stimoceiver 's Techdirt Comments
Latest Comments (27)
-
On the post: Mehdi Hasan Dismantles The Entire Foundation Of The Twitter Files As Matt Taibbi Stumbles To Defend It
-
On the post: Another Casualty If Section 230 Gets Repealed: Food Safety Data
stimoceiver ( profile ), 10 Mar, 2023 @ 12:58amit's been a minute
Sorry, I was trying to copy and paste point #7 the link F230 shared and frame it with some markdown on my phone - and failed severely. In order to critique the utter ridiculousness of believing that a stronghold of right wing policy propaganda like the Ripon Society would care about the "civil judiciary" adjudicating "fair and unfair"! Somehow I have a feeling its not civil rights they're talking about. Didn't techdirt use to allow editing or deletion of comments?
-
On the post: Another Casualty If Section 230 Gets Repealed: Food Safety Data
stimoceiver ( profile ), 10 Mar, 2023 @ 12:45amonline censorship is a liberal game and republicans want in
You speak of torts, yet torts are civil. But what you are talking about are criminal matters. This is the core of why the social publisher is the wrong place to look for liability. You are asking a company that transacts in user content on the scale of the post office or UPS, to open and read or inspect every package or letter it delivers. And if they can't do that, you suggest we simply shouldn't have public electronic communication on this scale. Because that will be the immediate effect of repealing Section 230. Public communication of this volume is public speech and I agree that it should have far more 1st amendment protection than it does. The Twitter files have cemented this for me. The amount of signal throttling and narrative policing already happening at the behest of both government and corporation is out of control. So the Ripon Society can take heart: there are clearly lots of limousine liberal democrats who would love to see online speech policed. The same ones policing narratives on Twitter, the same ones trying to intimidate Matt Taibbi in yesterday's congressional hearing. It's nice to see a couple republicans claim to care about free speech for a change. But I highly doubt "free online speech" will be a plank of the GOP platform anytime soon. Both parties have more than enough politicians who wear their cultural and technological illiteracy like a badge of courage.
-
On the post: Another Casualty If Section 230 Gets Repealed: Food Safety Data
stimoceiver ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2023 @ 11:24pmOverseas harassment?
I'm actually with you on the spirit of these points, but repealing Section 230 is a one-size-fits-all solution that will restrict expression, not protect it. 1) Are you seriously suggesting that overseas harassment online is a big enough issue that US citizens online speech should be rigorously policed and restricted? 2) Kiwifarms. Didn't you post a link to the Ripon Society? Somehow I don't think the Ripon Society cares too much about trans folks being doxed! I actually agree that we could enact better laws at the federal level to address online doxing and stalking. But eliminating Section 230 protections for publishers is not the way to do it. The 1st aendment is the FIRST amendment for a reason. The 1st amendment allows the expression of all ideas, even offensive ones such as anti-trans bigotry, Nazism, and Christian nationalism. Who in their right mind would trust idiots in Washington to decide what speech is allowed and what speech is disallowed? Just another arena for governments to overregulate and then the policies will flip flop every few years when the "other" party comes into power. And you missed my point earlier. The Twitter Files reveal this is already well underway. Speech on social media during the election and the pandemic that disagreed with government narratives is already being policed. You sure you're not just jealous that only one party seems to wield this power? Rather than laying new layers of mandated corporate and government policing of speech, a better solution would be to grant ISP's Common Carrier status, then grant social media sites Common Carrier status. That way everyone is guaranteed their communications will reach their intended recipient or audience. The same way UPS, Fedex, USPS, and the POTS telephone system already work. Then corporate censorship of Your Favoritge Right Wing Narrative becomes a federal crime. 3) This is an excellent point but seemingly very little to do with Section 230. 4) The only ones talking to judges are people with money, not working class victims of harassment. What you suggest here is a structural problem with our government & again I don't see the relevance to Section 230. Repealing 230 without a well reasoned replacement would stifle everyone's expression in order to protect the rights of the few. Didn't Benjamin Franklin have something to say about "those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety"? And you are right, judges and politicians are notoriously ignorant of technology, like the folks at the Ripon Foundation seem to be. I'm all for protecting victims of stalking and harassment a little better. Yet you seem to think the only way to accomplish this is to open the floodgates for lawsuits by technical changes to the way speech on the internet works. But the only people who can file lawsuits are people with money. That is one thing that won't change anytime soon. So who do these changes really protect?
-
On the post: Another Casualty If Section 230 Gets Repealed: Food Safety Data
stimoceiver ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2023 @ 10:07pm- Internet Injustice. Today, Congress’ Section 230 precedents disenfranchise the civil judiciary’s adjudication of Internet illegal conduct cases to legitimately determine truth-lies, fair-unfair, and legal-illegal. Instead, Congress has unreasonably empowered random unvetted private actors with immunity to mediate all of Americans’ interactions arbitrarily for profit, surveillance, politics, power, and dominance.
-
On the post: Another Casualty If Section 230 Gets Repealed: Food Safety Data
stimoceiver ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2023 @ 09:55pmSilence the victim
Freedom of expression gives you the right to be as abusive as you like. But if you cross the line into harassment, stalking, and doxing, the redress for this already exists. It is called "flagging" content for removal by the site, followed by notifying law enforcement. The existing laws and the existing interpretation of Section 230 are just fine for this. But your solution for "the plight of victims who have no redress against mob harassment, doxing, stalking and other types of harms online" is to stifle everyones freedom of speech, including the speech of these victims. Anyway where is this epidemic of mob harassment, doxing, and stalking you speak of? Got a source?
-
On the post: Another Casualty If Section 230 Gets Repealed: Food Safety Data
stimoceiver ( profile ), 09 Mar, 2023 @ 08:57pmThese are some crazy comments
The attack against Section 230 and the attack against NYT vs Sullivan are isomorphic. Each represents a sharp attack against basic freedom of expression protected by the 1st Amendment. The effect of both is to make publishers fully liable for everything they publish. 1) Eliminating Section 230 eliminates protection for social publishers who publish large volumes of user contributed speech. They must police speech to search for all forms of restricted speech and censor that speech. This also has the very serious side effect of creating and maintaining a new list of "restricted speech", something the Twitter files seem to reveal is already well underway. Whether this new list of "restricted speech" that social publishers would need to screen for would include defamatory speech is beyond my pay grade, but it seems overturning NYT vs Sullivan would add defamatory speech to that list. And as Techdirt has repeatedly made the case, content moderation at that scale is already a full time job with Section 230 in place. Eliminating Section 230 would force all social media operating in the US to completely retool their systems and either hire an enormous amount of moderation staff, or drastically limit user submitted content. 2) Overturning NYT vs Sullivan eliminates protection for journalists against unknowingly defaming a public figure. How does a journalist "unknowingly" defame a public figure? By citing an unverified source. This would make a news outlet liable for anything their journalists publish. The establishment already frames certain sources as contentious or questionable. Large news outlets (with legal departments) whose journalists cite those sources may or may not be accused of defamation. But small, independent journalists who cite these sources will be easy pickings. So if Xinhua runs a sparesly documented story about a US CEO comitting fraud in China and citing only Chinese sources, an indepedent journalist in the US citing Xinhua is open to being sued by the CEO.
-
On the post: Amazon Pays Employees To Chirp Happily On Twitter About Wonderful Working Conditions
-
On the post: Elsevier Says Downloading And Content-Mining Licensed Copies Of Research Papers 'Could Be Considered' Stealing
stimoceiver ( profile ), 18 Nov, 2015 @ 05:16amI applaud the hackers behind the Library Genesis project.
The project makes tens of thousands of peer reviewed journals, books, and other documents freely available through a search engine. The back end repository for all this data is a torrent pool, invisible to the search engine users, but open to participation via seeding or extending the pool.
It mirrors quite a bit of otherwise paywalled content.
And its dedicated to the memory of Aaron Swartz. How cool is that? -
On the post: Lenovo Busted For Stealthily Installing Crapware Via BIOS On Fresh Windows Installs
stimoceiver ( profile ), 13 Aug, 2015 @ 09:37amcustomers who want actual control of the hardware they own
This is a great article because it gives a nice clear example of not only what corporate-level actors think of our privacy and security, but also just how opportunistically they will act when left to their own unregulated and profit-driven whims.
It leads me to ponder: between now and the future of armed AI battlebots kicking down doors instead of cops, what kind of future can we predict for implantable computing?
Lenovo's actions are a nice foreshadowing.
So are smart tv's that share your every spoken word with third parties.
So are advanced persistent threats in the hard drive mcu firmware(s) and unpatchable firmware vulnerabilities that affect nearly every USB memory stick in existence.
So is the hidden second operating system in every phone, the baseband OS.
So are the terms in the Windows 10 license agreement that obligate the user to agree to so many kinds of spying, automatic updating, and remote top-down command-and-control from big brother Microsoft.
For that matter, so are the ubiquitous, corporate-owned, proprietary and for-profit nature of the cell phone and internet network architectures. Why aren't corporations racing to embrace the Internet Of Things and the future beyond by designing an open, community-owned, peer routed and decentralized network architecture where all we will need to do to join is put up an antenna? Something that is free to join, neighborhood-centric, and useful for civic and community organising?
Its clear that if the hardware manufacturers are left to their own devices (pun intended), implanatable computing with a proprietary for-profit software-as-a-service unmoddable hardware locked proprietary baseband operating system, and advanced persistent spyware and adware in every BIOS and firmware will be the norm, and not some glaring exception. -
On the post: Wikileaks Latest Info-Dump Shows, Again, That The NSA Indeed Engages In Economic Espionage Against Allies
stimoceiver ( profile ), 31 Jul, 2015 @ 09:54pmOld news is how old? Very.
I'm surprised how few netizens, journalists and regular citizens are aware of Interception Capabilities 2000.
It was a report prepared in 1999 for the Director General for Research of the European Parliament (Scientific and Technical Options Assessment programme office, no less)
"On the development of surveillance technology and the risk of abuse of economic information."
It leads one to wonder: exactly what "abuse of economic information" via international NSA/Five Eyes "COMINT" style surveillance had already occurred circa 1999 to justify an entire report to the EU parliament on the subject.
Also if anyone remembers - I believe it was the William Binney leaks (see I dont remember either, its all so hard to keep up with) circa 2002. He developed NSA software met the legal requirements for respecting citizen privacy and included functionality to mask "content" and "selectors" until the required court orders were obtained. But in their wisdom the NSA went with another package called "Trailblazer", ostensibly lacking that privacy functionality, as well as severely over-budget and ultimately cripplingly dysfunctional in other ways.
Well, it just so happens that Interception Capabilities 2000 includes screenshots of a NSA software called "Trailmapper".
So not only does this make a great read for anyone trying to understand the evolution of surveillance technology. It also reveals enough about the state of the art of COMINT surveillance tech circa 2000 to give a nice basis for extrapolating the pace of technological development that led to the "NSA Catalog" era of surveillance, interception, and exfiltration tech. -
On the post: Will Corporate Sovereignty Disputes Lead To Wars One Day?
stimoceiver ( profile ), 23 Jun, 2015 @ 04:42amIf the TPP and TTIP pass, corporations will go from having de facto sovereignty to having de jure sovereignty.
Until this happens, who, exactly has enjoyed the privileges of sovereignty besides states?
The fact that corporations are pushing for de jure sovereignty through these treaties shows that the nearly unchecked privilege corporations enjoy thanks to corporate "personhood" just isn't enough for today's transnational corporations.
From what little has been leaked, its not hard to see that the TPP and TTIP are clearly part of the same pattern of stifling competition we see when corporate lobbying results in legislation that stifles innovation and so-called "disruptive" technologies. In fact, they streamline the process by taking the decision making process out of the hands of politicians legislators and judges who are (theoretically) beholden to both their constituency and the laws of their jurisdiction and instead places it directly in the hands of those who answer only to the bottom line.
But corporations differ from states in several very important ways. States are bound to a geographical location. Corporations are not, and regularly flex this mobility to get around taxation, environmental and safety regulations, and labor laws. Clearly the TPP is designed from the ground up to give sanction to this way of doing business - that is, outside the reach of any one jurisdictions laws.
Also, based on the pattern of large-scale exploitation by the worlds corporations of smaller and more poorly governed countries, it is highly likely that there is more than one corporation in existence that possess greater resources at their disposal than some of the world's smaller and poorly governed countries.
Because of these two points it should be clear that giving corporate powers de jure sovereignty through the TPP and TTIP will put them at significant advantage over land-locked state powers in many situations. Calling TPP and TTIP "treaties" or "partnerships" is really just nice a euphemistic whitewash for what will really happen under de jure corporate rule.
If the TPP and TTIP pass, the corporations of the world and the moneyed powers of the world who control them will then have free reign to redraw to their liking the geopolitical borders of almost any part of the earth that suits them, and by use of any and every dirty trick from deception to coercion.
TL;DR: Granting corporations de jure sovereign status will shortly empower them to wage war on every level, up to and including armed combat. -
On the post: Senator Wyden Attacks CIA Redaction Demands As 'Unprecedented'
stimoceiver ( profile ), 03 Nov, 2014 @ 12:30amwonder whats in there thats such a big deal???
Must be some awfully innovative "interrogation techniques" they're trying to hide.
Just a guess (really) but I'll bet this particular rabbit hole runs significantly deeper than just waterboarding or clamping electrodes to scrotums. MKDELTA and MKULTRA were just the beginning. Thats so vintage mid-century. Count on heavy use of drugs and sophisticated electronics for this torture session you won't be able to remember later. -
On the post: New Snowden Doc Reveals How GCHQ/NSA Use The Internet To 'Manipulate, Deceive And Destroy Reputations'
stimoceiver ( profile ), 02 Mar, 2014 @ 11:52amRe: Re: Re: (Scientology)
Too bad a few agents got caught infiltrating the Federal government (the biggest security breach in US history) and went to jail in the 1970s. It's a wonder why the government didn't just shut down and dismantle the entire cult operations right then and there.
Actually, it wasnt very long after the failed "Operation Snow White" that Hubbard went into hiding. After he was out of the game a new shell corporation sprung up with a new board of directors which then took ownership of all the old copyrights owned by Hubbard.
And shortly after that the IRS suddenly recanted their years of persecution of Scientology and decided to grant the tax exempt status they had been seeking for decades.
So its quite possible that some of those in the government who originally wanted to dismantle Scientology had a change of heart and decided it served a better purpose to keep it going, only under entirely new management. -
On the post: If You Don't Care About The NSA Because You 'Haven't Done Anything Wrong,' You're Wrong
stimoceiver ( profile ), 28 Nov, 2013 @ 10:35amSpeaking of data collection...
Anyone interested in NSA data collection should have a look at this piece published on Cryptome back in august, to see just how far and wide the 'net' is being cast, and who has access to its contents:
PROTON, CLEARWATER and LEXIS-NEXIS -
On the post: If You Don't Care About The NSA Because You 'Haven't Done Anything Wrong,' You're Wrong
-
On the post: NSA Still Not Sure What Snowden Took, But May Try To Pre-empt Future Leaks
stimoceiver ( profile ), 15 Nov, 2013 @ 07:37pmspeculation about possible future leaks
Here are my speculations on an as yet purely hypothetical scenario of possible capabilities of NSA surveillance now or in the near future.
What if, of all the cell towers that ostensibly provide cellular communications to us, only half of them actually did so? And for that half that does indeed do so, there are of course possibilities for surreptitious data channels, priority override for wealthy customers (when the towers circuit capacity is maxed out and they just have to make a call, so a lower priority call gets bumped), hidden services, networks, etc.
But what about the other half? With the ubiquity of cell towers in our lives - and their capabilities - going unquestioned for two+ decades, there are some disquieting possibilities. One of the foremost speculations that comes to my mind would be a network of high precision SIGINT triangulation and intercept stations, capable of acting as a large scale phased array for precise monitoring of electronic devices of "persons of interest" within each cell triangle, as well as the possibility to deliver energetic responses of varying power and precision to those same targets. Could this also have psychological implications, especially though the principles of electrochemistry being used to remotely influence endocrine responses? Nearly all of us lack the specific spectral analysis and survey equipment to make either such evaluation.
Also worthy of note, the fact in the field of classified State-Security and higher technical surveillance (aka SIGINT), such SIGINT monitoring posts are known to monitor "guard bands" for the appearance of signatures of remote TSCM (Technical Surveillance Counter Measures) equipment in the vicinity of the target. So that bug sweeps not only not going to work, the equipment used to do the sweep will be easily detected by those doing the technical surveillance in the first place.
q.v. James Atkinson's Granite Island Group, Technical Surveillance Counter Measures: Threat Levels -
On the post: IETF Begins To Work On Designing A Surveillance-Resistant Net
stimoceiver ( profile ), 02 Nov, 2013 @ 09:11amFree Mesh Networks.
We've had the tech available to us for years now, if not decades.
We've become so addicted to the idea of firewalls and isolated WLANs being a necessity that we've failed to see the alternative.
Right now our internet is proprietarily routed. Proprietary not in that the protocol is secret, but rather proprietary in that the path between geographical neighbors almost always includes long trips through the infrastructure to centralized datacenters. In other words, an infrastructure-centric network.
We need to turn this paradigm on its head and create a peer routed mesh. NOT as a primary "go to" destination in and of itself as the current internet is, but rather as a new kind of community interconnectivity.
I recognize the obvious utility of firewalls. But we've lost some amazing potential technologies by not creating a network which was node-aware and even node-centric instead of infrastructure-centric.
First and foremost, we lack the ability to put up an antenna and connect and network with those nearest us, for free, at whatever data rate such peer routed interconnect could achieve.
Such a paradigm doesnt need to be solely for the purpose of routing or wireless transport. Imagine that youve just moved into a new high rise with ethernet wiring between all apartments. And imagine for simplicitys sake that each floor has its own switch and that all units share a single subnet.
Under the current paradigm, plug in your computer and - security considerations aside - all you get is an internet connection. Whether you have a router or a software firewall, you are protected against exchanging any unwanted traffic with others on the subnet.
But turn this around and think of the possibilities of exposing a few ports. Imagine plugging in your ethernet and suddenly your "network neighborhood" shows an icon for each other apartment, depending on their privacy settings. Each node could have its own profile page, message queue, instant messaging, file transfer, even the ability to coordinate VLAN's for gaming.
The protocols to create such a user experience for the most part already exist in one form or another, though it might take some rethinking to decentralize functions such as email, profile pages, and instant messaging.
We could even implement a type of community DNS, managed by committee, for such a context.
The one stumbling block I see to all of this is the currently extensive use of private ipv4 subnets and NAT. For such a network architecture to truly be scalable beyond high rises to neighborhoods and cities, we'd need something like ipv6, and lots of MIMO devices. Hackerspaces or other volunteer organizations could handle neighborhood to neighborhood backhauls.
I see a few projects edging their way in this direction. One is the Hyperboria Project. Another is the The Free Network Foundation..
As far as I'm concerned the ultimate goal should be to enable a nationwide or even global networking paradigm where all someone has to do to join the network is to put up an antenna and begin networking with ones neighbors. -
On the post: Snowden Rebuts Sen. Feinstein's Claims That The NSA's Metadata Collection Is 'Not Surveillance'
stimoceiver ( profile ), 25 Oct, 2013 @ 06:58pmWhether or not this obvious "surveillance" of us all really "IS" "surveillance" or not, theres one thing I'd like to know.
Many who have been following these developments for the past decade will remember an informative document called "Interception Capabilities 2000". If you haven't seen it, its well worth reading if for no other reason than to provide some perspective on the technological development of COMINT surveillance systems over the time span of the last 13 years or more. It even has some screenshots of an NSA surveillance software of that era called "Trailmapper".
The subtitle of this report was somewhat longer:
"Report to the Director General for Research of the European Parliament (Scientific and Technical Options Assessment programme office) on the development of surveillance technology and risk of abuse of economic information."
So, I'm curious, for all those better versed in the recent earth history of state level surveillance tech than I: What abuses of economic information were known to have occurred? I've read through the document once or twice and while it highlights the potential risk of abuse of economic intelligence by 3rd parties connected with the intel communities, I don't recall any explicit references or footnotes indicating to what extent such had already at that time happened.
And I can't help but assume it must have happened at the time of the reports writing in order to earn so prominent a place in the title and subject matter of a report to the EU parliament.
After reading "The Secret History of Signals Intelligence" and a few introductory documents on cryptography I see no reason to believe our telecom network wasn't equipped with the capability for COMINT surveillance since day one. Because if it has been going on since the implementation of these public networks (if not being an a priori justification for their creation in the first place) then perhaps a better issue for activists to concern themselves with would be elucidating and illuminating not only what the criterion currently are for acting on the intel thus gathered and to what degree private commercial information might be shared with competing businesses, but how (or whether) these criterion have evolved (or devolved) since their devising.
q.v. Interception Capabilities 2000 -
On the post: 15 Year Old Student Commits Suicide One Week After Arrest For Streaking During Football Game
stimoceiver ( profile ), 14 Oct, 2013 @ 11:07amRe: Re: Re: Any one know if he was on any medications
On Oct 9th, 2013 @ 1102 am, The Groove Tiger wrote:
> Yeah it's not like teenagers are normally chemically imbalanced or anything.
The idea that chemical imbalance of the brain is in any way normal or even common is perpetuated most by those whose livelihood is tied either directly or indirectly to the prescription of psychotropic drugs.
Many scholarly articles have come out in the past 2 years supporting the conclusion that our society is dangerously over medicated on such substances. Here's one summary from a Scientific American author, and you can find many more peer reviewed journal and lay articles to support this contention: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/2012/03/05/are-psychiatric-medications-making-us-sicker/
Hot take
Whether or not the censorship that Taibbi claimed to expose actually happened at any scale, the mainstream discourse that has followed seems to suggest that a significant percentage of the American public is okay with full fledged censorship.