UK already did their "prove your age" act, EU is well on the way of doing it, every year they try a new chat control law, and sooner or later they'll force some kind of "real name" online, requiring identifying yourself when registering an account. And that's just the new stuff, france was pushing key escrow for many years, UK can jail you if you forget (or not give) your passwords, germany can fine you you if you use nasty words against a politician, etc.
All of this is terrible, obviously, but this one has a silver lining. The web will be such a nicer place when people can't hide behind anonymity.
That's one of the depressing things about sites with "real" (whatever that even means) name policies: turns out people will happily be virulently nasty trolls just as readily without pseudonymity
Yay! /s
EU and the member states are nothing but thugs and terrorists. Very powerful ones, but terrorists nonetheless. Putin or russia has not once threatened me, stolen from me under the threat of throwing me in jail, yet EU does. Russia has never tried to steal money from other citizens to try bribe me, yet an EU state has.
EU and its member states are an enemy of the people.
Sweden is in favor of Chat Control.
And this is total bullshit. E2EE instant messaging software will remain encrypted and private. OMEMO and OTR, too.
Pay for a VPN if you don’t want the VPN company to be complicit in tracking you.
And no, Mullvad is not free.
Any free VPNs could make it pay-to-use without changing a thing.
Having to pay for a VPN does not mean that it is more secure or whatever it is you are thinking. I could be a customer AND product at the same time.
This is just human nature. Any place where humans live in close proximity for hundreds of years suffers the same fate until a revolution or power restructure resets the counter through the removal of the previous structures vestiges.
Thanks to technology, it just keeps getting easier. Less time to put restrictive measures in place and a tighter feedback loop. Oh joy.
The original problem with The Panopticon was that it was 1 person in the center observing X amount of people. And at best, was a probabilistic 'am I being watched right now? ' with the answer of very low probability. For complete surveillance, you'd need a surveiller per watched.
Enter technology.
Now the surveillance isn't a person, but a set of computer programs. And, optimizing and analyzing the limited data flow out of a user is doable.
And you then have computational spies everywhere. Most of them are limited to specific usecases. However the more data is shared, the tighter fascist control can be maintained. Then it just comes to 'detected event' and 'summon the secret police'.
It is an anathema to the very foundation of America, especially in the year of the 250 year anniversary of the American Revolution. 250 years ago today, Americans were already killing British for the human right to free speech and freedom from this kind of aristocratic despotism of the hereditary ruling class.
> "[...]unprecedentedly broad site-blocking order that aims to restrict access to shadow libraries [...]. In addition to ISP blocks, the order also directs search engines, DNS resolvers, advertisers, domain name services, CDNs and hosting companies to take action."
Is that any different than the King's decree to smash the printing presses to disseminate information beyond the control and censorship of the aristocracy and treasonous merchants that enabled their web of control?
> The tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.
They can't pretend anymore that it can't happen, but yet keep ignoring the risk
I was told that I don't understand the internet and technology when I said that all these types of things would be happening, as it easily predicted if you even remotely integrate a basic understanding of human nature.
Reality though is that, sure, you and me may for the time being be able to get around some of these efforts, but what does that matter when the vast majority already don't avail themselves of any of the subject resources, and the regime's control measures will only expand from here and will make it nearly impossible for even people like us to get access to things, let alone share them.
My advice; try to "hoard" as much valuable information, data, and knowledge as possible; especially things regime really does not like and keep them offline and ideally in shielded storage. Maybe it will be for nothing and I am wrong, but maybe you may create the cache of human knowledge that survives into the future and humanity can uncover and recover from your "backup".
We are really looking at a digital Fahrenheit 451 scenario or like when Kings and Bishops sent out their henchmen to smash printing presses and torture anyone who dared disseminate information that was not regime approved thought. It may not seem like it today, especially since it is all of course only about saving children and countering "piracy", and we know of course that those are never just feigned intentions to obscure nefarious objectives that always turn out to be true.
I put "fascist" in quotes, because it has become an utterly useless and impressive term that is far more noise than signal due to imprecise and inaccurate overuse. Call them aristocrats, oligarchs, despots, tyrants, authoritarians... but saying that the ruling classes of most western societies are motivated by the metaphor of keeping together for strength is simply not a credible position.
As a non-European, I see the benefits of the EU efforts, but I also see them (the suits in Brussels) getting hooked on power and control in the last ~7 years.
As an example:
"The EU Commission refuses to disclose the orchestrators behind its mass surveillance proposal, which would effectively end citizens’ online privacy." - https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1l2655n/the_eu_comm...
Edit: removed unnecessary content.
Seems like something I'd be afraid of though if I were a EU citizen, or in a neighboring country the EU wants to absorb next.
Unfortunately it seems to be a worldwide trend.
I think it would be shorter to list countries without serious (current) authoritarian tendencies.
At the moment, the right is what is pushing for authoritarianism in most western countries. And fascism is conservative in nature and not progressive. All fascist policies are by definition right wing but not all authoritarian policies are fascist.
And if anything HN is really good at being weirdly against bread and butter social democratic policies. It’s an American website after all. I don’t think you could ever get away with discussing far left libertarian ideas on HN.
Curiously - I tried to find any news on this from Belgian sources, but couldn't find it (in my quick search).
If you deny civilians access to content but grant AI the access, what are you trying to accomplish?
The big ones, though, they don't dare to go up against those. You can't bully OpenAI into submission and threats of spurious lawsuits, you have to actually win, and they don't have an interest in taking that risk.
I know that there is a slippery slope here, but we need to change laws and make systems that are resilient against censorship. That's the only long term solution imho.
Let's be honest: it's piracy. They are not banning books. They're fighting illegal distribution. Just use a VPN and pirate the books. We gotta be honest to ourselves here.
This is just as pivotal to Right-to-Repair as it is to expecting digital assets that have been “bought” not to brick themselves after some arbitrary period.
I think we need law changes around digital ownership for sure, but I don't think this applies here.
PS: big fan of the internet archive. I'm just arguing that we need to do things correctly. And we need to let the authors be able to make a living from their work.
Literary output and quality have never been solely contingent on authors making a living from their work. The necessity of authors making their livelihood writing is the idyllic myth. Literature can, and has, bloomed from both the pen of the pauper and the privileged.
Jane Austen made perhaps £600 from her writing. Kafka kept a full-time day job and saw zero literary income in his lifetime.
Not to say there’s not people that haven’t made fortunes from those examples, but it sure wasn’t the author.
Libraries are also, at least where I am within the EU, pretty regulated. Libraries follow a compromise between the interests of the author and the public, one that the Open Library has never established.
The Internet Archive is rife with pirated content and basically a well-intentioned The Pirate Bay when you look at it from a copyright standpoint. The American laws that make it possible for the IA to exist don't apply elsewhere. Things like "public domain" simply don't exist in other countries.
Making the IA work internationally is forcing a square peg through a round hole. It'll only limit what the IA is capable of accomplishing. I'm quite at peace with "the IA is banned from countries incompatible with the IA's mission".
Just imagine the pushback if public libraries were invented today. They'd never get off the ground. Lobbyists from the copyright cartel would treat them as a five-alarm emergency, in the unlikely event that Republicans didn't block funding at the state and Federal levels.
I need to import many of my books from America by resellers and pay many duties..
Sometimes a book at $20 is sold >$200..
We must have p2p , decentralized application frameworks with strong encryption. A framework I can write my next saas on and no, not blockchain.
If you want a serverless network, there's at least this: https://zeronet.io/docs/site_development/getting_started/
I personally find little attraction installing in my brain furniture I can't sit on. If I can't freely reuse the ideas in the book to create anything, it is a net loss to read it.
Or maybe a employee could license a copy of company's software to themselves and then share it online?
Belgium broadly has a duopoly, with the first two ISPs listed having the vast majority of the market. Both of them have been doing blocking of pirate sites for decades, with at least one of them actually resolving + blocking by IP address, not just DNS blocking.
Needless to say, both have video on demand services to protect.
conartist6•14h ago
I have no respect at all for that judge's authority to do that, only the utmost disrespect for someone who would criminalize such an ordinary thing. If every podunk hyperconservative can write global bans then we will regress to the lowest common denominator
betaby•12h ago
What exactly does it mean in simple terms?
barry-cotter•11h ago
bevr1337•10h ago
Originally, it may not have been used kindly. I wonder if Podunk could be thought of as an Americanization of the Roman's barbarians. (The others.)
wand3r•10h ago
betaby•9h ago
FredPret•11h ago
I'm conservative and I feel exactly as you do about this type of judge and judgement.
jeroenhd•10h ago
Akamai and friends won't shut down their Belgian contracts for one bad ruling. Their financial incentives (combined with laws that put serving stakeholders' interests above basic human decency) simply don't align.
If it weren't for modern capitalism making all companies part of giant megaconglomerates, the Internet Archive wouldn't have a problem if BelgiAkamai and PayBel stopped serving them. Unfortunately, almost everything you can do or buy online and offline now belongs to maybe 20 or 30 megacorporations which means any court in a reasonably well-off country can have worldwide consequences.