If a handful of payment processors can decide who can get money or not, it sounds like you need laws to force them to be neutral. Imagine if you couldn't put a truck on a road because the road is owned by someone that doesn't like your business!
Classic mistake. This is why you should never type your real name into a website that you don't wan
>One user, who goes by Monica, wrote in a post on her personal blog that Glassdoor added her name and the city where she lives to her Glassdoor profile following an email exchange with Glassdoor customer support, despite having never provided her name during the sign-up process some years earlier
Wait, what.
This is just grotesque and unethical. You do NOT go around fixing other people's profiles. You do NOT edit other people's posts. This is a huge breach of trust for any platform that handles user inputted information.
I managed to connect. I don't know how much I can copy, since it's quite a long thread, but here is the first message.
> Something exceptionally grim is happening on the Internet.
> In the last few months, the constant flood of algorithmically generated junk content has kicked into an AI-powered overdrive, and it is cutting a swath of destruction as it overwhelms search engines, filters, and moderation systems
> Call it Gresham's Law 2.0: bad content drives out good.
> I'm starting this thread to document it, because there is a lot happening all at once.
With everything in consideration, I think the real problem are incentives.
When human-created content competes and loses against AI-generated spam, the system is ill-designed.
This is the culmination of algorithms that have rewarded engagement over everything else. Creator platforms look at content made by experts that are high quality and take time to make and effort to consume, and judge it worse than trashy content full of controversial drama pushed every week without research or effort based on arbitrary metrics. Now we've reached the point where the creator is unnecessary and all that matters is engagement.
Creator-less engagement will be the future of the web. A technology that triumphed by connecting people around the world will die connecting you with nobody but an AI that acts as wall and filter between you and the rest of the world.
imo, I think we've been publishing all wrong. We should publish more of things done correctly to inspire by example rather than whining about everything that is wrong in this world for a hundred pages.
People said it would take twice as long to make two versions of the same frontend, so they spent a hundred times as long making crossplatform, responsive, accessible GUIs that often feel terrible to use no matter who the user is.
Regarding A, one point I've seen raised about open source, specially the idea about checking someone's github activity as part of a hiring process, is that making open source contributions, or more specifically, contributing for free, is a privilege the poor can not afford.
It's ironic, but exactly the people who benefit from free software wouldn't spend their time making free software because they need money to eat.
It makes me very sad to see that reddit's new design is so heavy it can't even be accessed by part of the world. It's like parts of the internet are closing theirs doors just so they can have more sliding effects that nobody wants.
Or maybe I'm just a weird one who prefers my browser to do a full load when I click a link.
Btw there was a time everyone kept talking about "responsive" web design and, having used only low-end smartphones and tablets, I kept finding it weird that there was such focus on the design being responsive for mobile devices when those mobile devices were so extremely slow to respond to touch to begin with. Of course I know that's not what they meant, but it still felt weird.
The internet is a global system that spans ~all jurisdictions, and most internet criminals live in jurisdictions that don't prosecute internet crimes as long as the bad actors leave citizens of their own country alone.
So they're criminals as far as the US and allies are concerned, but de facto not criminals where they live. If they're going to be locked out of the system, it has to be by the infrastructure, because their government has no interest in stopping them.
I see. Perhaps there should be a legal framework to get the government to demand companies like cloudflare stop serving these international criminals, then. That way it wouldn't depend on a private entity making the judgement.
Do you ever think it's weird that we have gone through web 1.0, web 2.0, semantic web, intertubes clogged with spam bots, web 3.0: crypto edition, and the dawn of AI scraping, and we still haven't figured out these issues?
Which government do you mean when you say "the government"? Any national government? Only the US government? Only governments in which the US is friendly and/or has agreements with?
Would you want authoritarian governments to be able to demand Cloudflare stop serving those they consider criminals that are outside their borders?
I again ask: is it desirable for any of those countries to be able to unilaterally force a company to enforce its laws regardless of where the individual in question is?
If the equipment is in country X, it seems reasonable to enforce the rules of country X. Plenty of companies refuse to operate in specific countries, including China, because they don't want to follow rules of that country.
If CloudFlare chooses to do business in China, that's a choice they're making and it comes with consequences.
Maybe they can offer service where customers will only be served from equipment outside of China, maybe that's not something they choose.
Are you American? Because that sounds like such an American idea of how the world works.
To answer your question: most malware actors can be traced back to Russia, what exactly do you think "sending the cops" after them will accomplish and if the answer is "nothing", then does that mean you don't think they can be called criminals?
It doesn't need to be physical cops. What I mean is that if crimes are being committed, the legal system should initiate a process that either puts them in jail (which as you say may not be possible) or ends up with cloudflare banning and other internet companies blacklisting them. That way, the burden of judging criminality isn't on random companies but on the appropriate authorities.
Cloudflare shields criminals from cops. They do so because of "free speech" or whatever. There was recently a story about a swatting victim, who tried to get the forum the swatters use to shut down. Cloud flare refused to give the identity of the criminals, the case even went to court and the victim lost and now apparently has to pay court costs.
Our legal system is unfortunately not perfect, which is why it matters what infrastructure providers do.
Do they enable criminals by shielding them from the police? Or do they have policies in place that prevent abuse of their service?
With Cloudflare, I'm pretty sure they lean towards the former.
Which is a catch-22, because subpoenas / warrants for collection of digital information have to name a specific intended target (a real legal identity under suspicion, not some pseudonym) — and "the real legal identity of the suspect" is exactly the thing that Cloudflare's proxy-shielding prevents you from learning. Courts won't act until they have some specific individual to act toward.
(This is also why, whenever you hear about e.g. police stings on Tor forums, they never mention requesting courts to issue warrants to ISPs for collection of e.g. traffic-analysis-correlation info about locations of servers hosting illegal content. Instead, this de-anonymization step is something they always have to achieve extra-judicially, usually by contracting a private network threat intelligence firm.)
Or you don't hear about the methods they are using for deanonymizing because they would get the cases thrown out of a court. Warrantless wiretapping and the like... And the private firm is just lying for them so law enforcement can do parallel construction.
Is the website illegal? Or maybe the police need to deal with spam calls more sensibly. Presumably they can trace where the calls are coming from in real life
wait, are you mad cloudflare decided not to be an active participant in a doxxing campaign? Swatting is awful but I'm inclined to side with cloudflare here.
I'm mad that they offer anonymity to criminals. If you offer a service that lets people hide their identity, you ought to perform a bit of due diligence.
