic for whitehouse.gov getting redirected to a look-a-like site that has nothing but the rhetoric that Russia is pushing on it. It's citizens could be deceived by this sort of thing.
On the post: Internet Censorship Bills Won't Help Catch Sex Traffickers
Re: Re: Classic
Not really true.
Usenet? Most usenet lawsuits and legal action end up in a pile on the floor, the distributed nature of the whole thing makes it very difficult to figure out who is even the source service. However, with fewer players in the field, it might be more possible. At the same time, if you are the one propagating alt.sex.minors.for.hire don't you think you deserve just a little responsibility for it?
TOR? Not really. Like a VPN, TOR is not a content service, only a transport. Nothing in SESTA or other offered changes would suddenly make "transport" companies liable in any way.
MMORPG? Not really. See, part of the SESTA rules requires forms of knowledge and support. That someone happens to post a message on your service doesn't suddenly create either of those things.
However, if an MMORPG site had a forum and created a "Pedophile chat here" area, then yes, they would have knowledge and would be offering support.
"So Ajit declares war against the digital exercise of the 1st amendment. Congress follows up with an act of war against any non-mainstream communications service on the Internet."
You just rattled the tin foil a little too hard, I can hear it from here.
Seriously Ajit Pai isn't doing anything for or against the 1st amendment. You had free speech online before Title II, and you will have it after it's gone. Any ISP silly enough to start blocking broad swaths of legal speech will find themselves facing the FTC and consumer backlash. No local politician, no State office, and no congress critter would stand in the way of new competition to replace ISPs who fail to meet the minimum standards of free speech.
There is no problem supporting the 1st amendment. However, free speech never means "any speech", there are plenty of types of speech that are not generally protected by the first. Quite simply, the 1st amendment isn't an absolute, even it has limits.
On the post: Internet Censorship Bills Won't Help Catch Sex Traffickers
Re: Re: Classic
Let's say you want to publish a news rag full of escort ads with photos and descriptions. You credit it, you edit it, and you give it to me, a printing company that also distributes newspapers to various point of sale locations, news boxes, and distributed them door to door.
Can the person printing and distributing your work be held blameless for the content, even if it's clearly promoting an illegal activity?
If notified by authorities that this material is illegal, should I, as the publisher, be able to say "some other guy gives it to me to print" and not disclose who that is? Should I be allowed to continue to print and distribute it, even knowing that the content it illegal, and that many of the ads are for paid sex with trafficked women, minors, or those who fall into both categories?
Should a website have more protection that the printer and distributor? Do you honestly think they would be able to stand in court and say "we aren't liable, we don't know who writes it and purposely delete or phone records hourly to assure that we don't"?
Think about it.
On the post: Dear Tech Guys: HBO's Silicon Valley Is NOT An Instruction Manual
Re: Silicon
Good ideas have been replaced with bad ideas, often referred to as jerk tech or what have you. "Not Hot Dog" is the sort of good idea that makes the place run, I guess.
For every good idea there are hundreds of really bad ones. The difference in the valley is that with a good enough pitch, you could get a few rounds of financing for just about anything. With the way IPOs go, they only have to hit maybe 1 in 1000 to still make a pot full of money. The other 999 solve problems nobody had to start with.
Silicon Valley of source isn't an instruction manual. It's observational humor, the type that is funny because it's generally true. The characters are slight exaggerations, but they are based on something we can relate to. That says it all.
On the post: Internet Censorship Bills Won't Help Catch Sex Traffickers
Classic
First, it's not net censorship. Nobody will be denied their legal right to speak. Rather, it removes extra protection that exists only for websites and not for any other type of publisher in the US.
Second, and you have to pay attention here: There are not laws to catch sex traffickers. It's not the point.
The point is a little more sublime, perhaps a little to nuanced for everyone to catch. It's called "making it more difficult to turn sex trafficking into money", by making it harder for clients and providers to meet up and exchange money for "service".
Specifically, it's aimed at those who are not "in the know" having contacts to get this sort of thing without online help. Those people (mostly men, admittedly) who perhaps would never use a street hooker, but who might fall for an internet ad that makes it sound like a single girl offering her services for a few extra bucks, not realizing that it's just a sex slave controlled by a pimp who takes most or even all of the money.
When you remove the financial benefits of pimping, when you lower the consumer pool for the service, then you maybe make it less likely that girls get caught up in this sort of problem.
It doesn't catch any sex traffickers. It doesn't need to. We have laws for that already. We just need a small change to section 230 to stop allowing websites to promote the stuff (and profit indirectly from it) with impunity.
It's nuanced, and from what I can tell, the silicon valley types aren't really good with nuance.
On the post: Why I Changed My Mind On Net Neutrality
Re: Re: Re: eNFORCEMENT?
I have already pointed out that Comcast is in the process of upgrading the IP network. They aren't doing it to make the internet faster, they are upgrading it to run the X1 IPTV boxes. What is important about this sort of technology is that it runs in it's own internal reserved lane, and is not part of the general internet traffic.
So, they can work to improve their cable TV style product, give greater choice, more pay per view, more optional programming, and still not be in any way in violation of the NN.
The reality is that in some cases, if enough consumers are using the sort of thing, it might actually limit the amount of bandwidth available on their network for internet users at peak times.
All of this, of course, not in violation of NN. Things that use the IP networking but are not "internet" aren't part of NN.
So you see, while you can say "well, that isn't NN, is it?" it's an explanation of why it appears a company like Comcast is still spending on their network when in fact it's not at all for internet users. For your reference (in case you are too laxy to look) all of the reports saying "look, they are still spending on their networks with NN" also show Comcast as one of the biggest spenders. Now you know why, and why it's not really a truthful conclusion.
On the post: Why I Changed My Mind On Net Neutrality
Re: eNFORCEMENT?
NN basically says there cannot be slow and fast lanes, but it doesn't even start to cover how fast those lanes should be. It's a recipe for dragging feet and working to use your IP network for non-internet services.
On the post: FCC Boss Lies Again, Insists Net Neutrality Harms The Sick And Disabled
Re: Re: Not prioritization but DEprioritization
One of the things that NN doesn't address is things like connection ratios. Most ISPs use anywhere from 10 to 1 to 200 to 1 or more as a ratio between your connection speed and the rest of their upstream network. So as an example, they may run 100 meg to your neighborhood, and then sell 100 20 meg connections on it. That would be a 20 to 1 ratio. Most of the time and for most normal "web surfing" activity, 20 to 1 is not too horrible, especially at 20 meg per connection.
But then they may also do that again further up the ladder, taking 100 of their 100 meg connections and having them share a 1 gig connection. That is another 10 to 1 step, making your original connection now a 200 to 1 shot. Starting to get bad.
Then they peer. Well, if you happen to be heading where a lot of people are heading, and that peer is overused, then you may also see slow downs. So you are 20 to 1 times 10 to 1 times who knows what.
All of that is perfectly acceptable under Net Neutrality. As long as the ISP isn't specifically block sites, content, or protocols, they have not violated the letter of the rules (not law, it's only rules!).
So you could set your medical monitor to be your top priority on your router. It could get 100% of the bandwidth when it needs it, but it would still have to suffer the 20 to 1, 10 to 1, unknown congestion issues that all the other traffic has to face.
For what it's worth, NN makes it so that ISPs have little in the way of motivation to fix this. Comcast is spending a bundle to upgrade their network to support their X1 cable box, which will run "outside" of the internet in reserved space, without having to deal with congestion. It's not a violation of NN because it's not internet traffic and won't be part of your internet service.
Otherwise, they have little reason to upgrade their networks unless they can find a way to charge you significantly more for it.
Next >>