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.

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.

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.

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

/cc @ulkesh@beehaw.org

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.

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

• Cloudflare
• Comcast

Both of whom are abusers of #netneutrality, 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.

Hence why we need a public option.

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 #AI 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.

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.

First and foremost, #HP is not an option for anyone who boycotts #Israel. 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.

Thanks for pointing that out. I added your link to the post.

I appreciate the background & history… and the workaround sounds quite useful until Lemmy evolves more.

If you want to contribute some code

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. I would have to fork it just to get it out of MS Github and into an ethical work environment. And from there I would have to learn 2 or 3 new languages IIUC. I’m merely a user, or tester at best, trying to just get an understanding of the problems… not even yet at the stage of digging through existing bug reports. When I wrote what you quoted, I did not even know yet if the tool was limited or if it’s malconfigured, or if a mod wasn’t making full use of the software. PenguinCoder hinted in another thread there is a thread hiding option in one of the Lemmy forks but did not elaborate. Superficially that sounds like a more appropriate mechanism for an off topic thread if it works the way it sounds.

Thus the item was removed from that community. What is the problem here?

You may be talking from the confines of the software’s capability. But in effect the thread was more than removed from the community. The only meaningful tie a thread has to a community is the link appearing in the timeline. The URL in fact excludes the community name. If you simply remove the timeline link there is theoretically no technical or social reason a civil sitewide-rules-compliant conversation cannot continue. And no reason it should not continue.

There is likely a code limitation here. Lemmy was designed by folks who are overly gung ho on suppression (judging from how they ran dev.lemmy.ml, the deliberately hard-coding of the slur filter, their reputation, etc). I’ve not kept track of Lenny and other forks so it’s unclear if any of them offer more graceful functionality without the overbearing interventionalism for handling off topic posts. It certainly needs to evolve more in this regard because I’ve yet to see any Lemmy et al instances that enable a mod to move a thread to a more fitting community.

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.

You’re referring to anonymity, not privacy.

Anonymity is part of privacy; not a dichotomy.

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.

Difference between hidden and removed and even deleted.

Does Lemmy give those three different actions?

I can imagine that something that’s illegal would be deleted in the fullest extent to support legal compliance. I can imagine that an uncivil shitshow would be removed, whereby the content is still reachable to admins but not to users. And I would expect something that is off topic for a community would be hidden, assuming that means just not visible in the timeline but still accessible by users who have the link.

Is my understanding of the 3 actions correct? Why would an off topic post be removed and not hidden?

The point is in removing said ‘discussion’ from the platform.

Does that mean a site-wide rule was broken? Because in the case at hand, it’s simply a matter of a civil conversation that was started in the wrong community.

Who benefits from the disruptive suppression of a conversation when the conversation is no longer cluttering the community where it was off topic? I can only see this making sense if the discussion were breaking sitewide rules independent of the community it started in.

The transparency problem can be seen in the foss modlog. Before subscribing and investing effort into a community, I take a gander at the modlog to see whether the mod is overly energetic and eager to control. Some people like that mod style but some users prefer to avoid it. So if you look at the latest entry in the foss modlog, users should be able to visit the post to determine whether it was a sensible moderation move. They should be able to confirm “yes, this is off topic, so I am happy to participate in this community”, or “no, I will move along”. It’s not about payroll. It’s about users having transparency on moderators.

In the case at hand, an apparently off topic post was removed from the timeline (fair enough, if truly off topic). Yet it was civil and in line with beehaw site rules, so there is no sensible reason to be as disruptive as to suppress conversation in that thread. When something is off topic for the community timeline, it’s merely an organizational problem of clutter. Action beyond removing the link from the timeline is over interventionalist. What’s the point? It’s bad faith to suppress a civil discussion.

I don’t know if I’m hitting on a beehaw problem or a lemmy problem. If Lemmy only gives blunt instruments that lack the capability I describe, then the lack of transparency is a #lemmyBug.

The nuclear: destruction of all traces of a post/comment is probably only useful in extreme cases like CSAM. Otherwise it’s useful for users to be able to evaluate mods to verify there are no shenanigans to establish trust. A user should be able to see the modlog and then see most removed content from a transparency PoV, one hopes.

And I think lack of transparency is an issue. I just raised an issue about that.

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.