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debanqued

@debanqued@beehaw.org

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debanqued , (edited )

It’s worth noting that the FCC’s so-called “Open” Internet Advisory Committee () tragically gives two seats on the board to:

  • Cloudflare
  • Comcast

Both of whom are abusers of , especially Cloudflare. A well-informed Trump-free administration should be showing Cloudflare and Comcast the door ASAP.

Sure, Trump would just bring them back. But it’d at least be a good symbolic move.

Indeed, as someone else pointed out, the needed change should come from pro-netneutrality legislation. And the legislation needs to be broad enough to block Cloudflare’s broad discriminatory arbitrary attack on access equality, not just tinker with speeds at the ISP consumer level.

debanqued ,

Whether the legislation is appropriate at the state or fed domain is unclear. Certainly if the orange tyrant takes power again, I would probably want state govs to be able to protect consumers from netneutrality abuses.

debanqued ,

Why would it necessarily have to be federal law, and not state law?

/cc @ulkesh

debanqued , (edited )

On a serious note, plenty of people here surely know what net neutrality is. Net neutrality is the guarantee that your ISP doesn’t (de-)prioritize traffic or outright block traffic, all packets are treated equally.

That’s true but it’s also the common (but overly shallow) take. It’s applicable here and good enough for the thread, but it’s worth noting that netneutrality is conceptually deeper than throttling and pricing games and beyond ISP shenanigans. The meaning was coined by Tim Wu, who spoke about access equality.

People fixate on performance which I find annoying in face of Cloudflare, who is not an ISP but who has done by far the most substantial damage to netneutrality worldwide by controlling who gets access to ~50%+ of world’s websites. The general public will never come to grasp Cloudflare’s oppression or the scale of it, much less relate it to netneutrality, for various reasons:

  • Cloudflare is invisible to those allowed inside the walled garden, so its existence is mostly unknown
  • The masses can only understand simple concepts about their speed being throttled. Understanding the nuts and bolts of discrimination based on IP address reputation is lost on most.
  • The US gov is obviously pleased that half the world’s padlocked web traffic is trivially within their unwarranted surveillance view via just one corporation in California. They don’t want people to realize the harm CF does to netneutrality and pressure lawmakers to draft netneutrality policy in a way that’s not narrowly ISP-focused.

Which means netneutrality policy is doomed to ignore Cloudflare and focus on ISPs.

Most people at least have some control over which ISP they select. Competition is paltry, but we all have zero control over whether a website they want to use is in Cloudflare’s exclusive walled garden.

debanqued , (edited )

Interstate commerce is governed by the federal government.

Not exclusively. Interstate commerce implies that the feds can regulate it, not that they have exclusive power to do so. We see this with MJ laws. The fed believes it has the power to prohibit marijuana on the basis of interstate commerce, but in fact mj can be grown locally, sold locally, and consumed locally. Just like internet service can be.

Suppose you want to buy a stun gun in New York. You can find stun guns sold via mail order from another state (thus interstate commerce), but New York still managed to ban them despite the role of interstate commerce.

A close analog would be phone laws. The fed has the TCPA to protect you from telemarketers, but at the same time various states add additional legal protections for consumers w.r.t. telemarketing and those laws have force even if the caller is outside the country. (Collecting on the judgement is another matter).

Schools now require the internet for kids. ISPs being allowed to be anything more than a dumb pipe means they have the control of what information is sent across their network.

Education is specifically a duty of the state set out in the Constitution. If you can point to the statute requiring schools to provide internet for students, I believe it will be state law not federal law that you find.

The internet is now a basic human right in the United States for numerous reasons, one of which is #2.

I don’t quite follow. Are you saying that because education is a human right, that internet access is a human right? It doesn’t work that way. First of all, people who do not exercise their right to an education would not derive any rights implied by education. As for the students, if a state requires internet in education that does not mean that internet access becomes a human right. E.g. an Amish family might lawfully opt to homeschool their child, without internet. That would satisfy the right to education enshrined in the Unified Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) just fine. A student attending public school in a state that mandates internet in schools would merely have the incidental privilege of internet access, not an expanded human right that students in other states and countries do not have under the same human rights convocation. If your claim were true, it would mean that California (for example) requiring internet provisions for students would then mean students in Haiti (a country that also signed the UDHR that entitles people to a right to education) or Texas would gain a right to internet access via the state of California’s internal law. A state cannot amend the UDHR willy nilly like that.

Also, if internet could be construed as a human right by some mechanism that’s escaping me, the fed is not exclusively bound by human rights law. The fed signed the treaty, but all governments therein (state and local) are also bound to uphold human rights. Even private companies are bound to human rights law in the wording of the text, though expectation of enforcement gets shaky.

ISPs cross state boundaries and should be governed by interstate law.

I subscribed to internet service from a WISP at one point. A dude in my neighborhood rolled out his own ISP service. His market did not even exceed the city.

The local ISPs have ISPs themselves and as you climb the supply chain eventually you get into the internet backbone which would be interstate, but that’s not where the netneutrality problem manifests. The netneutrality problem is at the bottom of the supply chain in the last mile of cable where the end user meets their local ISP.

Also with MJ laws, several states have liberated the use of marijuana despite the feds using the interstate commerce act to ban it.

An ISP being a business, especially a publicly-traded one, will sacrifice all manner of consumer/user-protection in order to maximize profit. And having the states govern against that will lead to a smattering of laws where it becomes muddy on what can actually be enforced, and where.

Sure, and if the fed is relaxed because the telecoms feed the warchests of the POTUS and Congress, you have a nationwide shit-show. A progressive state can fix that by imposing netneutrality requirements. Just like many states introduce extra anti-telemarketing laws that give consumers protection above and beyond the TCPA.

And having the states govern against that will lead to a smattering of laws where it becomes muddy on what can actually be enforced, and where.

That’s a problem for the ISPs that benefits consumers. If ISPs operating in different states then have to adjust their framework for one state that mandates netneutrality, the cost of maintaining different frameworks in different states becomes a diminishing return. US consumers often benefit from EU law in this way. The EU forced PC makers to make disassembly fast and trivial, so harmful components could quickly and cheaply be removed before trashing obsolete hardware. The US did not impose this. Dell was disturbed because they had to make pro-environment adjustments as a condition to access to the EU market. They calculated that it would be more costly to sell two different versions, so the PCs they made for both the EU market and the US market become more eco-friendly. Thanks to the EU muddying the waters.

The right to repair will have the same consequences.

debanqued , (edited )

A website isn’t a common carrier

We were talking about network neutrality, not just common carriers (which are only part of the netneutrality problem).

you cannot argue that a website isn’t allowed to control who they serve their content to.

Permission wasn’t the argument. When a website violates netneutrality principles, it’s not a problem of acting outside of authority. They are of course permitted to push access inequality assuming we are talking about the private sector where the contract permits it.

Cloudflare is a tool websites use to exercise that right,

One man’s freedom is another man’s oppression.

necessitated by the ever rising prevalence of bots and DDoS attacks.

It is /not/ necessary to use a tool as crude and reckless as Cloudflare to defend from attacks with disregard to collateral damage. There are many tools in the toolbox for that and CF is a poor choice favored by lazy admins.

Your proposed definition of net neutrality would destroy anyone’s ability to deal with these threats.

Only if you neglect to see admins who have found better ways to counter threats that do not make the security problem someone elses.

Can you at least provide examples of legitimate users who are hindered by the use of Cloudflare?

That was enumerated in a list in the linked article you replied to.

debanqued ,

Hence why we need a public option.

debanqued ,

First and foremost, is not an option for anyone who boycotts . And even neglecting that, HP is still the least ethical of all ink suppliers.

from the article:

Prices range from $6.99 per month for a plan that includes an HP Envy printer (the current model is the 6020e) and 20 printed pages. The priciest plan includes an HP OfficeJet Pro rental and 700 printed pages for $35.99 per month.

So the 20 page deal probably reflects the consumption of most households that print. That means the cost ranges from $7—35¢ per page. You must print 20 pages to reach 35¢ pp. A library would likely charge ~5—10¢ pp flat. Print shops tend to be cheaper than libraries.

The 700 page deal amounts to $36—5¢ pp. So you have to print exactly 700 pages to get a good price. Everyone who does not print exactly 700 pages every month for a span of 2 years will get screwed.

One of the most perturbing aspects of the subscription plan is that it requires subscribers to keep their printers connected to the Internet.

Bingo. It’s not a “smart” printer, it’s a dependent printer.

debanqued ,

Glad to see mention of Oki! Oki is the single most ethical choice. But they pulled out of the US market, sadly enough. The US is no place for ethical products.

debanqued , (edited )

from the article:

Subject to the terms of this Agreement, You hereby grant to HP a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right to use, copy, store, transmit, modify, create derivative works of and display Your non-personal data for its business purposes.

Holy shit. I wonder if HP is feeding customers’ data to an machine to exploit in some way. It doesn’t even seem to be limited to what people print. HP’s software package is probably not just a printer driver. But even if it is, a driver runs in the kernel space, so IIUC there’s no limit to what data it can mine.

debanqued ,

Sign-up still requires a phone number… -.-"

Thanks for the warning -- that was my first question. It is my top reason (among many other reasons) for avoiding Signal.

Checkout Matrix/Element or Session,

All 3 of the sites you linked are Cloudflare sites (thus antithetical to privacy). Yes, I know you can use some of that tech without touching CF, but when they run CF websites it reveals hypocrisy & not understanding the goals of their audience.

debanqued ,

You’re referring to anonymity, not privacy.

Anonymity is part of privacy; not a dichotomy.

debanqued ,

Anonymity is part of privacy.

Specifically, anonymity is confidentiality of identity. Confidentiality is part of privacy, which is a broad concept. So when a tool or mechanism works against anonymity, it works against privacy. It may not work against a privacy aspect that you care about, but it’s privacy nonetheless.

debanqued ,

iME can be “disabled” if you go along with all the hand-waving. The nuts and bolts of it is that the ME /must/ execute when powering on the CPU, but then there is a moment in the boot sequence in which it can be disabled. For some people, that’s good enough.

debanqued ,

I can’t watch videos but I will say that my biggest problem with the iME is not the security issue, but the anti-consumer aspect. Intel decided non-corporate consumers (who do not want or benefit from iME) can be disregarded marginalized. So disabling iME is insufficient and misses the problem.

The answer is to boycott iME CPUs. I never bought an intel CPU after 2008. I write this comment from a 16 year old PC just fine. I have pulled some more recent hardware out of dumpsters, ensuring I do not support anti-consumer products.

debanqued ,

makes the same claim as well. IMO it’s a great marketing tactic to say “we have our own crawler” to imply to people they will get some unique results-- but I’m not convinced that supplemental crawlers are significant. They are all too happy to rely on the crutch of the search engines they source from.

debanqued ,

indeed. I cannot reach this link from tor:

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html

debanqued ,

is an open source crawler that you can run and feed Searx with. I recall some searx instances that run their own YaCy. YaCy can also share indexes with other YaCy instances.

Chrome & Firefox are a false duopoly. Do we need another option? Should there be a public option? Should it come from Italy?

Mozilla is ~83% funded by Google. That’s right- the maker of the dominant Chrome browser is mostly behind its own noteworthy “competitor”. When Google holds that much influence over Mozilla, I call it a false duopoly because consumers are duped into thinking the two are strongly competing with each other. In Mozilla’s...

debanqued OP , (edited )

I’ve not been tracking them because I tend to only collect dirt on the greatest of evils. What comes to mind:

  • default search engine: Google (this is what that Google money is for officially)
  • Mozilla gave the boot to a lot of plugins and imposed some kind of control-freakish trust mechanism. Plugins/extensions were evicted from the plugin repository and they made it hard for plugin creators to distribute their plugins. I lost several very useful plugins when Mozilla took this controlling protectionist stance.
  • MAFF ditched. Mozilla abandoned a good format for archiving websites. I had a lot of content saved in *.maff files which Mozilla dropped direct support for and at the same time they blocked MAFF plugins.
  • Without Firefox, Google would be easily targeted with anti-trust actions. Google props up Mozilla just enough to be able to claim they have “competition”. Google can be most dominant when it has a crippled competitor under its influence.
  • Google killed the free world JPEG XL format. When a browser as dominant as Chrome withholds support JPEG XL, there is then no reason for web devs to use that format. Google did this because JPEG XL competes with a proprietary Google format. Firefox does not support it out of the box either, likely because of Google’s influence. Firefox users can enable it by going through some config hoops, so if Chrome alone did not kill it, that certainly would.

I vaguely recall a slew of Mozilla actions that were anti-thetical to privacy and user interests which caused me to move them from “a decent browser” to a “lesser of evils”. Hopefully others have better records of Mozilla’s history.

update May 2024

  • Mozilla uses data abuser Cloudflare for their exclusive access-restricted blog
  • Mozilla has decided to add more tracking to their browser to collect people’s search activity.
debanqued OP ,

Like the default search engine is not an example of Google’s control, it’s Mozilla’s revenue model.

It’s both, of course. Mozilla’s revenue enables Google control. If Mozilla changes the default search to one that is not in Google’s interest, they will lose their revenue.

The remainder sounds like personal gripes that you’re misconstruing as evidence of nefarious intent.

It’s both. I’m a user so I notice when Mozilla makes an anti-user move. Businesses serve their customers. Mozilla’s customer is Google, not me. So Mozilla serves Google, not the users. W.r.t evidence, I gave no evidence. I did not say “this is evidence”. If you want to challenge a claim because you can’t find the evidence on your own, you can ask for the evidence.

And as I said, I did not keep track of all Mozilla’s anti-user shenanigans over the years. So you’re not looking at a complete list of issues. It’s disingenuous to treat it as if it were.

There’s also plenty of evidence to the contrary, total cookie protection to name but one.

I did not mention anything about cookies, so which of my points do you think cookie protection counters what I’ve said?

Additionally, beurocratic processes produce terrible software.

Nonsense.

First of all, capitalism produces terrible software when you’re the product rather than the customer. It’s often shit even when you are a paying customer. The best quality software is produced outside of capitalistic structures.

I’ve worked on both gov and commercial environments. The gov process was superior for quality. On a commercial gig I was actually told not to fix bugs as they were spotted because it was important for the customer to discover the bug & report it so the supplier could charge them extra for the bug fix. The whole commercial work environment was rife with chasing profit (of course) which means cutting corners to cut expenses. If a developer produces something high quality in a fortune 500 company, they get back-roomed for “gold plating” (which means they’ve invested more in quality than necessary for the consumers). That doesn’t happen on gov projects.

It’s also wrong to attribute bureaucratic processes strictly to government projects. You may have a shit-ton of bureaucracy in the governance outside of the project which leads to: “build a Mars rover”. How bureaucratic the processes are within the organization is independent of whether it’s a commercial project or not. Fortune 500 corps are inefficient due to their bureaucratic structures. I could not reuse code from one project to another within the same company because there were rules about one project benefiting from another internal pot of money. So a piece of code had to be rewritten from scratch on the other project which means more bugs than you would have if the audited code could have been reused.

Finally, browsers are incredibly complex

Precisely why lack of competition is problematic.

debanqued OP ,

I just had a look at Debian’s official repos. No Safari browser. Did a search… found “how to install Safari on linux… start by installing WINE…” (yikes)

So in terms of a government offering public services that need to serve all people, Safari is not an answer unless the gov finances porting it to linux.

debanqued OP ,

Millions = mere peanuts, for developed countries. That price tag is also a good reflection of the degree of privacy people are being forced to compromise in order to finance the development and maintenance of Google Chrome. A gov has a duty not to subject its people to arbitrary privacy abuses. Yet some govs are designing web services for Google Chrome and then forcing people to access those services online by removing the offline option.

debanqued OP ,

This misses the point. Governments are designing web services for Chrome. So you have two choices:

  • pawn yourself to Google and use Chrome; or
  • experiment with unsupported browsers, which even if they work you’re still limited to the window of standards Google decided was good for their business

It’s a lousy idea. The gov should be supplying services that are wholly free of Google’s influence.

debanqued OP ,

Mozilla is not in danger so long as they continue to serve Google. You cut 83% of Mozilla’s revenue and I guarantee you there will be problems.

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