Here's my problem. It's great that some censorship will be prevented, but what about stuff like child pornography. I'm worried that, if successful, this will turn into a "we don't like our government so let's go create our own country where there are no laws", without thinking about the laws that we actually do want enforced...
[Edit: I wish people would stop voting down the parent. It is a legitimate point of view and down-voting is supposed to express a lack of value, not disagreement with content]
Child pornography is basically the trump card of the pro-censorship argument. Nobody is in favour of it, everybody thinks it's awful, even really passionate freedom-of-speech types often think an "except for child pornography" clause is an allowable compromise.
But the truth is that anybody who wants child pornography on the Internet can already get it, if they try hard enough. Many of us who've worked for large web companies are aware that one of the first forms of abuse that happens to any service that allows image uploading is that it starts getting used to distribute child porn. Shutting down domain names will do nothing because the people who deal in this stuff have been having their shit seized and shut down for years already.
By the same token, DNS is not essential to preventing censorship. We can send each other IP addresses through social networks, distribute shortlinks to servers that change every hour, or any one of a hundred other methods.
The balance to strike is: is censorship of material we think legitimate happening often enough right now that we want to make it easier to route around, knowing that doing so will make it harder to censor stuff that we find universally objectionable? A month ago I'd have said no, but today I'm not so sure. And that's a dangerous consequence of the actions the US government is taking in response to these leaks. By cracking down, they risk provoking a revolution that will make it impossible to control these things in future.
Just for the record, I'm not saying that my concern would stop me supporting a non-ICANN DNS system, but I don't think that "they can do it anything" means it isn't something worth thinking about in any topic about moving the internet away from governments, even if only regarding DNS systems.
> down-voting is supposed to express a lack of value, not
> disagreement with content
Let's face it: we mostly upvote posts we agree with. Then the trouble is, that for the symmetrical acction we must have symmetrical meaning. If I press on the gas and it makes a car to go faster I expect it to go slower when pressing less. If I click up-arrow to express agreement, I expect that down-arrow will express disagreemet.
I wish people will continue to vote down to express disagreement and use "flag" to express lack of the value or inapropriate content.
At the time of the edit, that post might have been in negative numbers. Voting expresses agreement, yes, but any score below 1 should be reserved for troll/frivolous/vulgar posts.
Precisely why I specified what "down-voting" is for. In my view, the correct score for a valid opinion that nobody else agrees with is 1. I feel up-voting can express both agreement and/or belief that something is valuable.
It doesn't seem particularly beneficial to the community to fade out posts simply because a few more people disagree with them than agree with them. Unless you're simply trying to encourage group think, I guess.
What about people that make their own kids (I hear humans can do that) and then abuse them? Clearly we should have video cameras in every room to ensure that this doesn't happen.
What if someone, right now, is doing something I don't approve of!? Something must me done!
Let's not put up straw men. I'm surprised you have so many upvotes for such an absurd argument--not that there aren't valid ways to disagree, but I don't follow your logic.
The issue is whether there is speech that is objectionable, and whether free speech has some sort of nearly universal limit if properly considered (yeling fire in a crowded theater, for example) and whether creating a law-free zone might have unintended consequences.
I don't see how a straw man implying that all laws require draconian enforcement really benefits the conversation. So we let child molesters do as they please because somehow any law enforcement would mean total and constant invasion of privacy? Not sure I follow the leap.
He's not beating on a straw man. The problem is you're conflating child abuse with certain patterns of bits floating around on the Internet.
I've also heard pedophiles claim that looking at child porn sates their desire to act out those fantasies, so perhaps fewer children are being harmed? That sounds plausible to me since 'normal porn' works, to some degree, as substitute for sex for many non-pedophiles.
> The problem is you're conflating child abuse with certain patterns of bits floating around on the Internet.
Please reread my posts. I am talking about the bits. The only place where I talked about actual child molesters (child abuse) was to point out a specific false-choice that jrockway put up--that we had to put cameras everywhere to enforce child abuse laws, which really was defeating an argument that no one made--ie, jrockway was the person who brought up actual child abuse, not the bits. He has articulated his position better in other posts now.
The issue is whether there is speech that is objectionable, and whether free speech has some sort of nearly universal limit if properly considered (yeling fire in a crowded theater, for example) and whether creating a law-free zone might have unintended consequences.
Child porn isn't speech, it's evidence -- evidence of a crime that has already taken place. This crime, like other crimes, can and should be prosecuted without any sort of totemic obsession with inanimate copies of the evidence.
In general, censorship of kiddie-porn-as-speech is the greatest favor we can do these criminals. We've already taught them to hide in the real world, and hide well. Now we're teaching them to cover their tracks online.
Child porn is illegal because its creation damages the child. Its continued distribution is not the primary problem, the fact that it was created in the first place is. So the solution to child porn is to find it, use good-old-fashioned police work to find who made it, and use the legal system to remove that person's access to children.
No need to break the Internet and restrict free speech for this very-special case. Let's spend the money we want to spend on censoring the Internet on more detectives, so that child abuse can be eliminated!
The same goes for "counterfeit goods" or whatever the DHS used as rationale for seizing domain names. Don't break the Internet; just buy one of the fake watches, ask UPS where it was shipped from, get a warrant, and bust the guys! Right?
(I fear that in the US, though, the problem with child porn is not that children were abused, but that people like something in a sexual way. Consider the person who was mailed a box of comic books that depicted "under-age" children in a sexual context. The government wanted to put him in prison for 15 years. For receiving a box of books.
"Sexting" is another example. It's doubtful that one can abuse one's self, but the government still wants to put people in prison for it.
What I find most amusing is that all people look pretty much alike when naked. I don't understand why naked pictures are such a hot-button political issue. It seems like the government just doesn't really want any depictions of sex [children, adults, tentacles, or otherwise] around at all.
To go even further - by driving the distribution further and further underground it becomes harder to track down the originator and prevent the actual abuse. The police/politicians attack distribution because its easier and makes them look like they're doing something.
Exactly. Remember when file-sharing first became popular? Everyone used Napster, which had one centralized indexing server. If someone wanted content removed, they could just ask Napster and it would be gone.
This wasn't good enough for the RIAA, which shut Napster down completely. This caused the programming community to come up with an un-blockable alternative, and now everyone uses un-blockable encrypted BiTorrent with DHT. If you want something gone, there is nothing you can do short of shutting down the entire Internet.
(It wasn't un-blockable initially, but some greedy ISPs tried to block it, so now it's encrypted UDP instead of cleartext TCP. Now the ISPs can't block it reliably, and they waste their own bandwidth because UDP has no concept of a window size.)
So oops... now it's super-easy for people to distribute child porn, all because the music industry got greedy.
I should note, and I make this comment most of the time that someone mentions encrypted BitTorrent, that "encrypted" BitTorrent is not really encrypted. As you mentioned, attempts are made to fudge the protocol and make it hard to recognize that the BitTorrent protocol is being used.
It does not, however, provide any encryption or anonymity for your traffic. All packets are sent in the clear, your real IP address is still shown to all connected peers, etc.; do not rely on an "encrypted" BitTorrent connection to save you from a packet-sniffing fiend because the content you're downloading is not given any extra encryption by an encrypted BT connection, because the connection is not really encrypted in the classical sense, it's just obfuscated so that ISPs can't automatically detect BT traffic and disconnect/throttle/filter. "Encryption" was a bad thing to call BT encryption.
The IP address is an interesting issue; there is really no need to attach it the data that you send out, which is the illegal part. I guess too many ISPs use egress filtering to prevent clients from forging the source address? (Also, tit-for-tat would be harder without any verification of who's actually sending you packets.)
You know, porno is just an excuse for the government to do censorship. Before Chinese government cracked down the majority of opposing voices on the Internet, they did it in the name of anti-porno. They officially banned Google.com because they found porno there (but we all knew the real reason).
Australia learned the trick and started to do the same. Looked at how screwed it is now.
Can people stop reading opinions into what I said please - I said that it could be a problem, not that I think we need to keep government control because of it...
It is indeed a problem. The problem of this problem, though, is that some people are using it as an excuse to create even bigger problems. For all of us. Some experienced this before. We are experiencing it now. People making .P2P are trying to undo these problems.
The real problem of child porno is so small that it is basically a non-issue in practice compared to all the problems that are created to fix it. There should be better ways.
There always was a black list, for child porn etc, but the proposal was to dramatically expand it to include lots of other categories. Then the Libs said they won't support, and it seemed to have died. However, from only a couple of days ago, here is some evidence, admittedly third hand, that some of the expanding has already taken place (3rd para, and near the end):
Why is this being downvoted? While a position that I disagree with, it wasn't presented in an unreasonable way. This is the exact same question / concern many normal people will have, and what politicians and law enforcement will use as scaremongering. Might as well face the question here...
I didn't downvote, but to offer an alternate theory to silverstorm's, it might be because "think of the children" (and kiddie porn in particular) is possibly a worse debate-killing cliche than invoking Third Reich. It's essentially a fearmongering tactic most of the time, and I really think it should be ejected from intelligent conversation unless strongly justified.
Freenet / other darkwebs trivially demonstrate that child porn isn't so easily stopped. And it's not like taking down a website participating in illegal activity is actually doing anything to stop that or enforce the laws around it; it at best sweeps it under the rug.
As jrockway points out, let's keep this discussion to the specific issue at hand. If we generalize we go to very undesirable consequences.
Unpopular and inconvenient as it might be this is a valid point and certainly one that needs to be considered. Freedom always comes at a cost, which isn't a bad thing as long as we don't forget that cost.
"The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all."
I recall reading, at one point, that the FBI is the largest distributor of child pornography in the united states, with the goal of identifying individuals who are interested in it and either keeping an eye on them or arresting them.
While I obviously agree that child porn is unacceptable, who do you propose stops distribution of it?
The FBI? ICANN?
There are always going to be bad things in the world. Maybe we should be trying to focus on the problem at the source (mental health, law enforcement, etc.) and not when it's too late online.
I can't down-vote anyone. I was actually quite disappointed when I first read that you can down-vote above some karma threshold.
Text/turn-based commenting system already ensure that one has to 'wait' for the other to finish their writing. Down-voting only seems like shouting louder and thus seems unnecessary. The only reasonable excuse is SPAM prevention. For that, however, I think that automated flagging system, that won't influence points, would do just fine. I also try to up-vote any opinions that I do not agree with, but that argument their point well.
Long story short, I think down-voting is unnecessary and even potentially harmful. I don't comment often, so it's not going to happen anytime soon, however I plan to not use my down-vote privileges, once I get them, for any reason at all.
(Actually, I think I'll create greasemonkey script to ensure I won't downvote anyone accidentally.)
